How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams

To Kyle Belz-Thomas, an ideal life included a noisy house full of children. “Kyle is a strong, determined, caring man who would do anything to protect and support his family,” he once wrote of himself. He grew up as the youngest of three in New Baltimore, a suburb of Detroit on the shore of Lake St. Clair. His mother, who comes from a large Italian family, sent him to an all-boys Catholic high school, where he felt out of place and was teased regularly. When Kyle was twenty, he moved into his own apartment and came out to his family; to his relief, they were accepting. In 2014, on a dating app, he met Adam, an artist with a day job as a private-client banker, and spent the next year trying to get him to go on a date. Adam finally told him, “Come and find me, I’ll be outside mowing my lawn,” giving him only an approximate location. A week or so later, they went out for dinner and drinks. “He was nice, and he cared, and he was interested in what I did,” Adam told me recently. In 2016, they got married and moved with their three dogs into a four-bedroom house on more than two acres in a rural area outside Detroit. Kyle was thirty-five and working as an I.T. manager. He wanted to adopt a child in the next year. “We were both getting older, and, being a gay couple, we figured it would take a while to be matched with a baby,” Kyle said. “And we’d heard horror stories.”

They started researching adoption agencies. Then a friend of Kyle’s mentioned that a former middle-school classmate of theirs named Tara Lee was running her own adoption business. In January, 2017, he and Adam drove to a nearby Tim Hortons to meet her.

Lee, who was thirty-five, was waiting for them at a table with a manila file folder of paperwork. She was small, with shiny black hair, dark eyes, and a nose ring; her voice was high, like a child’s. She explained that she was a licensed social worker with a boutique adoption agency called Always Hope. She didn’t look or speak like the staff members from other agencies; she cursed and had tattoos running down both arms, which gave her a folksy air that she said made it easier to bond with young pregnant women, who were often dealing with addiction, poverty, and other challenges. During their meeting, Adam noticed an expensive-looking watch on Lee’s wrist that seemed at odds with her image.

Many adoption agencies are affiliated with churches that disapprove of gay couples; Lee said that she had never worked with a same-sex couple, but that she had no objection to it. “It felt like a comfortable fit,” Adam recalled. He and Kyle signed the paperwork that day and gave Lee a deposit of twenty-five hundred dollars. They prepared a twenty-two-page book about their family, filled with descriptions and photos of their home and of their parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. One image showed Kyle cradling a newborn; another showed Adam in his art studio, where he makes custom figurines of people’s pets.

Lee began sending them profiles of potential birth mothers, or “first mothers,” as they’re sometimes called. In April, 2017, Lee sent an e-mail about Angel, whose due date was July 8th. After a horrific sexual assault, Lee said, Angel had become pregnant, and was now determined to give up the baby. She was twenty-one and already had a two-year-old son, whom she was raising on her own. Lee encouraged Kyle and Adam to send their book to Angel, and they were thrilled when Lee told them that Angel had chosen them as adoptive parents. The total cost of the adoption would be around twenty-five thousand dollars, which included eight thousand dollars for Angel’s living expenses. According to state regulations, those could include housing, food, and medical treatment.

They met with Angel and Lee for lunch at a Red Robin restaurant and started going to Angel’s ultrasound appointments. “It was a mad rush to get a nursery done,” Adam told me. They chose a wildlife theme for the room, and decorated the walls with trees and foxes. They had sent money to Lee to help move Angel and her son into an apartment in downtown Detroit, and to pay for furniture and a fridge, groceries and Uber rides. The couple never dealt directly with Angel; payments always went to Lee, who told them it was easier that way. “We kept handing over money constantly,” Adam said.

On June 23rd, Angel gave birth to a boy. Kyle and Adam sped to the hospital, where Tonya Corrado, an attorney Lee worked with, gave them adoption papers to sign. Angel seemed content when they named the baby Maxwell, and she remained calm when the couple took him home. Kyle and Adam were quickly thrown into a life defined by warming bottles, changing diapers, and Max’s sleep schedule.

