Jonah Bevin obtains protective order against adoptive father former KY Gov. Matt Bevin (Free Access)

A judge has entered an emergency protective order against former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin sought by his adopted son, Jonah Bevin, now 18, directing him to have no contact with Jonah until the matter can be heard in court.

The order does not include Glenna Bevin, Jonah’s adoptive mother, but directs her to appear at the March 19 court hearing.

In a statement to the court, Jonah alleges his adoptive parents, Matt and Glenna Bevin, abandoned him in a brutally abusive facility in Jamaica last year and sought to send him to Ethiopia, his birthplace, last month after he went public with his allegations in an interview with the Kentucky Lantern.

“I now believe they were trying to get me to disappear,” Jonah’s statement said.

The Bevins, who are divorcing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The order bans Matt Bevin from any contact or communication with Jonah pending the hearing and requires he remain at least 500 feet away from him. It also requires Bevin to temporarily surrender any firearms in his possession within 24 hours to the Jefferson County sheriff.

In his interview, Jonah said that at the Jamaican facility, he endured several months of severe beatings, death threats, waterboarding and being buried in sand before Jamaican child welfare authorities shut down the Atlantis Leadership Academy in early 2024, citing abusive conditions. They removed eight youths, all Americans.

Jonah and child advocates who worked to relocate the youths have said the Bevins declined to act on his behalf or return him to the United States. As a result, he for a time ended up in the custody of the Jamaican child welfare system.

It is a startling turn of events involving the former Republican governor who campaigned on improving the state’s adoption and foster care system and his wife, who as first lady, made child welfare her primary focus.

Matt Bevin, as a candidate and later governor, often mentioned the Bevins’ adoption of four children from Ethiopia, including Jonah, took them to public events along with the couple’s five biological children and posted frequent photos on social media.

Jefferson Family Court Judge Angela Johnson granted the order Friday just a few hours after Jonah, who traveled to Louisville with child advocacy lawyer Dawn J. Post Thursday, filed the petition in Jefferson County.

Johnson also is the judge handling the pending divorce case of the Bevins,

Jonah also filed a police report Thursday with Louisville Metro Police, alleging he was abandoned in Jamaica by the Bevins.. A final copy of the report is not yet available.

Post, who specializes in what she calls “broken adoptions,” said they are hoping the report will prompt authorities in Kentucky to consider criminal charges in the case.

According to Kentucky law, abandonment occurs when a parent or guardian “deserts the minor in any place under circumstances endangering his life or health and with intent to abandon him.”  It is a Class D felony, the least serious, and carries a penalty of one to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

Jonah, in an interview Thursday, said he’s pursuing the case because he has learned that many more youths, including adoptees, have suffered from maltreatment at “troubled teen” residential facilities that claim they can help emotional and behavioral problems.

“There’s many other kids like me that need help,” he said. “They need their voices to be heard.”

Post said her visit to the facility in Jamaica, where she traveled to offer free legal help to the youths removed from Atlantis, underscored the magnitude of the problem.

“My goal as an attorney for children has always been and only been to make a difference,” she said. “There’s this whole population of broken adoptions, a significant, significant number.”

Jonah, in his statement, also details multiple incidents of abuse and neglect he said involved him after the Bevins adopted him at age 5 and a group of three siblings from Ethiopia in 2012. He said he was slapped, struck and grabbed and at one point assaulted by someone connected to the family.

Jonah, said he was last homeless in Utah after he turned 18, said in the statement he would like to return to Kentucky but is afraid to do so because without court protection.

“Due to the nature of the threats, abandonment and neglect, I have reasonable cause to believe that further harm may occur without the issuance of an immediate protective order,” his statement said.

Post has said she is working to find a more suitable placement for Jonah.

In his first public comments since he left the Jamaican facility in February 2024, Jonah told the Kentucky Lantern last month he experienced brutal beatings and other mistreatment at the Atlantis Leadership Academy, which promoted itself as “the perfect location for healing.”

It was one of several residential facilities his parents sent him to, starting at age 13 he said.

After Jamaican authorities removed the youths from Atlantis, Jonah said the Bevins made no effort to come to his aid, leaving him in custody of that country’s child welfare system.

Advocates for the youths said they were unable to reach the Bevins to arrange his return to the United States.

