Hot Sauce Mom was on a mission
Hot Sauce Mom was on a mission
In a March 2010 interview, Jessica Beagley and her husband told the media they wanted to adopt children in need
Posted: Wednesday, August 24, 2011 3:09 pm
By Scott Christiansen with reporting from Anna Vernaya
A November 2010 episode of the tabloid TV show Dr. Phil may have made Jessica Beagley notorious as "Hot Sauce Mom" and spawned misdemeanor child abuse charges against the mother of six from Anchorage-but it wasn't the first time Beagley consented to interviews about her family life.
Beagley and her husband Gary were in the habit of granting TV interviews even while traveling to Russia to adopt their twin boys. That's what they told Anna Vernaya, a Russian-born journalist and translator who lives in Alaska, in March 2010, about six months before the Dr. Phil appearance. Vernaya's interview was intended for a regional newspaper in Magadan, the capitol city of Magadan Province, the region of the Russian Federation where the twin boys were adopted.
"Basically it was just Russia where we were looking [to adopt]," Gary Beagley told Vernaya. "The rules in those different places did not allow us to adopt because we already had four kids-but Magadan did, and that's why we went to Magadan."
Last week Jessica Beagley was on trial for forcing one of her twin adopted boys to gargle hot sauce. She then ordered the boy, who was crying while Beagley screamed at him, into a cold shower. Another child videotaped the discipline. Beagley's attorney told the jury the producers for Dr. Phil asked Beagley keep "a camera handy" to submit video for an episode called "Angry Moms." After Beagley's TV appearance, she was charged with one count of misdemeanor child abuse. The jury convicted her Monday. Jessica Beagley is free but awaits sentencing and faces up to a year in jail.
Vernaya provided a tape of her interview to the Press. The interview was conducted in the couple's South Anchorage home, about six months before the TV appearance. Children can be heard playing in the background, and Vernaya even interviews the twins in Russian. The interview is almost two hours long. One child interrupts by banging on the keys of a piano. The piano playing doesn't sound as much like music as it does a young child just trying to get attention from the adults in the room.
Gary Beagley is a cop who works for the Anchorage Police Department and Jessica is a full time mom who is active in both her children's public school program and in children's education in the Mormon congregation where the Beagleys worship. On the tape, the couple told the journalist they paid $60,000 to an adoption agency-not including airplane tickets for two trips to the Russian Federation-to adopt a pair of twin boys from a detsky dom, a "children's home" in the Magadan Province.
Throughout the interview, Jessica Beagley displays a brand of armchair psychology one might expect from a full time mother and erstwhile educator. She sounds like she's studied this child-rearing thing. She also sounds like a person with convictions. To some ears, she might sound judgmental. She might overanalyze people and their actions. She does this whether she's describing the relationship between the twins, or the detsky dom employees and Russian child welfare workers, or the Alaska child welfare system-even when she describes herself. She readily admits that four-year-old boys sometimes seem alien to a mother.
"I don't understand when they make noises when they play, when they're running around and they're not doing what mama tells them," she says.
Beagley sounds okay with all this. She doesn't sound like the mother on that other tape, the one Dr. Phil so expertly exploited. She wonders why a little boy would use his hand to pantomime a rocket ship while imitating jet engine sounds from his throat. She says the detsky dom had a fenced yard. Once in Alaska, the Beagley's had to enforce a no-playing-in-the-street rule the boys didn't seem to understand.
Her husband is more straightforward.
"They're boys," Gary Beagley says at one point, earning chuckles from both his wife and the interviewer.
The couple said they knew they would adopt children someday, even before they married. When their eldest child enrolled in a Russian-language immersion program in the Anchorage School District, they began to focus on from Russia. The older child would later serve as the twins' interpreter, and the whole family is learning conversational Russian, although English is spoken at home. "We realized that although they wouldn't be in Russia any more, they would still have some of that culture in their lives," Jessica Beagley says on the recorded interview.
The interview tape also reveals another side of Beagleys, a mission complex that seems rooted within the family psyche, particularly in Jessica. Her attorney would later say at trial the couple looked to overseas adoption because they wanted to help children in need. During Vernaya's interview, they explained they knew little Russian while traveling back and forth. The couple shopped for fresh fruit and vegetables for detsky dom children. They packed vitamins, too, explaining they "knew" that the twins and their peers were in an underfunded and ill-prepared orphanage. Jessica also sent care packages to the detsky dom children after returning to Alaska, and said she did not know if those arrived at her destination.
The things she "knew" about child welfare in Russian seem to have been crafted by the adoption agency personnel and her own observations. The detsky dom was ill-prepared to raise some of the handicapped children she met while visiting. "I know the workers don't have the education to take care of those special needs kids," she says, adding, "They are in the business of keeping them alive until they can go to school."
News reports of Jessica Beagley's trial - the Press did not send a reporter-
include coverage of testimony by a psychologist named Stephen Mailloux, who told a jury that the boy who was forced to gargle hot sauce has his own complex psyche. Mailloux said the boy had an attention deficit disorder (people can be born with that), a reactive attachment disorder (from frequently changing caregivers) - and post-traumatic stress, from what Mailloux said was abuse. It's not clear whether Mailloux learned about the twins' story solely from the Beagley or had any sources from Magadan.
Still, if even half of what the Beagleys told Vernaya is true, it paints a picture of a disruptive early childhood that would be difficult for any kid, with or without ADD.
The Beagleys told Vernaya the twins' father had been in and out of prison, suffered from alcoholism and abused their mother. At one point the mother and children were displaced by an apartment fire after a government-owned building burned. The biological mother, awaiting housing from provincial authorities, turned her twins over to the detsky dom as a temporary placement. Jessica Beagley tells that story on the tape. The twins were two-and-a-half-year-olds when they arrived at the detsky dom, Beagley says, and authorities in Russia extinguished their mother's parental rights because she visited her sons only three times during the six months after placing them in the detsky dom.
Vernaya, the Russian-Alaskan journalist, says she has met the twins' biological mother in Magadan. "She was not aware they had taken away her parental rights. She is not alcoholic," Vernaya says. "No one was looking for her, so she could be informed that they were taking parental rights away."
On the tape, Beagley says she does not know if the alcoholic father physically abused his children. If Jessica Beagley's trial teaches one thing, it's that some child abuse - psychological abuse or abuse that cause only minor physical harm - can sometimes be difficult to define, let along interpret across a culture and language gap. One person's discipline may be abuse to another. Beagley learned that Monday, when an Anchorage jury found her guilty.
scott@anchoragepress.com