I Left the Troubled Teen Industry 18 Years Ago Today
I’m Finally Talking About it Again
For nearly a decade I tried to tell people I was kidnapped. I tried to tell people my parents had it done. I tried to tell people what Spring Creek was really like. For the next decade I told almost no one. It felt like no one believed me.
18 years ago today — on my 18th birthday — I checked myself out. I woke up this morning with the knowledge that I walked out of Spring Creek precisely half my life ago.
People have taken to calling it the “Troubled Teen Industry” in recent years. Yes, it is that. People are now, and have long been, making good money tricking parents into thinking they are scaring their kids straight. But by 2006 things had gotten terribly out of hand, and the truth of it all has only recently been accepted by society at large.
I’m talking about it again. I hope this time I’ll be believed.
Two large figures entered my room in the middle of the night.
“We’re with Teen Help, you’re coming with us.”
I opened my eyes a slit. Groggy, but not hungover. Despite the water bottle of Old Thompson stuffed down next to my bed, I had actually spent the night trying to dig out my final exams. Even with all the whiskey, drugs, and skipping class, I could usually pass on the exam alone.
“Can I talk to my parents?”
“No, get dressed. Now.”
I had absolutely no way to know if these people were legitimate. Having no other meaningful option, though, I reached down and grabbed the patchwork pants on the floor next to my bed. I was already wearing a Linkin Park t-shirt. As they walked me to my bedroom door I stopped and nodded over at the pack of Camels on my nightstand. The larger figure stuffed them in my pocket. It would be my last pack as a minor.
They put me in the back of a rented and child-locked SUV. They drove me to the airport and met with airport security before they let me out. I was a flight risk. They escorted me to a plane that was apparently bound for Las Vegas. I sat quietly in the middle seat with a tight lump in my throat and fought back tears as the plane lifted off.
On the two hour layover in Vegas, the man who had stuffed the Camels in my pocket brought me into a smoking lounge. He tried to outsmoke me. To make me sick. I’ll be honest, I got a little sick, but I was in a chainsmoking mood.
“We’re taking you to Montana,” he said as he snuffed out another butt in the gravelly smoking lounge can.
“So what?” I shrugged. I could show no signs of weakness.
I was taken to Thompson Falls, Montana. To Spring Creek Lodge Academy. They forcibly shaved my shoulder-length hair. They held my friends — children — in isolation as punishment. They subjected me to conditions that a New York Times article referred to as “physically and psychologically brutal,” and added “the program and its staff have been accused of sexual abuse, physical violence, and psychological duress.”
That article was published in 2003, almost 3 years before I was taken.
Following the New York Times’ coverage of Spring Creek, U.S. Representative George Miller, who served in the House of Representatives from 1975 to 2015, and Representative John Conyers, Jr., serving from 1965 to 2017, wrote a letter to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. They asked the Department of Justice to investigate Spring Creek’s parent company, the Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP).
The Department of Justice declined.
2 years later, I was taken to Spring Creek. I might be a different person if the Department of Justice had taken on that investigation.
I finally feel comfortable talking about Spring Creek again thanks largely to a recent documentary, “The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping,” released on Netflix on March 5, 2024. “The Program” was directed and executive produced by WWASP survivor Katherine Kubler.
“The Program” shows, in a three episode arc, what I know to be true — that the Troubled Teen Industry has been psychologically and physically abusing children for decades. “The Program” follows a group of survivors from the Academy at Ivy Ridge in upstate New York as they explore the grounds of their now abandoned behavioral modification facility. Ivy Ridge, like Spring Creek, was run by WWASP.
The Ivy Ridge survivors in “The Program” spoke a language I knew. Categories of offenses in WWASP programs range from “Cat 1,” rolling your eyes or farting, to “Cat 4” note passing or possessing phone numbers, to the dreaded “Cat 5,” the most serious — and most ill-defined — offense.
Each offense takes points from your total score translating to more time in the program. This means staff can hang the threat of not seeing family or friends for months or years over children’s heads in order to control their every action. Speaking, moving, standing up, and sitting down without permission are all considered offenses. A Category 5 offense requires starting the entire program over, regardless of any prior progress made by the child. This can mean an additional 12 months or more in the program.
Take a minute with that rule sheet. It is psychologically horrific. See, e.g, Rule 211(a) or (g).
Kids were also sent to “worksheets” if they broke those rules. At Spring Creek that meant writing mindless (non-academic) handwritten essays for hours at a time in the dismal, tiny room shown in episode 3 of “The Program.”
