We can do the innuendo, we can dance and sing
When it’s said and done, we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that crap is king, give us dirty laundry
…Don Henley
Thursday night someone on Facebook pointed out that Jason and Christy Vaughn’s Save Grayson! Twitter account promotes their failed attempt to adopt Grayson Wyrembek as an “adoptee rights” issue. I’ve been reading the Vaughn’s Keeping Grayson Home webpage (KGH) and posting on its forum, but I have not seen this outrageous claim promoted there, at least in those words, though the implication is apparent. I checked “Save Grayson!” and sure enough:
Save Grayson!
@KeepGraysonHome is in His hands
Share the love. Support adopted childrens rights & best interests. Always follow back. Call US+404/482-1585. Updates here & on Facebook http://ow.ly/34fdG
The term is qualified as “adopted childrens rights.” But, (1) Grayson was never adopted or even legally available for adoption and (2) the term “adoptee rights” is generally understood to mean the unequivical legal right of adopted adults to their own original birth certificates and other state records about our births and adoptions. “Adoptee rights” is not about the demand of adults to adopt a child or even about the process of adoption itself. Despite stretched Vaughn-logic, no one has a right to adopt a child and no child has a right to be adopted. When demeaning remarks by politicians and clueless editorial comments appear in the media referring to adopted adults as “children,” no one but the most illiterate assumes genuine “children” are being discussed. I wasn’t even sure if I’d heard the specific term “adopted childrens rights” before, so I Googled, the phrase and came up with nothing relevant.
It is vitally important to dig under the surface of this despicable case to uncover hidden agendas and a bigger picture. We cannot let “adoptee rights” be co-opted by what Baby Love Child calls “child collectors.” The misappropriation of our language and co-option of our bastard rights in the midst of the Vaughn’s public pity party and beg-a-thon suggests a profound ignorance of adoption or that more is going on with them and their unknown handlers than meets our already jaundiced eye. Maybe both.
******
Contact phone number: 404-482-1585. This same number is listed at the bottom of the Vaughn’s KGH webpage: This website is sponsored by Crimelo | (404) 482-1585
This number is located in Norcross, Georgia, located right next to Atlanta, the headquarters of the Vaughn’s new “superlawyer,” L. Lin Wood. I called the number and a recording of a woman’s voice told me I’d reached the phone number of “Keeping Grayson Home” and to leave a number for a callback. Next, I used several reverse phone number sites to find the owner’s name, but came up with “not found” or “anonymous. One said the phone number belongs to a cellphone. For $25.00, one site”might” locate the owner, a bribe I have not paid. Of course, there are services that let anyone set up a phone number, far away from their real location, that’s accessible from their own phone, but Norcross seems more than a coincidence. Why wouldn’t a hotline established for the purpose of “Keeping Grayson Home” be located in the Sellersville, Indiana area, where Jason and Christy Vaughn live?
I don’t have a copy of the Vaughn’s original KGH webpage, which went live as far as I can tell on October 11, 2010. The phone number, however, does not appear in any “official” post by the Vaughns until October 28, 2010 when a press release announcing Wood’s retention was published–Dateline Los Angeles. Unlike every other press release I’ve ever read or written myself, this one flunks Press Release 101: there is no paper trail to track back to the point of origin: no contact person or organization, no letterhead, and no distributor (such as PR Newswire). Only the Norcross phone number and an email addy to KGH. The Vaughns simply published the text and other sites linked back to that page. That the press release is datelined Los Angeles and not Sellersville, suggests the handiwork of media maven and former LA County Assistant DA specializing in child sex crimes Robin Sax who has taken up the Vaughns standard. Sax is prominently featured on the front page of KGH, and her articles demonizing Grayson’s father Ben Wyremek appear throughout the page. She considers Grayson “an endangered child.” That Sax is quoted in the press release, pretty much clinches it.
The first “Save Grayson!” tweet appeared on November 4, 2010. I didn’t see it then, but I’m guessing that the phone number was published on Twitter from the start. I don’t know if the phone number was included on the original webpage. The cache is quite new, and the page isn’t old enough yet to show up on the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. The phone number did not appear on promotional material for prayer vigils or the Vaughn’s dinner and silent auction fundraiser at The Captain’s Quarters in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky on November 28, 2010. In fact, no phone number was listed, only an email address for the event organizer.
