“Gossip Girl” star Kelly Rutherford is going to court in a dramatic bid to keep her children in the US.
The actress claims her kids have been wrongly “deported” by a California judge who ordered them to live with their father, her ex-husband Daniel Giersch, in France.
Following a bitter custody battle, the judge ruled the children — son Hermés, 7, and daughter Helena, 5 — would live in France and Monaco because Giersch no longer has a visa to travel to the US, so he would be unable to visit them.
Rutherford has an emergency hearing in Manhattan federal court Wednesday to try to prevent her son and daughter from returning to their dad following their summer vacation, which ends Aug. 19. Her lawyer Robert M. Wallack told us, “No child should be forced to leave the United States at the ruling of a judge. It is tantamount to deportation and violates their civil rights. We hope to obtain a ruling that they not be sent back while this is being litigated.”
Rutherford has filed a suit against US Attorney General Eric Holder and Jeh Johnson, secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, and others in the Department of Justice and US Citizenship and Immigration Services. It reads: “No similar case could be found where children who were born and raised in the United States were deported from their own country, where their mother still resides, to accommodate the demands of a non-citizen parent forbidden to re-enter the United States.” Rutherford’s team of legal heavyweights also includes Alan Dershowitz.
Rutherford, 45, who lives in New York City, was not available for comment Tuesday night but previously said, “What have we come to that American children can be deported from their own country — without doing anything wrong? The mother did nothing wrong . . . yet the mother and her children get punished? The father, who isn’t even American, wins. In an American court of law.”