Episode Two

i was expecting

a stable mentally sane

leadership bullshit

when they gave my dad the tour first thing my dad came back and told me was hey on the bright side

you're non jail but on the downside these rooms looks just like my barrick's when i was in iraq

stevenage your first appointment

when i came in there everybody was like staring at me and the boys dorm like there's a huge window like looking out into the courtyard and um where i was walking in i was walking into the courtyard everybody was just standing at the window i already know what's happening here

ah from the campus of freedom village usa an international ministry dedicated to reaching the teenagers of the united states

in canada welcome to victory

my name is margaret and this is we warned them freedom village an investigative mini series 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

uh

those were the voices of brighton and weston two kids that were both at the village around the same time as wonder an angel wonder mentioned that he could connect me to some of his friends who still lived around the area so later in the year wonder maggie and i took a roadtrip backup state we first went to fredonia new york where brian was work

seeing as a welder this was the first time that boy wonder had seen bryden since they left the village they gave each other a big hug and then immediately started wrestling it was the first time that i'd seen such a strong sense of brotherhood that had been created from this place

brighton's family is christian and his dad was in the navy growing up he was constantly moving around living in texas oklahoma california and eventually new york he arrived at the village in december of twenty seventeen and left in january of twenty nineteen i asked him about his first day there

mask really nasty and

we walk through these doors and they had aunt day mr dante he was sitting there talking to this other guy i forgot how i see him one talk the other guy but um

there was fright out there allwood

roy i hated that kid from the second i got there but he out there hollywood and they were like you barbie good kid this will shall be doing well yeah okay and you didn't know what that meant at the time no i had no clue know little also those they kept yelled at the kid now sitting there laughing because those kids stupid as fuck do with their say

it is just out there fucking whole war materiel added

thirty psi we just do it they say things that hard just walking in circles fuck and ooh you're late or your phone is a little bit more retarded yeah i use that word but a lot more you know yes the mental drainage that place was so

angel had mentioned this mental fatigue as well

i asked them when it first began first day first official day but i woke up to a bell

no one told me about the dow it made me jump like sit up out of bed and be like oh my god what's going on like in made me think there's like an earthquake going on the whole building shakes and so it was scary and then alleges didn't even tell me i'm socially get up and go to devotion sitting there making his bed and getting dressed he's brushing his teeth while his due

it it too is just sitting there were only yo yo you get all your depots doug devos cbos what are those a little book every morning you go the place one page and write down what you thought about the verse of the day how you apply it to your life so she just leave

it's the room and i'm like what the heck so i jump out of bed and i went to her and i'm following her and she goes in the the baseman and they all just start reading a prayer and i'm like six am to read a prayer after a giant bell the first valley you go to the lobby for they take roll and then you go back to the room

and you get it all done you have to clean your room having a room spotless and then go do your morning shore we clean we go to breakfast and then while we're up what do you guys click what are you cleaning the dorms so we each um a certain chore todo my first shore was blunt kitchen love most kitchener things kitchen a new party going on so kitchen lawn

barn kitchen pastors crew then go on the market it seemed like your level determined your chore my girlfriend maggie from the first episode who was also a clinical therapist helps me break it down as well yeah i think it determined kind of like everything like it seems like the level system was

a way of organizing all your whole kind of like life at this place into a hierarchy where like the higher level you are is not just like the chores you do are different it's like what you can do with your time is different the amount of freedom you have is different if you're on a lower level you're doing more work but you're

also like being publicly humiliated more often you're being isolated you're not allowed to talk to other people and it's a way of incentivizing them you know to follow the rules and they're visible they're being published in public where everyone can see

freedom village used a level system to determine the daily tasks of students the lowest level was no level where you were mainly subjected to hauling wood you can move up to a level c level e level and then the top level before becoming junior staff was called pastors club i was the highest level that i could be

actually made it to a higher level than i was allowed to be because you have to be there for x amount of years to make it to pcm and how many years jeff it nothing it's one you have to be you have to have been there over a year but i it into pcm could you describe what pastures crew was yeah

