Cindy Ettler (0:00)

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Please take care while listening. Drop the precious blood of thy Christ, Amen and changing them by Thy Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Amen. This is the Orthodox Christian priest Father Cassian Newton, formerly known as Dr. Miller Newton. He sits at the pulpit wearing an emerald green robe, surrounded by oil paintings of saints and flanked by two acolytes who bow to him during the service. At one point they open a white metal gate in the shape of a cross that separates Newton from his congregation, and his parishioners approach him one by one to receive his blessing. Newton is the chairman and director of the Christ at the Sea Foundation, a nonprofit organization that offers religious services and retreats at his compound in Madeira Beach, Florida. I don't want to get myself in trouble, but I ended up back in Florida for a brief time, and I knew about this compound that he's got. I had a friend drive me by this compound just to see. This is Tammy, the street survivor who you heard at the end of last episode, who tracked Newton to his newest nonprofit. While she used to leave in voicemails, she eventually decided to go see him in person. It ain't no religious retreat. Trust me and believe when I say that as sure as I'm breathing right now, he's got somebody up in that compound against their will. This is not a priest. This is not a man of God. If there is a devil on this earth, he is it. He's the reason I walk around always armed. I have a gun next to me right now. Tammy didn't get out of the car that day. She says the thought of it makes her afraid. Not of Miller Newton, but of what she might have done if she was face to face with him again. It's for the best that she didn't confront him, but I do know people who have. I worked at a hair salon maybe a mile or two from his house, and one day I just kind of got a little antsy and decided to drive over and knock on the door. This is Kimberly. She was in the Kids of Bergen county as a teenager from 1988 to 1990. A decade later, she was living in Madeira Beach. She was following the court cases in New Jersey that would eventually bankrupt Miller Newton. That's when she found out that he had come home to Florida and decided to pay him a visit. Unlike Tammy, she found herself face to face with Miller Newton. And he had a priest's collar on, and he wasn't as tall as I thought he was. You know, he's hunched over a little bit more. His posture isn't so great. And he was a regular ass person. He had this little place with a couple of parents worshiping him, and that was fine. That was plenty. He didn't need a big building with 300 kids. And I realized right then he was an absolute megalomaniac. And I realized it wasn't muddy, but it was the power. He finally asked me, what are you doing here? What'd you come here for? And I said, I don't know. I don't know if I came here to give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I came here for closure. Maybe I came here to blow up your house. But I do know that I'm not on first phase anymore, and you can't sit me down. And I just walked away. And I know I drove away crying, but it was absolutely invigorating. It makes me happy to hear that Kimberly was able to do so much healing in that single moment. But she isn't saying that it fixed everything. She knows that she'll be trying to process her trauma for the rest of her life, just like every other survivor. For those of us who went through Straight or the Seed or kids, the places where we were traumatized are long gone, and so are most of the people responsible. Those who are still around to answer for it will never give us the closure we're looking for. So it's up to us, the survivors, to figure it out for ourselves. Most of us are still haunted by one big question. How? Not how did this happen, but how do we move on? And more urgently, how do we make sure that what happened to us never happens to anybody else ever again? My name is Cindy Ettler, and this is the sunshine. We reached out to Miller Newton for comment. He declined. Noticeably absent from his remarks was anything resembling an apology. And there wasn't even a hint of repentance in his voice. Even if Newton refuses to own up to what he did, the evidence is everywhere. A simple online search for Miller Newton Straight ink reveals countless websites, forums, and social media posts dedicated to documenting his abuse. But that wasn't the case back when Kimberly went knocking on Miller Newton's door. The Internet as we know it today had yet to change the world. And not many people even knew how to get online. One of my first boyfriends, he had a computer at home and he very much encouraged me to learn programming. So I already had the skills before the Internet was accessible to the masses. This is Ginger. She spoke in an earlier episode about brainwashing and torture at Straight Incorporated in Florida when Miller Newton was clinical director. Ginger left Straight in the early 1980s. By the late 90s, she had become a self described computer geek and keyboard warrior, using her computer skills to