9: Horrifying Tales from the Troubled Teen Industry
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Hi, everyone. I just wanted to add a little note at the beginning of this episode to let you know that this one is heavy. It's incredibly important, but it features stories of physical and sexual abuse done to minors at the hands of the troubled teen industry.

If you need to sit this one out, I totally understand. And I'll meet you at the next episode on March 2nd. Thanks. It's that feeling. When the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding. It's when your heart starts pounding.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of terrifying tales. I'm your host, Kaitlin Moore. On this podcast, we've covered everything from the paranormal to the supernatural and some true crime in between. But today, we're going to take a look at an ongoing real-life horror. It's happened in our backyards, to some of our schoolmates, and maybe even to some of you. Picture this.

It's 1997 and the world is asleep. Or at least, all of the residents in this gated community in Southampton, New York are. The street lights are on, the moon is high, the only sound is the purr of the neighborhood watch's car. A multi-million dollar Dutch colonial home sits at the end of a long road flanked by potato fields, and inside sleeps a teen girl. Her life is one of opulence.

But here, in this moment, she's just like any other girl, trying to get enough sleep to be able to function at school the next day. She's peaceful, but unaware her life is about to change forever.

She's woken by the sound of her bedroom door being kicked in. Two intruders enter and rip her from her bed. The sleep has barely worn off, but her adrenaline kicks into overdrive and she starts screaming, trying to get the attention of her parents. She's dragged from her bedroom down into the foyer where she sees her parents both standing there, watching. They don't look concerned at all.

You're maybe familiar with this story, but that girl was Paris Hilton. And she was about to be driven from her home in New York to a troubled teen wilderness program in Utah. And she was in a car accident.

The abuse she'd face at the hands of the troubled teen industry over the next year would haunt her for the rest of her life. Though Paris' story is tragic, it's not uncommon. And each year, thousands of kids are ripped from their beds in the middle of the night and shipped like parcels to troubled teen programs similar to Paris'. Today,

We're going to talk about some of those stories. The goal of today's episode is not to tell the entire history of the troubled teen industry, but instead to highlight some of the stories and let victims speak. I'll be adding some context throughout. Let's dig in. I found Zara on TikTok. She was posting videos nearly every day, trying to get word out about her devastating experience within the troubled teen industry.

Zara had just gotten home five months prior, and after going through an experience that typically shames survivors into silence, she was on a mission to get the word out and save some of the teens that she knew were still inside. Zara, like Paris, was taken from her bed in the middle of the night when she was just 14 years old.

and told she was going to a wilderness program in Utah. So when I got to my first program, it was a wilderness therapy program. And me going into it, I was thinking like wilderness camp. So I was thinking like, you know, like maybe like a log cabin, some canoeing. Like I still wasn't like happy about it, but I was not definitely not expecting what it was. Wilderness therapy programs are lauded as ways to heal teens without the distractions of the modern world.

With price tags as high as freshman year at a private university, you'd think they'd be equivalent to a really, really nice summer camp. When I look at the website for Zara's program, words like yoga, meditation, healing all stand out. And when Zara arrives, that's kind of her expectation. The first day I got there, I remember they had me change out of all my clothes. They had people strip search me.

So you're really not getting like any information at this point on like what is happening to you?

All the information I was given was really the information the transporters gave me. So wilderness camp, two weeks, and I'm going to Utah. And that was really it. The staff at the wilderness program explained some of the rules and stuff to me. I wasn't really given any information. And I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone.

So when they first bring you into the wilderness program, at least for the one I was in, they kept me on isolation, which is, I guess, what they do when they first bring a kid into the new group. They don't let you talk to anybody. You can't ask any questions. You're kept separate from the group. So, like, I could see the group of girls in front of me, and they were all talking and hanging out, but I couldn't talk to them. And that was, like, just, like, a rule, like,

Right off the bat was I got into the group, but I couldn't talk to anybody. And so that was really confusing for me being a kid, like seeing all these girls and also being confused about what just happened to me. You know, like I want to ask them, like, wait, did they, you know, did they take you too? Like, what are we doing here? But you can't do that. And I was like automatically threatened with consequences that they would extend my isolation, that they wouldn't let me into the group at all if I tried to talk to any of the girls.