yeah ukraine is his house pretty much

remote as his long you cut his trees

clean his gutters cleaned his house

and this was ah this was a um a part of like your daily chores yeah if you were in passages clever you would have to go for yeah yeah but it was like an honor to get there we we started out so hard why because we were your pastors golden boys if you were out there woo

like you sometimes take you out for burger king or something like that or when he had to go to the store like our wear store you may get to ride with them or go inside and that was all the outside human action interaction we really got

the kids were being told that they were going to be rehabilitated at this place and then to be sent back into society as better people but while they were there they were being forced to comply with a unique and singular level system which will most likely make it more difficult for them to enter back into society this

this could be understood as a tactic of institutionalisation being accustomed so firmly to the care and routine of an institution as defined independent life in the outside world difficult or unmanageable it targets people who regularly can't fit into society oftentimes this is just due to systematic oppression like racism or classism

they'll enter into places like prison or seminaries or other closed off institutions that set them apart from the rest of society with the intention of eventually returning back to society as better people but what it actually does is gets them used to a closed off way of life in this case the kids

we're working all the time to grow in a curated level systems specific to freedom village for survival if you don't comply you're constantly being punished or shamed i found it interesting that you could only get on pastors club the highest level if you stayed for over a year that doesn't really incentivize you to leave the

program if you've spent a whole year being forced to acclimate to this kind of life why would you want to leave to start all over again in the regular worlds i agree with that like these kids here are not being taught skills that are going to help them thrive in the regular world like they're being trained in

skills life skills that are only helpful to them inside of this institution and they're also i feel like a deeper point of this is they're getting good at figuring out how to please the people who are deciding their level system and their punishment they're getting good at manipulation

they're getting good at cutting off themselves from their own emotional needs so that they're more capable of conforming into the system they're getting good at ignoring their bodies which are signaling to them that they're in pain and they need to like stop hollywood and go inside and get warm and in order to like carry out this punishment system they

learn how to cut that off in themselves and none of that stuff is going to help them live a healthy happy life in the regular world

i wondered what would happen if you tried advocating for yourself

one time halloween in my bedroom and i was on no level and i was laying on the ground saying at the ceiling and i had

i've been hauling for like weeks and weeks and then um i just set up and then all of a sudden my neck is stuck and i can't move it and i have i don't know if they knew or not that i had scoliosis but now i'm stuck here and i'm crying and screaming down the hall i'm like

please please please

can't move my neck no one is answering and so i just leave and i walk out of my room and i go all the way down to amber's room who's like ever since gonna do something i can't move my neck cloak and i was going with that and when she was like come on we're going to know about it she wasn't really mad she was like they shouldn't not make you haul if you have scoliosis cause they should know something bad

it's gonna happen and then we'd go all the way to new admin oh my goodness amy look i can't move my neck and when she sits down she's like ok sitting here will talk to ms ginger and then we go up to ms ginger and this ginger's like mad at me and i'm like i can't help it like that's like giving me this holiday and then

she's like does it feel like a stabbing feeling or pinching feeling and i'm like i don't know it just hurts and then she started screaming at me you have to tell me i'm like i don't know like i'm sobbing in tears on one book i can't turn my neck it feels like a pinch i guess i don't know can you please do something and this amy takes it to the hospital than there were like oh you have to go

go to emergency room because we're not here right now and then we got x-rays for me and then um we went to walmart after to get heating packs or something and then you had to go to walmart ticket the heating packs and have it there

but i just don't look all because you can't just like get up and not do it your all know over a reason to them so if you say you just didn't get out of bed one morning then i did that before when i was like actually trying to get kicked out and

i wouldn't do anything i want to listen to them instead of going to hallway i stayed in beyonce's room and beyonce were super super close at the time and then um they're telling me to get out and i was like no they were trying to um driving the bed i was sitting on and so i went underneath the bed

ed and i decided sitting underneath the bed i was like dragging out then um miss anna she's gone i hate she came in and just sort of like streaming i mean screaming at me and then um