advocate for drug policy reform. Then something happened that brought back memories from a time in her life that she tried to leave in the past. We also have an opportunity during this legislative session to fight the scourge of drugs in our communities. In 1999, Jeb Bush, the newly elected governor of Florida, announced a $540 million anti drug plan. Our budget recommendation increases funding by 80% to fight this Battle Bush made the announcement at a press conference in a Miami suburb not far from where the Dade county branch of the Seed had been located back in the 70s. And he sounded a lot like the founder of the Seed, Art Barker, when he said it shouldn't be cool for young people to drink or do drugs. I hope there will be a whole culture of young people who are changing the way that all of us look at drugs. It made me think of those late night open meetings when Art Barker would be railing about the glorious future we had before us, when you won't even have to send your kids to a program because the whole country will be the program. Ginger had grown up in a Seed family. Four out of her five older siblings were in the program before she was sent to Straight. So for her, Jeb Bush's speech hit a little too close to home. And among his talking points was, I think $100 million in funding for juvenile drug rehabilitation. That stood out in my mind because I knew that the Bush family were tight with Straight Incorporated. But as far as Ginger knew, Straight had been shut down a long time ago. After benefiting from years of political support from the Reagans and Bushes, the program's abusive tactics finally caught up with it. No amount of political goodwill could shield it from the $15 million in legal settlements and the widespread negative media coverage. The last Straight treatment facility closed its doors in 1993. Still, Ginger was wary about any member of the Bush family becoming involved in drug policy. So she voiced her concerns to fellow drug policy advocates. I said, well, I've never talked about this to you before. This is going to sound crazy. I don't really care if you think I'm crazy, because this is really important. Ginger told them about Straight. To her surprise, some of them knew all about it. And they knew something that she didn't. Straight Incorporated hadn't gone away Since 1995, Drug Free America foundation, or DFAF, has been committed to following the vision of our founders, Betty and Ambassador Mel Sembler, cultivating a world where people can live free from the burden of drug use. In 1995, Strait rebranded as the Drug Free America Foundation. The founder of the organization, Mel Sembler, changed its mission from drug rehabilitation to drug policy. Treating patients had left Straight exposed to liability. So the Drug Free America foundation was going to make its impact by swaying public opinion. They lobby against any attempt to soften are drug laws, and they pour millions of dollars into lobbying against any legalization efforts. Mel Sembler was never held accountable for his involvement in Strait in fact, he was more powerful than ever before. Remember, for Mel Sembler, founding Strait was a career launchpad. He went from building shopping malls to rehab facilities to political fundraising. By the 2000s, he was influencing presidential elections. So not only had Mel Sembler not faced any consequences over Strait, he was using his status to breathe new life into the organization. I thought, this cannot happen without me making some noise. Ginger wanted to raise awareness about the sordid history of the Drug Free America Foundation. But she wasn't sure where to start. So her activist friends gave her a suggestion. They told her to get in touch with a man named Wes Fager. Fager worked for the Department of defense in Washington D.C. for over 30 years before retiring to pursue a passion, the takedown of Straight Incorporated. He was a former Straight parent who had tried unsuccessfully to sue the organization over the abuse that his son experienced in the program. Since then, he had been obsessively gathering information that he planned to turn into a book exposing the dark underbelly of Strait. He sent me a copy of the rough draft of his book and I read it. And what he's saying is, it's not your imagination. You're not paranoid. These really are the people behind the drug war. Wes Vegar wanted to get the information out to as many people as possible. That's why he was writing the book. But Ginger had a better idea. The Internet. By 2000, the Internet service provider America Online was in over 20 million homes around the country and growing fast. I said, the people that you're trying to reach, they're all on aol. So what we should do is open a website that's very user friendly, make it look and function like America Online. Really easy to interact, you know, peer to peer communication. You don't need an editor, you don't need a publisher, you don't need a broadcaster. Just start typing. So Ginger repurposed an old web server that she was using for something else. It was called fornits.com which was a reference to a short story by Stephen King. And so Fornits became