Imprisoned Hudson Valley lawyer disbarred for kidnapping daughter

A former area lawyer has been disbarred for abducting her 2-year-old daughter in 2021.

On Jan. 17, the state Supreme Court’s Second Appellate Division in Brooklyn disbarred Chelsea Ann Four-Rosenbaum retroactive to July 22 when she was convicted in Sullivan County of felony kidnapping.

Four-Rosenbaum was sentenced to seven years in prison and incarcerated at the Albion Correctional Facility, a minimum to maximum security prison near Rochester.

She had worked as a paralegal for several years in Connecticut and New York and began practicing law in 2014. She worked most recently for law firms in Newburgh, Orange County, and Hawthorne, Westchester County.

The child’s father, Alexander Four-Rosenbaum, had legal custody of the girl. On June 17, 2021, Chelsea Four-Rosenbaum and the girl’s grandmother, Mary Jane Hollman, of Vernon, Connecticut, abducted the child from her father’s home in Eldred.

Four-Rosenbaum, according to court records, believed she had received signals from God or Jesus that her daughter had to be removed from her father’s custody.

Mother and grandmother had withdrawn large sums of cash and moved from place to place to elude discovery.

More than two months after the abduction, police in Bellevue, Washington found everyone in a hotel. The child, according to a December 2021 story in the Sullivan Times, appeared to be safe and well-cared for.

Mother and grandmother were extradited to New York and convicted in 2022 of felony kidnapping.

In formally disbarring Four-Rosenbaum, on a motion by an attorney grievance committee, the appellate court noted that she had been automatically disbarred and ceased to be an attorney upon her conviction of a felony.

Hollman, 62, is imprisoned at Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford. She is eligible for release in December 2025.

Four-Rosenbaum, 36, is eligible for release in August 2027.