I never felt comfortable with my ex-husband’s new wife, Janice, but I already knew how admitting that would sound.
Of course the ex-wife dislikes the new wife. She’s envious. She’s resentful. She can’t let go.
So whenever Janice behaved as if she was owed something or made herself the center of attention, I stayed silent. Even when she made remarks about my parenting skills or tried to assert herself as Alison’s “real mother figure,” I didn’t engage. My ex and I had equal custody, and I wasn’t prepared to let them accuse me of disturbing his bond with our daughter.
Nevertheless, I never fully trusted Janice when she was alone with Alison.
Alison was five, completely in love with Rapunzel. Her bedroom overflowed with Rapunzel dolls, bedding, towels, costumes, and tiny crowns. She had long, naturally curly blonde hair almost to her waist and treated it like a rare gem. Even a simple trim called for careful discussion beforehand due to her fear of losing too much.
“I want it to reach the floor like Rapunzel’s,” she’d say while brushing it in front of the mirror.
That is why I sensed instantly that something was amiss when I arrived at my ex-husband’s house on Monday morning for school drop-off.
Janice opened the door, and Alison came out from behind her.
My breath caught in my throat.
All of Alison’s beautiful blonde curls were missing.
Every strand.
Her hair was reduced to a short, uneven pixie, crooked pieces jutting out near her ears. Alison stood there, staring down, her hand at the back of her neck, still processing where her hair had gone.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
Janice rolled her eyes, interrupting me.
“Oh, calm down. It’s just hair.”
I addressed Alison. “Sweetheart, why did you cut your hair?”
She wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“I got tired of being Rapunzel,” came her quiet reply. “I’m Team Tinker Bell now.”
It sounded rehearsed.
Alison was never that into Tinker Bell. She’d watched it maybe twice. From the start, Rapunzel had always been her top princess.
I knelt near her. “Did you ask to have your hair cut?”
Before she could answer, Janice interjected.
“She consented,” Janice said. “Let’s not dramatize this due to your attachment to a haircut.”
I straightened slowly.
“Where is her hair?”
Janice shot me a look, as if the answer was obvious.
“I kept it.”
“You kept Alison’s hair?”
“For a wig,” she answered, adjusting her robe. “Do you know how expensive human hair is? Alison had extra, and my hair’s thinning. This was the ideal solution.”
For a moment, I couldn’t process it.
“You cut a five-year-old’s hair to make yourself a wig?”
“She’s a kid,” Janice replied. “She doesn’t need long hair. It’s impractical, tangles, and needs a wash every visit. I’m an adult. I need to maintain appearances.”
“You had no authority to cut her hair.”
“I’m her stepmother.”
“That doesn’t give you permission to take her years of growth because you wouldn’t pay for a wig.”
Janice laughed.
Actually laughed.
“Oh, please. You’re mad because she resembled you before. Now she has an updated cut instead of looking like a wild waif.”
I moved closer.
“And she agreed.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Yes, she did,” Janice insisted, glancing at Alison.
Tears welled up in Alison’s eyes.
“Janice said she’d do something for me if I gave her my curls,” Alison confessed.
When I found out what was promised, my anger was overwhelming.
“She said if I let her cut it,” Alison whispered, “she’d take me to meet the real Rapunzel. Not the costume lady at the mall. The real one. She said Rapunzel would grow my hair back for me with magic, faster than normal, because Rapunzel likes girls who share their hair with people who need it.”
I felt something in my chest go completely cold.
“Janice told you that?”
Alison nodded, still not looking up. “She said it was a secret, and if I told you before it happened, the magic wouldn’t work anymore.”
I looked at Janice, waiting for her to deny it, to say Alison had misunderstood, to offer any explanation that didn’t amount to lying to a five-year-old to manipulate her into surrendering something she’d spent years growing and protecting.
“She’s five,” Janice said instead, with a small, dismissive shrug. “Kids believe in magic. I don’t see the harm in a little imagination.”
