Stephanie's Story

April 4, 2004
    Hello my name is Stephanie Hope. I'm 15 years old. We have been in the court system for the last 4 years in Mariposa and Tuolumne Counties, California. I have 6 siblings, 5 sisters and 1 brother; the oldest is 21 and the youngest is 9 years old. My parents' names are Danielle Duperret & Don Emel.

When our parents were together, our mom would take care of us. We were home-schooled by our mother. We lived at the bottom of a canyon. We had a small Mitsubishi truck and a 32 foot Blue Bird Motorcoach. The truck was my father's, and my mom could not drive the Motorcoach. Most of the time, our dad had the engine in pieces in his garage. Our dad worked all day, came home for meals, complained, and disappeared in the garage to work on his projects, which he never finished.

There were no children in the canyon, so we did not have any friends. None of us kids ever had friends, until our parents got divorced.

Our mom became very sick in the canyon. Our oldest sister had to take care of us (she was 10 at the time), and we all helped one another. One time, my sister Evie (who was 8 then) had just finished cleaning the basement, when our father got home; he blew-up, at her especially. Evie went downstairs and started to pull the shoes off the rack, which she had just cleaned. In a fit of anger, our father grabbed her from behind. She elbowed him in the stomach. He spun her around and hit her in the face, dragged her to the stairs and threw her up them. She landed about half way up; he went up to her, grabbed her hair and threw her again. For the next week, Evie was not allowed to be seen by anyone and we weren't allowed to tell anyone. We had to act like nothing had ever happened. Evie's face was bloody, her lips were swollen, and her forehead was black and blue.

When our parents split up, we were constantly going back and forth, every few days. We weren't allowed to say who we wanted to live with. One day, our Mom took us to a shelter for abused women in Marin. We went home after about a week to get clothes and feed the pets. Our father met us at the house with the police. The deputy had court orders giving our dad full custody of us, giving him the house that we were living in with our mom (he had a house twenty minutes away), and the van we had gotten was also given to him. Our mom had to leave the house within 18 hours, with all her stuff. Our mom had her practice in our house (she is a doctor in natural health). She lost her clients. She had no money, and no car, and lost the one thing she cared about more than anything: her kids.

For the next month our father's mother came out from Florida. It was horrible; we weren't allowed to go outside because we might get freckles, so we sat in front of a TV screen all day. Our dad got worse by the day, but he played the "good father" around his mother. During that time, our mom stayed with anyone that would let her sleep on the couch. She borrowed money from her friends. When we finally got to go back with her, we were forced to sell the house. We were forced to get rid of our pets. We lived in the family room of a client of our mom's for one year, because we were too poor to have a home. Her client had a daughter our age, who got us to work at the live theater which we love.

Theater became an escape for us; we could get away from our father for most of the time that we were forced to go to his house. Our father hated the fact that we had found something we liked. He complained that we were never there. When the theater shut down for a few weeks, and life went back to "normal" he did all he could to avoid us, so we took up theater again and he started to complain again. We would go even if we were sick. Our dad never did anything for us when we were sick or hurt. I remember one time when a friend and I were riding a bike and we had an accident. I had amnesia for hours and he did nothing, but if my brother had a stuffy nose because our dad fed him wheat and milk, which he is allergic to, he would rush him to the emergency room. Our father lied to doctors and forced our brother to have surgery, which did not help him. My brother is a dwarf, and my father can't seem to accept that. Now our father wants my brother to have a "learning disabled" label, so he can take him away from us. The school says that he is not learning disabled, so our father is taking the school to court.

The first court appointed evaluator, Amy Velasquez, turned everything we said against us to make it look good for our father. The one thing that I really remember is that one time our mom took us camping and the last night was cold, so Amy Velasquez turned it into "the kids were forced to live in tents and they were freezing". Her whole report was like that. She said that our mom was alienating us. Now our father gives that report to everybody: doctors, lawyers, schools, and anybody that he meets to try and make them think he is such a great guy, and my mom is somehow defective.

