June 18, 2024 • 58 mins
The seminars were part of WWASP’s unique treatment model. Elaborate, psychological processes created by two facilitators that left a trail of trauma in their wake. We will hear from both survivors and parents what it was like to endure these often days-long experiences.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following episode contains disturbing and graphic accounts of survivor experiences.
It may not be suitable for younger audiences. Please listen
with care.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
From iHeartRadio, London Audio and executive producer Paraceltan. This is
Trapped in Treatment. I'm Rebecca Mellinger.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Grown and I'm Caroline Cole. Join us on our journey
to uncover the hidden truths of an industry shrouded in scandal.
We're on a mission to make sure that no child
has to experience the hell that is the troubled teen industry.
This season for diving into the Worldwide Association of Specialty
(00:46):
Programs and Schools or WASP, one of the largest teen
treatment networks in the world, masterminded by one man, Robert Litchfield.
The stories you will hear in the following episode are
the personal allegations and accounts of individuals who have attended
treatment at one of these facilities. All experiences, views, and
(01:09):
opinions are their own.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Last week, we broke down the unique seminar model that
Lichfield created for his WASP programs. The seminars were designed
to break down emotional patterns and force you to reflect
on your choices but in reality, they cause deep emotional
trauma and silent interior scars for many of the survivors.
Here's Aaron describing one of the exercises.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
They like slide this towel with duct tape around it
in front of you, and they're like grab the towel
and like let it out basically, and I like, you
grab it, like whacking the floor with the towel and
like screaming like not like not like I don't even know,
Like I'm never screamed like that before or since in
(02:02):
my entire life. I was in labor without an epidural
for a long time. I've never screamed like that.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
The seminars weren't exclusive to students. Parents also attended them,
including my mom Meredith. They were told their participation in
the seminars would lead to better results for their kids,
so how could they not want to do it? But
my mom had a different takeaway than what the seminar
facilitators were probably hoping for.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
I think they are incredibly abusive seminars. I don't know
who's developed these courses. I don't know who's developed them,
but they are an abuse. It's almost like, to me,
an experiment in sadism against humans. Let's see how far
(02:54):
we can push these people and then laugh at them.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The troubled teen industries inside workings were a mystery to
many people, and today we get to hear from someone
who neither worked for WASP nor attended any of the programs.
So far, we have heard the allegations of survivors and
parents who have made their way through WASP affiliated facilities,
but in this episode, we're going to hear from a journalist,
(03:22):
one of the only journalists ever granted access to Tranquility Bay,
a WASP affiliated behavior modification center on the coast of Jamaica.
In early two thousand, Decca Akenhead arrived in the Jamaican
town of Treasure Beach. She was a journalist for the
(03:42):
well respected British publication The Guardian at the time and
was on assignment covering a new hotel in the area.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
I was sent there on a storre to do a
story in Kingston in the early nineties, and then it
was asked to come down to the beach to write
a review of a little hotel called Jakes, which had
just opened. And there's no accounting to why some places
just grab your heart. Is there, but as since I
riding beach and I really felt like the place that
I wanted to be in A spent as much time
as human as possible here ever since then.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Treasure Beach is a small, isolated fishing town on the
southern coast of Jamaica. It's over two hours from the
capital city of Kingston and about the same from Montego
Bay Airport. The roads getting there are notoriously bumpy, but
the distance and remoteness of it all didn't deter Decca.
Decca shared that she fell in love with Treasure Beach immediately,
(04:34):
so much so that she and her family rented a
house by the beach, settled in, and got to know
the locals in the area. Decca often explored the surrounding
area when she wasn't working, but in what would otherwise
be paradise, there was something in the small town that
stood out to her. On a stretch of picturesque beach,
just a few hundred yards from her house was a
(04:56):
white stucco building that she says looked like an abay
and a hotel. Its doorways and windows stood open, and
the property was surrounded by high metal fencing. What she
saw was Tranquility Bay. Much like facilities such as Casta
by the Sea or Paradise Cove, Tranquility Bay's name did
(05:18):
not match what was going on behind closed doors.
Speaker 5 (05:22):
I would walk past Tranquility Bay most mornings with my dog,
and at first I thought it was a really sort
of maybe a sort of stemiderrelict hotel. And then I
noticed these guards, which cut a slightly odd figure in this.
As I said, what looked like a sort of a
hotel that had been abandoned and was down on its luck.
(05:43):
But then one morning I noticed this crocodile of white
teenage children. They kind of marched in single file across
the property. Most of them had their head shaved, and
it was such a bizarre and strange spectacle that that's
when we began just asking around locally, you know, what
is that place at the end of the day, what
(06:04):
are these kids doing there?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Being the journalist that she is, Decca started digging. She
told us that the responses she got back from the
people in her area were unexpected. At first, she thought
it was just local gossip.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
I guess it's true of any small village, but it's
very definitely true. A treasure Beach that you'll hit all
kinds of rumors and sort of half truths, and people
get in the wrong end of the stick about this,
that or the other. And so when people first started
to tell me what it was, I thought, well, obviously,
just absolutely nonsense, because knows where people have got this
(06:41):
idea that this is. It just sounded so manifestly and plausible,
so preposterous that I remember laughing with my husband, going, God,
is this is hilarious that people think that that's what's
going on. I wonder what it really is, because what
people were telling us was that it was essentially a
private prison law American children, and that seemed so articularly,
(07:04):
I mean, how could there possibly be a private prison
in the middle of nowhere on the south coast of
Jamaica for American children. It just didn't make any sense.
So I thought it was like many of them sploys here,
intermsopeople that were just a jumble of misunderstanding, and that
that's all it was.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
So she went back to her house and did an
Internet search, something that was still quite new at the time.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
But then it was in the very very early days
of the Internet that we were one of the very
few people in the village to have an Internet connection,
and it was one of those all dial up systems,
and it was pre Google. I can't even remember the
name of the search engine. And I'll never forget sitting
at my desk with my heart sort of stopping and
I'm staring at the screen and I'm scrolling and I'm searching.
(07:49):
And it turned out that everything that people have been
telling us the village was more or less completely true.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
It's telling that people from the outside thought Tranquility Bay
was a private prison while it was technically a therapeutic
boarding school and not a literal detention center. It does
underscore how many survivors felt at Tranquility Bay. While doing research,
Ducca on earthed marketing websites for Troubled Teen programs, as
(08:20):
well as news articles describing various allegations of abuse. At
the time, Decca had never heard of the Troubled teen
industry or facilities like this.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
I discovered reading on my laptop that it was precisely
as they said, that these children have been sent here
to be locked up the extended periods of time, and
that this was a completely legitimate facility that was part
of this phenomenon called the troubled teen industry. The one
important caveat which I subsequently discovered to be not true
(08:54):
is that I was being told by locals in the
village that these children were extreme criminals, extreme drug addicts,
the wicked of the best of the wicked. This is
of course pri Guantanamo Bay, but essentially they were sort
of describing these teenagers and the catgor of the worst
of teenagers, as if they were terrorists, that it had
(09:17):
to be sent to this special facility because they were
so wicked. And I was also told that, you know,
they'd all been sent here by the courts, and that
I subsequently discovered could not have been further from the truth.
But that was the story that everyone in the community
had been told about, and that's when I began reading
about it and began what was a long and protracted
(09:42):
campaign to persuade the owners of the facility to grant
me access as a journalists to write about it.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Tranquility Bay opened its stores sometime around nineteen ninety six.
Its owner was JK a young man who worked his
way up from the night security shift at bright Way
Adolescent Hospital. The same hospital, Robert Litchfield acquired the operational
rights to and became what seemed like an unofficial funnel
to other WASP institutions. While DECO waited to hear back
(10:11):
from administrators about gaining access to the facility, she continued
her research and the web just kept growing more and
more complex.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
Back then, Worldwide Association's specialty program was expanding rapidly. What
was striking was the number of them that were in
parts of the world with shall we say, pretty elastic
relationship with good governance facilities and so places like they
(10:40):
had one in Samoa. So it's pretty obvious it didn't
get a genius to look at the locations of their facilities,
and even within the United States, they tend to be
a more impoverished state where were it would be obvious
that a large tax paying employer would be very welcome
within the community. So obviously that raised a lot of suspicions.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
DECA believes that whilst made it a habit of opening
programs in far off places that provided protection due to
their isolated location, not to mention the financial incentives of
local job growth and tax revenue for the locations to
support its endeavors.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
And the fact that several facilities are already been closed.
There was a series of closures, as one in Costa
Rica that were related to abuse or concerns about the
operational standards or the integrative facilities. So it was very
clear that this was both an organization that was growing
(11:42):
and making lots of money, and it was a company
with a cherry checked history already of facilities around the world.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
One detail in particular stood out to her.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
What was also striking about the organization is that it
was a very tight next family owned and run operations,
and that also raised questions about them about corporate governance
and about accountability and all of the questions that immediately
you wonder about when you see an organization being run
(12:19):
by family members whose credential qualifications are frankly, sure, to put.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
It mildly, Decca had picked up on something interesting the
tight knit nature of the WASP organization. Though not every
program affiliated with WASP was run by one of Lichfield's
family members, many of those who opened facilities or ran
the organization had some kind of personal relationship with him.
(12:48):
We see that clearly with JK and his father ken K.
Ken K served as the president of WASP and was
hired by Robert Litchfield Both father and son also previously
worked a bright Way adolescent hospital back in Saint George, Utah.
But Decca felt that Jk's qualifications to run a program
like Tranquility Bay were lacking.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
JK has been twenty seven when he opened the facility,
and his prior work history has been he'd been a
gas station attendant, and he'd been a kind of administrator
in a juvenile psychiatric facility in Utah that has been
(13:32):
run by what he had been a college dropout. He
had absolutely no educational qualifications in child development whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
According to Decca, and has reflected in her reporting for
The Guardian. When questioned about his qualifications, the younger K
was dismissive. He told Decca quote, experience in this job
is better than any degree. Am I an educational expert? No,
But I know how to hire people to get the
job done. He also said that he had the best
(14:06):
job in the world.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
JK was very much of the view that that was
all to the better, and that these silly people with
their newfangled ideas and their fancy diplomas know nothing, and
he was the ultimate authority on how you fix children.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Decca wasn't aware of the troubled teen industry prior to
her moving to Jamaica, but she kept digging and pushing
to gain access to Tranquility Bay. Finally, three years later,
she got the nod of approval. The fact that she
was even able to write about the facility and spend
an extended period of time inside was almost unprecedented. A
(14:47):
journalist from Time magazine visited in nineteen ninety eight, but
other than that, the media was not overly welcomed. She
doesn't know exactly why JK finally gave in, except that
when she talked to him, it was obvious that he
truly believed that this was a great program. He took
pride in it.
