Episode Six

i was one of the last five people are you in the last five because my parents were like they didn't even know that the places like shutting down

no one told them

and i couldn't home because you know i didn't know phone software while they were gonna move to south carolina when i first heard of that um dated of slideshow after the slideshow i just started crying i was like a double move to stop carolina i don't care how nice it is down there i'm gonna stay like with my family

i can't do that basically we had cleaned everything like everything like take all the fucking old school shit throw it in the dome falls all the stuff like basically strong evidence away hang on so let me just get this straight they were planning to transform the kids who were acting village helps you on about your alignment of us

on a fucking rehab okay but south carolina the idea of south carolina and then eventually at some point that idea got thrown out the window today i'll tell you why now why do you know why i do can you tell me

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

welcome to victory

my name is margaret and this is we warn them freedom village and investigative miniseries unpacking what happened freedom village usa through interviews with the people who experienced in themselves

we will mention different forms of abuse and violence throughout the series so please take care of yourself as you finish ah

uh

so what did happen you just heard western angel and boy wonder contemplating their destinies at a new freedom village in south carolina but like angel said one day the plan to move to south carolina abruptly ended she didn't know why and i didn't either

her until i met a woman named jazz up until this interview i was mainly just collecting stories and chronicling events that had already happened when i met jazz i realised for the first time that this story is an over it's actually still unfolding right now through the work of activists i think sometimes people

talk about your programs they're like oh these people are just cold and like this this and that but like i was not a troubled kid i was sent away to cover up abuse she went to freedom village in two thousand and ten and was trafficked all the way from california between the ages of two and eight she was sexually assaulted by multiple adults in her community

e her mother joined a more intense church and eventually became a pastor there jazz was pressured to keep quiet as a kid about the abuse however she became concerned that the same thing would happen to her little sister unfortunately she was right after she found out her sister had been assaulted fourteen year old

jazz started telling the other adults in the congregation so that is the premise of why i was sent away because i would not stop talking about it i went to the person who ordained my mother told them what happened they didn't do anything either

people are like oh she's some troubled kid who came in and blah blah blah no honey this is not my first rodeo this is why the anger that i have for all of these things people are like oh she's just angry well yeah

yeah i'm angry because i have seen um

corruption and environments that are saying you know that our our campaigns and they're not and so when i went to freedom village um

i think all of those things that kind of prepared me and i knew the red flags i was very kind of in the shadows i did not want attention drawn to myself and i was at freedom village women there were sexualized you know i'm saying you work groomed for marriage definitely

the abuse that jazz experienced there especially as a queer person of color was what motivated her to take action when she got out my main experiences i did witness conversion therapy i went through extreme racism my first experience of racism there wasn't even from a white person

yeah so it kind of shows you the culture like they were already telling me oh mexicans are nothing but rapists drug dealers and you know etc and this was way before trump came into the picture

in episode four we establish that there is an element of brainwashing involved in the effective functioning of freedom village and i would argue a brainwashing that is rooted in racism and hate against other groups of people hierarchies like the level system gave a sense of control to not only the people in positions of power

power but also the kids in the higher ranks this weaponizes someone's sense of self jazz talks to me about how people of color queer people nor divergent people were taught to hate their own identities through this brainwashing at this point i've interviewed nearly thirty people that went to freedom village across before decades

and i've noticed that kids who did not fit into the traditional white christian model were more likely to be in or sent to the bottom of the hierarchy and so carried the heaviest workload i felt kinda like a mule honestly i they had me do an extremely hard work no one ever showed me how to do it extremely exhausted

like definitely child labor status you know what i mean the neglect i went through like really long periods almost my whole state without basic my basic needs being met you know what i'm saying like so close for the warm weather clothes for the cold weather um

anything that i needed it was not provided

after jazz left she joined a facebook group the group served as a place for former members both staff and students to come and reminisce and maybe connect with old roommates at this time this was the only platform she knew to connect with other survivors however when she joined the page was monitored by former staff members children they weren't

