The father of a 7-year-old American girl at the center of a bitter international custody battle said he has given up contesting his ex-wife's custody of the child, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
Erich Foretich, in an interview published in the Christchurch Star, said from the United States that he had been forced to accept that his daughter, Hilary, would live in New Zealand with his former wife, Elizabeth Morgan.The mother was jailed for more than two years after she defied a 1987 court order that said she had to allow Foretich visitation rights.
Morgan, a Washington, D.C., plastic surgeon, has accused her husband of sexually abusing Hilary, a charge he repeatedly denied.
Morgan has sought permanent residence in New Zealand to stay with Hilary, who has been attending school in Christchurch, where she has been living with her maternal grandparents for about two years to evade the court order.
"The only issue is where is Hilary going to live," Foretich was quoted by the Star as saying. "I'm not even going to wage that battle. I feel she belongs back in America."
Foretich, a northern Virginia dental surgeon, went to New Zealand from the United States in February after the whereabouts of his daughter was revealed in a television program.
Foretich returned to his Washington-area home two months after hiring lawyers to represent his case in the Christhurch Family Court and meeting his daughter for the first time in three years.
"I am not pleased with the situation," the newspaper quoted Foretich as saying. "I am not pleased my daughter is living with Elizabeth Morgan or that certain assurances made to me haven't really been kept or followed through. But I've decided there's not much I can do about it."
Foretich said he did not know if the Family Law Court in Christchurch had finished with the case or what had become of his efforts to gain a compromise settlement.
"I bent over backward to make conciliatory gestures toward (Morgan) and there was indication that she wanted to be conciliatory . . . but I haven't heard anything," he said.