A struggling single mom thought she was giving her young son a chance at a better life by entering into an open adoption with a wealthy Manhattan couple.
But Nina Yusupov, of Brooklyn, never imagined she would have to cut off all ties with the boy — and now she’s suing for the right to see him again.
“I feel like I’m lost,” the Borough Park woman told The Post Monday through tears.
“I imagine he’s thinking, ‘Why is my mother not coming to see me? She used to come see me before. What happened?’”
Yusupov, 32, met the couple, David and Jennifer Bergenfeld, through a big brother/big sister program in 2008, according to Manhattan Surrogate’s Court papers.
She says in her suit that she had just gotten a divorce and was broke and depressed at the time.
The Bergenfelds live in a luxury Upper East Side co-op.
David, 42, is an associate at the financial law firm D’Amato & Lynch. Jennifer, 45, is senior legal counsel for Global Bank.
Yusupov needed help raising then-6-year-old Eliyahu, and the Bergenfelds started taking the boy on weekends, the suit says.
Then they offered to adopt him, allowing her to remain in his life, which Yusupov agreed to after signing a document with the couple that guaranteed bi-monthly visitation, regular phone calls, photos and letters, according to court records.
But Yusopov says the Bergenfelds never filed the agreement with the court and cut off the visits three years ago.
“The Bergenfelds convinced me with false promises, making me believe that they were my family and my friends at a most vulnerable time in my life,” Yusupov says in court papers.
Her lawyer, Steven Feinman, says in filings that his client is “not educated, nor financially self-sufficient,” while the Bergenfelds are professionals who suggested and paid for Yusupov’s lawyer in the adoption.
Court records show the Bergenfelds, who declined to comment for this article, won an order of protection in 2010 that barred Yusupov from seeing Eliyahu after she allegedly tried to kidnap him.
Another attorney for Yusupov, David Bellon, called the kidnapping allegation false.
The adoptive parents allege that “the biological mother and her boyfriend had gone to [their] home to forcibly take back the child” after claiming that he had been abused, and Manhattan Family Court Judge Gloria Sosa-Lintner wrote in 2013 that Yusupov’s visits were canceled because of her “aggressive behavior.”
Yusupov fears the Bergenfelds have alienated the boy from her, his grandma and his 8-year-old brother. She is suing to enforce the open-adoption agreement.