In January, 2018, Lee called them to say that Angel was pregnant again, and that she wanted them to adopt this baby, too. Max was almost seven months old. He had recently been rushed to the hospital with breathing problems, and he had stayed on oxygen in the intensive-care unit for a week. Kyle and Adam had a mortgage and about thirty thousand dollars of additional debt. “It was crazy,” Adam said. But Lee pressured them. “What are you going to tell Max when he finds out you had the chance to adopt his sister and you didn’t do it?” they recalled her saying. This time, she asked for half of the fees and all of the birth-mother expenses up front. On January 20th, they gave Lee a check for ten thousand dollars.

“Are your hands clean?”

Cartoon by Tom Toro

They prepared a second room, decorated with mermaids and pirates, and bought bright block letters to spell the baby’s name, Alexandra, on the dresser. During the next few weeks, Kyle and Adam were often unable to get updates from Lee about Angel. In February, Kyle invited his parents and siblings over for dinner. Everyone was gathered around the dining table when he handed Max to his mother and asked her to take his sweatshirt off, revealing a T-shirt that said “I’m going to be a big brother.” In a video that Kyle’s sister took on her iPhone, Kyle can be seen wiping tears from his eyes. They sent the video to Lee, thanking her.

In March, they gave Lee another three thousand dollars for Angel’s expenses. But, about a month later, Lee told them that Angel was backing out of the adoption. “It really hurt,” Adam said. The emotional pain was compounded by the fact that he and Kyle couldn’t recover any of the money they had sent to cover Angel’s living expenses.

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Soon afterward, Lee called them again: she had found another birth mom, April, who was due at the end of the year. In a document describing April’s situation, Lee wrote that April “is very close to me. We speak daily, even when she isn’t pregnant. She has a heart of gold.” Lee estimated that the cost of this adoption would be higher: about thirty-five thousand dollars, fifteen thousand of which would go toward birth-mother expenses. Fifteen thousand dollars was due immediately. They wrote Lee another check.

Tara Lee grew up in Mount Clemens, Michigan, a town close to New Baltimore. She was the eldest of six children. She told me that her father ran the service department at a Cadillac dealership, and that her mother was a stay-at-home parent and, later, a supermarket manager. Lee’s parents divorced when she was three but remained close. “We did eat dinner at the dinner table as a family every single night,” Lee wrote in an e-mail. “We got into trouble for having our elbows on the table lol. I was raised with manners and respect.”

Lee attended Anchor Bay High School, in a nearby town, where she was outgoing and popular. A former classmate, Kristy Steakley, said, “Tara was a people person. She could talk to anybody.”

Lee was an average student, but she dreamed of becoming an attorney, and couldn’t wait to get out of Mount Clemens. “I planned to live in a one bedroom apartment somewhere on the upper east side of New York City and work in corporate America my whole life,” she wrote in an online-diary entry from 2017. “However, the lord had other plans for me.” After Lee graduated, in 1999, she moved to Florida, to work at Epcot. “I wanted to explore life,” she said. She and her high-school boyfriend, Jeremy, who now works for a heating-and-cooling company, got married in 2002, shortly after Lee gave birth to their first child, a daughter.

In 2005, when Lee was twenty-three, she was arrested for writing a series of bad checks, including two to local jewelry stores and one to Costco. She pleaded guilty and was ordered to repay twenty-two thousand dollars to at least seventeen different businesses. Later that year, she wrote a bad check for a Polaris snowmobile, which led to another guilty plea. Lee had another daughter that year, and then, in 2007, a son.

In 2012, Lee adopted the first of two children from a woman she had met in Michigan. According to Melanie Peterson, a mother of five in Milwaukee who tried to adopt through Always Hope, Lee told an improbable-sounding story of meeting the mother of her adopted children at a picnic one day; two weeks later, Lee claimed, the woman showed up at her door and announced that she wanted Lee to adopt from her. Lee declined to discuss her adoptions, but she wrote in an e-mail, “I never wanted to facilitate adoptions. I wanted to help at risk pregnant women with their options.” She added, “I could not believe that many women only knew about either parenting or abortion. I wanted women to know that they had options. . . . I am pro life. I was pro life choices for those who didn’t want to have an abortion.”

