Ten years after her ex took their children to live in Lebanon against her wishes, Sally Faulkner has celebrated Christmas with them for the first time in years.
“We’ve missed out on so much together,” says the brave mum who never gave up on trying to bring her two children back home to Australia.
Sally’s plight became global news in 2016 when she was arrested in Lebanon for attempting to recover her then-two-year-old son, Noah, and his then-five-year-old sister Lahela.
The previous year her former partner, Ali Elamine, had taken the two children to Beirut on a holiday, and then refused to return them.
DESPERATE BID
The Nine Network enlisted and paid former soldier Adam Whittington, founder of Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) to snatch back the children in a desperate bid to bring them home.
The recovery effort went horribly wrong and it was later revealed that Elamine was tracking Sally’s recovery operation using their daughter’s iPad, which was connected to the email account Sally used to coordinate the operation.
Sally, 40, got to spend just a few hours with the children before Lebanese police arrested her and star reporter Tara Brown, along with the Nine TV crew and the CARI founder and team.
“I spent 20 minutes with Sally and the kids in the safe house. They were so happy, so, so happy,” Adam later told Seven’s Sunday Night about the moments after the retrieval.
“All they kept saying was, ‘Mummy we’re going back to Australia – we’re going back to home.’”
Adam and his team of four remained jailed for a further six weeks after Sally and the Nine team were released after two. Sally was only freed after signing, while handcuffed, an agreement giving up her claims to custody. Nine paid Elamine $690,000 to encourage him to drop charges against the crew.
What followed were nine torturous years for Sally, who was not allowed to see her children again, apart from infrequent phone calls and video messages – until November last year when they were finally reunited in the United States.
Sally revealed on a podcast in October 2023 that Elamine had opened “a line of communication” because he needed her permission to get passports for their children to escape the bombing in the southern Lebanese town where he lived.
When he and the kids fled Lebanon for the US last year, Sally lodged a temporary protection order in Georgia, where they landed, and Elamine was separated from the children.
In January, Sally was granted temporary custody.
The Georgia judge who heard the case called it “the most screwed-up case I’ve ever had in my entire 45 years of being a lawyer and a judge” and “the most bizarre case I’ve ever seen in my life”.
Soon after, Sally was able to return to Queensland with Lahela and Noah, where she lives with new partner Brendan Pierce, who she shares three other children with – Eli, nine, Izac, seven, and Lylah, three.
The couple run a cleaning company together.
FIGHT TO REUNITE
Sally, who has previously said she felt “numb” after losing her older children, never gave up the fight to reunite with them.
In the time they were apart, infrequent video and phone calls were her only contact with them.
“When we do talk, it’s blissful, it’s full of laughter with lots of joking around. They are very curious to know certain things about their childhood here in Australia. They love when I tell them stories of when they were young,” she posted on Facebook.
Sally said these video calls allowed her abducted children to bond with their three younger siblings.
She has also shared some of her journey with the millions of Aussies who supported her on social media, setting up a Facebook page in 2020 in the hope that her kids would read it and realise her determination to reunite and that she had never stopped fighting to see them.
“I never stopped thinking about them and loving them,” she said back then.
