Also media.
Ah, we are back. It's behind the Bastards, the only podcast that will be allowed once our junta takes over. We are we're actively planning the overthrow of the US government and the end of democracy, but not to any kind of political end. We don't really have an agenda
or a plan. We just really want to get more people listening to podcasts, so, you know, a worthy, worthy cause for democracy to die as a result of Mara Wilson, How do you feel about killing democracy to moderately increase the profitability of a podcast.
I mean, well, I guess it really depends which podcast we're talking about.
I mean this one, not not one of those other podcasts.
Yeah, I mean this one, this one, you know, I mean, I mean for fundsis, you know, destroying democracy for funzis. I think a little destroyed a little bit, you know, we can and for a person who's.
Been yes, think of the dog food Anderson will be able to afford once we purge all all of the opponents of our new regime.
You know, if there was a dog food that was or it was like that worth it, I would spend every dollar on it for her, every dollar.
That's what we're going to do with the dissidents is turn them into quality dog food. You deserve speaking quality dog food, not really speaking of that at all. That has nothing to do with our guests today, Marow Wilson, Mara, how are you doing? How are you feeling as we're coming to part two of this?
I mean, I'm doing okay. This is very infuriating to me for a lot of reasons, but I mean I am glad in some ways. I'm very glad that this is something that I'm passionate about and I fucking hate and uh.
And yes that, but you've been a great guest. I am also so thrilled about your memoir. Where am I now? Which people can buy wherever books are sold, or you can buy it wherever books are sold. Take it to a place where books aren't sold, sell it there, you know, Yeah, help help out a little bit? Why not, Mara? As a as a side note, you were, you know in a movie people probably know famous film Matilda, in which
the bad guy is an evil used car dealer. We talk a lot on this show about how used car dealers in general are one of the largest funders of the radical right. How would you feel about us like repurpot it, purposing some of the old art for that into like like World War two era, like we have to destroy the car dealer menace propaganda posters.
I do kind of wonder about. I mean, Danny DeVito might be in favor of that.
Yeah, he seems like a pretty cool guy.
Oh, he's very cool. He's very cool. Like, yeah, I he's very cool. And he's also also also not a bad guy to talk politics with in my opinion, But he and I think have similar beliefs, So yeah.
Much genuinely nice to hear. Well, folks, you know, make make matilt proud, destroy the political power of the car dealers trying to wrench our country away from democracy. I know, I just talked about ending democracy to increase my profits. But it's bad when other people do it, you know. Obviously speaking of things that are bad when other people do them. Wilderness camps not the best intro, but whatever,
you know, Mara, you brought up last episode. I just wanted to highlight this because I thought it was particularly perceptive the similarities to sen and On, which was really meaningful because while I think there's maybe aspects of like the way in which they would kind of like basically kidnap addicts. That were probably inspirations to Steve Cartizano for
doing this at his camps. The more direct inspirations were how they did a lot of the actual quote unquote therapy, because one of the things that he was a big advocate for in his camps was what's called anger therapy. This is when you sit everyone around in a circle and have everyone yell at one person at a time about how shitty they are and what a terrible person. It's basically the whole group abuses every individual member in it,
one person at a time. Right, And the fact that such a rending experience creates this like feeling of catharsis that's the idea, right. The reality is it's just incredibly psychologically damaging.
Yeah, but I think it's sort of like if you get into a fight with somebody and they say really mean things to you, you know afterwards, that's going to stay with you. You're going to think, you know, for the time, oh this is what they really think of me? Are they?
You know?
And that affects your relationships, that affects your self perception.
So when we talk about Troubled Team Wilderness camps, that starve and beat students. The obvious question that comes to mind is how on earth is any of this legal. And in order to tell that story, we have to go back in time again to the nineteen fifties and
the Second Red Scare. In the post war era, you see the birth of organizations like the John Birch Society, which had been formed kind of as a reaction to the fact that the New Deal got forced through and all of these rich guys had to get slightly less
rich so other people wouldn't starve to death. So in order to stop that from ever happening again, they start funding these conspiracist organizations like the John Birch Society, which preaches about a vast communist conspiracy in which your sinister socialist professors and teachers are going to steal your kids. Right, That's a big part of the propaganda they put out.
And this is the first time in which conservative parents start organizing as a group and insisting on doing their own audits of schools and of teachers, initially just to try to ferret out communist influence. Now, not long after this, she started getting desegregation, which leads to an explosion in the growth of private school facilities, and again a lot of parents being like, we should have the right to ensure our children don't have to be educated next to
kids who are a color we don't like. Right that comes in right alongside we don't want our kids to be taught communism.
Well, the funny thing is I think that like this led to and it is something that even went on I think in the nineties and two thousands. There was this sort of like like my family were like lower middle class, you know, my dad was like a libertarian Republican and my stepmother was kind of a political She's a Filipino Catholic, so she was religious. But basically like
they thought that private schools were inherently better than public schools. Yeah, which meant that I spent most of my time at public school because you know, I guess my mom had been a Democrat and she and then when we got older, they really pushed my sister into going to private school. But since we weren't wealthy, she ended up at like the shittiest private school ever because there was no oversight
and it was inexpensive. And so that happens all the time that people end up going to these places where there's no oversight and crazy shit happens all the time. Like that's that's what it is. Like, my my sister ended up at the school where just all this crazy shit happened. Yeah, and it was like a very specific religious sect that none of us belonged to, and so she got kind of brought just to that.
I believe in God, there's no way they'll abuse kids like the Catholic church.
Yeah, but I mean it wasn't like actively abusive to her, but.
It was weird school. Yeah. Yes.
She has a lot of very crazy stories about like oh yeah, there was a man who was living in the gym and see that sounds like like because his wife kicked him out, but he was like in good standing in the church, so he.
Lived in oh man. See, I have my experience with private school kids that makes me always laugh whenever parents talk about like this is what I'm going to do so that the public schools don't ruin my kid by teaching them secular values. There was a Catholic private school called Jesuit in the Dallas area, and the Jesuit Boys were who you would buy drugs from as a teenager. Because the Jesuit Boys always had weed and acid and like cocaine and stuff.
They're all on and they're all on drugs and make serious drugs too, Like nobody could afford cocaine at MBLIC school.
No, no, no, no, rich kids can be and they cut it with baby powder to sell the pores. It's tragic. That's why I operate a charity that provides underprivileged kids with quality.
Blow.
This shit is straight from Columbia. We don't step on it all only Sophie. It's a five oh one C three. We're allowed to talk about it on the air.
Does your friend Oliver North help with it?
Yes, Actually he's been a huge part of our organizing. He knew a lot of people.
Did he die? Did he die?
No?
I think he's got to still be alive.
See one of those one of those like, yeah, I'm.
Pretty sure he's still alive because I don't remember having a party for it, and I will have a party when all the North dies. So we were talking about why why the laws allow for these kinds of facilities, and yeah, a lot of it has its roots in kind of desegregation. This fear over communism and the whole religious right gets birthed in the seventies over what might euphemistically be called a question of school choice. Right, they're
angry at like integration of Bob Jones University. Right, there's going to be black people at our private school. And an idea kind of starts to spread in American society as the religious right gains more power, that parents are having their rights infringed upon by the existence of a society that might at some point expose those children to attitudes and ideas they're parents dislike. This is low key one of the most dangerous things in this country right now.