the Internet's first discussion forum for stray survivors. It wasn't meant to be a forum for social interaction or healing or certainly not therapy. I knew that was way out of my depth. No, it was simply to provide a place where people could document their story and anyone with a computer could throw it all out there to the wind and see if something will take purchase. Prior to Fournitz, survivors of Strait had little choice but to try and process their trauma in isolation. There really Wasn't a way to find one another or know if anybody wanted to be found. Turns out they did. I didn't expect it to get big at all, but it got way out of hand really fast. One of the first people to engage with Fournets wasn't a straight survivor, but a former seedling. Somewhere around 2000, I Googled the Cedar Barker and up came this group, Fournets. This is Craig, who spoke in earlier episodes about his time at the Seed, the precursor to Straight in St. Petersburg. And in that group was Ginger Wes Fager. And they were talking about Straight and I made a post about the scene and then boom, it just developed into a big discussion. One of the people who joined that discussion was somebody else who spoke in this series, this kid Craig, who was on the seat in St. Pete. He wanted to talk to me. This is John Underwood, the former heroin addict turned staff member who became a true believer in art Barker and the Seed. One of the things I posted was, you may have failed the Seed, but the Seed never failed. Anyway, that's still how I feel. The Seed staffers and the Seed, people who claim to save their life always say the same thing. We had such a good thing going. If only this didn't happen. If only that didn't happen, and eventually one of them will open up rehab. It's just a reoccurring theme in this whole teen help industry, and it's really the thing that perpetuates it. Craig learned through discussions with survivors of various programs on fournets that when one program closed, others cropped up in its place. Craig's own father was a part of that cycle when he helped Mel Sembler start Straight, Miller Newton Left Straight and started Kids. And what the people on Fornitz were starting to realize was that those examples were only the tip of the iceberg. When they come into the program, they basically lose all freedoms except they can breathe and cough and sneeze everything else they have to request permission for. It's a high level of accountability. This is a clip from an investigative news report about a teen rehab in Orlando called safe, an acronym for Substance Abuse Family Education. This is a family treatment program, and unless the entire family is in treatment, it doesn't work. The day after Strait closed in Orlando, SAFE opened in the same building with the same staff and the same program. We motivate, which is how we get called on, and it seems a little ridiculous. The video was uploaded to Fournitz and it was eye opening to a lot of survivors. Once I saw that, I was like, it really Is straight. Oh, my God, it's still alive. There was just no denying it. This is Kathy. She spoke in an earlier episode about being part of the Mayflower group, which was the name given to the first group of kids at STRAIGHT in Fairfax County, Virginia. Kathy came to the same realization as many of the other survivors on Fournits street hadn't just transformed into the Drug Free America Foundation. It had mutated into dozens of copycat programs all over the country. So Kathy became obsessed with finding them. They took on many different forms, and not all of them kept kids locked in a warehouse. Kathy found a website for a wilderness program with photos of smiling children working together to overcome challenges in the great outdoors. I had kids of my own now, and some of them were preteens and teens. And that wilderness camp sounds really cool. You can get help with your confidence, and you can also get schooling while you're outdoors. I'm like, I would have loved that. But when Kathy did her research, she found case after case of gross negligence, rampant abuse, even death. I was just, like, flabbergasted. I thought, if somebody who's been through it now a parent can look at something like that and even think for a half a second that it sounds really good, that's bad. The Internet allowed teen rehab programs to reach more parents more easily than ever before. Kathy's parents had been convinced to send her to STRAIGHT at a PTA meeting. Now parents could be targeted by advertising anywhere they were online. I remember thinking, we have to get the word out there that they're not what they say they are. So I created a site called Straight Inc. Survivors. The growing online survivor community rallied around her site, offering support and encouraging her to dig even deeper. Cathy discovered that newer programs had become far more sophisticated in their marketing and recruitment strategies. And she had an epiphany about what exactly she was dealing with. It was business, nothing but business, and trying to make money off of people's fears for their kids. It was not health care. It was an industry. Cathy is often credited with