Episode Four

i just knew that it was a place where the help to troubled youth or so they said and from my knowledge i don't ever recall any incidents down there anything like that other than that's what they did they had troubled youth there that they had helped along the way

help them to adjust to society and things like that but as far as any wrongdoing or anything like that down there i'd never heard of anything must have been something that was always swept under the carpet just heard it was a school where a lot of abuse happened you know i grew up in the area nearby and heard nothing about it until i

i was in my late twenties is kind of ah very well kept secret in the region

you know they would help the kids learn a purpose

it used to be beautiful you drive by there they have like a hundred horses outside and the kids would work with them and everything yeah what was like the the rumors around talent were there any about what was going on there did you weren't paying their bills

that's all i heard they were there for good reason

but there are no free lunches you can't just sit here and do good and not pay your bills yeah okay okay that's what was basically happening from what i understand

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

canada welcome to victory too

my name is margaret and this is we warn them freedom village and investigative mini series unpacking what happened freedom village usa your interviews with the people who experienced it themselves we will mention different forms of abuse and violence throughout the series so please take care of yourself as you feel

of the clips you just heard were all people who live in the area where freedom village was located maggie and i drove back down route

fourteen along seneca lake and visited a local coffee shop stopped at a yard sale and eventually ended up at the dive bar in town i wanted to get a sense of what the people knew some genuinely didn't have a clue but with other people it felt like there was an elephant in the room the first time i talked to boy wonder he called it a call

lt and i'll be honest i word as enticing as a society we're kind of fascinated by cults something about them disturbs us but also intrigues us and i got even more intrigued when i found someone who was born at the village her name is mary and i connected with her online after i found a blog she had written

nh called out from the inside on her website we are the outsiders dot com here she writes about her experience growing up in an life after freedom village her parents are considered to be one of the founding families as they had started working with brothers before it officially even opened by the time she was

born in nineteen eighty seven they already had two kids and had been working there for seven years when freedom village was in it's prime mackey and i met up with her in a local coffee shop we sat in the back and got right into it testimony is

how you came to know jesus okay so like your story pre vs post

the christian culture is just at least like the evangelical corporate christian church is just like trying to get you to make this decision for christ like as soon as possible like you were five-year-olds you're just like so this is hell and this is you know like i knew all of it i knew about how i knew

about everything and i don't know if guys ever read revelation but like the mark of the beast in the rapture and the tribute like all this crazy stuff i had already read i knew all of it by the time i was in kindergarten like i it was just my life but that's normal for a lot of christians do they just got off knowing it and they're like well i've i've thought i was supposed to be

terrified at the rapture when i was nine by the time she was thirteen years old she was put into the singing group with the other program kids this was considered to be a privilege because kids were able to leave the property for five to seven days went on tour the group would travel to places like churches nursing homes and prisons sharing their testimonies singing

and collecting donations

after her touring years as a teenager she became full-time staff that was in my twenties i was the main supervisor for the entire girls' school and i never went to college like i just went through that program finished high school and they pretty much were like okay you're nineteen we're gonna fit you in as like it's like fifty teenage girls between

i'm thirteen and eighteen i'm responsible for their entire high school education like that's your response yeah we're responsible for their high school education yeah i mean i rocked it but like will they do it like i did i didn't have any like also no counseling like none of that is all like ridiculous i know

mary ended up staying till she was twenty four years old she fell in love as a teenager with her now-husband and ended up getting married and having a child while still living and working there she was nine months pregnant with her second child when she officially left now to meet this was sounding pretty culti and for a long time i never could

question that it wasn't until i actually started writing this episode that my perspective was challenged while working on this podcast i met another person who had been raised at an i f b or independent fundamentalist baptist church he was dating a friend of mine and became curious about my work as he hadn't ever heard of the troubled teen industry

he he agreed to sit down with me and helped me understand what it was like to be raised within that culture his name is hoge and he grew up attending exclusively i f b schools and later briefly attending pensacola christian college however while he was there he found out that a pastor from his father's seminary a man he had grown up with