The parents' rights movement is very familiar.
Yes. In an explainer for the AP News Brooks Schultz rights quote. In nineteen seventy two, the US Supreme Court cited parental rights when it allowed Amish families to exempt
their children from high school in Wisconsin v. Yoder. The court acknowledged that it was an exceptional case since the Amish lived separately and self sufficiently, said Joshua Weishert, a lawyer and professor at West Virginia University, and lawsuits stretching back to the nineteen twenties, courts have affirmed the rights of parents to direct their children's education, but they have emphasized that there's a balance to be struck with the
state's obligation to protect children's welfare. Now, recognizing the obligation doesn't mean that you actually act as if there is any obligation. And one of the things that has resulted from this is you've had states like Utah establish what are like very permissive parental rights regimes, right, And as I noted last episode, that's why there's such a like
that's why all these facilities are located there. There's other states where kids have more protection if their parents are crazy assholes who want to send them to an abuse camp. But if you get those kids across the border and
down into Utah, they have no rights anymore. Right, the parents can do literally anything to them, because there's this idea that like, well, you know, particularly this faith based idea that like the parent ought to be absolutely sovereign to the child, which right, like ye is bad.
It's I mean, that is a Christian thing, anna Mormon thing of the hierarchy of you know, there's God, then there's the father, then there's the mother, then there is the children, and and it you know, it is like they are right below, like the hierarchy is reinforced at every time, at every turn.
Yes, I'll admit this is a complicated thing to figure out as a society because, like, I don't think the solution is the state has absolute power over the lives of children, because that's not great.
They're necessari historically that is not sure, that.
Doesn't end well. But also kids, kids are children. They're not absolutely they're not capable of like having absolute sovereignty over their own lives, like immediately. I think there's probably probably the best you can do is kind of a sliding scale, and you know, try to make sure that there are like human rights protections that make it impossible to force certain things on kids. Ever, no matter what, it's really not an easy.
If you talk to anybody who's who's like ever worked with CPS, they'll you know, you can just see like the exhaustion in their eyes when they talk about it, because they're like, yeah, it's a really hard line. It's a very difficult thing to do, very very difficult. And there's certain things like I know in some states, like if a parent leaves marks on their child, like that's enough to prosecute them. And then there's other states where it's like, no, beat your kids as much as you want,
like they are your children. You know, you can do whatever or even have you know, have somebody else beat your kids. And it's not that big of a deal.
And I think, you know, as we acknowledge that, it's kind of messy to try to figure out where exactly the line should be. The line certainly shouldn't be where Steve Cartizano puts it, right where you can pay to
have your kids subducted and starved in the desert. And what's justifying all of these extreme adventures again is like drug use, right, the fact that drug use is so fucking scary and concerned parents have become the most powerful voting block in the country, Like both liberal and conservative parents in the late eight you know, in the eighties and then in the nineties, all have to be anti drug all have to talk about it like as opposed to well, you know, this is a thing that carries
some dangers to kids, and we should make sure that they're informed about it. And you know, there should be a great of awareness and society about this. No, no, this is like going to ruin entire generations, and anything we do is justified in stopping this scourge. Steve Cartesano rides that wave.
I know that like people who claim to have been hippies back in the day, like.
That is you motherfuckers smoked pot once.
Well that's the thing. Yeah, it's a much smaller percentage than we think. You know, it's a much smaller percentage
than we think. But it happened to enough people, and enough people knew people who you know, smoked weed and you know, like dropped acid to know that these people did not end up, you know, murdering people, and you know, and you know heroin addicts, Like you would think that people in the eighties and nineties who had lived through the sixties and seventies would, at least if I had not smoked a lot of weed themselves, known somebody there like known people who did I.
Think the two things that really amped this up to a massive degree are number one, like, heroin gets a lot more common, and heroin is a drug that if you fuck up on heroin, the consequences are more severe than smoking too much weed or even generally drinking too much. Obviously, drinking too much can be deadly, but it's a lot the lyne you got a lot more wiggle room with
drinking when you do with fucking horse. And the other thing, probably the bigger thing is the AIDS epidemic, right, which is tied to drug use, particularly intravene to drug use, and kind of it does help make the case to these parents that like, well, anything that sets you on a road that ends in heroin is like you're going to die, right, so we have to intervene early on.
And probably crack as well, which is.
Also yeah, cras is also a massive part of this.
And has a very racialized component. Yeah, so yeah, because.
That's probably yeah, probably that's less of a factor in these rich kids parents being concerned just because of like where crack is. Like, although cope is probably anyway whatever, we don't need to get too much into it. But yeah, that's so, that's that's kind of the stakes that are being set up, And it's important to understand where the stakes are because the thing parents are letting their kids
like happen to their kids are insane. So once local law enforcement starts getting involved, kids start escaping the camp and like showing up in town or showing up at the police station, like battered and bruised or in some cases are taken to their parents after they're like let out, and so doctors start looking over these kids. In one case, a doctor counted more than eighty scars, marks, and contusions
on the body of a single teenager. Another former student told the police that they had been dragged through the desert by instructors and then tied to trees as a punishment for not wanting to hike like insane shit, you know, like not even like tough love stuff, like just actual torture. As legal issues mounted, Steve seems to have mostly fucked
off to spend the company's money on stupid shit. Frustration over this eventually led to one of his top employees, admissions director Gail Palmer, to quit and start Summit Quest, Inc. Which is just a copycat of Challenger without all the baggage. Right, but she is basically doing it. It's a sixty three day course just like Challenger, and the business plan is
the same. This time ales going to run it, and she's going to hire some fucking drifters and give them a bunch of troubled kids and leaving them in the desert for two months. Right, And I want to quote again from John Krakouur, writing for Outside magazine. Five students were enrolled in the inaugural Summit Quest course, which cost
thirteen thousand dollars for sixty three days. Palmer sent the group to the arid Schiwitz Plateau near the north rim of the Grand Canyon, supervised by two young counselors who were paid minimum wage. During the first several days, Michelle Sutton, a pretty fifteen year old who had enrolled voluntarily to regain self esteem after an alleged date rape, complained repeatedly of exhaustion, sunburn, and nausea. As the group hiked through
the desert. She vomited up most of the water she tried to drink, and pleaded that she could not go on. According to councilor's field reports gathered by state and federal investigators, the lead counselor had been ordered to ignore such talk as manipulative behavior. You have been slapping off, she told Sutton. You are now being warned now a couple of things
are going on there. One of them, probably the bleakest part of this is that, like Sutton was not sent here by her parents or against her own will, she was raped and thought this program might be therapeutic for her. Right, And this gets to what we've been talking about. These counselors who don't know what they're doing, who have no education, just treat every kid the same and the way they are trained. And this is Steve's training, right. Everything in
this course has been stolen from Steve's program. Steve's program teaches anytime kids complain or say that they are physically uncomfortable or ill, they are trying to manipulate you. Well, that's like the.
That's like the yeah, they they all of these things. They always say children are incredibly manipulative. You know, teenagers are incredibly manipulative, and like some are, but teenagers don't. Manipulation usually requires some kind of foresight. It's also like and you kidders are known for that.
It's like when people say babies are manipulative, right, because a baby will like modulate how cries or whatnot in order to get certain kinds of attention. You can call it manipulative, or you can say like they have needs and try to fill those beads, like the teenager who is dehydrated and needs medical attention.