interested in listening to her that whole time i'm trying to talk about things

that happened there and i kept getting censored and my comments would be blocked and the admins with early deleted email address would be hitting me up like you know we're just gonna keep it about the positive things nothing like there was nothing positive maybe for some that were fortunate to you know

i don't know and even then some people who say oh i had a positive experience so realised the therapy and exploiting

years go by with many online arguments along the way but then one day jazz gets a notification from jeff the person who started the facebook group letting her know that he would be stepping down and then one day right before south carolina um oh yeah i haven't figured out that

like no one with censoring my comments anymore like finally nine years later

later though we were all having like real discussions finally just hit me up and he's like no i really like your style and like what you're talking about like you want to be an admin and like my dog just drop

first of all a lot of people in these groups don't like me because um

honest what were the ideologies that were taught freedom beverage racism homophobia and so some of them still have the remnants of them huh

i remember when i made the post smells like get through that man

i'm not gonna allow hunting a little bit like you know things are about to change and that's when we really began to eat things out

make it a safe space

it was during this time that she met someone who had been watching brothers for years his name is gabe

you have to understand like the hermit gabriel i didn't even know that freedom village went back that far i remember gabriel hit me up and he was just like

the stuff looks good

this guy just popped out the current and then i realized oh my god like he was there in the nineties and and this whole time of like when i entered freedom village and i theme for the first month how things were operating i knew there's more to the story and gabe had the story well actually multiple stories

ys gabe grew up in queens new york not too far from boy wonder actually and was sent to freedom village in nineteen ninety three with his twin brother he stayed for three years and his brothers stayed for even longer eventually becoming staff himself

we connected through facebook but since i was living in new york city at the time i met up with him in person we recorded this conversation while we were having lunch at one of his favorite local diners so when i left they always realised that it was hope in a sense right and so it was really hard to really recommend

you mean you had this religious sort of

program can see you of how you should go in this just roles that you sort of sort of have afforded it didn't make sense i always knew because of the extremis of how sketchy was however um i always thought that there was going to be some evolution to it

you know since he left gabe made it his personal mission to understand what had happened to him and his brother for the past twenty six years gabe has been connecting with survivors on his own it was not until like hearing like years ago some survivors back in myspace day i wanna say they were speaker

being on some of the troubles that they had in the past by sort of getting some indication that that was this habitual pattern that it wasn't changing and not until two thousand and seventeen or eighteen is when i really started to see faults talking about

at the end game of freedom village and how it could the problem is still to continue that that seemed to be a problem meeting you had these people who are cycling into one of coal in the generation to another to another and going through these extreme sort of abuses of environments and so that's when i

started to my eyes well for opening up

gabe dove deep into the history he was the one who actually informed me about lester roll-off the man who built the business model that freedom village copied and thrived off of him and jazz became friends and together with a group of four or five other survivors they began to organize specifically against a move to south carolina it's funny because

it literally happened right before it happened right after i took over the group like just coincidentally right yes just when they popped up and someone's like they're trying to move to south carolina and so we began to listen to the podcast the podcast that they are referring to is fletcher brothers he releases a thirty minutes sir

german style podcast every day and still does during this time though he was broadcasting his moves on the podcast jazz and crew began to listen to track what was happening in south carolina you would not believe that we're having to go through with these state people i mean it's just like wow they came out

out of the woodwork and i arrow i had guys that know my office the other day the mandy

or you can you can't shut the water down an ant girls in metairie yeah you're gonna keep the sprinkler system going

there aren't any girls there anymore

they're gone because you don't learn because you stupid people

ah illustrated south carolina should good and bring him down

the parents shine release of go ahead and new york state said oh no you gotta send them all home and their parents have to take him to south carolina

furious

seriously

and can you ever be one whoa you heard all about the interstate traffic true true

i looked at that woman and i said you know you've just proven to me once again that i am genuinely born again

oh why's that how's there

because i'm not crawling across his desk and grabbing you but in the meantime you better get out of here

forty years since i started pretty village forty years

folks we need to purge and

whether it's keeping this program on the air or sponsoring a young person

one time bid for five hundred dollars and you know what we can take a new young person into the facility today and we're getting ready to take them in down south carolina's but i need your help and i need to purge were also praying for sixty thousand dollars over the daily budget to get that voyage home