Speaker 5 (15:06):
Yeah, I think he got quite quite a proud you know,
he quite enjoyed showing its showing off. He was a
curious mixture of cynical and oddly guile. You know, he
didn't cite me as a very sophisticated person, and he
was torn between his kind of instinctive cynicism and wariness
(15:32):
of me and terrific pride in his facility uncertainty that
any right minded individual got to look at it would
feel nothing but impressed.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
I asked Daka, what she thought made JK feel that
specific way.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
The short, rather unkind answer would be that he was.
He had that overweening confidence of only breathtaking ignorance and
bisco the letty knew, the more certain he was, he
was a classific example of that kind of personality. A
longer answer might be that he was as much a
(16:11):
production you could give if they're victim of the thought
process and the thinking that created Tranquility Base, and he
had grown up in that. His father was very ston
remembering what it was. I don't think Jaka could conceive
of the idea of regent or a critically or an
(16:33):
objective view, or any of the above. And that very
way of thinking is exactly what informs the entire process
of the program that they instituted, Tranquility Bay and the
world into which the teenagers who are sent there found themselves.
And when you're in that world, the only way that
you can survive it and never escape it is by
(16:56):
appearing to a thousand internalized and all of the views
of belief system. It's a kind of totalitarian mindset that melodramatic.
That's essentially what they created, and JK was as much
a product of it as he was an author of it.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Decca's entry into Tranquility Bay required some terms and conditions.
The timing felt a little suspect too.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
Once they decided to grant me access, this came with
a great number of concerns and conditions. They arranged my
visit to coincide with the annual sports day or funday
at which a group of parents would be arriving who
were going to be taking their children homes. So these
(17:43):
are very satisfied customers who have sent their children here,
their children's work, the program, they've worked through to level six,
they've achieved the status whereby the facility says that these
tools are not cured and fixed. They're ready to go
home and their parents down to collect. And I was
also given access to any of the parents who were
willing to talk to me, But the vast majority of
(18:06):
the two hundred and fifty children who were there were
not in that category, and they ranged in age from
by memory. Some would be as young as fourteen, some
were as old as eighteen. One girl was even nineteen.
With each child on the arrival of assigns to what
they would call a family, which would be a single
(18:28):
sex group of about twenty other children, and they would
all sleep in one large concrete floored, whitewashed concrete wall,
completely bare rooms which just had chains on the walls
which levered down into if you can imagine a wooden door,
(18:51):
just to kind of large about the size of the
wooden doors, a piece of wood hooked to chain which
they would hook to the wall when they got up
in the morning and unhook at the end of the
day to get into bed. So it's absolutely Barton. It's
a concrete breath block, metal chains and wooden slabs that
(19:12):
they let on that it the facility was. I mean,
JK made no bones about it, and he said he
wanted to make it a place where nobody wanted to be.
And in that respect, my body to decree. The most
striking thing, Rebecca about them that I remember from the
(19:32):
moment we were introduced is that they had this really
straight I'd never really encountered it before, and teenagers before,
this kind of vacant, robotic, almost automaton like zombie, almost
demeanor manner. They spoke in these very kind of mechanical voices.
(19:55):
They had these very kind of vacant expressions in their faces.
And yes, they spoke as it felt like speaking to
people who've been programmed with the script, and every time
a question would deviate from the script or they would
look completely thrown and unable to unable to answer a
(20:15):
simple question.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Right around the same time that Decca arrived in Jamaica,
a young girl had also landed at the small seaside facility. Lindsay,
who we heard from in episode three, was fresh off
her stint at Cross Creek Manor in Laverk in Utah.
But any tiny flicker of hope Lindsay had for something
better got extinguished pretty fast.
Speaker 6 (20:43):
Well, Jamaica itself is absolutely breastaking. It is beautiful. It
is I mean, it's the Tropics. It's gorgeous, and so
on my way up there, seeing all that, I was
kind of hopeful that this was going to be a
lot more fun. Until we got probably two miles away
from the facility and it all became brushed and dirt roads.
(21:05):
And as we pulled up, I could tell there was
nothing else around for miles besides this compound that was
heavily gated. And as I came in, you know, I
saw the lines of people all, you know, looking straight
ahead in their uniforms, and I thought, oh great, this
(21:27):
is another, you know, another Cross Creek, but worse. And
I had no idea. I had no idea how much
worse it was going to be.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
According to Lindsay, she got sent to Tranquility Bay because
she wasn't adhering to the program at Cross Creek.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
Basically what happened was the Cross Creek staff got sick
of my shit and they felt like they were not
getting the response from me that they were supposed to
be getting. I wasn't falling in line, and so they hadn't.
I'm sure they coordinated coordinated it with my parents, but
they ended up sending me to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica
(22:04):
because I did not work the program at all in Utah.
So that was how that worked out.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
For Lindsay, who had spent several months at Cross Creek.
Some of the conditions at Tranquility were vastly different.
Speaker 6 (22:19):
Jamaica was a lot more structured.
Speaker 7 (22:21):
The staff were just at first, it was very difficult
to understand them because they had thick Petois accents, which
I had never been exposed to before as a dumb
girl from the West Coast.
Speaker 6 (22:36):
So it took me a while to you know, even
be brave enough to ask him he use a bathroom
because they were so like foreign and frightening, and they
just had no problem just shouting at the girls, and
I just scared the crap out of me.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
These types of scare tactics played a role at other
Troubled teen facilities, but there was a dramatic difference between
Cross Creek and Tranquility Bay.
Speaker 6 (23:05):
Well, when it is a third world country and the
other is not. There were, you know, just wooden slats
for windows that you would just turn, and I remember
thinking that was different because there was no there was
no glass window panes or anything like that. Everything was
dirt and wood and everything was just structure, meticulous structure.
(23:30):
The showers or outdoors. We had to close our we
had to hang our clothes on a line outside, just
like not that big of a deal, but it was
just stuff I had never done before, as you know,
a kid who grew up the way I grew up.
And the main difference I think was in Cross Creek
(23:52):
there was at least some semblance of we're trying to
help you. We're trying to care about your you know,
psychological needs, your recover. We neeeds if you're you know,
if that's what you came here for. Jamaica was not
like that at all.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
A few months after Lindsay arrived, another young girl, Chelsea,
was sent to Tranquility Bay, But unlike Lindsay, Chelsea didn't
have any prior experience with a WASP affiliated facility. She
came straight from one terrible situation to another.
Speaker 8 (24:22):
So yeah, so my childhood was pretty normal. I grew
up outside of ann Arbor, Michigan. I lived there for
a while. Well, actually we moved there in seventh grade,
and that was around the time that I started dealing
with bullying in school. So middle school was rough, and
then early high school was also rough, and I would
(24:47):
say probably about my junior By my junior year of
high school, I had pretty much decided that I was
just done, I guess, done trying to be a good
kid anymore. So I went really hard in the opposite
direction and stopped going to school. I stopped participating in classes,
and just pretty much went the other direction. And my
(25:12):
parents tried a lot of different things. They tried having
me go to therapy. At one point, I lived with
a friend's family for the summer. I got kicked out
a couple of times, and then I had a really
horrible week. I was sexually assaulted and told my parents
(25:35):
about it, and they made me report it to the police,
and I had to go get a rape kit done,
and during the rape kit, they did a drug test
and it came back positive, and so they told my
parents that I was also on substances, which probably contributed
to what happened to me. I didn't process that very well.
(26:00):
And then I went to a counseling session with my
therapist and I was not in a great headspace, and
she told my parents that she didn't think that she
could work with me anymore and that they needed to
try something more. I guess intense and showed them a
brochure for Tranquility Bay, and by the end of that week,
I was in Jamaica.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
That consecutive sequence of events truly did not make her
move to Jamaica any easier. Chelsea shares that the transition
was a drastic and rapid adjustment. She felt the new
environment was confusing and that the staff, which was mainly
made up of locals, were not sympathetic to Americans.
Speaker 8 (26:40):
I remember I was really terrified. I didn't understand people's
accents yet, So it would be probably about a month
before I could really understand what people were saying when
they were talking really quickly. And so the night watch
staff would sit We had like a veranda outside of
our room, and like there weren't really like closing windows
(27:00):
if you've seen like the tropical structures. It was just
kind of like this like lattice, this open lattice. So
they would sit there and they would talk really loudly,
and so it was really hard to sleep, and I
was scared.
Speaker 9 (27:11):
And there was this fan that blew like right on me,
and I.
Speaker 8 (27:13):
Was really cold, and I remember I went to get
up to use the bathroom and they were really mad
at me and yelled at me and explained, like you can't.
Speaker 9 (27:22):
You can't just get up and use the bathroom. U.
There's like a process.
Speaker 8 (27:26):
You have to ask for someone and they come in
and do checks, and you wait for that time and
you raise your hand and then you can go.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
I was, honestly, I think I was just in shock.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
As many survivors have shared, Chelsea said that the kids
had to ask permission to do anything. They were watched constantly,
but it wasn't just the rules that took her time
to get used to.
Speaker 8 (27:51):
There was like every night this screaming from the observation
placement room that you would hear.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
H.
Speaker 8 (28:01):
I don't remember if this was honestly my first night
or like within my first week, but a boy from
the voice that I ran away and was recaptured, and
the sounds from that were like I can hear them
now twenty one years later, and that I decided then
(28:22):
that I was never going to get sent to whatever
place that sound was coming from, and so that was
my primary goal.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Observational Placement, also known as OP, was Tranquility Bay's worst punishment.