Yeah, so when you like, like I got heat exhaustion, last year on my birthday because because I'm a late July baby and I was stupid and decided to have a party outside and many such cases, we all got heat exhaustion and I was the next day. I felt like I was going to throw up all day long. And yeah, if you feel like you're going to throw up after heat like that is when shit is really serious and you really need to Yeah, you need medical attention right away.
Yeah, you need to immediately start pounding the hottest coffee that you can get and ideally just get on a treadmill and sprint through it. You know, that's what's going to help.
Yeah, when you when you can't see anymore, then you know, that's when.
You know that, that's when you're better.
Yeah. But yeah, when you're bombing up.
Water, that's that's a horrible side. Get to medical care.
And the thing is, these these there are probably people who were like, oh, yeah, this would be good for me, Like I remember reading about like Harard bound and being like this could toughen me up.
A real program, Michelle might have a real program with responsible counselors who were not pushing kids too much and understood medically, you know, wilderness first aid could have been helpful to her.
Yeah, it could have been empowering to somebody who'd been through the sexual assault.
If she thought I might I think I might benefit from this. It probably is something that might have benefited her. It's just the people, the adults that you know. For one thing, there was no kind of licensure for these programs, not really, there was no kind of like state board that was actually looking into any of this. So Michelle when she started looking for programs, had no way of knowing who is legitimate.
Right, Yeah, what's like the summer camp program? You know, what's like a therapeutic program, and that that's the thing. A lot of these as therapy.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and that, Yeah, that's exactly what happened, right, And you know, none of because she the fucking palmer who again is trained by fucking Steve, just brought in minimum wage people who like, did not understand anything about wilderness survival. They miss that she has the symptoms of heat stroke and dehydration. And if you ignore those symptoms and force someone to do an arduous mountain trek, there's a good chance they're going to die. And that is
exactly what happened to fifteen year old Michelle Mo. Yeah, it's a it's fucked. Palmer alleged that Sudden, who remember, was in this program voluntarily after being assaulted, had died not because of dehydration and heat exhaustion, but due to a drug overdose. Right, Palmer didn't even do the work to know why this kid was there. She was like a kid in my program. I'll just say she was a drug addict, right, Like, it's so vile. It's vile and lazy.
It also doesn't make any sense because don't they exam in them to make sure check.
How did she get drugs?
Yeah?
Did you let her get drugs out there? How is that happening? Yeah, that doesn't make you better. You realize that doesn't make it better. If she got access to.
Drugs out here, that's even worse.
Yeah. Yeah, Now, obviously there's an actual coroner's inquest here and a doctor confirms that she did not die of drug overdose. There are no drugs in her system. She died due to dehydration. Given Palmer's this becomes a big media story. Right, Michelle is fifteen. You know her parents are very vocal. This actually like number one it destroys
Palmer's program. But it finally, for the first time, these programs, a lot of which had proliferated as a result of Challenger's success, get some scrutiny, right, and as a result, the media reaches out to Steve Cartesano and to be like, Hey, seems like this lady basically just does exactly what you do and a kid died. Is there a danger a kid's going to die in your program? And Steve told them a Challenger, a tragedy like the one that killed
Michelle Sutton could never happen. You want to guess what happened six weeks later? Oh my god, exactly, like literally two months later, something like that. On June twenty third, nineteen ninety, Kristin Chase enrolled at Challenger, And in this sentence, the mean the word enrolled means that she was taken in the dead of night by Challenger employees and driven
from Florida to southern Utah. Kristin had been enrolled in the program by her mother, who, like most of these parents, thought her daughter was in danger and needed the tough love of a boot camp to set her on the right path. I think her parents are separated because her father, Ronald, claims he was not informed that Kristin had been forced into the program right Ronald was, like, I knew she was in the program. I thought this was something kind of like Michelle, that she wanted to do, which is
not the case. So as soon as she arrives, the first thing they do is they starve kids. Right for the first two days that you're hiking, you don't eat any food. Right now, In addition to the fact that she is being starved, Kristen grows up at life. Has lived your whole life at sea level, and these are like seven thousand feet or more elevation mountains they're hiking in.
Oh, so you're supposed to up.
That'll fuck you up hard if you don't acclimate there. Again, if you know, if you understand anything about the medicine behind this, there are ways to responsibly acclimatize people to that environment.
No, that's because Yeah, when I went when I went to my you know, hippie boarding school, we were on a hill that was I think about six thousand you know, we were up in the mountains, and yeah, I was always a little fucked up. Yeah, the first day back from vacation and a little fucked up coming back down to sea level, you know, with my parents in you know, the valley in LA. Like, you need time, and you need you need electrolytes, and you need to be very careful about what you eat.
And walking start for two days exactly.
Walking is exhausting. Walking, just walking is exhausting at that altitude.
Yeah. A lawsuit from her father later noted that quote. Her medical history, forwarded Challenger by her mother, indicated that Kristin suffered from bouts of coughing up blood, stomach pain, urinary burning and frequency difficulty, running, minstreul difficulty, and a knee injury. So in addition, if I am and I'm not an expert on any of this, but I have
some training in wilderness first aid. If I am doing, if I am working for an organization like this and a kid with this medical history wants to do a sixty three, I'm not letting them in. I'm sorry. If you cough up blood regularly, and like, we don't really have a clear idea as to why you are not spending two months out in the desert in my wilderness program. That doesn't seem responsible, you know, But they don't care over a challenger. They're like, come on, cough up blood
here in the mountains. It'll be good for you. So Horsehair and the other counselors force her to do a six thousand foot elevation hike. The day that she arrives again, they deprive her of food. Next from a write up indserret dot com quote. Despite being upset, frightened, and ill, Kristin was forced to participate in four to five min hikes each day in temperatures exceeding ninety five degrees. She was not given a proper physical exam or any conditioning
activities prior to the hikes. The day before she died, Kristin Chase fell several times on one of the hikes, experienced knee pain, and showed symptoms of heat exhaustion of the evening prior to her death, Kristen told one of the challenger counselors that she was afraid of dying. In the program, a counselor wrote on an evaluation form, Kristen's number one short term goal is to get out of here safe and alive, the suit says, and maybe as
the employee, you shouldn't be working for a company. For lack. Well, this kid's goal is not to die here. I wonder if if we're handling health and safety properly.
Yeah, it's it's yeah, some implications there.
Yeah, it's just incredibly bleak like this this, I mean, this poor girl is like murdered by negligence.
Well but you know, oh sorry, is this a time for a break?
It's time for an AD break. That's right, terrible time for an AD break.
But yeah, I mean, I was just going to say quickly that the thing that is like with my head is that I knew people who went to these places more than ten years later.
Yeah, still the same, Still the same. Yeah, yep, speaking of which, are ads the same as they ever were? We're back? Uh Okay. So on June twenty seventh, Kristen was made to do another five mile hike. She started showing symptoms of heat exhaustion and eventually collapsed on the trail. Despite the fact that she had stopped breathing, Challenger employees did not call for a care Flight helicopter to come
in and rescue her. I don't know if it was literally the company CareFlight, but there's a company that did, Like you could like radio them and they would do emergency airlifts, right, which, if you are doing a service like this, if you're like a wilderness course like this, you want to have a contract with someone who can fly in no matter where you were and pick up an emergency case, right Like, that's part of the operating
a business like Challenger. Responsibly, Challenger did not have an ongoing agreement with any of these services, and in fact refused to call them anyway because Steve hadn't paid the bill and he was in an what's described in the court case as an ongoing disagreement over an unpaid bill, so he had he had fucked this helicopter emergency service over so he could keep renting Lamborghini's and he wouldn't let any of his employees call them, even for an emergency.
