Justice & Law Quote by Danielle Steel

Secrecy is sold as protection, but Steel’s point is that it often functions like a lock: it keeps the child out. By opening with the bureaucratic fact - sealed records in California, the seal “inviolable” - she frames adoption not as a private family story but as a state-managed system where access to your own origins is treated as a privilege, not a right. That word inviolable is doing heavy cultural work; it implies moral purity, as if the file were sacred, when what’s actually being protected may be adult convenience, institutional habit, or an old fear of scandal.

Then she twists the knife: fame, the supposed currency that buys everything, becomes the reason she’s denied parity. The judge’s logic is both paternalistic and perverse: because she is visible, she is somehow less entitled to basic identity information. Steel is exposing a hierarchy of deservingness where the “ordinary” adoptee gets one set of rules and the public figure gets another, as if notoriety cancels personhood. The subtext is frustration with a system that treats adoptees’ curiosity as dangerous and adoptees themselves as potential liabilities.

Context matters: Steel isn’t speaking as a policy wonk; she’s a novelist used to shaping narrative, suddenly confronted with a real-life plot point she’s not allowed to read. The line lands because it turns a personal grievance into a critique of how institutions confuse privacy with erasure, and how celebrity becomes an excuse to withhold what should be universally mundane: the right to know your own story.