Foretold · Los Angeles Times

Your Laws vs. Our Laws

May 16, 2023·49 min·4 clips

Paulina grabs her kids and flees at midnight, leaving her father-in-law asleep, as her phone blows up with accusations of kidnapping.

The episode opens with Paulina's departure just after midnight on July 19, 2018, as she grabbed her daughters and left the family's train station while her father-in-law slept on the couch. Her friend Amber drove her to a hotel, and within hours Bobby's family was texting that she had kidnapped the children. Paulina's first days away were marked by a mix of relief at being with her daughters and anxiety about the messages flooding her phone. She and the girls eventually moved to her mother's apartment. When Paulina tried to negotiate a shared custody arrangement with Bobby — 10 days with each parent — the men in both families agreed to an unusual 50-50 split. Faith Pino then explains the Romany kris, a council of elders that adjudicates disputes outside American courts. Nick Wildwood, a Romany elder from New Jersey, describes how kris works: it first attempts reconciliation, and if the couple must separate, the father traditionally keeps the firstborn child. Nick says an increasing number of Romany women are bypassing the kris for American courts, which he calls an epidemic threatening Romany survival. When Paulina quietly opened — but did not yet file — a court custody case as a precautionary measure, Bobby found out and stopped showing up with the girls. The children went missing for nearly three weeks. Paulina drove to every family house and psychic shop she could think of, finding them all dark and empty. Paralyzed with fear, she eventually filed for temporary emergency sole custody, which a judge granted. Using GPS data accessed from Bobby's car, she tracked the family to the Marriott Shadow Ridge Hotel in Palm Desert and called the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. But the deputy could not enforce the custody order without serving Bobby with the paperwork, and Bobby and the children never appeared in the parking lot. Faith Pino then details the history of institutionalized anti-Romani policing in the United States. The National Association of Bunko Investigators (NABI) runs training courses teaching police to profile Romani people, and created a database of 4,000 named Romani individuals with photographs distributed to police departments nationwide. Harvard researcher Dr. Margareta Matache found that four out of ten Romani people interviewed reported racial profiling by police. Lawyer Barry Fisher, who won a landmark 1985 California Supreme Court case defending a Romani fortune teller's First Amendment right to practice, explains that anti-fortune-telling ordinances are specifically designed to target Romani businesses. After nearly a month apart from her daughters, Paulina received word that Bobby's family would surrender the children but wanted no police present. She arrived at the train station to find an unannounced kris of about 30 men from multiple clans assembled to decide the case. She was not permitted to speak; her grandfather argued on her behalf. The kris ruled that Paulina could leave with both girls and that 50-50 custody would continue — an unusually progressive outcome. But Paulina left knowing she would pursue permanent American court custody regardless of the blackballing risk.

As heard by us

A midnight escape that opens into the machinery of anti-Romany prejudice.

Paulina's midnight escape gives the episode its first jolt, but the real shape of the story comes into view as it moves into American laws and law enforcement's treatment of Romany people.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A midnight escape that opens into the history of anti-Romani law, policing, and the idea of inherited criminality.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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