“You told my daughter a fairy tale character would reward her for handing over her hair,” I said slowly, “so you could avoid paying for a wig yourself.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds worse than it is.”
“It sounds exactly like what it is.”
PART 2
I got Alison into the car and drove two blocks and pulled over by the retention pond, and I did not cry, because she was in the back seat watching me in the mirror.
I asked her one more question, in the flattest voice I could manage.
“Sweetheart — when Janice cut it, was anybody else in the room?”
“No.”
“Was the phone out?”
She thought about it. “The phone was on the thing,” she said. “The bendy thing.”
A tripod.
Janice’s account is called Just Janice, and she has 340,000 followers, and I did not know it existed.
I want that on the record because everyone I have told this to says the same thing — how did you not know — and the answer is that my ex-husband’s wife blocked me on every platform in 2021, and I am a forty-one-year-old dental hygienist who does not spend her evenings looking for a woman she is trying very hard not to think about.
Her sister-in-law’s cousin follows her. That’s how I found it, that night, from a friend’s account, at 11:20 p.m. with my laptop on my knees.
The video had gone up the previous evening.
Nine minutes and forty-one seconds. Thumbnail: Janice holding a bundle of blonde curls in a fist, mouth open in a shocked smile, and the words BIGGEST SACRIFICE EVER in yellow.
I watched all of it. I have watched it since, in a room with a guardian ad litem, with a detective, and with a judge, and I still cannot get through the third minute without something happening in my throat.
Alison is on a kitchen stool. Janice tells the camera her stepdaughter has asked to do “the biggest, most generous thing.” She asks Alison to say what she’s doing. Alison says, “Giving my hair to Janice.” Janice corrects her — “and to somebody who needs it” — and makes her say it again.
The scissors go in at 3:40. There’s a jump cut.
At 4:15 my daughter is crying and reaching behind her head, and Janice laughs and says, “Oh, don’t be dramatic, it’s not a big deal,” in exactly the voice she used on me at the door.
At 6:50 Janice holds the whole ponytail up to the lens and says a brand name and a discount code, reading the code off a card in her other hand.
At 8:30 she coaches Alison through the Tinker Bell line. Twice. The take that made it in is the second one.
There are 41,000 views on it and the comments are ninety percent about how generous a little girl she is.
The hair never became a wig for Janice. That was the story she told me at the door because it was the story she thought I’d swallow.
The hair went to Tampa in a padded envelope, to an extension company called VelvetRoot, as one of the deliverables in a $1,400 sponsorship agreement — the other deliverables being a reel, three stories, and a “raw emotional moment.”
I know that because it is in an email that later came out in discovery, and because the subject line was Content plan — hair cut day.
The plan had a date on it.
The date was eleven days before Janice ever mentioned Rapunzel to my child.
I sat with that for a long time, because it reorganises everything.
She did not lose her temper and pick up scissors. She did not have a thinning-hair crisis at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night. Eleven days out, a woman opened an email from a brand, agreed a fee, agreed a delivery date, and then went looking for a way to get the merchandise off my daughter’s head with her cooperation on camera, because a crying child who has been tricked reads as a generous child on video and a crying child who has been forced does not.
Then she built the lie. Not a lie about haircuts. A lie fitted precisely to the one thing my daughter loved most in the world, with a secrecy clause attached — don’t tell your mother or the magic won’t work — which is the same instruction, word for word in structure, that every safeguarding leaflet in her school tells you to listen for.
She used the safeguarding script. For hair.
PART 3
I did not go back to that house and scream. I want to say I thought about my daughter’s stability. The truth is I called Rosanne Feld at 7:40 the next morning because a lawyer once told me that the person who screams becomes the case.
Rosanne told me to do three things: download everything, tell nobody, and go and sit in the school parking lot for as long as I needed before I picked Alison up.
Downloading everything took nine hours.
