SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019 | MOTHER JONES 31PLAN Cbefore her son began school last year,
Tiffany Gordon showed his father’s
mugshot to school administrators. “If
you see this guy, you have to call the
police,” she told them.
Ten years earlier, when Tiffany was
12, a young man she knew invited her,
her sister, and a friend on a late-night
car ride. “I thought we would be going
to McDonald’s,” Tiffany recalls. Instead,
18-year-old Christopher Mirasolo raped
Tiffany and took the girls to an aban-
doned house in eastern Michigan.
When the hiding place was discovered,
it marked the end of one nightmare—and
the beginning of another. A month later,
Tiffany realized she was pregnant. A pros-
ecutor filed charges against Mirasolo,
who might have faced a mandatory sen-
tence of 25 years to life for impregnating
a minor if he had not pleaded guilty to
attempted rape, which resulted in a prison
sentence of just two years. A judge let him
out less than a year later. Not long after,
Mirasolo raped another young girl and
was sentenced to 5 to 15 years behind bars.
Tiffany’s parents supported her
decision to keep the baby. Other family
members urged her to consider an abor-
tion. But she was adamant: “My son was
innocent,” Tiffany, now 23, remembers
telling her family.
She dropped out of school and stayed
afloat working odd jobs. For almost
nine years, she didn’t speak about the
assault and tried to suppress the mem-
ories—until 2017, when she applied for
state assistance. Without looking into
the circumstances of how she became
pregnant, county probate judge Gregory
S. Ross granted Mirasolo joint custody
and ordered Tiffany to live within 100
miles of him. Making matters worse, Ross
disclosed Tiffany’s address to Mirasolo
and ordered that his name be added to
her son’s birth certificate, according to
her lawyer, Rebecca Kiessling.
Tiffany’s experience battling her rapist
for parental rights is not unique. As many
as 32,000 women get pregnant through
rape every year, and at least one-third
decide to raise the baby instead of getting
an abortion or choosing adoption. But be-
cause more than a third of all states do
not terminate an assailant’s custody rights
unless he’s been convicted of felony sexual
assault, the women who make that choice
can be forced to co-parent with their
rapist. Even in states that make it easier
to deny rapists’ parental rights, loopholes
abound, and prosecutors and judges have
broad discretion in these cases.
That many rape survivors are forced to
share custody with their assailants gained
fresh relevance this spring, when Alabama
lawmakers passed a near-total ban on
abortion, with no exceptions for rape or
incest. Critics said the law was tanta-
mount to forced motherhood and pointed
out that Alabama was one of only twostates with no law barring custody rights
even when the assailant was convicted of
first-degree rape. At the center of the
debate was Tiffany’s lawyer. Kiessling
supports abortion bans even in cases of
rape but she is also fighting for laws to
protect rape survivors who do not want
to share custody with their assailants. As
such, she sits at an unusual confluence of
arguments over women’s rights and has
become a thorn in the side of legislators
who have pushed laws that force women
to carry their pregnancies to term with-
out considering their impact on rape
survivors. For Kiessling, ending all abor-
tions shouldn’t mean rapists can claim
shared custody. “There is nobody more
vulnerable than a pregnant rape victim,
so you’ve got to protect her,” she says.
Following significant media attention,
thanks to Kiessling and a petition signed
by more than 140,000 people, Ross
reversed his decision granting Mirasolo
custody in October 2017, saying he was
not aware of Tiffany’s rape. But facing her
rapist in court retraumatized Tiffany. The
custody case “should never have been
filed. That should be up to her,”
Kiessling says. Two years after the court
battle, Mirasolo’s probation has ended,
and with it, the no-contact order, Tiffany
explains. She worries that Mirasolo
could drop back into her son’s life. “Does
he show up and kidnap him? I don’t
know,” Tiffany says. “Could he show up
at his school and take him?”for decades, the majority of states let
convicted rapists exercise custody over
the children conceived in their crimes.
In 2015, President Barack Obama signed
the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act,
which encouraged states to pass mea-
sures terminating a father’s parental
rights when there was “clear and con-
vincing evidence” of rape. Those that did
would receive additional federal fund-
ing for violence-prevention programs.
The measure took aim at an imbalance
in custody law: Rape is one of the few
crimes for which a conviction is neces-
sary to end parental rights. In every state,
only “clear and convincing evidence” is
required to sever custody in cases of
child abuse and neglect.
Thanks to the work of victims’ rights
advocates, half of all states now use theWhen Your
Rapist Demands
Custody
More states are banning abortion without
exceptions for rape. But what happens to women
who must carry their pregnancies to term?
BY MICHAELA HAASphotographs by brittany greeson