Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Inventor of Those 'Troubled Teen' Wilderness Camps Where They Kill Kids

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Robert and Mara conclude the story of Steve Cartisano with a truly shocking number of illegal open air child torture camps.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the homestretch, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out, like Ezra Klein, Jen Psaki, Astead Herndon, Karl Rove, and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun,

thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee and Charlemagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a Mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your entry into a Mafia state. available exclusively on Apple podcasts. of the shoplifting queen herself. I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls,

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that will be allowed once our punta takes over. We are 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 wanna get more people listening to podcasts. So, you know, a 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 podcasts we're talking about. I mean, this one, not one of those other podcasts. Yeah, I mean, this one, you know, I mean, for funsies, you know, destroying democracy for funsies.

A little bit, a little destroyed democracy. A little bit, you know, we can, for Anderson, who's been very cute. For Anderson. Yes. Think of the dog food Anderson will be able to afford once we purge all of the opponents of our new regime. If there was a dog food that 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 of quality dog food Not really speaking of that at all. That has nothing to do with our guest today Mara Wilson Mara How are you doing, how are you feeling as we come into 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- I'm thrilled. Yes, that I can write against it on record. Not about that you hated this, but you've been a great guest. I am also 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 out a little bit, why not? Mara, as a side note,

you were 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 repurposing some of the old art for that into World War II era,

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, he's very cool. He's very cool. Like, yeah, I, I, uh, he's very cool. And, uh, he's, um, he's also, also, uh,

also not a bad guy to talk politics with in my opinion, but he and I, I think have similar beliefs. So yeah, that's 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 Sinanon. Which was really meaningful because while I think that there's maybe aspects of like the way in which they would kind of like basically kidnap addicts that were probably inspirations to Steve Cardasano 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, I mean, 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 gonna stay with you. You're gonna think, you know, for the time, oh, this is what they really think of me. Are they, you know, and that does, that affects your relationships and that affects your self perception.

So when we talk about troubled teen 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 1950s 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? Like, 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, you start 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 apolitical, she's a Filipino Catholic. So she was religious, but basically like they thought that private schools were inherently better than public schools. Which meant that I spent most of my time at public school

cause 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 and it was like a very specific religious sect that none of us belonged to and so she got kind of brought into That they believe in God. There's no way they'll abuse kids like the Catholic Church Yeah, I mean it wasn't like actively abusive to her, but it was weird. It just sucked as a 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 his wife kicked him out, but he was like in good standing in the church. So he lived in the gym. So they just put him up in the gym. 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 gonna 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. No, that's the thing. Because the Jesuit boys always had weed and acid

and like cocaine and stuff. Yeah. And they're all on drugs and like serious drugs too. Like nobody could afford cocaine at my public school, but they could at my private school. No, no, no, only rich kids can be, and they cut it with baby powder to sell to the poor. 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 at all. Robert. Only, Sophie, it's a 501C3. 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 or is he still? No, I think he's gotta still be alive. Is he one of those, one of those like, yeah, Kissing Earth types? 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 Leona North dies. Yeah. Yeah. So, we were talking about 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 70s over what might euphemistically be called a question of school choice, right?

They're angry at integration of Bob Jones University, right? There's going to be black people at our private school. 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 their parents dislike. This is low key one of the most dangerous things in this country right now. The parents' rights movement is pure evil. I was going to say, yeah, this sounds familiar. Yes.

In an explainer for the AP News, Brooke Schultz writes, quote, in 1972, 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 live separately and self-sufficiently, said Joshua Weishert, a lawyer and professor at West Virginia University. In lawsuits stretching back to the 1920s, 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. One of the things that has resulted from this is you've had states like Utah establish what are very permissive parental rights regimes. As I noted last episode, 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. 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 again is bad. It's, I mean, that is a Christian thing and a 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 it, you know, it's God, then there's the father, then there's the mother, then there's 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 either necessarily. No, historically that has not turned out well. Doesn't end well. But also the 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 the best you can do is kind of a sliding scale and try to make sure that there are human rights protections that make it impossible to force certain things on kids ever, no matter what.