Two years of my daughter that I had never seen.
Two hundred and thirty-one posts featuring Alison. Not the haircut. The haircut was the finale of a series I had never known was running.
Alison in the bath, in bubbles, from the shoulders up — Janice’s caption about how she “can’t get a moment’s peace.” Alison having a meltdown in a grocery store, filmed for ninety seconds while she screamed for me. Alison’s first day of pre-K, with the school’s name legible on the sign behind her. Alison asleep. Alison with a stomach bug in a bathroom, filmed from the doorway, captioned pray for me.
A recurring bit called MINI DRAMA QUEEN, eleven parts.
The one that put me on the floor of my own kitchen was from that April, and it was thirty seconds of Alison crying because she missed me, and the caption said, Mom guilt isn’t mine to carry with a laughing emoji.
My ex-husband knew.
That is the piece I had the hardest time with, and it took a deposition to get it plainly. Dave knew there was an account. Dave had been told it was “just mom stuff.” Dave had also, since 2023, been receiving a share of the brand payments into their joint account, and had made a mortgage payment out of it in March, and when Rosanne asked him whether he had ever watched a single video, he said, “Not really,” and then, after a long pause, “I saw the one about the birthmark.”
There is a video about my daughter’s birthmark. It has 212,000 views.
Rosanne walked me through the law. In our state, since 2024, a minor depicted in monetized content has a statutory right to a percentage of the earnings, held in a blocked trust account until they turn eighteen — and a parent who fails to do it can be sued by the child, at any point up to age twenty-one, with a records-keeping obligation attached.
Janice had kept no records at all.
The other thing Rosanne said was harder to hear.
“A haircut is not a crime and courts hate hair cases,” she said. “Filming her is not a crime either. What I can do is get you a modification and a restriction on depiction. So that’s what we’re going to ask for, and we’re going to be very calm about it, because the only person in this story who is going to look unhinged is whichever adult raises her voice first.”
The temporary hearing was in September. Judge Achterberg ordered a guardian ad litem, and I met Bettina Marsh in a small room with a box of tissues on the table, and I gave her a flash drive with two hundred and thirty-one posts on it.
She called me on a Thursday, eleven days later, and her voice was different.
“Mrs. Karsten. Has your daughter ever mentioned receiving gifts from someone she doesn’t know?”
PART 4
There was a wishlist.
Janice had set one up in the third month of the account, linked in her bio, and thirty-one items had been purchased off it and shipped to my ex-husband’s address in two years.
A play kitchen. Craft kits. Books. Four dresses. A pair of pyjamas.
I remember two of those parcels. I remember Alison in the pyjamas, at my house, on a Tuesday, and asking Dave where they’d come from, and Dave saying Janice’s aunt, and me thinking, briefly, that it was nice of her.
Some of it was from local people, and some of it was from strangers, and one account had sent eleven items over eighteen months, always within a day of a post in which Alison appeared, and had left comments on fourteen videos.
Bettina had flagged the comments to a detective before she called me, which is the reason I will be grateful to that woman for the rest of my life.
Detective Ramona Cheval sat in my kitchen the next evening and asked me not to look at the comment history, and I looked at it anyway, later, and I am telling you plainly: don’t. There is a version of this story where I describe them, and it doesn’t help anybody.
The account resolved to a man in another state. He had never come here. He had never made contact directly with my child. What he had done was legal in the way that standing outside a fence is legal, and the specific reason he had access to a five-year-old’s face, name, school, town, bath, illnesses, birthmark, and bedtime was that a woman with 340,000 followers had monetized all of it, and had left the front gate open on purpose, because engagement is engagement.
Cheval referred it to a task force. She told me they would look at the sender, and that she could not promise me anything, and that I should change Alison’s school if I could manage it.
I told Dave that night, on the phone, all of it, in about four minutes.
He said, “Okay.” Then he said, “Okay,” again. Then he asked me to hold on and I heard a door and I heard him being sick.
