'Hot Sauce Mom' Found Guilty of Child Abuse, Faces Prison
An Alaska mother who tried to get on the Dr. Phil Show by sending in a videotape of her force-feeding hot sauce into her son’s mouth as punishment for misbehaving has been found guilty of child abuse, and is now facing one year in prison.
Jessica Beagley, 36, became known as the “Hot Sauce Mom” after the video was aired on the Dr. Phil Show. Following that showing callers from around the country flooded the Anchorage police station demanding action.
She has not been convicted of misdemeanor child abuse by an Anchorage jury.
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“What happens when you lie to me?” Beagley asks her son in the video.
“I get hot sauce,” he replies.
The video was used as evidence against Beagley, who prosecutors argued was making as a desperate attempt to get on television.
In the video, Beagley is seen scolding her 5-year-old son, who was adopted along with his twin brother from Russia in 2008, before forcing hot sauce into his mouth and making him swallow. She then forces him to take a freezing cold shower and later admits to making him do jumping jacks to the point of exhaustion.
"There is no reason in the world why someone has to hurt a child to get on a reality show," prosecutor Cynthia Franklin told the jury in her closing argument.
However, Beagley said she only made the video because she loves her son and needed Dr. Phil’s professional guidance to help her correct her son’s continual misbehavior.
“She’s a loving, caring mother who had a child who had some behavioral problems that she was doing her best to deal with,” defense attorney William Ingaldson told the jury.
"The way the law is written...makes it really difficult for a parent to discipline your kids and not be subject to other people's subjective ideas of what is right or wrong," he added.
The aftermath of the video has caused uproar in Russia, where reports of children suffering abuse after being adopted in the U.S. caused Russian authorities last year to suspend international adoptions, the LA Times reported.
Pavel Astakhov, Russia's ombudsman for children's rights, has said that 17 Russian children have died as a result of domestic violence in the U.S. since 1992.
"It has been quite a revelation to me that children are being shipped out of Russia in the dozens, without any agreements. ... I say that such agreements should be signed not only with the United States, but also with the U.K., France, Germany and other countries," he told Russian newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta earlier this year.
Beagley will be sentenced on Monday and faces up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine. Alaskan authorities have not made a decision on whether or not children will be removed from the household. However, Andrey Bondarev, a representative from the Russian Consulate General's office in Seattle, has made several visits to the Beagley home and said he found no reason to remove the boy who was subject to abuse, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Nevertheless, he feels that questions remain to be answered.
"The whole discussion could be, what (happened) outside the video?” Bondarev said. “What happened prior to the video? What happened after?"
