David Goldman, a New Jersey man whose five-year custody battle for his son became international news, has a book coming out next year.
David Goldman's "A Father's Love" will be released in May by Viking, the publisher announced Monday.
In 2004, Goldman was married and living in Tinton Falls, N.J. when his wife Bruna Bianchi flew to Brazil with their 4-year-old son, Sean, for what was supposed to be a vacation. She announced she was staying there with Sean, later divorced Goldman and remarried.
Goldman spent years in American and Brazilian courts before he finally brought Sean home in 2009. Bianchi died in 2008 in childbirth, but Sean's Brazilian stepfather and grandmother continued to fight for custody in Brazil.
Years of frustration The Brazilian family fought court rulings in the United States and international treaties upholding David Goldman’s custody rights as Sean’s father. It was not until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama took up his cause early this year that the case moved from local Brazilian courts to the nation’s federal courts.
After years of frustration and setbacks, Goldman had been saying that he would not know he had his son back until the wheels of the plane were up and they were on their way back to the United States.
Reunited at last
On Christmas Eve 2009, Goldman was reunited with his son.
“It’s a miracle,” Goldman told Meredith Vieira in a December 2009 TODAY interview. “There was 364 other days that [it] could’ve been, if he ever were going to come home. But it was Christmas Eve. Somebody’s up there for sure. That’s amazing.”
Vieira asked Goldman to describe Christmas Eve and Christmas, the first night and day the two had spent together in five years.“Two beautiful nights,” is how Goldman described it. “There are no words to describe the pain and suffering these last five years. And there’s no words to describe how joyous and wonderful it is to be with my son again.”
Despite his resentment of the way Sean’s Brazilian family behaved during the five years of legal battling, Goldman said he would allow Sean’s maternal grandmother, Silvana Bianchi, to continue to see him. He had an opportunity to tell her that in the embassy.
“She said to me, ‘Will you allow me to see him?’ And I looked at her and I said, ‘I will not do to you what you have done to me,’ ” Goldman said. “And then I said, ‘But now you need to tell him that you remember how good of a father that I was, how good of a father that I am, and how you know I will continue to be a good father.’ And I also gave her a hug. He needed to see that.”