So eventually Challenger, instead of getting an actual medical helicopter in, they call for a tour helicopter that does like helicopter tours of Bryce Canyon, which does not rease. And again the time by the time it reaches Kristens, she is very much dead, you know, like it's she was already not like the odds were already kind of rough for her. By the fact that she was not breathing in in the wilderness, but the fact that it takes hours for
a chopper to arrive, you know. In the immediate wake of the disaster, Steve Cartersano started doing cable TV appearances where he claimed that Chase's death had nothing to do with the Challenger program. And I'm going to quote again from Desert News. She hadn't yet begun the sixty three day expedition and was on a four and a half mile day hike to explore some nearby caves and arches when she died. She could have walked over to Central Park and collapsed. Cardasano said on the Jane Wallace Show
on the Lifetime TV channel. Her death, though heartrending, has not caused him to reevaluate his program. We've had too much success, Cartizano said, pointing out that over seven hundred and fifty youths have completed the program. Now there's a lot that's bad about that. For one thing, they had absolutely started the sixty three day expedition, there were days into it, and she had been forced to continue hiking despite repeatedly complaining that she was in physical distress. This
is not a walking to I don't know. Maybe you've taken some hardcore hikes over to Central Park, but this is not like walking around in the park in the middle of the city now. Surprisingly, Kristen's mother is one of the people who came out to support the Challenger team and Steve, even though they had killed her daughter. She told her reporter, what we did for our daughter was the best thing we ever we could have ever done.
We felt this was the answer. I truly feel it would have been if she'd been able to complete it. It was not the you killed her. It wasn't the best thing you could have done. Because she died.
I mean, I guess she just probably needed to. Yeah, I don't know, like you need to justify the horrible things that happen.
It's such an I don't know if I feel like it's such a fucking American response, like particularly like middle class conservative response, like I am not responsible for anything bad that happens. It is the world doing the wrong thing.
Even if I do something that's like dangerous and on its face like reckless and on its face something that like any responsible person could have told me was a dangerous thing to do, I felt it was the right thing to do, which means it must have been and so the fact that it ended badly like can't be my fault. Right, it's this complete refusal to take any It's fucking a rack. It's a rack war syndrome, right, Like, it's this it should have worked, like fuck you people, Yeah.
It's it's really I mean, what makes what I wonder is how, like how did they they get like these people on shows that were like, oh, the program worked for me. Where the fuck did they find those people? Is what I'm wondering about, because.
I mean, there was probably incentive programs together.
There's definitely incentives. I think there may have been a degree of like money getting like who knows what Steve was doing behind the scenes with these people, but also some number of people of kids probably did feel like the program helped, right.
There was especially there was a different Netflix documentary, I forget the name of it, but one of the things that they talked about was that that there was like specific parent incentive programs for recruiting and recruiting parents to send their children to places and to spread good word and speak highly about it. That was a thing that happened.
And you also you have within these programs. You've got a bunch of kids, they're kind of hierarchies within the kids. Some of those kids you just have like helping out. You give them extra privileges and whatnot, and they kind of you're kind of almost in a lot of cases, weaponizing the kids who are the biggest bullies, right, having them bully the other kids to keep them in line, and maybe those kids wind up feeling like, well, I have a lot of power and agency in this situation
that I don't back at home. So it is a positive experience because they're getting to be shitty to some of the other kids, right. A variety of things are happening here. But like he's it's the I think part of the one of the villains here is like the willingness of daytime TV to like, well, we're never going to actually do any research on how these programs should
operate or how they do operate. But this charismatic guy stee have him and a couple of teenagers on, you know, like we'll talk to them about this thing and effectively give him free advertising, which is kind of all TV ever does in these cases.
I think that there's also like I know that there's the like the cash for Kids thing, and I knew I knew a girl who almost ended up in one of these programs, but because a psychiatrist suggested to her father that she should go and after that, this girl was somebody with a lot of issues, but she refused to go to a psychiatrist after that because she was so afraid that one would try to send her away.
Of course. Yeah, it's it's shited like the there's that fucking CIA program in Pakistan where they like pretended to be vaccinating people in order to like blood test them to try and find ben laden And it's like, well, when you do shit like that, Yeah, people are gonna think vaccines they're a scam.
Yeah, people aren't going to think. Yeah, people aren't going to be particularly happy.
Thanks the CIA. Yeah, so I know, I want to know. We just talked about Sharon, who I do not like very much, being like, this really was the best thing for my I know she died, but it's the best thing for my daughter. I gotta say, I don't know much about her relationship with her former husband, Ronald, but I'm gonna guess he was in the right side of that breakup because when he finds out about this, he was like, what the fuck did you do? You sent our daughter to die in the desert, and now you're
defending the people who got her killed on television. So one of the things that came out as a result of all this is that she had not told him and she shared custody with him, that she had had their daughter kidnapped, that she was not there willingly. Ronald gets very angry about all this, and he is made by a court the representative of his daughter's estate by a state judge, and in this capacity, he sues the
ever loving shit out of the Challenger program. Cardesano is charged with eight counts of child abuse and a misdemeanor for his involvement in Chase's death. Now, the good news is that, like Chase does win a bunch of money as a result of this lawsuit. The bad news is that Cardasano does not wind up with any criminal convictions
because they fuck up the case. Like there's like a weirdly shitty judge due to like a series of like like at one point in the court, like the first time they try they try this case, it gets thrown out because the judge forgets to read the charges to the jury at the onset of the trial. There are a couple of more things like that, and Cardasano is eventually acquitted, but his company winds up more than a million dollars in debt and he has to file for
Chapter eleven. Several more lawsuits follow from other children after this, all of which are settled out of court. By the end of nineteen ninety three, Cardasano is banned from ever running a similar program in the state of Utah again. So that's good, you know, Steve Cartersano, he's out of the picture. He's surely not going to come back later in this story running a series of of wilderness survival camps.
Let's talk about what happens in Utah after this point, because the fact that Utah has gone after Cartisano to some extent doesn't mean that they have any interest in regulating what has become a multimillion dollar industry in the state. When local and national media covered Kristen's death, they needed an expert to reach out to and to get quotes
about what had gone wrong in Steve's program. Many of them picked Larry Olsen, who, despite the negligent deaths of two students in his programs, was still held up as the good guy of the wilderness therapy industry. In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, he displayed particular disgust for Steve's boot camp model. You don't treat them like maggots. You treat them like human beings, which is a good
thing to be said. I just don't trust you at all, Larry. Now, whenever something terrible happens in a program like Challenger, there's an urge in the media to minimize issues in the rest of the industry, especially if that business tough love care for troubled teens is one that mainstream culture just sort of assumes is necessary. As a result, the focus was on how Challenger was a proly run program and not the idea that the whole concept might be a
bad idea. Right. Two former Challenger employees, Bill Henry and Lance Jagger are man Horsehair had testify against Steve at exchange for immunity from prosecution. Can you believe Horsehair rolled on Horsehair? You fucked over, Steve Montana? How could you so? Horsehair and his buddy Bill are still clear to operate a wilderness rehab survival camp thing in Utah, and now there's an opening in the market because Challenger is no longer accepting anybody. And so in nineteen ninety two they
launch a company, north Star Expeditions. That's a nice name, makes it sound very adventurous.
