Reporter Frank Main’s recent Sun-Times investigation details Steve Fanady, a disabled options trader who has spent four years in solitary confinement at the Cook County Jail without a criminal conviction.
His incarceration did not result from murder, robbery, fraud or public corruption. It stems from a civil contempt order arising from a 17-year-old divorce after a four-year marriage with no children. In the 2011 divorce judgment, disputed accounts worth about $2 million were awarded to Fanady. He says he liquidated the stock years ago. His former wife came from a wealthy, well-connected North Shore family; Fanady was the son of Greek refugees whose single successful investment, made before the marriage, is the subject of this dispute.
Fanady has already spent longer jailed than former 14 Ward Ald. Ed Burke after his corruption conviction, and he could soon surpass Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s federal sentence.
Civil contempt is lawful only if it coerces compliance. It cannot be used as punishment.
Yet Cook County Circuit Judge Michael Forti has continued Fanady’s detention without an evidentiary hearing to determine whether it remains coercive or has become punitive. The court has never identified stock Fanady currently possesses. Instead, it continues to hold him in contempt based on the stock’s 2021 value — about $10 million, 10 years after the divorce — without identifying property he could produce.
Fanady also argues his detention orders expired years ago and that Forti has not conducted a compliance-status hearing in more than two years, despite local rules requiring periodic review to satisfy due process.
If the stock no longer exists, what can he produce?
While jailed, Fanady’s parents died. He missed their funerals. He has not seen his 13-year-old daughter from another marriage, and he says he has not seen sunlight in four years.
If that is not punishment, what is?
Illinois’ SAFE-T Act allows many criminal defendants to remain free before trial, yet Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart retained private counsel to oppose Fanady’s release from jail on electronic monitoring. Fanady remains jailed without a criminal conviction while bearing the burden of proving he no longer possesses the property the court ordered him to produce.
Laura Grochocki, attorney for Steve Fanady
Jailed man failed his family
It’s disappointing that the Sun-Times story took at face value Steve Fanady’s claims that he doesn’t have the money to pay for child support or have control over his trust. There is no sign the Sun-Times investigated these claims, but rather it gave us a sympathetic portrait of a man the courts have found has failed to live up to one of life’s most important obligations — providing for one’s family.
Max Caproni, Edgewater
Supreme Court shenanigans
In what should have been a 9-0 opinion on birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, three Supreme Court judges dissented. Once again, as they have with expanding the reach of the Second Amendment, they create or fixate on a word and twist its meaning. This time it was the word “domicile” — that a newborn doesn’t have domicile in the United States. Sorry that the newborn wasn’t able to purchase a home to meet this test.
Peter Felitti, Ravenswood
NICU leave ensures healthcare equity
The Illinois Family Neonatal Intensive Care Leave Act became effective June 1, solidifying Illinois’ role as a national leader in workplace protection. While historic, its true value lies in its power as a public health intervention.
The law provides up to 20 days of unpaid, job-protected leave for parents who work at companies with 16 or more employees and whose children require neonatal intensive care unit observation.
Critically, it closes a cruel loophole in the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. Previously, a lengthy neonatal intensive care unit stay could drain a parent’s 12 weeks of federal leave before their baby even came home. This forced many parents back to work the morning after their fragile newborn was discharged.
By creating a separate “bucket” of leave, the law ensures parental leave isn’t swallowed by hospital stays.
This isn’t just about labor policy; it’s about health equity. Before June 1, a parent’s presence at a neonatal intensive care bedside was often a privilege of socioeconomic status. Families relying on hourly wages faced an impossible choice: miss a shift and lose the rent money, or leave their newborn’s side. The new law ensures that parental involvement — a clinical necessity — is not reserved only for those who can afford it.
Decades of research prove that parents are essential to neonatal recovery. Interventions like skin-to-skin contact stabilize heart rates and promote neurological development, leading to shorter hospital stays and improved long-term outcomes.
By protecting the right to be present, Illinois has recognized that parents aren’t visitors in the neonatal intensive care but vital members of the medical team. Our state has taken a meaningful step toward ensuring that every child, regardless of their family’s financial standing, has the best possible start at life.
Faris Kittaneh, fourth-year undergraduate student, integrated health studies, University of Illinois Chicago
Insurers face challenges as healthcare costs grow
The Sun-Times’ recent reporting by Stephanie Zimmermann on hospital pricing highlights a troubling reality: The cost of care remains confusing and inconsistent for Illinois patients. While the article exposes the opacity of hospital pricing, it also points to a deeper problem — a healthcare system where the major drivers of cost growth remain largely unaddressed, pushing care further out of reach for families.
Health insurers play a critical role in protecting Illinoisans from escalating expenses. Beyond negotiating prices, insurers provide cost-estimator tools and resources that help patients — especially those in high-deductible plans — make informed decisions and plan for medical expenses. But insurers cannot solve a systemwide problem on their own.
