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

Robert and Mara conclude the story of Steve Cartisano with a truly shocking number of illegal open air child torture camps.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ah, we are back. It's behind the Bastards, the only
podcast that will be allowed once our junta takes over.
We are we're actively planning the overthrow of the US
government and the end of democracy, but not to any
kind of political end. We don't really have an agenda

(00:26):
or a plan. We just really want to get more
people listening to podcasts, so, you know, a worthy, worthy
cause for democracy to die as a result of Mara Wilson,
How do you feel about killing democracy to moderately increase
the profitability of a podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
I mean, well, I guess it really depends which podcast
we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
I mean this one, not not one of those other podcasts.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah, I mean this one, this one, you know, I mean,
I mean for fundsis, you know, destroying democracy for funzis.
I think a little destroyed a little bit, you know,
we can and for a person who's.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Been yes, think of the dog food Anderson will be
able to afford once we purge all all of the
opponents of our new regime.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
You know, if there was a dog food that was
or it was like that worth it, I would spend
every dollar on it for her, every dollar.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
That's what we're going to do with the dissidents is
turn them into quality dog food. You deserve speaking quality
dog food, not really speaking of that at all. That
has nothing to do with our guests today, Marow Wilson, Mara,
how are you doing? How are you feeling as we're
coming to part two of this?

Speaker 3 (01:39):
I mean, I'm doing okay. This is very infuriating to
me for a lot of reasons, but I mean I
am glad in some ways. I'm very glad that this
is something that I'm passionate about and I fucking hate
and uh.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
And yes that, but you've been a great guest. I
am also so thrilled about your memoir. Where am I now?
Which people can buy wherever books are sold, or you
can buy it wherever books are sold. Take it to
a place where books aren't sold, sell it there, you know, Yeah,
help help out a little bit? Why not, Mara? As

(02:16):
a as a side note, you were, you know in
a movie people probably know famous film Matilda, in which
the bad guy is an evil used car dealer. We
talk a lot on this show about how used car
dealers in general are one of the largest funders of
the radical right. How would you feel about us like
repurpot it, purposing some of the old art for that

(02:36):
into like like World War two era, like we have
to destroy the car dealer menace propaganda posters.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
I do kind of wonder about. I mean, Danny DeVito
might be in favor of that.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, he seems like a pretty cool guy.

Speaker 3 (02:55):
Oh, he's very cool. He's very cool. Like, yeah, I
he's very cool. And he's also also also not a
bad guy to talk politics with in my opinion, But
he and I think have similar beliefs, So yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Much genuinely nice to hear. Well, folks, you know, make
make matilt proud, destroy the political power of the car
dealers trying to wrench our country away from democracy. I know,
I just talked about ending democracy to increase my profits.
But it's bad when other people do it, you know.
Obviously speaking of things that are bad when other people

(03:37):
do them. Wilderness camps not the best intro, but whatever,
you know, Mara, you brought up last episode. I just
wanted to highlight this because I thought it was particularly
perceptive the similarities to sen and On, which was really
meaningful because while I think there's maybe aspects of like

(03:58):
the way in which they would kind of like basically
kidnap addicts. That were probably inspirations to Steve Cartizano for
doing this at his camps. The more direct inspirations were
how they did a lot of the actual quote unquote therapy,
because one of the things that he was a big
advocate for in his camps was what's called anger therapy.
This is when you sit everyone around in a circle

(04:18):
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

(04:39):
psychologically damaging.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
Yeah, but I think it's sort of like if you
get into a fight with somebody and they say really
mean things to you, you know afterwards, that's going to
stay with you. You're going to think, you know, for
the time, oh this is what they really think of me?
Are they?

Speaker 2 (04:57):
You know?

Speaker 3 (04:57):
And that affects your relationships, that affects your self perception.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
So when we talk about Troubled Team Wilderness camps, that
starve and beat students. The obvious question that comes to
mind is how on earth is any of this legal.
And in order to tell that story, we have to
go back in time again to the nineteen fifties and
the Second Red Scare. In the post war era, you
see the birth of organizations like the John Birch Society,

(05:22):
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

(05:43):
socialist professors and teachers are going to steal your kids. Right,
That's a big part of the propaganda they put out.
And this is the first time in which conservative parents
start organizing as a group and insisting on doing their
own audits of schools and of teachers, initially just to
try to ferret out communist influence. Now, not long after this,

(06:04):
she started getting desegregation, which leads to an explosion in
the growth of private school facilities, and again a lot
of parents being like, we should have the right to
ensure our children don't have to be educated next to
kids who are a color we don't like. Right that
comes in right alongside we don't want our kids to
be taught communism.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
Well, the funny thing is I think that like this
led to and it is something that even went on
I think in the nineties and two thousands. There was
this sort of like like my family were like lower
middle class, you know, my dad was like a libertarian
Republican and my stepmother was kind of a political She's
a Filipino Catholic, so she was religious. But basically like

(06:44):
they thought that private schools were inherently better than public schools. Yeah,
which meant that I spent most of my time at
public school because you know, I guess my mom had
been a Democrat and she and then when we got older,
they really pushed my sister into going to private school.
But since we weren't wealthy, she ended up at like
the shittiest private school ever because there was no oversight

(07:09):
and it was inexpensive. And so that happens all the
time that people end up going to these places where
there's no oversight and crazy shit happens all the time.
Like that's that's what it is. Like, my my sister
ended up at the school where just all this crazy
shit happened. Yeah, and it was like a very specific
religious sect that none of us belonged to, and so

(07:30):
she got kind of brought just to that.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
I believe in God, there's no way they'll abuse kids
like the Catholic church.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, but I mean it wasn't like actively abusive to her, but.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
It was weird school. Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
She has a lot of very crazy stories about like
oh yeah, there was a man who was living in
the gym and see that sounds like like because his
wife kicked him out, but he was like in good
standing in the church, so he.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Lived in oh man. See, I have my experience with
private school kids that makes me always laugh whenever parents
talk about like this is what I'm going to do
so that the public schools don't ruin my kid by
teaching them secular values. There was a Catholic private school
called Jesuit in the Dallas area, and the Jesuit Boys

(08:17):
were who you would buy drugs from as a teenager.
Because the Jesuit Boys always had weed and acid and
like cocaine and stuff.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
They're all on and they're all on drugs and make
serious drugs too, Like nobody could afford cocaine at MBLIC school.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
No, no, no, no, rich kids can be and they
cut it with baby powder to sell the pores. It's tragic.
That's why I operate a charity that provides underprivileged kids
with quality.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
Blow.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
This shit is straight from Columbia. We don't step on
it all only Sophie. It's a five oh one C three.
We're allowed to talk about it on the air.

Speaker 3 (08:54):
Does your friend Oliver North help with it?

Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yes, Actually he's been a huge part of our organizing.
He knew a lot of people.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Did he die? Did he die?

Speaker 1 (09:04):
No?