Crimelo.com: 
This is listed as the “web sponsor” for the KGH webpage. As shown above, the 404 phone number is listed as its phone number, too. Google “crimelo” and “crimelo.com” and you’ll get nothing relevant except a link to whois (more about that in a minute)
This is listed as the “web sponsor” for the KGH webpage. As shown above, the 404 phone number is listed as its phone number, too. Google “crimelo” and “crimelo.com” and you’ll get nothing relevant except a link to whois (more about that in a minute) Hit the link on the KGH page or type the URL in to your browser and you’ll get nothing. I tried Firefox, Sea Monkey, Internet Explorer, and Chrome with several search engines. Nothing comes back but a blank page with the outline of an empty box. Kind of strange for a “web sponsor” site. Then, it gets interesting.
Hit Control-U on the crimelo.com blank page, and you’ll get the source code. At the very bottom of that, a Crimelo blurb:
The definitive social media location for victims, advocates, crime and justice news and discussion.
Turn down the hype. Challenge authority. Expose corruption. Keep them honest – tell your story.
Crimelo is all about people sharing the things they care about, find, think, or create.
Registrant Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent ()
Except for telling us that crimelo.com is a brand new site registered on September 29, 2010, the registration information is useless in identifying the owners because it’s done through the Whois Privacy Protection Service. Ownership of the Keeping Grayson Home webpage is registered through contact privacy.com. In other words, information about the owners of both is sealed from public view. Moreover, a Secretary of State search for “crimelo” (possibly a d/b/a for an unknown corporation) in Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia and California turns up nothing, as does “Keeping Grayson Home.” Why is a service that proclaims itself “The definitive social media location for victims, advocates, crime and justice news and discussion” unfindable? Crime is big news. There should be more than enough courthouse whistleblowers and people unhappy with justice outcomes to satisfy even the most greedy entrepreneur.
With cute prop Grayson, this entire performance is staged to deflect adoption agency (Adoption by Gentle Care) culpability for the Vaughn screw-up onto Ben Wyrembek, the courts, and any other scapegoat the Vaughns, et al can dig up. By singling out Ben, the bad dad, the adoption industry can continue to froth its contempt for biological fathers, who with the stroke of a pen can kibosh even the best laid “adoption plan,” while they pretend to support industry-defined unnamed “real fathers” who shut up and get out, by either design or force.
The beauty of the Vaughn affair is that in the re-scripting of the facts, paps/adopters can be elevated to saviour status, biological parents can be vilified as con artists, and as an afterthought, pesky bastards and their “fake” adoptee rights (fake as opposed to the newfound “right to adopt/be adopted”) claims can be co-opted. A distraught but clean cut, corn-fed family from Southern Indiana beats unashamed sloppy fornicators and their bitter fruits of the womb. It’s class war adoption style.
This brings me back to my original vexation: what’s really going on? Are invisible strings pulling the Save Grayson monster campaign the Vaughns are fronting?
I’ve been at this racket for a long time, and the only thing close to it that I’ve seen is when the pre-Internet DeBoers took it to the streets. Sure, there are other disputed adoption cases that have rumbled along the news cycle, but the Vaughns have taken their grievances to a new level of ego banging and nuisance litigation including a recent petition to adopt Grayson AFTER custody was granted to his father. The prosecution of their case, while an individual decision on the Vaughn’s part, is about bigger issues and agendas, not one little case. No doubt it’s an object lesson for other dad’s stripped of their rights by adoption agency slicksters. Who in their right mind wants spend tens of thousands of dollars only to be headlined like they’re Bruno Hauptmann?
What is Robin Sax, the self-described “child victim advocate” doing in the middle of this? Last month, on the Psychology Today blog, she wrote a scathing attack on the character of Ben Wyrembek and David Houston, a paralegal who has built an extenive public archive of legal documents from the case. Sax accuses Wyrembek of criminal acts, drug addiction, domestic violence, bad driving– and potential child abuse. She postulates Wyrembek’s sole reason for stopping the adoption of his son is to extract money from the Vaughns: “a bio-dad’s financial plan.” I met Ben last spring at the Ohio Supreme Court, and I can assure Sax that making it on the Vaughn’s dime was the last thing he had on his mind. That Sax is framing Ben Wyrembek as a criminal with criminal intent against the Vaughns and his own son–in effect claiming that assertion of parental rights by unmarried fathers is a criminal act–marks out dangerous implications for “bad dads” who buck the adoption system and fight to keep their kids.