hurry up it should be and start taking voice please please please

when age sixty founders we need one person around sixty thousand dollar check

oh please write every day should you give each one a to do the best you can and i believe god will bush

it just so happened that one of the members of the facebook freedom village truth group was living in the south carolina town that freedom village was planning to move to her name is liz

it was liz who initially was like we need to do something she's located in south carolina right so i reached out to her and i was like hey girl you know i'm saying let's do something with it and she just hit the ground running like knocking on the knocking on doors going into her community talking to people letting them know about the

abuse of alpha offices that went on jazz spearheaded the online organizing to get other survivors passionate about speaking up while liz started focusing on getting her local community passionate about not letting this facility come into their town since she wasn't empty at the time she calls her local fire department organize a meeting this

is some of the phone conversation she had with the fire chief and my conversation with congressman hide we were saying that maybe it would be a good idea for a group of you know four or five of the survivors to come down and hold maybe like a little meet and greet for the town people if they want to come talk to us and ask us whatever questions they have

a lot of people were still fully aware okay that would be wonderful at me okay so if we could arrange that for let's say the first week of august um where we just we feel like over the next month or so we have a very short window of time to kind of put a stop to this before it ever starts and we really

want to put in the efforts um to make that happen what we're going to try to make up some flyers when we get those made up i will get back ahold of you again and i'll get them sent to your fire hall i'm also going to send we have a binder that has about fifteen or sixteen like pretty lengthy testimonies from people that were either

they're at the location in new york staff people that were there or parents of children that were sent there and it's pretty eye opening but we're trying to give um you know the heads of the different you know areas that are working with us all a copy of this binder so they really have you know something solid in their hand that they can see like this is what goes on

there this is what we're working to stop

i went to stay low

now you might be wondering why i even have records of this phone call but at the time liz began recording all calls related to freedom village and posting them publicly on our soundcloud

she did this because people in positions of power were starting to notice her speaking out brothers was planning on partnering with a man named jonathan bailey bailey already own teen treatment facilities in states like arkansas tennessee and florida now he was interested in expanding his business and agreed to open up a new

new facility with the help of the brothers

jazz gabe josh jenny liz kiya were all members of the facebook group and began to organize a campaign specifically against the opening of the program under a new name called the freedom village experience they were the ones that gathered the binder of descriptions and testimonies that liz would present der

during the community meeting gave describes other steps they took to organize their partners on the property sort of appear out of nowhere and announced themselves publicly easy we're great homes all led by jonathan bailey and we are going to give people permission this problem with this is this project how

we went in the beginning is that we reported we we actually people on the ground they contacted child services who said that they should be looked upon to make sure everything was up the knob on new york that this was in child services in south carolina we went to even the governor's office when all around and really what really sparked this

this was that the reporters were starting to look at this the reports coming in and people were questioning unit and they started to reformat themselves so we went from feudal village to victory village right and then the new started to say

this former residents say what they experienced at freedom village in the nineteen nineties in two thousand was far from therapy and they left worse off than when they arrived they call the organization a cult but the new leadership says that they're hoping to take this in a different direction here in the upstate

hannah grace homes the organization that's partnering with freedom village to open a campus in pickens county says this program will be different and they are moving forward in a different direction with no corporal punishment no hard labor therapy we're looking for natural consequences were looking for natural rewards that's the best way we believe to cv

young people really achieve what they want to see when they grow up bailey says there's good and bad in everything and says there have been far more former residents of freedom village who had positive experiences than negative rungi and gonzalez say they and others are working to protect other youth every single one of us is so scarred by what happened to us there that we think is important enough that we're going to interact

to try to stop this i reached out to jonathan bailey after hearing these stories earlier tonight he tells me that fletcher brothers the pastor who ran freedom village up in new york for decades has stepped aside and that the program here will not resemble the methods that they used in new york their license is still being reviewed by the state at this point they face inspections over the