Speaker 2 (09:04):
I think he's got to still be alive.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
See one of those one of those like, yeah, I'm.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Pretty sure he's still alive because I don't remember having
a party for it, and I will have a party
when all the North dies. So we were talking about
why why the laws allow for these kinds of facilities,
and yeah, a lot of it has its roots in
kind of desegregation. This fear over communism and the whole

(09:31):
religious right gets birthed in the seventies over what might
euphemistically be called a question of school choice. Right, they're
angry at like integration of Bob Jones University. Right, there's
going to be black people at our private school. And
an idea kind of starts to spread in American society
as the religious right gains more power, that parents are

(09:51):
having their rights infringed upon by the existence of a
society that might at some point expose those children to
attitudes and ideas they're parents dislike. This is low key
one of the most dangerous things in this country right now.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
The parents' rights movement is very familiar.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yes. In an explainer for the AP News Brooks Schultz
rights quote. In nineteen seventy two, the US Supreme Court
cited parental rights when it allowed Amish families to exempt
their children from high school in Wisconsin v. Yoder. The
court acknowledged that it was an exceptional case since the
Amish lived separately and self sufficiently, said Joshua Weishert, a
lawyer and professor at West Virginia University, and lawsuits stretching

(10:31):
back to the nineteen twenties, courts have affirmed the rights
of parents to direct their children's education, but they have
emphasized that there's a balance to be struck with the
state's obligation to protect children's welfare. Now, recognizing the obligation
doesn't mean that you actually act as if there is
any obligation. And one of the things that has resulted
from this is you've had states like Utah establish what

(10:54):
are like very permissive parental rights regimes, right, And as
I noted last episode, that's why there's such a like
that's why all these facilities are located there. There's other
states where kids have more protection if their parents are
crazy assholes who want to send them to an abuse camp.
But if you get those kids across the border and

(11:15):
down into Utah, they have no rights anymore. Right, the
parents can do literally anything to them, because there's this
idea that like, well, you know, particularly this faith based
idea that like the parent ought to be absolutely sovereign
to the child, which right, like ye is bad.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
It's I mean, that is a Christian thing, anna Mormon
thing of the hierarchy of you know, there's God, then
there's the father, then there's the mother, then there is
the children, and and it you know, it is like
they are right below, like the hierarchy is reinforced at
every time, at every turn.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
They're necessari historically that is not sure, that.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Doesn't end well. But also kids, kids are children. They're
not absolutely they're not capable of like having absolute sovereignty
over their own lives, like immediately. I think there's probably
probably the best you can do is kind of a
sliding scale, and you know, try to make sure that
there are like human rights protections that make it impossible

(12:23):
to force certain things on kids. Ever, no matter what,
it's really not an easy.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
If you talk to anybody who's who's like ever worked
with CPS, they'll you know, you can just see like
the exhaustion in their eyes when they talk about it,
because they're like, yeah, it's a really hard line. It's
a very difficult thing to do, very very difficult. And
there's certain things like I know in some states, like
if a parent leaves marks on their child, like that's
enough to prosecute them. And then there's other states where

(12:51):
it's like, no, beat your kids as much as you want,
like they are your children. You know, you can do
whatever or even have you know, have somebody else beat
your kids. And it's not that big of a deal.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
And I think, you know, as we acknowledge that, it's
kind of messy to try to figure out where exactly
the line should be. The line certainly shouldn't be where
Steve Cartizano puts it, right where you can pay to
have your kids subducted and starved in the desert. And
what's justifying all of these extreme adventures again is like
drug use, right, the fact that drug use is so

(13:24):
fucking scary and concerned parents have become the most powerful
voting block in the country, Like both liberal and conservative
parents in the late eight you know, in the eighties
and then in the nineties, all have to be anti
drug all have to talk about it like as opposed
to well, you know, this is a thing that carries
some dangers to kids, and we should make sure that
they're informed about it. And you know, there should be
a great of awareness and society about this. No, no,

(13:46):
this is like going to ruin entire generations, and anything
we do is justified in stopping this scourge. Steve Cartesano
rides that wave.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
I know that like people who claim to have been
hippies back in the day, like.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
That is you motherfuckers smoked pot once.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
Well that's the thing. Yeah, it's a much smaller percentage
than we think. You know, it's a much smaller percentage
than we think. But it happened to enough people, and
enough people knew people who you know, smoked weed and
you know, like dropped acid to know that these people
did not end up, you know, murdering people, and you know,

(14:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Think the two things that really amped this up to
a massive degree are number one, like, heroin gets a
lot more common, and heroin is a drug that if
you fuck up on heroin, the consequences are more severe
than smoking too much weed or even generally drinking too much. Obviously,
drinking too much can be deadly, but it's a lot
the lyne you got a lot more wiggle room with

(15:00):
drinking when you do with fucking horse. And the other thing,
probably the bigger thing is the AIDS epidemic, right, which
is tied to drug use, particularly intravene to drug use,
and kind of it does help make the case to
these parents that like, well, anything that sets you on
a road that ends in heroin is like you're going
to die, right, so we have to intervene early on.

Speaker 3 (15:22):
And probably crack as well, which is.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
Also yeah, cras is also a massive part of this.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
And has a very racialized component. Yeah, so yeah, because.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
That's probably yeah, probably that's less of a factor in
these rich kids parents being concerned just because of like
where crack is. Like, although cope is probably anyway whatever,
we don't need to get too much into it. But yeah,
that's so, that's that's kind of the stakes that are
being set up, And it's important to understand where the
stakes are because the thing parents are letting their kids

(15:50):
like happen to their kids are insane. So once local
law enforcement starts getting involved, kids start escaping the camp
and like showing up in town or showing up at
the police station, like battered and bruised or in some
cases are taken to their parents after they're like let out,
and so doctors start looking over these kids. In one case,
a doctor counted more than eighty scars, marks, and contusions

(16:13):
on the body of a single teenager. Another former student
told the police that they had been dragged through the
desert by instructors and then tied to trees as a
punishment for not wanting to hike like insane shit, you know,
like not even like tough love stuff, like just actual torture.

(16:34):
As legal issues mounted, Steve seems to have mostly fucked
off to spend the company's money on stupid shit. Frustration
over this eventually led to one of his top employees,
admissions director Gail Palmer, to quit and start Summit Quest, Inc.
Which is just a copycat of Challenger without all the baggage. Right,
but she is basically doing it. It's a sixty three

(16:55):
day course just like Challenger, and the business plan is
the same. This time ales going to run it, and
she's going to hire some fucking drifters and give them
a bunch of troubled kids and leaving them in the
desert for two months. Right, And I want to quote
again from John Krakouur, writing for Outside magazine. Five students
were enrolled in the inaugural Summit Quest course, which cost

(17:15):
thirteen thousand dollars for sixty three days. Palmer sent the
group to the arid Schiwitz Plateau near the north rim
of the Grand Canyon, supervised by two young counselors who
were paid minimum wage. During the first several days, Michelle Sutton,
a pretty fifteen year old who had enrolled voluntarily to
regain self esteem after an alleged date rape, complained repeatedly

(17:35):
of exhaustion, sunburn, and nausea. As the group hiked through
the desert. She vomited up most of the water she
tried to drink, and pleaded that she could not go on.
According to councilor's field reports gathered by state and federal investigators,
the lead counselor had been ordered to ignore such talk
as manipulative behavior. You have been slapping off, she told Sutton.
You are now being warned now a couple of things

(17:59):
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

(18:21):
are trained. And this is Steve's training, right. Everything in
this course has been stolen from Steve's program. Steve's program
teaches anytime kids complain or say that they are physically
uncomfortable or ill, they are trying to manipulate you. Well,
that's like the.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
That's like the yeah, they they all of these things.
They always say children are incredibly manipulative. You know, teenagers
are incredibly manipulative, and like some are, but teenagers don't.
Manipulation usually requires some kind of foresight. It's also like
and you kidders are known for that.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
It's like when people say babies are manipulative, right, because
a baby will like modulate how cries or whatnot in
order to get certain kinds of attention. You can call
it manipulative, or you can say like they have needs
and try to fill those beads, like the teenager who
is dehydrated and needs medical attention.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah, so when you like, like I got heat exhaustion,
last year on my birthday because because I'm a late
July baby and I was stupid and decided to have
a party outside and many such cases, we all got
heat exhaustion and I was the next day. I felt
like I was going to throw up all day long.

