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Now you know two things about Faye Yager. You know why she is good at rescuing women from beastly men and corrupt or incompetent courts, and you know why she is bad at it.
Every case is her own all over again.
The courts are far from perfect, says John Rabun of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But they're not as bad as Faye claims. And turning children into fugitives, ripping them away from friends and family and home, can be "a cure worse than the ailment." In several of Faye's cases, mothers have been found, prosecuted and jailed, creating horrible new problems for the children.
"I happen to like Faye as a person. I like her spirit. But in all honesty she has set herself up as a social-service agency, except that unlike a social-service agency, she doesn't do her homework. She takes at absolute face value what the complainant says."
Yager started Children of the Underground in the late '80s when she parted ways with another underground, based in Mississippi and run by Lydia Rayner. Like Rabun, Rayner loves Faye's passion and deplores her methods. Hiding children is discreet business, but Faye is a moth after the hot lights of news and talk shows. Geraldo, Sally Jessy Raphael, you name a show and she was there in Fabulous Faye getups, ranting not just about pervert dads but at times including homosexuals, Masons, judges and satanic cults on her list of unholy conspirators. She once said 70% of her cases involved cults.
"When she did media, some of the things she said were exaggerated," Rayner says. "Like extremely exaggerated, and I said, 'You can't do this, Faye. You can't say something that's not true, then change the story. You have to have credibility.'" Faye says Rayner's exaggerations, not her own, got them in trouble.
A bigger concern, Rayner says, echoing Rabun, was that Faye took on cases indiscriminately, and as a consequence the organization drew lashes from screaming dads, the FBI and attorneys who slapped huge lawsuits on them. It was important, Rayner says, that they harbor only women and children in the most obvious cases of horrible sexual abuse and judicial malpractice. About 350,000 cases of in-family abductions are reported each year in the U.S.--nearly 1,000 a day--and almost every one of them is a complicated mess that can't be easily judged by anyone, as Rayner sees it. Not even by the best-intentioned, well-trained professionals. Certainly not by Faye Yager.
The two clashed repeatedly before Faye departed. "A couple of times she actually had a molester in hiding," Rayner says. Faye doesn't deny that, but says she turned the bad apples in when she learned the truth about them.
Scattered across the country now are childless fathers who claim they were wrongly accused, and they are absolutely flabbergasted that despite her public boasts of aiding in the disappearance of their children, Faye Yager isn't behind bars. She has been sued a dozen times by her count and never lost, and in a 1991 trial, one mother said that while she was under review for flight Faye kept her children from her and coerced them into lies about their father. But that case was a mosquito at her neck. Faye slapped it and walked away clean.