In 2015, Lee registered the Always Hope Pregnancy and Education Center in Jacksonville, Florida, where, according to adoptive families who worked with her, she had been counselling pregnant women and helping to match them with families to adopt their babies. Lee travelled frequently between Jacksonville and Michigan, but soon she was conducting adoptions primarily in Michigan. State law requires that adoption agencies be licensed, a process that Lee never completed, and in 2015 Michigan investigated her for operating an unlicensed agency. The investigation initially concluded that she wasn’t violating the law, based on her insistence that she was only taking birth mothers to appointments and arranging clothing donations. After receiving further complaints, state agents told Lee that she had to get a license to continue to facilitate adoptions, but she never applied for one. That year, she took in more than a hundred and thirty thousand dollars from adoption work.

Attorneys were needed to handle the adoption paperwork, and Lee eventually fell into a collaboration with Corrado and Talia Goetting, who had their own firm. Goetting had become an adoption lawyer after a traumatic childhood. Her mother, who got pregnant with her when she was sixteen years old, was sent to a home for unwed mothers, where she was pressured to give up her baby. Goetting felt unwanted by her adoptive mother. “It was an extremely difficult experience,” she said. “But I’m still glad that I was born.” When she was seventeen, she reunited with her biological parents, who later adopted three children from an orphanage in Russia. Goetting eventually went to law school, then worked as an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan before starting a family-law practice. Goetting said that she was inspired by her younger siblings and that, although her own experience of being adopted was “awful,” most adoptions aren’t like hers. Goetting is now married and has four children, one of whom was adopted from Guatemala.

Lee first contacted Goetting in 2016, to help a family in Florida adopt from a woman in Michigan. Goetting and Corrado’s job was to gather about thirty documents that had to be submitted to the county and the state; they included birth certificates, marriage certificates, driver’s licenses, an affidavit from the adoptive parents saying that they understood the adoption laws in Michigan, and proof that they had undergone a “home study” and a background check. Normally, most of this would have been done well in advance. With Lee, Goetting said, she or Corrado would be summoned to a hospital just before a baby was born, where they would meet the adoptive family for the first time and scramble to assemble the documents and other paperwork. “We’d get these phone calls, and we’d have to hustle,” she said. Goetting and Corrado’s fees were usually between five thousand and eight thousand dollars; they collected half of that from the family at the hospital, and the rest a few days later, when the adoption was finalized. Lee would usually present the lawyers with signed consent forms from the birth fathers, which were required. Another attorney worked with the birth mothers, and would often be called to the hospital at the last minute as well.

Lee told families that she was qualified to provide counselling services to birth mothers, and that she was trained as a doula, which enabled her to charge fees for assisting with their labor and delivery. Goetting said that she repeatedly asked Lee to provide evidence of her qualifications; eventually, Lee brought in a large, framed diploma for a master’s degree in social work from Northwestern University, which she left propped up on the floor in Goetting and Corrado’s office. It seemed odd, Goetting later recalled, but both attorneys continued to do business with Lee. “I wasn’t necessarily suspicious,” Goetting told me. “I don’t view the world that way.”

It is uncomfortable to think of adoptions as financial transactions, but they share many attributes. Adoptions are brokered by entrepreneurs offering a service that has life-changing consequences. Babies tend to move from the poor to the wealthier, and large sums of money change hands. Ellen Herman, a historian at the University of Oregon and the author of “Kinship by Design,” a comprehensive history of adoption in the U.S., told me that the idea of matching children with suitable families is relatively new. “There is a long history of treating adoption as a market,” she said. “It was considered an opportunity for commercial transactions and profits, not for families and child welfare.”

The transfer of children from one family to another was once an informal process. Lack of access to birth control, severe poverty, and the shaming of unwed mothers insured a steady supply of children whose parents couldn’t care for them; babies were sometimes stolen from hospitals and homes and then sold. In 1851, Massachusetts became the first state to establish laws for adoption, defining it as a practice that should be driven primarily by the needs of children rather than by the wishes of adults. Still, reform of the industry moved slowly. In 1854, the Children’s Aid Society started running “orphan trains,” which removed children from poor immigrant households along the Eastern Seaboard and sent them west to rural and farming communities, intending to place them in good Christian homes. The outright sale of babies also continued openly, with advertisements placed in newspapers and “baby farms” serving as warehouses for infants and children available for purchase. A 1917 study conducted for the Juvenile Protective Association quoted one Chicago baby-farm saleswoman’s slogan: “It’s cheaper and easier to buy a baby for $100.00 than to have one of your own.” That year, Minnesota passed the nation’s first law requiring that potential adoptive parents be evaluated for fitness, including by investigating their finances and inspecting their home.