had been convicted of molesting children initially the church had tried covering it up they allowed him to resign from the ministry and send him to do missionary work in germany potion i discussed this over tea and he tells me that eventually enough people spoke out the fbi got involved and the pastor was extradited back to the us where

he died in prison

so we went down here my dad goes to the school it's the first time that i'm ever exposed to racism it's the first time that i've ever exposed to child abuse

and all my friends who get abused i'm getting abused and all my friends you got abused and let's call it what it fucking is you know hitting kids and and telling kids bogeyman stories such it's abuse and it doesn't matter if it's well-intended it doesn't matter if the individual doing it is

doing it for your own good to never good there's no excuse for this exact thing exist in variety of different forms in a variety of different cultures throughout history so this did we have to be careful not to play the same awesome meme game with these entities because

the fact is it's just a different damn flavor of what everybody's doing hoechst really got me thinking about what exactly a cult is i started researching but to find a definition commonly agreed upon an academia was much more difficult than i expected among the people who research and report calls the devotee

tion is actually very controversial if we take it back the root of the word stems from the latin adjective cultus meaning inhabited cultivated and worshiped but the word call became popular in mainstream media during the nineteen seventies with the media covering the manson family heavens gay and peoples temple after ca

forcing the suicide poisoning of nearly a thousand members peoples temple leader jim jones became the poster child of cult leaders

in the last episode we talked about human trafficking which raised a ton of money for fletcher brothers and was connected to political agendas but we didn't talk about the methods through which these schools were accomplished these kids weren't held in chains and the property wasn't surrounded by a barbed wire fence to me

me the word call implies a level of brainwashing and spiritual manipulation so were the people at freedom village brainwashed

the next person i want to introduce his lauren she grew up in new york city and her parents centre to freedom village in two thousand and seven at fourteen years old when she was first sent away she actually didn't even know where she was being sent she thought she was just going to relatives upstate she ended up staying in the

program for three years and graduated in two thousand and ten she describes what it was like when she first arrived yeah it's very very hard to make her when you first get there you don't have a painting level high toilet paper but it's like talking

and i'll have to talk to anybody

considered corrupt

you only talk to people as a um for friends certain levels

so so you so you can't even talk to i mean i know that you couldn't talk to other guys but you can even talk to other girls when you first got there alright

some girls seem like or some of them you know definitely felt like they were in a low place so i mean

it was just very weird and

hello knowing and i could talk to it step definitely especially when i first got not currently too clearly because it was of the same age and that everybody the only profession who was from the city i couldn't talk to

although there isn't a clear definition of a call there have been models created to describe the process of brainwashing one of these is john lifton theory on thought reform which includes eight core themes the first is milieu control in which communication with the outside world is totally cut off

off and communication within the organization is tightly controlled and regulated the second is mystical manipulation which involves manipulating individuals' perceptions of their own behavior

remember to like my one and a half she has my three routes my mom passed me

just said that i want to weep

and i said

i like temperature i had i feel like god wants to be here

and it was my decision to stay at least my year and then i continued and i wanted to stay in graduate indoctrinated i thought this is where god wanted me

you got indoctrinated

yeah i've i was part of i feel like i was i was in it you know in the call at that point like look myself ation i felt like you know this is this was the place for me i feel like i feel like i still need to work on myself and that wasn't necessarily ready to go back

the slowly broke down her own sense of identity and out of necessity she started building a new one

i feel a being impudent village being forced to like get to know i guess at the time and like get out of a couple children just be shoveling sure that people leave me alone i just wanted

devon to think that i was in it just trying to be left alone you know and

and fletcher

having that fletcher actually extent that of stuff is kind of like you said

all you have to really do like even if you take got a question i have to really do is listen to ocean rules

and keep your mouth shut just go with the motions you don't accept believe with it but you just go with demotions and people will stop like thinking that you are corrupt or that they'll think that you've changed no because you are now listening to the cause

the third category is the demand for purity the moral polarizing of insiders vs outsiders mary described earlier that fletcher would actively shame people who had left the village gossiping about their looks or choices he was creating a perception that the outside world and everyone in it were inherently morally

