Today’s post was shared by The Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group and comes from www.nydailynews.com
 What was meant to be a three-week vacation in Italy turned into a two-month exile for a Chilean family from Manhattan. Mike Hurley, 37, and Malu Custer Edwards, 30, along with their 7-year-old son and two daughters — ages 5 and 3 — have been denied reentry into the U.S. by the State Department following a lawsuit from their nanny who accused them of enslaving her. The family’s nanny, Felicitas del Carmen Villanueva Garnica, 50, moved with them to the U.S. in 2011 from Chile, where they lived. Shortly after, she stopped working for them in mid-March. Two years later she filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court accusing them of human trafficking. Garnica said the couple took her passport and locked her away in their Upper East Side apartment without enough food and her medication for hypertension. She also said she was underpaid. They would also allow the children to hit her. She claimed that one of the kids once smashed the refrigerator door on her head. The socialites denied all the accusations. However, the state Department of Labor made the couple pay Garnica $6,302.54 in back pay. Edward and Hurley, who descend from Chile’s aristocracy, are a graphic designer and an interior designer, respectively. Without thinking the allegations would be an issue, the… |
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