i think i'll like some boy i got up and run the hallway because you don't want to come out or something like that and then she went outside and came back in and she just threw a piece of one on me and i just held it and she was like go home go home and then she left and then just like okay come on let's go home now and then i was just holding one and i

just sat down and then put it down and then

then i slept in the hallway that night with a lamp on me because um they're like okay if she doesn't want to listen then you're sleeping here tonight you can't get up you can't go to your room you can't shower you can they're like gifts have been hallway so i slept in the hallway but they told me they told amber that they had to shine a lamp in my face the whole night so that's what they do

but i put a blindfold on too so i can sleep i was genuinely shocked at the torture tactic being used to punish angel especially since they knew that she had scoliosis what did they think was going to happen and didn't they have the simplest of medical equipment like ice packs on hand

however if that hadn't been enough pastor brothers decided to do a sermon on her the next morning

hold it angels jimbo that's the title of the sermon that he called it and this is in front of all the kids from the boys and girls in front of the staff too and um i was like it was like there is this book called angels dreamboat and it was next to the um the vision

ah dark and those tied onto the dock but it wasn't tied correctly and because of those type it was typed incorrectly um when the wind came it ripped the whole dock off and the boat went missing or something it was something like he made it super long concerns are like forty minutes long but that's as like much as i can remember it basically saying because

if it wasn't tied right because i wasn't like dude i'm sociaux everything's gonna let you go wrong and then you know that's if he's trying to say so it was like i don't really care but then i told my mom and i was like jackie dennis around me and she thought it was cool and i never told her about how i had to sleep in the hallway with the light and my faith she saw

oh look another i never told her because i don't know i just feel like not that she wouldn't care but she already like a sad enough that i had to go there because she knows it like hurt me a lot so now whenever i bring it up it's just fun times i had there

yeah this is straight up bullying he was using his authority to demean someone in an already vulnerable situation with very little compassion i can see how his infinite power over these kids could inspire him to write personally amusing sermons

did he have a sense of humor pastor yeah yeah view if you think fuckin call girls so tell your girl a slut or body shaming or fucking tell us we're going to hell is funny when the ne is hilarious

the motherfucker he walked to the champ i'll never forget it he walked in the chapel and he was already started speaking on some kind of sermon and then he walked up behind me talk back and get this you get a ring on his ring towards lengthier on his right hand cocked back it was college ring and he smacked me in the head and

ah i thought was because of what the entire did you know we got caught and we weren't taught yet but us caught the caught because we were passing notes

were you guys flirting with each other yeah yeah well it was more like you know two kids talking about how they're gonna live a fairytale you know talking about how we're gonna run away and shit

there is pretty oil as it was a nice relief from the place honestly i always look forward every morning to go to school and checking a little crevice on my on my desk you just kept going every single day there is there's a new i think i said we'd send a little drawing sometimes and then ah

i kept or i told one person

first thing he does with the information as he goes and stitches army to go to go get people or go get staff to like it

his biggest thing i felt like was to pick out

faithful that staff liked and then make him look like shit so you looked the best and that's what happened i was up there on the levels i was doing good and ratted me out i wanted to beat the living shit out of him i wanted to go in his room and beaten you know i felt

like i finally had a relief from this place and you just took it away

and i honestly i had hate my in my heart i really did our bride had to stop me a couple of times we go into this room by is i know brian is not worth it

so every morning he wrote off everyone's writing in front of everybody's shit so like if it was a girl let's say they didn't include they didn't do their hair properly that morning did we

and he'd be like yeah such as such this is one you have no structure in your life this why guy will never love you for who you are and stuff like that what did he did what did he say to you to me adam yeah at that time or any of us to use past honestly of the

a threatened he said i've had enough you're going home and i really thought i was going oh that's pretty much

going nowhere i would never grow in the program again and he wanted me to stay on no logos like an example because his grandson liked her and they dated for living

and that's a whole nother story she didn't get it as bad as idea he he was i'm calling i'm calling your your parents you're going home and then he he went off and he was like told everybody why he thought i was there what did he say he told he told everybody he doesn't know how to keep his hands to himself he likes to touch girl

