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JUDGE OKS MAN'S REQUEST TO OVERTURN HIS ADOPTION

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The Palm Beach Post

Author: Jenny Staletovich, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Nearly all his life, Michael Chalek hated the abusive people who adopted him, bottling up his bitterness like poison, never expecting that one good thing would come of the rotten childhood they provided him.

In fact, he wasn't completely happy until he was completely rid of them.

On Monday, Chalek, 48, learned that a Gainesville judge granted an annulment of the adoption that a Jacksonville black market baby dealer brokered in 1952 for $200, perhaps marking the first time an adopted child has managed to invalidate his own adoption. Largely symbolic, the order allows Chalek to amend his birth certificate to include the names of his birth parents and his name at birth, Michael Edward Higginbotham Yarber.

"I have a real identity now," he said. "I'm almost equal to an average American where I have rights."

More importantly, Chalek, who moved from Boca Raton to Colorado last year, hopes his case will make it easier for other adoptees to unseal their birth records.

"It's going to . . . remove the mean albatross hanging around my neck all these years, but also clear a pathway for all these other adoptees."

In his order, Circuit Judge Maurice Giunta noted that he did not make his finding carelessly. "The public policy of this state is to protect and respect the privacy of those who so generously decide, for whatever reason, to give to a child the gift of the opportunity to achieve what life has to offer with adoptive parents, and give to the adoptive parents the gift of providing those opportunities to a child," he wrote.

However, because Chalek's parents abused him, and because they lied to state adoption officials about their previous marriages, Giunta ordered the annulment.

Chalek's fight is part of a growing national effort by adoptees to unseal records, said Madelyn Freundlich, director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a New York advocacy group. In recent years, Tennessee and Oregon passed laws allowing adults to open their adoption records.

Such laws, she suspects, will have little effect on whether parents decide to give up their children.

"Probably the best information we have to rely on is the two states, Kansas and Alaska, where records have always been available. The rates of adoption there are no lower than in states with sealed records."

Battle began a while ago

Chalek's battle to discover his identity began, he says, when he was 11 and learned he was adopted.

After graduating from high school at 16, he walked out of Adela and Alex Chalek's Atlanta house, never to return. Out on his own, Chalek says he moved in with a woman two years older, who helped him attend the University of Illinois. He went on to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering. He went about his life, marrying and having two sons, now 21 and 11, and becoming a commodities trader.

But the bitterness he felt about his adoptive parents, especially his mother who he says sexually abused him, continued to gnaw at him. Both are now dead.

In 1981 he learned the name of the hospital where he was born. Fourteen years passed before he contacted state child welfare officials and obtained the unsealed records that contained information about his adoptive parents, but not his birth parents.

Then in October 1998, he spotted a newspaper article about local private investigator Virginia Snyder, who was being sued for tracking down a birth mother. He visited Snyder and showed her his records.

She pointed out that the court documents used fictitious names and urged him to file a fraud claim seeking his adoption records.

So Chalek said he drove to Gainesville and persuaded a judge to unseal a 100-page adoption record, an unusual move since records are usually unsealed only for medical reasons.

"When I read the first page, I had to put it down and walk around because I didn't know about all this hidden stuff."

What Chalek learned was this: When he was 8 days old, he was sold by a baby broker for $200 to the Chaleks. Such brokering was illegal, but at the time, the laws were not vigorously enforced.

And he learned his mother was an 18-year-old barmaid named Winnie Faye Higginbotham Yarber who was separated from his father at his birth. Four days later, he found his mother, and the rest of his biological family, in Tallahassee.

When he met with them a year ago and showed them the records, Chalek said his brother asked what he wanted to do.

"I said people who don't like their spouses can go down to the courthouse and get a divorce. I said that's what I want to do with my adoptive parents."

Book, movie planned

His brother, friends with prominent Tallahassee attorney Mallory Horne, a former Florida House speaker and Senate president, persuaded Horne to take his case, although not easily.

"The next day we went to see Mallory and he said, 'What? I don't think we can do that.' A month later he sent a letter saying he was not taking the case. I called (my brother) and said he's in the Masons with you, make him take the case and he did. All the partners that bet we would not have won were wrong. Now they're very happy. The firm is getting so much work off this."

Chalek has big plans, too. He is in the process of writing a book and has talked to a Hollywood producer about a movie. He said Gov. Jeb Bush has invited him to dinner in March.

"These archaic laws need to be changed for adoptees. Adoptees are not given any rights like adoptive and birth parents," he said.

These days his sons are awfully proud of Daddy, he says.

"I've told the oldest one ever since he was knee high that he's lucky he knows who his real mother and father are."

* jenny_staletovich@pbpost.com

2000 Jan 4