Episode One

They thought that I was gonna run away. He was like "don't even think about running away because you have nowhere to go", and I was like okay okay I'll keep that in mind. He was like we're in the middle of nowhere and I'm like, "okay..."

They give me a tour walking around and I just he takes me and he's telling me , we walk into the room away from everybody he was like "you need to get the fuck outta here"

He's like "this place is a fucking cult dude. I'm over here like...

"What are you talking about? I'm court ordered, I can't leave." And he was like "ok I'm going to teach you how to survive."

(Fanfare) From the campus of Freedom Village USA, an international ministry dedicated to reaching the teenagers of the united states and canada

"Welcome to Victory Today"

My name is Margaret and this is We Warned Them: Freedom Village an investigative miniseries unpacking what happened at Freedom Village USA through interviews from people who experienced it themselves we will mention different forms of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse throughout the series so please take care of yourself as you feel necessary

I'm going to tell you a story about abuse of trust, faith, and power. I never expected to be in this position. I'm not an investigative journalist by trade but over the past two years i've interviewed close to thirty people that have become entangled in the world of Freedom Village so

How did this all start?

Well in the summer of 2020 while I was hanging out at a community garden in brooklyn new york I heard a boy telling a story he was hyperactive with bleached hair and bright eyes he was one of those people that naturally just attracted a crowd. I jokingly called him boy wonder and the nickname stuck.

anyways one day while we were hanging out he asked me where I was from I said rochester new york he stopped and said "right now ready ready I'm going to blow your fucking mind..." I was a bit hesitant but he went on to tell me that he had spent some time for the past year and a half in a rural area about forty minutes away from

rochester on a remote part of seneca lake he made it sound like a sort of prison sentence but I knew that he was too young to have gone to an adult prison upstate I asked him if it was some sort of school and he laughed

once he started describing some of the circumstances of everyday life there I had this gut feeling that whatever he was about to say was going to be important I asked him if I could record our conversation on my phone and he agreed I apologize in advance for the poor sound quality

the mornings it was eating we had to haul wood for three hours in the morning from 5am to 8am

we would have breakfast

after breakfast we go right back to hauling

what were you guys hauling wood for?

Okay so there was something there was something called ok there was levels

there was no level, no level was literally it was like solitary

you have no rights they told you what to do and if you didn't listen you got more no level. that wasn't shit to them

this is literally illegal

literally making me haul fifty pound pieces of log for six hours on a saturday during the day in a circle in 95 to 100 degree weather

literally to be you you can't sit here and tell me that a regular person would allow a young adolescent teenager to possibly hurt themselves

hauling big ass pieces of wood for six hours in the sun

like

we wouldn't... we weren't allowed to get water

we weren't allowed to use the bathroom

and when we were, they told us go behind like they treated us like we're animals

you were told to go behind the dump and just take a piss

like you treated like it got to a point where when you eventually did get off of no level

it was like I felt like I was a leashed pitbull.

I left my first interview with Wonder shocked and curious I wanted to find out if there was any information floating around the internet and found an avalanche of bad press from former students

the yelp page included reviews such as fletcher made many promises he did not keep we were forced to eat expired moldy food

even if we were to make eye contact with the opposite sex we got punished if we were to speak to the opposite sex the punishment would be worse it is my belief and understanding that fletcher brothers duped my parents into leaving me in his care in addition to hauling wood for hours I had to shovel horse shit however it was better than masturbating dogs for breeding which was my roommate's job

honestly I didn't know what to believe when it came to accredited articles I could only find a couple which was shocking considering the yelp reviews I had just read the most pressing was one from the rochester democrat and chronicle about a lawsuit alleging a girl was sexually abused there at ten years old other than that

I did find some out-of-date advertisements from Freedom Village itself it was approved by state officials as a boarding school but it was registered as a church under the name of gates community chapel the owner fletcher brothers was the head and seemingly only pastor involved but we'll look more closely at that in episode three

a few weeks later I went upstate to go visit my family and my partner maggie

she also happens to be a clinical therapist and she'll be lending her perspective and voice to this project going forward when I arrived to meet maggie she couldn't wait to tell me what had just happened to her she had been sitting in a coffee shop when she overheard a conversation that caught her attention