girls and all this stuff and you've to use pretty much sex shaming trying to say that i am a rapist that's pretty much just trying to say any trope

dude i never want to get up and punch an old man so hard in my life because i have little sisters i've baby sisters i have an older sister and he just kept going he was like you know where he's going after here he's going to jail he has no life he will never be anyone and then you went onto shame and tar commerce slut and a whore

and you then you went on to the majority and was like all these girls over here are dirty or you these boys over here they're liars and just went off earlier we were talking about how people like pastor were the ones handing out the punishments right they're the ones creating the level system

you're at the top of this hierarchical abuse but i think it's important to notice that it is a hierarchy it's not just one against them all but they've created a system where if you're in the middle you can pull people up or you can pull people down and so you have these kids snitching their incentive

guys too like you're incentivizing them to tear each other down

and i think that's what makes it successful that's why you don't have to have someone watching these boys twenty four seven because they're policing each other for you right yeah they're being forced to take part in the abuse like they're abusing each other like the kids also monitor each other when they're on the woodpile

i mean i wanted to talk about like the sexual dynamics the dynamics around sex that are like going on here because

i mean something that i've noticed is that from what multiple people have said that fletcher brothers in the chapel and he would talk about women it was always about like whether or not a man is ever going to love you even in that example brandeis gave he's like you didn't do your hair right this morning this is why you have no structure in your life this is why a man will never

love you for who you are or like we have other clips of him saying about girls like why would a man want a used up thing like you if it was a girl who had been doing sex work or something before she went in there so it's like i don't know that already is weird to me like why is he taking this angle with these teenage

girls these children you know like making everything about will a man love you later on in your life

kind of setting up this weird like sexual dynamic already but then on the flip side while they're actually in the program they're literally not allowed to look at the opposite sex right there's the six inch rule where you can't even get six inches from anybody i think it's just so unbalanced because there's no

no they're not allowing kids to ask questions and they're not really facilitating any healthy dialogue it's all lecturing and like shaming and punishing like this is all just instilling fear and shame around sex and sexuality and sexual expression and that lasts

that doesn't leave when you get out of there right

the last person we met on the trip upstate was weston he was living with his parents and syracuse new york and unlike most of the people we met with he was coming from an upper middle class home

at diversified my understanding of the demographic of who they were targeting however his parents had also heard about the program through a recommendation of another christian family i'm not quite sure if the parents knew why we had actually come so weston decided to set us up in the garage it was night by the time we arrived and we all saw

sit in a circle with interchanging lowlights playing the whole time

did you ever get sick oh yeah

like throwing off yeah from the food yeah but just a restaurant there i fucking was like definitely sick for like three weeks like every day you threw up yeah now it's just like fucking dead the drinks and the like

bagged chips were a hundred percent fucking expired how did they respond to them when they're just like here's some ibuprofen

literally literally it told me that when they did honestly sometimes they didn't even give me that they just put me like alright you can go sleep for the rest of the day and then the next day they'd be like oh you're fine

i can know from that clearly but

yeah those did you ever say like hey maybe it's the food or you didn't nah didn't even wanna like push my limits there was a lack of predictability when it came to punishments westen describes how he would maneuver around this how do you think they got so the kids that like that like reported to the staff

f secretly how did they like get them to genetic fry them into like give them extra privileges let alone love that he doesn't know about that whoa that i do know about they didn't know they did that to me once no fucking way biden take it so he did that to you they tried

let me guess level of rape yeah yeah that's the only way they're trying to like did they approach you with what is the airline so ah you got me like dirt on someone so

i'd be like oh no

maybe like oh what if we raise your level a couple levels get longer visits again

go off campus longer

fuckin what else

can't think of the last ninety days

oh and like sometimes like if you were to cut about it like if you said no like being a dickhead they'd be like ours and we're gonna demote your level and give you a write up for some shit because you said no yeah no yeah no to making some bullshit excuse for them

