The David Knight Show - BREAKING Another Death in the "Troubled Teen Industry"

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Marty Gottesfeld joins to talk about his breaking story on the very troubled "Trouble Teen Industry". Over $50 billion of private and taxpayer money poured into schools that have a VERY bad track record. Six deaths in just 4 years in Utah alone. Marty's Substack story can be found here: Jump and Don't Look BackFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Can Indigenous ways of knowing help kids cope with online bullying? At the University of British Columbia, we believe that they can. Dr. Johanna Sam and her team are researching how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth cope with cyber aggression, working to bridge the diversity gap in child psychology research. At UBC, our researchers are answering today's most pressing questions. To learn how we're moving the world forward, visit ubc.ca forward happens here. Drive safe and obey the rules of the road. Vehicle owners who receive a red light or speed camera violation can pay or dispute online at toronto.ca.aps. Well, joining us now is somebody that we've been talking about for years,

Marty Gottesfeld. He has a real compassion for helping kids that have been stomped on in the system, medically kidnapped and others, and he's got a breaking story. He's been very active as a reporter, even when they put him in jail for breaking the story about Justina Peltier and the actions that he did to try to expose medical kidnapping of Justine. But now there's a new story, and it just broke on Daily Mail. And so we want to get Marty on right away with this breaking news about a story that actually he's been following for a while, but this is a new death, a 17 year old who died last year. Uh, the, um, the diamond ranch

Academy though, has been shut down after an investigation into her death. But again, it's not the only one we're going to let Marty, uh, uh, explain this to you. You'll find the story at daily mail, but you'll also find it at Marty's Substack, and you can find Marty on Substack at Marty G. Thank you for joining us, Marty. Thank you for having me, David. It's an amazing story. Go ahead and tell people what's going on.

And again, I do appreciate your passion for trying to help kids out there. This is happening everywhere, isn't it? Yeah. Utah kind of is one of the leaders in these programs and also one of the leaders in deaths at these programs, but it does happen nationwide. We have these programs in Massachusetts. They're in red states, they're in blue states. It is unfortunate. There's probably about 200,000 kids moving through these programs at any given time. And what are these programs called and what is their stated purpose?

So the name that you hear in our circles is the troubled teen industry. The programs market themselves as therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment programs, wilderness programs, boot camps. But really under that umbrella come like also psych wards juvenile detention centers pretty much anywhere where a child is taken out of the home and held away from the family for the supposed like medical treatment development or rehabilitation of the child right so the psych ward we're justina Pelletier was held, you know, is one of these types of facilities, even though it's not, you know, technically for profit

and it's not private in the truest sense of the word. But when you look at the whole umbrella of all these places, like I said, it's 200,000 American kids moving through them and the abuses are horrible and the deaths are often horrible. So you mentioned Diamond Ranch Academy. That was one of the most famous, wealthiest, and also most notorious of these programs. The girl who died last year, her name was Taylor Goodridge. she was actually the third known child to die at Diamond Ranch Academy.

And it took those three deaths and it took a lot of coordinated action by the survivors of Diamond Ranch who put a lot of pressure on the state licensing agency at the same time that some celebrities like Paris Hilton and Paris Jackson also applied pressure. And, you know, nonprofits, the Utah Disability Law Center, which is a federally mandated advocacy agency, you know, released a very of professional licensing report that was part of the Goodridge litigation because the family had sued Diamond Ranch. And that all kind of culminated together. And what the state did, it didn't revoke Diamond Ranch's license. That would cause a long- running administrative process. So what the state did was they waited for Diamond Ranch's license to come up for renewal and they denied the renewal. And that is a much more

discretionary thing on the part of the state. Like to revoke a license, they have to show cause and there's due process and all that. I think there's still some level of due process in declining the renewal, but the state has a lot more discretion at that point. So that's what they did. Diamond Ranch closed on Monday. But last month in July, around the same time the state announced that it was going to deny Diamond Ranch the ability to continue operating, news broke that there was a suicide at another Utah program called Daniel's Academy in Heber City. And when I and my co-author, Nora Ashley Berry, started investigating this and speaking to some of the former clients from Daniel's Academy, we learned that there had

