The 10-year-old Texas girl lost at the center of the #StandWithSophie campaign. She came to Seguin, Texas with her father on July 12 and was lost there. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, her 42-year-old father Michael Long kidnapped her one year after she stated that her mother’s fiancé is sexually abusing her.
Michael Long doesn’t have the legal body of his daughter Sophie Long, so he chooses this way to bring her to him. According to sources, Michael has a white 2010 Ford Edge SUV or a gray van with blacblacked-outdoors and a black rap on the top and after kidnapping a juvenile he may be en route to Arizona, Utah, Mexi, co, or Colorado in one of these vehicles. Missing Sophie has a small burn mark on one of her arms.
Sophie sparked the #StandWithSophie campaign one year after her video got viral on the internet in which she was screaming for help at a custody handover. The video was uploaded on August 14, in which she was desperately clinging to Michael’s car and accusing her mother’s fiancé of sexual abuse. Many protestors came out with signs and demonstrated their support for Sophie.
Michael posted the video on into the rent and said he wanted to save her daughter from Mr. Jake, the fiancé of his ex-wife. He started a GoFundMe campaign to collect donations to pay the legal fees in the custody battle with his ex-wife, Kelly Long. He got donations worth $200,000 in the custody battle with Sophie’s mother who got full custody of Sophie and her two other children. As the video went viral, Kelly denied the fact of sexual abuse and said her daughter is safe in her care.
Kelly claimed that Sophie’s father forced her daughter to say these words. She added: ‘My mother, Kim Mitton, and I were trying to settle the little girl in the car and nothing more. Sophie started screaming and my mother was just pulling her ankle to save her from falling. The situation became terrifying and heartbreaking. It was not the way it posted.’
A judge granted full custody of her children to Kelly in September last year and allowed Long to visit them two times a month. Kelly also said she tried her best to avoid Sophie’s claims because she wanted to get custody of all three children.
‘Being a concerned mother, my priority is to protect the safety of all of my children including my daughter Sophie and two sons. I was reluctant to speak out about the viral video and the custody battle just because of my children’s dignity and safety.’
‘I didn’t care about anything and kept putting one foot in front of the other and tried my best to help my children to process the trauma they were experiencing. But finally, we get over the heartbreaking and terrifying situation’, she said.
Her attorneys said the pages tried to mislead the public with false claims. The purpose of creating these pages is to spread false information, but we are doing everything to warn the public to keep them away from these claims.
Sources close to Kelly said she denied her daughter’s claims of being abused sexually while in her care. She said Sophie’s father coached her to say these words. Kelly also hired lawyers to issue a fraud alert on campaigns and tried to remove all materials related to the GoFundMe page and #SandWithSophie. The page remains up, but people stop donating to it.
In the viral video, Sophie was screaming and telling her grandmother Kim Mitton of abuse during a custody exchange. She refused to go to her mother’s home where the fiancé of her mother used to come often.
The personal vendetta between Michael and his ex-wife has reached a dangerous level. They divorced each other and started a custody battle regarding three children in 2015. Long says the split was due to emotional abuse on her part, while Kelly claims he was an irresponsible and abusive husband.
In an interview with DailyMail.com in September, Michael said: ‘I wanted to see my children stable so I chose to leave them with their mother because she kept the marital home.’
Michael says he had personal issues to deal with in the wake of the divorce so he decided to move out. He went to Gilbert, Arizona for eight months and there he met his second wife. He tied the knots with Kourtney Chalmers in 2017.
Kourtney said Sophie called us many times to tell us about the sexual abuse at her mother’s home. Both She and Long said: ‘Sophie has repeated her claims in forensic interviews, but she didn’t have the courage and didn’t dare to speak about the alleged abuse in front of her mother.’
Kelly denied all these aspects and said her husband has a history of making false claims. She further said: ‘Multiple medical providers and also the Department of Child Protective Services have ruled numerous times, after multiple medical tests, that there is no evidence of any sexual abuse. During the interviews with forensic psychologists, Sophie and her brothers never exposed an outcry.’
A source close to Kelly said Sophie has undergone many interviews with forensic psychologists under the direction of CPS. But step-mother of Sophie said: ‘I’m unable to understand why CPS keeps returning Sophie to her mother even after having good reasons to believe in inSophie’s claims. She gave clear signs and tried to tell them in many ways, but they are not taking her claims seriously. It’s so disgusting to keep her throwing back to the wolves.’
Long and his second wife spent $30,000 to get custody of Sophie and then they started collecting donations via GoFundMe. They raised $200,000 to fight the custody battle. In the interview with DailyMail.com, Michael said:
‘It’s not difficult to remove a child from an abusive situation.’ And it seems like he turns his words to action.