Help Nicole get her daughter home!

My name is Irina, and I’ve been Nicole’s best friend for 18 years. She’s one of the best mothers I know. It’s hard for Nicole to ask for help or talk about these things with others, so I’m appealing to you on her behalf because we only have 30 days to get a wrongfully taken child back into the loving arms of the mother who raised her. Nicole is a single working mother who has provided a better life for her daughter, Sarah, than she's ever had herself. Now she's fighting to get her little girl back from her abusive father, after a Northampton County, PA court stole her baby in an outrageously discriminatory decision.

For over 2+ years, Nicole has been fighting to get her child back from an incestuous County where conflicts of interest relationships lead to a full bench recusal 15 months into her battle while her daughter has been denied mental health care and suffered emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her father who has been allowed to keep her. Nicole has depleted her savings, lost her marriage, and countless sleepless nights worrying for her daughter and suffering the pain of not having her baby with her. 7-year-old Sarah wants to go home to her Mother where she is safe, comfortable, and loved. Sarah has told many friends and relatives that her father hits her, that he’s scary, and that he punishes her for talking about wanting to return to her mother.

Nicole secured full time work from home employment and is available to care for her daughter in ways her ex is not while he continues to practice law without a license, while failing to obtain a bar license due to issues with character and fitness. All of these facts and more have been ignored by the Court. Instead, the Court concentrated on Nicole's sexual history, adverse childhood and poverty (which she triumphantly overcame as an adult), and misrepresentations made by her daughter's father and his attorney. The Court went so far as to willingly allow opposing counsel to physically throw money at her in open court, and suggested to Nicole on the record that she should have submitted to her ex’s propositioning of her in his childhood bedroom in order to visit with her daughter because “it would be nice for the child to see her parents together.”

The Court did not hear her evidence or testimony, did not bother fact-checking, and instead inserted its biases into the case including Judge Bertin's insistence that Puerto Rico is a foreign country that Nicole's maternal family "emigrated" from; that all impoverished and homeless people are "mental and dangerous”; and that Nicole was petty for filing an abuse report against her ex because she "didn't have black eyes or a broken back," and that her ex "just had a little temper flare.”

Please help me make this right for my best friend and her little girl. The way this county has treated her is abhorrent and dangerous to parents who look like her. Nicole is a symbol for many parents of color who break generational cycles of abuse and poverty for their children to have better lives and futures.

Please help me raise money for Nicole’s appeal to get little Sarah home where she belongs!

Thank you!