Crime Seen | Episode 88: Hell Camp: Teenage Nightmare

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[00:00:26] That's Shopify. When Copilot simplifies complex data so your teams can act, that sun's shining on a beach.

[00:01:44] And when Copilot uncovers hidden insights, you're on that beach. Hello, everyone. I'm Mari Forth. I'm Sarah Car four time club. I don't like that. We gotta go six and seven over here. But thank y'all for having me. I'm sorry if I came in I know we were excited. We were excited. We're so happy to have you. Yes, we are. And if you haven't already, you would have heard Chappelle on all of it's just like teenage dirtbags, you know, kids being kids or, you know, actual kids this time. I think the Woodstock groups, these were like young adults, you know,

[00:05:44] but these are literal children who are being treated.

[00:07:01] Yeah. And as somebody who I'm on a 63-day correctional retreat, featuring extreme physical activity, physical and emotional abuse, and the aim of making them good, air quotes, again. Yeah, beat the good into them.

[00:07:03] Yeah.

[00:07:04] Hmm.

[00:07:05] When 16-year-old Kristen died on a five-mile forest hike Cartesano then established Pacific Coast Academy in Samoa with the same philosophy in operating procedures. Here, a little more cautious of the allegations of child abuse, the staff required the students to discipline each other. After a concerned father smuggled a damning videotape out of Samoa, workers at the U.S. Embassy staged a rescue.

[00:08:23] No charges were brought against Cartesano. of some of the things that we've seen in that realm. I will say specific to that church, but a lot of things that surround that type of ideology, Netflix has made bank off of. I mean, y'all have covered a bunch of them. I've watched them on my own. They're out there. So I would say for the property, it did fine. Protecting them. But as far as like,

[00:09:41] it's feeling like a true crime documentary.

[00:09:43] I guess they don't really delve into the crime enough for me.

[00:09:45] They talk about the experience in the same way as

[00:11:01] when you put them up on a witness stand, when they were, the US embassy had to go and rescue these children who had been taken out of the camp and hidden on a beach and they had to drive in in their black SUPs and rescue them. And then the documentary says, well, you know, then 9-11 happened, so

[00:12:24] he didn't get charged. they did, they kind of produced this one like it was a scammer doc, right? Did it feel like more of a- It felt crazy. Yeah, exactly right. More of a scammer doc than a true crime doc. Like we've been saying, I think this was a true crime doc. When they got to Kristen's death, they got to Kristen's death

[00:13:42] like maybe 20 minutes into the property. And I thought we were going to stay here for a second.

[00:14:43] quite deeply in his articles, but I kept waiting for him to delve.

[00:14:45] Like, when was he going to delve?

[00:14:47] When somebody going to delve?

[00:14:48] And then the only kind of slightly

[00:14:53] amusing thing about the the terrible court case that he was found not guilty

[00:14:55] in is he never paid his attorney. So I thought, oh, OK, so you would think, well, that attorney has, you know,

[00:14:59] can he not say something that doesn't break privilege?

[00:15:02] Get another legal expert from the outside, you know?

[00:15:05] Yeah, he counters your lawyer.

[00:16:04] the director maybe didn't think they had enough for three parts, which is which is fine. Then they could have gotten away with the two part. This is Hulu. I feel like they would have done a two-parter in in no time.

[00:16:10] But I just really felt like we could have gotten more because I was just sitting here like the Breaking Bad meme like how

[00:16:17] does this man keep getting away with this because they weren't telling us.

[00:16:21] Yeah

[00:16:23] I don't think they just move on when like,

[00:17:41] and then he does it again.

[00:17:42] I'm like, wait, but go back to the fact that

[00:17:44] this is a career criminal.

[00:17:46] He has made a career off of her treatment at one of these camps. And then it says, ah, but we must go back in time. And I thought, great, they're scene setting and they're going to go back. They're going to dig in. But it felt like everything's like he was a terrible person, but he exists within a society.

[00:19:02] He exists within a system, a structure.