It sounds like a cruise. That like it does.
Yeah, it sounds like Yeah, it does sound like a cruise. Given that the company was owned and operated by men's trained by Steve Cartesano, who had played a direct role in the death of christ and Chase, you probably won't be surprised to hear that they almost immediately got another child killed. In early March nineteen ninety four, about a year after they start doing this, Aaron Bacon enrolled in North Stars again, sixty three day wilderness program. They all
are the same length. Bacon is one of these kids who had been a good student most of his academic career, but got into pot in his sophomore year and started missing classes. In February, he was in a fight with some kids. In the local news reports that came out after this, Alta said he was in a fight with the crips, and I don't know if he was in a fight with the real crips or there were some other kids in his school calling themselves the crips, which I think is likelear.
That's like every time people talk about gangs, it's like, are you guys talking about organized crime or are you talking about like a group of kids that we know.
We definitely had some kids in my middle school who called themselves bloods, and I do not think they were affiliated with the criminal organization.
But yeah, you have these like you have these like thirteen year olds who will like in LA who will tag like m S thirteen on something. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you guys, you're not MS thirteen tagging that on a locker. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a big part of their operation. Oh yeah, that's if you want to move some serious crystal, you got to have lockers in every state. Oh yeah. So his parents get convinced that he is in a downward spiral that's going to lead with him murder, end with him murdered in a gang war. Now. In his article for Outside, John Krakauer describes how Aaron Bacon's mom found out about north Star. Students at north Star learned that mother Nature does not make exceptions, explained the outfits brochure
they learned responsibility, self disciplined motivation. Tuition was thirteen zo nine hundred dollars for a sixty three day course, plus another seven seventy five to have erin forcibly escorted to Escalante, something north Star strongly recommended Bob's architecture firm. That's his dad, once prosperous, had lately been teetering on the brink of insolvency,
and the Bacons no longer had that kind of cash. But, says Sally, his mom, after talking to several parents whose kids have been helped by the program, we were given a lot of hope that north Star was going to build Aaron's self esteem. I knew it would be rigorous, but I pictured him out there with God and nature, hiking all day, discussing his issues with therapists around the count fire at night. Just a totally fanciful idea of what was actually going on here. None of these counselors
are therapists. None of them have relevant training in this. They're not even like any kind of teacher. Now it's unclear to me do Sally and Bob know that, But they are aware of some of this, because several days into his time with north Star. Aaron sends a letter back to his parents and writes, I'm trying to work this program as well as I can, but I can't believe you want me believing this stuff. I've been told that all therapists, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists are quacks. I've
been lectured on the stupidity of believing in them. I miss you, mom and dad. And maybe that's a side that your kid's not going to get good therapy. Yeah, at the Wilderness camp. That's teaching him that psychiatrists are liars. You've got to trust only horse Hair knows how to be an adult. Great stuff. So, prior to handing their child off to strangers, the only concerns Bob and Sally had expressed to north Star was that their son was very thin, and they worried that he wouldn't be provided
enough food. Our old, pale horse Hair assured them he would never let a student lose weight during one of their one of their sessions. For three weeks after Aaron was taken away in the night, his mom called regularly to check up on him. She was told that her son was a whiner, lingering pretending to be sick and doing so badly at the program that they might have no choice but to have him repeat it kids. The
counselor said, we're angry at Aaron for slowing them down. Now, the reality of what's happening here is that for the first two days that they're on these hikes, Aaron and his classmates are starved. North Star claimed that this was to cleanse the toxins out of them. Aaron, very thin, already hiking and not eating, grew very quickly ill. Then he fell and injured himself badly enough that a week or so in he was unable to hike with his
backpack and left it behind. His counselors were like, well, you left your backpack behind, that's where your food was. You don't get to eat now. So he spends another two days without food. He gets even sicker. Because he was clearly ill and slow. He became the subject of mockery, with counselors calling him homosexual and in one case taking his sleeping bag away as punishment. In a letter to his parents, Aaron wrote, I feel like I am losing
control of my body. I've peed my pants every night for the past three nights and tonight when we started our little hike, I took a dump in my pants. I didn't even feel it coming, It just happened. All the other students started a I've been telling the staff that I'm sick for a while, and they say I'm faking it now again. If you were to tell those symptoms to anyone with fairly minimal medical training, those are
signs of serious illness. Right. When a theoretically healthy young teenager loses control of their bladder and bowels during extreme physical exertion, that means something is very wrong and you need to get them to a hospital immediately. Right, nothing is done. On March thirtieth, three weeks into his trek, Aaron's mom called the school, which warned her that he might need to repeat the program because he was doing
so badly. The next day, they called to inform her that her son was dead due to a perforated ulcer that leaped through his small intestine and cause a massive fatal infection. North Starr insisted they had done nothing wrong. Aaron had just been sick, the ulcer had been there anyway, nothing they did could have prevented his death. But then Sally saw her son's body. Here's how she described it. Quote. His legs were like toothpicks, his hip bones stuck way
out his ribs. He looked like again, a concentration camp victim. There were bruises from the tip of his toes to the top of his head, open source, up and down the inside of his thighs. The only way we were even able to recognize him was a childhood scar above his right eye. Jesus, Yeah, yeah, it seems like a good time to go to ads and we're back. So that's fucking bleak and like adjacent to murder. I think
negligence this bad. Like I don't really see much of a difference between this and just like killing a kid right like purposefully, like.
It really is. I mean, I do know that, like the humiliation there is is just kind of it's just part of it.
It's a nama. That kid was in hell the last days of his life exactly.
Yeah, you're and and yeah, they do make it seem like these kids are all manipulative, you know, But his.
Crime was he smoked weed. Great great parenting by the way from Bob and Sally there. I don't want to shit on him too much because their kid died, but also you're part of the reason why. So I don't really feel all that.
There's got to be Like, I know they must like the way that they do it, because I know people who had terrible parents who were sent to these programs. But I also know people who had very loving, caring parents who sent their kids to these programs that if they knew, they never would. So I think all the money in this goes into sales.
Yeah, it goes into sales. It goes into like making this, and and you also have the cultural inertia is with you, right, the weight of well, obviously kids these days are worse than they've ever been, right, which is a big thing in the media. Obviously, the consequences of kids getting into drugs or so dire. Obviously tough love is the only thing that works. Right, Like all of these things together that you're doing most of the ad work for these companies.
All they need to do is come in and say, you know, we'll give your kid this kind of like you would imagine hiking through the desert, you know, sharing wisdom with your probably will we'll kind of insinuate Native American counselors. They'll learn all sorts of ancient wisdom, right, Like that's literally how the ad campaigns work for this
A lot of them. The money is in like we know these different native techniques for like providing therapy too, right, Like there's all sorts of bullshit stacked on.
They there is. I think there's a religious element underneath it all.
Yep, I think.