The Vaughns pathological campaign endangers the tenuous rights of biological parents that courts and legislators have carved out in the last twenty years. You can be sure that “Grayson’s Laws” will be introduced around the country next year in an attempt to abrogate those hard-won rights, and to make it more difficult than it already is, for parents to retrieve their children from the adoption mill. I thoroughly expect Jason and Christy Vaughn and their friends, lawyers, and handlers, to march into the Ohio General Assembly next year, lawsuits, petitions, pictures, and videos in hand, to convince lawmakers to “fix” the laws they are so sure the Ohio Supreme Court and other courts misread. I don’t know about other states, but here in Ohio, activists and ethicists, including me, will fight back.
Turn down the hype. Challenge authority. Expose corruption. Keep them honest – tell your story.
Crimelo is all about people sharing the things they care about, find, think, or create.
There are no links to anything in the source code except to a login page for a WordPress installation.
I Googled these exact quotes above and found nothing.
A whois search reveals little:
Domain name: crimelo.com
Registrant Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent ()
Fax:
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St – F1
C/O crimelo.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
US
Administrative Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent ()
+1.4252740657
Fax: +1.4259744730
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St – F1
C/O crimelo.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
US
Technical Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent ()
+1.4252740657
Fax: +1.4259744730
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St – F1
C/O crimelo.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
US
Status: Locked
Name Servers:
ns1.ipage.com
ns2.ipage.com
Creation date: 29 Sep 2010 20:29:00
Expiration date: 29 Sep 2011 15:29:00
Except for telling us that crimelo.com is a brand new site registered on September 29, 2010, the registration information is useless in identifying the owners because it’s done through the Whois Privacy Protection Service. Ownership of the Keeping Grayson Home webpage is registered through contact privacy.com. In other words, information about the owners of both is sealed from public view. Moreover, a Secretary of State search for “crimelo” (possibly a d/b/a for an unknown corporation) in Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia and California turns up nothing, as does “Keeping Grayson Home.” Why is a service that proclaims itself “The definitive social media location for victims, advocates, crime and justice news and discussion” unfindable? Crime is big news. There should be more than enough courthouse whistleblowers and people unhappy with justice outcomes to satisfy even the most greedy entrepreneur.There are very valid reasons why people, such as survivors of crime, abuse, and domestic violence want their names, contact information, and data protected by non-searchable web registration. It is about protecting your voice and maybe your life. There is nothing wrong with that. The Vaughns, however, have made their private business the public’s business.
If the Vaughns were worried about privacy and Internet anonymity, they would not have promoted themselves for months with local and national media interviews and appearances, prayer vigils, fundraisers, and now a public website that includes a donation link, and an open Facebook page. If they were concerned about 3-year old Grayson’s privacy
the Vaughns would not have dragged him to Good Morning America. (see KGH website for links for media coverage). Whether they intended to or not, their attempt to keep Grayson from his father has made the Vaughns both media pimps and media whores, exploiting the media and being exploited by it. The incurious and increasingly irrelevant MSM, too indolent and fat to actually dig out the facts and ask real questions, swarm and fawn over the Vaughns while the curious public tunes in for regurgitation and performance.
With cute prop Grayson, this entire performance is staged to deflect adoption agency (Adoption by Gentle Care) culpability for the Vaughn screw-up onto Ben Wyrembek, the courts, and any other scapegoat the Vaughns, et al can dig up. By singling out Ben, the bad dad, the adoption industry can continue to froth its contempt for biological fathers, who with the stroke of a pen can kibosh even the best laid “adoption plan,” while they pretend to support industry-defined unnamed “real fathers” who shut up and get out, by either design or force.Moreover, the staging diverts public attention from adoption corruption featured in the news weekly: Guatemalan baybee brokers, murdered Russian adoptees, basemented foster kids greasy thieves, crooks, pedophiles, and lamsters–and the unpleasant fight of ungrateful bastards to reclaim our rights that the industry and its cronies at the statehouse revoked. Forget it all! Adoption is about family building and bad guy Ben Wyrembek is a family wrecker.