actually been a previous suicide of a Daniels Academy client by gunshot two and a half years earlier in December 2020 that had gone completely unreported. So we were able to find and identify that prior suicide as well as the more recent suicide last July. and Utah had placed Daniels Academy on conditional licensing until this coming Sunday. And now we're not sure what the future of Daniels Academy is going to be, but we've spoken to current and former staff. We've spoken to former clients. Our sources say that Daniels Academy has taken no meaningful preventative action to stop a third suicide. It took three deaths to close Diamond Ranch. I'm really hoping that we will not have a third death at Daniels.

So Daniels markets itself to parents of autistic children as a residential program and so like in the troubled teen industry one of the ways that one of the tells that a program is one of these kind of less legitimate um faux rehab places as opposed to like a legitimate you know program is uh you know they'll they claim to have the fixed everything everything, right? No matter what your child has, oh, they can fix it. And there's a price. It's usually on the expensive side, you know. And you said something about Paris Hilton being involved in this. You said, is it because, I think you said that she was involved in this

at some point in her previously as a child? They'd put her in one of these troubled teen academies or something? Oh, they sent her to a whole bunch of them. She kept running away and they kept sending her to more and more restrictive places. She ultimately landed at the Provo Canyon School in Provo, Utah. That is one of the most notorious, harshest of these programs. A federal judge in 1980 actually issued a permanent injunction against Provo Canyon and its medical director because he found the school had been physically abusing children, had been placing them in solitary confinement, had been reading and censoring their mail, and also subjecting them to polygraph examinations, like lie detector tests, to try and suppress criticism of the program. And it was actually two plaintiffs who were able to kind of sneak information out of the program to their parents, kind of like Justina had to do in the Boston Children's Hospital psych ward that started that case. And, you know, you'd think a permanent

injunction would lead to some reform, but it's not as effective an item as it might sound at first glance. And Provo has, has remained very controversial. Um, it's under new ownership now, United Health Services owns it now, and they consistently declined to comment on any allegation, um, regarding the prior, um, conduct of the facility. Wow. How, how big is this troubled teen industry? Do you have any idea about how much, uh, they're getting, uh, government money, right. As part of this. Yeah. Okay. So do you have any idea about how much, uh, I know there's private money and government money. Do you have any idea how much even the

government side of this is? I think the government side of it is very significant is at least half, um, kids get sent, uh, to the, to the industry through special education placements, through individual education plans for special needs kids. That was how my wife's little brother ended up at one of these places in Utah. That was how I got started in this whole thing. It's a multi-billion dollar industry by all accounts. Oh, yeah. How come there's so many of them in Utah? What is it about Utah?

Do they have just really lax oversight? What's going on with Utah? Historically, yes. They had very, very lax oversight. And the Utah, like it, so there are a lot of wilderness programs, and they need wilderness in which to operate, right? So Utah is very conducive in terms of that. They also have very lax oversight, historically speaking,

although it looks like public scrutiny is starting to maybe turn a corner with Utah, and they're starting to take a harder look at these programs. But then in addition to that, so there's the barrenness, right? So if you look at like Diamond Ranch, we have a picture of it in our articles. You see a baseball diamond and a football field surrounded by desert. And so one of the things with these programs is the kids try to run away. That's what Paris Hilton did. They run. So they put these things in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the desert, to try to discourage the children from running. But the kids run anyway, and then they end up lost in the wilderness and they die like it's not it's it's you know it's not as effective

a deterrent as they would like it to be and it's very very dangerous actually like if you're going to have your kid run away from the program you'd rather have a run somewhere where there's water and food yeah and not like squelching desert wow wow yeah because these kids have problems in the first place to begin with. What, and you talked about, you know, one of the red flags of one of these programs, the fact that they claim that they can cure everything. What should people look for if they've got a troubled teen in their family and somebody is recommending one of these programs? I mean, what, what should they look for as a red flag? First, I want to address something. Some of these kids are troubled for sure,