(19:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah, you need to immediately start pounding the hottest coffee
that you can get and ideally just get on a
treadmill and sprint through it. You know, that's what's going
to help.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
Yeah, when you when you can't see anymore, then you know,
that's when.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
You know that, that's when you're better.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
Yeah. But yeah, when you're bombing up.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Water, that's that's a horrible side. Get to medical care.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
And the thing is, these these there are probably people
who were like, oh, yeah, this would be good for me,
Like I remember reading about like Harard bound and being
like this could toughen me up.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Yeah, it could have been empowering to somebody who'd been
through the sexual assault.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
If she thought I might I think I might benefit
from this. It probably is something that might have benefited her.
It's just the people, the adults that you know. For
one thing, there was no kind of licensure for these programs,
not really, there was no kind of like state board
that was actually looking into any of this. So Michelle
when she started looking for programs, had no way of
knowing who is legitimate.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
Right, Yeah, what's like the summer camp program? You know,
what's like a therapeutic program, and that that's the thing.
A lot of these as therapy.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and that, Yeah, that's exactly what happened, right,
And you know, none of because she the fucking palmer
who again is trained by fucking Steve, just brought in
minimum wage people who like, did not understand anything about
wilderness survival. They miss that she has the symptoms of
heat stroke and dehydration. And if you ignore those symptoms

(21:25):
and force someone to do an arduous mountain trek, there's
a good chance they're going to die. And that is
exactly what happened to fifteen year old Michelle Mo. Yeah,
it's a it's fucked. Palmer alleged that Sudden, who remember,
was in this program voluntarily after being assaulted, had died
not because of dehydration and heat exhaustion, but due to
a drug overdose. Right, Palmer didn't even do the work

(21:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
It also doesn't make any sense because don't they exam
in them to make sure check.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
How did she get drugs?

Speaker 3 (22:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (22:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
Drugs out here, that's even worse.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah. Yeah, Now, obviously there's an actual coroner's inquest here
and a doctor confirms that she did not die of
drug overdose. There are no drugs in her system. She
died due to dehydration. Given Palmer's this becomes a big
media story. Right, Michelle is fifteen. You know her parents
are very vocal. This actually like number one it destroys

(22:35):
Palmer's program. But it finally, for the first time, these programs,
a lot of which had proliferated as a result of
Challenger's success, get some scrutiny, right, and as a result,
the media reaches out to Steve Cartesano and to be like, Hey,
seems like this lady basically just does exactly what you
do and a kid died. Is there a danger a
kid's going to die in your program? And Steve told

(22:55):
them a Challenger, a tragedy like the one that killed
Michelle Sutton could never happen. You want to guess what
happened six weeks later? Oh my god, exactly, like literally
two months later, something like that. On June twenty third,
nineteen ninety, Kristin Chase enrolled at Challenger, And in this sentence,
the mean the word enrolled means that she was taken

(23:17):
in the dead of night by Challenger employees and driven
from Florida to southern Utah. Kristin had been enrolled in
the program by her mother, who, like most of these parents,
thought her daughter was in danger and needed the tough
love of a boot camp to set her on the
right path. I think her parents are separated because her father, Ronald,
claims he was not informed that Kristin had been forced

(23:37):
into the program right Ronald was, like, I knew she
was in the program. I thought this was something kind
of like Michelle, that she wanted to do, which is
not the case. So as soon as she arrives, the
first thing they do is they starve kids. Right for
the first two days that you're hiking, you don't eat
any food. Right now, In addition to the fact that
she is being starved, Kristen grows up at life. Has

(24:00):
lived your whole life at sea level, and these are
like seven thousand feet or more elevation mountains they're hiking in.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
Oh, so you're supposed to up.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
That'll fuck you up hard if you don't acclimate there. Again,
if you know, if you understand anything about the medicine
behind this, there are ways to responsibly acclimatize people to
that environment.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
No, that's because Yeah, when I went when I went
to my you know, hippie boarding school, we were on
a hill that was I think about six thousand you know,
we were up in the mountains, and yeah, I was
always a little fucked up. Yeah, the first day back
from vacation and a little fucked up coming back down
to sea level, you know, with my parents in you know,

(24:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
And walking start for two days exactly.

Speaker 3 (24:50):
Walking is exhausting. Walking, just walking is exhausting at that altitude.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah. A lawsuit from her father later noted that quote.
Her medical history, forwarded Challenger by her mother, indicated that
Kristin suffered from bouts of coughing up blood, stomach pain,
urinary burning and frequency difficulty, running, minstreul difficulty, and a
knee injury. So in addition, if I am and I'm
not an expert on any of this, but I have
some training in wilderness first aid. If I am doing,

(25:18):
if I am working for an organization like this and
a kid with this medical history wants to do a
sixty three, I'm not letting them in. I'm sorry. If
you cough up blood regularly, and like, we don't really
have a clear idea as to why you are not
spending two months out in the desert in my wilderness program.
That doesn't seem responsible, you know, But they don't care

(25:39):
over a challenger. They're like, come on, cough up blood
here in the mountains. It'll be good for you. So
Horsehair and the other counselors force her to do a
six thousand foot elevation hike. The day that she arrives again,
they deprive her of food. Next from a write up
indserret dot com quote. Despite being upset, frightened, and ill,
Kristin was forced to participate in four to five min

(26:00):
hikes each day in temperatures exceeding ninety five degrees. She
was not given a proper physical exam or any conditioning
activities prior to the hikes. The day before she died,
Kristin Chase fell several times on one of the hikes,
experienced knee pain, and showed symptoms of heat exhaustion of
the evening prior to her death, Kristen told one of
the challenger counselors that she was afraid of dying. In

(26:20):
the program, a counselor wrote on an evaluation form, Kristen's
number one short term goal is to get out of
here safe and alive, the suit says, and maybe as
the employee, you shouldn't be working for a company. For lack. Well,
this kid's goal is not to die here. I wonder
if if we're handling health and safety properly.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah, it's it's yeah, some implications there.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah, it's just incredibly bleak like this this, I mean,
this poor girl is like murdered by negligence.

Speaker 3 (26:49):
Well but you know, oh sorry, is this a time
for a break?

Speaker 2 (26:53):
It's time for an AD break. That's right, terrible time
for an AD break.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
But yeah, I mean, I was just going to say
quickly that the thing that is like with my head
is that I knew people who went to these places
more than ten years later.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah, still the same, Still the same. Yeah, yep, speaking
of which, are ads the same as they ever were?
We're back? Uh Okay. So on June twenty seventh, Kristen
was made to do another five mile hike. She started

(27:26):
showing symptoms of heat exhaustion and eventually collapsed on the trail.
Despite the fact that she had stopped breathing, Challenger employees
did not call for a care Flight helicopter to come
in and rescue her. I don't know if it was
literally the company CareFlight, but there's a company that did,
Like you could like radio them and they would do
emergency airlifts, right, which, if you are doing a service

(27:47):
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

(28:09):
refused to call them anyway because Steve hadn't paid the
bill and he was in an what's described in the
court case as an ongoing disagreement over an unpaid bill,
so he had he had fucked this helicopter emergency service
over so he could keep renting Lamborghini's and he wouldn't
let any of his employees call them, even for an emergency.