It's not an easy problem. If you talk to anybody who's ever worked with CPS, they'll, you can just see 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. It's 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 can do whatever, or even have somebody else beat your kids and it's not that big of a deal. And I think 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 Cartesano puts it, right? Exactly. Where you can pay to have your kids abducted and starved in the desert. And what's justifying all of these extreme interventions, 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 eighties, 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 there should be a degree of awareness in society about this. No, no, no, this is going to ruin entire generations and anything we do is justified in stopping this scourge. Steve Cardisano rides that wave. I know that people who claim to have been hippies back in the day, like that is...

Yeah. You motherfuckers smoked pot once. Well, that's the thing. Yeah. It's a much smaller percentage than we think. It's a much smaller percentage than we think, but it happened to enough people and enough people knew people who smoked weed and dropped acid to know that these people did not end up, you know, murdering people and, you know, and, 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, but you got a lot more wiggle room with drinking than you do with fucking horse. it's a lot, the line, you got a lot more wiggle room with drinking than 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 intravenous 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, crack, you're right. Crack is also a massive part of this. And has a very racialized component. Yeah, yeah.

So 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 coke is probably, anyway, whatever. We don't need to get too much into it. But yeah, so 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 kid, 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 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 80 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? 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 63-day course, just like Challenger,

and the business plan is the same. This time Gail's going to run it and she's going to hire some fucking drifters and give them a bunch of troubled kids and leave them in the desert for two months, right? And I wanna quote again from John Krakauer writing for Outside Magazine. Five students were enrolled in the inaugural Summit Quest course,

which cost $13,000 for 63 days. Palmer sent the group to the Arid Shivitz 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 15-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 counselors' field reports, gathered by state and federal investigators, the lead counselor had been ordered to ignore such talk as manipulative behavior. You have been sloughing 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, right? Well, that's like the, yeah, they, all of these things, they always say children are incredibly manipulative, teenagers are incredibly manipulative.

And like some are, but teenagers don't, manipulation usually requires some kind of foresight. It's also like- And teenagers aren't known for that. It's like when people say babies are manipulative, right? Because a baby will like modulate how it cries or whatnot in order to get certain kinds of attention. Because they're trying to fucking survive. You say babies are manipulative, right? Because a baby will like modulate how it 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 needs. Like the teenager who is dehydrated and needs medical attention. So when you like, like I got heat exhaustion last year on my birthday, cause I'm a late July baby, and I was stupid and decided to have a party outside. And 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 gonna help. Yeah, 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 vomiting up water, that's- That's a horrible sign. Get to medical care. And the thing is, there are probably people who are like,

oh yeah, this would be good for me. Like, I mean, I remember reading about like, Outward 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 sexual assault. If she thought, I think I might benefit from this, it probably is something that might've 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's the thing, a lot of these advertise themselves as therapeutic. Yeah, exactly.

And 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'd 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 15-year-old Michelle. God, 15. Yeah, 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 Doesn't make any sense because don't they examine them to make sure

that they're not like- Don't they check? Yeah, they check. How did she get drugs? 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 a drug overdose. There were no drugs in her system. She died due to dehydration. Given Palmer's... This becomes a big media story, right? Michelle is 15. Her parents are very vocal.

This actually, number one, it destroys Palmer's program. But 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 Cardasano 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 at 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 23rd, 1990, Kristen Chase enrolled at Challenger. And in this sentence, the word enrolled means that she was taken in the dead of night by Challenger employees and driven from Florida to Southern Utah. Kristen had been taken in the dead of night by challenger employees and driven from Florida to southern Utah. Kristen 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 Kristen had been forced into the program. Right? Ronald is 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, Kristin grows up at like, has lived her whole life at sea level, and these are like 7,000 feet or more elevation mountains they're hiking in.

So you're supposed to- Oh, that will fuck you up. That'll fuck you up hard if you don't acclimate. Again, if you understand anything about the medicine behind this, there are ways to responsibly acclimatize people to that environment. No, that's, cause yeah,

when I went to my hippie boarding school, we were on a hill, that was I think about 6,000, we were up in the mountains and yeah, I was always a little fucked up the first day back from vacation and a little fucked up coming back down to sea level with my parents in 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. You need to not be starved 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 to Challenger by her mother indicated that christin suffered from bouts of coughing up blood stomach pain urinary burning and frequency difficulty running menstrual 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 and 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 63, 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 forced her to do a 6,000 foot elevation hike the day that she arrives. Again, they deprive her of food. Next from a writeup in Deseret.com, quote, despite being upset, frightened and ill, Kristen was forced to participate in four to five mile hikes each day in temperatures exceeding 95 degrees. She was not given a proper physical exam or any conditioning activities prior to the hikes.