But the thing is, like I know somebody who went into this program and said that they came out believing in God, but only because they felt like they had to in a way, because it was like they they well, yeah, it was basically they were like they were like, I feel like right now the only thing that's giving me hope is the idea of a God, you know, and the only thing you know and so and it it feels like it is like when people, some people who
come out of traumatic experiences lose their faith, but some people they gain it because they're like God was the only, you know, thing that I could think of, and I was praying to God to let me go through this, you know, and let me get through this alive.
Yeah, because you need to, especially as a child. Yeah, your degree of context, your understanding of like like what are your your degree of power in any situation is so little like that. I get how that might be psychologically necessary. Like some people, what's going to get you fath.
Exactly that's what That's what's going to get them through, you know. And I mean you're probably also like you could you can hallucinate really easily after after the desert, so probably.
That oh yeah, that also has Yes, yes.
Starvation and heat exhaustion can make you see something.
It we'll fuck you up again, you know. That's why we're offering like a you know, a special camp. We're just gonna take you out into the desert until you hallucinate. It's nice, it's legal. We may mix a little bit of peyote into the water. It's not really peyote. I got it off a Facebook, but it's got mushrooms on the side of the bottle. So that's got to be good enough for you, you know, in the desert with me. Yeah, exactly, something will happen, and don't worry. I know what dehydration
looks like. So one thing you'll notice from all of the stories if kids who have died in these programs is that while the child who died was obviously ill and in very clear need, of medical attention. They were attacked by staff for faking it, for having a bad attitude, for trying to get out of the program, for being manipulative. All of this trace is back to Steve Carrsano, Remember, trained all of these people and running these other facilities.
These all of these deaths are people linked directly to Steve. In an interview earlier in his career with Challenger, Steve told a reporter, we are breaking down facads. Kids come in with all sorts of little ways to manipulate, with a lot of anger. We physically stress them out and that breaks down the facades to get to their heart. So again, the training that Steve established is you have to physically stress these children to break down the barriers
between them and healing. So really, by ignoring when this kid start shitting blood in the desert, we're doing the best thing for him. He's just trying to manipulate us by losing control of his bowels. See why the.
Kids I know who did like who didn't necessarily suffer physical effects from it, although I mean they all did because they all were you know, lack of food and lack of sleep, right, But and you know, exposure to the elements, but they were all humiliated. They were made to be dirt, if you know, people were made to like people were forced to like be nude or like pee in front of each other like what themselves as punishments things like that, like you know, in addition to
being yelled at, But humiliation was a big one. Humiliation in front of a group of people.
And it's the kind of thing it's it shows you how it's just like the primary difference in toxicity between like the programs that Larry Olsen is running, which are very much imperfect, but don't do this to kid Like the deaths there are, I think generally due to your responsibility, but they're not torturing kids the same way. Like one of the things that the on a Sazi camp that he runs afterwards will do is that, like you get
two thousand calories a day. Now, they do have this weird rule where if you like eat your food early, you have to like catch animals and like forage and what not to like fill up the gap and you're But none of their kids ever like starved to death, so I guess they probably did it right. And I think the key thing is that like aspects of that were like, well, you have to manage the amount of food that you have, like you're on a high for a while. This is like part of learning wilderness survival.
If you're not pairing that with and all of the kids are going to yell at you and make fun of you, and the counselors will beat you and call you gay, then it's not necessarily a bad ex as long as there's a certain degree of like medical training present, not necessarily a bad experience, right. It could be useful to learn things about, like managing calories when you're out in the wild. That's not what's going on in these places. Right after Chase's death in nineteen ninety, Utah had forced
through its first serious regulations for wilderness therapy. Most of these focused on what kids couldn't be made to do. There were restrictions you can't have a kid hike up with a pack that's above a certain percentage of their body weight. You have to give kids a set number of calories per day. But as Krakauer noted in nineteen ninety five, responsibility for enforcing these regulations fell to a loan civil servant, Kin Stettler, who was supposed to monitor
more than one hundred youth treatment companies statewide. In practice, it was impossible for him to write her it on so many programs, and North Star was among those that escaped close scrutiny. Stetler devoted Mormon knew Jagger and Henry well and says that he trusted them as fellow saints implicitly. After Bacon's death, Stetler's confidence in Jagger and Henry remained steadfast.
He quickly cleared North Star of any wrongdoing and allowed the program to stay in business, which it did for six months until the State of Utah filed criminal charges in October nineteen ninety four. So again, the guy they when they decide to regulate this after two kids die, the guy who does it is like, well, it's Mormons running this camp. Mormons would never put a kid in danger. Oh, the kid died, must not have been their fault, you know.
Thankfully the Bacon's parents make enough of a problem that the State of Utah does something, But like they almost didn't, you know. And again, yeah, it.
Is really I don't know the idea of like yeah, of like, well, nobody in this group would would be a bad person.
Well he would never do this.
Yeah, that's just it's such a strange. It's such a strange idea to me like that that well, yeah, of course, of course you wouldn't do that.
It's this thing we can all. It's easy to see what a bad idea that is, right when you're thinking about like, well, I'm not a Mormon. I know a lot of bad things about the church of about the Mormon church, right, Like the LDS church has a dark history. Churches in general often have dark histories of child abuse.
I'm not surprised that stuff like this happens. But we all have our groups where we're like, well, no one in this group whatever abuse a kid, right, That's how kids keep getting abused, Like everyone has has different groups.
That that's why you always need some sort of oversight that is not the group itself making sure when you're dealing with like organizations that take care of kids, making sure kids aren't getting molested, because there is no group that will not include some child molesters in it.
No, it's it's sociology one o one. You know, everybody's always like like this is its social ties are the most important thing, and it's why people will some people will be like, you know, I can't believe this famous person is standing with with this abuser. And it's like, well, I mean, it's not a good thing that they're doing it, but probably they have close social ties with them, and it's really hard for people to cut off social ties. Sometimes.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, because it's not, but it blames Yeah.
Yeah, and this is specifically why you don't leave it up to random people. Yeah, it's why you build robust organizations. That's job is to like not take it as red that people aren't abusing kids, right, and to be an advocate for those kids.
Yeah, people on the outside who can be objective about it, because you get this sort of like like I mean, this is and and obviously this isn't just like a Latter Day Saints thing like this is in every religion and every institution. There's some kind of old boy network. There's some kind of you know, oh well, yeah, well this guy is my friend. He would never do that.
Yeah. And yeah, when we talk about like cases of like film sets and stuff like that, especially back in the day that we're abusive to like child actors, and there's always the question of like, well, what did other actors on the set know at the time. But the bigger problem is that like, well, it shouldn't have been up to them either, Like there should be again, professional agencies, that's job is to do this so that you're not
trusting that everyone's going to like you don't. You can't just trust that everyone involved in the organization is going to be the best version of themselves. You assume that there are going to be that people are going to be cowards, you assume that people are going to be sneaky, and you build a system that does not like take that for granted.
I think, I mean, I think a lot of us who didn't have bad experiences on film sets because I mostly had good experiences on film sets, But it was because we had people in our lives, like our parents and studio teachers who always advocated for us, who always made sure that we weren't doing anything unsafe, and who would take us aside and say, hey, are you sure about this? Do you really want to be doing this? Do you feel safe about this? But obviously that's not
the case everywhere, but yeah, but that's the thing. You have these people who are advocating and these people who are a little bit outside of this, you know, And yeah you do. You need the outside, the outside eye, the outside perspective, you need the chicks and balances.