(28:30):
So eventually Challenger, instead of getting an actual medical helicopter in,
they call for a tour helicopter that does like helicopter
tours of Bryce Canyon, which does not rease. And again
the time by the time it reaches Kristens, she is
very much dead, you know, like it's she was already
not like the odds were already kind of rough for her.

(28:52):
By the fact that she was not breathing in in
the wilderness, but the fact that it takes hours for
a chopper to arrive, you know. In the immediate wake
of the disaster, Steve Cartersano started doing cable TV appearances
where he claimed that Chase's death had nothing to do
with the Challenger program. And I'm going to quote again
from Desert News. She hadn't yet begun the sixty three
day expedition and was on a four and a half

(29:14):
mile day hike to explore some nearby caves and arches
when she died. She could have walked over to Central
Park and collapsed. Cardasano said on the Jane Wallace Show
on the Lifetime TV channel. Her death, though heartrending, has
not caused him to reevaluate his program. We've had too
much success, Cartizano said, pointing out that over seven hundred
and fifty youths have completed the program. Now there's a

(29:37):
lot that's bad about that. For one thing, they had
absolutely started the sixty three day expedition, there were days
into it, and she had been forced to continue hiking
despite repeatedly complaining that she was in physical distress. This
is not a walking to I don't know. Maybe you've
taken some hardcore hikes over to Central Park, but this

(29:59):
is not like walking around in the park in the
middle of the city now. Surprisingly, Kristen's mother is one
of the people who came out to support the Challenger
team and Steve, even though they had killed her daughter.
She told her reporter, what we did for our daughter
was the best thing we ever we could have ever done.
We felt this was the answer. I truly feel it

(30:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
I mean, I guess she just probably needed to. Yeah,
I don't know, like you need to justify the horrible
things that happen.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
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

(31:00):
like any responsible person could have told me was a
dangerous thing to do, I felt it was the right
thing to do, which means it must have been and
so the fact that it ended badly like can't be
my fault. Right, it's this complete refusal to take any
It's fucking a rack. It's a rack war syndrome, right, Like,
it's this it should have worked, like fuck you people, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
It's it's really I mean, what makes what I wonder
is how, like how did they they get like these
people on shows that were like, oh, the program worked
for me. Where the fuck did they find those people?
Is what I'm wondering about, because.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
I mean, there was probably incentive programs together.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
There's definitely incentives. I think there may have been a
degree of like money getting like who knows what Steve
was doing behind the scenes with these people, but also
some number of people of kids probably did feel like
the program helped, right.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
There was especially there was a different Netflix documentary, I
forget the name of it, but one of the things
that they talked about was that that there was like
specific parent incentive programs for recruiting and recruiting parents to
send their children to places and to spread good word
and speak highly about it. That was a thing that happened.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
And you also you have within these programs. You've got
a bunch of kids, they're kind of hierarchies within the kids.
Some of those kids you just have like helping out.
You give them extra privileges and whatnot, and they kind
of you're kind of almost in a lot of cases,
weaponizing the kids who are the biggest bullies, right, having
them bully the other kids to keep them in line,
and maybe those kids wind up feeling like, well, I

(32:34):
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

(32:56):
operate or how they do operate. But this charismatic guy
stee have him and a couple of teenagers on, you know,
like we'll talk to them about this thing and effectively
give him free advertising, which is kind of all TV
ever does in these cases.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
I think that there's also like I know that there's
the like the cash for Kids thing, and I knew
I knew a girl who almost ended up in one
of these programs, but because a psychiatrist suggested to her
father that she should go and after that, this girl
was somebody with a lot of issues, but she refused
to go to a psychiatrist after that because she was

(33:31):
so afraid that one would try to send her away.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Of course. Yeah, it's it's shited like the there's that
fucking CIA program in Pakistan where they like pretended to
be vaccinating people in order to like blood test them
to try and find ben laden And it's like, well,
when you do shit like that, Yeah, people are gonna
think vaccines they're a scam.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah, people aren't going to think. Yeah, people aren't going
to be particularly happy.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Thanks the CIA. Yeah, so I know, I want to know.
We just talked about Sharon, who I do not like
very much, being like, this really was the best thing
for my I know she died, but it's the best
thing for my daughter. I gotta say, I don't know
much about her relationship with her former husband, Ronald, but
I'm gonna guess he was in the right side of

(34:19):
that breakup because when he finds out about this, he
was like, what the fuck did you do? You sent
our daughter to die in the desert, and now you're
defending the people who got her killed on television. So
one of the things that came out as a result
of all this is that she had not told him
and she shared custody with him, that she had had
their daughter kidnapped, that she was not there willingly. Ronald

(34:41):
gets very angry about all this, and he is made
by a court the representative of his daughter's estate by
a state judge, and in this capacity, he sues the
ever loving shit out of the Challenger program. Cardesano is
charged with eight counts of child abuse and a misdemeanor
for his involvement in Chase's death. Now, the good news
is that, like Chase does win a bunch of money

(35:03):
as a result of this lawsuit. The bad news is
that Cardasano does not wind up with any criminal convictions
because they fuck up the case. Like there's like a
weirdly shitty judge due to like a series of like
like at one point in the court, like the first
time they try they try this case, it gets thrown
out because the judge forgets to read the charges to

(35:24):
the jury at the onset of the trial. There are
a couple of more things like that, and Cardasano is
eventually acquitted, but his company winds up more than a
million dollars in debt and he has to file for
Chapter eleven. Several more lawsuits follow from other children after this,
all of which are settled out of court. By the
end of nineteen ninety three, Cardasano is banned from ever

(35:47):
running a similar program in the state of Utah again.
So that's good, you know, Steve Cartersano, he's out of
the picture. He's surely not going to come back later
in this story running a series of of wilderness survival camps.
Let's talk about what happens in Utah after this point,
because the fact that Utah has gone after Cartisano to

(36:09):
some extent doesn't mean that they have any interest in
regulating what has become a multimillion dollar industry in the state.
When local and national media covered Kristen's death, they needed
an expert to reach out to and to get quotes
about what had gone wrong in Steve's program. Many of
them picked Larry Olsen, who, despite the negligent deaths of
two students in his programs, was still held up as

(36:31):
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

(36:52):
an urge in the media to minimize issues in the
rest of the industry, especially if that business tough love
care for troubled teens is one that mainstream culture just
sort of assumes is necessary. As a result, the focus
was on how Challenger was a proly run program and
not the idea that the whole concept might be a
bad idea. Right. Two former Challenger employees, Bill Henry and

(37:15):
Lance Jagger are man Horsehair had testify against Steve at
exchange for immunity from prosecution. Can you believe Horsehair rolled
on Horsehair? You fucked over, Steve Montana? How could you so?
Horsehair and his buddy Bill are still clear to operate