The day before she died, Kristen 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, Kristin'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 like, well, this kid's goal is not to die here. I wonder if we're handling health and safety properly. Yeah, it's bleak, there's some implications there. Yeah, it's just incredibly bleak. Like this, I mean, this poor girl is like murdered by negligence. Well, the thing is, oh, sorry, is it 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 messes with my head is that I knew people who went to these places more than 10 years later. Yeah, still the same. Still the same. Yeah. Yep. Speaking of which our ads the same as they ever were. Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted. But turns out the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast,

Next Question, starting October 3rd. This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki, Astead Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee, Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne the God.

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was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel de Lilla. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. Tephany exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your

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podcasts. Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon-wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez-Rejon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. Season two. season two. Are we recording?

Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba, and the Pinyo Colada from Puerto Rico. So all of these things these we thank Latin culture.

There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the 9th century B.C. B.C.? I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. Okay, so on June 27th, 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 Care Flight, but there's a company that you

could 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. Oh, for fuck's sake. 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

Lamborghinis 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 reach, and again, by the time it reaches Kristen, she is very much dead.

You know, like she was already not, like the odds were already kind of rough for her by the fact that she was not breathing 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 Cartesano 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 Deseret news. She hadn't yet begun the 63 day expedition as 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, Cardisano said on the Jane Wallace Show on the Lifetime TV channel. Her death, though heart-rending, has not caused him to reevaluate his program. We've had too much success, Cartezano said, pointing out that over 750 youths have completed the program." Now, there's a lot that's bad about that.

For one thing, they had absolutely started the 63-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 a reporter, "'What we did for our daughter was the best thing 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 Iraq, it's Iraq war syndrome, right? Like it's this, it should have worked. Like, fuck you people.

Yeah, it's really, I mean, what makes, what I wonder is how, like, how did 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 to get them to talk about their... There's definitely incentives.

And, yeah. 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? Especially- There was a different Netflix documentary, I forget the name of it, but one of the things they talked about was 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 the thing that happened.

And you also, you have within these programs, you've got a bunch of kids, there are 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, Steve, we'll have him in 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 yeah, 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 again. Of course. Yeah. It's shit 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 Bin Laden. And it's like, well, when you do shit like that, yeah, people are gonna think vaccines are 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 wanna 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 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.

Cardasano 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. There's like a weirdly shitty judge due to a series of... At one point in the court, the first time 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 Cardisano is eventually acquitted. But his company winds up more than a million dollars in debt, and he has to file for Chapter 11. Several more lawsuits follow from other children after this, all of which are settled out of court by the end of 1993. Cardisano is banned from ever running a similar program in the state of Utah again. So that's good. Steve Cartesano, he's out of the picture.

He's surely not going to come back later in this story running a series of wilderness survival camps. Let's talk about what happens in Utah after this point, because the fact that Utah has gone after Cartesano 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 Olson, 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 poorly 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, our man Horsehair, had testified against Steve in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Can you believe Horsehair rolled on Steve? Horsehair, you fucked over Steve Montana. How could you?

You fucked over Steve Montana, how could you? So, Horsair 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 1992, they launch a company, North Star Expeditions. That's a nice name, makes it sound very adventurous. It sounds like a cruise that like grandma goes on.

Yeah, it does sound like a cruise. Given that the company was owned and operated by men trained by Steve Cartesano, who had played a direct role in the death of Kristen Chase, you probably won't be surprised to hear that they almost immediately got another child killed. In early March 1994, about a year after they start doing this, Aaron Bacon enrolled in North Star's, again, 63-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 kid, the local news reports that came out after this, all just 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 likelier. 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, you 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. Yeah, you have these like 13 year olds who will, like in LA who will tag like MS-13 on something. Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, yeah, you guys, you're not. I don't quite know if this counts. MS-13, MS-13 tagging that on a locker, yeah. Yeah, that's a big part of their operation. Oh yeah. That's like, if you wanna move some serious crystal, you gotta have lockers at their operation. Oh yeah. If you wanna move some serious crystal, you gotta have lockers at every state. Oh yeah.

