Socialite-turned-businesswoman Paris Hilton turned heads late in June when she bluntly testified to the House Ways and Means Committee about being sexually abused and “force-fed pills” after her parents shipped her off at 16 years old to the Provo School for so-called troubled teens. Of course, turning heads and grabbing headlines is the point for Hilton. But here, the attention she garnered was political and personal, as over the past five years, she’s become the famous face representing thousands of activists dead set on taking down the billion-dollar troubled teen industry that’s featured in filmmaker Tara Malone’s new documentary, which is trending this week on Max.
For Malone, who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter by telephone as her series was trending on Max, will always be an inspiring catalyst for the growing movement seen in her three-part, three-hour series, Teen Torture, Inc. Weaving together survival tales from generations and multiple camps and youth facilities in the U.S. offering parents fished in by misleading ads a what they may believe is a fresh option to tame their child, truly troubled or not, with “scared straight” tactics that range from verbal assault to systemic abuse akin to the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment.
The series then follows the money to show how some of these abusive and unlicensed facilities are connected to major U.S. business interests and politics, with none other than Mitt Romney and his firm, Bain Capital, turning up as the acquirer of one still-functioning business, the Aspen Education Group. The acquisition came just as then-Gov. Romney was gearing up for a presidential bid that Bain purchased.
“It was always important to us that the audience understands what really makes this tick,“ Malone said. “Because it is such a complicated, layered web of an industry, and to understand why our survivors mobilize the way they do, and why people react to the story the way they do, we wanted them to be able to untangle it — and that is no easy feat.”
Of Teen Torture, Inc.’s dark and disturbing stories of abuse from survivors, at least two are recognizable: Danielle Peskowitz Bregoli, known as rapper Bhad Bhabie, who found viral fame after a clip of her on Dr. Phil in 2016 threatening the audience to “cash me outside”; and reporter Evan Wright, whose series of articles written while embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan was adapted into Generation Kill, a 2006 limited series that aired on HBO.
Danielle learned on that episode that she’ll be sent by her mother to Turn-About Ranch in Escalante, Utah, for six months. At her wit’s end, Barbara Ann Bregoli had brought her daughter to Dr. Phil McGraw’s show; McGraw was a major cheerleader of the troubled teen industry and claimed he was surprised to learn of the abuse Danielle suffered, which included, as she claims, staff forcing her to sit still for three days straight without sleep.
“I am most driven by first-person storytelling and survivor-based storytelling,” Malone said. “It was important for us to make sure that we had multiple generations of this, in terms of the voices that we had covered. Because this is not a new problem. It’s something that has been going on for decades, but it is also something that is very current. There’s not one type of teenager that this happens to, whether that’s about the economics of it or the race of it, or the where they live.”
Wright entered one of the notorious The Seed facilities at 13-year-old, which were scattered around Florida, as a teenager after being kicked out of school for selling weed. Methods of rehabilitation there have been compared to those of the North Korean brainwashing technique used against South Koreans and the rehab-turned-cult Synanon; here, “attack therapy” was introduced, wherein the subjects are yelled at, humiliated and abused.
A stripping of all privacy ensued at the experimental school — being held while urinating and defecating, made to stay silent for days, and “pledging to die for the final battle for the soul of America” — were all part of Wright’s experience at The Seed, which was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.
“The only way to escape is to pretend to comply,” Wright tells the filmmakers in an interview.
The Seed was dissolved in 2001 — but its legacy lived on in Straight, Inc., another facility founded in its image. The true legacy of both facilities today is the high rate of suicides later in life of those sent there and are left with post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Sadly, Wright joined them on July 12 when he was found dead in his Los Angeles home. The coroner deemed it suicide by firearm.
The series executive producer Julian P. Hobbs, the principal at Talos Films, along with Elli Hakami, says that Wright was a good friend of his for years and also crucial in putting the documentary together, so much that he was given a co-executive producer credit.
“He was critical in helping us make these links across time and the organizations and different people and different power bases, which is what Evan’s specialty is — a master at making connections,” he said.
The filmmakers explained that with such a harrowing topic, they knew they’d be drudging up long-dormant memories and childhood pain that can easily overwhelm anyone. This is why, as they explained, guardrails and support were crucial for the interview process.
“There was a lot of making sure that we were clear about what they needed out of the film, and what their expectations were,” Malone said. “It’s tough, it’s tough for people to come out and speak in truth,” Malone said, adding, “I try to take these particular conversations as the gifts that they are.”
Teen Torture, Inc. joins the recent Netflix documentary The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping as the second feature to stream into millions of homes that looks at the issue while seeking to spark change. And some progress has been made to end deadly programs for good — for example, a Missouri House Bill was passed in 2021 and provided for changes to the system, like requiring background checks for staffers and volunteers at child residential homes.
But the fact is, these facilities are moving south of the U.S. border or overseas once they are shunned by the courts or sued into oblivion. As long as parents want to unload a problematic teenager, abusive facilities could continue. Despite this, Malone remains confident that change can and will come.
“There’s a financial incentive to keep [the industry] going, and that’s backed by some powerful people in Washington, D.C., who are ideologically supportive of it,” she said, adding, “Change is a tough process but I think it’s beginning to happen.”