(37:37):
a wilderness rehab survival camp thing in Utah, and now
there's an opening in the market because Challenger is no
longer accepting anybody. And so in nineteen ninety two they
launch a company, north Star Expeditions. That's a nice name,
makes it sound very adventurous.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
It sounds like a cruise. That like it does.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, it sounds like Yeah, it does sound like a cruise.
Given that the company was owned and operated by men's
trained by Steve Cartesano, who had played a direct role
in the death of christ and Chase, you probably won't
be surprised to hear that they almost immediately got another
child killed. In early March nineteen ninety four, about a
year after they start doing this, Aaron Bacon enrolled in

(38:20):
North Stars again, sixty three day wilderness program. They all
are the same length. Bacon is one of these kids
who had been a good student most of his academic career,
but got into pot in his sophomore year and started
missing classes. In February, he was in a fight with
some kids. In the local news reports that came out
after this, Alta said he was in a fight with

(38:41):
the crips, and I don't know if he was in
a fight with the real crips or there were some
other kids in his school calling themselves the crips, which
I think is likelear.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
That's like every time people talk about gangs, it's like,
are you guys talking about organized crime or are you
talking about like a group of kids that we know.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
But yeah, you have these like you have these like
thirteen year olds who will like in LA who will
tag like m S thirteen on something. Yeah, it's like, yeah,
you guys, you're not MS thirteen tagging that on a locker. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah, that's a big part of their operation. Oh yeah,
that's if you want to move some serious crystal, you
got to have lockers in every state. Oh yeah. So
his parents get convinced that he is in a downward
spiral that's going to lead with him murder, end with
him murdered in a gang war. Now. In his article
for Outside, John Krakauer describes how Aaron Bacon's mom found

(39:48):
out about north Star. Students at north Star learned that
mother Nature does not make exceptions, explained the outfits brochure
they learned responsibility, self disciplined motivation. Tuition was thirteen zo
nine hundred dollars for a sixty three day course, plus
another seven seventy five to have erin forcibly escorted to Escalante,
something north Star strongly recommended Bob's architecture firm. That's his dad,

(40:11):
once prosperous, had lately been teetering on the brink of insolvency,
and the Bacons no longer had that kind of cash. But,
says Sally, his mom, after talking to several parents whose
kids have been helped by the program, we were given
a lot of hope that north Star was going to
build Aaron's self esteem. I knew it would be rigorous,
but I pictured him out there with God and nature,
hiking all day, discussing his issues with therapists around the

(40:32):
count fire at night. Just a totally fanciful idea of
what was actually going on here. None of these counselors
are therapists. None of them have relevant training in this.
They're not even like any kind of teacher. Now it's
unclear to me do Sally and Bob know that, But
they are aware of some of this, because several days
into his time with north Star. Aaron sends a letter

(40:55):
back to his parents and writes, I'm trying to work
this program as well as I can, but I can't
believe you want me believing this stuff. I've been told
that all therapists, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists are quacks. I've
been lectured on the stupidity of believing in them. I
miss you, mom and dad. And maybe that's a side
that your kid's not going to get good therapy. Yeah,

(41:16):
at the Wilderness camp. That's teaching him that psychiatrists are liars.
You've got to trust only horse Hair knows how to
be an adult. Great stuff. So, prior to handing their
child off to strangers, the only concerns Bob and Sally
had expressed to north Star was that their son was
very thin, and they worried that he wouldn't be provided

(41:37):
enough food. Our old, pale horse Hair assured them he
would never let a student lose weight during one of
their one of their sessions. For three weeks after Aaron
was taken away in the night, his mom called regularly
to check up on him. She was told that her
son was a whiner, lingering pretending to be sick and
doing so badly at the program that they might have

(41:57):
no choice but to have him repeat it kids. The
counselor said, we're angry at Aaron for slowing them down. Now,
the reality of what's happening here is that for the
first two days that they're on these hikes, Aaron and
his classmates are starved. North Star claimed that this was
to cleanse the toxins out of them. Aaron, very thin,
already hiking and not eating, grew very quickly ill. Then

(42:19):
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

(42:42):
his sleeping bag away as punishment. In a letter to
his parents, Aaron wrote, I feel like I am losing
control of my body. I've peed my pants every night
for the past three nights and tonight when we started
our little hike, I took a dump in my pants.
I didn't even feel it coming, It just happened. All
the other students started a I've been telling the staff
that I'm sick for a while, and they say I'm

(43:03):
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

(43:25):
is done. On March thirtieth, three weeks into his trek,
Aaron's mom called the school, which warned her that he
might need to repeat the program because he was doing
so badly. The next day, they called to inform her
that her son was dead due to a perforated ulcer
that leaped through his small intestine and cause a massive
fatal infection. North Starr insisted they had done nothing wrong.

(43:46):
Aaron had just been sick, the ulcer had been there anyway,
nothing they did could have prevented his death. But then
Sally saw her son's body. Here's how she described it. Quote.
His legs were like toothpicks, his hip bones stuck way
out his ribs. He looked like again, a concentration camp victim.
There were bruises from the tip of his toes to
the top of his head, open source, up and down

(44:07):
the inside of his thighs. The only way we were
even able to recognize him was a childhood scar above
his right eye. Jesus, Yeah, yeah, it seems like a
good time to go to ads and we're back. So

(44:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
It really is. I mean, I do know that, like
the humiliation there is is just kind of it's just
part of it.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
It's a nama. That kid was in hell the last
days of his life exactly.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
Yeah, you're and and yeah, they do make it seem
like these kids are all manipulative, you know, But his.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Crime was he smoked weed. Great great parenting by the
way from Bob and Sally there. I don't want to
shit on him too much because their kid died, but
also you're part of the reason why. So I don't
really feel all that.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
There's got to be Like, I know they must like
the way that they do it, because I know people
who had terrible parents who were sent to these programs.
But I also know people who had very loving, caring
parents who sent their kids to these programs that if
they knew, they never would. So I think all the
money in this goes into sales.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, it goes into sales. It goes into like making this,
and and you also have the cultural inertia is with you, right,
the weight of well, obviously kids these days are worse
than they've ever been, right, which is a big thing
in the media. Obviously, the consequences of kids getting into
drugs or so dire. Obviously tough love is the only

(46:04):
thing that works. Right, Like all of these things together
that you're doing most of the ad work for these companies.
All they need to do is come in and say,
you know, we'll give your kid this kind of like
you would imagine hiking through the desert, you know, sharing
wisdom with your probably will we'll kind of insinuate Native
American counselors. They'll learn all sorts of ancient wisdom, right,

(46:27):
Like that's literally how the ad campaigns work for this
A lot of them. The money is in like we
know these different native techniques for like providing therapy too, right,
Like there's all sorts of bullshit stacked on.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
They there is. I think there's a religious element underneath
it all.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
Yep, I think.