It was a small room in the basement of the
facility where kids were made to lie prone on their stomachs,
chin in the dirt with their hands at their sides.
Aaron spent almost a month in OP.
Speaker 10 (28:50):
But observation placement like absolutely absolutely, I mean, I mean
it's savage.
Speaker 11 (28:57):
It's like, oh my godness. I was there for a
month in July because I wanted to leave when I
turned eighteen, and.
Speaker 10 (29:12):
They wouldn't let me until they were having like a
parents weekend, and they wouldn't tell me that my parents
were coming, that they were invited, and so I got
really mad about it, and I wanted to leave because
I was eighteen and I was allowed to. But they
(29:32):
wouldn't send me. You know, my parents wouldn't like sign
off on it. They wouldn't send my ticket, they wouldn't
do anything. So I got really mad, and I was
put in observation placement for three weeks, three and a
half weeks or so during July.
Speaker 11 (29:48):
And you know, I mean it's hot, like it's Jamaica.
Speaker 10 (29:52):
It's July, like you can imagine, like it's you know,
billions of degrees all the time, you know, And we're
in this little room with like the only windows are
like you know, these little windows with you know, like
the wooden slats. There's one fan, like you know, one
small like sort of like circulating fan like up in
the corner.
Speaker 5 (30:14):
You know.
Speaker 11 (30:15):
Sixteen hours a day, you're laying.
Speaker 10 (30:19):
Flat, face down on the floor with your hands by
your side. You're not allowed to sleep. You have to
like keep your head faced to the staff member who's
in the room. You can't read, you can't do school work,
you can't do anything except for lay there for sixteen
hours a day.
Speaker 11 (30:41):
On the floor with a towel on the hard tile
floor and then so.
Speaker 10 (30:49):
And that's just I mean, that's just that's just like
the beginning of it though, because you know, the only
times you could sit up really were four meals, you know,
and they would bring like your meal like in like
a little box or whatever, every you know, every few hours,
and then you could sit up and eat and then
(31:11):
sit up for like another five minutes after you're finished eating.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Aaron said, it got even worse.
Speaker 11 (31:18):
The I mean, like the worst thing about the ope
there was really the fitness because and it was brutal.
It was so brutal, you know, just like the biggest.
Speaker 12 (31:33):
Like Beefy is like BUFFI is, dude, Like staff member
would come in, you know, and they would close the
windows and they would turn off the fan, and then
you would have to do like five thousand jumping jacks,
like two or three thousand set ups, like one thousand,
(31:55):
fifteen hundred.
Speaker 11 (31:56):
Pushups, and I mean that's like God.
Speaker 10 (32:03):
Knows what it did to my brain, you know, like
that sort of like that like that kind of like
intense heat like and they would close the windows to
do this too. And there's like seven or eight people
in a tiny, little room, you know, doing all of
this stuff, and I mean, you know, it got like
every day, it would get to the point where your sweat,
like I like, I would be like sweating so much
(32:25):
that you know, I would be like trying to do
push ups and like slipping in my own sweat. And
you know, they would thank God that they would give
us water, like at the very least, like we did
have water, and we did have as much water as
we wanted.
Speaker 11 (32:41):
To drink, like then like during those times, like but.
Speaker 10 (32:46):
Oh my goodness, and oh my god, it hurt, like
it hurt a lot.
Speaker 11 (32:54):
It was a it was awful.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
The fact that Erin was thankful to be able to
have water should illustrate enough how deplorable the conditions at
Tranquility Bay really were. JK spoke about observational placement in
a two thousand and four BBC documentary called Locked in
Paradise and tried to justify its purpose as well as
(33:18):
the length of time someone was sent in for. Unsurprisingly,
he put the onus.
Speaker 13 (33:23):
On the kids if they're refusing the program, if they're
a danger to themselves or others, if they have acted
out physically or in a violent manner, they will probably
find themselves an observation placement and the length of stay
that the kids stay in there. We try to get
all of the kids out within twenty four hours. However,
(33:44):
if a child is acted out physically, then they're going
to find themselves in there for a longer period of time.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
This clip highlights how JK created just enough wiggle room
to leave open the possibility that some people could end
up being locked in op days at a time. It
shows that even after all the scrutiny his facility and
others faced, he was still bold enough to tell yet
another news program that he thought such extreme isolation was
(34:14):
warranted for juveniles who were already thousands of miles away
from home. Not every child experienced observational placement, but the
tropical environment was often its own kind of punishment, from
the plumbing to the food situation. Chelsea's descriptions of Tranquility
Bay are pretty dire.
Speaker 8 (34:34):
Adjusting to the conditions at Tranquility Bay was one of
the harder things. We didn't have hot water in the
entire facility, We didn't have proper sewage, we didn't have
a functioning kitchen, so we showered twice a day outside
(34:55):
in these like outdoor stalls with this cold water, and
we washed our clothes and buckets in cold water and
hung them out on the line, and then we ate.
Speaker 9 (35:09):
I guess it was food.
Speaker 8 (35:12):
That was prepared mostly in this like dirty outdoor area,
and we drank powdered milk from gatorade containers that sat
in the sun all day, and that we were really sick.
I remember being really sick, and I remember talking to
the nurse about that and finding out that everyone was
really sick, and they just called it adjusting to the water.
(35:39):
But I'm pretty sure, you know, like we were drinking
unfiltered water that we probably shouldn't have been drinking, and
eating things that shouldn't have been eating.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
If everyone is getting sick from the powdered milk or
tainted water, then clearly there was a larger problem at
its core. No one should have to live in these conditions.
As was the case with several other WASP affiliated facilities,
Tranquility Bay had come into an impoverished local area, and
those hired were more a part of the experience rather
(36:12):
than dictators of it.
Speaker 8 (36:16):
Yeah, so most of the staff lived on site with us,
and they were locals from the area. This is a
really small community. Pretty much everybody was from that area
that parish. A lot of people lived on site with
their kids, so we had I kind of considered there
to be like two tiers of staff. So there were
like the staff that we interacted most of the time
(36:38):
the day to day, and they were, like I said,
mostly locals. They would be harsh with you at times,
but for the most part, I felt like we were
kind of all living this nightmare together. I had a
hard time complaining to them about things because I knew
that they were also living there, so like being like,
oh it was in this food bad that you're also
(36:59):
eating didn't go very far. But then there was like
another class of staff, and so these are mostly the
Americans that ran the facility. So we had the owner JK,
and then like the main office staff that did admissions.
They lived in a different part of the area, like
a mansion thing that JK owned, And there was a
(37:24):
very different vibe with those staff members in terms of
how they related to us.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Chelsea's description of JK really juxtaposes the difference between how
the teens lived in the comfort of those at the top.
Speaker 8 (37:38):
So I only saw him from a distance we never
spoke one on one. When he came, he would pull
up in this like red sports car, if I remember,
and he was usually sun tanned. He was bald like
baldish and blonde at the same time, and he would
wear like tropical shirts and just kind of look like
(38:00):
the quintessential rich guy.
Speaker 9 (38:01):
And he looked very out of place. So you know,
we're all living in squalor like and then here comes JK.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Decca spent three days at Tranquility Bay. By the end
she wanted to speak to the parents who had sent
their kids there, but she struggled to find the right
way to ask. When she finally found the words, she
was appalled by the answers.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
I was very conscious that, after taking three years to
get into the property, I was very conscious that I
could be evicted very easily, and so it was very
important to try and expressed no opinions and to ask.
(38:51):
I was worried that even if I asked a question
that inferred a critical subtext that implied them. If I
were to ask the question implied any kind of critical subtext,
that alone could be enough to terminate the entire And
I spent three years to try to get into the place.
I was very I had to be very cautious, and
(39:15):
some parents didn't want to talk. But many of the
parents were absolutely thrilled to bits with their purchase. In
crew terms, you know, they really felt they've got their
money's work. They felt this was money well spent. They'd
sent to tranquility a child who was, in their terms, disrespectful, rude,
(39:41):
really odd themes that became that emerged very quickly in
conversations with the parents because lots of them had sent
their child there because they were really cross and their
child didn't seem to like them. They were really cross,
So it was a really consistent theme. You know, she
just did like me. Mums would say, or and because
(40:04):
I'm dying today, I don't think not liking your parent
is a criminal offense, and I don't think you have
some divine right to your child's affection. And actually, most
teenagers don't like their parents, and that is absolutely necessary
and appropriate, developable little stage that will enable them to
leave home. This the idea of adolescents as a necessary
(40:28):
biological process of separation. It seemed completely unfamiliar. They were
cross that their children have behavior as if they didn't
like them, and that felt like there had been some
major flaw. There have been a fault, there have been
some fault in the system, and they'd pay Tranquility Bay
to fix it. It really felt like that they sort
(40:50):
of seemed to see their child as some kind of
product that has gone wrong.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
JK Toldeggah the length of someone's stay at Tranquility Bay
depended mainly on the teen's attitude and willingness to change.
According to her Guardian article, he said, quote if a
parent wonders why their kid is here so long, well, ge,
we are doing our part. Maybe you need to ask
your little Joey why he's not moving forward. Everyone knows
(41:17):
how to earn the points end quote. Being able to
leave Tranquility Bay for good poses its own number of difficulties.
Decca shared with us that she believed that the children
were not sent with any specific time outlined to complete
their program. Instead, the possibility of getting out relied on
how much the kids complied with orders that seemed to
(41:40):
be their only hope of leaving.
Speaker 5 (41:43):
They would be there for as long as it took
for the process to the program to break them and
rewire their brains so that they could convincingly present themselves
as young people who believe they deserve to be sent there,
that they I had nothing but gratitude to their parents
for sending their nothing but gratitude to the program for
(42:06):
curing them, for redeeming them. And if they deviated in
any way from that, anything they said or intimated gave
any member of staff any suspicion that they did not
truly believe that, then their exit would be revoked and
they'd stay there until the staff was satisfied that they
truly believed it. And so I had this surreal series
(42:28):
of conversations with fifteen sixteen year old kids who were
telling me in this very robotic way to a girl
to a boy. They also sending, if my mom or
my dad had not sent me here, I would be dead.