I was in buffalo like a little while after we had first heard about this place he there was oh yeah there was like this artist in the coffee shop is asking everybody for like an interview and he was asking about like can you describe something that had a big impact on your life like an event a big experience you went through

and this guy started talking and I kind of was like tuning out and then I heard him say something about a horse barn and this like place in upstate new york and a crazy pastor and I was like oh my god and I like we know her and I was like wait wait wait Dude are you talking about Freedom Village? and he was like oh my god yeah you know about it

Mags got his number and asked if I could interview him more formally he agreed to meet us by the river where we could record our conversation in his van but this is not a typical off-white van you would ignore or maybe be wary of because it is

a hand-painted the replica of the mystery machine from scooby doo the entire interior was covered in red velvet and littered with little trinkets that gives fox his own unique style honestly it was a pretty dope setup I asked him how his family first heard about Freedom Village

was looking at like ah between my wanting three years in prison and my

wasn't like really my pastor but I was like where my dad went to church like he kind of intervened or like he had the information of like about the place kind of like they were like talking with lawyer to judge what I ran like made suggestion the judge was like oh you were in jail at the time okay you'd been in there for like a

couple months or something

yes okay yeah but then your dad found out about this other option you could do yes through who through my his past at the time or like we went to church and we were younger what church was this this is midtown bible church okay it's a christian church yes okay and not like

it's nondenominational so it's not like baptists are just you know bible a you know faith

and ah he came in and visited me in joe the passer and yeah he liked trying to get me he's like telling me about god stuff and like it wasn't like it wasn't that wasn't my lane I'm saying I'm like okay that's cool he makes sense but really don't believe that and um

anyway so yeah like the original prison itself I took the opportunity because it's like okay like you're looking at like one two years brother or you could do this it's been a year at this camp whenever this facility and you can't leave the property or anything like that but once you done with the year then like you just beyond probation in

I say

honestly after my first interview with boy wonder I went into this conversation with a serious bias I mean it seemed to me that this alternative to prison was simply another kind of prison in itself but it wasn't until ten minutes into this interview that fox said something that would make me sit back and take my new

role as a journalist a bit more cautiously but eventually I was in like service one day and I just like I was like I was like god as a guy if you're real show me

and then like the room just start it's like glow

and it was like we're like this is trippy and then I was like kind of just like okay this we're trying to shake it off

and then I did it again like you know and then I asked like another time when dancer was like god if you're real show me then once again like the room just started to glow like everything it was like light and bright in white homes

and then there's like I did that like three or four more times and then I was like okay there's something's it is and I was just like I mean it's servers I think I would just like later on that day like er went back to my room I was just like ah um if you're real come into my life and then ever since saying like

I mean we've been rocking like god has been in my life and you know i've been going you know what people call saved and you know a christian by title um

to me it was like why would you limit yourself you know like before like like why would you limit yourself based on these rules

but the different design is actually freeing it's like freeing you having faith by asking crisis t by ice and cries into your life

do you feel like you'd like grass face while there

faith in christ

even the most high faith in god

fox's interview challenged my initial narratives of Freedom Village maybe it wasn't a prison or a cult maybe it really was a place where kids could go and find god and some just never took the opportunity

but I still couldn't shake the idea of the conditions that boy wonder had described

I asked fox more about the daily life there

have a clean room do your chores which is like either like you know yes certain responsibilities like when i'd be on the kitchen and I do kitchen prep or ah you know monitor like six to ten which is like the punishment form thing where like people walking in circles with wood

would we might have to like monitored those people or so yeah this what punishment circle yeah so there's like a thing where it's like you know if like you break through like yes like carry like logs in a circle just logs in a circle yeah

how heavy are the logs they can be they can be heavy but there's different size they also had different size and this is like what song is this like a track like I'm what's the circle the parking lot

oh come a parking lot and she just literally have to carry it back and forth and for like four hours four hours

