A chance encounter with a family friend informed Rachelle of the truth. For years, she thought her father had adopted a boy, who she thought would be safe from harm. "And I feel partly responsible for what happened to her, and I beat myself up about it all the time because I feel that it was my fault that I did not say anything."īecause she had lost contact with her father, Rachelle says she didn't know the details of the adoption. "It goes through my mind every day and I feel so much guilt," says Rachelle. She now feels that if she had told someone, Masha might have been spared. Rachelle never revealed the terrible secret about her father to anyone, until the FBI contacted her during their investigation. No longer interested in Rachelle, the two lost nearly all contact. After six years of torment, Rachelle claims Mancuso stopped when she reached puberty. But she says the sexual abuse intensified during weekend visitations with her father. She says she painfully remembers how her father began molesting her when she, too, was just 5 years old.Īfter years of abuse, Rachelle's parents divorced when she was 10 years old. She grew up in the same house with the same secret shame. Rachelle, Mancuso's biological daughter, says she shares a painful bond with Masha.
The house where he and Masha lived has since been sold to a new family. He also pleaded guilty to the horrible sex crimes he committed against Masha and was sentenced to serve 35 to 70 years in prison. Two years ago, Matthew Mancuso was sentenced to 15 years on federal pornography charges. Sergeant Zaglifa says that to gain proper perspective on the severity of child pornography, it's important to call them "child sex abuse images." "When those images are being made," says Sergeant Zaglifa, "that's sex abuse in progress." He offers his expert advice for how parents can protect their children: "The number one thing is: No chat rooms." Her rescue, says Sergeant Zaglifa, was an unexpected reward for what he calls the "physically and emotionally draining" work of capturing child predators. Working with other agents, he traced Mancuso's Internet address to a location near Pittsburgh, where he was later arrested.ĭuring their investigation, police officials had no way of knowing that the little girl in the photographs was Mancuso's adopted daughter. Sergeant Zaglifa says his instinct told him this man was an absolute danger to children. Posing as a pedophile, Chicago area police officer Mike Zaglifa discovered Mancuso in an online chat room.
Back in the states, Masha expected a nice American home with a bedroom all her own. No phone calls were made to his ex-wife or to his biological daughter. What she didn't know was the adoption agency failed to properly check her new father's background. But nothing could have been farther from the truth. Mancuso seemed like her knight in shining armor. He visited Masha several times at the orphanage, took her to nice dinners, and bought her candy. After months of waiting, Mancuso traveled to Russia to meet his new daughter. He contacted a New Jersey adoption agency requesting information on 5-year-old Caucasian girls, and chose Masha from a videotape. Meanwhile, 41-year-old Matthew Mancuso, a divorced father in Pennsylvania, was looking for a little girl to adopt. Soon after recovering from her traumatic ordeal, Masha was sent to an orphanage where she prayed that a good family would come to rescue her. Her own mother tried to kill her when she was only 4 years old by stabbing her in the back of the neck with a kitchen knife. She was born in southern Russia to an alcoholic mother and a father she never knew. The image displayed above, of a bikini-wearing, rifle-toting Sarah Palin, began circulating on the Internet within days of the announcement that she had been tapped for the vice-presidential spot on the 2008 Republican ticket.At 13 years old, Masha has already survived the unthinkable. American Legion/VFW frown on garments made from US flag.Īlaska governor Sarah Palin quickly became the object of such attention when Senator John McCain selected her as his running mate for the 2008 presidential election. If it’s real it’s dynamite! She’s a Life Member of the NRA yet is at a pool where guns and alcohol are mixed.
There is a third person behind the beer/cig guy holding another rifle. Behind her a male is holding a can, possibly beer, and in the other hand a cigarette. She is wearing a stars and stripes bikini. It shows Vice Presidential candidate Sara Palin holding a rifle. It’s an unfortunate aspect of modern life that just about any woman who enters the public sphere at a national level is presumed to have posed for risqué photographs (anything from cheesecake shots to nude pictures) at some point in her past, and that (whether she has or not) examples of such photos will inevitably be fabricated and put on public display.