We later got appointed a lawyer, Debra Bennet. She was a children's lawyer, who also twisted things. She made us go to our father one week a month, plus 2 week-ends. There, us kids were separated: the three younger ones went to a babysitter they did not like, and my two older sisters and I would stay at his house. We watched videos, played video games, and were bored most of the time. We were not allowed to do our homework. Just last year, another psychologist was appointed, Dr. Carmichael. He too twisted things that we said. He would say that we had all been brainwashed into saying everything that we had said, because we all had the same views of our father. When we told him about the fact that our father had beat us up, he said that we were probably just over exaggerating and probably wasn't half as bad as we made it sound.

Our father hired Cassie Akers from ICES (Infant Child Enrichment Services, who cater to children 6 years old and under; we were between 8 and 17), to help him set up rules at his house. Although we usually did not have much to eat there, he would fill up the refrigerator before her visit. We had to scrub the house, hide the R-rated movies and the guns. He would lecture us to "behave or else". One of the rules was that we had to be in bed by 10 pm. One evening, I was working on a puzzle that my mom had bought me (because there was nothing to do at his house). He was hammering, trying to repair a door. When he saw me, he messed up my puzzle and yelled that it was past bedtime. Two days later, he got upset at me because I did not want to watch a movie with him, at well past 11 pm. One other rule was "no bad language". Of course, it did not apply to him, who taught us that language. Cassie Akers wrote a nice letter for him to the court.

Judge William Polley pretty much OK's whatever our father's attorney (Mark Borden) brings in, but anything that our mom tries to bring gets thrown out because she doesn't have a lawyer. One day at our father's house, we got in a fight with him, which ended with Evie being thrown into a wall and dragged out to the living room. He then hauled me out to the living room and threw me on the couch beside her, and called the cops saying that his two teenage daughters had just assaulted him. A deputy called Dickson came to the house and proceeded to lecture us about listening to our father. He didn't listen to the fact that we were the ones that were hurt, and that it was not the first time that it had happened. There was another time during September when we got into another argument that lasted for a few hours. In the end, our father said that we were not going to the theater again, and left. We were working there, and were needed. After awhile, my sister Evie went down to try to talk him into letting us go the next day, because we were supposed to work; she spent the next two hours arguing with him (he did most of the talking). When it stopped it turned out that my sister Evie had gone into shock and my father yelled at us to get in the car and we went to the hospital. Our mom met us at the hospital; Amy had called her. We were there for hours before a deputy showed up (Sak Badge). He told our mom that our father could break our arms and claim that it was an accident or self defense, and refused to do a report. Evie wanted to go with our mother to recover, but our father refused to let her go.

We hid weapons throughout the house, to protect ourselves, should our father have another fit of rage.

A few months later, Evie finally said that she wasn't going to our father's house anymore. A cop came: it was Dickson again. Evie was almost forced to go, but his superior (Hunt) came and talked to Evie, and then to our father. Hunt told our father to go home and that Evie was staying with our mom. He was the first one who really listened to what we said. A few months later I did the same thing. A few months ago our younger sister Sophie, stopped going as well. Deputies Serrano and Champlin listened to her. Our younger sister and our brother would like nothing better than to stop going as well. We want to be together again.

Our mom wrote to the D.A., to ask for help. She was concerned because of the guns and the beatings. She was told that nothing could be done until there was a "body". Our mom's Consulate (she is Swiss) wrote a couple of times to the D.A. (Donald Segerstrom) to ask for an investigation. The answer seems to have been that an investigation was conducted, and that there was nothing to worry about. We don't understand how they could have conducted an investigation without our knowledge. We were hoping they would listen to us and our witnesses. The D.A.'s assistant, Mike Knowles, told our mom that if she insisted, we could be put in foster care.

Nobody in our family likes our father anymore. We call him our "ex" father. He can play the very concerned parent when he wants to, but as soon as there are no witnesses, he will stab us in the back. He keeps messing up with our mom's job, so she cannot work or hire and attorney, and so we stay poor. We cannot do much, and are depressed. Most of us have insomnia and nightmares. Many people know about the situation, but the judge doesn't listen to us, or to our mother's witnesses. Everything the court does is labeled "In the Best Interest of the Children" when in reality it has always been "In the Best Interest of the Child Abuser".


--- Stephanie Hope,
written at age 15

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