Woman defends mother for taking her away from her father as a child
A woman whose mother abducted her as an infant and travelled the world with her for 15 years stood in a US courtroom, fighting back tears, and told a judge she has had a good life even though she didn't know her birth father growing up.
"I was raised very fortunately. I was loved beyond belief," Samantha Geldenhuys, 21, told US District Judge Richard Gergel on Tuesday after her mother, Dorothy Lee Barnett, pleaded guilty to parental kidnapping and two counts of falsifying passport applications.
The judge sentenced the 54-year-old Barnett to 21 months in jail followed by two years' supervised parole. She is expected to be free in a few months because she gets credit for time served since her arrest in November 2013.
That's after she was tracked down in Australia, where she had been living under another name since 2007. It was the first time her daughter learned about her past. "It was a shock to me, and this is the last place I expected to be standing," Geldenhuys said.
She said she had recently spent some time with her father, Benjamin Harris Todd. He had legal custody after her parents divorced in 1994.
"That was an experience I cannot describe in words," she said. Prosecutors said that a few months after the divorce, Barnett left for a birthday party during a visit with her daughter, then called Savanna Catherine Todd and nearly a year old, and didn't return. Barnett was eventually located in Australia and fought extradition but was returned to the US in September.
Barnett said she fled to Malaysia and then South Africa, where she married Juan Geldenhuys, who is now dead. She said the family later lived in Botswana, New Zealand and Australia, moving for her husband's job.