Okay, so this program wasn't the canoeing, campfire singing experience that she was expecting, but it was just going to be two weeks, and then she would be back home in Florida. What Zara didn't know was that this was not going to be just two weeks. Zara was 14 when she was taken from her home,

But she wouldn't make it back to Florida until she was 18 years old, spending the next three and a half years being passed from program to program, unable to do anything because she was a minor.

She said that she started getting a sense that all was not what it seemed pretty soon after arriving in Utah. So when I first realized, like, that it wasn't going to be just two weeks was probably once I was able to get, like, allowed into the group and able to talk to the other girls because I think I said something about, like,

oh yeah, you know, at least it's only two weeks or something. And I remember someone being like, what? Like, it's not two weeks. And I was just super confused because I'm like, you know, what do you mean? Like they told me it was going to be two weeks. And they're like, most of the time people who are put in wilderness programs, like right in the beginning, normally are basically filed into a residential facility after that. Like a rare amount of kids get to go home.

And so I basically found that out from another girl telling me like, hey, you're not going home and it's definitely not going to be in two weeks. What was that like for you to hear that?

It was really hard because, like, being taken from your home and being placed in a whole new environment, especially as a kid in a whole different state with neither of your parents, none of your friends. Like, I didn't get to tell anyone I was leaving because I didn't know what was happening. So it just... I felt really alone, honestly, when I got there. Yeah. And even once I was able to get into the group and allowed off isolation, I still felt alone because...

And as if the looming realization that you're not going home anytime soon isn't bad enough, Zara described to me what the actual day-to-day was like within the program. Oh, wow.

Another really weird thing that happens, and I think it's just...

Their main goal, it felt like to me when I was in the program, was just to keep you as, like, isolated as possible and to just keep you from knowing anything that was going on. They wouldn't let you have any, they called it FI, which stands for future information. That's what the staff called it. And we weren't allowed to have any of that. So, like, they didn't tell us, like, hey, you're going to be hiking for this long today. Or, like, hey, this is where we're hiking to. Like, no.

we didn't know any of that I never knew what time the whole time I was out there it was that I was waking up I knew it was around the same time every day and I knew that we would like have lunch around the same time and have certain groups but I didn't know what the actual time was I slept outside I didn't go in inside one time um I was outside for four months straight definitely underfed um

not enough clean water. We weren't allowed to take showers, so I didn't have a real shower for my entire four months when I was in there.

Our showers basically consisted of us getting a bucket of water and a thing of soap and dumping it on ourselves to rinse ourselves off. Oh, my God. And even with that, like, you know, you're not given like a towel or anything to dry off with. So you use your dirty clothes to dry off and you're still outside. So you never really get clean. Yeah. And even then, those showers were like once every one to two weeks we would get one of those.

So when I finally left my wilderness program to go to my residential, like I was covered in dirt. Yeah. I used to call it perma-dirt because it was like permanently caked on. You can see in like pictures of me from my program, like my hands look brown and it's like, what is that? No, it's dirt. How much were you eating at the wilderness place? They gave us one cup of food.

So like, I don't know if you've heard of those small little metal cups. Yeah. Like camping cups, I guess. It was like that amount of food. And then we would fill up water bottles from like these blue jugs. But the catch with the water was that when we wanted fresh water, it would be like at our next hiking spot. So we'd have to hike miles and miles to get to it. And that was like part of the way they were able to get us to even hike. Because I know a lot of people would ask me like, well, why didn't you just not do it? And it's like,

well, if you want fresh water, wouldn't you? Yeah, yeah, of course. And one cup of food, what type of food was this? They gave us, so for breakfast, it would be like grains and oats or granola and oats. It was like a cup of that with powdered milk.

And then for lunch, so basically we got a bag of food. They would drop off once a week when the therapists would come out. They would bring fresh, like new food with them.

Yeah. Yeah.