x two weeks so zo ben if the license for freedom village does indeed get approved does the state provide some kind of oversight and all of this that was some of the concerns of the former residents that after they get their license they could file for religious exemption but bailey reassures me that they will face the same sort of oversight that any state foster care program also

faces alright we'll see where all this leads thank you liz was able to get in touch with jonathan bailey and had a couple of phone calls with him before the town hall meeting bailey claimed that the facility was going to have nothing to do with brothers well except for the fact that they would be hiring fletcher brothers son jeremy brothers as director of operations

jeremy has his own history and lawsuits of abuse i wonder if your organization is so good why would you want to involve yourself with that mushy i don't have an echostar

but just five years here's the dilemma

i was not i don't have the money for that property you stay longer okay um and so i'm in a cock about two million dollars to start a foster

facility okay two thousand and nineteen

a private plan

ability made a lot more sense for us but we needed to have donors who were willing to help with that

so we had an opportunity to to basically carry on some sort of legacy that fletcher had with these donors yeah you may think like was all bad and that's fine but there was a there was some legacy there are some people claim they've been helped

in the early years of what he was doing was very different than today i think the last eight to ten years was a different freedom village and hey we're looking for us to do take the donor base and give them an opportunity to support something that really truly could contain our kids in exchange for getting

a job no no so so the d so we decided to do that and part of what we wanted to do was i wanted to mentor jeremy e what a program should look like okay i've known jeremy for a long time i've known different charities and hunting outside influence of his dad i think he couldn't be

i'm not saying the silver bullet niger question no no i appreciate the answer and so i would i guess i guess i would come back to that with if you feel that he's not currently at a level and that he needs mentoring to get to a level where he can properly run a program then why are you giving him such a high up leadership position right now

now he doesn't have to have that position right away

discharge of the discharge of operations is not going to do the program well i'm being in charge of anything yes that's opposition right i being in charge of anything it gives me a charge of food and facilities with ammo

hey baron john do you realize that some of the major complaints about the village involve food and facilities

in fact probably among the top ten eight of them are involved with the condition of the facilities

but all the saps from outside of general manager i'm not champion while jeremy jeremy was one of the people in leadership when it happened that's what i'm saying is that jeremy was at the top when all that was going on

all happen before ya know i was there with jeremy

obviously frustrated liz jazz and the whole freedom village experienced group were recording and saving the calls to display at the fire hall meet and greet meanwhile on such your brother's podcast he was responding to the recent tv news interview that question the integrity of freedom village

you know i was

attacked recently virtually too well about the fact that we've had a woodpile okay i named it

that's our form of discipline over the years

to come up with a new one in south carolina will choose their own nerissa about the word chest

ah darling it's not a woodshed number one it's a woodpile

these are little darlings you gotta remember by the way oh

we haven't exactly been daily with the sweethearts of the world some forty years okay go get h ito kids i used prepare and gang members you know we we've probably gone through it all and

and but anyway you think that i shot saying

oh and and and you know what is really sad

ah

there was a girl food down there

they paid me to lie patch doe

oh you gotta be kidding me seriously you lie a little thing oh i remember her well

oh the flaming member of the l g b t q organization now

she lied a better father evasion or she lied about a guy in the church abuse near serious say they come out of the woodwork

in a huge crowd satan dark long enough they're gonna come out of the woodwork

yes they were coming out of the woodwork right just to prove the point that fletcher was more involved in the property liz decided to give him a call pretending to be a fake donor

hello past the british hi i recently donated money to calls for donations

for the freedom village move to south carolina i've recently been told that that move is no longer happening is absolutely not okay jonathan bailey was the one who gave me this information

he might have but um are you planning on having the boys dorm up and going before you open your doors because i had thought that that was going to be updated decision i'm not gonna lift the six thirty we're gonna help

boys and girls okay in the meantime in the meantime we're going to be sending young people to the integration effort

they're already up and going and i've heard those are in florida right

i'm sorry that the hacker's home was implored a correct yes ma'am okay so the children have been sent to florida right now until you can get the the campus open okay yeah okay but i just wanted to make sure because like i said um you know it was it was strange i contacted john bailey because i had seen about the news you know i was kind of like the person who's