corrupt

it was a one year program there was like billed as a one year program as you come you stay for your year and then you're supposed to leave but what happened with it because it was such a contained environment because there was a lot of spiritual abuse it was like they were very very pressured to stay once

like if you want to try and leave at your year it was like nah cool like and so you kind of just be like

what fletcher would spin would just kind of bring up your past and be like you really do you really feel safe to leave like everybody's serving god here you could stay in serve god to or you could go and like working mcdonalds like what do you want to do so do order got mcdonalds basically yeah and there would be like this the one or two people that would would leave on good

terms very hard to leave on good terms but if you managed it then like those people go out and do like great things and then maybe we'd like see them in a banquet or something or like a fundraising event that we'd go to see like there's like joe that was that left on good terms and like how many times every time we would see one of those people fletcher would find so

something about them or something to see their hearing in their ear like did you see the clothes they were juicy tight clothes like she's not doing well we can't talk to her like so nobody ever actually left on good terms and we all knew it and it just felt again like i think that my parents had a different drive for being there but for me it was just like

i'm terrified to leave and i don't want any of these kids to leave like i just was part of the system of like let's get them graduated and let's find a place for them here like which is quite sad because it made people fall like hard flat on their faces when they left because they had no support from any of us like anybody that left it wasn't

like good decision and if we made pretended like it was at least for me i can only speak for myself but at least for me as a staff person i was just like well they shouldn't left like that's the way that i functioned and thought so i don't think i was ever called to be there by like

i don't think i had that name calling my parents had it was just all fear-based so i think that was a lot of staff because by the time we left probably ninety percent of the staff were programmed kids

ninety percent of the staff were programmed kids that's a lot of kids who never left the fourth core theme is probably the most obvious to understand in relation to freedom village because it's the call of confession every student was required to give a testimony about their sins in front of huge crowds or on his radio and tv show

and it wasn't just one time these confession rituals were a normalized part of daily life at the village in fact many aspects of life were rituals used in ways that seem designed to elicit shame marianne added up meeting her husband at freedom village and they became close while touring in the singing group together she describes the first

three years of their friendship as being the foundation of their relationship

in her blog she goes into detail about her upbringing and healing journey all touch it at the end of this episode and honestly recommend anyone that is curious to go check it out however in order to officially date they had to be granted dating permission everybody had to go through fletcher including the staff and their kids the man would

go up to chaplet eight am kneel before fletcher and ask for talking permission even though they had been best friends for nearly four years at this point they still had to go through this process of humans into officially dating mary got caught playing truth or dare and her dating privileges were taken away for three months they weren't allowed to see or talk to each other

mary explains to me that she finally built up the courage to confront brothers about getting back the privilege

coming down the hallway towards me and that was like we need to be certain i went over to him and he gave me this huge hug and i was just like you could tell like this is a good time to be like me and be happy with me and like clearly he was pretty happy with me in the moment so he's just love you mary know just like okay i'm dating

mission back with mike think i just kind of slipped it in there in that moment trying to be assertive and i wrote this blog like i remember him he i could tell he didn't remember taking it away like i could tell by the way that and like my life had been ruined at this point like i'm just like oh this is the hardest

thing i've ever gone through and i could tell that he was like

why like he didn't even remember what he had done to me and was just like sure like yeah i think that and i just like grey and last but despite her heartbreak and hurt she still wasn't fully upset with him

for me again i didn't question fletcher ever i literally thought this was a punishment from god like i was down there like oh my gosh like i've idolized my boyfriend i must love him too much this is good for me like god is teaching me like like again a coping mechanism

instead of thinking this man hurt me and took away something i love mary was following the narrative that god had realised she was doing something wrong and stepped into corrector behavior i asked if she ever considered blaming fletcher no never anything i thought he loved me like i thought it was love which again is very abusive you just think

you think it's your fault like literally you think this pain is my fault and he just loves me and is trying to help her all like like there was no accountability it was just swept up in his charisma that you just i don't know we kind of wish you could talk to him but like i don't

but yeah i didn't question it i think one of the most stereotypical elements of a call that we haven't yet brought up in this episode is the charismatic leader one person views themselves as a sort of god and wants their followers to think the same they possess an uncanny ability to charm and manipulate people meh