Jonah said he and two other boys at Atlantis, also Black and both adopted, were the last to leave Jamaica after their adoptive families took no action to help return them.

“At that point, I didn’t think nobody cared about us — especially the Black kids,” he told the Kentucky Lantern.

Adopted at age 5 from an Ethiopian orphanage, Jonah said that after turning 18, he was living on his own in Utah with no support from the Bevins, who are wealthy and live in Anchorage, an affluent enclave east of Louisville. He said he was living in temporary housing, supporting himself with part-time construction work.

At the Jamaican facility, conditions including beatings, waterboarding, threats, ridicule and food deprivation are alleged in more than a dozen federal lawsuits pending in Florida against Atlantis, and its affiliates. Jonah is not among former residents who have filed the lawsuits but is considering joining the litigation, Post said.

Among defendants in the lawsuits against Atlantis are the facility’s founders, Randall and Lisa Cook, a husband and wife who have not responded to any of the lawsuits.

“Randall Cook allegedly fled the jurisdiction of Jamaican law enforcement authorities in April 2024 to escape prosecution,” one of the lawsuits said. It said multiple former staff members are facing criminal charges of abuse and neglect in Jamaica.

The Cooks could not be located for comment and the Atlantis phone number does not work.

Jonah, in an interview, described a violent beating from facility staff after he attempted to escape three days after his arrival at Atlantis in December 2023.

“I was bleeding from my nose, mouth,” he said. “They made me clean it up with a mop. They made me clean up my own blood.”

After that, “I was getting beaten every day.”

He and seven other youths, all but one under 18, would remain there until Jamaican child welfare authorities conducted a surprise inspection in February 2024, removing them.

Jonah said that he and two other youths, all Black and all having been adopted in the United States, were abandoned by their families and placed in custody of Jamaican child welfare authorities.

He and Post said that lawyers for Atlantis and some parents appeared at court hearings in Jamaica arguing that the youths were exaggerating or lying about the abuse and that the facility should be reopened. That effort failed and Jamaican authorities began working to try to get the youths home.

Bevin, a Christian conservative, served as governor from, from late 2015 through 2019 before he was defeated in his bid for a second term by current Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat.

As governor, Bevin promoted adoption and called for sweeping improvements to the state child foster and adoption system he said had obstructed the Bevins’ effort to adopt a child in Kentucky.

During his 2015 campaign, Matt Bevin was highly critical of Kentucky’s adoption system and said in a 2017 interview on KET his desire to reform it was “the driving reason I made the decision to run.” 

Matt Bevin said in the KET interview the introduction of four adopted Black children who spoke no English into his household went smoothly.

“It has been a very, very seamless transition,” Bevin said.

But Jonah had a different recollection, telling the Kentucky Lantern that he as early as age 8 didn’t feel like he fit into the household, struggling to master English and trying to overcome learning disabilities. He said he clashed with others in the home, including Glenna Bevin, whom he said was largely in charge of overseeing the children.

“I was getting in trouble,” he said. “When I couldn’t speak English, if I did something wrong, I couldn’t understand.”

At age 13, Jonah said the Bevins sent him to what would be a series of out-of-state residential facilities for youths before he wound up at Atlantis in Jamaica in late 2023. He said he was taken there in handcuffs by a “transport team” hired to move him from a residential center in Utah.

Conditions at Atlantis first reported last year in the Sunday Times of London, attracted international headlines after celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton flew to Jamaica in April to aid the youths as part of her advocacy work to reform what she calls the “troubled teen” industry that victimized her. She has created a foundation, 11:11 Media Impact to promote her advocacy.

Jonah said he had no idea of Hilton’s celebrity or advocacy but was grateful for her support and the attention generated by her visit.

Post, who said she specializes in working with children from “broken adoptions,” said the problem is more widespread thanpeople realize and that a for-profit industry has developed purporting to help such youths, It includes consultants, who help parents identify facilities, transport teams that take youths—sometimes forcibly–to such places and loosely regulated residential facilities, some outside the United States.

Meanwhile, she said a Gofundme account she started to help support Jonah is doing well, with more than $13,000 raised in just a few week. He already has used some of the proceeds to buy clothes and other necessities, she said.

Article from Kentucky Lantern