coining the term the troubled teen industry. And most people point to Ginger and Fournets as having provided the spark for the explosion of troubled teen activism on the Internet. Of course, they weren't alone. Many others were working alongside them and independently to build a movement. I know from personal experience the harm that is caused by being placed in youth residential treatment facilities. When I was 16 years old. This is Paris Hilton. She's a survivor, too. She's among the growing number of high profile advocates speaking out about the dangers of teen rehab programs and pushing for the passage of federal legislation that would strengthen oversight of the industry. My parents were completely deceived, lied to and manipulated by this for profit industry about the inhumane treatment I was experiencing for the survivor community. The Internet has facilitated so much healing, but it has also revealed a dark side and a disturbing secret that nobody wants to talk about. The holidays are all about sharing with family meals, couches, stories, Grandma's secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also share a cart. With Instacart's family carts, everyone can add what they want to one group cart cart from wherever they are so you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce or who should get mini marshmallows for the yams or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then share the meals and the moments. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes plus enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and terms apply. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies where we rewatched every single episode of the Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me Steve? It is Cyrus Carell in the studio. Every Wednesday we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the Office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging into our mail bag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus on Mondays we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids instantly, set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids spending with real time notifications. Kids get to earn, save and spend wisely and parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight today@Greenlight.com Odyssey for a long time I didn't have access to the Internet. But once the Internet started becoming more popular, I looked up Straight Incorporated and I began Reading about what happened to me. This is Valerie. The series opened with her story of arriving at Strait in Sarasota, Florida on Halloween of 1982. Valerie was our window into what it was like to be thrown headfirst into the world of Straight Incorporated. And now she's going to tell us what it was like to adjust to life after Straight. For her, that started on a day in February of 1984 when she was pulled out of the group and brought to an office where her mom was waiting for her and demanding to take her home. To this day, Valerie isn't exactly sure why. I wonder if my mom thought like, why isn't my daughter ever progressing? Because although I didn't get along with my mom, my mom knew that I was an achiever. I wondered if my mom also thought, was she being used just for money? Whatever it was, she just got pissed off and pulled me out. Valerie left Straight that day with her mom as unexpectedly as she had arrived. They drove back to Daytona beach where Valerie was expected to pick up her life, where she left it like nothing had ever happened. She re enrolled in high school and managed to graduate later that spring as a 19 year old alongside her younger sister. In the fall, her sister left for college, leaving Valerie alone in the house with her mom. She was still dealing with the psychological whiplash of being pulled out of the program and dropped back into the real world. But she had no way of processing it. She and her mom didn't talk about it. All they did was argue. And I just remember getting into an argument with my mom and leaving the house and just saying, I'll never come back again. And from that point on, I was on my own. Technically, Valerie was an independent adult, but she didn't feel that way. Most days she felt like she was still trapped back at Straight. In the back of my mind I could hear the cries of those other girls. Sometimes it was distant and sometimes it was loud. And it would always bring me back to Straight. And I did not know how to cope with that. Valerie didn't know it, but she was suffering from severe post traumatic stress. All that she knew is that she was profoundly angry about what had happened to her. I was so pissed. I didn't pinpoint on anybody. I hated everybody. And I did feel like I was going to hurt somebody else. And so what I did is I learned how to hurt myself. Valerie's trauma manifested as self harm destructive behavior and compromising decision making. And I found myself in a situation that was not good for me and I didn't know how to get out. So I thought, just kill yourself. There have been many times in my own life where I've thought about suicide. I don't know many survivors who haven't at one time or another. It