In March, 'the St Petersburg legislator who had become a spokesman for the law started mentioning me and my 'perverted family' in his interviews,' and Gessen contacted an adoption lawyer asking 'whether I had reason to worry that social services would go after my family and attempt to remove my oldest son, whom I adopted in 2000.' The lawyer told Gessen 'to instruct my son to run if he is approached by strangers and concluding: 'The answer to your question is at the airport.' In June 2013, Gessen was beaten up outside of the Parliament she said of the incident that 'I realised that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle.' She stated that 'a court would easily decide to annul Vova's adoption, and I wouldn't even know it.' Given this potential threat to her family, Gessen 'felt like no risk was small enough to be acceptable,' she later told the CBC Radio.
In December 2013, she moved to New York because Russian authorities had begun to talk about taking children away from gay parents.