So, his parents get convinced that he is in a downward spiral that's going to lead with him, 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 Northstar. Students at Northstar learned that mother nature

does not make exceptions, explained the outfits brochure. They learned responsibility, self-discipline, motivation. Tuition was $13,900 for a 63-day course, plus another 775 to have Erin forcibly escorted to Escalante, something Northstar strongly recommended. Bob's architecture firm, that's his dad, once prosperous, had lately been teetering on the brink of insolvency, and the Bakens no longer had that kind of cash.

But, says Sally, his mom, after talking to several parents whose kids had been helped by the program, we were given a lot of hope that Northstar was going to build Aaron's self-esteem. I knew it would be rigorous, but I pictured him out there with God in nature, hiking all day, discussing his issues with therapists around the campfire 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 Northstar, 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 sign that your kid's not gonna get good therapy at the wilderness camp. That's teaching him that psychiatrists are liars. You've gotta trust only horsehair 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 Northstar was that their son was very thin and they worried that he wouldn't be provided enough food. Our old pal Horsehair assured them he would never let a student lose weight during 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, malingering, pretending to be sick, and doing so badly at the program that they might have no choice but to have him repeat it. The other kids, the counselor said, were 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. Northstar 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 to laugh. 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 30th, 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 leaked through his small intestine and caused a massive, fatal infection. Northstar insisted they had done nothing wrong. Erin 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 sores 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 Christ. Yeah. Ma'am. This seems like a good time to go to ads. Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted. But turns out the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd.

This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki, Estet Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee, Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well.

I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Power to the podcast for the people. So whether you're obsessed with the news or just trying to figure out what's going on, this season of Next Question is for you. Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel de Lilla. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one woman WikiLeaks. Tephany exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad free, When most people think of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, they think of Richard Jewell, a security guard who was first painted as a hero by the media, but later became a suspect

in the FBI's investigation. But in the summer of 1996, it was Eric Rudolph, a terrorist and dedicated soldier in the FBI's investigation. But in the summer of 1996, it was Eric Rudolph, a terrorist and dedicated soldier in the white supremacist Christian Identity Movement, who executed the bombing and escaped into the night. And that's all most people know about him. What most people don't know about him is that before withdrawing from civilization, he also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub. What even fewer people know about him is that he eluded the authorities for five years in the mountains of North Carolina until his eventual capture in 2003. And what I didn't know about him was how our two lives were connected.

From iHeart and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Cole Acasio, and this is Flashpoint. All eight episodes are available to binge now. Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join Tinderfoot Plus for an ad-free binge experience. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that.

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Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez-Rejon. Our podcast Hungry for History is back. Season two. Season two. Are we recording? Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? Hungry for History is back. Season two. Season two.

Are we recording? Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? Okay. And this season, we're taking in a bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Saying that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba,

and the Piñuco Lada from Puerto Rico. So, all of these, we things. We thank Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the 9th century BC. BC? I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the MyCultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 just kind of, it's just part of it. Oh, it's a nightmare. That kid was in hell the last days of his life. Exactly. Yeah. You're, and yeah, they do make it seem like these kids are all manipulative

You know, but again his crime was he smoked weed right 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 the you're part of the reason why so I don't really feel all that I think like there's gotta 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 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 are so dire. Obviously, tough love is the only thing that works, right? Like all of these things together, you're doing most of the ad work for these companies. All they need to do is come in and say, we'll give your kid this kind of like, you would imagine hiking through the desert, sharing wisdom with your probably, we'll kind of insinuate Native American counselors. They'll learn all sorts of ancient wisdom, right?