was almost like a self fulfilling prophecy. We were told constantly that without Straight we'd be dead. They reminded Valerie of that on the day she walked out the door for the last time. They said to me, if you leave today, you will die. If you leave today, you will commit suicide. I hate it that they said that to me. I hate that they put those words in my mind. The worst part about it is how right they were. I know way too many survivors who have taken their own lives. Ask anyone who was in Straight and they'll tell you the name of at least one person who they knew personally. There isn't any reliable record keeping that could point to an official number, but in one of the dark corners of the online survivor community, there's something called the suicide list. It's a Facebook page with the names of hundreds of survivors who are no longer with us. I started hearing that friends I knew in Straight were killing themselves. I instantly knew why. I mean, I was struggling after Straight, but it was alarming. That was so many. This is Marcus Chatfield, the Straight survivor turned historian who you've heard throughout the series. Right now, I think I know of 13 kids from straight that I knew personally who have committed suicide and Straight, There were maybe 200 people I knew by name. So for me, if it's 13 out of 200, that's astronomically larger than the national average. That average, according to the National Institute of mental health, is 14 people per 100,000. With so much anecdotal evidence about the suicide rate among survivors, it would be helpful to see the official data, but there is none. The only scientific studies on the teen treatment industry come from biased sources. There's a lot of research out there that's being done by staff members, people who are professionals in the field with their thumb on the scale, so to speak. They have a vested interest in not asking the right questions. And the questions that they're asking almost never include negative impacts of the program. Any research that shows negative effects is going to be dismissed by the treatment industry. They want to defend their careers, they want to defend their colleagues, their economic interests. In trying to show that these types of treatment methods work, Marcus isn't suggesting that the outcomes are a result of nefarious collusion or that these dynamics are exclusive to the teen treatment industry. Some of it boils down to human nature. The word treatment has positive connotations. So there's a built in bias against the idea that a treatment could actually be harmful. As obvious as it seems to anybody who's been in a program, there's a massive resistance against that idea. So I don't think the teen treatment industry wants to know about the negative impacts of how teen treatment interventions affect adult development. So in the absence of concrete research about the negative consequences of Straight and who is most susceptible, the most reliable analysis is anecdotal and it comes from those of us who were there. The people that committed suicide were people who had a really hard time adjusting, just got beat down and beat down and beat down emotionally to such an extent that they just never recovered. Marcus has never met Valerie, but he may as well have been describing her and her time at Straight Incorporated during its most notoriously sadistic period. Under the control of Miller Newton, Valerie has stories that are too awful to repeat. The weight of the psychic burden that she was forced to carry into adulthood was more than anyone should have to bear. Because of what happened to me in Straight, I wasn't ready to handle life really at all. And I didn't know how I was going to survive because the things in my brain hurt so bad. I thought it would put my mind to rest if I was to take my own life. Mallory can only remember drinking alcohol one time prior to Straight. But in the years that followed, she started drinking to numb her pain. By the late 1990s, Valerie's drinking had gotten really bad. An acquaintance offered to put her in touch with somebody who could help, a therapist. But Valerie was terrified by that idea. Straight had that twisted kind of therapy, and I literally thought a therapist would hit me, punch me, kick me, or possibly rape me. Valerie ultimately agreed, but found herself frozen. In her first several sessions, she couldn't bring herself to say a single word. Her first big breakthrough was when she was able to cry. Eventually, she worked up the courage to speak in therapy about the source of all her pain. And so then I had to start talking about what happened in straight. And that was just really difficult. I know it affects the other person. I know it does because it's real life and it's horrible. And sometimes I felt like I didn't want to tell my counselor and they just assured me they're trained and it's okay. Just say it, say it and then deal with it. Valerie has been in therapy for over two decades now. She's had several counselors during that time, including an expert in Cult deprogramming and a former combat veteran who specializes in treating ptsd. But all of Valerie's progress