And this was one of the many articles of faith
that they were wedded to. And it would only take
(42:49):
a simple question such as how would you have died
to throw them, and they would have no idea, They
would never even have sort of thought. I don't know,
but they absolutely believed that they would be dead. Now,
of course, whether or not they truly believed it, or
whether or not they had successfully perfected an appearance of
(43:13):
believing it was the fascinating question. But no teenager in
their right mind, when they're literally moments from getting out
of this place, was going to say anything to me
that would indicate that they were in any way in sincere.
I mean, they'd have to be mad, wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
They trance like robotic? This is also how survivors previously
described having to work the program. It even became obvious
to Decca why the kids would be desperate to level
up in the point system and get one step closer
to going home.
Speaker 5 (43:50):
The thing that I came to understand talking a lot
more about the program is that it creates a pmetically
sealed universe in which the only people you believe and
the only diputy trust, and the only piblity talked to
are people who are similarly signed up to and invested
in this a medically field program and its beliefs and
ideals about how you pick children. So, by definition, anybody
(44:14):
who didn't subscribe to this view was by definition discredited
by the very fact of the dissent, so it was
impossible to have and that there was no such thing
as an legitimate dissenting view. If you desent from the program,
then you are by definition a heretic and uh, and
we're just claiming wrong. So it was a kind of
(44:36):
almost fundamentalist kind of mindset and world in which they
all operated.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Living in squalor, unsanitary food, observational placement. An owner who
rides around in his sports car while the teens around
him stay underfed and underslapped. How could a place like
this have any legitimacy in the eyes of the law.
In a complaint filed in Utah Federal Court against Teen
(45:03):
Help and Tranquility Bay in nineteen ninety nine, the facility
was described as a quote squalid jungle camp infested with flies, mosquitoes, scorpions,
and vermin, among other things. Unsurprisingly, Tranquility Bay and Teen
Help denied the claims, and the lawsuit was subsequently dismissed
without a finding of liability. But in Decca's opinion, JK
(45:27):
was not the worst person at Tranquility Bay. In fact,
there was one person who stood out to her more
than anyone else and who she will never forget. To
put this into context, Decca has worked at prominent news
publications in the UK for over twenty years. For her
to remember and have such a visceral reaction to someone
(45:48):
that she met this long ago shows just how bad
it was.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
Such SUI, Yeah, I've met lots of people in my career, really,
all sorts of people. That's financial being a journalist, right,
and your brain just deletes and deletes the room to
store a memory of all of them. That man has
never vacated her memory. He made a lasting impression. Dr
(46:21):
Marcell Chapuri. He was an extremely confident, self assured man who,
unlike JK, had no concern about talking to media or
showing what he did for his work. He was only
too happy to let me see what it is he did. Marshall.
(46:45):
Shapuri made a big play and his status as an
independent psychologist, so everyone else who works I not Dtor Shapuri.
He was just independent, a psychologist who would come and
work on therapy with the children back in great therapy
(47:08):
and if a parent wanted to pay for it, one
to one therapy and crucially he believed that he was
an independent kind of arbiter.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Doctor Shaprix had started his own practice, Shaprix and Associates
in nineteen ninety eight and began consulting member programs in
the early years of WASP, so technically he was independent. However,
the lines separating him and WASP are extremely blurry. Decca
reported that he was working half of every month for
(47:41):
WASP facilities.
Speaker 5 (47:42):
The parent trust him precisely because he was independent, But
he worked the two weeks stated ever before at Tranquility,
and then the other two weeks of every month he
spent working at other WASP facilities. So I'm not sure
if he had any other employer. As far as I
can seej What's a soul employer. So the extent of
(48:04):
which he could legitimately be described as independent was questionable.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Why why has he stuck in your mind for so
many years?
Speaker 5 (48:15):
I guess the simple answer is you could say all
of the staff who worked with that facility are local,
uneducated rule Jamaicans who are being employed by a large
employer to do a job. And you could say that JK,
who's running the place, is a product of has grown
(48:40):
up with his father running this organization. He's never really
been exposed to anything else. He believes it. She could,
she's somewhat been brainwashed. You can kind of forgive him.
There is no plausible defense on god, uh, how educated
(49:02):
man with a medical qualification who calls himself a psychologist.
There is no defense on earth for how he could
have been complicit in what went on there, witness to
it and have not. It was unforgivable that somebody with
(49:23):
his education and his qualifications could have been complicit in
what went on there.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
It wasn't just doctor Shapui's alleged conflict of interest or
his arrogance that stuck with her. Decca alleges that she
felt his methods could be cruel, especially when it came
to one aspect in particular.
Speaker 5 (49:43):
He had this kind of Wolffish amusement about the trauma
of these children. He was amused and gratified by the
traumas that they experienced a tranquility, or the traumas the
head experienced in their childhood. He ran a series of
(50:06):
therapy groups, one of which, I kid you not, was
called rape and molest For a very significant proportion of
the girls there could experienced some kind of sexually beset
and he was in charge of group therapy for young
adolescent victims of rape and moleste. And he conducted these
(50:32):
groups therapies on the basis that I mean, it's so
incredible to me, is ever about say I think I
think I wroking it up right. It sounds it's just
mind bog loans and medical professional who works with teenagers
(50:54):
to say these things. That his position towards the rape
molest groups was, yeah, I think the bad thing that
happened to you, yeah, you know. But his message to
them was, you have got to take responsibility for what
you did to get raped or molested. Plucky clothes you wore,
(51:16):
hanging out with the wrong guys, getting yourself wrong, getting
that guy's car. You are responsible for what happened to you.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Unfortunately, the number of teens at Tranquility Bay who attended
the rape and molest group was extremely high. Here's Chelsea.
Speaker 8 (51:38):
I think within my first week or two of being
there is when I attended my first session of rape
and molested and I just remember how many people were
in that room as like the first shocking thing. I mean,
if it wasn't everyone from the girl's side, it was
eighty five percent of the girl's side attended rape and
(52:00):
molest group. And that was like just mind blowing to
me because I felt like this was this thing that
had happened to me and hadn't really happened to other people,
but then I realized it happened to like everybody that
was at this place, and especially like molestation. If we
(52:20):
had a surprising amount of girls who had been molested
by the people who sent them to Tranquility Bay.
Speaker 9 (52:27):
And this was an.
Speaker 8 (52:28):
Open known fact that was talked about in group and
something that I really struggled with.
Speaker 9 (52:37):
At the time, and I guess even now.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
As described by Chelsea, the rape and molest group placed
the responsibility for sexual assault on the working and non
working choices.
Speaker 9 (52:50):
The group was very.
Speaker 8 (52:53):
It was similar to the seminars in that it was
confrontation based and revolved around the same concept to there
being no such thing as right or wrong. There was
only working or non working choices. And so it was
our jobs in the rape in the lest group to
look at what had happened to us and identify the
non working choices that we made that led to our
(53:15):
sexual assaults.
Speaker 4 (53:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (53:21):
So in my case, I used to spend a night
at his house all the time, and we would usually
share it, and so the particular night that that happened,
I was over at another friend's house. He was out
doing something else. Entirely I was drinking, I got really sick,
and he offered to pick me up and let me
spend the night so I didn't have to go home,
(53:42):
and that's when.
Speaker 9 (53:43):
The sexual assault happened.
Speaker 8 (53:44):
So, in terms of processing that through the lens of
working and non working, I made a non working choice
by choosing to go drink with my friends and drinking
in general. And I made another non working choice when
I got into the with my friend, and you know
that's why that happened.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
An unknown number of young women would pass through Chapuiz
so called therapy group and would be blamed or told
to be accountable for the assaults that happened to them.
It's an experience many feel had a lasting negative effect
on their mental health and self worth, and many survivors
do not feel like these methods were healing or beneficial
(54:32):
to them personally, and yet they have to live on
with the ramifications.
Speaker 5 (54:38):
I don't know in what universe it qualifies for the
term therapy, and I don't know what universe. Marcel Chapule
could feel good about what he did for them, but
he felt absolutely pleased to punch for himself. He couldn't
(54:59):
have been proud or of his work.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Decca had access to Tranquility Bay for three days. The
way she described her feelings about the facility after leaving
are especially haunting.
Speaker 5 (55:15):
I mean, after seeing teenage girls hair into each other
to keep rip each other to shreds verbally, and after
seeing children being made to learn their face, and after
hearing Master she can really talk about how girls needed
to take responsibility for getting themselves raped. In many ways,
(55:36):
the sports datings were the least distressing, most innoxious of
all the things that we witnessed there. But in many
ways I found I remember walking away at the end
and they were playing on the big sound system and
usher songs, and there was something uniquely grotesque about this
(56:00):
kind of fiction of fun, this sort of notional idea
that these kids were going to have fun day or
sports day. It felt like the absolutely final impult that
you kind of co op some sort of pretend of humanity.
(56:22):
What everything about this institution was Will Barrack to the
point of depraved.
Speaker 2 (56:35):
Deco's stories about Tranquility Bay, the kids, the parents, and
the personalities that ran it were unnerving. The kids were
treated as a product, something that had gone wrong, something
to be fixed, a sentiment that seemed to exist throughout
the WASP universe. Next time untrapped in.
Speaker 14 (56:57):
Treatment, I anyway cannot imagine like a more evil person.
He's the most like manipulative, abusive person I've ever dealt
with in my entire life by far. He constantly had
me tell myself that I was cancer for being gay,
and that the only way anybody around me could thrive
was to kill me.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
From records available to us, it appears Tranquility Bay shut
down sometime in two thousand and nine. All of our
efforts to reach Robert Litchfield, JK. Ken K, and Marcel
Chapui for comment were unsuccessful, and they did not return
our request for comment. Other than as described in this episode,
no one mentioned in this episode has ever been charged
(57:54):
with or found guilty of any crime stemming from allegations
of abuse or in connection with WASP or any of
the schools affiliated therewith.
Speaker 4 (58:10):
Hey everyone, it's Paris.
Speaker 2 (58:12):
Thanks for listening to episode eight.
Speaker 4 (58:14):
If you want to get involved with our movement, sign
up for the updates the link in our episode description.
Speaker 8 (58:19):
We have to act together to make sure this never
happens to another child.