the dirt on somebody

so you you didn't

wanted to ease you said you like your work and oh yeah yeah because fuckin though just ruin the reputation of myself in the dorm and none of the guys would like

fuck me or anything everybody and that was basically that was basically like the whole motive of everything like to add the stick is back like if you're the odd one out you're fucked basically really because everybody just like dog vanu fucking made fun une shirt like

sounds like prison yeah

but it wasn't just behavior that decided who was assigned no level

do you think they treated you different based off of where you're from and or the color of your skin

they were just like confederate ish okay

but i only got like three days and he got some like i'm like now even now six months six oh yeah because he's just oh so oh so you've got three days and he got six months yeah because i actually hated yeah angel also picked up on a racist incident that happened in chapel

there is this point in genuine who is super dark skin and um i think he was there for like

drinking or you don't like smoking to anyone any other teenager would do and then um he tells cheren to get up like in front and um stand with him and then he's like tell me jalen do you go to your friends and and say hey and we're in the southern state of iowa i'm just looking to everybody to see if anyone was going to

say something no one said anything and then he was just talking jalen like that and i was like whoa looks like somebody say something somebody said something but november so he just sat back down and then

chuckles and mention everything just went back to normal nowhere but then i heard this the houston's wish things in dubai which will like justifies like i remember he wouldn't let like if you were a white guy like been to a black girl and vice versa because the bible says you're not supposed to be on a more yeah that was the voice of

tim a survivor who reached out to me when i was upstate with the boys he describes what was called the paper bag test apparently you could only attain dating permission if you stayed for a long time on a high level or became staff essentially they use the color of a paper bag to control who could date each other

so the darker kids could date each other and the later kids could date each other but you couldn't date internationally my friend from nineteen eighty four describes her experience for my specific situation when i i was still in the program and this guy that i became friends with really good friends in fact we used

like write little notes to each of the really tiny tiny tiny roll it up roll it up and stick it in the pen just from the pen like in the horror and like as he's passing you would independence and we did that for like a month and no one got vaulted in early and that's how we can't really well so when he graduated so then he had asked permission today and

before they could get permission they said they had to like see if i

meet the requirements to date him it was based on race because according to the bible it says thou shall not be unequally yoked and the way they interpreted that verse was like no race mixing until two big falsities for the first time under the umbrella of christianity as like whoa this isn't real christianity are you kidding me

isn't that the christianity i know you know they they they explained to me like well there are three races is a corkboard mongoloid negroid according to anthropology like okay

and they they needed to like chip my background to see which um

which race i fall under it wasn't like chinese let alone look chinese

although you know we're considered asian it was like

people can see that i they think i'm like the devil

ever was like ok you're cool right i'm like okay wow i'm so lucky wu

so they literally just deemed you as white yeah yeah yeah even though you're not white or at all according to anthropology yeah yeah i mean yeah yeah so to me that was like one of the first instances of being exposed to racism

and um i was so disgusted because in my gut i knew this was wrong you know

when i received the initial email from tim it read hello my name is tim and i've been waiting for something like this for twenty years i was at freedom village from nineteen ninety eight to nineteen ninety nine about thirteen months and in those months i was exposed to things my young mind couldn't fully grasp

that place really screwed with my head i've just recently got my life together i'm from maryland please call i was terrible

i was disgusting like the dorms are all broke down the showers are all rusty and old like beds are all own disgusting number always being hungry because you know you can like the the higher level he was more shoes you got so new level you can get any seconds and you've got the smallest portion it was all donated old stuff

from like dude they would ride around grocery stores to get donated food i mean it was crazy like a lot of files there

i remember i'm so sorry

i remember a couple of times where like

i think i posted on a page once our mister kilroy and that and i loved mr joy you know but he just wasn't no position to be working you know it was just children and stuff like that i'm everyone he you know

when horseplay and like you have us like you know people talk to us know us and be like hey you guys go ahead and like you know fight it out and see you and stuff like that and look for the one instance i recall a not vaguely really with him is when he like yeah there's like this eleven year old twelve year old kid there be kind of way more than eighty