A chef in chainmail armor looks at some knives stuck in a stone as if it were Excalibur.

Cartoon by Seth Fleishman

Through the twentieth century, the rules governing adoption were increasingly shaped by negative perceptions of unmarried mothers. David Smolin, the director of the Center for Children, Law and Ethics at Samford University’s law school, told me that the regulations “created this legacy of secrecy and shame that we’re still trying to get out from under.” In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of intellectually disabled women in public institutions such as mental-health facilities and prisons did not violate their constitutional rights. The decision was interpreted broadly, fuelling a perception that single pregnant women were promiscuous and unfit to be parents. In the years after the Second World War, out-of-wedlock births increased dramatically, and so-called maternity homes proliferated. Upper- and middle-class girls and women could live there until their babies were born and given up for adoption, and then they returned to their communities as if nothing had happened. This came to be known as the Baby Scoop Era, and it lasted until the nineteen-seventies, when increased access to birth control and abortion made it easier for women to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

By that time, adoption had been embraced by some conservative Christian churches, which saw it as a means of avoiding abortion and expanding the Christian population. Pastors encouraged their congregations to adopt children from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, prompting tens of thousands of transnational adoptions. Later scandals revealed that not all of those children were lacking family members in their home countries who wanted them, and the number of international adoptions dropped by around ninety per cent from a high, in 2004, of twenty-three thousand.

The private-sector and nonprofit adoption and child-welfare-services industries in America generate an estimated nineteen billion dollars a year in revenue. Each state has its own rules about who is qualified to arrange an adoption, which families are eligible to adopt, the rights of birth mothers to change their minds, and the rights of birth fathers to be involved in the decision. This has left enormous gaps in the system. “The whole thing is so fraught with vulnerability, inequality of power, and you still have the apparatus of the old secrecy-and-shame system,” Smolin said. “Big money and a veil of secrecy attracts bad actors.”

Lee carefully controlled all communication between expectant mothers and adoptive families, and tried to prevent the two sides from contacting each other directly; she arranged most in-person meetings and usually came along. This gave her tremendous influence over two sets of emotionally vulnerable people.

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To grow her business, Lee needed to find women willing to give up their babies for adoption, which is not easy. Smolin told me that the largest number of adoptions in the United States occur within the foster-care system, which has approximately four hundred thousand children, many of whom have experienced some sort of trauma and may ultimately be reunited with their birth families. Some seventy thousand foster-care adoptions take place each year, and they are heavily regulated by the government. The market for newborn babies is very different—according to one estimate, up to two million families may be looking to adopt, but only about twenty thousand women a year decide to relinquish their babies. “You’ve got these private adoption intermediaries charging thirty, forty, or fifty thousand dollars a year, chasing twenty thousand women who are willing to consider it and end up doing it,” Smolin said. “The money aspect of it is very troubling.”

Smolin noted that, although the relative shortage of adoptable babies has given birth mothers more leverage to demand things such as “open” adoptions, in which they are promised the ability to maintain contact with their children, there is no adequate legal enforcement mechanism. He also pointed out that adoption intermediaries often serve as advisers to pregnant women, informing them of their options—even as they stand to gain financially if the women choose to pursue adoption.

Lee worked with many birth mothers who were in treatment for heroin addiction, in and out of prison, or homeless. According to Chelsea Coffman, who put her baby up for adoption through Lee and later worked as her personal assistant, Lee recruited women at local methadone clinics. Coffman told me that her prior drug use had led Michigan Children’s Protective Services to remove her two kids from her custody. When she found out that she was pregnant again, while in jail in 2017, another inmate introduced her to Lee. Coffman said that she felt she had to give the new child up for adoption in order to focus on her sobriety and to improve her chances of regaining custody of her other two kids. “It always hurts,” Coffman told me. “You always have that missing piece.”