Worse, you could get sent to “the Hobbit.” It was a small isolation hut with no temperature control and no one around. If any single staff member got mad at a child, they could haul them off to the Hobbit alone and with no accountability. Kids would come back from the Hobbit clearly psychologically altered.
I have long been opposed to the use of isolation as punishment inflicted on adults, including solitary confinement in jails and prisons. At Spring Creek and other WWASP programs, though, solitary confinement was used on children who never received even a modicum of due process, and had not been charged with any crime. Our parents had simply signed us away. These children were subjected to the demonstrably torturous and traumatic use of isolation as punishment at the whims of untrained staff with little to no oversight by anyone experienced in child psychology.
Spring Creek was ultimately shut down in 2009 after numerous lawsuits were filed against it for child abuse and even wrongful death.
On October 7, 2004, a year and a half before I was taken there, 16 year old Karlye Newman hanged herself in a bathroom stall at Spring Creek. Karlye’s family brought a lawsuit against multiple defendants, including National Contract Services, LLC, in the United States District Court in Missoula, Montana. According to the Complaint, “National was one company of a large web of interlocking companies run by a man named Robert Lichfield.” Newman v. United Fire & Cas. Co., 995 F. Supp. 2d 1125, 1127 (D. Mont. 2014).
Karlye’s family sued National on the theory that “many of the services National claimed to provide Spring Creek Lodge were inadequate and contributed to Karlye’s suffering and eventual death, including misleading marketing, wrongful admission to the program, poor educational services, and negligent training.” Id. at 1127–28. “The Program” documentary’s third episode does a fantastic job explaining the complexities of Robert Lichfield’s holdings, his founding of WWASP, and his direct connections to Spring Creek.
In a suit against Robert Lichfield directly, a court reviewed Spring Creek’s abject lack of experience with mental health issues.
The evidence established that no formal assessments were done when students entered the program to determine if the students were suicidal upon admission, nor was the Spring Creek staff provided with specific suicide assessment training. As a result, the Spring Creek staff was largely unaware of Karlye’s history of depression and suicidal behavior prior to her admission. One of the only alerts was a check mark for “Suicide Thoughts/Talk” placed on Teen Help’s Admission Criteria form.
Throughout her time at Spring Creek, Karlye struggled with learning. She was emotional, injured herself, made suicidal threats, was placed on “high risk” status, and was put in solitary confinement on multiple occasions. Spring Creek documented numerous instances where Karlye was depressed, suicidal, wanted a therapist, or attempted suicide. [Her mother] was never informed of these events, nor was she allowed to visit Karlye, and Karlye was not allowed to contact [her mother].
On October 7, 2004, Karlye was found unconscious with a sweatshirt tied around her neck, having hanged herself from a doorknob in the bathroom of the dormitory where she lived. She died after being airlifted to a hospital in Missoula. She was sixteen years old.
Newman v. Lichfield, 364 Mont. 243, 247–48 (2012).
Karlye’s family ultimately settled their lawsuit. While I am truly happy her family was awarded some compensation for their pain, and while I hope they actually got that money in the end, Robert Lichfield has largely emerged from his time orchestrating the Troubled Teen Industry unscathed.
In 2006, the Turley Law Firm filed a lawsuit against WWASP on behalf of 25 plaintiffs. Over the following years hundreds of survivors and parents joined the suit. By 2013, 357 survivors and their parents had joined the action against Robert Lichfield and WWASP in the United States District Court for the District of Utah.
Survivors alleged being held in isolation, unsanitary living conditions, denial of adequate food, denial of proper medical care, denial of even minimally sufficient education, being “[k]icked, beaten, thrown and slammed to the ground,” “[b]ound and tied by hands and/or feet,” “[c]hained and locked in dog cages,” “[f]orced to lie in, or wear, urine and feces as one method of punishment,” “[p]oked and prodded with various objects while being strip searched,” “[f]orced to eat their own vomit,” “[s]exual abuse, which included forced sexual relations and acts of fondling and masturbation performed on them,” and “[e]motional abuse by subjecting student Plaintiffs to near-total parental and societal isolation. Personal visits, correspondence, and telephone calls were either forbidden or discouraged.” Complaint at pp. 39–40 of 228.
That Complaint was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.
