Masha Allen - Adoption

Masha Allen - Adoption

Masha was born in 1992 in Novoshakhtinsk, a small town near Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Her biological father left her mother to raise her on her own. The woman was an alcoholic and stabbed Masha in the head at the age of five, forcing police to remove her from the house and put her in the local orphanage.

Her mother visited occasionally, and told Masha she would be able to return home soon. But eventually Masha was told she would instead be among a group of children to be adopted by American families. She was hopeful that her life would improve, although slightly disappointed that she would have only a father (Mancuso was a single man).

However, upon returning to America with him, she learned of his true plans for her. Mancuso made her sleep with him naked on her first night in his house and began regularly molesting her shortly afterward, forcing her to share his shower as well and barring her from eating junk food, pasta and raw vegetables in favor of peanut butter sandwiches to keep her thin and delay the onset of puberty. She reported later that he even made her go through a mock wedding to him.

After he had begun abusing her, he began to take pictures, she said later. At first they were typical pictures any parent takes of a child, with her fully clothed, but gradually he began to photograph her in her underwear, then naked and finally performing sexual acts. At one point, she said, he even chained her to the wall in his basement for some pictures with BDSM overtones.

He kept her in line with threats not to talk to anyone, and rewarded her participation in photography sessions with toys and video games, as well as an annual trip to Disney World.

This went on for five years until FBI agents arrested Mancuso at his house in 2003. Mike Zaglifa, a police sergeant in the Chicago suburb of Palos Heights, had given Mancuso's IP address to them after going undercover and trading pictures with Mancuso online.

They had not expected to find him living with a child, and Masha quickly told the police what he had been doing with her. She was removed and readopted by Faith Allen, a single woman who had herself been through similar experiences in her own childhood. She was finally able to give Masha the parenting she needed, giving up her status as a foster mother to concentrate on Masha alone. They have since moved to another state. She still receives intensive therapy but otherwise lives a normal life.

Masha Allen - How did it happen?

Many people wondered how Mancuso was allowed to adopt the girl in the first place. While he did not have a previous criminal record as a sex offender, single men are very rarely allowed to adopt unrelated girls and in fact the law in Russia's Rostov Oblast, where Novoshakhtinsk is located, prohibits such adoptions.

A Cherry Hill, New Jersey woman named Jeannene Smith had overseen the adoption through an Indiana-based agency called Families Thru International Adoption (FTIA), after Mancuso, who had explicitly requested a five-year-old, blonde, blue-eyed girl, selected Masha. When FTIA's founder, Keith Wallace, fired her midway through, she went to New Jersey and founded another agency, Reaching Out Thru International Adoption (ROTIA), which finished the adoption and was supposed to do post-placement checks required by Russian law.

However, Nancy Simpronio, the Pittsburgh-area social worker who had done the original home study required for the adoption never did, and at the time Russia had no provision for enforcing that regulation (since then, foreign adoption agencies that fail to provide those reports run the risk of losing their accreditation to operate in Russia). A post-placement would have revealed that Masha had no bedroom of her own at Mancuso's house and slept with him, among other things.

Prior to the adoption, she also failed to contact Mancuso's ex-wife as well as his biological daughter, Rachelle, even though she knew about them. He had sexually abused the latter regularly, had no contact with her since she was 13, and says she would have told anyone who had asked about it. She told ABC News correspondent John Quinones on a December 1, 2005 segment of PrimeTime devoted to Masha that she feels considerable guilt over what happened to her onetime half-sister and her inability to prevent it when she heard her father had adopted a young girl (She was able to apologize to Masha in person later).

Smith has since cofounded a lobbying group called Focus on Adoption which lobbies on behalf of agencies that primarily do international adoptions. She has not commented on the case publicly, citing confidentiality laws.

Masha intends to file a civil suit against Simpronio's agency for what they allege was an inadequately researched and overly positive home study, as well as FTIA and ROTIA, which her lawyer says fault each other for permitting the adoption to go through.

Authorities in Pennsylvania have promised to review the circumstances surrounding the adoption.