As news of Felicitas Villanueva, the Chilean nanny allegedly “enslaved” by her Upper East Side employers, continues to unfold, domestic worker advocates have informed The Observer that Ms. Villanueva’s story is far from uncommon.
“The isolation that nannies feel, especially in New York, is overwhelming,” Rosana Reyes of the National Domestic Workers Read More
The latest case of nanny-abuse, reported in The New York Post today, has some complicating factors that keep it from being the regular sob-story of rich parents gone wrong.
Namely that the nanny in question, 50-year-old Chilean native Felicitas del Carmen Villanueva Garnica, has been diagnosed with encephalitis after running away from the “captivity” of her former employees, whom she has worked for since 2010. As anyone who has been watching Hannibal this season can tell you, the condition, an inflammation of the brain, most commonly manifests itself in patients with seizures, loss of memory and vivid hallucinations.
This is not to imply that Ms. Villanueva’s claims are any less legitimate, only that any private defense attorney worth their salt will most likely use the nanny’s psychiatric and medical records, such as they are, to their clients’ benefit. Read More
An Upper West Side mother came home to her La Rochelle apartment on Thursday and was confronted with a nightmare come true: two of her children brutally stabbed and bleeding in a bathtub and the children’s nanny nearby, bleeding from wounds in her throat.
The children later died.
The New York Times reported that the middle-aged nanny was transported to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center where according to some reports she was in stable but critical condition. Police say a bloody knife was found near the injured nanny and that she is a “person of interest” in the deaths of the little girl, age six, and the two-year-old boy.
The Times interviewed another resident of the posh apartment building who witnessed the harrowing moments after the children’s mother discovered the scene: Read More