heading this whole thing up so i just contacted him to find out you know about the while and other things and he had stated to me that all the freedom village staff were fired and sent home um and that he wasn't going to have any connection with freedom village so that's the only reason i'm concerned about it and i just wanted to clarify

that before said my friend down there with her husband to fix the well

well you're the boss man okay so you're you're you're going to be the one who makes all those decisions and you're saying is still happening well about all

and then the day of the community meeting and south carolina came jazz recalls what it was like watching from the facebook livestream

so

we were kind of nervous we didn't know how things are gonna go um we have never done anything like this before

and

i'm just smiling right now this is i still can't believe it sundays but um we have this meeting stuff and last minute

jenny

she's the one who started the freedom village experience with me by the way she couldn't make it so we were kind of scrambling because liz had a lot of anxiety and she was like you know i didn't anticipate doing this alone and it was kind of like we run the edge of possibly cancelling the events you know because it's triggered

enough when you have went through it but now when you have to go in front of a community um and we heard that jonathan bailey was gonna be there possibly some other supporters of fletcher were gonna be there and after being gasped for so long it was just she had a lot of anxiety and i had a lot of anxiety for her

her our whole little team was just kind of really nervous of how things were gonna play out so we encourage post the ideal so it was just her um that was going to read off testimonies of you guys whoa we what we did was is we've created a slide show to talk about freedom village and what it entails

and then we submitted testimonies she had like a booth setup that had like quotes from freedom freedom village like the you know a fletcher and other staff members clothes from thompson bailey's i he had stated um and then our testimonies on the table so that people can go and read them um so

is basically giving this presentation and um

we were all on the live by the way watching her just like holding our breaths you know like what's gonna happen and i still can't believe it to this day and it just kind of changes everything that i thought was possible when you use your voice like amazing things can happen and

the community of south carolina was receptive to what we were saying and when jonathan bailey tried to get up there and kind of give his spiel then they're like wait a minute like literally the community didn't even have to be prompt or any raise

if they were like hey aren't sure the guy that's partnering with sotho and you know like and he basically booed him off the stage right and afterwards she just we all you know she stood close to where the lie was happening so we could see it and we were just listening to her

talk to reporters in the community and just the outpour of love and like

genuine lee wanting to help them protect youth was beautiful and and i'll never you know when you think about south carolina you think oh you know they're not as progressive or whatever but what i seen that day really changed like i said everything that i thought was possible about just you know so

if anybody's who's scared to use their voice because they think they might be gaslight just remember this you know what i'm saying remember this event that we didn't south carolina where we didn't know if it was possible or not we didn't have that many resources or money or anything but we used our voice and and most peace

people i would say almost all people aren't will be receptive to that so it's really amazing and i really appreciate every single person who you know helped us make that happen it's just amazing it really is amazing

and i hope that it is an encouragement to people that they anybody can make a difference

the plans for the south carolina facility folded under the public pressure and media attention after the meeting to community members began calling and writing emails to the d h s office and their elected officials because of all of their phone calls

emails on top of the media attention the new facility was never reopened that was in two thousand and nineteen and since then fletcher and jeremy have not launched another program to our knowledge they both currently live in largo florida where fletcher continues to release his daily thirty minute podcast he preaches

about the bible and continues to solicit donations for his own ministry despite the fact that it literally no longer exists in the wake of the black lives matter movement he started selling merchandise with the tagline kids' lives matter i wish i was kidding

all jokes aside though the brothers family has been keeping a low profile however it seems that their legacy of abuse is far from over they are currently entangled in four sexual abuse cases that are still open in new york state they have been using excuses like the coven pandemic

and lack of funds to push back their court dates

on top of all of that in august of twenty twenty two jeremy brothers was arrested in florida according to the public files from florida's lake county clerk some of the charges included domestic battery and video voyeurism under the docket section the reports explained that jeremy had drugged a child and then sexually assaulted them it's

pretty graphic i will attach these links in the episode show notes for anyone interested in reading them based on all of this and the fact that fletcher is well into his seventies i don't think it's likely that they're going to be opening up another school however even if they aren't relevant anymore the industry that made them rich is still alive

