A Baby Adopted, A Family Divided

A video leaks of a wealthy politician describing how he adopted a Native child, leading to outrage from the child’s biological family and members of her tribe.

This story was published by Reveal on August 24, 2024.

Collage of photos of a baby, cows in an open field, a document from October 12, 2018 beginning "To whom it may concern" and the adoption record document.

By Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung

Listen to the episode here, at Revealnews.org.

In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child.

He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child.

That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of non-Native families.

This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them.

This episode was produced in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Dig Deeper

Read: ‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’ (The Cut)

Read: Forever Home (Mother Jones)

Listen: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (Radiolab)

Listen: This Land podcast

Credits

Reporters: Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung | Producer: Ashley Cleek | Editor: Jenny Casas | Fact checkers: Nikki Frick and Kim Freda | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda with help from Aisha Wallace-Palomares | Post-production support: Claire Mullen and Missa Perron | Editorial support: Kate Howard, Adreanna Rodriguez, and David Barstow | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky and James Chadwick | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.