Speaker 3 (46:44):
But the thing is, like I know somebody who went
into this program and said that they came out believing
in God, but only because they felt like they had
to in a way, because it was like they they well, yeah,
it was basically they were like they were like, I

(47:06):
feel like right now the only thing that's giving me
hope is the idea of a God, you know, and
the only thing you know and so and it it
feels like it is like when people, some people who
come out of traumatic experiences lose their faith, but some
people they gain it because they're like God was the only,
you know, thing that I could think of, and I

(47:28):
was praying to God to let me go through this,
you know, and let me get through this alive.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah, because you need to, especially as a child. Yeah,
your degree of context, your understanding of like like what
are your your degree of power in any situation is
so little like that. I get how that might be
psychologically necessary. Like some people, what's going to get you fath.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
Exactly that's what That's what's going to get them through,
you know. And I mean you're probably also like you
could you can hallucinate really easily after after the desert,
so probably.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
That oh yeah, that also has Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
Starvation and heat exhaustion can make you see something.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
It we'll fuck you up again, you know. That's why
we're offering like a you know, a special camp. We're
just gonna take you out into the desert until you hallucinate.
It's nice, it's legal. We may mix a little bit
of peyote into the water. It's not really peyote. I
got it off a Facebook, but it's got mushrooms on

(48:27):
the side of the bottle. So that's got to be
good enough for you, you know, in the desert with me. Yeah, exactly,
something will happen, and don't worry. I know what dehydration
looks like. So one thing you'll notice from all of
the stories if kids who have died in these programs
is that while the child who died was obviously ill

(48:49):
and in very clear need, of medical attention. They were
attacked by staff for faking it, for having a bad attitude,
for trying to get out of the program, for being manipulative.
All of this trace is back to Steve Carrsano, Remember,
trained all of these people and running these other facilities.
These all of these deaths are people linked directly to Steve.
In an interview earlier in his career with Challenger, Steve

(49:10):
told a reporter, we are breaking down facads. Kids come
in with all sorts of little ways to manipulate, with
a lot of anger. We physically stress them out and
that breaks down the facades to get to their heart.
So again, the training that Steve established is you have
to physically stress these children to break down the barriers
between them and healing. So really, by ignoring when this

(49:32):
kid start shitting blood in the desert, we're doing the
best thing for him. He's just trying to manipulate us
by losing control of his bowels. See why the.

Speaker 3 (49:40):
Kids I know who did like who didn't necessarily suffer
physical effects from it, although I mean they all did
because they all were you know, lack of food and
lack of sleep, right, But and you know, exposure to
the elements, but they were all humiliated. They were made
to be dirt, if you know, people were made to
like people were forced to like be nude or like

(50:01):
pee in front of each other like what themselves as
punishments things like that, like you know, in addition to
being yelled at, But humiliation was a big one. Humiliation
in front of a group of people.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
And it's the kind of thing it's it shows you
how it's just like the primary difference in toxicity between
like the programs that Larry Olsen is running, which are
very much imperfect, but don't do this to kid Like
the deaths there are, I think generally due to your responsibility,
but they're not torturing kids the same way. Like one
of the things that the on a Sazi camp that

(50:35):
he runs afterwards will do is that, like you get
two thousand calories a day. Now, they do have this
weird rule where if you like eat your food early,
you have to like catch animals and like forage and
what not to like fill up the gap and you're
But none of their kids ever like starved to death,
so I guess they probably did it right. And I
think the key thing is that like aspects of that

(50:56):
were like, well, you have to manage the amount of
food that you have, like you're on a high for
a while. This is like part of learning wilderness survival.
If you're not pairing that with and all of the
kids are going to yell at you and make fun
of you, and the counselors will beat you and call
you gay, then it's not necessarily a bad ex as
long as there's a certain degree of like medical training present,
not necessarily a bad experience, right. It could be useful

(51:18):
to learn things about, like managing calories when you're out
in the wild. That's not what's going on in these places.
Right after Chase's death in nineteen ninety, Utah had forced
through its first serious regulations for wilderness therapy. Most of
these focused on what kids couldn't be made to do.
There were restrictions you can't have a kid hike up

(51:40):
with a pack that's above a certain percentage of their
body weight. You have to give kids a set number
of calories per day. But as Krakauer noted in nineteen
ninety five, responsibility for enforcing these regulations fell to a
loan civil servant, Kin Stettler, who was supposed to monitor
more than one hundred youth treatment companies statewide. In practice,
it was impossible for him to write her it on

(52:01):
so many programs, and North Star was among those that
escaped close scrutiny. Stetler devoted Mormon knew Jagger and Henry
well and says that he trusted them as fellow saints implicitly.
After Bacon's death, Stetler's confidence in Jagger and Henry remained steadfast.
He quickly cleared North Star of any wrongdoing and allowed
the program to stay in business, which it did for
six months until the State of Utah filed criminal charges

(52:24):
in October nineteen ninety four. So again, the guy they
when they decide to regulate this after two kids die,
the guy who does it is like, well, it's Mormons
running this camp. Mormons would never put a kid in danger. Oh,
the kid died, must not have been their fault, you know.
Thankfully the Bacon's parents make enough of a problem that
the State of Utah does something, But like they almost didn't,

(52:45):
you know. And again, yeah, it.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Is really I don't know the idea of like yeah,
of like, well, nobody in this group would would be
a bad person.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Well he would never do this.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Yeah, that's just it's such a strange. It's such a
strange idea to me like that that well, yeah, of course,
of course you wouldn't do that.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
It's this thing we can all. It's easy to see
what a bad idea that is, right when you're thinking
about like, well, I'm not a Mormon. I know a
lot of bad things about the church of about the
Mormon church, right, Like the LDS church has a dark history.
Churches in general often have dark histories of child abuse.
I'm not surprised that stuff like this happens. But we

(53:28):
all have our groups where we're like, well, no one
in this group whatever abuse a kid, right, That's how
kids keep getting abused, Like everyone has has different groups.
That that's why you always need some sort of oversight
that is not the group itself making sure when you're
dealing with like organizations that take care of kids, making
sure kids aren't getting molested, because there is no group

(53:49):
that will not include some child molesters in it.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
No, it's it's sociology one o one. You know, everybody's
always like like this is its social ties are the
most important thing, and it's why people will some people
will be like, you know, I can't believe this famous
person is standing with with this abuser. And it's like, well,
I mean, it's not a good thing that they're doing it,
but probably they have close social ties with them, and

(54:13):
it's really hard for people to cut off social ties. Sometimes.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, because it's not,
but it blames Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
Yeah, and this is specifically why you don't leave it
up to random people. Yeah, it's why you build robust organizations.
That's job is to like not take it as red
that people aren't abusing kids, right, and to be an
advocate for those kids.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
Yeah, people on the outside who can be objective about it,
because you get this sort of like like I mean,
this is and and obviously this isn't just like a
Latter Day Saints thing like this is in every religion
and every institution. There's some kind of old boy network.
There's some kind of you know, oh well, yeah, well
this guy is my friend. He would never do that.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Yeah. And yeah, when we talk about like cases of
like film sets and stuff like that, especially back in
the day that we're abusive to like child actors, and
there's always the question of like, well, what did other
actors on the set know at the time. But the
bigger problem is that like, well, it shouldn't have been
up to them either, Like there should be again, professional agencies,

(55:13):
that's job is to do this so that you're not
trusting that everyone's going to like you don't. You can't
just trust that everyone involved in the organization is going
to be the best version of themselves. You assume that
there are going to be that people are going to
be cowards, you assume that people are going to be sneaky,
and you build a system that does not like take

(55:35):
that for granted.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
I think, I mean, I think a lot of us
who didn't have bad experiences on film sets because I
mostly had good experiences on film sets, But it was
because we had people in our lives, like our parents
and studio teachers who always advocated for us, who always
made sure that we weren't doing anything unsafe, and who
would take us aside and say, hey, are you sure
about this? Do you really want to be doing this?