interesting

and would guys have to do this a lot did you after guys and girls yeah guys and girls yeah where there are different separate it so so you never need did you see the girls yeah I saw the girls but I kinda got out of it how would it be because like I have a chronic illness and so it was like I was like sometimes I just like ya I can't do

do this like this is I can do and it wasn't like three years running illness yeah like card yeah nice little bit but I mean honestly like for like four hours like on my rose I good for me and kids would have to do this a lot like that's what my friends are talking about well it depends like like I said like if you're not doing

dumb shit like

because there is this as a kid for like the place where like rebels is a place for like the rule of like people like me you know I'm saying like fuck shit up you know sam I n you're young you know I'm so you really don't know you really don't give a fuck like you're just young to see your dome as well

yeah you know I mean yeah to a certain extent yeah it's also just like figuring shit out and sometimes people have hard circumstances that they mess that I gotta deal with you know and that's a lot as all the us was all of us like we are

milan traumatic shit happened to us you know

was this at all dramatic

no not for me

that's why I'm here right right

and would I be the person I am today had not been for that please

fox expanded my idea of the kind of influence this place had both good and bad

I wanted to meet more people who had been sent to the Village to really understand the lasting effects so I did what all good investigators do and I went to facebook I met a woman from brooklyn who had been in the program for three and a half years when I went back to the city she was kind enough to welcome me into her home

how did you hear about Freedom Village or how did your family hear about Freedom Village okay so I grew up in brooklyn tabernacle one of the members of the church a solid member there she had five sons two of them

or acting Village and over a period of time three of them ended up being there but one of them who was there he graduated from the program went on staff and everything and how old were you at the time I was fourteen years old fourteen okay why were you be I guess wanted by being such a way

hey or um

typical you know teenage star curtain home school hanging out with the wrong crowd

yeah my my father next year that I was to get pregnant he changed me from like three different high schools here in brooklyn yeah one after the other and finding like ne but even my diary one day he's like oh she said I was getting away she's any good

nah she can't look avoid a guy okay so that's how they end up sending me there

so what did they ask you or what like wasn't your choice at all or did not say in the matter okay now do you remember did they tell you before yes yes okay to think of you some time are not grounded I was what's gonna happen and I was devastated because I felt like

like rejected again because I came here from the caribbean to live with my parents and outside result and I had such a hard time adjusting to the new family I never knew them before coming here so I had a really hard time adjusting to the family um

to a new country you know when I was six months old my parents had left me with my grandparents they couldn't take because of immigration reasons and stuff so I didn't know that many grow up with them I didn't know that as my parents for five years so it was like ah like a major shock and that adjustment just carried over into my preteens and whatever and it just you know came

I'm out in different ways of me

you know acting out in school and whatever but not really I was like a good student you know yeah I had um skipped the seventh grade back then I was in a special specialized you know program but somewhere along the road road I think because the communication was so bad between me and my mom

um that um

yeah it's just bad it was just so just having a really rough time and prevent just you know tell me that they're gonna send me away again send me away I was like there's like a double whammy of rejection and I took it really hard but you know it it worked out well I needed that and that's what I needed I needed to be away

and it wasn't so much about that I was a bad kid sometimes just don't have the right parenting feels is now your manuals yes but it's one of those things that you gotta you learn as you go you know right you run the ship as you know kind of thing do you remember your first day at all oh yeah I remember the drive up there yeah do you want to just

yeah like it was yesterday and I'm fifty years old now like I remember it was like in winter actually was is this week march fifteen

eighteen eighty four

nineteen eighty four thirty three years before boy wonder first arrived

I remember the drive of dams coal that it was snowing and less dar again

um

I was really cold and I was just like shut down for six months for six months whenever the Village I'm like