Another birth mother, Moriah Day, worked for Lee as a house cleaner when she was in high school. When Day became pregnant, at the age of nineteen, she wasn’t sure if she could take adequate care of a baby. She recalled Lee saying that adoption would be better for the baby, and that Day wasn’t up to being a mother. She came to regret the decision and told me that she often cries when something reminds her of her daughter, who is now three years old and lives with a family in Chicago. She showed me a tattoo, on the inside of her right arm, of her daughter’s name and birthday, along with the adoptive parents’ names. “You love this baby so much, and you say to yourself, ‘Can I really do it?’ ” she told me. “Even if it breaks your heart, you say, ‘I’m going to put you with someone wonderful who can really take care of you.’ ” She said that she still struggles with anger toward Lee. “Something put her on this earth to be the best manipulator and liar you have ever seen,” Day said.

In the summer of 2018, Kyle and Adam became increasingly concerned about their match with April, who was due in late December, according to Lee. All they had received was a blurry photograph from Lee that showed a rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed young woman in a trucker cap. When they asked if they could have an ultrasound photo of the baby, Lee said that she would try, but an image never arrived. Though Lee had initially told them that April took good care of herself during pregnancies, she eventually said that April was refusing prenatal care. “We became kind of skeptical of this one,” Adam told me. He called Lee in frustration, demanding to know where their money was going. “Tara said, ‘Are you yelling at me?’ ” he recalled. He immediately backed down. He didn’t want to jeopardize their chances of getting another baby.

When Kyle and Adam finally suggested to Lee that they drop the match with April, she said that she would keep what remained of their fees and expenses, about fourteen thousand dollars, and apply it to a future adoption. During the next few weeks, Kyle maintained a close, chatty dialogue with Lee, exchanging text messages with her almost daily and speaking frequently with her on the phone. Kyle found her easy to talk to; he shared updates about his work and about Adam’s art projects and their home renovations. Lee loved hearing about Max, who would soon turn one and was just starting to walk.

Kyle and Adam and other families Lee worked with noticed that she had a taste for luxury fashion. She owned Christian Louboutin shoes and a Balenciaga handbag—accessories that weren’t seen very often in her middle-class suburb. Cortney Edmond—a mother of six from Colorado, whose two arranged adoptions with Lee fell through after, according to Lee, the birth mothers changed their minds—said, “Tara would always tell me, ‘Yes, I have a shopping problem, but I don’t want you to think the money comes from adoptions. The money all comes from my husband. He makes all the money.’ ” Edmond recalled accompanying Lee on a trip to an upscale mall outside Detroit. Lee walked into a jewelry store where the clerks knew her by name, pointed at something, and bought it without asking the price; then they went to the Louis Vuitton store, where Lee purchased a seventeen-hundred-dollar purse.

One evening in early October, 2018, Goetting was preparing to leave work when she overheard Corrado on the phone, sounding defensive. An adoptive mother from South Carolina named Julie Faulkenberry was shouting at her; when Goetting entered the room, Corrado placed the call on speakerphone. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Faulkenberry said. “You’re scamming people. How can you sleep at night?”

Goetting and Corrado spent the next hour on the phone. Faulkenberry, who is a nurse, and her husband, Jake, had three biological children. They wanted a fourth, and had started working with Lee after suffering three miscarriages and a stillbirth. In May, 2017, Lee matched Faulkenberry with a Florida birth mother named Mariah, who was having a boy. The Faulkenberrys named their future son Elijah and, they said, sent about fifteen thousand dollars to Lee for Mariah’s expenses. Then, shortly before the due date, Lee told them an ultrasound had revealed that the fetus had life-threatening health defects. When he was born, he lived for only thirty-five minutes. Faulkenberry and her family were devastated by the news. Lee promised to send Elijah’s birth and death certificates and some photographs, but they never came. Faulkenberry suspected that the story of Mariah and Elijah was a lie; when she hinted as much, Lee replied, by text, “I hope you don’t think this is a scam.” By then, Faulkenberry had placed a call to the F.B.I. She also started contacting other Always Hope families through Facebook, and discovered that many of them had stories similar to her own. In one instance, Faulkenberry said, Lee had told adoptive parents that their birth mother had been shot, and that both she and the baby she was carrying had died. Faulkenberry said that she had spoken with birth mothers who had been living in deplorable conditions because Lee had never paid their bills. Lee had also told some families that she had cancer or had had a stroke, neither of which appeared to be true.

