A controversial treatment used in custody fights can keep family members apart for years against children’s wishes. ‘It all absolutely destroyed me.’
By Dan Frosch | Photographs by Ash Ponders for WSJ
Aug. 24, 2024 at 9:00 pm ET
PHOENIX—Tori Nielsen was 16 when she and her 12-year-old brother were whisked away from their mother at the Maricopa County courthouse by four strangers in a white minivan on the morning of May 27, 2021.
The strangers wouldn’t tell Tori and her brother where they were going, she recalled, as the siblings held hands and cried in the back seat. After hours on the interstate, they arrived at a hotel somewhere by the ocean. The strangers, three men and one woman, barricaded the door to their room with furniture so they couldn’t leave, Tori said.