Speaker 2 (58:22):
Be part of the change and make sure to listen
to all our episodes.
Speaker 4 (58:26):
You can find them at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
The following episode contains disturbing and graphic accounts of survivor experiences.
It may not be suitable for younger audiences. Please listen
with care.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
From iHeartRadio, London Audio and executive producer Paraceltan. This is
Trapped in Treatment. I'm Rebecca Mellinger.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Grown and I'm Caroline Cole. Join us on our journey
to uncover the hidden truths of an industry shrouded in scandal.
We're on a mission to make sure that no child
has to experience the hell that is the troubled teen industry.
This season for diving into the Worldwide Association of Specialty
(00:46):
Programs and Schools or WASP, one of the largest teen
treatment networks in the world, masterminded by one man, Robert Litchfield.
The stories you will hear in the following episode are
the personal allegations and accounts of individuals who have attended
treatment at one of these facilities. All experiences, views, and
(01:09):
opinions are their own.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Last week, we broke down the unique seminar model that
Lichfield created for his WASP programs. The seminars were designed
to break down emotional patterns and force you to reflect
on your choices but in reality, they cause deep emotional
trauma and silent interior scars for many of the survivors.
Here's Aaron describing one of the exercises.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
They like slide this towel with duct tape around it
in front of you, and they're like grab the towel
and like let it out basically, and I like, you
grab it, like whacking the floor with the towel and
like screaming like not like not like I don't even know,
Like I'm never screamed like that before or since in
(02:02):
my entire life. I was in labor without an epidural
for a long time. I've never screamed like that.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
The seminars weren't exclusive to students. Parents also attended them,
including my mom Meredith. They were told their participation in
the seminars would lead to better results for their kids,
so how could they not want to do it? But
my mom had a different takeaway than what the seminar
facilitators were probably hoping for.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
I think they are incredibly abusive seminars. I don't know
who's developed these courses. I don't know who's developed them,
but they are an abuse. It's almost like, to me,
an experiment in sadism against humans. Let's see how far
(02:54):
we can push these people and then laugh at them.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The troubled teen industries inside workings were a mystery to
many people, and today we get to hear from someone
who neither worked for WASP nor attended any of the programs.
So far, we have heard the allegations of survivors and
parents who have made their way through WASP affiliated facilities,
but in this episode, we're going to hear from a journalist,
(03:22):
one of the only journalists ever granted access to Tranquility Bay,
a WASP affiliated behavior modification center on the coast of Jamaica.
In early two thousand, Decca Akenhead arrived in the Jamaican
town of Treasure Beach. She was a journalist for the
(03:42):
well respected British publication The Guardian at the time and
was on assignment covering a new hotel in the area.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
I was sent there on a storre to do a
story in Kingston in the early nineties, and then it
was asked to come down to the beach to write
a review of a little hotel called Jakes, which had
just opened. And there's no accounting to why some places
just grab your heart. Is there, but as since I
riding beach and I really felt like the place that
I wanted to be in A spent as much time
as human as possible here ever since then.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Treasure Beach is a small, isolated fishing town on the
southern coast of Jamaica. It's over two hours from the
capital city of Kingston and about the same from Montego
Bay Airport. The roads getting there are notoriously bumpy, but
the distance and remoteness of it all didn't deter Decca.
Decca shared that she fell in love with Treasure Beach immediately,
(04:34):
so much so that she and her family rented a
house by the beach, settled in, and got to know
the locals in the area. Decca often explored the surrounding
area when she wasn't working, but in what would otherwise
be paradise, there was something in the small town that
stood out to her. On a stretch of picturesque beach,
just a few hundred yards from her house was a
(04:56):
white stucco building that she says looked like an abay
and a hotel. Its doorways and windows stood open, and
the property was surrounded by high metal fencing. What she
saw was Tranquility Bay. Much like facilities such as Casta
by the Sea or Paradise Cove, Tranquility Bay's name did
(05:18):
not match what was going on behind closed doors.
Speaker 5 (05:22):
I would walk past Tranquility Bay most mornings with my dog,
and at first I thought it was a really sort
of maybe a sort of stemiderrelict hotel. And then I
noticed these guards, which cut a slightly odd figure in this.
As I said, what looked like a sort of a
hotel that had been abandoned and was down on its luck.
(05:43):
But then one morning I noticed this crocodile of white
teenage children. They kind of marched in single file across
the property. Most of them had their head shaved, and
it was such a bizarre and strange spectacle that that's
when we began just asking around locally, you know, what
is that place at the end of the day, what
(06:04):
are these kids doing there?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Being the journalist that she is, Decca started digging. She
told us that the responses she got back from the
people in her area were unexpected. At first, she thought
it was just local gossip.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
I guess it's true of any small village, but it's
very definitely true. A treasure Beach that you'll hit all
kinds of rumors and sort of half truths, and people
get in the wrong end of the stick about this,
that or the other. And so when people first started
to tell me what it was, I thought, well, obviously,
just absolutely nonsense, because knows where people have got this
(06:41):
idea that this is. It just sounded so manifestly and plausible,
so preposterous that I remember laughing with my husband, going, God,
is this is hilarious that people think that that's what's
going on. I wonder what it really is, because what
people were telling us was that it was essentially a
private prison law American children, and that seemed so articularly,
(07:04):
I mean, how could there possibly be a private prison
in the middle of nowhere on the south coast of
Jamaica for American children. It just didn't make any sense.
So I thought it was like many of them sploys here,
intermsopeople that were just a jumble of misunderstanding, and that
that's all it was.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
So she went back to her house and did an
Internet search, something that was still quite new at the time.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
But then it was in the very very early days
of the Internet that we were one of the very
few people in the village to have an Internet connection,
and it was one of those all dial up systems,
and it was pre Google. I can't even remember the
name of the search engine. And I'll never forget sitting
at my desk with my heart sort of stopping and
I'm staring at the screen and I'm scrolling and I'm searching.
(07:49):
And it turned out that everything that people have been
telling us the village was more or less completely true.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
It's telling that people from the outside thought Tranquility Bay
was a private prison while it was technically a therapeutic
boarding school and not a literal detention center. It does
underscore how many survivors felt at Tranquility Bay. While doing research,
Ducca on earthed marketing websites for Troubled Teen programs, as
(08:20):
well as news articles describing various allegations of abuse. At
the time, Decca had never heard of the Troubled teen
industry or facilities like this.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
I discovered reading on my laptop that it was precisely
as they said, that these children have been sent here
to be locked up the extended periods of time, and
that this was a completely legitimate facility that was part
of this phenomenon called the troubled teen industry. The one
important caveat which I subsequently discovered to be not true
(08:54):
is that I was being told by locals in the
village that these children were extreme criminals, extreme drug addicts,
the wicked of the best of the wicked. This is
of course pri Guantanamo Bay, but essentially they were sort
of describing these teenagers and the catgor of the worst
of teenagers, as if they were terrorists, that it had
(09:17):
to be sent to this special facility because they were
so wicked. And I was also told that, you know,
they'd all been sent here by the courts, and that
I subsequently discovered could not have been further from the truth.
But that was the story that everyone in the community
had been told about, and that's when I began reading
about it and began what was a long and protracted
(09:42):
campaign to persuade the owners of the facility to grant
me access as a journalists to write about it.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Tranquility Bay opened its stores sometime around nineteen ninety six.
Its owner was JK a young man who worked his
way up from the night security shift at bright Way
Adolescent Hospital. The same hospital, Robert Litchfield acquired the operational
rights to and became what seemed like an unofficial funnel
to other WASP institutions. While DECO waited to hear back
(10:11):
from administrators about gaining access to the facility, she continued
her research and the web just kept growing more and
more complex.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
Back then, Worldwide Association's specialty program was expanding rapidly. What
was striking was the number of them that were in
parts of the world with shall we say, pretty elastic
relationship with good governance facilities and so places like they
(10:40):
had one in Samoa. So it's pretty obvious it didn't
get a genius to look at the locations of their facilities,
and even within the United States, they tend to be
a more impoverished state where were it would be obvious
that a large tax paying employer would be very welcome
within the community. So obviously that raised a lot of suspicions.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
DECA believes that whilst made it a habit of opening
programs in far off places that provided protection due to
their isolated location, not to mention the financial incentives of
local job growth and tax revenue for the locations to
support its endeavors.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
And the fact that several facilities are already been closed.
There was a series of closures, as one in Costa
Rica that were related to abuse or concerns about the
operational standards or the integrative facilities. So it was very
clear that this was both an organization that was growing
(11:42):
and making lots of money, and it was a company
with a cherry checked history already of facilities around the world.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
One detail in particular stood out to her.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
What was also striking about the organization is that it
was a very tight next family owned and run operations,
and that also raised questions about them about corporate governance
and about accountability and all of the questions that immediately
you wonder about when you see an organization being run
(12:19):
by family members whose credential qualifications are frankly, sure, to put.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
It mildly, Decca had picked up on something interesting the
tight knit nature of the WASP organization. Though not every
program affiliated with WASP was run by one of Lichfield's
family members, many of those who opened facilities or ran
the organization had some kind of personal relationship with him.
(12:48):
We see that clearly with JK and his father ken K.
Ken K served as the president of WASP and was
hired by Robert Litchfield Both father and son also previously
worked a bright Way adolescent hospital back in Saint George, Utah.
But Decca felt that Jk's qualifications to run a program
like Tranquility Bay were lacking.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
JK has been twenty seven when he opened the facility,
and his prior work history has been he'd been a
gas station attendant, and he'd been a kind of administrator
in a juvenile psychiatric facility in Utah that has been
(13:32):
run by what he had been a college dropout. He
had absolutely no educational qualifications in child development whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
According to Decca, and has reflected in her reporting for
The Guardian. When questioned about his qualifications, the younger K
was dismissive. He told Decca quote, experience in this job
is better than any degree. Am I an educational expert? No,
But I know how to hire people to get the
job done. He also said that he had the best
(14:06):
job in the world.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
JK was very much of the view that that was
all to the better, and that these silly people with
their newfangled ideas and their fancy diplomas know nothing, and
he was the ultimate authority on how you fix children.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Decca wasn't aware of the troubled teen industry prior to
her moving to Jamaica, but she kept digging and pushing
to gain access to Tranquility Bay. Finally, three years later,
she got the nod of approval. The fact that she
was even able to write about the facility and spend
an extended period of time inside was almost unprecedented. A
(14:47):
journalist from Time magazine visited in nineteen ninety eight, but
other than that, the media was not overly welcomed. She
doesn't know exactly why JK finally gave in, except that
when she talked to him, it was obvious that he
truly believed that this was a great program. He took
pride in it.