By dismissing this case, the court does not mean to minimize the seriousness of the allegations made in the Sixth Amended Complaint. If those allegations are true, the Plaintiffs here were subjected to treatment that nobody deserves to suffer. But based on the allegations of the Sixth Amended Complaint, this court simply does not have the jurisdiction to hear this case.
Wood v. World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, Case No. 2:06-CV-708 CW, 13 (D. Utah Aug. 2, 2011).
All attempts to amend the Complaint proved futile and the matter was ultimately dismissed once and for all. I reached out to the Turley Law Firm in 2022 to inquire whether any action was successful. A Legal Assistant who worked on the case, and who is still at the firm, informed me that a subsequent state court action was also dismissed. Robert Lichfield was able to escape accountability.
We did file a case in Utah state court which was also later dismissed. The petition we filed in state court was approximately 1,300 pages after we added confidential Plaintiff information. This was not a class action. A copy of the petition is on our website should you need additional information. Thank you. With kind regards.
I thanked her for her work on the case. It does seem they tried to get justice for those kids and their parents. The dismissal of those Complaints must have been a harsh blow to all involved.
That is what makes the hubris of those who ran WWASP all the worse. Following the release of “The Program,” Robert Lichfield wrote a letter to the editor on March 26, 2024. The first sentence alone was deeply insulting to those he has caused immense trauma over the years.
I usually don’t respond to former students’ comments as these students usually suffer from a history of severe problems and often mental illness.
He’s talking about me. He is telling me that I have a history of severe problems and probably mental illness. How did a man so callous come to be in charge of the lives of so many children?
Survivors of his programs responded, penning a series of letters to the editor of their own.
I was stripped from my right as an American citizen to have proper food, clothing and shelter as a minor. I was forced to clean other women’s menstrual blood off underwear without gloves. I was forced to eat food that my body could not properly digest due to my Crohn’s disease. The staff that were employed at these places were not licensed. Many documents prove this on unsilenced.org.
— Amber Halsey
Children had zero access to abuse reporting. In two years, I had one 15-minute phone call home — monitored. Copies of letters saved by my family are more heavily redacted than the Warren report.
I personally was beaten, starved, covered in scabies, ringworm and boils, tortured daily physically and psychologically, made to sit in stress positions on sand-covered concrete, and at times hog-tied, locked in a small box in the sun, left there for days at a time.
— JC Sevcik
I was a student at Spring Creek Lodge at 15 years old between 1997–1998. My younger brother (13) was also a student in Paradise Cove, Samoa between 1995–1998. We both graduated the WWASP program and attended all seminars. My brother is now dead by his own hand and my mother has not spoken to me in 14 years. My family is irrevocably broken.
— Hilary Martin
18 years ago today I checked myself out of Spring Creek. All I got was a ride to Missoula, Montana and a $25 gift card to Albertson’s if I did. I left anyway. Maybe now you can understand why.
Sitting on the concrete next to a payphone in a place I had never heard of in my patchwork pants and Linkin Park t-shirt, chainsmoking my first Camels in months, with a grocery bag full of Top Ramen I didn’t know how I would cook — and no home — I was more scared than I had ever been. Probably more scared than I have been since. Yet, it was somehow the far safer option. The other option was staying at Spring Creek and being subjected to more abuse.
I still have a hard time with the years people didn’t seem to believe me. The years when people didn’t want to understand that these programs exist or how bad they really are. But I am not mad. Not anymore. On the contrary, I am glad simply to feel seen after all these years. To be believed. About something I left behind half my life ago today.
I also recognize that I did not have it nearly the hardest. Many kids spent far longer in Spring Creek and in these programs. A friend of mine spent more than two years in Cross Creek, an arguably harsher WWASP facility in Utah. I know the abandonment of it all had a significant impact on him. I have also recently been exchanging letters with a man who was sent to Spring Creek when he was younger, and who has long since been incarcerated. In comparison to the dehumanization of our larger criminal justice system, his time at Spring Creek must seem like a small cog in a much more unrelenting machine. We all live with it differently, but we must live with it nonetheless.
While Spring Creek was ultimately shut down, these programs still exist. Despite a 2008 Government Accountability Office report detailing widespread mismanagement, abuse, deceptive marketing, and death connected to these behavioral modification facilities, almost nothing has been done.
In April of 2023, United States Representative Ro Khanna introduced the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act (H.R. 2955). This bill would develop an interagency work group to set out best practices regarding the health and safety of children in residential programs, including the use of isolation and restraint, care, treatment, and appropriate placement. Even Rep. Khanna admits it does not go far enough.