It is hard to believe that Goetting and Corrado, who handled the legal aspects of many of Always Hope’s adoptions, were unaware that so many of them had fallen through. Still, Goetting told me that, while listening to Faulkenberry, she felt a growing sense of shock. “It was stunning, it was sad, it was almost unbelievable,” she said. She began to run through all the previous moments with Lee that had made her feel uneasy. “She created this circus,” Goetting recalled of Lee. “There’s a baby being born, there’s no attorney for the birth mother, the adopting parents have no attorney. Tara has been their only source of information, and she keeps it that way. It was always chaos.”

A person sits on a couch with two other people who are overhyping the movie they're about to watch.

Cartoon by Roz Chast

Maria Panchenko, an attorney who had started working with Lee the previous May, was leaving the courthouse when Goetting called her and asked her to come to Goetting and Corrado’s office. Panchenko was initially skeptical of her concerns: adoptions often failed, and adoptive parents could be emotional or disgruntled. “Tara would never do something like that,” she told herself. Still, she drove straight to Goetting and Corrado’s office, where they called Faulkenberry back and asked her to tell her story again.

At some point while Faulkenberry was talking, Panchenko felt her stomach drop. She turned to Goetting and mouthed, “What the fuck?” After the call ended, Panchenko said, “We need to pull every file.” They spent several hours looking through their own records before Goetting remembered that she had access to Lee’s e-mail account. In the following days, as the lawyers scrolled through thousands of messages, they found countless instances in which Lee seemed to be promising the same baby to more than one family.

“We’re in way over our heads,” Panchenko said.

Through Instagram, Panchenko got in touch with a friend who had worked in the human-trafficking squad at the F.B.I. in Detroit. After they spoke, another agent, Matthew Sluss, called her. Sluss had been with the F.B.I. since 2017 and had worked on numerous fraud cases. “I just kept spewing things out,” Panchenko recalled. A phrase came to her, and she started repeating it: “adoption scam.”

In early October, Lee contacted Adam. “I’m calling you because you’re the calmer of the two of you,” she said. She told him that she had another birth mother for them. Renee had already placed one child for adoption through Lee and was pregnant again. She was “very personable, Very outgoing and very educated,” Lee wrote in a description she sent. Lee told Adam that Renee had already looked at the couple’s book and liked them. Kyle and Adam had lost more than twenty thousand dollars on their two failed adoptions, but, they recalled, Lee told them that she still had several thousand dollars of their payments in escrow that could be applied toward the new adoption; all she needed now was an additional five thousand dollars. That night, Lee arranged a phone call with Kyle, Adam, Renee, and herself. Afterward, Lee told the couple that Renee had chosen them as the adoptive parents. They sent over the five thousand dollars, and spent the next week texting with Renee, but soon she stopped returning their messages. They started to feel a familiar sense of dread.

Around this time, Teresa and Mike Matheny were making preparations to drive to Detroit from their home in Atlanta. Teresa, an animal technician in a research lab at Georgia State University, and Mike, a loan officer, had been through two rounds of fertility treatments and had given up on becoming pregnant. Teresa told me that, because Mike is Jewish and she was brought up Southern Baptist, they had trouble finding adoption agencies willing to work with them. Then they had a phone call with Lee, who quickly introduced them to a birth mother.

“It was this really emotional moment for us,” Mike told me. Lee said that she would send an adoption contract right over. As soon as he hung up, Mike said, he called their credit-card company to ask for an increase in their credit limit. They sent two payments, totalling thirteen thousand dollars, to Lee that afternoon. “I’m not someone who just hands people money. I’m a fine-print guy,” Mike said. Still, he said, he wasn’t a naturally suspicious person, and “alarm bells didn’t go off.”