That's literally how the ad campaigns work for this. A lot of the money is in, we know these different native techniques for providing therapy too, right? There's all sorts of bullshit stacked on. 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. Self-defense. 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 of a god, you know, and the only thing you know, and so and 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 thing that I could think of and I was praying to God to let me go through this, and let me get through this alive. Yeah, because you need to, especially as a child, your degree of context, your understanding of 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 like that's just what's going to get you through it. Exactly. That's what, that's what's going to get them through, you know? And, and I

mean, you're probably also like you couldn't, you can hallucinate really easily after, after the desert. So probably that, that also has something to do with it too. Yes. Starvation and heat exhaustion can make you see something. It will fuck you up. It will fuck you up. That's why we're offering 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 of Facebook, but it's got mushrooms on the side of the bottle. So that's got to be good enough for you, you know? Something will happen. Come hallucinate 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 of 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 traces back to Steve Cartesano. Remember trained all of these people

and running these other facilities. 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 facades. "'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 starts 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. Even the kids I know who didn't necessarily suffer physical effects from it, although I mean, they all did because they all were lack of food and lack of sleep and exposure to the elements, but they were all humiliated. They were made to eat dirt. People were forced

to be nude or like pee in front of each other like wet 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. 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 Olson is running, which are very much imperfect. But don't do this to kids. The deaths there are, I think, generally due to irresponsibility.

But they're not torturing kids the same way. One of the things that the Anasazi camp that he runs afterwards will do is that you get 2000 calories a day. Now, they do have this weird rule where if you eat your food early, you have to catch animals and forage and whatnot to fill up the gap. But none of their kids ever starved to death. So I guess they probably did it right. I think the key thing is that aspects of that were like, well, you have to manage the amount

of food that you have. Like you're on a hike for a while. This is 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... As long as there's a certain degree of medical training present, not necessarily a bad experience. It could be useful to learn things about managing calories when you're out in the wild.

That's not what's going on in these places. After Chase's death in 1990, 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 1995, responsibility for enforcing these regulations fell to a

lone civil servant, Ken Stettler, who was supposed to monitor more than 100 youth treatment companies statewide. In practice, it was impossible for him to write hurt on so many programs, and North Star was among those that escaped close scrutiny. Stettler, a devoted Mormon, knew Jagger and Henry well, and says that he trusted them as fellow saints implicitly. After Bacon's death, Stettler'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 1994. So again, the guy, 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 be a bad person. Right, Mormons would never do this, yeah. Yeah, that's just like, it's such a strange, it's such a strange idea to me, like that, well, yeah, of course. Of course they 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, like 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 would ever abuse a kid, right? That's how kids keep getting abused. Like everyone has different groups. 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 sociology 101, you know? Everybody's always like, this is, it's social ties are the most important thing. And it's why people will, some people will be like, I can't believe this famous person is standing

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, cause it's not, but it explains.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is specifically why you don't leave it up to random people. Yeah. That'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 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. I mean, and yeah, we talk about like, um, cases of like film sets and stuff like that, especially back in the day that were 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'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, 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 wanna 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, and yeah, you do, you need the outside, the outside eye, the outside perspective.

You need the checks 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. You know? Like you just can't, you just never, you shouldn't leave it up to people whose expertise is not sniffing out child abuse

to try and figure out if that's happening, you know? We keep learning this, 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 at also at nearly every school. Let's talk about 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 streak talking. But I think that it's, you know, any kind of institution. I obviously agree with you 100%. I feel the same way when people obsess, not that it's not like the Epstein was not worth like, certainly at one point when his crimes were 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 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 horrible things. It's like, no, these are like poor adults abusing poor children. And 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 in Hollywood, it's, they have complete control over your dreams and your future. That says something. In a church, they have complete, in any kind of religious institution, over your soul, those are very big things. And if it's your mother, your father, your grandfather, your stepfather doing it, like your grandparents,

like 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. Like again, where do we draw that line? Is it question a society should have? Ask itself, but like you shouldn't trust parents

to control children either, in like to a degree of totality, you know? Yeah, I mean, like a lot of times there might be like an aunt or an uncle who's nearby, who's like, hey, you know, is stuff going on here okay? Like things like that, there's gotta be some kind of checks and balances and we don't have that because we, yeah.

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 one interpretation of family, but not in a extended community, extended family, extended respect. I don't know.