I was so resistant I remember one time we I was planning with a couple of the girls to run away and they heard the staff heard about it so they can't get in front of our door so we were going to sneak out in the open like hey you know we were going to go anywhere so when I realised I was like well I guess I'm not going anywhere so I was just very resistant for the

first six months as you know I was dealing with a lot emotional april

and I'm like just don't want to be here but I had no choice and I think it was a love of the sap that really brought me and finance like okay I'm done I'm done resisting and I'm going to yield now

yielding

I think that's a powerful choice for a fourteen year old to have to make

I respected how my new friend took the time to explain where she was coming from specifically in regards to her parents not knowing what to do it was similar in concept to the next interview I did with another woman I met on facebook her name is sherry and she arrived at the Village and ninety ninety nine

at fifteen years old however unlike the others she is not from the city but from the countryside of binghamton new york

I was in southern tier of new york being to new york as are the area from county where I was raised um and so like I was in the country that I went to the city then went back to the country Freedom Village my mom didn't know anything she didn't know what she didn't know I mean she went under

stand depression should yeah when the house isn't being talked about but I and and in her home and in her upbringing being raised in a very small tight like country community middle of nowhere in western new york you know they were very isolated my mom went through horrible abuse with her step mom law

just your own moment she was four I mean and it was just disaster so she didn't even know like she was taught to be afraid of mental illness they were taught it's demon possession you know and so that's kind of like what she believed but then she would see me as her daughter going to this not understanding what it was and see

same scale and seeing that whatever it is is real but she didn't know what to do with it a little bit more about sherry is that she's a certified nurse and she really knows how to communicate her mental health journey she describes her childhood in detail noting the formative life events that shaped her upbringing including the regular verb

verbal and physical abuse her father subjected her to a sexual assault by relative's boyfriend and the tragic death of her best friend she mentions her social anxiety growing up and the instability caused by constantly moving homes with her overworked mother later in life she would be diagnosed with high functioning autism

she started missing school when a relative fell ill but this soon spiraled into something deeper

what ended up happening is I really did want to do the right thing I didn't want to feel like this but I literally at some points as catatonic clue depressed looking back on it like my mom I was in there but I my body would not cooperate with me I just was flat mood I barely talked

my mom like lifted me hoisting me up you know like she would her patients and I was just dead way I had no control because it was like god sake of somatic response from my body to shut down and and then i'd be in the state for two to three weeks and then like something

so kind of really set me off and I just go into a fit of rage I mean just tearing the house apart because I mean I was like I had so much emotion that I couldn't even bottle it up anymore and it would just volcanic I mean it just massive and

um

and it was just a lot of screaming a lot of yelling

you know kicking things you know putting holes in all that kind of stuff you know private rye very primal because that's exactly where I was out with my animal brain because as I learned to therapy when your fighter flight like that you'd thought pre-frontal cortex of your brain biologically shuts off to let your instincts take control and that's where I

was living at by this time though about three-quarters of the way through my first time in ninth grade um the school served cop town and I'm like look you have to get her to school or we're going to have to charge you with neglect and she's like I'm trying your best I don't know what to do I can't like be there to make sure she gets rushed just haven't

people call me people stop by I mean just everything just wasn't working and so they said well there is another option you can put her on person a pins petition which is a person in need of supervision probation it was for people like kids like that that needed action but rather than it being ah

this is where the system this is where I get into me of how I ended up at Freedom Village I go in ninth grade for the second time the depression is just getting worse and worse and worse and it was inevitable I was gonna end up somewhere there was no question about and I blame the you know the justice department for

for failing me the system failed me they could have gotten me the help I needed them and all of this would have been avoided but they did it they treated me like I was a criminal like I was a bad kid and so now here I am thinking I was gonna get some help family and know they're just like threatening

mean like if I don't get to school they're gonna ask late this process and it just can ask lady and ask like I mean just rolling over to different levels of probation because I wasn't going to school meanwhile nobody along that line thought to stop and say why isn't this girl going to school what can we do to help her they just kept punishment punishment pun

punishment and getting more severe to the point where they put me on what was called the icp intensive supervision probation which is the last step before they were talking about sending me to a group home you know I got put into this pipeline of courts and probation I was not a bad kid I was very traumatized hurting sad anger

every kid right who had nobody to talk to um and

rather than when I got on probation rather than the courts like looking yeah okay why is she dealing with this what's going on they labeled me as a bad kid I appreciate that sherry talked about the larger system involved in this it was a reminder to me that people coming from financial