pounds and he takes teeth out

like i remember like because he would always do the speeches before we were like you know dirty or your church or something like that and he was like well you know you guys horse play with me don't don't get upset when you know something like this happens as opposed to like you know i'm sorry that i checked this jeju

i weigh about two hundred pounds tease out

you know like he does despite it like it was on us because because we horseplay with them too much and tim was right he was spinning in a way that protects him from taking accountability i later came to find out that most of the staff members did not receive background checks and were oftentimes alumni from the program itself i came across a website

called heal online dot org which tracks the status of employees at different private residential homes for young people according to their database none of the staff of freedom village were licensed mental health counselors not only that they weren't licensed mental health counselors like

were they did they have any experience at all do they have any qualifications i mean i think these were just like random and i wanna say we don't have to like put this in but um i feel like this is an interesting story that we while we were in the process of doing all the research for this project we went to a diner one morning

that was up the road from where freedom village used to be and we were asking around in the diner like hey do you guys remember freedom village did you like have any experiences with it and a guy sitting at the bar turned around and he was like oh yeah i almost took a job there and we were like what do you mean and he said he saw

oh like an advertisement for a job as like a staff member at the village but he ended up turning it down or like so wise you turn it down and he's like because what they basically offered was no no pay but that you could just come live on the property for free like essentially you get free room and board and exchange

for like being a staff member here and that was it and this was like open to anyone you know like no background check no no nothing it's like being a prison guard but you have to live at the prison and you don't get paid and not only that but it's like who realistically thinking like what

kind of adult person would be attracted to that offer you know what i mean like probably someone who's not in the best situation in their life right and on top of that the program wasn't even accredited

this is my friend from nineteen eighty four again

did you end up graduating from the program and they get your high school diploma well according to the university's college material city it was an accredited so had to go back and get my ged but this was even after had gone to college i had gone to liberty university in lynchburg

virginia and and you're going to kick that idiot

anyway it was a bible college so i hate my home when i can make my son oliver yet because my parents were like well i'm not fitted i'm not paying that bill

because that was gonna get my my credits transferred anyway unless i'd be the bill so i had to start all over again

and and then your city was like well your high school diploma is unaccredited so i had to go get my ged

ah well i just did some college out you know those like

wow new videos have been offenders obviously yeah but yeah so like do you that you didn't have that information like upon leaving freedom village that this wasn't credited yeah were you thinking like this is my high school diploma yeah well i got into college i did a semester and a half already you know what i'm saying yeah

yeah did you feel like you were learning know guys like the worst part of freedom village academically we were not we did it was in a good quality of education i think it only worked for people who started in that kind of program

you know like the like the staff kids who started in that program from like you know five years old up

that's what they know so that's you know but i don't find it was a good quality of education because i exist what um that's one of the weaknesses of that program yeah what made it not quality

by who could sit in a cubicle all day and learn there was no sense of creativity no sense of interaction no i mean like it's just like very rote you go through these booklets and you just keep on going

to me that's not

a good form of educate that's not a good educational system i still found it funny that tim legs mr kilroy even wonder and bryden and weston talked fondly of some of the males staff in their dorm wrestling men breaking the six inch rule physical intimacy something that they all lacked i think when you're in a traumatic situation

like that when you're mentally and emotionally exhausted all the time you form bonds with who's ever within arms reach it doesn't matter who they are

but in an environment where violence is normalized and accountability is absent the consequences of a typical interaction can be catastrophic

i asked weston if he had ever gotten in any fights

split somebody's head open but that was it wasn't really a fight it was more of an accident because he liked his new pants me you'll think fast and i was like whoa

i'm like video there's no way you just did that bro he's like right before he got into his doorway i jolted forward and shoved and he lost his footing and slipped like this like losses

wham great into like the doorframe and all the doors for the bedrooms were fuckin fire escape doors like metal doors i like i walked away after i shoved him because he went into his room so i didn't even think like i fucked him up that bad and soon you started your slip and i was like it's good for