The birth mother was in treatment for opioid addiction and was taking methadone to address withdrawal symptoms; her newborn baby would likely experience withdrawal as well and would need to spend time in the neonatal intensive-care unit. Teresa and Mike planned to be in Detroit before the due date, October 21st. They were packed and ready to leave when Teresa received an e-mail from another adoption agency that they had signed up with, based in Michigan. The message asked whether they were working with Lee. She responded “yes,” and then followed up with a text message to the head of the agency. She got a text back that read “Don’t do anything—stay calm. . . . Someone will call you—don’t contact Tara.” Mike recalled that he heard a “bloodcurdling” scream from Teresa. They immediately called Goetting and Corrado, who were representing them in the adoption. The lawyers told them that Lee was under federal investigation for adoption fraud, and that it was imperative they not tell anyone. Corrado said that, since they already seemed to know, she could share a few things. “We have no reason to believe your adoption is fake,” Corrado said over the phone. “But we don’t have confirmation, either.”

Corrado, Goetting, and Panchenko spent two weeks creating a spreadsheet for the F.B.I. with information about every Always Hope adoption they knew of and any problems they had uncovered. They also started calling prospective adoptive parents to tell them that Lee had apparently defrauded them by matching them with birth mothers who didn’t exist or by telling more than one family that they were adopting the same baby. “It was horrible,” Panchenko told me.

The F.B.I. agents met with Corrado, Goetting, and Coffman, the birth mother who had worked for several months as Lee’s assistant. A prosecutor named Sara Woodward joined them. That summer, Coffman had spent most days driving around with Lee while she took phone calls and visited pregnant women. Coffman had quit after learning that she had never received much of the expense money that her baby’s adoptive parents had sent to Lee to give to her. She described to Sluss the layout of Lee’s home, and told him where Lee kept her computer and her files. The next day, November 9th, Sluss and a team of F.B.I. agents knocked on Lee’s door, wielding a search warrant. A Detroit TV news station, WXYZ, received a tip about the raid and sent over a news crew to film it. The agents removed boxes, files, and Lee’s computer hard drive. Panchenko was in court, in the middle of a trial, when Lee texted her, “The F.B.I. is at my house.”

Although WXYZ had footage of the raid, the station didn’t know who the target was or why it had happened. A few days later, Heather Catallo, a veteran investigative reporter at the station, was at her desk when her boss handed her a sheet of paper with the address of the raid on it. “See what you can find out about this,” she told her.

Meanwhile, Kyle had started to investigate their ongoing adoption with Renee. He found her last name and her husband’s name on social media. On Facebook, he found her profile page, which included pictures of her pregnant belly, along with posts in which a woman thanked Renee for choosing her to adopt the baby and announced the details of a spaghetti fund-raiser that she was hosting at her church to raise money for the fees. Kyle wrote a message to the woman, saying that he and his spouse had also been matched with Renee’s child. Renee’s husband learned of the message and contacted Kyle. “I remember when Renee spoke to you guys a few weeks ago,” Kyle recalled him saying. “But we decided to go with this other family. Didn’t Tara tell you?”

When Kyle confronted Lee, she said that Renee must have been deceiving her, and refused to return the five thousand dollars that he had sent her the prior month. She said that Goetting and Corrado were trying to frame her and steal her business, with the assistance of several adoptive mothers who were angry that their adoptions hadn’t worked out, and that they had triggered an F.B.I. investigation of Always Hope. Lee promised that she’d find them another baby. Kyle also recalled her telling him, “I swear on my children’s lives I will get your money back.”

On December 4th, Catallo reported Lee’s name on the air. Catallo told me that, as soon as she started covering the case, families who had worked with Lee contacted her, including a distraught father whose child, without his knowledge, had been placed with a family in another state.

Two people do yoga.

“I know this sucks, but just think of how awful we’ll feel tomorrow.”

Cartoon by Lars Kenseth

Kyle and Adam said that Lee called them several times in distress because adoptive families and birth mothers were “abandoning her” after seeing news reports about her. She insisted that the investigation would soon be dropped, and said that she had found another birth mother for them. At one point, Kyle told me, she called him and suggested that she was thinking of killing herself. He was so concerned that he picked Max up early from day care and rushed to Lee’s house.

Kyle said he believed that Lee was innocent until January 11, 2019, when she was indicted. Adam was at work when the complaint was unsealed; he printed it out and went to the parking lot to read it in his truck. The charge accused Lee of seeking to defraud families by misrepresenting herself as a licensed adoption worker and social worker, of matching more than one set of adoptive parents with the same birth mother, and of matching parents with birth mothers who weren’t pregnant or who didn’t exist. Adam called Kyle, who was at home, and said, “She did this.”