Hospitals face real financial pressures, including looming cuts to Medicaid and public insurance reimbursement rates that already lag the actual cost of care. But those challenges cannot obscure the fact that hospital services now account for nearly 40 cents of every premium dollar paid by privately insured consumers. As hospital costs rise, families, employers and anyone purchasing coverage feel the impact directly.
Insurers, by contrast, are held accountable through medical loss ratio requirements, which ensure that a substantial share of premium dollars goes toward medical care rather than administrative costs. If insurers fail to meet those standards, consumers receive rebates. Few other sectors in the healthcare system operate under comparable accountability.
As healthcare costs accelerate, premiums rise, pushing consumers toward higher deductibles, or in some cases, out of the insurance market entirely. Policy decisions that make coverage less affordable — like allowing enhanced premium tax credits to expire — or that weaken insurers’ ability to manage costs, only worsen the problem. These policies don’t address affordability; they gaslight it.
The consequences are already visible. More than 90,000 Illinoisans have left the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Insurers face growing challenges participating in markets where costs rise unsustainably and healthy individuals exit the risk pool.
Voters understand the stakes. A recent Morning Consult survey for the Century Foundation found that healthcare affordability remains a top concern, with preventing hospital overcharging highly ranking among voters’ priorities.
Insurers are working to address these challenges, but lasting solutions require accountability from every part of the healthcare system. Policymakers must focus on the underlying drivers of healthcare costs. Transparency alone does not lower prices.
Laura Minzer, president, Illinois Life & Health Insurance Council
Development at what cost?
Across Will County and the southwest suburbs, farmland and open space are rapidly being converted into warehouses, trucking facilities and logistics infrastructure tied to the nation’s expanding supply chain economy. The recent story in The New York Times, “20,000 Trucks a Day: Life Near a Booming Warehouse Hub,” captured the human consequences of that growth in the form of public health and safety. Why are we encouraging such a trade-off between quality of life and economic development?
Local governments are under real fiscal pressure. Communities built largely around single-family housing often struggle to cover the long-term costs of roads, utilities, schools and public safety, through residential property taxes alone. In that context, industrial development and expanded tax revenue can appear necessary. But decisions on this scale cannot be shaped only by short-term fiscal considerations. They should reflect adopted plans, infrastructure realities, environmental limits and the long-term priorities of residents.
Comprehensive plans exist to help communities manage growth before major land-use decisions are made. Yet increasingly, large industrial projects appear to be advancing ahead of, or in conflict with the planning frameworks meant to guide them. Increasingly, the problem is one of cumulative regional impacts that cannot be addressed through isolated municipal decision-making. Watersheds, truck traffic, air quality and infrastructure systems do not stop at municipal boundaries. For example, several communities have approved costly infrastructure projects to import Lake Michigan water as local supplies become strained. At the same time, development patterns continue to intensify water demand and decisions fail to recognize the limits of finite natural resources.
This region contains some of the Midwest’s most significant natural landscapes, including Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, which stands alongside one of North America’s largest logistics networks. These lands recharge aquifers, reduce flooding, improve air quality, support wildlife habitat and provide important public health and economic benefits. Farmland also sustains the region’s agricultural economy while preserving open space.
As growth pressures intensify around the nation’s largest inland port, the public has an opportunity to demand that land-use decisions reflect long-term stewardship alongside economic development. The choices being made now will determine whether this region grows in a coordinated and sustainable way or continues down a path where cumulative impacts outpace the systems meant to manage them.
Sara Egan, director of conservation planning, Openlands
Kick out of soccer
I really enjoyed Rummana Hussain’s latest column about more Americans getting soccer.
I just wanted to share a few of my experiences with the sport. I first played soccer in the 1960s while in high school. Soccer was not supported elsewhere at my high school in Long Island.
My sons and daughter started playing on American Youth Soccer Organization teams in the 1980s. I tried coaching but quickly gave it up to anyone who had played it more.
Around 1992, my older son Matt, who just visited his brother Nick in Kansas City to see the Netherlands vs. Tunisia game, found an article in a soccer magazine about buying World Cup tickets for the five games at Soldier Field in 1994. This special offer got you a single ticket for each of the five games for $125. After discussing it with my wife and our three kids, we decided to buy three tickets for each of the five games. In the end, I went to all five games taking various combos of family members with me.
Our seats were just off of the end zone at the opposite end from the opening ceremony stage. So, we missed the drama of Oprah falling, etc. Seated in the stadium we were surrounded by folks asking very basic questions about soccer. Clearly a number of them had been to many football games but never soccer games and didn’t understand why they kept going all the time. At the time, we lived in the suburbs, and it was really fun to be in the city with all the international visitors. The game between Bulgaria and Greece was especially fun. I think the Greeks had at least one goal shot, which had the Greek fans going wild despite not scoring. And Bulgaria won its first ever World Cup match and their fans went crazy.
I still follow World Cup matches on TV and have to say I really enjoy watching the women play every bit as much as watching the men play (maybe even a little more).
Mike Burke, Ravenswood Manor