Yeah, it's the Boy Scouts shit, right, Like I had a great time in the Boy Scouts while a bunch of kids were getting molested, right, Like, you just can't you just never, You shouldn't. You shouldn't leave it up to people who are whose expertise is not sniffing out child abuse to try and figure out if that's happening. You know, we keep learning this, Lets schools learn this lesson all the time. You know, I can't believe this
teacher was doing that. You know, they were the cool teacher. Like, well, we all had a cool teacher who was doing something they shouldn't have been doing.
Well.
That's the thing, too, is when people say to me, like, so many children are abused in Hollywood, I say, yes, but children were abused also.
At nearly the Catholic Church.
Yeah, the children. Well, and that's what I say to them. I say, this is not a problem that's unique to Hollywood. It's a problem that is in every institution where somebody has extreme power over anybody else. And maybe that's my anarchist street talking. But I think that it's you know, any kind of institution.
I obviously agree with you one hundred percent. I feel
the same way when people obsessed. Not that it's not like the Epstein was not worth like certainly at one point when his crimes are being ignored, a lot more attention was needed, but the obsessional focus on this idea of like teenage and like child girl victims as opposed to how the vast majority of child sex trafficking looks, which is people's parents and relatives primarily doing it right and is mostly kids who were poor, and like, don't intersect.
They're also the people who are abusing them are poor, and so there's not this angle of like this is the wealthy and powerful engaging in these these horrible things. It's like, no, these are like poor adults of using poor children, and like that doesn't get any kind of attention, right, and even though it's a much more common version of the problem.
Yeah, I think also if somebody has complete control over you and complete control over what you're doing, and you know in Hollywood it's they have complete control over your dreams and your future, you know that says something in a church they have complete you know, and any kind of rep your soul, yeah, or your soul. You know,
those are very big things. And you know if it's your mother or your father, your grandfather, your stepfather doing it, you know, like your grandparents, like you know, these are the people that you're supposed to love and look up to.
So yeah, and that takes us back to these facilities. This idea that like the parent or guardian of a child should have absolute power over them. No, they shouldn't. Yeah, Like again, where do we draw that line is a question of society should have ask itself. But like you shouldn't trust parents to control children either, like to a degree of fatality, you know.
Yeah, I mean like a lot of times there might be like an aunt or and uncle who's nearby who's like, hey, you know, is stuff going on here? Okay, Like things like that. There's there's got to be some kind of checks and balances and do have that because we yeah.
It's it's it's hard, and so we just don't do it.
Ironically, we are not We talk about being very family oriented, but we're not really like we're family oriented in a in a one interpretation of family but not in a extended community, you know, extended family, extended you know respect. I don't know that's that's a whole other topics, but.
There's a lot to say about, like our attitudes towards I think a lot of this toxicity comes back to the Roman Empire, if I can go go back to Rome, because back back in the Roman Empire, there was this understanding that like, you were legally a child as long as your father was still alive, right, and he could he could kill you. They have parents had the specifically the pattern Familius had the technically the legal ability to
execute his children. And there I think there's a surprising number of people who think that that should more or less still be the law. Certainly, the way that a lot of parents treat their their gay and trans kids makes me think that like, oh, so that that idea is still kicking around in a lot of heads.
Huh yeah, or you need to take your child.
Yeah, you got to break your kid down, right. So we've just talked about what Steve's people did after he left the state of Utah, and I know that I sneakily said Steve was gone from the story now, But surprise, Mara, Steve has a post scrunt. He's got a third approach. Oh boy, he has like three more acts here. So for his own sake, Steve did not take the fact that he was no longer allowed to operate a wilderness
therapy camp in Utah lying down. He moved to Hawaii in nineteen ninety, where he started to run a child treatment facility without a license. Write up in the New York Times notes Thomas D. Ferrell, the deputy district attorney who sought the injunction to close the up, said he interviewed the children who were removed from the Malachai program, and every damn one of them, he said, told officials
that camp counselors physically abused them. So that's great. I'm sure that's the end of Steve's career, right, How many more times could the government get involved with you abusing children in your camps? And oh? A couple of years later, he got caught operating another facility, this time in the
US Virgin Islands, again without a license. He was shut down again, but several months later, two boys escaped from another facility he was running in Costa Rica and told parents that they had been imprisoned and physically abused.
In nineteen they start going to because like then you had these ones. Wasn't there like a school. It wasn't a wilderness program, but there was like a school I think in Guantanamo Bay or a No Tranquility Bay.
Oh no, no, no, Puerto Rico. Okay, he operates at nineteen ninety four, he operates a camp in Puerto Rico. And this camp gets busted because he's operating it under a fall name. This camp gets busted because local law enforcement finds, like a cop finds like a car parked kind of in the woods and finds five boys tied up with rope in the back of the car with nooses around their necks.
Jeezu go.
So the cops are like, what's what's going on here, kids? And the kids are like, well, we're in this wilderness camp and they're disciplining us. And the cops are like, this doesn't seem like something you should legally be allowed to do to children. We're taking you in And so they look into the matter and it turns out that counselors had gotten fed up with these boys and left them tied in the back of a car because they
didn't want to, like do a hike or something. Steve and his program were charged with child abuse yet again, but they bounced before being served. Frustrated by the fact that he kept getting caught, Steve was by this point using a fake name in order to operate his businesses. When he was asked about this by The New York Times, he told them that he had to use an alias now just to stay in business and feed my family.
That article goes on to tell the story of Christopher Humble, who was enrolled by his mother in an outdoor therapy program in Samoa. After finding an advertisement for something called the Pacific Coast Academy, his mother talked on the phone with their head marketer, Stephen Michaels, who was really Steve Cartisano. The man has caught an imagination, but he cannot fathom having a name that is it's Steve oh Man. That's
I don't know why, but that's quite funny. Yeah, Michaels, here's the New York Times again.
Turned his back on his Italian heritage.
Yeah he did. He did, really threw that away and threw away his Montana heritage too. Quote mister Michael she recalled told her that her son would receive proper care as well as stern discipline at the academy's camp on the South Pacific island of Samoa. Persuaded by his promises, Miss Humble enrolled her son, Christopher, in a one year
program for twenty thousand dollars. Christopher lasted six months. When he returned home in December nineteen ninety nine, Miss Humble said his weight had dropped to one hundred and eighteen pounds from one hundred and sixty five. He had scars from beatings, and he could barely walk or talk. So it always ends the same way. All of these camps worked the same way, which at this point the first one I might be like, well, maybe you were just
so negligent that you let this happen. We're now four camps send this is how you want them to operate, right, Like, that's clear to everyone, I think now. The Times notes in that article that over his twelve year career up to that point, Steve had been accused of fraud and abuse at every single camp he operated. His Samoan program lasted just three years before more than a dozen children
made reports of physical abuse. One teenager claimed to have been molested by multiple camp counselors, all of whom had been hired by Cartesano. When confronted about all of this by The Times, Steve defended himself by arguing that the children were all habitual liars whose parents just wanted refunds. He would argue that only twenty five of the twelve hundred children who'd attended his camps were even complaining, a
number that was blatantly untrue even at the time. When asked about the numerous allegations of abuse by his students, Steve told The Times, all of them are unfounded, all of them exaggerations. It never happened. These kids were no angels to begin with, and they would say anything to get sent home. So angels, Hey, are you going to say?