The beauty of the Vaughn affair is that in the re-scripting of the facts, paps/adopters can be elevated to saviour status, biological parents can be vilified as con artists, and as an afterthought, pesky bastards and their “fake” adoptee rights (fake as opposed to the newfound “right to adopt/be adopted”) claims can be co-opted. A distraught but clean cut, corn-fed family from Southern Indiana beats unashamed sloppy fornicators and their bitter fruits of the womb. It’s class war adoption style.As I wrote previously, adoption, traditionally a private matter, has become, over the last decade and a half, a community event which the public either reviles or revels in. While adult adoptees are denied access to their own birth certificates, passports, pensions, and liscensures, all in the name of someone else’s spurious “privacy right,” child adoptees, too young to understand and consent, are trotted out for public display as if they were showing at the Westminster Kennel Club. Scenes from National Adoption Day events, the mournful day when more birth certificates are sealed in the United States than any other day of the year, are flashed on TV screens and printed in newspapers, with no thought of adoptee privacy. Children at the adoption court are marketable; bastards demanding their rights aren’t.
******
This brings me back to my original vexation: what’s really going on? Are invisible strings pulling the Save Grayson monster campaign the Vaughns are fronting?In this day of info overkill, narcissism, and TV ADD, without a team of ambitious and expensive professional consultants, lawyers, and PR flacks your wheat will turn to chaff. That is, your “cause” or grievance won’t make it much past your personal blog and your neighbors.
The Vaughns surely can’t be doing this campaign alone. Mother-in-law Phyllis Vaughn, who posts so much she must have a keyboard glued to her fingers, sends voluminous but non-sensical messages out to FB and Internet sites daily that reflect little political or media savvy. Father-in-law Ed Vaughn wants us to pray. Yet the “underground” campaign has a pushy “professional” feel to it, even if the Lin Wood press release flunked Press Release 101.
I’ve been at this racket for a long time, and the only thing close to it that I’ve seen is when the pre-Internet DeBoers took it to the streets. Sure, there are other disputed adoption cases that have rumbled along the news cycle, but the Vaughns have taken their grievances to a new level of ego banging and nuisance litigation including a recent petition to adopt Grayson AFTER custody was granted to his father. The prosecution of their case, while an individual decision on the Vaughn’s part, is about bigger issues and agendas, not one little case. No doubt it’s an object lesson for other dad’s stripped of their rights by adoption agency slicksters. Who in their right mind wants spend tens of thousands of dollars only to be headlined like they’re Bruno Hauptmann?The secrecy of crimelo.com and webpage registration issues could mean nothing, but I think it’s important. A web” sponsor” acting as hotline for a “customer” with no known other “customers,” is suspicious. Are the Vaughns “crimelo” (that doesn’t sound right) or is someone building a business on their backs?
What is Robin Sax, the self-described “child victim advocate” doing in the middle of this? Last month, on the Psychology Today blog, she wrote a scathing attack on the character of Ben Wyrembek and David Houston, a paralegal who has built an extenive public archive of legal documents from the case. Sax accuses Wyrembek of criminal acts, drug addiction, domestic violence, bad driving– and potential child abuse. She postulates Wyrembek’s sole reason for stopping the adoption of his son is to extract money from the Vaughns: “a bio-dad’s financial plan.” I met Ben last spring at the Ohio Supreme Court, and I can assure Sax that making it on the Vaughn’s dime was the last thing he had on his mind. That Sax is framing Ben Wyrembek as a criminal with criminal intent against the Vaughns and his own son–in effect claiming that assertion of parental rights by unmarried fathers is a criminal act–marks out dangerous implications for “bad dads” who buck the adoption system and fight to keep their kids. What’s in it for Lin Wood, a go-to guy with a roster of high profile, upscale clients that include John and the late Patsy Ramsay, Richard Jewell, Howard K .Smith, Gary Condit, and Natalee Holloway’s mother. He doesn’t come cheap. He gets people on TV. He sues people. I have no idea what, if anything, Wood has done for the Vaughns so far. His name doesn’t appear on any of the legal documents found in David Houston’s online archive, but I suspect he’ll end up, with Sax by his side on The Nancy Grace Show, pitching the Vaughns and pulling our purse strings while he sues Wyrembek for something.
