Kentucky mother sues state agency over alleged violation of adopted daughter’s privacy
Republished from Kentucky Lantern
A Kentucky mother says after she asked the state to help her manage her adopted daughter’s “severe” behavioral issues, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services sent letters to the child’s birth parents and others, asking them to take her in.
Jennifer Nelson filed a lawsuit in Caldwell Circuit Court last week, saying the state violated her daughter’s privacy.
Nelson is asking for a declaration from the court that adoption records are confidential and that “adoptive parents are the only legal parents.” She also wants the court to block any future letters from being sent and other damages.
Her daughter, 14, identified by the pseudonym Ann in the lawsuit, has been living at a Louisville residential facility since June 2024, Nelson said.
“I’m so torn because in my heart, I want her home, and it hurts me when I leave her,” she told the Lantern. “We visit often, but when I leave, she’s okay. That’s home, and that hurts. But I’m also very grateful that she sees that as home. She is … in a living environment where she is not different than anybody else there. She has severe behavioral issues, but that is the norm there.”
Nelson, a lawyer who is representing herself, names several state and local officials, including outgoing secretary of the CHFS Eric Friedlander and Department of Community Based Services Commissioner Lesa Dennis.
A CHFS spokeswoman said that as of Thursday, the cabinet hadn’t been served with the lawsuit and couldn’t comment directly on it.
“Team Kentucky is committed to the well-being of children and families across the commonwealth,” said Kendra Steele, the executive director for the cabinet’s Office of Public Affairs.
“Once an adoption case is final, it is sealed to protect the identities of the child and their new family,” Steele said. “Very few employees within the Department for Community Based Services can access those cases. The department takes the sensitivity of these cases very seriously.”
‘A higher level of assistance’
Jennifer and her ex husband, Jared, adopted Ann and her biological brother in May 2012, and Ann was “never in the legal or physical custody of her biological parents,” the lawsuit states.
“Jared and Jennifer met Ann at the hospital on the day she was born,” according to the lawsuit. “The parental rights of both Ann and her sibling were involuntarily terminated.”
It was soon “clear” to Nelson that Ann had special needs, she said, citing “cognitive impairments” and “various mental, behavioral and emotional problems.”
“After years of documented and observed struggles with behavioral issues, cognitive impairments and mental health disorders, it was evident that Ann required a higher level of assistance than either parent could provide, and that Ann had become too dangerous, putting herself and others at risk of harm, to be in a private home setting without intervention,” the lawsuit says.
In August 2023, the couple reached out for help from the Post Adoptive Placement Stabilization Services (PAPSS), a state program that lets adoptive parents put their child in a residential facility without giving up custody, according to the CHFS.
But over the course of eight months, the lawsuit says, the Nelsons and PAPSS tried to find a facility for Ann, but she “was rejected by every facility in Kentucky, multiple times,” over her IQ level and documented behavior issues.
By that time, Ann “had become unmanageable in the home and was a safety risk to herself and others,” the lawsuit states. “A symptom of Ann’s illness includes unprovoked attacks upon family and teachers. For example, Ann would routinely be suspended from school for hitting, biting, crying, yelling and attacking both students and staff. At home, Ann would be violent with her siblings and her family. On multiple instances she attempted to throw herself from moving vehicles.”
In April 2024, the Nelsons took Ann to the children’s hospital at Vanderbilt in Tennessee after she “attacked teachers in her special education classroom and attempted to use scissors against students and staff,” the lawsuit states. The hospital kept her under observation for five days and then wanted to discharge her.
Nelson was “adamant with the hospital staff that the child was too violent and that Ann needed treatment. Jennifer stated that she would not leave without getting Ann help,” according to the lawsuit.
Eventually, after the hospital filed a report — later unsubstantiated, according to the suit — of neglect against Nelson, she filed a custody petition with the state, asking CHFS to take temporary custody of Ann.
That petition was approved, and the CHFS became Ann’s temporary custodian in April 2024, with a goal of getting her admitted to a facility and getting her stabilized so she can come home, the lawsuit states.
“I love her. I want her better, but I want her fixed, because I’m going to die one day, and when that happens, she’s going to be in prison, or she is going to be in some group home, strapped to a bed, and I don’t want that,” Nelson told the Lantern. “I want her treated now so that I don’t have to worry about her being killed or arrested or strapped to a bed.”
While in the state’s custody, Nelson says in her suit, the cabinet sent at least 60 letters to people — including biological and adoptive family — seeking placement for Ann. One went to Jared Nelson, Ann’s adoptive father, saying he had been identified as a “potential father,” according to the lawsuit and a copy of the letter shared with the Lantern.
Nelson wonders what if one of the letter recipients had said yes? And who accessed the private adoption information in order to identify and write to Ann’s biological parents?
Kentucky law states adoption records are to be kept confidential by the parties involved, their lawyers and cabinet representatives who are given permission by a court to examine them.
“I think that they — the social workers on the ground — believe that they have to send these letters, but in order to know who all to send them to the biological relatives they would have to have access to TWIST,” Nelson said.
TWIST is a computer database, iTWIST, that houses information on abuse and neglect cases and has itself been the center of a debate between the cabinet and the auditor’s office of late over who should have access to it.
The incident led Nelson to believe there is a disconnect in policy and law.
“I work with a lot of social workers, and I think the ones that are on the ground are doing what they can with what resources they have,” she said. “And I don’t know why there is such a block between the regs, the policy and the law.”
For now, Ann is scheduled for a neurological evaluation in June, which Nelson hopes will provide answers to what, specifically, Ann needs treatment for. Right now, staff suspect schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, mood disorder, autism and other diagnoses.
The hope and goal remains: bring Ann home, a goal Nelson said she’s “devastated” to not yet be able to do.
“Until we can figure out a regimen of both behavioral therapy and medication that will, at least, ensure her safety and everyone else’s,” Nelson said, “then … she’s where she needs to be.”
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