murray is aware that this man is hurting her and yet in the same sentence says that she thought he loved her charismatic leaders are good at disguising their abuse as genuine care and love for the people that are under their control you know like there's just a weird things like pastors or priests like we just weirdly assume that they have any easier

connection to god like they can hear better but like it's all be asked like course it's not like that but it just i don't know he he had a way about him that he would intimidate people that he felt threatened by lent to the to the weak impressionable or even super pure and hurt people

well he just abused the crap out of them like he would

but not not before he made them feel like they were everything wonderful so it's like you know like he he would love love love and take you out to lunch and pay for all your thing like you took my family to disney world and paid for everything like so you it's like you paint this picture of a total monster but that's not what he looked like and that's still

not what he looks like like i don't know after everything i've been to like i don't think i would even trust myself being in a room with him for a day and not come out loving him supporting him again like that's how charismatic and like there's something about him you're just like it's true everything he's saying is true and it's like there's a reason

people drink jim jones claim like it's a thing and it's just such a back-and-forth of like dominating you but also making you feel like you're everything this brings us to two more themes of lipton's theory on brainwashing one of these is sacred science which is when the leader professors at totalitarians ign

theology and claims that it's an absolute truth and the other is using emotionally charged language with the goal of impeding critical thought

constant exposure to this type of language combined with the other factors we've talked about will inevitably begin to affect the way that you think the way that you speak act and even the way you treat other people sherry who first came to freedom village at fifteen years old and nineteen ninety one describes an incident when she was being accused of having

a crush on a boy everyone was at a staff member's house on the property for cookout when they all went up to the second floor of the bar when she want to give them an answer to who she had a crush on the staff member took away the ladder and forced her to sing the song out loud in front of everyone four separate times o b e d

e i n z e o b e i n z e obi b e i n z obedience is very recipe show that you believed

shame rituals the point of shame rituals are to break down someone's self image and sense of personal boundaries when a person experiences a shame ritual like this it becomes harder for them to rely on their own sense of direction since it's always being challenged the only people to rely on for examples of what is right

wrong are oftentimes the same people who are handing out the abuse which creates a large bias towards their personal agendas we see this ritualistic shaming too with the hierarchal highly mobile level system at the bottom is the caste of untouchables who are publicly shamed every day with wood hauling and the silent treatment from the entire

our community

i wanted to bring cherie back for this episode because of how she ended up staying at freedom village during her time there she became close with the only staff nurse they formed a bond when she first arrived at fifteen years old and over the years became a sherry herself said one of her only safe people there

but a month before the nurse died staff of freedom village brought sherry aside they asked me about going nurses like i don't know i my answer to the millinery was so because this is the legal they taught us to use so i said you know i kind of feel like i wanna be a servant and try different departments out and figure out what's the right

field fit for me

and it wasn't fletcher that i was talking to i was talking to what i call his eyes i turned in his henchmen various strong domineering

in my opinion arrogant hold themselves but that's just my opinion but it was like they were ultra strict old soldier strict i was terrified of men because my whole childhood a group who prayed a man and they may even more freedom and so when they presented me with this op

option the way that they said it was like well you know it's okay it's actually it's actually good for servants to sometimes have credentials and like cabinets big decision i don't know if i'm ready for this i need to decide like okay well we'll call you back in about five minutes minutes let us know what you decided i had five minutes sit there in the cafeteria

of all places with the nurse deliberating to a good nurses school or new i dare say no and end up with consequences for saying no so like well i guess there's just no choice but to be made and nice i guess go and so they gave me a choice to tune a three-year r n program and i tend to happen myself

i'm programming like no question there so i went for the ten month program i was an hour away and at first they had a son

the audio staff nurse sometimes do it another staffer would drive me you know the hour there and then come back and pick me up that day johnny back and i'd be on duty all night and then he oftentimes would just roll me over and i watched duty and then i'd roll over to school with no sleep and people wondering why i'm falling asleep and was so

