Chelsea Reeves, who had spent the majority of her childhood in and out of foster care, was determined to get her youngest brother out of the system and into her care.
Hugo was only five months old when his older sister used the criminal injury reward she received in 2023 against social services in the UK to hire lawyers and obtain legal guardianship.
Reeves, who was only 21 at the time, had been abused for years and was determined to give Hugo the life she had never had.
When asked about her early childhood, Reeves, now 23, struggles to remember anything before the age of nine. “I do not remember anything,” she admits. “I have never been able to remember it in therapy or anything like that.” She remembers only fragments of stories attached to old photographs, but nothing concrete.
She recalls the abuse vividly from 2011, when she was placed in a foster care home under Gary Teague. “I was abused horribly,” Reeves says, and she was eventually sent back to live with her biological mother.
“I ran away to my nan’s because I did not want to live with my mum…it was not safe,” she tells me. Reeves finally spoke out a year later, revealing the horrors she had witnessed in foster care, but was met with suspicion rather than support. “Social services just said, like, she would never believed me about anything.”
Reeves was reinstated in the system in 2016, at the age of 14, but one phone call changed everything. “We got a phone call…to basically say that they have reopened my case, because there is been 12 other children that have come forward over the years and said that similar things have happened to them,” Reeves tells me.
Her case was transferred to family court, the first step toward preventing her abuser from fostering or adopting additional children. Although she won the case, the process was exhausting. “It was absolutely horrific,” she explains. “It is like being told by professionals and police that you are lying. “It never happened to you.”
The emotional toll was enormous, influencing her adulthood in ways she never anticipated. “What I went through as a child was so horrific in foster care that I was such a closed-off, negative person,” Reeves reflects. “I started having behavioral issues and was extremely anxious. It resulted in PTSD for me.”
After a year of battling it out in family court, the case was transferred to criminal court, where she finally received some justice. According to KentOnline, Teague was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison in 2017, with an additional four years served on a licence.
He was found guilty of 13 sex charges, including secretly filming children bathing and inciting a child to perform a sex act. Teague was convicted for attacking children as young as three years old.
Even after her abuser was imprisoned, Reeves believed that justice was incomplete. “The way I saw it, I had told people this had happened to me, and that situation that I was put in was by social services,” she tells me. “They put me in charge of him. “They did not believe me.”
When she turned 18, Reeves decided to hold social services accountable and launched a criminal investigation against them. It was not until October 2022 that social services admitted they were responsible for Reeves’ abuse, and she agreed to their settlement offer in August 2023.
“That is when I felt like I got my justice because, yes, the person that abused me got sent down and is in prison, but I also still held on to the fact that like social services abused me as well, because they are meant to protect kids and look after them,” Reeves tells me.
As a result, she was determined to get her brother, Hugo, out of the system, a process that almost destroyed her.
Hugo was removed from Reeves’ biological mother and placed in foster care after a court order was issued against her. It took her 5 months to win Hugo’s right to live with her, and another 4 months to obtain special guardianship.
“Getting him out of foster care was incredibly difficult,” she tells PEOPLE. “They forced me to relocate so that I could find an extra room for him. “They made me pay for dog training because they tried to say my dog was naughty, when actually he isn’t. They thought, because I have been abused as a child, I would go and do it to Hugo.”
Nonetheless, even after the court rejected her assessments twice, Reeves fought for herself tirelessly. “I wrote an email that could have been put into a book; there was 186 pages of these court documents,” she tells me. “Each paragraph where they lied and said misinformation, I rewrote that…and sent it going, actually, this is the truth.”
On her third attempt, Reeves passed. “My last court appearance was in April 2022 with a friend… “I said if [Hugo] does not come home with me, I do not want to live anymore,” she confesses.
“Because all I could think about was, if I was abused in foster care, how will he be okay? And all I could think was, “I can take care of him, so why not give him to me?” … I have never had a criminal record. “I was just a good kid who got out of foster care and was doing much better for themselves.”
After being granted special guardianship of Hugo, Reeves used her remaining criminal injury reward to take her brother on a few adventures around the world.
“When he was nine months old, I took him to Dubai. He is been to Dubai, Paris, Orlando, and Barcelona, and I just kept traveling until, like, obviously, the money ran out,” Reeves admits, which she has been chastised for online.
Her TikTok account was banned in October 2024 after she frequently responded to hateful comments on the platform. “Everyone would see my vacations… Everyone would say something… Reeves says, “I deserve something nice after suffering for so long.”
“I would explain this to people, and it was always like, ‘Do not go on vacation, then do not do this, do not do that. And it was so difficult to communicate to the people that, like, I have been through so much abuse in my life, and it is taken me so long to even get justice, that, yes, I know I should be responsible with my money, but I do not want to be,” she admits. “I have had to take responsibility for my court case. I have had to pull myself together to deal with life. “I deserve to live a little, you know.”
Another common source of confusion for viewers of Reeves’ TikToks is Hugo’s belief that his older sister is his mother. Despite this, she took the time to explain her reasoning to PEOPLE, as well as the plans she has in place to tell him the truth soon.
Reeves admits that she initially found it odd that her younger brother was calling her “mom,” especially since she had not given birth to him. However, a social worker once warned her that as Hugo grew older, he would wonder why other children had parents pick them up, which could lead to emotional problems. She suggested that Reeves let Hugo call her mother until it was time to explain it to him.
“I plan to create a scrapbook with a picture of our biological mother from the day he was born, labeled ‘tummy mummy,’ and explain to him that I did not give birth to him.” “And then let him ask questions,” she says. “He will know I am his sister; I never intend to lie to him, but I am not going to tell him when he is four or five years old that I am not his mother. “He will never understand.”
She is confident that Hugo will one day understand the situation and recognize her as his sister. If he chooses to call her by her name rather than “mom,” Reeves claims she will never be angry with him.
“This is all I have ever wanted; I want him with me. And that was from the start; the moment I saw him, I did not feel like he was not my child, which is strange. “I did not feel like he was my brother,” Reeves told PEOPLE.
“It was like that instant feeling of, like, I am going to make sure…you are never going to have the life I had. You will have lots of love and happiness, and nothing bad will happen to you. So, yes, I had to make a lot of sacrifices, but it was all worth it to ensure that he never had a bad day in his life.
Reeves’ current TikTok account is very different from her previous one; it is filled with love and support for her and Hugo.
“All I have ever wanted to do is be in the media, I have wanted to spread awareness on the foster care system, the abuse that I went through, the lack of care for children, especially in the UK,” she tells me. “It is happening far more frequently than it should be, and it should not be happening given the process that foster carers must go through. “Things are getting missed.”
Hugo, now two years old, has become a way for Reeves to heal from her own childhood trauma, as well as an opportunity to rewrite their stories together.
“I do not feel like a 23-year-old mom; I just feel like I am living it through him, which is the truth…” I find it difficult to explain to people that this is my first time living, as if I have never done it before, and I am getting to do it with him,” she says.
After everything she is been through, Reeves wants to share her story with the world, explaining the challenges she faced in obtaining special guardianship and advocating for a better foster care system in the UK. She says, “That is the final goal. To support and help others, so that no one has to feel the same way I do.”