“This bill is a first step. Obviously, we have to go further,” said Mr. Khanna, adding that he wanted to create legislation that could actually pass in a divided Congress.
— Oct. 19, 2023 New York Times Opinion — Maia Szalavitz
States have had similar difficulty in passing meaningful legislation to regulate these programs.
Paris Hilton, who was held at the Provo Canyon “School” in Utah as a teen, has testified in support of many of these legislative initiatives, and has been an outspoken advocate in bringing awareness to the Troubled Teen Industry.
It’s heartbreaking to my family because they had no idea. They thought they were sending me to a normal boarding school because these places have such deceptive marketing. [They] have these brochures and websites with stock photos of children smiling and rainbows and riding horses. It’s the complete opposite once you’re in there.
It’s just been extremely painful to talk about, but it’s so important because I know that there are children who are locked up in these places right now and they have no voice. That’s why I’m out here advocating for them and for their rights.
This has been happening since the 1960s, and I believe they’ve gotten away with it for so long because the children haven’t been believed. The things that happen in these places are like something out of a horror film. It just breaks my heart that it’s still happening today. Children have died in the name of treatment.
At this very moment there are estimated to be well over 100,000 kids being actively subjected to the abuse and lifelong trauma of the Troubled Teen Industry in the United States alone, and no one — except a few tireless advocates — seems to be doing anything about it.
This vicious cycle repeats for precisely the same reason I stopped talking about Spring Creek for a decade. Adults don’t believe what their children are telling them.
In testimony on Capitol Hill before the House Ways and Means Committee on June 26, 2024, Hilton added:
These programs promised growth, healing and support but instead did not allow me to speak, move freely or look out a window for two years. I was force-fed medications and sexually abused by the staff. I was violently restrained and dragged down hallways, stripped naked and thrown into solitary confinement.
My parents were completely deceived — lied to and manipulated by this for-profit industry. So can you only imagine the experience for youth who don’t have anyone checking in on them?
If you are a child in the system, hear my words: I see you. I believe you. I know what you’re going through and I won’t give up on you. You are important. Your future is important. And you deserve every opportunity to be safe and supported.
When looking at one of those deceptive brochures and being assured by staff that everything is going according to plan, it is easy to see how a parent could be lulled into inaction. Letters sent home — when they are allowed — are heavily monitored, censored, and edited by Troubled Teen Industry staff. At Spring Creek and other WWASP programs writing anything negative about the program itself was a punishable offense known as “manipulation.” By carefully monitoring all contact between children and parents, and largely preventing it altogether, these programs create the perfect environment for abuse without interference.
This problem is compounded by the fact that children sent to these programs sometimes have pre-existing substance use issues or previous interactions with the criminal justice system. As a result, any attempt to explain to a parent what the program is really like once the child leaves is often brushed off as a symptom of some greater sickness or a lie.
We have been telling the truth the entire time.
Documentaries like “The Program” and testimony from high profile celebrities like Hilton help us to convey this truth. But for anything to actually get done about this widespread abuse, survivors have to be believed and heard. Please, for the sake of children still in these programs, listen. The cost to these children, their families, and their futures as a result of inaction on this issue is immense.
Future generations will look back on many of the tactics used in the troubled teen industry in the same way we look back on forced lobotomies and ask: How did we allow these practices to pass off as mental health treatment for so long?
— October 11, 2023 New York Times Opinion — Alexander Stockton
I have had successes in my life and I have a good relationship with my parents very much in spite of being taken to Spring Creek. It was a psychological setback that my family and I continue to deal with in our own ways. It is something that has shaped my personality to an extent. I do not suffer bullies. I do not suffer those who hurt children.
I passed the bar exam and swore an oath to uphold the Constitution as an attorney in 2018. By then all statutes of limitations for any of my causes of action against Spring Creek, against Robert Lichfield, or against any of my captors had long run. I have come to terms with the fact that I may never get justice personally. However, those who still run these programs, those who put children in isolation, those who deceptively market these programs, and those who abuse kids for profit, should be very afraid. We are coming for you. I am coming for you.
A line in the song “Little People” from Les Misérables has become a refrain of solidarity among survivors of the Troubled Teen Industry. It is a rallying cry for the hope — the promise — that we will get justice.
Never kick a dog because he’s just a pup,
You better run for cover when the pup grows up.
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, help is available 24/7.
Please note that the views expressed in this article are made in my personal capacity and not as an attorney or on behalf of any entity.