Speaker 5 (15:06):
Yeah, I think he got quite quite a proud you know,
he quite enjoyed showing its showing off. He was a
curious mixture of cynical and oddly guile. You know, he
didn't cite me as a very sophisticated person, and he
was torn between his kind of instinctive cynicism and wariness
(15:32):
of me and terrific pride in his facility uncertainty that
any right minded individual got to look at it would
feel nothing but impressed.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
I asked Daka, what she thought made JK feel that
specific way.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
The short, rather unkind answer would be that he was.
He had that overweening confidence of only breathtaking ignorance and
bisco the letty knew, the more certain he was, he
was a classific example of that kind of personality. A
longer answer might be that he was as much a
(16:11):
production you could give if they're victim of the thought
process and the thinking that created Tranquility Base, and he
had grown up in that. His father was very ston
remembering what it was. I don't think Jaka could conceive
of the idea of regent or a critically or an
(16:33):
objective view, or any of the above. And that very
way of thinking is exactly what informs the entire process
of the program that they instituted, Tranquility Bay and the
world into which the teenagers who are sent there found themselves.
And when you're in that world, the only way that
you can survive it and never escape it is by
(16:56):
appearing to a thousand internalized and all of the views
of belief system. It's a kind of totalitarian mindset that melodramatic.
That's essentially what they created, and JK was as much
a product of it as he was an author of it.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Decca's entry into Tranquility Bay required some terms and conditions.
The timing felt a little suspect too.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
Once they decided to grant me access, this came with
a great number of concerns and conditions. They arranged my
visit to coincide with the annual sports day or funday
at which a group of parents would be arriving who
were going to be taking their children homes. So these
(17:43):
are very satisfied customers who have sent their children here,
their children's work, the program, they've worked through to level six,
they've achieved the status whereby the facility says that these
tools are not cured and fixed. They're ready to go
home and their parents down to collect. And I was
also given access to any of the parents who were
willing to talk to me, But the vast majority of
(18:06):
the two hundred and fifty children who were there were
not in that category, and they ranged in age from
by memory. Some would be as young as fourteen, some
were as old as eighteen. One girl was even nineteen.
With each child on the arrival of assigns to what
they would call a family, which would be a single
(18:28):
sex group of about twenty other children, and they would
all sleep in one large concrete floored, whitewashed concrete wall,
completely bare rooms which just had chains on the walls
which levered down into if you can imagine a wooden door,
(18:51):
just to kind of large about the size of the
wooden doors, a piece of wood hooked to chain which
they would hook to the wall when they got up
in the morning and unhook at the end of the
day to get into bed. So it's absolutely Barton. It's
a concrete breath block, metal chains and wooden slabs that
(19:12):
they let on that it the facility was. I mean,
JK made no bones about it, and he said he
wanted to make it a place where nobody wanted to be.
And in that respect, my body to decree. The most
striking thing, Rebecca about them that I remember from the
(19:32):
moment we were introduced is that they had this really
straight I'd never really encountered it before, and teenagers before,
this kind of vacant, robotic, almost automaton like zombie, almost
demeanor manner. They spoke in these very kind of mechanical voices.
(19:55):
They had these very kind of vacant expressions in their faces.
And yes, they spoke as it felt like speaking to
people who've been programmed with the script, and every time
a question would deviate from the script or they would
look completely thrown and unable to unable to answer a
(20:15):
simple question.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Right around the same time that Decca arrived in Jamaica,
a young girl had also landed at the small seaside facility. Lindsay,
who we heard from in episode three, was fresh off
her stint at Cross Creek Manor in Laverk in Utah.
But any tiny flicker of hope Lindsay had for something
better got extinguished pretty fast.
Speaker 6 (20:43):
Well, Jamaica itself is absolutely breastaking. It is beautiful. It
is I mean, it's the Tropics. It's gorgeous, and so
on my way up there, seeing all that, I was
kind of hopeful that this was going to be a
lot more fun. Until we got probably two miles away
from the facility and it all became brushed and dirt roads.
(21:05):
And as we pulled up, I could tell there was
nothing else around for miles besides this compound that was
heavily gated. And as I came in, you know, I
saw the lines of people all, you know, looking straight
ahead in their uniforms, and I thought, oh great, this
(21:27):
is another, you know, another Cross Creek, but worse. And
I had no idea. I had no idea how much
worse it was going to be.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
According to Lindsay, she got sent to Tranquility Bay because
she wasn't adhering to the program at Cross Creek.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
Basically what happened was the Cross Creek staff got sick
of my shit and they felt like they were not
getting the response from me that they were supposed to
be getting. I wasn't falling in line, and so they hadn't.
I'm sure they coordinated coordinated it with my parents, but
they ended up sending me to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica
(22:04):
because I did not work the program at all in Utah.
So that was how that worked out.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
For Lindsay, who had spent several months at Cross Creek.
Some of the conditions at Tranquility were vastly different.
Speaker 6 (22:19):
Jamaica was a lot more structured.
Speaker 7 (22:21):
The staff were just at first, it was very difficult
to understand them because they had thick Petois accents, which
I had never been exposed to before as a dumb
girl from the West Coast.
Speaker 6 (22:36):
So it took me a while to you know, even
be brave enough to ask him he use a bathroom
because they were so like foreign and frightening, and they
just had no problem just shouting at the girls, and
I just scared the crap out of me.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
These types of scare tactics played a role at other
Troubled teen facilities, but there was a dramatic difference between
Cross Creek and Tranquility Bay.
Speaker 6 (23:05):
Well, when it is a third world country and the
other is not. There were, you know, just wooden slats
for windows that you would just turn, and I remember
thinking that was different because there was no there was
no glass window panes or anything like that. Everything was
dirt and wood and everything was just structure, meticulous structure.
(23:30):
The showers or outdoors. We had to close our we
had to hang our clothes on a line outside, just
like not that big of a deal, but it was
just stuff I had never done before, as you know,
a kid who grew up the way I grew up.
And the main difference I think was in Cross Creek
(23:52):
there was at least some semblance of we're trying to
help you. We're trying to care about your you know,
psychological needs, your recover. We neeeds if you're you know,
if that's what you came here for. Jamaica was not
like that at all.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
A few months after Lindsay arrived, another young girl, Chelsea,
was sent to Tranquility Bay, But unlike Lindsay, Chelsea didn't
have any prior experience with a WASP affiliated facility. She
came straight from one terrible situation to another.
Speaker 8 (24:22):
So yeah, so my childhood was pretty normal. I grew
up outside of ann Arbor, Michigan. I lived there for
a while. Well, actually we moved there in seventh grade,
and that was around the time that I started dealing
with bullying in school. So middle school was rough, and
then early high school was also rough, and I would
(24:47):
say probably about my junior By my junior year of
high school, I had pretty much decided that I was
just done, I guess, done trying to be a good
kid anymore. So I went really hard in the opposite
direction and stopped going to school. I stopped participating in classes,
and just pretty much went the other direction. And my
(25:12):
parents tried a lot of different things. They tried having
me go to therapy. At one point, I lived with
a friend's family for the summer. I got kicked out
a couple of times, and then I had a really
horrible week. I was sexually assaulted and told my parents
(25:35):
about it, and they made me report it to the police,
and I had to go get a rape kit done,
and during the rape kit, they did a drug test
and it came back positive, and so they told my
parents that I was also on substances, which probably contributed
to what happened to me. I didn't process that very well.
(26:00):
And then I went to a counseling session with my
therapist and I was not in a great headspace, and
she told my parents that she didn't think that she
could work with me anymore and that they needed to
try something more. I guess intense and showed them a
brochure for Tranquility Bay, and by the end of that week,
I was in Jamaica.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
That consecutive sequence of events truly did not make her
move to Jamaica any easier. Chelsea shares that the transition
was a drastic and rapid adjustment. She felt the new
environment was confusing and that the staff, which was mainly
made up of locals, were not sympathetic to Americans.
Speaker 8 (26:40):
I remember I was really terrified. I didn't understand people's
accents yet, So it would be probably about a month
before I could really understand what people were saying when
they were talking really quickly. And so the night watch
staff would sit We had like a veranda outside of
our room, and like there weren't really like closing windows
(27:00):
if you've seen like the tropical structures. It was just
kind of like this like lattice, this open lattice. So
they would sit there and they would talk really loudly,
and so it was really hard to sleep, and I
was scared.
Speaker 9 (27:11):
And there was this fan that blew like right on me,
and I.
Speaker 8 (27:13):
Was really cold, and I remember I went to get
up to use the bathroom and they were really mad
at me and yelled at me and explained, like you can't.
Speaker 9 (27:22):
You can't just get up and use the bathroom. U.
There's like a process.
Speaker 8 (27:26):
You have to ask for someone and they come in
and do checks, and you wait for that time and
you raise your hand and then you can go.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
I was, honestly, I think I was just in shock.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
As many survivors have shared, Chelsea said that the kids
had to ask permission to do anything. They were watched constantly,
but it wasn't just the rules that took her time
to get used to.
Speaker 8 (27:51):
There was like every night this screaming from the observation
placement room that you would hear.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
H.
Speaker 8 (28:01):
I don't remember if this was honestly my first night
or like within my first week, but a boy from
the voice that I ran away and was recaptured, and
the sounds from that were like I can hear them
now twenty one years later, and that I decided then
(28:22):
that I was never going to get sent to whatever
place that sound was coming from, and so that was
my primary goal.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Observational Placement, also known as OP, was Tranquility Bay's worst punishment.
It was a small room in the basement of the
facility where kids were made to lie prone on their stomachs,
chin in the dirt with their hands at their sides.
Aaron spent almost a month in OP.
