Chilean socialites and married couple, Micky Hurley, 37 and Malu Custer Edwards, 30 accused of abusing their nanny and locking her up in their Upper East apartment have been denied re entry to the US after traveling abroad.
The denial would come after the pair went on a luxurious Italian vacation this recent summer only to be denied re entering the US after a border official cited a case against them involving human trafficking.
Chilean nanny to sue NY socialite family claiming she was a virtual slave.
The fracas would come to light after the pair descended from Chilean aristocracy, spent a year in and out of court denying Felicitas del Carmen Villanueva Garnica‘s allegations that she was locked up and abused in their apartment.
Their 50-year-old aide testified that she was brought to the US from Chile using a fake passport and forced to work 12 hours a day for just $2 an hour for three months looking after their three children.
However, a judge dismissed the case on December 10, claiming Villanueva contradicted her own testimony.
Despite the ruling, 30-year-old Ms Edwards, 37-year-old Mr Hurley, and their young children – aged three, five and seven – remain marooned in the northern town of Portofino.
Ms Edwards, whose ancestor Agustín Edwards Mac-Clure led the League Of Nations in 1922, said in an interview with the New York Times that friends remark: ‘Well, what’s so bad about Italy?”
Offered the socialite: ‘Well, just wait until you are anywhere in the world, and you think you’ll be there a couple of weeks, and then be told you can’t go back to where your life is.’
She and Mr Hurley, who descends from Chile’s founding fathers, are now looking for a new rental apartment and appealing to the consul general in Italy.
Meanwhile, she says, they are struggling to ignore a tumultuous influx of hate mail after a string of emails between the husband and a photographer, Roque Rodriguez they once hired claiming the couple stiffed them on an unpaid bill of $240 made the rounds.
Told Edwards via the New York Post: ‘We have received hate mail and even death threats from the lies that were said about our children and ourselves,’
‘We just want to return to our current lives in New York.’
The lawsuit against the family was thrown out this month after a judge said Garnica contradicted herself.
Court documents show Judge Alvin Hellerstein found Garnica ‘testified that she did not believe her own allegation, that the mother, Malu Custer Edwards, purposefully allowed the children to hit her,’ and that she ‘testified she was never locked in any room.’
Despite the denials from Edwards and Hurley, the New York Department of Labor ordered the couple to pay Villanueva $6,302 in back wages in 2011.
Garnica had claimed that the couple often left her with only small slices of bread and milk to eat, while they were regulars at the exclusive French restaurant Balthazar – where entrees run $30 to $45.
Responded attorney Robin Alperstein at the time:‘The claims are completely without merit and will be fully refuted in court.’
Garnica said she began working for Edwards and Hurley in Chile in December 2010 but the couple decided to move to New York in January 2011 so Edwards could enroll the the New School.
She claimed the couple did not deliver on their promise of $10-an-hour and health care.
Finally, in March 2011, she quit her job claiming one of the children slammed her head in a door.
At present the couple continue to petition to be re admitted to the US whilst languishing in Italy and presumably in search for warmer clothing attire befitting of aristocratic stock…
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