but a lot of them are sent away for, you know, kind of bogus reasons. So like what happened to Justina, right? She was not troubled and she ended up in one of these places, right? We've seen divorce courts use these programs when you have an influential parent and the child is maybe going to testify to abuse by that influential parent, the court orders the child placed out of state far away where the child is unavailable to testify. So we've seen that in quite a few cases. You know, my wife's little brother was sent away because he was staying up late and, you know, doing regular teenage things. And just, you know, the family didn't respond to that in a way that, you know, doing regular teenage things. And just, you know, the family didn't respond to that in a way that, you know, other families might have. And that's the key thing. I think if you've got a family that, you know, you got a problem with the kid who doesn't have a problem with the kid at some point in time, but if you're going to just

kind of kick them off to an institution that in and of itself is not generally going to be as good an outcome as you're going to get with the family that God created to take care of these kids. I mean, nobody's going to take better care of your kid than you are. Nobody's going to have a better insight into their problems than you do. And so that's a given. As you point out, a lot of people are putting kids in there just because it's a convenience thing or because it's part of a legal fight and a divorce, various other issues, that's the really the key thing. But, you know, if you have a situation where some kid gets put in there or they're going to do that anyway, maybe there's some concerned family member that doesn't really have, you know, any control over this. What could they look at with this? There

would be special danger signals. I don don't know are there any of them that you think that are earning good or is the entire troubled teen industry a lot of trouble for teens i mean is that the bottom line this whole thing is messed up yeah i mean i don't have a very very hard time ever endorsing any uh any residential treatment program the amount of due diligence that i would have to do to arrive at that conclusion. I mean, and frankly, like you said, right, like most of the time, the best solution is at home. And if you're not going to solve it at home, you're just kicking the can down the road. Like you're still going to have this problem later. So, you know, and there are some children though, you know, who might really

need an out of home placement where the situation, the amount of care involved, and I'm not insensitive to that either, but you have to do your due diligence, right? And if the program is promising to be able to treat every kid for everything, if there is a very vocal group of survivors who are claiming abuse, and that's one of the big smoke signals for me, right? When you have 100 kids saying saying this place abused me, you need to listen to that. They're not making that up. One kid, two kids, you might have a couple of bad out, but with some of these places, it's hundreds. There are generations of survivors that come out of some of these places. And they're not all making it up. So you have in Pennsylvania,

two state judges, two state juvenile court judges, shut down the local juvie jail. They bought into a for-profit juvenile detention center, and then they accepted kickbacks from the juvenile detention center for sending 5,000 teens into the private facility. They were caught. They pleaded guilty or tried to plead guilty. The Justice Department gave them such a sweetheart deal for this awful thing that they had done that the federal judge overseeing the case, who was like an older federal judge,

he was appointed many, many moons ago. He was not part of the Bush, Obama kind of machine, right? He said, this plea is way too lenient. The court's not going to accept it. And he basically forced him to go to trial. And then the Justice Department let one of these crooked judges out during COVID. But about a dozen or so of the kids who were affected by this ended up committing suicide, either during their detention or shortly thereafter.

And so kids can end up in these places, you know, for any, and for very corrupt reasons. It doesn't really reflect, it's not safe to come to a conclusion about the child just because the child was placed in one of these places. And it continues to haunt them because, like, when your diploma is from, you know what I mean, like the Juvenile Attention Center, like that's on your resume for life. Like that's, you know what I mean?

Like that's a real issue, you know, going forward. If people find out about that. And the sad thing is that you have a lot of these troubled kids, because again, the parents have, have not paid attention to them or have, uh, you know, uh, made a lot of, um, we'll just say, uh, uh, bad decisions about parenting. And then it only gets worse. You put them in these types of situations. it's like pouring gasoline on the fire yes it very rarely ever gets any better and very rarely like institutionalizing a child very rarely improves anything now again i'm not going to say that there's never a case but they are exceedingly rare and and like you would you would know it you know what i mean like if like the child has trouble going to the bathroom and cleaning up after himself, right?