Speaker 10 (28:50):
But observation placement like absolutely absolutely, I mean, I mean
it's savage.
Speaker 11 (28:57):
It's like, oh my godness. I was there for a
month in July because I wanted to leave when I
turned eighteen, and.
Speaker 10 (29:12):
They wouldn't let me until they were having like a
parents weekend, and they wouldn't tell me that my parents
were coming, that they were invited, and so I got
really mad about it, and I wanted to leave because
I was eighteen and I was allowed to. But they
(29:32):
wouldn't send me. You know, my parents wouldn't like sign
off on it. They wouldn't send my ticket, they wouldn't
do anything. So I got really mad, and I was
put in observation placement for three weeks, three and a
half weeks or so during July.
Speaker 11 (29:48):
And you know, I mean it's hot, like it's Jamaica.
Speaker 10 (29:52):
It's July, like you can imagine, like it's you know,
billions of degrees all the time, you know, And we're
in this little room with like the only windows are
like you know, these little windows with you know, like
the wooden slats. There's one fan, like you know, one
small like sort of like circulating fan like up in
the corner.
Speaker 5 (30:14):
You know.
Speaker 11 (30:15):
Sixteen hours a day, you're laying.
Speaker 10 (30:19):
Flat, face down on the floor with your hands by
your side. You're not allowed to sleep. You have to
like keep your head faced to the staff member who's
in the room. You can't read, you can't do school work,
you can't do anything except for lay there for sixteen
hours a day.
Speaker 11 (30:41):
On the floor with a towel on the hard tile
floor and then so.
Speaker 10 (30:49):
And that's just I mean, that's just that's just like
the beginning of it though, because you know, the only
times you could sit up really were four meals, you know,
and they would bring like your meal like in like
a little box or whatever, every you know, every few hours,
and then you could sit up and eat and then
(31:11):
sit up for like another five minutes after you're finished eating.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Aaron said, it got even worse.
Speaker 11 (31:18):
The I mean, like the worst thing about the ope
there was really the fitness because and it was brutal.
It was so brutal, you know, just like the biggest.
Speaker 12 (31:33):
Like Beefy is like BUFFI is, dude, Like staff member
would come in, you know, and they would close the
windows and they would turn off the fan, and then
you would have to do like five thousand jumping jacks,
like two or three thousand set ups, like one thousand,
(31:55):
fifteen hundred.
Speaker 11 (31:56):
Pushups, and I mean that's like God.
Speaker 10 (32:03):
Knows what it did to my brain, you know, like
that sort of like that like that kind of like
intense heat like and they would close the windows to
do this too. And there's like seven or eight people
in a tiny, little room, you know, doing all of
this stuff, and I mean, you know, it got like
every day, it would get to the point where your sweat,
like I like, I would be like sweating so much
(32:25):
that you know, I would be like trying to do
push ups and like slipping in my own sweat. And
you know, they would thank God that they would give
us water, like at the very least, like we did
have water, and we did have as much water as
we wanted.
Speaker 11 (32:41):
To drink, like then like during those times, like but.
Speaker 10 (32:46):
Oh my goodness, and oh my god, it hurt, like
it hurt a lot.
Speaker 11 (32:54):
It was a it was awful.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
The fact that Erin was thankful to be able to
have water should illustrate enough how deplorable the conditions at
Tranquility Bay really were. JK spoke about observational placement in
a two thousand and four BBC documentary called Locked in
Paradise and tried to justify its purpose as well as
(33:18):
the length of time someone was sent in for. Unsurprisingly,
he put the onus.
Speaker 13 (33:23):
On the kids if they're refusing the program, if they're
a danger to themselves or others, if they have acted
out physically or in a violent manner, they will probably
find themselves an observation placement and the length of stay
that the kids stay in there. We try to get
all of the kids out within twenty four hours. However,
(33:44):
if a child is acted out physically, then they're going
to find themselves in there for a longer period of time.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
This clip highlights how JK created just enough wiggle room
to leave open the possibility that some people could end
up being locked in op days at a time. It
shows that even after all the scrutiny his facility and
others faced, he was still bold enough to tell yet
another news program that he thought such extreme isolation was
(34:14):
warranted for juveniles who were already thousands of miles away
from home. Not every child experienced observational placement, but the
tropical environment was often its own kind of punishment, from
the plumbing to the food situation. Chelsea's descriptions of Tranquility
Bay are pretty dire.
Speaker 8 (34:34):
Adjusting to the conditions at Tranquility Bay was one of
the harder things. We didn't have hot water in the
entire facility, We didn't have proper sewage, we didn't have
a functioning kitchen, so we showered twice a day outside
(34:55):
in these like outdoor stalls with this cold water, and
we washed our clothes and buckets in cold water and
hung them out on the line, and then we ate.
Speaker 9 (35:09):
I guess it was food.
Speaker 8 (35:12):
That was prepared mostly in this like dirty outdoor area,
and we drank powdered milk from gatorade containers that sat
in the sun all day, and that we were really sick.
I remember being really sick, and I remember talking to
the nurse about that and finding out that everyone was
really sick, and they just called it adjusting to the water.
(35:39):
But I'm pretty sure, you know, like we were drinking
unfiltered water that we probably shouldn't have been drinking, and
eating things that shouldn't have been eating.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
If everyone is getting sick from the powdered milk or
tainted water, then clearly there was a larger problem at
its core. No one should have to live in these conditions.
As was the case with several other WASP affiliated facilities,
Tranquility Bay had come into an impoverished local area, and
those hired were more a part of the experience rather
(36:12):
than dictators of it.
Speaker 8 (36:16):
Yeah, so most of the staff lived on site with us,
and they were locals from the area. This is a
really small community. Pretty much everybody was from that area
that parish. A lot of people lived on site with
their kids, so we had I kind of considered there
to be like two tiers of staff. So there were
like the staff that we interacted most of the time
(36:38):
the day to day, and they were, like I said,
mostly locals. They would be harsh with you at times,
but for the most part, I felt like we were
kind of all living this nightmare together. I had a
hard time complaining to them about things because I knew
that they were also living there, so like being like,
oh it was in this food bad that you're also
(36:59):
eating didn't go very far. But then there was like
another class of staff, and so these are mostly the
Americans that ran the facility. So we had the owner JK,
and then like the main office staff that did admissions.
They lived in a different part of the area, like
a mansion thing that JK owned, And there was a
(37:24):
very different vibe with those staff members in terms of
how they related to us.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Chelsea's description of JK really juxtaposes the difference between how
the teens lived in the comfort of those at the top.
Speaker 8 (37:38):
So I only saw him from a distance we never
spoke one on one. When he came, he would pull
up in this like red sports car, if I remember,
and he was usually sun tanned. He was bald like
baldish and blonde at the same time, and he would
wear like tropical shirts and just kind of look like
(38:00):
the quintessential rich guy.
Speaker 9 (38:01):
And he looked very out of place. So you know,
we're all living in squalor like and then here comes JK.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Decca spent three days at Tranquility Bay. By the end
she wanted to speak to the parents who had sent
their kids there, but she struggled to find the right
way to ask. When she finally found the words, she
was appalled by the answers.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
I was very conscious that, after taking three years to
get into the property, I was very conscious that I
could be evicted very easily, and so it was very
important to try and expressed no opinions and to ask.
(38:51):
I was worried that even if I asked a question
that inferred a critical subtext that implied them. If I
were to ask the question implied any kind of critical subtext,
that alone could be enough to terminate the entire And
I spent three years to try to get into the place.
I was very I had to be very cautious, and
(39:15):
some parents didn't want to talk. But many of the
parents were absolutely thrilled to bits with their purchase. In
crew terms, you know, they really felt they've got their
money's work. They felt this was money well spent. They'd
sent to tranquility a child who was, in their terms, disrespectful, rude,
(39:41):
really odd themes that became that emerged very quickly in
conversations with the parents because lots of them had sent
their child there because they were really cross and their
child didn't seem to like them. They were really cross,
So it was a really consistent theme. You know, she
just did like me. Mums would say, or and because
(40:04):
I'm dying today, I don't think not liking your parent
is a criminal offense, and I don't think you have
some divine right to your child's affection. And actually, most
teenagers don't like their parents, and that is absolutely necessary
and appropriate, developable little stage that will enable them to
leave home. This the idea of adolescents as a necessary
(40:28):
biological process of separation. It seemed completely unfamiliar. They were
cross that their children have behavior as if they didn't
like them, and that felt like there had been some
major flaw. There have been a fault, there have been
some fault in the system, and they'd pay Tranquility Bay
to fix it. It really felt like that they sort
(40:50):
of seemed to see their child as some kind of
product that has gone wrong.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
JK Toldeggah the length of someone's stay at Tranquility Bay
depended mainly on the teen's attitude and willingness to change.
According to her Guardian article, he said, quote if a
parent wonders why their kid is here so long, well, ge,
we are doing our part. Maybe you need to ask
your little Joey why he's not moving forward. Everyone knows
(41:17):
how to earn the points end quote. Being able to
leave Tranquility Bay for good poses its own number of difficulties.
Decca shared with us that she believed that the children
were not sent with any specific time outlined to complete
their program. Instead, the possibility of getting out relied on
how much the kids complied with orders that seemed to
(41:40):
be their only hope of leaving.
Speaker 5 (41:43):
They would be there for as long as it took
for the process to the program to break them and
rewire their brains so that they could convincingly present themselves
as young people who believe they deserve to be sent there,
that they I had nothing but gratitude to their parents
for sending their nothing but gratitude to the program for
(42:06):
curing them, for redeeming them. And if they deviated in
any way from that, anything they said or intimated gave
any member of staff any suspicion that they did not
truly believe that, then their exit would be revoked and
they'd stay there until the staff was satisfied that they
truly believed it. And so I had this surreal series
(42:28):
of conversations with fifteen sixteen year old kids who were
telling me in this very robotic way to a girl
to a boy. They also sending, if my mom or
my dad had not sent me here, I would be dead.