the disadvantaged homes are ultimately more vulnerable and targeted by the state and oftentimes priming the parents is the first step this is sherry describing what happened when she first arrived to Freedom Village they took my parents out of the room put them in another room across the hall

are across the lobby and I was in this room with one of the girls from the program and the video that they showed me was you know from the eighties it was for horrible video quality to begin with but the content was what scary they were tough on drugs and they showed this video

eo part of the video in when I'm going in on all about drugs and everything and how well this one kid he got high em whatever they studied a high and then the next image is c threw himself in front of a mac truck and these his dad mangled body picture is right there on the screen

and I had never even the concept of drugs I mean I knew about it from dare but I didn't I was ah I mean just that was traumatizing to me to see that and then apparently what they did with my parents was they went over there and they showed them a separate video that basically said don't

believe anything your kid says they're gonna tell you anything they have to to get out of this place they're going to tell you that the rules are horrible that the people are mean that all these bad things are happening it's all an attempt because your kids basically a troubled youre bad kid your child's troubled and you can't trust the words that they say

cause they'll do anything to get out of you know of this and so that's my mom my dad you know blindly accepted that because that was you know just the way they said it would work and I'm like okay well then they had to like checklists it was more like a consent form that had mulled

multiple it broke down in different sections and you had initial in the side of the on and one of the main ones was that you agree to a voluntary one year commitment to the program and um that voluntary commitment

it was a sham I wanted to find out if this was actually a voluntary commitment I went back to the Freedom Village website and found the original intake form any guardian considering sending a kid there would have to fill out this packet of information before signing over legal guardianship this included one

one page of medical history previous placements and consent to transfer records however it also asks for seemingly irrelevant information such as if the child had been involved in any homosexual activity or if they had listened to excessively loud rock or rap music okay our program for teenagers

a euphoria first students are required to make a voluntary one year commitment to Freedom Village that moves that while many judges probation officers and councillors have suggested a student attend Freedom Village no one can be mandated or court order to enter the program that decision must be made by a young person this is one of mine and boy wonders friends who didn't go to the Village himself but was cured

eus about it's influence his name is e j and he started researching Freedom Village after one of his best friends from queens was sent there in high school everything that i've heard it was the word and nothing was ever volunteer

I also asked maggie if she believes it was a voluntary commitment

well technically yeah I mean I think this is true based don't know like

the kids that we know that have gone there as an alternative to prison like the court didn't order them to go to Freedom Village they gave them a choice of going to prison or going to Freedom Village so technically they voluntarily went there and then if you're below the age of eighteen and your parent sends you there I mean that's your parents sort of sp

speaking for you in that sense but that's still not consent will legally it is

like in reality it's not of course when you're under the age of eighteen it can be anything like your parents yeah your parents or your legal guardian

so technically that is true even though like in practice it's obviously complete bullshit

like if you give someone a choice between prison and something else and they choose the other thing and then you say like oh well it was their choice but

e j brings up another good point exactly when you look at it even it loiseau giving over the youth of america and canada right giving a hope right now pete if you're a child that's just went into through this whole process of getting charged some shit and you're facing five years puck ten years and you're like holy shit what the fuck did I just do it that's the first thing that's happening

to you you're not gonna know how to react to it and you want to stressing to be under his ridiculous life so then you look at this rehabilitation program that's gonna make you better you're gonna give you fuck three screamers a day you know it's more comforting more soothing you don't have no where I said exactly the way you view form when looking at a picture they got white picket fences it looks like such a literally like one of diaz's so why would you choose

risen over this

of course non-wood prison you gonna go to this thing we can go to with the hope of actually you know learning about yourself and becoming a better person right because it's perfect and that's the thing a lot of kids that go there they weren't even that that was not what I heard at all every kid that went there was because of their parents from what I had learned so far these kids were being sent there by their parents and some sort of authority

within their religious community but one of the last things that we found while scanning through the documents was this they asked for the family income the monthly income of both parents