in therapy has been about getting back to where she started when she was a teenager before Straight. Now she feels nostalgic for the life she could have had. I never had regular milestones like everybody else, you know, like, that's what you do is you graduate and you go to college and then you find someone. But because everything was so hard, it's like those things didn't happen for me. So I find myself 58 and single. I always felt like with relationships that people don't really understand who I am. I'm afraid that someone's going to know of the way that I suffered, and it's going to scare them away. And so I didn't even know how to work a relationship. Like, what does that even look like? The stories that Valerie shared in this series are heartbreaking. But as I mentioned before, some of them will go untold. There was a lot of sexual abuse at Straight. In Valerie's case, it was perpetrated by other kids and adults, including Miller Newton. I don't feel like I could tolerate anyone touching me sexually, but it's something I do want to experience, and it's something that I can experience. And maybe I'm looking or maybe it's okay to look, you know, and to be happy, to be genuinely happy. Valerie has experienced two radically opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to rehabilitation. Straight's brand of therapy derailed the trajectory of her life. Proper mental health counseling set her back on course. She no longer feels buried underneath the rubble of her trauma. For a long time, I was afraid of crying because crying meant I was going to get beaten. And so I'd go to the beach and I would cry in the sand, and all I could see is the sand and my tears. And I told my counselor one time, and he said, valerie, I want you to do something. I want you to lift your head up. And he said, I want you to see the sun. And for the first time since that day that I went into Strait, I felt like I could see the sun again. It's been decades since I've been locked up and straight, and I thought that I would end up dead, and instead I'm loving my life. Valerie has made incredible progress, but finding happiness is still a constant struggle that she works through every day, because if she doesn't, somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she can still hear the cries of the other girls. Back at Strait, my counselor tried to help me to understand that all of those kids grew up and that some of them actually grew up to enjoy their life. And they stopped crying. And I always wonder, where are they now? I'm in Fernando, North Dakota, even though I hate the winter. It's awful, especially for a Florida girl. This is Tammy, who spoke at the beginning of the episode about driving past Miller Newton's compound. Now she lives about as far away as possible from the site of her trauma. When she was at straight in Florida with Valerie, there was only one Valerie. Yep, I remember her. She sat on me quite a bit. One of the most difficult parts about reconnecting with survivors is knowing that we were forced to be each other's abusers. In some ways, healing from our own trauma is easier than reconciling what we did to others. I don't have any hard feelings towards Valerie because I was forced to do the same shit. We all hurt other kids because it was our own ass on the line. So she should not have that guilt. None of us are innocent and all of us are victims. But you know what? I'm not a frickin victim. I'm a survivor. Being a part of the survivor community is emotionally exhausting, but by and large we've learned to forgive each other and ourselves. And we've reluctantly accepted that the facilitators of our trauma won't face retribution in this life. That just leaves the people most responsible for what happened to us. Which raises a question that will haunt many of us for the rest of our lives. How can we ever forgive our parents? When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof like Aloe Allbirds or Skims. Sure you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business. Making, selling and for shoppers buying. Simple for millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. And the not so secret secret with Shop Pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going. 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One day, my sister called and said, hey, I'm with mom, and she's making noises and sounds and she's not saying any words. And I said, I think mom had a stroke. Valerie was right. Her mom did have a stroke, the first of several she'd have in the early 2000s. At that point, Valerie's relationship with her mom was nonexistent. But after the first stroke, Valerie started dropping by her mom's house to help out. And she would always say, I don't want you here treating me like a baby. But she wasn't, like, making her meals or taking her medicine or washing her clothes. So every day I'd check in on her. Valerie's dynamic with her mom was still very fraught. She was in therapy and starting to talk about her unresolved trauma from Straight. But she was still a long way from being able to talk about it with her mom. My mom and I have never talked about the