Diksha Sundriyal
In Lifetime’s ‘Stolen Girl,’ Kate Beckinsale stars as Maureen Danning, who embarks on a perilous journey across countries in a quest to reunite with her daughter, Amina. The story focuses on a real-life case of parental abduction, where a young girl, Nadia, was taken away by her father to Syria, while her American mother, Maureen Dabbagh, spent years searching for her. While the film presents a fictionalized version of the story, many aspects of Maureen Danning’s experiences are drawn from the life of Maureen Dabbagh, who has dedicated her life to helping others reunite with their children. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Maureen Dabbagh’s Life Changed After the Alleged Parental Abduction of Her Daughter
Maureen grew up in a small town and worked as an emergency medical technician before getting married and having three children. The stress of her job and work led her to leave her career in medicine, and she became a seamstress to make ends meet. Her marriage dissolved amicably, and she got a divorce, following which the custody of her children was given to her ex-husband. This decision was made considering that Maureen had contracted a rare nerve disease and couldn’t provide proper care to her children while going through her treatment. It was during this time that she crossed paths with a Syrian man named Hisham Dabbagh, who worked at the hospital where she received her treatment.
They got married in 1988 and moved to Medina, Ohio, where their daughter, Nadia, was born two years later. While things had been fine between the couple initially, the cultural differences, especially in the way they wanted to raise their daughter, started to cause conflicts. Realising that they couldn’t find a common ground, Maureen filed for divorce. The court ordered the parents to share custody, with each parent having one month with their daughter. What worried Maureen was that, by this time, Hisham had moved to Florida, which meant that Nadia would be a long way from Ohio.
The mother was also concerned about not being able to see her daughter, again, something that Maureen stated that Hisham had allegedly threatened to do before they got divorced. According to Maureen, in the month that Nadia spent with him, her ex-husband did not abide by the rule of allowing the child to talk with her mother regularly. She said that he would dodge calls, and even when he picked up, Maureen didn’t get to speak with Nadia. This started to make her anxious, and her worst fears came true when Nadia did not return to Ohio one month later, as ordered by the court. This occurred in December 1992, and for the next couple of months, Maureen attempted to persuade the authorities to help her regain custody of her daughter.
In February 1993, Maureen became concerned when the repeated calls to Hisham’s apartment went unanswered. When she called the hospital where he worked, she was told that he hadn’t shown up to work that week. It later turned out that he had left the country with Nadia on February 12, 1993. Even after this, Hisham couldn’t be charged with international child kidnapping. The first problem was that there was no law concerning the matter at the time. And the second problem was that the custody dispute between him and Maureen was still pending in court.
Maureen Trained Herself as a Snatchback Agent to Find Nadia
It was in October 1994 that Maureen got full custody of Nadia, which led to the issuing of a warrant for Hisham’s arrest in November, per records. Maureen was convinced that he had taken their daughter to Syria, but the problem was that Syrian law wasn’t obliged to follow American rules. It was also pointed out that even if they agreed to give over her ex-husband due to his arrest warrant in America, they couldn’t let Nadia, a Syrian citizen, leave. So, in February 1995, Maureen filed a claim for Nadia’s custody in Syria, which she won because Hisham hadn’t followed the Syrian law of registering the girl as his daughter.
With Maureen winning full custody in Syria as well, an arrest warrant was issued for Hisham, per court filings. By then, however, he had left the country again. This time, he went to Saudi Arabia. By now, Maureen had spent around a quarter of a million dollars, paying lawyers and private investigators to track her daughter and bring her back. She had also talked to the media, in the hopes that the case would receive public attention and put pressure on the authorities to help her. In 1998, she went on a hunger strike to get the attention of the lawmakers in making strict policies to prevent what had happened to her and Nadia from happening to other parents and children.
During this time, she also got involved in the world of snatchback agents, whom parents hired to bring their kids back home. Determined to get her daughter back, Maureen said she trained herself as a snatchback agent. She also revealed that she learned how to cross borders, to use automatic weapons, to track people through data mining and GPS, among other things. She utilized these skills to assist other parents in locating their children while continuing to search for Nadia. At one point, during one of her many visits to Syria, she managed to find where Hisham and Nadia were staying.
Because the legal channels were still impeding her efforts to reunite with her daughter, she thought about giving in to her rage and taking Nadia away, even if it meant holding Hisham and his family at gunpoint. She later revealed that, at that moment, she had blood on her mind, but the thought of Nadia seeing this dark side of her made her stop and reconsider her actions. She had to consider that years had passed since Nadia had seen her, and now, Hisham and his family were the only family the girl knew. So, Maureen decided to step back and let Nadia make the decision of finding her when she grew up.
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Maureen Dabbagh is Helping Reunite Other Families Today
Now in her late 60s, Maureen Dabbagh resides in Capron, Virginia. She has worked as an international parental child abduction specialist for Cross Border ADR since 1997. During her search for Nadia, she took classes on mediation and multicultural conflicts. She was certified by the Virginia Supreme Court to serve as a mediator for juvenile and domestic relations. She also holds a BS in Psychology from Regent University and was trained in advanced cross-border mediation from the University of Miami School of Law. She has worked on more than 1200 international child abduction cases, and her expertise is recognized by the courts across the country. She has testified before state and federal Congress, as well as the UN Human Rights Commission. For the latter, she also drafted a presentation on international parental kidnapping.
From 1994 to 2014, she served as the CEO of P.A.R.E.N.T International, a company she founded to help people reunite with their children. She ran an Alternative Dispute Resolution, Research & Development firm called Dabbagh and Associates from 2005 to 2013. She has volunteered as a peacebuilding mediator for Mediators Beyond Borders and served on the advisory committee for Co-Parenting Solutions, Inc. She shared her deep knowledge of the world of parental abduction and recovery of children in two books: ‘Parental Kidnapping in America’ and ‘The Recovery of Internationally Abducted Children.’
Maureen reunited with Nadia in 2010. At the time, her daughter was 20 years old and had decided to reach out to her independently. While Maureen had shared her journey of finding Nadia with the world, she decided to keep the details of her reunion private. Having had her case in the public eye for so long, she said, “When Nadia and I connected, that was my time. I didn’t want that exploited.” Similarly, Maureen has chosen to keep other aspects of her life private. Reportedly, she goes by a different last name, though she has used Dabbagh on her social media and author profiles.
Years after losing Nadia, Maureen built another family, but has kept the details of the same to herself. She intends to keep working on the cases of parental abduction. She hopes that her story, told through various forms of media and her books, helps others learn valuable lessons about how to handle certain situations, whether it’s reconnecting with their children or deciding when to let go and move on. At the end of the day, she wishes that her story educates people and shows them that resolving conflicts by using children as weapons is not good for anyone, especially the children.