parents' education levels

it's the if they're members of the church yeah church member okay and then this gets this is weird this is weird right are you aware of any relatives or friends who might object to this placement lists names and addresses of people who may be object and interfere with this placement

yeah so what's he gonna do send a letter like go to their house like what why why would you need their address what are you going to do with this information like to me this I feel like this could be part of a screening process like they're trying to sift

through and weed out kids who have too strong of a support system like kids who you know how powerful people might come knocking on your door and asking questions but if no one list any names here you can be pretty confident like no one's going to object to what you're doing no one's gonna get curious

sherry finishes her reasoning for believing the voluntary commitment was a kind of scam if not legally then at least psychologically

that voluntary commitment

it was a sham because you are locked and now the campus wasn't locked but you were manipulated and controlled so tightly that your fear kept you in prison there because you knew what would happen if you if you tried

do anything stupid

when I went back upstate to buffalo new york boy wonder connected me to a girl that he had met at Freedom Village her name is angel and she was sixteen years old when we did this interview well personal hungary there

you're there for eleven months and how old were you when you went into the program thirteen you were thirteen years old and well useful to be fourteen again but they said I could

it was my mom was like really excited the time moved getting arguments all the time choose like I want her to help we did the interview at maggie's house an angel brought her little sister along with her even though I offered them both a chair they decided to sit together in one I mean I think angel to me came off as

like super emotionally intelligent and also kind of a protector almost in like a sneaky way like she doesn't make a big deal about it but you can tell and she knew that hearing these stories like I think she knew that how tough that would be for her family and

she chose to protect them and keep a lot of this stuff to herself your mom find out about financial or not sure if you should have found it because it was cheap and she needed something affordable for me to go I know that I was going there she's like we're gonna take you somewhere and we think you'll you'll be happy there I was like okay i'll do it because

yeah i'll be asking they all do it and then she shows up we drive for like two hours to get there and I show up and I was really excited it looked nice because I shut up in the new admin they admitted me and pastor brothers I talked to him he made me see what goes like a really bad person and I was like how do you know why he was like

um was talking to this officer he say he said something that would really bother oh they thought that was gonna run away and then but you're just not in there yeah it was your first day yeah like it was like my first hour in there and then um he was like don't even think about running away

because you have nowhere to go and I was like okay okay i'll keep that in mind it's like wearing the middle of nowhere and I'm like

fear a tactic that would be used right from the very beginning

I asked angel if she ever tried to communicate to her family what she was feeling they wouldn't send out letters I wrote a letter to hollow in time and then I was on the phone unfruitful months but another person was monitoring my call because they were really on the other end like the person mom

or your know like they were just they just had a light in the room with you while you're on the football okay yeah but it wasn't a staff member it was one of the girls who because they were on a high level they're allowed to and it was like one of my friends so what we did instead of like her like really like monitoring my phone call we searched all

around that that's when we found so many unsent letters and I found a letter that I sent to my mom all I said I was just telling trying to tell my mom how they make us haul for four hours at night like our two three hours in the morning in the afternoon like we never get a break and then they know

ever sent that letter out and also why wouldn't you want them knowing that aren't they supposed to know

it really shook me when I realized that I only grew up around forty five minutes away from the Freedom Village location

that summer I traveled up route fourteen to see the property for myself

I remember staring out at the grounds from it's one and only main road

and the sun was setting immediately drew it's warmth and light leaving this chile inescapable countryside

the landsat desolate in front of me for large buildings and some old houses with a wide parking lot

I couldn't help but imagine boy wonder hollywood at that same place for hours or my friend from nineteen eighty four who had travelled from the caribbean to brooklyn and eventually to here with all these pine trees I thought about fox driving around in a scooby-doo van and sherry at home with her children

I'm an angel now with her sister who had only left there two years ago

it all seems so random

so chaotic

how did these people from all over the state and all over the country as we'll soon find out end up here

is it really safe for parents to send kids with problems to an isolated facility so far away from their homes and has angel mentioned where their communication was censored they're out of contact with anyone who can actually advocate for them