That's a whole other topic, but anyway. There's a lot to say about like our attitudes toward, I think a lot of this toxicity comes back to the Roman Empire. If I can go back to Rome. comes back to the Roman Empire, if I can go back to Rome. Because 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 kill you. They have, parents had the ability, specifically the paterfamilias had the technically, the legal ability to execute his children. And 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 gay and trans kids makes me think that like, oh, so that idea is still kicking around in a lot of heads, huh? Yeah. Or you need to break your child. Yeah, or you gotta 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 script. He's got a third act. Fucking cockroach. Cockroach. Yeah, 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 1990, where he started to run a child treatment facility without a license. A write-up in the New York Times notes, Thomas D. Farrell, the deputy district attorney

who sought the injunction to close the operation, said he interviewed the children who were removed from the Molokai 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 19- Is this where like, they start going to, cause like, then you have 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 no Tranquility Bay. Oh no, no, no, Puerto Rico. Okay. He operates at 1994, he operates a camp in Puerto Rico. And his, this camp gets busted because he's operating it under a false name. This camp gets busted because he's operating it under a false 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. Jesus, oh my God. So the cops are like, 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, Steven Michaels, who was really Steve Cartesano. The man has quite an imagination, but he cannot fathom having a name that isn't Steve. Oh man, that's, I don't know why, but that's quite funny. Yeah, Steve Michaels. Here's the New York Times again.

Turned his back on his Italian heritage this time. Yeah, he did. He did. Really threw that away. And threw away his Montana heritage too. Tragic. Quote, Mr. Michaels, 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 $20,000. Christopher lasted six months. When he returned home in December 1999, Miss Humble said his weight had dropped to 118 pounds from 165. He had scars from beatings, and he could barely walk or talk. So, it always ends the same way. All of these camps work 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 and 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 12 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 Cardisano. 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 25 of the 1,200 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 hey, we get it, they were no angels, hey. I was gonna say, no angel, there you go. Steve shaking hands with every cop in the country. Like, 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 to say anything about it. Yeah, yep, yep, yeah. If you come home unable to speak, 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 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 them anymore. Yeah. I wouldn't. Yeah, no, that's the thing too. 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, like, think about this, you know, they're going to be the subject of a lot of hate and resentment. Understandably so. Understandably so for the rest of these kids' lives. Don't send your kids to these programs, parents. You know? Yeah.

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 gonna guess not great. The tough love didn't work here. Steve Cartesano died of a heart attack in 2019. 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 120,000 children live in troubled teen facilities, which include wilderness programs. Training standards fluctuate drastically from organization to organization. And in 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office recorded more than 1,500 employees

involved in litigation for abuse in 33 states. And from 2018 to 2021, 13 people were fired or resigned from youth treatment centers in Utah due to sexual behavior and sexual assault allegations, according to a 2022 investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune. There was a TV show about wilderness camps. I remember that in like the 2000s. I called like, you know, Brat Camp or something like that. Brat Camp. Yeah, it had a, it had a, that was like, like they had like a moment, you know, when Dr.

Phil is sending them away to everybody. Yeah, let's see if we can get some good TV out of this. Yeah. And considering that they're, you know, for, 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 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 2000s and in 2010s and

now finally 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 16 children have died in these facilities since 1990. Thousands more have 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 2007 which, quote, found it difficult to grasp the national picture due to irregular licensing rules at the state level and ambiguity surrounding the labels 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. 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 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 decentralized all of this is, about how difficult it is to 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 Erica died of dehydration and heat stroke one day into a Nevada program in 2002. Cynthia had done her homework in trying to pick a place for her daughter, and by 2002 there were state licensing requirements. 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 Erica 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

and 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 has borne fruit as this article in the Salt Lake Tribune makes clear. Legislators enacted more regulations in 2021 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 in 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. That may ultimately be the thing that actually does more to kill it than any of these regulations right is the fact that at this point the sheer weight, you know, celebrity has helped with this of attention on this has given it a black eye. In 2023, 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 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. of spreading the word is probably the best that they can do. And that helped shut down some of the places like this that were actually school schools. If something has a bad enough reputation, sometimes that sort of starves it of oxygen. And I don't know. I think that that's one of the best things, one of the only things really that can happen.

And yeah, you're right, probably 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 overlords so that they can understand human culture. Congratulations on that contract, by the way. That's a big one. Anything else you wanna 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 Libro.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 Scribd and I believe is now called Everrand. Oh shit, did they change Scribd? 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 these horrible stories of terrible things.

Go hug a kitten or again, drive to the corporate offices of. No, Absolutely not. Mm-hmm. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

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