abuses of Straight. The way that I was going to punish my mom is she would never know because I just felt so betrayed and abandoned by my mom. I felt like she rescued me. I don't know how to say it like, I felt like my mom rescued me. This is Mario, Valerie's older brother, the one who she thought she was visiting when she ended up in Straight on Halloween 1982. His relationship with their mom and his experience at Straight couldn't have been more different than Valerie's. As Valerie told us in episode one, after their dad died, Mario's behavior became increasingly troubling, culminating in the night he and some friends broke into an apartment. There's a lot of adrenaline that pumps in your system when and you're breaking into a house. I picked up the speaker to steal it, and there was a can of lighter fluid behind it. Spur of the moment, lighter fluid, match mattress. Next thing you know, the occupied apartment complex is now on Fire. That stupid moment changed my life almost instantly. Mario was arrested and put in jail while he waited for his court date. The charges for the b and e and the arson and everything was 42 years. So I'm 18, and you know what I'm saying? I'm thinking, I'm not going to get out of here until I'm 60. Mario's mom was afraid and desperate to keep him out of prison. She tried to think of anything that might make him sympathetic to a judge when it came time for sentencing. Then she had an idea. Rehab. It was kind of known that if somebody was in rehab that a judge would like back off on them, they're not going to yank you out of rehab. So I think that my mom was trying to tuck me anywhere that was beneficial and not jail. So that's how Mario got to straight. His mom rented an apartment nearby and traveled back and forth every week to attend open meetings and parent reps. The whole process was expensive. I mean, with the apartment, the gas, the paying for the program, easy over $100,000, and that's just me. Mario thrived in straight. He had plenty of actual druggie stories to share in wraps, so he advanced fast. Every week in open meetings, his mom told him how proud she was. He even caught the attention of miller newton. I did some speaking engagements with miller newton. Mario graduated from the program in under a year and went on staff. You know, I mean, I thought I'd like to be one of the higher ups on the chain of command. But Mario says he was surprised when Valerie showed up at straight. I remember her coming in, and I remember thinking, what is she doing here? And just feeling helpless, you know, like, what am I supposed to do? He also says he was unaware of how much she was struggling. It seemed like Valerie was on first face for quite a long time and that I remember always thinking, what's wrong? It's been four decades since Mario and Valerie were in straight, and they've remained a part of each other's lives since then, but they've never had a meaningful discussion about their experience. I never said, valerie, what happened to you in strait? Whenever Valerie would talk about straight and be really emotionally affected by it, I don't know what it is that she's feeling, because if you would have asked me what was straight like for you, my primary answer would have been, I felt like it really helped me. Valerie didn't have that experience. She would describe it as having ruined her life. And I always felt like she got swept in with me by mistake. Valerie Says that's about as close as he's ever come to saying anything like that to her. I think Mario thinks that maybe it's his fault that I went into straight, and that's why he doesn't talk about it. And I think that Mario does know that I suffered, and he takes that on himself. And I don't want to put the blame on him, so I try to, like, give him all kind of grace. Valerie doesn't want an apology from Mario, but she wishes they could talk about their experience before it's too late. She never got that chance with her mom, whose health only continued to decline. I felt like, as her oldest daughter, that it was my turn to step up and take care of my mom. And so I would always go over there and take care of her. But I had to learn how to forgive my mom to take care of her. I had to learn how to forgive her, to shower her and to feed her like a child. And I felt like that was really healing for me to take care of my mom. Sometimes she wasn't able to talk. Sometimes she was. But I always said, mom, please tell me you love me. She would just, like, smile, but she never would say those. And I really wanted her to say it. Just tell me one time, Mom. Could you just tell me one time that you love me? And I felt like somewhere my mom, in her heart, she really loved me. Just didn't know how to say it, you know? But I got to love my mom in the end the way that she should have loved me. It's beyond admirable that Valerie was able to get to that place with her mom. I certainly didn't. I don't talk to my mother much anymore. She doesn't have a place in my adult life. She lost that privilege for the way she treated me when I was a kid. A lot of us feel that way about our parents, and a lot of our parents feel that way about