[00:19:05] He made $10 million in three years. Seeing this, I was just like, so you have $16,000 to waste on getting your kid kidnapped, but you don't have the time to actually figure out what their needs are. Because in the world of conscious parenting and positive discipline, kids acting out is because there's an unmet need. There's a need there that's being unmet.

[00:20:21] And yes, by the time that theyeraldo. Yes, Heraldo. He got so much media exposure for it. Again, maybe society has to take a little bit of blame in media here, but putting him on those shows just opened up his clientele because more people saw it.

[00:21:41] It gave him a platform to be like,

[00:21:42] hey, this is what I do and this want to be able to prompt your kid to be able to work in their natural state and be able to fix problems their own way as opposed to having to revert to a certain mode in order

[00:23:05] to make decisions. What do I need to do? And it's called fawning, in case people are interested, F-A-W-N-I-N-G, where you fawn upon the bully, you don't resist, but you in fact learn the behavior that makes you safe. So you are constantly in a state of untruthfulness.

[00:24:20] You're constantly in a state of hyper-awareness,

[00:24:25] pretending, you read people extremely well, personal for a moment, it startles and saddens me when I react in a circumstance now, all these years later, and I have to really notice that behavior and curb it. So when the grown up teenagers were talking, I thought, yeah, they're still there. They're still there. I would have liked that to have been explicated a little more fully.

[00:25:40] Yeah, I agree. And then, well, that's a really good point too. Just, I mean, you asking which

[00:25:45] one of y'all are unhappy and thinking somebody gonna raise their hand and my head, you know, I know how to survive. It's like, yeah, but you shouldn't be in survival mode your whole time. People do that when they come out of prison, too. They're so used to being in like teed up and like on edge about everything. You know, they can't they don't know who to trust this and others. So then when they finally get indoctrinated, they are still making life hard for themselves because they only know how to live in that space of just anxiety.

[00:27:02] You know, like I only know how to be in survival mode and attack mode,

[00:27:05] you know, in defense mode.

[00:27:06] They don't know how to survive, she was talking about surviving as a junkie on the streets, as a homeless junkie. Yes, she was.

[00:28:20] So I became a homeless junkie,

[00:28:22] but thank goodness for my training

[00:28:24] because I managed to make it through there

[00:28:26] and now I have a house.

[00:28:27] It's like, okay. They should not be in this wilderness therapy. And if you can spend $16,000 on stupid wilderness therapy, you can't spend that money to get your kid help for like rehab. You know what I'm saying? Like family therapy, even getting a room with a therapist who can tell you what you're doing

[00:29:40] wrong as well as listening to the child.

[00:29:43] All of the episode. Franny Marin will join me for the first word on a Survivor 46 after the two hour premiere Wednesday night. Then on Thursday I'll have an exit interview and Survivor know it all's with Steven Fishback.

[00:31:00] Plus everything we have coming up for you in our Survivor podcast feed. multiple occasions. Is this the thing you really want to teach your kids? You really want to teach your kids that they have no autonomy and that they need to listen to the closest authority figure and just hope that that authority figure is on the moral up and up and not take advantage of them in several ways. The way that Steve was able to get rid

[00:32:20] of to get through the Utah desert and the's in charge of them. There is no governing body that's stopping him from doing whatever the hell he wants to these kids. And people's parents are just signing them up. I was done. I wasn't expecting the boats. Yeah, I wasn't expecting the boats at all.

[00:33:41] I was not expecting the Caribbean.

[00:33:42] And then the double back to Samoa.

[00:33:45] I mean, all of it, hope to become junior staff. So now they have a better, they have better food, better quarters, and they have power over the non, you know, the others.

[00:35:00] And while we have one who's very apologetic, I thought, yeah, that's a, that's another she says. You could have just said no. Yeah, but he was a kid too, you know, and I'm not making excuses for him. Right. Exactly. If they're grooming him to be that person, it's like we can't be- A lot of grooming. Yeah, so it's hard to hold children accountable for things that they're being taught and forcibly taught.

[00:36:20] You know, he's trying to survive

[00:36:22] and his next best option is, okay, if I survive

[00:36:24] and I tie her up, maybe I loosen the ropes a little bit.