That weekend, Goetting contacted Kyle after piecing together the history of their dealings with Lee. She told them that April, the second birth mother Lee had matched them with, hadn’t been pregnant.

In July, the government filed another indictment of Lee, in which it also charged a local woman named Enhelica Wiggins as an accomplice, after finding recordings on her phone in which she had posed as a fake birth mother to several of Lee’s adoptive families. (Wiggins pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison.) The government found that Lee had taken in $2.1 million from her adoption activities, more than a million of that in 2018. She had also spent almost four hundred thousand dollars on luxury purchases, including more than forty thousand dollars each at Louis Vuitton, David Yurman, and Hutch’s Jewelry. Her degree from Northwestern was fake; the school doesn’t offer a master’s in social work. In August, Lee pleaded guilty to wire fraud. When I spoke to her by phone, Lee said that she was innocent, adding that prosecutors had threatened to charge her husband if she fought the case by going to trial. (Sara Woodward said that this was not true.) Lee was on the verge of tears as she told me that pleading guilty had been a mistake. She is now seeking to overturn her plea.

The investigation had found a hundred and sixty families and seventy birth mothers whom Lee allegedly defrauded. Some of them, including Teresa and Mike Matheny, had successfully adopted babies, but most had not. Dozens of members of adoptive families travelled from across the country to a federal courtroom in downtown Detroit to attend the sentencing, which took place about two weeks before the covid-19 shutdown. Melanie Peterson, one of the adoptive mothers, told me that the hearing was one of the most powerful experiences of her life. “There was something about being present with those other families—we walked into that courtroom literally hand in hand,” she said. Watching Lee enter the room in a prison jumpsuit, hearing the sound of her ankle chains clinking, was deeply cathartic. “I just needed to see her face, to know that she was a real person, that I wasn’t making this all up in my heart and head,” Peterson said.

Bernard Friedman, the judge overseeing the case, said that Lee had “ruined people’s lives for generations,” ordered that she pay restitution of more than a million dollars, and issued the maximum penalty permitted under the sentencing guidelines: ten years and one month in prison.

Before Friedman handed down the sentence, he told the victims in attendance who planned to address the court to take their time. The hearing lasted for nearly five hours. Fifteen people, including Adam, Peterson, and Teresa Matheny, spoke. Lee was described as a “criminal” and a “monster.” Several victims made passionate calls for reform of the adoption system, and argued that the current patchwork regulation of baby brokers was inadequate. Amber Morey, a nursing student in Phoenix, described the experience of being matched with a birth mother named Stacey in 2017, sending Lee thousands of dollars for expenses, reorganizing her life around becoming a mother, and then flying to Michigan for the delivery, only to be told by Lee that Stacey had inexplicably disappeared. Morey then requested to address Lee directly. She turned toward Lee, who sat at the defendant’s table, and asked, “Did Stacey even exist?” There was a pause before Lee replied, “In my heart she did.”

When I visited Kyle and Adam this past May, they were getting ready to leave on a family camping trip. We sat in a bright sunroom papered with children’s finger paintings and posters of the alphabet. Their year dealing with Lee had been “a mess” for them as a couple, Adam told me. “We fought. We argued. We disagreed on everything.” He said he had been frustrated that Kyle had been so blind to Lee’s deceptiveness, although he acknowledged that he had been fooled, too. They even contemplated divorce. Kyle told me that the worst part was that he missed so much time with Max while tracking down birth mothers on the Internet, reading news reports, and, eventually, coöperating with the F.B.I.

After Lee was charged, Kyle and Adam said, they had tried to get used to the idea that they would be a one-child family, and that Max would grow up without siblings. Kyle said he decided to make one last inquiry with the adoption agency that had conducted their home study. “We wanted to know what a real adoption is like,” he told me. A few weeks later, he got a call from the head of the agency, who said that it had what’s known as a “stork drop”—a baby who is born at a hospital and relinquished for adoption without advance notice.

As they prepared to drive to the hospital, Kyle called his parents. “Can you come over to watch Max?” he recalled asking them. “We’re going to the hospital to pick up our daughter.”