Girls would have to steal food or take food from other girls just because they didn't have enough to eat. Yeah. And like even trying to like look in like a staff's backpack trying to find more food because you're hungry. You may be thinking, if conditions were so bad, why didn't she just tell her parents so they could come get her? Well, the program had a way to stop that from happening. You can't let your parents know or you can't talk to anybody in the outside world about

about what's happening because if you do have like mail privileges or phone call privileges, they're heavily monitored. When I used to get like letters and stuff, there would be parts blacked out. So whatever like the therapist or the staff didn't like, they would black it out. And same with outgoing mail. So if you're trying to tell your parents like, hey, this is happening, they can just black that out and then send it. They'd never even know.

Reading about wilderness programs online, you're bombarded with horrifying details similar to what Zahra experienced. But you'll also find plenty of stories where these inhumane conditions turn dire. Students with medical emergencies that are neglected, cases of dehydration, cases of abuse, and in some extreme cases, death. As was the case with the Catherine Freer Wilderness Program.

Erica Harvey was just a year older than Zara when her parents enrolled her in the Catherine Freer Wilderness Program in 2002. Erica thought she was going on a family vacation to Lake Tahoe when her parents dropped her off at the outdoor therapy program. Erica was using drugs, and the program promised Erica's family a chance for a new beginning for her. The first day she was there, they took the kids on a long hike. Reports say that Erica had refused most food and drink that day.

And around 6 p.m., she started speaking gibberish. Now, Erica was on antidepressants and antipsychotic medication, something that the staff did not have experience dealing with. At one point, Erica's eyes rolled back into her head and she fell backwards into a deep ravine. When someone finally went to go check on her, she had no pulse.

Erica's death certificate would read dehydration and heat stroke. But it wasn't until years later, after her family sued Catherine Freer, that they would learn the details of what really happened once Erica went down. Erica had been showing signs of overheating for hours, but staff told her she was being defiant and when she collapsed, it took an hour for them to do anything about it.

When they finally called for a medical helicopter, the staff was confused as to exactly where they were and gave the wrong directions and coordinates. It was about five hours before doctors were able to look at Erica. And by that time, she didn't have a fighting chance. So the Catherine Freer Wilderness Program probably closed after Erica's death, right? No.

In October of that year, just five months after Erica's death, another 17-year-old would die at Catherine Freer. The name and cause of death is unknown as this person was a minor. And then, another five months after that, Corey Baines would die at Catherine Freer after a tree fell on his tent and crushed him in his sleep.

He was just 16 years old. It would take another nine years for the Catherine Freer Wilderness Program to finally close its doors. And Zahra saw some of these horrors firsthand, almost having a medical emergency herself. There was one time that I can remember in my program where we had been hiking all day and it was snowing out and it was freezing cold and it had gotten to the point where like

girls were literally having to sit down because they couldn't hike anymore. And they told us, you know, like, we're not setting up shelter here. Like, you're just going to be sitting here and you're not going to get any water until we get to our site. And so we hiked, we finished the hike and got to where we needed to get to. And

Wow.

Wow.

Denying kids medical care because they may run away. Obviously, this doesn't sound like the therapeutic retreat her parents were promised, but now it sounds worse than prison.

Little did this program know that not here, not at the next program she was forced into, but the one after, Zara would do the thing they feared the most. She would run. Zara's escape after the break.

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No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. Let's fast forward just a little bit in Zara's story. So she was at her wilderness program for four months. Then she was sent to a residential program for a while and then another co-ed program afterwards.

Zara told me that her father did not want her to come home, despite her pleas, so she was passed around from place to place, unable to leave because she was still a minor. Two years into doing the troubled teen musical chairs, she was only 16 years old and had two more years until she could sign herself out, so she decided to take matters into her own hands.

Okay, yeah.

actually gotten up to what they called like a level five, which is where I had more privileges. And I had like gotten it approved to go off campus. They had actually let me get a job at like a place like on the same street.

It was at a Little Caesars. There was like a CVS next to like the Little Caesars or something and I would go take like cash back and I gave this guy in California who I found on Craigslist rent money. And as soon as I was like ready to go, I left. Like I just went, walked off campus like I would normally do and I just, I didn't come back. I took a Greyhound bus

Did they ever come for you? Like, did they ever find where you went?

Yeah, smart. Right. And if I had gone home, my dad would have sent me back to a program.

Right, yeah. Right. So you just stayed in California. Yeah.