And this was one of the many articles of faith
that they were wedded to. And it would only take
(42:49):
a simple question such as how would you have died
to throw them, and they would have no idea, They
would never even have sort of thought. I don't know,
but they absolutely believed that they would be dead. Now,
of course, whether or not they truly believed it, or
whether or not they had successfully perfected an appearance of
(43:13):
believing it was the fascinating question. But no teenager in
their right mind, when they're literally moments from getting out
of this place, was going to say anything to me
that would indicate that they were in any way in sincere.
I mean, they'd have to be mad, wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
They trance like robotic? This is also how survivors previously
described having to work the program. It even became obvious
to Decca why the kids would be desperate to level
up in the point system and get one step closer
to going home.
Speaker 5 (43:50):
The thing that I came to understand talking a lot
more about the program is that it creates a pmetically
sealed universe in which the only people you believe and
the only diputy trust, and the only piblity talked to
are people who are similarly signed up to and invested
in this a medically field program and its beliefs and
ideals about how you pick children. So, by definition, anybody
(44:14):
who didn't subscribe to this view was by definition discredited
by the very fact of the dissent, so it was
impossible to have and that there was no such thing
as an legitimate dissenting view. If you desent from the program,
then you are by definition a heretic and uh, and
we're just claiming wrong. So it was a kind of
(44:36):
almost fundamentalist kind of mindset and world in which they
all operated.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Living in squalor, unsanitary food, observational placement. An owner who
rides around in his sports car while the teens around
him stay underfed and underslapped. How could a place like
this have any legitimacy in the eyes of the law.
In a complaint filed in Utah Federal Court against Teen
(45:03):
Help and Tranquility Bay in nineteen ninety nine, the facility
was described as a quote squalid jungle camp infested with flies, mosquitoes, scorpions,
and vermin, among other things. Unsurprisingly, Tranquility Bay and Teen
Help denied the claims, and the lawsuit was subsequently dismissed
without a finding of liability. But in Decca's opinion, JK
(45:27):
was not the worst person at Tranquility Bay. In fact,
there was one person who stood out to her more
than anyone else and who she will never forget. To
put this into context, Decca has worked at prominent news
publications in the UK for over twenty years. For her
to remember and have such a visceral reaction to someone
(45:48):
that she met this long ago shows just how bad
it was.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
Such SUI, Yeah, I've met lots of people in my career, really,
all sorts of people. That's financial being a journalist, right,
and your brain just deletes and deletes the room to
store a memory of all of them. That man has
never vacated her memory. He made a lasting impression. Dr
(46:21):
Marcell Chapuri. He was an extremely confident, self assured man who,
unlike JK, had no concern about talking to media or
showing what he did for his work. He was only
too happy to let me see what it is he did. Marshall.
(46:45):
Shapuri made a big play and his status as an
independent psychologist, so everyone else who works I not Dtor Shapuri.
He was just independent, a psychologist who would come and
work on therapy with the children back in great therapy
(47:08):
and if a parent wanted to pay for it, one
to one therapy and crucially he believed that he was
an independent kind of arbiter.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Doctor Shaprix had started his own practice, Shaprix and Associates
in nineteen ninety eight and began consulting member programs in
the early years of WASP, so technically he was independent. However,
the lines separating him and WASP are extremely blurry. Decca
reported that he was working half of every month for
(47:41):
WASP facilities.
Speaker 5 (47:42):
The parent trust him precisely because he was independent, But
he worked the two weeks stated ever before at Tranquility,
and then the other two weeks of every month he
spent working at other WASP facilities. So I'm not sure
if he had any other employer. As far as I
can seej What's a soul employer. So the extent of
(48:04):
which he could legitimately be described as independent was questionable.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Why why has he stuck in your mind for so
many years?
Speaker 5 (48:15):
I guess the simple answer is you could say all
of the staff who worked with that facility are local,
uneducated rule Jamaicans who are being employed by a large
employer to do a job. And you could say that JK,
who's running the place, is a product of has grown
(48:40):
up with his father running this organization. He's never really
been exposed to anything else. He believes it. She could,
she's somewhat been brainwashed. You can kind of forgive him.
There is no plausible defense on god, uh, how educated
(49:02):
man with a medical qualification who calls himself a psychologist.
There is no defense on earth for how he could
have been complicit in what went on there, witness to
it and have not. It was unforgivable that somebody with
(49:23):
his education and his qualifications could have been complicit in
what went on there.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
It wasn't just doctor Shapui's alleged conflict of interest or
his arrogance that stuck with her. Decca alleges that she
felt his methods could be cruel, especially when it came
to one aspect in particular.
Speaker 5 (49:43):
He had this kind of Wolffish amusement about the trauma
of these children. He was amused and gratified by the
traumas that they experienced a tranquility, or the traumas the
head experienced in their childhood. He ran a series of
(50:06):
therapy groups, one of which, I kid you not, was
called rape and molest For a very significant proportion of
the girls there could experienced some kind of sexually beset
and he was in charge of group therapy for young
adolescent victims of rape and moleste. And he conducted these
(50:32):
groups therapies on the basis that I mean, it's so
incredible to me, is ever about say I think I
think I wroking it up right. It sounds it's just
mind bog loans and medical professional who works with teenagers
(50:54):
to say these things. That his position towards the rape
molest groups was, yeah, I think the bad thing that
happened to you, yeah, you know. But his message to
them was, you have got to take responsibility for what
you did to get raped or molested. Plucky clothes you wore,
(51:16):
hanging out with the wrong guys, getting yourself wrong, getting
that guy's car. You are responsible for what happened to you.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Unfortunately, the number of teens at Tranquility Bay who attended
the rape and molest group was extremely high. Here's Chelsea.
Speaker 8 (51:38):
I think within my first week or two of being
there is when I attended my first session of rape
and molested and I just remember how many people were
in that room as like the first shocking thing. I mean,
if it wasn't everyone from the girl's side, it was
eighty five percent of the girl's side attended rape and
(52:00):
molest group. And that was like just mind blowing to
me because I felt like this was this thing that
had happened to me and hadn't really happened to other people,
but then I realized it happened to like everybody that
was at this place, and especially like molestation. If we
(52:20):
had a surprising amount of girls who had been molested
by the people who sent them to Tranquility Bay.
Speaker 9 (52:27):
And this was an.
Speaker 8 (52:28):
Open known fact that was talked about in group and
something that I really struggled with.
Speaker 9 (52:37):
At the time, and I guess even now.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
As described by Chelsea, the rape and molest group placed
the responsibility for sexual assault on the working and non
working choices.
Speaker 9 (52:50):
The group was very.
Speaker 8 (52:53):
It was similar to the seminars in that it was
confrontation based and revolved around the same concept to there
being no such thing as right or wrong. There was
only working or non working choices. And so it was
our jobs in the rape in the lest group to
look at what had happened to us and identify the
non working choices that we made that led to our
(53:15):
sexual assaults.
Speaker 4 (53:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (53:21):
So in my case, I used to spend a night
at his house all the time, and we would usually
share it, and so the particular night that that happened,
I was over at another friend's house. He was out
doing something else. Entirely I was drinking, I got really sick,
and he offered to pick me up and let me
spend the night so I didn't have to go home,
(53:42):
and that's when.
Speaker 9 (53:43):
The sexual assault happened.
Speaker 8 (53:44):
So, in terms of processing that through the lens of
working and non working, I made a non working choice
by choosing to go drink with my friends and drinking
in general. And I made another non working choice when
I got into the with my friend, and you know
that's why that happened.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
An unknown number of young women would pass through Chapuiz
so called therapy group and would be blamed or told
to be accountable for the assaults that happened to them.
It's an experience many feel had a lasting negative effect
on their mental health and self worth, and many survivors
do not feel like these methods were healing or beneficial
(54:32):
to them personally, and yet they have to live on
with the ramifications.
Speaker 5 (54:38):
I don't know in what universe it qualifies for the
term therapy, and I don't know what universe. Marcel Chapule
could feel good about what he did for them, but
he felt absolutely pleased to punch for himself. He couldn't
(54:59):
have been proud or of his work.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Decca had access to Tranquility Bay for three days. The
way she described her feelings about the facility after leaving
are especially haunting.
Speaker 5 (55:15):
I mean, after seeing teenage girls hair into each other
to keep rip each other to shreds verbally, and after
seeing children being made to learn their face, and after
hearing Master she can really talk about how girls needed
to take responsibility for getting themselves raped. In many ways,
(55:36):
the sports datings were the least distressing, most innoxious of
all the things that we witnessed there. But in many
ways I found I remember walking away at the end
and they were playing on the big sound system and
usher songs, and there was something uniquely grotesque about this
(56:00):
kind of fiction of fun, this sort of notional idea
that these kids were going to have fun day or
sports day. It felt like the absolutely final impult that
you kind of co op some sort of pretend of humanity.
(56:22):
What everything about this institution was Will Barrack to the
point of depraved.
Speaker 2 (56:35):
Deco's stories about Tranquility Bay, the kids, the parents, and
the personalities that ran it were unnerving. The kids were
treated as a product, something that had gone wrong, something
to be fixed, a sentiment that seemed to exist throughout
the WASP universe. Next time untrapped in.
Speaker 14 (56:57):
Treatment, I anyway cannot imagine like a more evil person.
He's the most like manipulative, abusive person I've ever dealt
with in my entire life by far. He constantly had
me tell myself that I was cancer for being gay,
and that the only way anybody around me could thrive
was to kill me.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
From records available to us, it appears Tranquility Bay shut
down sometime in two thousand and nine. All of our
efforts to reach Robert Litchfield, JK. Ken K, and Marcel
Chapui for comment were unsuccessful, and they did not return
our request for comment. Other than as described in this episode,
no one mentioned in this episode has ever been charged
(57:54):
with or found guilty of any crime stemming from allegations
of abuse or in connection with WASP or any of
the schools affiliated therewith.
Speaker 4 (58:10):
Hey everyone, it's Paris.
Speaker 2 (58:12):
Thanks for listening to episode eight.
Speaker 4 (58:14):
If you want to get involved with our movement, sign
up for the updates the link in our episode description.
Speaker 8 (58:19):
We have to act together to make sure this never
happens to another child.
Speaker 2 (58:22):
Be part of the change and make sure to listen
to all our episodes.
Speaker 4 (58:26):
You can find them at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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