Feb. 7 issue - Nataliya Derkach just wanted a husband. In 1998, she was a 26-year-old college student in Kiev, divorced and disenchanted with the Ukrainian dating scene. Then she met Natasha Spivack, a Russian-American who runs Encounters International, an Internet matchmaking service that caters to American men seeking Russian and Ukrainian brides. Spivack had just the catch for Derkach: a handsome, successful businessman named James Fox. Derkach married him two months after they met in the United States, moving to Virginia and taking his last name. But James soon began beating her, says Fox. And when she turned to Spivack for help, Fox says Spivack told her that all American men were "crazy," and to deal with it or risk being sent back to Ukraine. Fox did as she was told, until one night in the summer of 2000, when Fox says her husband beat her as she breast-fed the couple's infant daughter. Fox wound up in the emergency room with her face bruised and swollen and a human bite mark on her hand.
Fox escaped to a women's shelter, then got radical: she sued Spivack and Encounters International, becoming the first to win a case against an Internet bride service. In December, a jury awarded her $433,500. The verdict rattled the murky, often unregulated world of international matchmaking, shining a spotlight on some of its practices. The case "puts companies on notice," says Fox's lawyer, Randall Miller. "They can't operate in the shadows anymore." The court found that Spivack failed to tell Fox about a provision in the immigration law that protects foreign women from deportation if they leave abusive husbands. The jury also held Spivack liable for assuring Nataliya Fox that her husband had been carefully screened. Spivack denies wrongdoing. Her lawyer argues that any responsibility she might have had ended when the Foxes wed.
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