An upcoming documentary will spotlight the potentially unethical practices used in Cambodian adoptions.
Filmmaker Elizabeth Jacobs, 21, will revisit the claim that ‘poor Cambodian families are preyed on by baby recruiters’ in her documentary, The Stolen Children.
Elizabeth’s parents used the services of adoption agent Lauryn Galindo, the same woman who Angelina Jolie, 46, famously used to adopt her son Maddox in 2002.
Galindo was jailed in 2004 for ‘falsifying documents to obtain US visas for orphans’.
Jacobs, who is a film and marketing student at the University of Massachusetts, is determined to uncover the truth about Galindo’s adoptions.
The Sun reports that between 1997 and 2001 half of adoptions from Cambodia to the US – approximately 800 out of 1600 – went through Galindo.
At the time, Galindo and her sister Lynn Devin ran an adoption agency called
Seattle International Adoptions, and shortly after Jolie adopted her son Maddox, Galindo and Devin faced criminal charges.
Devin faced a $150k fine while Galindo was jailed for falsifying names, birth dates and places of birth of Cambodian children she helped to place with US families two years.
This came after Jolie and her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton took full custody of Maddox.
When the scandal was exposed, the U.S. government and several other countries shut down adoptions from Cambodia, with Jolie saying she knew nothing of the illegal trade. There is no evidence Maddox was not an orphan.
Jolie insisted at the time that she went to ‘great lengths to ensure Maddox did not have a living birth-mother in Cambodia’ and that she would ‘never rob a mother of her child.’
Galindo told The Sun in a recent statement that she would be happy to answer any questions Jacobs may have, but insisted the young filmmaker has not reached out to her yet.
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