In just like someone's guest bedroom? Me and the guy that I was with at the time slept on like this twin bed in his living room. I felt safer, I guess, coming home at 18 because I knew at that point, like now, like I'm a legal adult, like I'm not like a minor. I can't just be held in like this child prison with a bunch of other kids. And it's like, I'd have to actually do something wrong to get a consequence now. You know, it's not like how it is when you're under 18. Yeah.

Zara is one of the rare and extremely lucky ones who successfully ran away. Running away from these programs carries a lot of risks. Oftentimes, the staff are professionally trained in tracking down runaways, and if you try to run away while at a wilderness program, you're left to your own devices with nothing but miles of desert surrounding you.

Dawn Birnbaum was 17 years old when she ran away from Elan School in Maine. Elan School was considered one of the most controversial and devastating troubled teen schools until its closure in 2011. One of the tactics Elan School used was called the ring, where a student would be forced to stand in a boxing ring and fight other students one after another until they lost. So,

So understandably, Dawn ran away from this school in March of 1993. She made it to a truck stop in the area, but never made it home. Dawn's body was soon discovered in a snowbank off of Route 26. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. And eventually, a trucker named James Robert Cruz Jr. would be arrested for her murder. In December of last year,

USA Today ran an article showcasing the trauma done by the troubled teen industry, where Zara's program was called out by name. A young girl was sent there for help with an eating disorder, but the trauma she faced while in the program caused her disorder to relapse more intensely than before. She said her family had spent $20,000 on support that their daughter needed leaving the therapy program. How ironic is that?

Zara's program released a response in the form of a podcast hosted by the executive director of the program, in which he basically claims that troubled kids lie and the negative press is not to be believed. He claims that kids that have positive experiences move on to be happy, contributing members of society and don't feel the need to talk about their experiences. So all you'll ever hear about these programs are the kids that had negative experiences.

I wanted to know how a place like this could still exist when I couldn't find a single positive thing said ever by someone who actually attended the program. So I called them and I pretended to be a mother who was interested in sending her troubled 15-year-old daughter away. I told them my daughter had been acting out after a sexual assault that happened when she was 13 years old.

I knew a lot of these places are ill-equipped to handle something of such magnitude, so I wanted to see what they would say to me. The following is a reading of the transcript of the phone conversation I had with Zara's wilderness program.

So the first thing I asked was if there were resources to help my daughter with her specific trauma. Yeah, absolutely. What we're called is trauma-informed, right? And for our girls' groups specifically, and with some of the trauma that it sounds like your daughter's experienced, we're doing a lot of somatic work, meaning, you know, kind of helping our kiddos feel safe within their bodies, right?

When your bodies have been victimized like that, it feels really unsafe to be there. And a lot of it is what's removed. All of the distractions of the cell phone, of the peer group, of the, you know, whatever is to distract the self and help them be more present in where they are, which can be scary. And so as they remove all those distractions and they're moving in their body, they're, you know, eating better and hopefully feeling better. I could feel my jaw clench when she said eating better.

I wanted to know what a typical day would look like. The hundreds of online reviews from kids, as well as Zara's experience, shows that their days are full of starvation, hiking in extreme conditions, and not bathing.

But of course, they told me something entirely different. Yeah, every day is a little different. And at the same time, we still want to have structure because that's the reality for our students, right? The day usually goes morning group chores, day hike, lunch along the way, and then we're setting up camp. And then from there in the late afternoon, usually time set aside for therapeutic quiet times.

So that's for them to work on their assignments, it's for them to just take personal time, it's for them to be able to learn how to be with themselves in the quiet, and of course that's with support. And then there's also what we like to call mandatory fun times.

Sometimes that's in the morning, sometimes it's in the afternoon. We kind of just flow with what makes sense for the group and what that looks like is either we're doing yoga practice or we're doing mindfulness or we're allowing them to learn how to do deep breathing and meditation work.

And it's that, again, that's the somatic work that's built in. Okay, I could really see how a parent would think that this is maybe a good option for their child. She was saying exactly what vulnerable parents want to hear. My ears did perk up when we started talking about the transportation aspect of the program. You know, the part where they kidnap your child. So we have students who join us. Sometimes it looks like parents bringing them. Other times it looks like using professional transport services.