[00:36:27] Maybe I'll just throw, Raphael, you will pay. But, uh, yeah, Jenny Jones, Mari, the bootcamp, Ricky Lake, y'all are all there. Y'all are all complicit. Did y'all didn't like, send them to the boot camp and the kids be like, whatever, whatever. I do

[00:37:43] what I want. And we would like watching it. Fist bumping like take those bad ass kids, where they test themselves, but they have to feel completely safe. It has to be their choice and they have to be surrounded by people who are wanting to be their experience, to be positive, wanting to teach them and have, you know, for want of a better word, loving attitude to them. This is not that. Yeah, exactly that.

[00:39:01] And

[00:39:02] it's just so frustrating.

[00:39:04] It truly is frustrating to me because from the very moment that

[00:40:02] tools to be a good person doing this. Like you're just not, you're traumatizing them.

[00:40:04] You're giving them PTSD.

[00:40:06] You're, you're really just shaking, you know, shaking them up to the point of like,

[00:40:13] where are we, what are we doing here?

[00:40:15] Like this, that was the whole, that my whole thing, this the whole time I was

[00:40:18] watching, I was so angry.

[00:40:19] I'm just so angry at the parents for doing this to these kids because you should

[00:40:24] be trying to protect your kids from being traumatized.

[00:41:24] it to them and someone else said, no, don't do that because you would be punished. You would both be punished for sharing food.

[00:41:26] So it's even like the basics of kindness are not allowed.

[00:41:30] So I mean, as you say, Chappelle, we can't blame these kids for being used as tools

[00:41:37] to be violent towards other kids when they're being taught.

[00:41:41] You're not even allowed to share your food if somebody wants it.

[00:42:43] that this person will now get over and will be better because of it. You know, trial by fire.

[00:42:44] Who among us, you know what I'm saying?

[00:42:46] It's like looking at their kid thinking, my kid can't make it in a situation like that.

[00:42:50] No, my kid will rise to the occasion.

[00:42:52] They're thinking that they're sending a kid out there to learn a lesson that they are

[00:42:55] ill-equipped as parents to teach them.

[00:42:57] And they're incorrect.

[00:42:58] They're incorrect.

[00:42:59] They're being scammed.

[00:43:00] They're being led astray.

[00:43:01] There's a reason why this man does not stop doing this because it is a crime that is working

[00:43:06] for him.

[00:43:07] He does it three different times. Oh no, I mailed the tape off, but it's secretly in his briefcase. They're doing so much to cover it up. This is a known problem and everybody is being lied to. Now, about that first kid, even, you know, because that's my defense of some of the parents, right? But to the other side of that, there's no criteria that get you landed in this place.

[00:44:21] Your parents decide that you're going and you go.

[00:44:24] So it could be you're a drug addict.

[00:44:27] You probably need rehab, but I'm sending you there.

[00:45:22] the kids are confused because I think I thought my parent loved me. How do we end up here?

[00:45:23] You know, so I think this man, this this man

[00:45:27] deserved to pay for his crimes and he got away scot free as far as I'm concerned.

[00:45:31] I completely agree.

[00:45:33] Parenting is not easy, and that's why,

[00:45:37] you know, that's why you're doing it all over again.

[00:45:39] Right. Right.

[00:45:41] It's not easy.

[00:45:42] So there's no easy fix, no matter who your kid is.

[00:45:45] You know what I'm saying?

[00:45:46] Each kid is different. like boom, this crazy thing happened to a socialite, someone who's been rich their entire life, who's basically been famous since the day they've stepped on the earth, just because of they're an heir to a legacy. And this happened to them. And we're expected to believe that they had Paris Hilton out there in Utah, in the desert, and you didn't show us none of that?

[00:47:00] What about Samoa?

[00:47:02] What about the Caribbean?

[00:47:02] Where was Paris?

[00:47:03] I need more information about Paris Hilton,

[00:47:06] one of the most famous onto onto the broader subject, but they never went broad after Paris, but they used her to bookend the documentary. That's a really good point, Chappelle. It just bothered me because I was waiting on the follow up for like, okay, so what happened?