(55:58):
Do you feel safe about this? But obviously that's not
the case everywhere, but yeah, but that's the thing. You
have these people who are advocating and these people who
are a little bit outside of this, you know, And
yeah you do. You need the outside, the outside eye,
the outside perspective, you need the chicks and balances.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
Yeah, it's the Boy Scouts shit, right, Like I had
a great time in the Boy Scouts while a bunch
of kids were getting molested, right, Like, you just can't
you just never, You shouldn't. You shouldn't leave it up
to people who are whose expertise is not sniffing out
child abuse to try and figure out if that's happening.
You know, we keep learning this, Lets schools learn this

(56:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
Well.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
That's the thing, too, is when people say to me, like,
so many children are abused in Hollywood, I say, yes,
but children were abused also.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
At nearly the Catholic Church.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
Yeah, the children. Well, and that's what I say to them.
I say, this is not a problem that's unique to Hollywood.
It's a problem that is in every institution where somebody
has extreme power over anybody else. And maybe that's my
anarchist street talking. But I think that it's you know,
any kind of institution.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
I obviously agree with you one hundred percent. I feel
the same way when people obsessed. Not that it's not
like the Epstein was not worth like certainly at one
point when his crimes are being ignored, a lot more
attention was needed, but the obsessional focus on this idea
of like teenage and like child girl victims as opposed
to how the vast majority of child sex trafficking looks,

(57:40):
which is people's parents and relatives primarily doing it right
and is mostly kids who were poor, and like, don't intersect.
They're also the people who are abusing them are poor,
and so there's not this angle of like this is
the wealthy and powerful engaging in these these horrible things.
It's like, no, these are like poor adults of using

(58:00):
poor children, and like that doesn't get any kind of attention, right,
and even though it's a much more common version of
the problem.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
Yeah, I think also if somebody has complete control over
you and complete control over what you're doing, and you
know in Hollywood it's they have complete control over your
dreams and your future, you know that says something in
a church they have complete you know, and any kind
of rep your soul, yeah, or your soul. You know,
those are very big things. And you know if it's
your mother or your father, your grandfather, your stepfather doing it,

(58:28):
you know, like your grandparents, like you know, these are
the people that you're supposed to love and look up to.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
So yeah, and that takes us back to these facilities.
This idea that like the parent or guardian of a
child should have absolute power over them. No, they shouldn't. Yeah,
Like again, where do we draw that line is a
question of society should have ask itself. But like you
shouldn't trust parents to control children either, like to a

(58:57):
degree of fatality, you know.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
Yeah, I mean like a lot of times there might
be like an aunt or and uncle who's nearby who's like, hey,
you know, is stuff going on here? Okay, Like things
like that. There's there's got to be some kind of
checks and balances and do have that because we yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
It's it's it's hard, and so we just don't do it.

Speaker 3 (59:15):
Ironically, we are not We talk about being very family oriented,
but we're not really like we're family oriented in a
in a one interpretation of family but not in a
extended community, you know, extended family, extended you know respect.
I don't know that's that's a whole other topics, but.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
There's a lot to say about, like our attitudes towards
I think a lot of this toxicity comes back to
the Roman Empire, if I can go go back to Rome,
because back back in the Roman Empire, there was this
understanding that like, you were legally a child as long
as your father was still alive, right, and he could
he could kill you. They have parents had the specifically

(59:54):
the pattern Familius had the technically the legal ability to
execute his children. And there I think there's a surprising
number of people who think that that should more or
less still be the law. Certainly, the way that a
lot of parents treat their their gay and trans kids
makes me think that like, oh, so that that idea
is still kicking around in a lot of heads.

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Huh yeah, or you need to take your child.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
Yeah, you got to break your kid down, right. So
we've just talked about what Steve's people did after he
left the state of Utah, and I know that I
sneakily said Steve was gone from the story now, But surprise, Mara,
Steve has a post scrunt. He's got a third approach.
Oh boy, he has like three more acts here. So

(01:00:41):
for his own sake, Steve did not take the fact
that he was no longer allowed to operate a wilderness
therapy camp in Utah lying down. He moved to Hawaii
in nineteen ninety, where he started to run a child
treatment facility without a license. Write up in the New
York Times notes Thomas D. Ferrell, the deputy district attorney
who sought the injunction to close the up, said he
interviewed the children who were removed from the Malachai program,

(01:01:04):
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

(01:01:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
In nineteen they start going to because like then you
had these ones. Wasn't there like a school. It wasn't
a wilderness program, but there was like a school I
think in Guantanamo Bay or a No Tranquility Bay.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Oh no, no, no, Puerto Rico. Okay, he operates at
nineteen ninety four, he operates a camp in Puerto Rico.
And this camp gets busted because he's operating it under
a fall name. This camp gets busted because local law
enforcement finds, like a cop finds like a car parked
kind of in the woods and finds five boys tied

(01:02:10):
up with rope in the back of the car with
nooses around their necks.

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
Jeezu go.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
So the cops are like, what's what's going on here, kids?
And the kids are like, well, we're in this wilderness
camp and they're disciplining us. And the cops are like,
this doesn't seem like something you should legally be allowed
to do to children. We're taking you in And so
they look into the matter and it turns out that
counselors had gotten fed up with these boys and left

(01:02:36):
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,

(01:02:57):
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

(01:03:17):
with their head marketer, Stephen Michaels, who was really Steve Cartisano.
The man has caught an imagination, but he cannot fathom
having a name that is it's Steve oh Man. That's
I don't know why, but that's quite funny. Yeah, Michaels,

(01:03:39):
here's the New York Times again.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
Turned his back on his Italian heritage.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Yeah he did. He did, really threw that away and
threw away his Montana heritage too. Quote mister Michael she
recalled told her that her son would receive proper care
as well as stern discipline at the academy's camp on
the South Pacific island of Samoa. Persuaded by his promises,
Miss Humble enrolled her son, Christopher, in a one year

(01:04:04):
program for twenty thousand dollars. Christopher lasted six months. When
he returned home in December nineteen ninety nine, Miss Humble
said his weight had dropped to one hundred and eighteen
pounds from one hundred and sixty five. He had scars
from beatings, and he could barely walk or talk. So
it always ends the same way. All of these camps

(01:04:26):
worked the same way, which at this point the first
one I might be like, well, maybe you were just
so negligent that you let this happen. We're now four
camps send this is how you want them to operate, right, Like,
that's clear to everyone, I think now. The Times notes
in that article that over his twelve year career up
to that point, Steve had been accused of fraud and
abuse at every single camp he operated. His Samoan program

(01:04:50):
lasted just three years before more than a dozen children
made reports of physical abuse. One teenager claimed to have
been molested by multiple camp counselors, all of whom had
been hired by Cartesano. When confronted about all of this
by The Times, Steve defended himself by arguing that the
children were all habitual liars whose parents just wanted refunds.

(01:05:10):
He would argue that only twenty five of the twelve
hundred children who'd attended his camps were even complaining, a
number that was blatantly untrue even at the time. When
asked about the numerous allegations of abuse by his students,
Steve told The Times, all of them are unfounded, all
of them exaggerations. It never happened. These kids were no
angels to begin with, and they would say anything to
get sent home. So angels, Hey, are you going to say?

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
No angel?