us, too. There was something wrong with my mom long before for the program, and the program didn't help make it any better. And, no, she would never think she had anything to apologize for. She was a martyr. No apology. There's never been an acknowledgement. You know, maybe we fucked up. Their answer is always, we did what we had to do. Others were able to reach an uneasy truce with their parents. I often tried to cut myself off from her, but we maintained a relationship, and she got close to sort of kind of saying that she might have felt bad. We reached a point in our relationship where we didn't have to talk about it anymore. And I was happy with that. And I think he was too. He came from a broken family, and he created one as well. And still others have found a way to make amends. A lot of people are shocked that I even still talk to my parents, but my dad has said sorry to me. And my dad knows that his actions have hurt me and that they affected me negatively. It's harder with my mom. She is more defensive, you know, which always feels like, I'm sorry, but this is why it's okay that I hurt you. I want to have a much better relationship with my daughter than I do with my mom. Some program survivors, like a lot of other people with trauma in their childhood, have tried to heal those wounds through their relationships with their own children. The only great thing I ever did was I raised a good kid and I made sure she went to college and became something I'm not. I did good in that regard. I'm very proud of my daughter. I love her to death. For some people, as hard as they might try, they end up repeating the mistakes of their parents. Having a messed up childhood doesn't guarantee that you'll do any better. It often means quite the opposite, because trauma is generational. That's why I've chosen not to be a parent myself. But I have dedicated my life to breaking that cycle of abuse. Hi. Hi. I haven't seen you in forever. Oh, my gosh. I know. I missed you. I became a certified teen life coach. I work with kids who are just like I was at their age. What is happening? Anything big happen? Oh, my gosh. So today when I got home, you would not believe what happened. Is it what I think happened? I don't have all the answers for their parents. Nobody does. Especially not those who claim they do. But I've devoted every day since I got out of straight to finding a better way forward for struggling teenagers. You know, like, when you're writing, like an essay, you have a. Like you have a hook. Yeah. We could do like. Yeah, good idea. Okay, wait, we have to write this down right there. So this is what I tell their parents. You have to let go. Your teenager is rebelling. Because that's what teenagers are supposed to do. They're trying to figure out how to become adults themselves. It's instinctual for parents to want to steer them in the right direction. But too often, that desire manifests as control, which leads to rebellion. Instead of being demanding, be curious and ask questions about what they think, want, and feel. Listen without suggestion or correction. And if they ask, offer your advice, be there for them, but let go of control. And that's exactly the opposite of what a program like Straight will tell you. It's natural to be afraid for your kid, but don't fall victim to those who look to prey on that fear. Don't be convinced that they can do better than you. Don't ever let them deny you from loving your child. You actually gave me another idea. Okay, let's see. This is a great idea, bro. We're low key eating today. I don't consider my experience at Straight to be a tragedy. I choose to view it as preordained, a necessary experience that made me into who I am today. A survivor, part of a community that is fighting back by raising awareness, advocating for regulation and legislation that might one day put an end to the institutionalized child abuse taking place in the troubled teen industry. So that nobody has to tell a story like this one ever again. The Sunshine Place is an Odyssey original podcast. It's written, directed and produced by Perry Crowell. Our writer producer is Margot Gray. Our story editors are Maddie Sprung Keyser and Lloyd Lockridge, executive produced by Robert Downey Jr. Susan Downey and Emily Barclay Ford from Team Downey, Jenna Weiss Berman and Maddie Sprung Kaiser from Odyssey and Josh McLaughlin. Edited by Perry Crowell, mixing and mastering by Bill Schultz, production support from Sean Cherry and Paul Anderjak and narrated by me, Cindy Ettler. Special thanks to J.D. crowley, Leah Reese, Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff. If you want to hear more of the Sunshine Place, please take a moment to rate and review the show. It really helps. You might think financial crime is all about money, but sometimes it ends in murder. I'm Nicole Lapin, host of Money Crimes, a Crime House Original Podcast. Each episode features a thrilling story about the dark side of finance and how to protect yourself from it. Follow and listen to Money Crimes and Odyssey Podcast in partnership with Crimehouse Studios. Available on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.