[00:48:20] Because they did, like you said, a book ended it. So it started with Paris and it got like,

[00:48:24] okay, but tell me how Paris Hilton was involved in that's not the story that they were telling. If it was a broad open-ended story about the troubled teen industry itself, maybe we could have gotten more. But because they focus in on Steve here, I don't think that she was a part of it. But you're right, Chappelle, it really was like they did it to try and grab our attention.

[00:49:40] Again, a lot of sensationalism, a lot of fluff, a lot of prettiness don't think she wasn't hiking in the Utah desert. Right. And she was probably in what an Elon type, Elon school type of troubled teen facility. Look that up, anybody, if you if you have it, if you're curious about that side of it. But let's go ahead and get to our ratings.

[00:51:00] Chappelle, how many magnifying glasses are you going to rate

[00:51:03] Hell Camp Teen Nightmare out of a possible five?

[00:51:07] Man, see, now my favorite thing after talking it through with job probably give it a three because I don't think I would recommend it for anybody. I think that it would show you it's like it teaches you something but it does you don't learn anything from it. You don't see that there's a consequence to these actions. You don't see that there's that there's a general an ending to the story. It's just

[00:52:23] a story of something that happened and then it went off happened. Is there something missing there? Again, she may have been given the order by Netflix, we want an eight minute documentary, we don't know. But I think I would recommend it while also marking it down if I may do both.

[00:53:43] I don't mind if a documentary or a series

[00:53:45] makes me want to give credit where it's due.

[00:55:03] It's just that the things that left me hanging Does it help if I raise my rating to two point five? Yeah, I'll raise my. Yeah, no, I'll raise my two point five. I'm feeling very bad having compliment and having and hearing Chappelle. No, it's so good. It is. It's well done.

[00:56:21] But it's very well done.

[00:56:23] I've missed the.

[00:56:24] It's a lot missing. Exactly.

[00:57:27] children died in those congregate care facilities or the troubled youth facility programs. And did you say 80?

[00:57:30] 80 children died within that period.

[00:57:35] And it's just so much meat on this bones for, I think knowing that there's so much that

[00:57:41] she could have, the director could have tapped into that didn't. So yeah, I and I do agree with Sarah's a soft recommend. It's I don't think it I think if you watch it It won't ruin your day Turn it on I get mad Like some of the other stuff that I feel like yeah, you won't be mad at the documentary you'll be mad at the situation Yeah, yeah, and and I think you can you know, I'm all for watching true time while you clean and stuff like that

[00:59:04] So it's so it wasn't it was a truly really easy watch listeners? I do not. However, in our conversations about what we were going to talk about, man, y'all made some really good recommendations to me because what was the show we were thinking about talking about where the, the, the colonizer showed up on the island. Listen, listen, that trailer right there. I said, Oh, okay. Now look, hold on. We're going to talk about that.

[01:00:23] Now I'm not mad about the pivot to this. This was very entertaining. I mean, Rosamund Pike, I just is fantastic. So it sent me and my holiday companions off on a bit of a mini Rosamund Pike film festival. So I am going to recommend that to you. So if you've been holding off like me, watch it. It's available on Netflix in Australia. And if

[01:01:41] you're in the US, you'll have to pay forennanon had a part in the troubled teen industry and all of it. So it's a much, much more in-depth coverage of the troubled teen industry as a whole. If you want to go and check that out because that's episode 517, 518 and 519

[01:03:02] on the last podcast on the left.

[01:03:04] We'll put those in the show notes.

[01:03:07] At crime scene, we are eager to hear your feedback And so very quickly, I guess we should have the color purple coming soon. That should be fun. But we got some other stuff in the chamber too. So check that out. Follow me on Twitter at Chappelle's underscore show and continue to keep up with my Suits coverage as well. As we're wrapping up Suits, our nine season rewatch podcast or official watch podcast or whatever the case may be nine seasons in like six episodes left.

[01:04:22] It's time.

[01:04:23] Wrap it up Suits podcast.com.

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