'Troubled Teen' Program Where Paris Hilton Was Tortured Is Finally Going Down
Now for the rest of them.
Most of our collective memories of Paris Hilton come from her reality TV/socialite era. When she traipsed around the country with Nicole Richie in fuzzy Juicy Couture tracksuits, working as camp counselors, fast food servers, farmers and what have you, and encountering a young Ke$ha, or the 2000s when she and her occasional wardrobe malfunctions were a staple of the gossip blogs.
But before that, just a few years before that, really, Hilton was in Utah, having been sent away to Provo Canyon School’s Springville Campus, a boarding school for “troubled teens” where Hilton and countless others say they were tortured, sexually abused, starved, shot up with Haldol and otherwise drugged, piled on, and put in solitary confinement as a means to “tough love” them into behaving.
As you can imagine, it did not exactly accomplish that so much as it just traumatized the children who were sent there — and, to be clear, they were children, some as young as 8 years old.
Earlier this week, the Utah Department of Health and Human Services finally revoked the “school’s” license after finding that they “had repeatedly violated rules intended to safeguard the well-being of the teens under its care,” to put it mildly.
Hilton first came forward about the abuse in the school in the 2020 documentary This Is Paris, and has really been dedicated to getting it shut down and to drawing attention to the deeply fucked “troubled teen industry” since then.
Just a warning, the video below is a really hard watch.
“The place that hurt me, and countless children before and after me, will no longer be allowed to operate,” Hilton wrote on Instagram in response to the news. “The children inside are going to be removed, which has been my dream for a long time.”
Honestly, I think what she’s done here is incredible, because I don’t think a lot of people fully grasped how severely abusive and fucked up these programs were until she started bringing attention to the subject. Whatever else she’s done with her life, she deserves all the credit in the world for that. These facilities have counted on people not fully understanding what happens there, because they make their money off of freaked-out parents who feel desperate to “save” their supposedly “out-of-control teens” and don’t actually know what they’re getting into. Weirdly enough, they don’t put “people who aren’t doctors will be performing cervical exams on your daughter” in the brochures.
There have been endless reports of severe abuse at both the Provo Canyon School’s facility for boys in Provo and their facility for girls in Springville dating all the way back to 1978 when the ACLU filed a lawsuit against them alleging cruel and unusual punishment, although it was several recent cases that prompted the state to finally take action.
Via New York Times:
In one case, the department said, video footage showed a staff member striking a client who was being physically restrained. In other instances, it said, staff members failed to ensure that the teens there had the right to be “free from discrimination,” “free from potential harm or acts of violence” and to be “treated with dignity and respect.”
In one case, the department said, the Provo campus failed to summon emergency medical services after a minor there was knocked unconscious and sustained severe head and facial injuries during a physical assault. Instead, the department said, the center called “a nonmedical transport company” to take the client to the hospital, delaying treatment.
Hopefully, this means the school will close, although it doesn’t seem like they’ll be going down without a fight. Tim Marshall, the chief executive of the school, says they’re looking at their options and hoping to appeal. You know, so they can keep making an absurd amount of money torturing children.
“As this is an ongoing matter, we are limited in what we can say at this time,” Marshall told the New York Times. “Our priority remains providing safe, high-quality care and support for adolescents and their families, and we remain committed to serving those in need.”
The Provo Canyon School is just one facility in a multi-billion dollar industry ($23 billion in taxpayer funding, alone) with almost no regulation whatsoever, which is pretty horrific when you consider the fact that we are talking about places where we are sending vulnerable children and teenagers. The kids who get sent to these programs vary between those who have committed actual crimes and have been sent there by judges as an “alternative” to juvie and kids who just weren’t doing well in school, who have mental health issues, whose Christian parents didn’t like that they were gay or imagined that they were “promiscuous” because they kissed someone, who have a tendency to talk back, etc. etc. Hilton was sent there because she was sneaking out and going to clubs and parties. Tattoo artist Kat Von D, who was also sent to the Provo Canyon School, said her conservative parents sent her there because she got into punk rock and tattooing.
Oftentimes these kids get “kidnapped” by “teen escort companies” in the middle of the night without even knowing that their parents were going to send them to these places.
A very large proportion of these facilities use techniques inspired by brainwashing practices in North Korea and the tactics of a notoriously abusive 1970s era cult called Synanon that promised to help people with drug addiction but then just shaved their heads and made them torture one another.
Jen Robison, a survivor of the Provo Canyon School, described in the documentary series Teen Torture, Inc. (available on HBOMax) having her head shaved and being called “Auschwitz” by the staff, on account of how she was Jewish.
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In the 1990s and 2000s, “out of control teens” were a staple of talk shows. They’d come on these shows, fight with their parents, wear overly revealing clothes, and sometimes they’d get a terrible makeover and other times they’d get sent to places like this. Hell, Jenny Jones even had some kind of military guy who used to come out and scream at kids — a guy who, it turned out, would later have his “troubled teens” facility closed after they left one kid handcuffed for three days. We all remember rap artist Bhad Bhabie’s appearance on Dr. Phil — when she was better known as the 13-year-old “Cash me outside, how bout dat” girl. Well, the facility he sent her to after that appearance was one of these programs that it turns out was also abusive.
There aren’t as many of them as there used to be, but they’re still around and they are still doing terrible things to kids. Sometimes without local authorities even being aware that they exist — other times with local authorities literally moonlighting at the facilities and participating in the abuse themselves, as was the case at the now-closed Agape Boarding School in Missouri.
It is understandable that parents feel overwhelmed by kids who are always getting into trouble — and trust me, as someone who was always in trouble as a kid, was always in detention, and feels badly about it now, I do feel that deeply. But they need resources that are not this, and the kids need help, not abuse and trauma. Hopefully, all these “schools” can burn the fuck down and we can start from scratch.
I remember reading horror stories about these places in the 1980s. All credit to Paris Hilton for taking this on and winning.
This IS a nice time! Sometimes there is justice in the world. But I hope there'll be healing for the victims.