Like, okay, if you're in a situation like that, I'm not going to say that an institutional placement is never appropriate. But for most of these cases, you know, this is not a situation where a licensed medical professional would recommend residential placement or institutionalizing the child. And what they usually do is they try to go around and they try to make sure that no licensed, you know, knowledgeable medical professional has a chance to review the placement before it's done. Right. And so usually there's not a sign off from a qualified professional saying this child needs residential treatment. It's usually done by the family, sometimes with help from the school district on like an individual education placement.

But you will not see, you know, a competent medical professional signing off on most of these. Some of them you will like the Pelletier case. But for the most part, no, you don't you don't see that. And so like really, really high tuition. Right. Lack of like high level care. Right. Lack of high-level care. A lot of these kids, their families are paying top dollar, and they're getting therapy, what they call therapy, from a licensed clinical social worker. Someone who doesn't even have an advanced degree in psychology.

Someone who's not a doctor, has no prescription pad. And if you're paying top dollar for once-a-week therapy with a social worker, that's warning number one. If you send your kid to someplace and you're spending, some of these places are $10,000 a month. Wow. And you're spending that kind of money and your child is not seeing MDs, you know what I mean? Every week. That's huge warning sign. The other, another huge warning sign is the troubled teen places, the bad ones almost uniformly move to restrict the family communication very severely. The child is not allowed to stay in contact with friends,

with former teachers, with church staff, clergy, you know what I mean? They will tighten down very much. And when the kid does complain, they'll say, oh, the kid's just manipulating. The kid's lying. Don't believe them. But that restriction on communications is a dead giveaway. Like, I'm very dubious of gag words. It was part of what got me upset about the Pelletier case on the first place. This is America. You should be able to speak freely. Oh, yeah.

Right? So that restriction on communications is a huge warning sign. That is a big red flag. I mean, we saw that all through the pandemic and everything. Well, we can't show you this. And I'd seen it before with people pushing climate change. Show us your data. You published it. We've used it to create policy. No, I can't show you something over you or they're over on you, or they're trying to do something illegal when they try to keep everything hidden, that that's an absolute red, red flag there, uh, in this particular case, a diamond ranch, uh, your headline

says, um, you got other schools with troubled teens in Utah thrive despite six student deaths and four years. And this particular case of a Taylor Goodridge, uh, that is the headline a story here, uh, tell us what. In this particular case of Taylor Goodridge, that is the headline story here, tell us what happened in her particular case. So she, I'm trying to remember what the actual cause of death was, but she was very physically ill. Her blood pressure was high.

She had obvious cardiac symptoms. I think she had GI symptoms as well um she's vomiting all the time the articles say she's vomiting all the time yeah yeah and and diamond ranch did not take her to outside medical care wow until it was too late wow wow and she died and she was faking it and and that's another kind of telltale with these programs is you know they always say the kid is faking until the kid is dead. Wow. And there was some very compelling testimony by the government accountability office in front of Congress about 15 years ago. That is just a gut wrenching clip where they go through about seven of these cases and, you know, the GAO called it torture. And when Congress pushed on GAO to

say, did you really mean to use that word? GAO said, absolutely, yes. Some of these cases were torture. Wow. And you point out in your article, you say they were paying $12,000 per month to send her to this academy. And now there is a lawsuit from that family against that academy. How big are these schools, approximately? How many students do they have there? I mean, some of them are very small, only a handful. Some of them are very large,

into the hundreds. Diamond Ranch was one of the larger ones. I don't know off the top of my head how many kids were there, but they fielded a football team and a baseball team. They were large enough, and they competed in the Division I-A in Utah. That's a lot of money. You got that big a student body, and they're paying $12,000 month that's amazing well yeah and and now now you see the issues that's a lot of political donations that's a lot of donations to the sheriff's office or to the you know to the governor's re-election uh campaign um yeah that's how that pbs did a big investigation of the programs in montana and they found hundreds of thousands of dollars of lobbying on the part of the programs in Montana. Wow.

