Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: Broken Circle

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Andrea Canning catches up with Keith Morrison and Dateline producer Liz Brown about their episode, “Broken Circle.”  In 2020, a 21-second video filmed secretly at Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch, a religious reform school in Missouri, went viral on TikTok. Soon after, the local sheriff launched an investigation into possible abuse, and the school closed. Surprisingly, the person who posted the video was none other than Amanda Householder, the daughter of the school's owners. Keith and Liz discuss Amanda’s choice to go against her parents and how she joined forces with former Circle of Hope students to change Missouri laws regulating religious schools. Plus, Keith shares two podcast-exclusive clips from his interviews with former students from Circle of Hope and a similar nearby boys’ school, Agape Ranch.Listen to the full episode of "Broken Circle" here: https://link.chtbl.com/dl_brokencircleupdate

Hey, everyone. I'm Andrea Canning, and we are Talking Dateline. Today, I'm here with Keith Morrison and the producer of this episode, Liz Brown. Hello to both of you. Hi, Andrea. Hello. Hi, Andrea. Okay. This episode is called Broken Circle. If you haven't listened to it yet, it's the episode right below this one on your list of podcasts. So go there and listen to it and then come back here. Today, Keith has two interview clips that he's going to play for us that were not in the show.

To recap, in 2020, a 21-second video filmed secretly at a religious reform school in Missouri went viral on TikTok. Within weeks, the local sheriff launched an investigation into possible abuse at the school, and the school closed. What was surprising, the person who had posted the video was none other than the daughter of the school's owners, and Amanda Householder was on a mission to stop her father, no matter what the personal cost.

Okay, Liz and Keith, let's talk Dateline. All right. So let's just start with how sad this episode made me feel for these teenagers. It was heartbreaking to think that their parents were sending them there to try to do right. And then they're subjected to this everything, this manual labor, sexual abuse, and it goes on and on. When I looked at the TikTok video, I mean, my gosh. Knock her out. Yes, sir. I mean it. Knock her out. Yes, sir. I mean it. Knock her out.

Yes, sir. And that goes for the rest of you. If she clenches her fist like she's going to hit you, that's a threat. Knock her out. Yes, sir. That was it's like one of the great things about a little snippet of video, even if it doesn't show you very much for very long, you hear the voice of the person who is committing these, I'll call them sins, whatever you want to call them. You hear that person and you hear their real personality as they are telling one little girl to hit another little girl and knock her out. And the way it's said in those just very few seconds, it was amazing. It's amazing how 21 seconds can be so powerful. Exactly.

It was really disheartening to watch this, that there's places like that that exist. Well, and more than you would think. I assumed at the beginning of this that it was sort of one isolated case, one bad seed. But the problem is much more endemic to that. And it traces back to an oversight in some state legislation, certainly in that particular area, but also in some other parts of the country where religious schools are not regulated in the same way and not supervised in ways that other kinds of schools are regulated. And Liz, can I just say just some excellent reporting. Oh, thank you.

On your part, investigating to track all these people down and get to the heart of the matter and the truth of the story. It was really good investigative work. I do want to give a shout out to Tyler Kincaid. He's a digital reporter at NBC, and actually, he was the trailblazer on this story. He posted an article when the school was first closing. We thought, we have to look into this. But going back to what Keith was saying, if a school is founded or run according to religious principles, you don't want to know, you don't want to judge, you don't want to get involved. I think that's, you know, part of the kind of hesitancy of some states to regulate. But that was also kind of the lure for some of these parents,

you know, that this is religious, this has some kind of morality, this biblical discipline that these parents were promised. I know that when I first started looking into this story, I was like, how could you send your child to this school? But the more parents that we spoke to, the more I kind of understood that they, in many cases, were trying to do the best that they could for their children. Absolutely. Well, if somebody offers you an option that is supposedly an option

that is morally correct, which is a godly biblical thing to do. And you, you know, I've been listening to sermons day in and day out from somebody who says that that's the right way to raise a child. Well, I guess maybe you'd think about it. Well, and there's, and clearly a lot of things are not shared with the parents about exactly, you know, what goes on there. So, you know, the parents were certainly duped to a certain extent as far as just how tough the love was there. And the fact that tough love works would be the philosophy. And in some cases, indeed, tough love works,

but it just depends on how it's supplied, where and by whom. I want to talk about the mother and daughter, Teresa and Ashley, because as I'm watching them, I thought how brave of these two to go on national television and share this story. Because Teresa especially had such guilt for sending her daughter there. And you would, as a parent, it would crush you to know that you sent your child into harm's way, even though she didn't know. It was crushing for her. Yeah.