He called Rosanne himself the next morning and consented to everything we had asked for, which took the fight out of the case and put it entirely onto Janice.
And Janice’s response — sent from her own phone, at 12:41 a.m., to me, three days before the hearing — was this:
You put your child in the middle of this. Everything I posted was legal and I have a right to my own story. If you go through with Thursday I will post the whole custody file and let 340k people decide who the real problem is. Alison already knows you’re the reason she can’t see her dad.
I forwarded it to Rosanne at 12:43.
At 6:15 the next morning, my phone rang. It was the school.
Alison had not arrived, and Janice’s car was on the office camera at 7:52 the previous afternoon, and my ex-husband was not answering his phone.
PART 5
They were at a Rapunzel-themed character breakfast at a hotel in Charlotte, three hours away, and Janice had taken my daughter there on a school day to film a video called I KEPT MY PROMISE.
Dave had been at work. He’d believed they were going to the dentist.
Cheval reached the hotel before I did. I got there at 10:40 and my daughter was in a paper crown at a round table with syrup on her sleeve, and she saw me and she ran, and then she said the thing I will be carrying for a long time.
“Mom, don’t be mad. I have to smile for the video or the magic doesn’t count.”
Judge Achterberg heard about the trip at the hearing forty-eight hours later, and it did the work that two hundred and thirty-one posts might not have done on their own, because a judge can argue with a parenting philosophy but not with a school absence and a hotel receipt.
The orders came down in October and they are still in force.
Janice has no unsupervised contact with Alison. She may not photograph, film, record, or depict her in any medium, or describe her in any public post, including with her face obscured. Every existing item featuring Alison — all two hundred and thirty-one, plus the archive — had to come down within fourteen days, with a certification filed. The wishlist was deleted. Alison changed schools in January.
The account itself is gone. VelvetRoot cancelled the contract within a week of Rosanne’s letter and, to their credit, sent back the hair, which arrived in the padded envelope it had been shipped in, and which I have not been able to throw away or look at, and which is in a box in my closet while I figure out which of those two things I’m going to do.
Under the statute, the earnings attributable to Alison — three years of brand payments and platform revenue, $61,300 by the forensic accountant’s calculation — went into a blocked trust in her name. Dave paid his half back over eighteen months. He also, without being ordered to, wrote our daughter a letter to be opened at eighteen explaining exactly what he did and did not do, and let me read it, and it was worse about himself than I would have been.
The out-of-state account was referred to a federal task force. I have been told what I am allowed to be told, which is not much, and that a case remains open. I have made peace with never knowing more.
Alison is seven now.
I should say what the year in between actually cost, because “she got her orders” is not the same as “it was fixed.”
I paid Rosanne $19,000, which came out of the money I had been saving to replace a fourteen-year-old car. I lost two friendships to people who thought I had blown up a family over a haircut, and one of them said the phrase “it grows back” to my face in a parking lot. Dave and I have had to learn to be civil in a new way, which we are managing at about seventy percent.
And there was a stretch in the winter when Alison would not let me photograph her at all. Not at Christmas, not on her birthday, not on a good day at the beach. I have almost no pictures of my daughter from the age of six.
I understood it and I hated it, and Dr. Solvang told me not to negotiate with it, and she was right.
Her hair is at her shoulders. It came back curlier, which she considers a personal victory over the universe.
She had one bad year — the flinching at phones, the asking whether things were “for posting,” a period around six where she narrated her own play as though someone were watching. Dr. Solvang did nine months of work with her that I could not have done myself, and the narrating stopped in the spring.
Last month I took her to a real salon for a proper trim, her idea, and the stylist asked at the end, the way they do, whether we wanted a picture for the wall.
Alison looked at me in the mirror, checking.
I said, “Up to you, baby. It’s yours.”
She thought about it for a second, and then she shook her head, and she said, “No thank you. I just want to have it.”