So when it comes to making the decision for your kiddo, I just usually encourage you to ask questions like, well, will they come willingly and will they be safe? And if they wouldn't be safe, then it's probably worth looking into hiring a transfer professional service.

Here, we're not going to skirt underneath that. We're going to have that discussion with your daughter. Okay, this was probably a traumatic experience for you coming in, right? What's interesting is in the long term, like we don't see it affecting treatment as far as if a student's brought by transport or not. It's interesting. It's hard to track that, but that's generally what we pick up in our research. Okay.

But another piece, too, is it does become, you know, not to glamorize it at all because it's not, it's hard, but it does become a connecting conversation, a conversation pretty early on for our new students. So, oh, how did you, you know...

Pretty bold of her to tell me that kidnapping children didn't affect their treatment. When in her documentary, Paris Hilton said that she still has nightmares of being ripped from her bed even at 40 years old.

And this woman was just brushing it off as if it were a talking point amongst new students. I did end up calling one of the transport services that she recommended, but at this point my patience was a little thin with these people. I did ask the transport company if there was anything that would prevent them from taking my daughter and putting her in a van as long as I consented to her being taken.

if there was anything she could say or do that would allow her to stay home. No, the only thing that would happen is if for some medical reason, you know, she had to be taken to a hospital. But just because she's putting up a fight and resisting, that's not enough for my team to say, you know, we can't transport her. So the only thing that would, you know, hold them up is if, you know, something that required medical attention.

And to be honest with you, the majority of the kids that we do this to walk out of the house willingly and go as planned. Fortunately, and because, you know, the children typically respond better to other types of authorities than their parents,

And, you know, the interventionists, their main goal is to get the child to walk out of the house willingly and go. And like I said, 99% of the time that happens. There are, you know, the very few and far between that really do struggle and put up a really good fight. So I don't want you to think that it's not something that couldn't possibly happen, but it's pretty rare.

The interventionists are very good at what they do and getting the children, like I said, to walk out of the house on their own. They'll work with them and get them to understand, you know, why they're going, where they're going, how they're going, all those things. I wanted to know if the people taking the children were licensed therapists.

Um, they all have different background histories, whether it's counseling, psychology, law enforcement. Some of them have even worked in these programs with the children, you know, that they attend. So it just depends. But you would be provided with like a picture and a bio. Cool. So I'd get a headshot and resume of the retired cop that was hired to kidnap my daughter.

I couldn't believe she was telling me most kids walk out of their homes willingly. Every story I had heard said otherwise, and I couldn't even imagine the fear I would personally feel in that situation.

But again, they were saying everything a vulnerable parent in this situation would want to hear. And then the programs that the kids are sent to censor communication so parents don't ever really know the reality. And in the meantime, the troubled teen industry is making hundreds of millions of dollars off this cycle every year. It's estimated that up to 200,000 teens are currently in over 5,000 operating troubled teen facilities.

But people like Zara and Paris are trying to bring awareness and put an end to it. I asked Zara what healing looks like for her moving forward. I guess for me, healing just looks like being more vocal about my experience. I think talking about it helps me process through it more.

I know I've definitely like gone back to like some of the journals and stuff that I kept when I was in my wilderness program and tried to like reread some stuff and just like get my mind in order. It's like such like a life altering event. And it basically just paused time for like two years. It's kind of hard to like jump back from. Yeah. But definitely just I guess for me healing, it's really just like still processing things.

Unfortunately, this story doesn't have that happy of an ending, aside from the fact that Zara got out alive.

Breaking Code Silence is working on putting an end to these places, and I'm linking in the episode notes a place to donate and read more about survivors' stories. I'm also going to link where you can find Zara on TikTok and hear more of her story. Her and I spoke a lot more than what's in this episode, so I'm also going to put that whole conversation with Zara up on my Patreon, which I just started. And any money I get from signups from this episode will go towards Breaking Code Silence and survivors. That will also be linked.

We're going to take a short break after this episode, but we'll be back on March 2nd. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Music by Artlist. You can follow the episode on Instagram at heartstartspounding. Have a heart-pounding story you'd like to share on the podcast? Email heartstartspounding at gmail.com. Okay, round two. Name something that's not boring. A laundry? Ooh, a book club. Computer solitaire. Huh? Huh?

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