Yeah. It is really a disgusting situation that is happening. And let me ask you this. You know, sometimes they get counselors and stuff like that. Do they ever have any chaplains or clergy or anything like that? Or is it all drugs and psychology and brutal discipline? What is it that they typically do at these places? So there is some level of religious service.

And some of the programs that were the most controversial were the kind of like Pray Away the Gay programs where also a lot of kids died. So some of them are religiously affiliated to my knowledge, diamond ranch was not to my knowledge. Daniel's academy is not, I don't think, um, religion really plays, uh,

you know, an active role in, in most programs, but it has in some to disastrous results as well. And as you point out, yeah, it can be used either, either good or bad.

And in terms of the way that it's, uh, it's hit, uh, it can be used either good or bad in terms of the way that it's hit on people. Well, this really is an amazing story. And as you go through this article, you point out the people that are there, not licensed mental health and so forth, and they've been operating these things for decades. A lot of these, I guess, as you point out, Utah, Montana, they're going to be wilderness places because they can say, well, you know, it's going to, and typically it does help people to get out of a city environment and to get into a wilderness environment, the open spaces and that type of stuff.

But again, you know, it also presents a risk to them if these kids, these troubled kids get out of that and try to run away. What happens? Kids die in those wilderness programs just on the regular hikes. Yeah. It's without running away. Some of them have been marched to death. Yeah. The Aaron Bacon story is awful. I mean, he, it was a similar one to Taylor. You know, he had a perforated ulcer. Um, they kept him marching. They would not believe him until he died. Wow. And that was in the Utah wilderness.

Wow. Just get used to it. You're fine type of thing. Yeah. You know, it's that kind of, seriously. I mean, it's that kind of discipline. I, you know, Donald Trump was sent to a military academy. He was a troubled kid, I guess. And look at how he turned out. That's a cautionary tale, I guess. I'm not going to comment on that one. I know I'll go there by myself.

Um, but it's, uh, that should be the warning sign to everybody. Uh, your child could turn out like this, the, um, uh, it is, uh, it is truly amazing. But again, people have been doing that type of stuff, boarding schools, military schools, and now we have this troubled teen industry that is there. Um, yeah, there's a world of difference between a regular boarding school and the troubled teen industry. You know, I went to a boarding school for high school, and, like, they used that, right? Because at first when I heard, you know, my wife's little brother said a boarding school,

I thought of what my experience was like, you know, in a New England boarding school and a prep school. And it's not like a regular boarding school. Like, if you sent your kids to, you know, like a good prep school or something, this is not the same thing. This is a very, very different environment. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think there's probably all, you know, there's a big difference between each one of those categories as you jump down. And I've, I've not heard of this troubled teen industry before. So it's very important that you get this out there to people

and, um, very important article and people can find this on Marty's sub stack at Marty G. And it's also, uh, on the daily mail it just broke today and so thank you so much uh marty for coming on before you leave though uh give us an idea how things going and now that you've gotten out of jail we're all so happy to see that you're out of jail now and and you're pursuing journalism and you're doing a lot of good original breaking of stories um how are things going uh Things are very well. So far, I've not had an issue with the government on home confinement. I'm kind of knocking on wood that that continues.

The journalism has been great. I love doing it. But I don't think it's going to be me in the long term. In the long term, I'm going to transition to some kind of cybersecurity role somewhere where I can have, I think, an even larger impact and be able to do and fund the kind of efforts that I want to do. And I'm exploring that actively. And I think I'm going to have an announcement by the end of the year. Oh, good, good. Well, I know that you've got a real passion for helping kids. That's what got you in trouble and unjustifiably. Can't think of a better reason to get in trouble. That's right. That's right. And so I appreciate your heart in terms of trying to help kids. It really is a very important thing and we can all see that. And so again,

if people want to know more about this, hopefully you don't have a child or somebody that's a relative in your family that's in this type of situation but a real red flag for all this stuff and and a very serious warning about something that people may not have been aware of I haven't seen anybody else talking about this so kudos to you for pointing this out and bringing this to people's attention thank you so much Marty appreciate it thank you for having me David all right have a good day thanks you too okay we'll be right back stay with us the common man

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