so opportune because you know by this point i had been outside of the real world for five years i was twenty going on twenty one but i was still the mentality of a fifteen year old and a very sheltered one

in spite of this she had been pressured to become the full time nurse for a population of over two hundred students she had never received a valid high school diploma from freedom village and during the time that she was working as a nurse was never even paid a minimum wage sherry ended up staying at freedom village for seven years

rs i was working eight to twenty hours a day on call twenty four seven

for a period of year until like six months before she died she finally fought with them to get me a cell phone so arrogantly scoff campus money to get supplies because up until then they won't let me leave in cases there was an emergency and they needed a car i was trapped at this place and i couldn't abandon care

where and when am i supposed to do and i was highly stressed up because i was being put in positions where i had to work outside of my school my practice but i had no choice and

recording them wasn't even on my radar like because this is just what i was living with daily for seven years so recording like those are normal it was just my normal so i didn't realize how bad it was i think i would have lost my mind

everything she is saying makes me think of betrayal they are making her believe that if she reports them she'll be betraying freedom village the kids and the sacred bubble in which they supposedly live which aligns perfectly with the final step in lifting snow

theory the dispensing of existence the group and it's ideology become the highest value at this stage people in the group will be willing to sacrifice their own comfort sometimes at extreme levels if they believe it's in the best interest of the group but it's all it was also so twisted at least for me

because i thought that lake psychological pain with

like my cross to bear like it was good like it was a good thing because you have to suffer somehow like there's you know like suffer as christ suffered is what he would say so that makes him go i guess my struggles i guess my depression and my anxiety is really just

first the enemy attacking me because i'm doing so much good so like who would even preach like if you don't feel attacked by the enemy must be doing something wrong because you're not useful to god

so it just like makes people accept their trauma and like just go through it and you think it's the class i gotta pay and that makes me really sad because there's so many people especially that have been the village that are just out there and they think that they deserve their pain like they think that they deserve to just be confused and

anxious and like

and it doesn't have to be that way like it really doesn't have to be that way

i'm not an expert on religion but i'm pretty sure pastors or priests of any religious tradition don't live in luxury the way that brothers did his excessive consumption excessive spending an excessive marrying fun fact he got divorced three times don't exactly paint a picture of a man of god not to mention the fact that he bullied and ble

little children on a daily basis often through the use of racist and homophobic slurs all of this begs the question how could people dedicated to doing god's work and up following a man with such glaring moral flaws maybe because he knew who to choose to bring into his circle i think

he was looking for people who loved god and wanted to like

follow like because you know people that are like cult leaders or people that take advantage of people like you have to have the certain pureness of heart i feel like it's ingredient they look forward that they can manipulate and take advantage of and that's what happened to my family so it's like

it's kinda like you have to hold two things at once just like pureness part but i don't think my parents ever meant what happened to happen and they almost just followed what they thought was right and like then the brainwashing comes in so that it's just like you don't see what's happening when it's happening and i just felt

they also felt an idol i can't quite speak to my stories and their story and rarely knows how i felt which is growing up there and feeling like i could never leave because of how like just the atmosphere that was there but for them they didn't want to leave because they felt called to be there because they actually cared about the teenagers and they were so

so involved in all of these like troubled teens lives that like so they felt held there by like we want to help these kids like that's why we came here but for me it was like i'm here because i'm terrified but we've up until now who should really been the only person to make me question the original idea of freedom village being

a call that was until maggie and i were able to meet with gary craig the investigative reporter for the rochester democrat and chronicle he covered parts of the downfall of freedom village throughout the last decade and still follows the case i ask him if he would consider freedom village a call and then the author remembers reporter i'm like extremely

cautious of my workshop stuff i don't i mean i think the similarities you could argue that maybe they are similarities in some ways were kind of useless or like a really trying to get everybody to sort of singular focus on the brainwashing or whatever it is believed that

here's your your safety spot but for some reason i'm not explaining about cult has always seemed just stronger than i've been willing to go

because i'm just kind of thinking about it in the sense of like the insular nature like i mean you have a charismatic leader who has sort of um portrayed themselves as a godlike figure to the supporters yes um and then you have a situation where he's intentionally inst