The Vaughns and their handlers and others like them, hide behind legitimate privacy needs and policy. TeamVaughn has politicized what was a simple, unfortunate disputed adoption claim that should have been settled three years ago, turning it into a mediacentric adoption war. The sore loser Vaughns, who bet the bank knowing they’d lose it, now want recompense from the courts and applause from the public. The quiet winner Ben Wyrembek is defamed as a criminal.
The Vaughns pathological campaign endangers the tenuous rights of biological parents that courts and legislators have carved out in the last twenty years. You can be sure that “Grayson’s Laws” will be introduced around the country next year in an attempt to abrogate those hard-won rights, and to make it more difficult than it already is, for parents to retrieve their children from the adoption mill. I thoroughly expect Jason and Christy Vaughn and their friends, lawyers, and handlers, to march into the Ohio General Assembly next year, lawsuits, petitions, pictures, and videos in hand, to convince lawmakers to “fix” the laws they are so sure the Ohio Supreme Court and other courts misread. I don’t know about other states, but here in Ohio, activists and ethicists, including me, will fight back.The Vaughn case is a stand-alone, but its tentacles reach far out into AdoptionLand, subverting the ethical and legal treatment of children and natural parents. TeamVaughn, whether the Vaughns understand it or not, is co-optiong the adoptee rights movement through misappropriation of language conflating the genuine civil rights of adopted people everywhere with the made-up “special right” of people–especially the Vaughns–who desire to adopt children to adopt them. In the fight for their special right they have turned the object of their desire into tabloid fodder and themseleves into AdoptionLand pariahs. Look for them to be nominated for the 2011 Demons of Adoption Award.
Superior work, research and writing, Marles. You told it and told it well. I am proud to be the mother of Bastards!!
Don’t these smarmy characters give you the creeps?
These people are the crystal clear example why people who think they should be allowed to adopt innocent children should be required to pass psychological exams. These people are pathologically insane.
Oh my god, can they really keep pushing this case??? There was no adoption! How can they stalk this father and his child and continue to harass them via bogus lawsuits?? Why aren’t they suing the people who gave them bad legal advice (AGC or their lawyers or whoever)??? This case sickens me and makes me afraid.
Excellent blog/work, Marley. Thank you.
Have you read the latest saga here..
http://keepinggraysonhome.com/?p=581
Titled “Grayson’s Abuse”. Am thinking this is supposed to have been written by Jason Vaughn’s mother, Phyllis Vaughn. I have read many of her ‘comments’, and this latest saga offered by P. Vaughn, to me has some earmarks of plagiarism from research, with bits mixed in from Phyllis..if it was written by Phyllis at all. Also seems to me this is another bit of *co-opting* by the Vaughns to fit their particular justifications that this little boy belongs to the Vaughns.
You know Dawn, I think the Vaughns would have a case of wrongful adoption or something related to it against AGC. I saw their lawyer, Mike Vorhees at the Ohio Supreme Court and overall was unimpressed with his arguments. It just occurred to me that some of this staging is to keep the Vaughns from seeing just how much the agency is at fault. Instead they have truly bastardized Grayson in the worse way possible. At this point it’s all about desire.
I’d like to see their butts in jail! The Vaughns, Christy and Jason. Right next to The Evil Bartholet.
I can not understand these people who believe what they did qualifies them for sainthood.
Great job of follow up. After keeping the boy for three years they feel the need to justify themselves.
lorraine from
First Mother Forum
Thanks, Lo. I haven’t considered them kidnappers, but I do think their actions qualify them as harassers. Their checkbook wringing lawyer has also filed numerous nuisance suits. which at some point will backfire.Courts only tolerate some many of meritless tricks.
Are they still fighting this? Grayson is back with his father, it is over, the Vaughns should get over it. If they really cared about the child they would have returned him years ago, and perhaps worked out a situation with the father where they could stay in touch. But they have ruined any hope of that. This should never have happened. I give Ben credit for not seeking publicity.The Vaughns and supporters should take down their Facebook page and the rest of it and realize they lost.