Amen. They were so brave. They just felt so strongly that they wanted to share their story. Teresa, she gave us a handbook that the school gives parents when you sign up your kid. And in the handbook, it laid out some of the rules about being in communication with the children. So she wasn't allowed to have any contact with Ashley for 30 days. They were told they weren't allowed to whisper on the children. So she wasn't allowed to have any contact with Ashley for 30 days. They were told they weren't allowed to whisper on the phone. I mean, so there are all these controls to prevent that communication between parent and child. How would you know what was

going on there? You would have no idea, but she still felt this incredible guilt and it's taken years for them to repair that relationship. Yeah. Well, you heard Ashley saying, I hated my mom. I hated her. I'm not going to lie. I couldn't stand her. I couldn't stand looking at her. You feel guilty? Yeah.

You know, how could I do this to my child? Thinking I was helping her. I have a question for both of you. Boyd Householder, who ran the school along with his wife, Stephanie, do you think that, you know, going back to the religious element, do you think Boyd truly thought

that he was doing a good thing? Or do you think that he was a man with serious anger issues and that this was his, you know, they were his punching bag to get out this anger? You know, he was drawn. It was Boyd's wife who took him to church and said, here's the preacher you need to listen to.

And that preacher was preaching a message that resonated with Boyd because he had been, you know, he'd been a drill instructor. He knew how to be tough with recruits. You apply those same principles to an eight-year-old child who's been away from home for the very first time, living with a bunch of other kids who are all terrified. It's not a good scene, that's for sure. He also, remember, worked at that other school, Agape, before he opened his own school. And from the conversations that we had with more than a dozen students there and staff, former staff members, the environment was very similar. The boys were treated in an equally physical way. So, yes, I mean, we can't get in people's heads, but from one of Boyd's former students at Agape and a clip from a different former student who tells Keith her dramatic story of being taken to Circle of Hope.

So you had a lot of brave souls talking to you, and I was especially struck by the idea of these teen girls suddenly finding themselves at the school at Circle of Hope. Ashley talks about being driven there by her pastor, but you have an extra clip from your interview with another student named Denae that was also very disturbing. Let's take a listen to that. What was your first connection with one of these places? What happened? I literally was awoke at like 4 a.m. in the morning to a stranger in my bedroom being like, you need to get dressed. We're leaving. And I was carried to a car where I was handcuffed and put in a car where I couldn't get out. And you were at home when this happened? Yes. In your own bed and your

childhood home? Yes. Yes. My mother was nowhere around. And then once I was physically in the car, she ended up coming out and the car, I couldn't get out of it. There was bars that prevented me from getting to the front. Like one of those cages that they have in police cars? Yes. And I literally sat there and just became a shell of a human. Wow. Just remind me what had led up to Danae's mom feeling hopeless and that, you know, she had to do this. Well, she was not behaving in the way that her mother wanted her to. She was seen as a problem child. But, you know, things that were not that unusual in any teenager's family, quite frankly. Yeah. And speaking of the teens,

we have another clip that did not air in the original episode from Colton Schrag, who was a student at Agape Boarding School where Boyd had worked before. I'd watch him grab students and chuck them to a wall, grab them by the neck

and slam them on the rocks outside, get in their face yelling and screaming, you know, just completely out of control. He was out of control. Yeah, he was. I actually had an incident with him myself. headcount every time we left like the main dining hall or main cafeteria we'd line up in a line and a leader student would take take account and I was I was standing in line kind of spaced out and I was making a simple beat with my mouth you know and what householder saw walked up and punched me in the stomach he's like we don't listen to that devil music here if I ever catch you doing that again I'm going to take you to the padded palace we're going to restrain you i looked at boyd householder

i said why wait let's go right now and so we did we went to that room got restrained oh i hated hearing about the padded palace that was so awful? You say in the episode that Boyd Householder denied getting violent with students like Colton or Danae. He did say that he restrained them if they got violent for their own safety and other students. But I keep coming back to that TikTok video and you hear him telling a student to knock out another girl. Knock her out. Yes, sir. I mean it. Knock her out. Yes, sir. I mean it. Knock her out.