live and thriving shortly after south carolina we found out that this wasn't an isolated like just freedom village oh then we're like oh wow this is like there's a whole network which they called the troubled teen industry and they've been talking about this program since two thousand and five when george miller created the end inte

occasional abuse of at-risk youth fact this act introduced to congress by california representative george miller spurred the government accountability office to conduct a report and present the findings of abusive practices within the troubled teen industry in a congressional hearing in two thousand and eight the g a o proved that youth in

residential facilities experienced male treatment including but not limited to physical abuse sexual assault neglect medical neglect and violation of civil and human rights was basically the starter of what became scarpa which is the stop child abuse

residential programs and that's what's been being reintroduced for legislation since like two thousand and eight two thousand and seven

scarpa is another bill that has been circulating for the past decade but is still yet to get past one reason may be that it doesn't have any bipartisan support however back in the spring of this year a new bill called psycho the stop institutional child abuse act was introduced to congress this would create a federal work group to collect

ict information to improve best practices and reports in these programs it would also involve a national study to quote examine the state of youth and youth residential programs and make recommendations to federal and state agencies based on the data of youth this bill was actually introduced with the help of paris hilton who was a

celebrity that has come out with her story of abuse in a tta program in utah her story has brought the teen treatment movement into the public eye which i think is a great thing however she is not an accurate representation of the majority of the kids who are being affected by this i just

want to point that out because i feel like it's not talked about enough in this movement

in the beginning of twenty nineteen jazz and gay launched a letter with the national youth rights association talking about the neglect in these facilities during covert nine days before launching the letter cornelius frederick a sixteen year old boy died at a facility in michigan because staff members tag

tackled and restrained him for too long nine days after that naomi woods a seventeen year old girl died due to medical neglect at a facility in florida both were black youth this along with the demand for more safer spaces within this kind of advocacy is what inspired jazz and gabe to form we warn them

and now nonprofit that focuses on ending institutional abuse and systematic oppression through direct action i got to be part of the official launch of the campaign back in twenty twenty one along with a group of other advocates and survivors from across the country we just celebrated our third year anniversary as a group along

and with focusing on the stories and statistics specifically within marginalized communities we also highlight religious programs which often exist on the fringe of the troubled teen industry

religious programs is a lot different from the secular programs that they call los

um so those were the program's kinda being put in the spotlight and the difference between our program being religious is that those religious exemptions are what allow our programs to pop up and they don't ever have to report anything to the state secular programs different stories they may not have to get all of the certifications but they still

have to make it known that they exist no so virtually um religious programs go undetected

like jazz mentioned there are many different facilities that fall under the umbrella of the quote troubled teen industry these include religious programs like freedom village but also wilderness therapy camps therapeutic boarding schools conversion therapy camps rehab programs and some boot camps i personally know people from my life

who have ended up working in these industries particularly at wilderness therapy programs the sad thing is they really believe that they are helping kids and doing good work which maybe they are in one to one relationships but i can't get over the larger system in which they are taking part in these programs dist

captive marketing schemes are powerful and take advantage of people's ignorance and good intentions there is still no national database for all of these schools if an abuse is reported even if it gets to a court level and a school gets shut down they can open up in a new state and under a new name because of the lack of data now

no regulators are even drawing the connections within the past decade activists have actually collected their own database of abusive programs which can be found at on silence dot org this is a great resource to send someone that may be considering working at these programs already works at one or two a parent who wants to send their child away

a i will attach this resource along with a few more in the show notes the sick bill is bipartisan and will be voted on this fall however federal laws take a long time to pass which is why getting involved on a local level is probably the best way to see change i talked to gabe about what red flag

eggs for these kinds of programs can look like so what are the red flags that have been bearing their communities so that they can see that understand all the license of the providing proper nutrition is what does the education level the providing quality bomb and what are the views of of this program right

and things like that gabe goes on to tell me about the importance of knowing and forming relationships with your local elected officials these are the people who are writing or voting on legislation that will most likely affect your kids or even you directly you can find your local and state representatives by going to find my rep dot org or go to we warn