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Steve's shaking hands with every cop in the country, like.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
It's it's the thing. I mean, the thing is like Also,
I can only imagine how many of these children were
sexually assaulted but were too terrified. Never said you can't
say anything about it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
Yes, yep, yep. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
If you come home unable to speak, you know you're
not going to be able to say this person did
something to me.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
It also like, it takes a lot of trust, as
does anyone to talk about that. And if your parents
have just paid for you to be abducted for a year,
maybe you don't trust him anymore. Yeah, I wouldn't. Yeah,
it might not be smart to trust them after that.

Speaker 3 (01:06:14):
Well, these places also ruin families because of that too,
because even parents who were taken in, who were you know,
miss like, think about this, you know, they're going to
be the subject of a lot of hate and resentment, understandably,
understandably so for the rest of these kids' lives.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
Don't send your kids to these programs parents, you know anyway.
So now I will say this about Steve. He seems
to have a he was a customer as well as
a purveyor of these services, because he sent both of
his kids, I think to these programs. He definitely sent
his son David, who developed a drug problem, paid for

(01:06:52):
him to be kidnapped and taken to a wilderness camp.
Now I don't know much about David, but the documentary
that came out recently, Steve's wife says that David is
in prison at the time the documentary was formed. So
I'm going to guess not great. The tough love didn't
work here. Steve Cardesano died of a heart attack in
twenty nineteen. He left behind a massive industry largely formed

(01:07:16):
in his image. As this paragraph from an article in
Rolling Stone makes clear, his Wilderness Camp set the foundation
for thousands of other programs. More than one hundred and
twenty thousand children live in troubled teen facilities which include
wilderness programs. Training standards fluctuate drastically from organization to organization,
and in two thousand and five, the US Government Accountability
Office recorded more than fifteen hundred employees of involved in

(01:07:38):
litigation for abuse in thirty three states, and from twenty
eighteen to twenty twenty one, thirteen people were fired or
resigned from youth treatment centers in Utah due to sexual
behavior and sexual assault allegations, according to a twenty twenty
two investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
So, there was a TV show about wilderness Camp. I
remember that in like the two thousands, called like you know,
brat Camp or something like that, like camp. Yeah, it
had it had a that was like like they had
like a moment you know when doctor Phil is sending
them away to everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
See if we can get some good TV out of this.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
Yeah, and considering that they're you know, for it had
been more than like it'd been ten or fifteen years
and these children had been dying, It's it's like, that's
the thing that just drives me up the walls that
these places still existed, They still you know, there was
no no oversight that these places were able to get

(01:08:39):
even bigger.

Speaker 2 (01:08:41):
Yeah, you know, in the.

Speaker 3 (01:08:42):
Two thousands and and you know, in twenty tens, and
now finally you know, are being shut down, but are
probably going to spring up other places.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they'll have another renaissance at some point.
At least sixteen children have died in these facilities since
nineteen ninety. Thousands more suffered injury and trauma. As you noted,
attempts to reform the industry or even develop a comprehensive
understanding of its harm have been uneven at best. I
found an article by the BBC that summarizes the US

(01:09:11):
Government Accountability Office report in two thousand and seven, which
quote found it difficult to grasp the national picture due
to irregular licensing rules at the state level and ambiguity
surrounding the label's facilities used to describe themselves like boot
camps or therapeutic boarding schools. Still, the investigators found thousands
of allegations of abuse and several deaths at programs like

(01:09:32):
this around the United States and in US owned businesses.
So yeah, basically, like we found huge numbers of allegations
of physical sexual abuse, we found a number of deaths.
But there's so little standardization and even what these places
are called that it's impossible to get like the kind
of data that you would want to have for programs

(01:09:53):
like this. I can't say there's no evidence they fucking
work right. As a result of how like decentralized, all
of this is about how difficult it is to kind
of even find out what's going on. It's been left
to the parents of dead kids and to adult survivors
of these programs to try and force accountability. Cynthia Clark

(01:10:14):
Harvey is one of the former Her daughter Ericad died
of dehydration and heat stroke one day into a Nevada
program in two thousand and two. Cynthia had done her
homework in trying to pick a place for her daughter,
and by two thousand and two there were state licensing
requirements so she thought, like, this place is licensed by
the state, it's accredited, they have a good reputation. This
should be safe and then quote. After weeks of deliberation

(01:10:38):
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,

(01:10:59):
there was already a message waiting on their answering phone
telling them to call. They were told Erika had an
accident and staff were performing CPR. So Cynthia wound up
testifying to Congress about what had happened to her daughter.
And she's been joined in her advocacy by a number
of celebrity survivors of these programs, most famous among them
Paris Hilton, who has funded a significant amount of advocacy

(01:11:21):
in documentary journalism to try to bring this industry to
an end. It's taken a long time, but the work
of these survivors and parents is borne fruit, as this
article in the Salt Lake Tribune makes clear. Legislators enacted
more regulations in twenty twenty one in response to increased
scrutiny in recent years of youth treatment programs amid allegations
of mistreatment and abuse. The legislation placed limits on the

(01:11:43):
use of restraints for all programs and addressed the use
of drugs and isolation rooms and residential centers. It also
earmarked more money to hire more state regulators who now
go into youth treatment programs more often, and it requires
programs to report when a staff member used a physical
restraint on a young person or puts them in seclusion.
Perhaps the greatest damage has been done to the reputation

(01:12:04):
of the industry as a whole, and that may ultimately
be the thing that's actually does more to kill it
than any of these regulations, right, is the fact that
at this point, the sheer weight and you know, celebrity
has helped with this of attention on this has given
it a black eye. In twenty twenty three, nearly half
of Utah's wilderness camps shut down. The ones that remain
are hosting only a fraction of their full capacity. So

(01:12:26):
as you've said, you know, we can be hopeful that
this thing is dying out, but uh, you know, someone
will come along with something else at some point.

Speaker 3 (01:12:36):
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

(01:12:58):
the best that you know, they can do. Yeah, and
you know, that helped shut down some of the some
of the like some of the places like this that
were actually school schools. You know, if something has a
bad enough reputation, sometimes that sort of you know, starves
itt of oxygen and you know, yeah, and it's I
don't know, I think that that's one of the one

(01:13:21):
of the best things, one of the only things really
that can happen. And yeah, you're right, probably something something
else that's just as shitty might take its place. But yeah,
hopefully hopefully these places will not be around much longer.

Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's as good a note to
end on as any Mara Wilson, Mara, your memoir Where
Am I Now? Out in stores, available on the internet,
being beamed into space to be listened to by our
coming alien overlord so that they can understand human culture.
Congratulations on that contract, by the way, that's a big one.

(01:13:58):
Anything else you want to plug before we roll out?

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
Yeah, I've been writing articles for The Guardian about psychology
and wellness, and I've been doing a lot of audiobook
narration these days. I love doing it voiceover and audiobooks
or narration are like my favorite thing. You can find
a lot of those books on liber dot FM. And
also I wrote another short memoir called Good Girls Don't,

(01:14:24):
which is about being a pissed off people pleaser, and
that is available on what was formerly known as scribbed
and I believe is now called ever Rand.

Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
So yeah, change scribed.

Speaker 3 (01:14:36):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
Excellent. Thank you so much, Mara. You've been wonderful, and
you listeners have also been wonderful listening to this these
horrible stories of terrible things. You know, go go hug
a kitten or you know again. Drive to the corporate
offices of.

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):
No, Absolutely not.

Speaker 1 (01:15:09):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:15:30):
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