I was going to say what was remarkable about that video is just that it had such an impact. Like it was, people have been complaining about the school for years. So it opened in 2006. This video is in 2020. People have been complaining about this school since 2007. Nothing had happened. Then this 21-second video comes along, and all of a sudden, people are investigating, people are paying attention, and things start to change. And Amanda was a person who was making it all

possible in the end. Imagine her dilemma. She has grown up in this family. She loves her mother and father. They have a certain philosophy about the way children should be raised and schools should be operated. Amanda herself worked in that school, did the things that were required, which sometimes gave her a lot of trouble, a lot of pause. But it was only when she was able to get away from the school herself, when she finally said, enough, I'm leaving, I'm going off to live my own life, and saw things from the outside looking in, that she recognized that this was just a terrible thing and that really she had to do something on it.

But making the decision to turn on your own parents and keep that fight up, not just for a week or for a month, but for years and years and keep at it. No matter how much, no matter how the parents had to answer for that legally, that was just remarkable. And it was a testament to her staying power and her ability. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some updates on the story. There's a major update since the original episode aired regards to the legal aspect of all this.

So the big one is that Boyd and Stephanie were both criminally charged. We're talking more than 70 felonies for Boyd, including abuse for child, more than 20 felonies for Stephanie, including abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. And they both pleaded not guilty. Boyd actually died recently before he went to trial, which is pretty, if you're talking about Amanda and her relationship with her parents, she hadn't spoken to them in years. So she had, when we spoke with her recently, very mixed feelings about that because on the one hand, she was grieving, but she was also angry. She was angry that the survivors didn't have a chance to face Boyd in court. The mom's trial is pending.

In terms of Agape, the boys' school where Boyd worked before Circle of Hope, three staff members pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assaults on boys there. And Agape ended up closing. They said it was because of lack of enrollment and lack of funding. But, you know, you can read between the lines. And there's another person charged too, right? Agape used to go take the boys to the town doctor, David Smock, if they were sick. But in December 2021, he was charged with felonies, including multiple counts of sexual misconduct. He allegedly committed crimes against children he met through Agape. He's pleaded not guilty, and he's in custody with his trial pending.

The school hasn't made any statements about those charges against the doctor. The fact is that these children were vulnerable, that they were not able to communicate with their parents, that they wouldn't have been believed had they told somebody they were being abused, which makes them absolutely the perfect victims for an abuser. And abusers tend to be attracted to the kind of places where they can abuse children. Yeah, it's always in all kinds of these stories, whether it's this type of story or a woman who's been, you know, taken advantage of by a man or whatever, it's, they're in vulnerable places in vulnerable places, and people prey on the weak.

And that's exactly what this is. I mean, kudos to the media, including you two and your team for really shining a light on this problem. It's just sad that it took that long. And I think the biggest kudos is to Amanda and the group of kids. Yeah, true. Oh, yeah, very much so. Yeah. If it hadn't been for her, this wouldn't happen. And they picked up the phone.

They pounded the corridors in the state capitol to say, this has to stop. This has to stop. They were demonstrating outside the school. I mean, they did everything they could possibly do. And their campaign went on for quite some time. And can you imagine some of those kids, Amanda,

had restraint? Like some of the former pupils? Like imagine trying to build that relationship. Yeah, it's awkward when you think about it. Like that initial, you know, coming together, right?

Absolutely. Amanda with these various people. I mean, yeah. How did she gain their trust? It just, it took some time. I think that they were all hurting. And when they recognized that Amanda understood what she had done and that she was part of them hurting and that she wanted to make amends, they were only too happy to join her. I'll call it a crusade to do something about this. So thanks to the survivors, the law did end up changing in Missouri. So now religious schools have to register with

the state. So the state knows that they exist. Employees do have to do background checks. It's a step in the right direction. How satisfying was it for you to know that after the report aired that real action was being taken against the householders, the schools? It was one that was really a privilege to be able to be part of because something happened because of it. And some children were able to avoid a fate that was not something anybody wants to think about. So yeah, it was a great thing to do. You know, that future teens that could have gone off to those facilities that now will not. Thank you both for diving into this very important story that has impacted a lot of lives. And hopefully there will continue to be more change as awareness is spread about these kinds of facilities.

Thank you, Andrea. Thanks, Andrea. That's Talking Dateline for this week. Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories or about Dateline, you can reach out to us on social at Dateline NBC. See you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.