Iowa Social Worker Sued After Lying to Court to Remove Children from Parents

Former Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS) social worker Chelsea Gray may finally be facing justice for her part in lying to a judge in 2018 that caused 4 children to be wrongly removed from their parents. District Associate Judge Adam Sauer had ruled in 2018 that Chelsea Gray had delivered fabricated reports and trial testimony that helped convince a judge to terminate the legal rights of the mother and father of four northern Iowa children. The judge said Gray's testimony was riddled with "lies and misrepresentations." "What does not, or at least should not happen, is that an agent of the government, charged with the task of safeguarding the welfare of children, would completely fabricate contact with a family in order to mask non-compliance with the agency's policy," Sauer wrote. He added, "Providing false testimony of any kind is an unfathomable violation of the trust that the people in the State of Iowa place in their public servants and cast a dark and permanent shadow upon all of us." However, even after this ruling, apparently nothing was done to hold Chelsea Gray or DHS responsible for these actions, even after a county attorney found 10 other cases where Gray allegedly gave false information, and reported this to the attorney general's office. Earlier this month (April, 2019), however, criminal charges have now apparently been filed against Gray for perjury, presumably by one of the families that suffered from her false testimony.