killing fear in people about the idea of leaving and trying to create an environment where people will not leave even after they graduate yeah i think and actually enjoy your point i think to me the difference might be that you just hit it

i mean would he would he be happy if he had called the i think he'd be ecstatic

thank you love me a cult leader ah

but i also think of cultures where people

go it's like they go to the cult leader and and you know these students were really i mean they were sent to the gold later i may maybe we have someone probably by choice but and you know they end of the not by choice exactly the end they a lot of we're happy to get away from the cold to me the difference may be as if you take like a jim jones or somebody somehow he created some

war in which people are just wanting to be there they found me was as he provided them something that the rest of the world didn't have been fletcher tried to build that world i don't know if he necessarily succeed at that he makes a good point a lot of the survivors once getting out of the village were very happy to leave there

however i still don't think it's that simple

many survivors did end up coming back even though they knew it was an abusive environment one example of that was lauren so wait what year did you get there

oh seven two thousand and seven and you were fourteen

yan you left

um

i graduated oh so you graduated from the program

okay i graduated with my dad after your weird nigger year and you're technically like graduated from aha but i guess people call costing other high school killing to you and your staff and they were getting too far ahead of everybody today i'm going to go to college

so after that first year was it your choice to stay

interesting so um well let's talk just by watching you you were brainwash

wow um for both those two years you would say

yeah but i mean i would

when the samples grade washington black truffles and walk to the idea

brainwashing effects your mind on a subconscious level often without the awareness that it's happening it can lead people to make choices that go against their own best interests it's religious abuse it's it's it's own brand of abuse and you don't see it until

sometimes you don't even ever see it because it has this other person which is god attached to it whereas like physical abuse like you're dealing with that person when it's religious abuse it's like so mentors that you attach it to like the device

which wow why you know and like that's what was my hardest thing that takes away

all power from a person because went into religious like you don't cope with any faith like for me like i would never do drugs to numb pain because i have religious doctrines like i'll never do drugs like i can't do and even have access to drugs like

you know or like i would have never committed to a even though i was sane later press like i would have never done that because of their religious abuse it's like it stops you from any like way to try and cope with your feelings because you're so scared of all the options i would have never had to a therapist because he preached against psychiatry

but what i really think locks in the brainwashing is the combination of the spiritual manipulation and the stripping of resources mary describes what it was like when she started to explore the idea of leaving at that point when we left mike was working i remember this because i applied for food stamps to go biggest only were there because we had no money

and you apply for food stamps while you were still working yeah oh right and i worked forty five hours a week i wasn't even on the payroll

mike worked probably like fifty sixty hours a week and made two hundred and seventy two dollars a week

sort of but like what really we got that probably every five or six weeks like that too so yeah so i reported that and like not even knowing because i'm like i don't know how things work out in the world so i'm just like report that and like full lady was like this is a real life you can't even get food stamp like you need to get real jobs and i'm like

did you see the hours we work like we work our asses off and we don't and she was just kind of like i don't know what to do with this application because like it's not real like it's not even real life to be like that so to leave and like understand that people get paid weekly and like so yeah out to like fight it if that's not happening

like you have like some kind of labor in the real world like you know if your boss doesn't pay you you're allowed to come back and say hey this is right it's even been weird for me to wrap my mind around but like i deserve to get paid like because i just in that missionary environment you're just so conditioned just like i don't need money like i just want to do this and so

like i am the perfect person to be taken advantage of just like oh you wanna volunteer your time sure like i don't even think about it like it's not even so i don't know it was actually kind of cool to be like oh yeah money coming in all the time so when i left i was suicidal like twenty four seven i by the time i had

nervous breakdown before i laughed while the time i laughed i was working eighteen to twenty hours a day by myself seven days a week on call twenty four seven i was being paid ninety eight dollars and seventy one cents a month if they decided that they were gonna pay me that much i kept all my ah ma month i have all my paycheck stubs

every single one of them but there's not much they can do first of all because statue limitations and second of all like there was no signed document it was just they rolled me into staff i didn't get paid for the first ten months of being on staff at all