Reigh has, appropriately, been shielded from the more invasive dimensions of public reporting on the case. The accounts of the kidnapping and the trial use her name and her age at the time because this information was part of the public court record, but the details of her life after the kidnapping — where she attended school, how she has processed what happened to her, where she lives now, what her relationship with either parent looked like — are not part of the public record and should not be treated as such.
She was a child in 2008. She is, by the passage of time, an adult now. The experience she had — being taken by a parent from a supervised visit, living for six days in a prepared but unfamiliar environment, being recovered by federal agents, and then spending her subsequent childhood in the shadow of court proceedings, public reporting, and the revelations about her father’s identity — is not something the available reporting can adequately characterize. It is hers to characterize, if and when she chooses.
What can be said is that her mother fought consistently for her protection — in the initial divorce and custody proceedings, in the kidnapping investigation, in the trial. The custody arrangements sought and obtained by Sandra Boss were designed to protect Reigh, and the supervision requirements that Gerhartsreiter ultimately defeated, however briefly, were in place precisely because her father’s identity was uncertain and his stability was questionable.
The supervised visit on July 27, 2008, was an attempt to give a child access to her father in conditions that would protect her. It failed. The system designed to protect her did not protect her on that day. She was taken.