The Mitchells’ Story    

    “One family is the Mitchells, I hear he is an attorney is Southern Ohio,” Mary told us. “ I wondered what he thought of all this mess, especially since Denise would refer to him whenever we were told about a delay and she would say, ‘I ran this by the Mitchells and they’re fine with it. He’s an attorney, you know.’”  

    Nobody is ever invisible if they’re on the Internet. After reading this one part in Mary’s email, I began a careful look at all the past posts on some of the International Adoption bulletin boards to see if I could locate a “Mitchell” and “Volgograd.” I had to see if this were true and see if Mr. Mitchell had indeed given Denise any legal advice about her agency.  

    Some days I do a better net.search than others. On the very same bulletin board that “Liz” posted to asking about the investigation in Perm, I scrolled down a few pages, and lo and behold, I saw the following posted by Diane Mitchell on Nov. 18, 1999:

    We are in the process of adopting a little boy and girl from Volgograd and are awaiting a court date.  Wondering if anyone else is adopting from this region or knows anything about what is happening there.  

    Thanks.  Diane.

    We finally worked up the nerve to contact this family in June of 2000 and received the following responses, briefly outlining the same disturbing patterns that Mary Hutchison related to us. Mr. Mitchell responded by saying that his children were doing fine and were healthy and keeping he and his wife very busy and occupied. 

    However in his response of June 7, 2000, he said “It was not, however, the smoothest of roads from start to finish. It took about a year and a half and we lost one referral” [Note: Yet another lost referral from Dennis Gornostaev’s Russian facilitators].   

    Their timeline had been this: they signed their contract in September 1998 and completed their paperwork including the I-171-H in December of 1998. In April of 1999 they received two referrals after switching from another region to Volgograd. In October 1999 they then lost the one referral and immediately accepted another — something the Hutchisons were not able to do.

    (And much later we learned about still another client, whose name is unknown to us, who apparently tried to circumvent Building Blocks out of unhappiness around the same time. Denise took drastic measures against these people).

    They did travel, as you can see, in December 1999. All in all their adoption took them 14 months from sign-on to pickup. In 1999 that was an awful timeline.  

    “We … ended up in Russia in early December with no set court date. We did not quite know that information before getting on that Delta plane. We waited there about ten days before being told we would get a court date,” Mr. Mitchell explained in an email.

    “We were in the pre-Christmas Embassy closing made scramble” (something Daniel, Linda Wright, Cyril and Yekaterina and I never got to experience). “We had problems with our documents when we got to the embassy. This was an issue with the facilitators … We about pulled our hair out so many times, but we ended up with two great kids.”  

    This surprised us, for we had fully been expecting the “Denise Hubbard is a saint and thank her so much for our precious angels” that her happy clients usually sent our way. We did, however, press the Mitchells for some clarification, because we were really disturbed by the fact Denise was using Mr. Mitchell’s legal knowledge to bolster her own claims about her business, and told him what Mary Hutchison had related to us.  

    In a subsequent email, Mr. Mitchell responded: “By the way, I am an attorney … I have never been involved in adoption law and certainly never told Denise anything she was doing was legally okay or not, with one exception. At one point, I told her I did not feel the liquidated damages clause in her contract was enforceable against us.  I do know she had an attorney in Ohio named Rick … I truly hope that’s who she may have been referring to, although his last name is not Mitchell.”  

    He went on about working with Denise and the atmosphere she had so carefully created, “We did find getting information difficult and were told not to post on the Internet.  Obviously, my wife did anyway, which was not well received.  Denise’s relationship with my wife changed immediately when that happened.  

    Another pattern with Denise — divide the spouses.  Talk to the husbands while pushing away the wives.

    “We never received information about other couples in Volgograd, even though we did ask. It was interesting to talk to these people when we all eventually traveled together. None of us was told the same thing about very much. Also, we had to use their travel agency” [Medina Travel] “at the last minute if we wanted to be met in Russia. This cost us several thousand dollars extra.”      

    Ten days later, Mrs. Mitchell sent us this last email which we found rather humorous.

    hi again.

  Just a note to say that we are going to the building blocks picnic, I know that may seem strange as we are also not happy with the agency or them with us, but we did meet some other families while we were in Russia who we would like to stay in touch with (they also were not very happy and we did all find the need to try the vodka) … we wanted to let you know that we are if we see you there” [note: we were NOT invited to this picnic as you shall see] “although Denise may not wish to see us (we aren’t a glowing reference) we don’t care and we shall be there anyway. 

D. Mitchell – who also posted on APR and wasn’t liked for that either.

   Although Mr. Mitchell was interested in hearing about how Denise had represented his legal expertise to the Hutchisons in a manner that suggests he wanted to confront Denise about it, we never heard back from him and can only assume that they, too, have moved on.

   Back to the Hutchisons’ story.

    Back to our story