No angel?
Steve's shaking hands with every cop in the country, like.
It's it's the thing. I mean, the thing is like Also, I can only imagine how many of these children were sexually assaulted but were too terrified. Never said you can't say anything about it.
Yes, yep, yep. Yeah.
If you come home unable to speak, you know you're not going to be able to say this person did something to me.
It also like, it takes a lot of trust, as does anyone to talk about that. And if your parents have just paid for you to be abducted for a year, maybe you don't trust him anymore. Yeah, I wouldn't. Yeah, it might not be smart to trust them after that.
Well, these places also ruin families because of that too, because even parents who were taken in, who were you know, miss like, think about this, you know, they're going to be the subject of a lot of hate and resentment, understandably, understandably so for the rest of these kids' lives.
Don't send your kids to these programs parents, you know anyway. So now I will say this about Steve. He seems to have a he was a customer as well as a purveyor of these services, because he sent both of his kids, I think to these programs. He definitely sent his son David, who developed a drug problem, paid for him to be kidnapped and taken to a wilderness camp. Now I don't know much about David, but the documentary that came out recently, Steve's wife says that David is
in prison at the time the documentary was formed. So I'm going to guess not great. The tough love didn't work here. Steve Cardesano died of a heart attack in twenty nineteen. He left behind a massive industry largely formed in his image. As this paragraph from an article in Rolling Stone makes clear, his Wilderness Camp set the foundation for thousands of other programs. More than one hundred and twenty thousand children live in troubled teen facilities which include
wilderness programs. Training standards fluctuate drastically from organization to organization, and in two thousand and five, the US Government Accountability Office recorded more than fifteen hundred employees of involved in litigation for abuse in thirty three states, and from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty one, thirteen people were fired or resigned from youth treatment centers in Utah due to sexual behavior and sexual assault allegations, according to a twenty twenty
two investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune.
So, there was a TV show about wilderness Camp. I remember that in like the two thousands, called like you know, brat Camp or something like that, like camp. Yeah, it had it had a that was like like they had like a moment you know when doctor Phil is sending them away to everybody.
See if we can get some good TV out of this.
Yeah, and considering that they're you know, for it had been more than like it'd been ten or fifteen years and these children had been dying, It's it's like, that's the thing that just drives me up the walls that these places still existed, They still you know, there was no no oversight that these places were able to get even bigger.
Yeah, you know, in the.
Two thousands and and you know, in twenty tens, and now finally you know, are being shut down, but are probably going to spring up other places.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they'll have another renaissance at some point. At least sixteen children have died in these facilities since nineteen ninety. Thousands more suffered injury and trauma. As you noted, attempts to reform the industry or even develop a comprehensive
understanding of its harm have been uneven at best. I found an article by the BBC that summarizes the US Government Accountability Office report in two thousand and seven, which quote found it difficult to grasp the national picture due to irregular licensing rules at the state level and ambiguity surrounding the label's facilities used to describe themselves like boot
camps or therapeutic boarding schools. Still, the investigators found thousands of allegations of abuse and several deaths at programs like this around the United States and in US owned businesses. So yeah, basically, like we found huge numbers of allegations of physical sexual abuse, we found a number of deaths. But there's so little standardization and even what these places are called that it's impossible to get like the kind of data that you would want to have for programs
like this. I can't say there's no evidence they fucking work right. As a result of how like decentralized, all of this is about how difficult it is to kind of even find out what's going on. It's been left to the parents of dead kids and to adult survivors of these programs to try and force accountability. Cynthia Clark Harvey is one of the former Her daughter Ericad died of dehydration and heat stroke one day into a Nevada
program in two thousand and two. Cynthia had done her homework in trying to pick a place for her daughter, and by two thousand and two there were state licensing requirements so she thought, like, this place is licensed by the state, it's accredited, they have a good reputation. This should be safe and then quote. After weeks of deliberation and planning, they traveled to Nevada under the guise of
a family trip with her younger sister. When the deception was revealed, Erica became scared and angry and refused to get out of the car. After a turbulent hours long group therapy session with other families, she and the other children were taken away. This was the last time Cynthia and her husband ever saw their daughter alive. By the time they got back home to Arizona the following evening, there was already a message waiting on their answering phone
telling them to call. They were told Erika had an accident and staff were performing CPR. So Cynthia wound up testifying to Congress about what had happened to her daughter. And she's been joined in her advocacy by a number of celebrity survivors of these programs, most famous among them Paris Hilton, who has funded a significant amount of advocacy in documentary journalism to try to bring this industry to
an end. It's taken a long time, but the work of these survivors and parents is borne fruit, as this article in the Salt Lake Tribune makes clear. Legislators enacted more regulations in twenty twenty one in response to increased scrutiny in recent years of youth treatment programs amid allegations of mistreatment and abuse. The legislation placed limits on the use of restraints for all programs and addressed the use
of drugs and isolation rooms and residential centers. It also earmarked more money to hire more state regulators who now go into youth treatment programs more often, and it requires programs to report when a staff member used a physical restraint on a young person or puts them in seclusion.
Perhaps the greatest damage has been done to the reputation of the industry as a whole, and that may ultimately be the thing that's actually does more to kill it than any of these regulations, right, is the fact that at this point, the sheer weight and you know, celebrity has helped with this of attention on this has given it a black eye. In twenty twenty three, nearly half of Utah's wilderness camps shut down. The ones that remain
are hosting only a fraction of their full capacity. So as you've said, you know, we can be hopeful that this thing is dying out, but uh, you know, someone will come along with something else at some point.
I think that letting parents know, you know, and letting people know what these places really are and what they actually do, I do think is because obviously the you know, trying to get oversight through you know, any other means doesn't seem to be really working. And I think that really just sort of spreading the word is is probably the best that you know, they can do. Yeah, and you know, that helped shut down some of the some of the like some of the places like this that
were actually school schools. You know, if something has a bad enough reputation, sometimes that sort of you know, starves itt of oxygen and you know, yeah, and it's I don't know, I think that that's one of the one of the best things, one of the only things really that can happen. And yeah, you're right, probably something something else that's just as shitty might take its place. But yeah, hopefully hopefully these places will not be around much longer.
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's as good a note to end on as any Mara Wilson, Mara, your memoir Where Am I Now? Out in stores, available on the internet, being beamed into space to be listened to by our coming alien overlord so that they can understand human culture. Congratulations on that contract, by the way, that's a big one. Anything else you want to plug before we roll out?
Yeah, I've been writing articles for The Guardian about psychology and wellness, and I've been doing a lot of audiobook narration these days. I love doing it voiceover and audiobooks or narration are like my favorite thing. You can find a lot of those books on liber dot FM. And also I wrote another short memoir called Good Girls Don't, which is about being a pissed off people pleaser, and that is available on what was formerly known as scribbed and I believe is now called ever Rand.
So yeah, change scribed.
I think they did. Yeah, I think they did, And so yeah, check out check out Where Am I Now? And Good Girls Don't?
Excellent. Thank you so much, Mara. You've been wonderful, and you listeners have also been wonderful listening to this these horrible stories of terrible things. You know, go go hug a kitten or you know again. Drive to the corporate offices of.
No, Absolutely not.
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