Tag: Arizona

Molly Dickin had only been at an all-girls boarding school in Arizona for a few months when she and two other girls climbed over a barbed-wire fence and ran off into the desert.

It was around 8 p.m. in late April 2015, and Dickin was making her escape from Spring Ridge Academy, a now-closed, for-profit boarding school just over an hour north of Phoenix that housed up to 76 teen girls at a time to treat behavioral problems.

Dickin, now 28, told HuffPost she could no longer stomach the abuse she said she endured while there. Dickin said she was forced to participate in psychological games that included having to roleplay her own sexual assault in front of her peers, and faced punishments that included not being able to speak to anyone for weeks at a time.

“We were just very, very desperate to get away from SRA,” said Dickin, who had turned 18 two months before her escape.

Dickin made it over the barbed wire, but the dark made it hard to see the blood that now covered her arms and face. With backpacks filled with only a change of clothes and some snacks, the three girls sprinted into the cold desert.

After a night of walking in the desert and eventually on dirt roads, the sun started to rise. The girls had settled to rest on the deck of an empty cabin when police finally found them.

“The young lady had an apparent, recent scratch across her cheek and nose,” a report from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office said.

“We tried to explain to them the reasons that we had run away, like what we were running from,” Dickin said. “But they just returned us without looking into anything.” The sheriff’s office declined to comment for this story.

Nine years later, in 2024, the school’s controversial practices exploded into public view when the mother of a former student won a federal lawsuit after alleging that Spring Ridge was an abusive, cult-inspired program that used fraud and manipulation to “imprison students for an arbitrary and uncertain time period for money.” She also claimed that the program was able to “sever” the relationship between her and her daughter.

Spring Ridge, and other boarding schools and boot camps like it, which together are known as the “troubled-teen industry,” had started to come under scrutiny from media outlets and lawmakers. Last year, a jury awarded the mother more than $2.5 million in damages, an unprecedented amount that experts hoped would be a turning point toward reining in a multibillion-dollar industry they say preys on vulnerable teens and their families.

But the ruling was reversed earlier this year over allegations that a juror may have done their own research about the industry prior to the verdict being read, potentially biasing the outcome. A judge declared a mistrial and scheduled a new trial for January 2026.

Though Spring Ridge closed in 2023, former students say too many facilities like it are still in operation. HuffPost spoke with six former students who attended the school as teens and reviewed hundreds of pages of court records, police reports and on-site government inspection reports. Together, they paint the picture of a facility that traumatized many of its students. Meanwhile, Spring Ridge’s founder insists there was no abuse and referred HuffPost to two former students who spoke highly of her and the program.

Many alums can no longer speak for themselves; during the trial, the attorney for the plaintiff listed nearly 30 former students who have died since Spring Ridge’s inception in 1997. Many died by overdose or suicide, the attorney said.

The school’s founder, Jeannie Courtney, told HuffPost in a statement that those numbers are “deeply misleading.”

“Unfortunately, despite our best attempts to help these individuals lead healthy, productive lives, some did later succumb to the same issues that had led them to Spring Ridge to begin with,” Courtney said.

Former student Shannon Saul, now 27, told HuffPost she knew four of those who died and still struggles with survivor’s guilt.

“I would say that a [minority] of us are out there living our lives thriving,” Saul said. “A lot of people are still struggling with addiction, or the trauma is too intense and they can’t handle relationships.”

Stories of abuse from troubled-teen facilities have trickled out for decades, but few programs have been held accountable. HuffPost previously reported on a Utah facility in 2016 that responded to allegations of abuse from former students by changing its name while keeping the majority of its staff. A 2024 story from NBC News outlined the facility’s continued allegations of abuse. A lawyer for the facility denied the allegations.

Around 120,000 to 200,000 children are estimated to be living in troubled-teen schools and camps at any given time, with little to no government oversight.

“The number of youth who have been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused or neglected while living in a residential facility is unknown,” noted a 2024 report by the federal Government Accountability Office that examined the safety of the programs after multiple teens died while in their care.

A law signed by then-President Joe Biden that same year mandates a federal study with a report issued every two years for the next decade on child abuse in programs similar to Spring Ridge — a victory for advocates and survivors who have worked to shed light on the industry’s practices.

Celebrity Paris Hilton testified in front of Congress in 2024 about the trauma she said she endured at Utah’s Provo Canyon School when she was 17.

“These programs promised growth, healing and support, but instead did not let me speak freely or even look out a window for two years,” Hilton testified.

Those who attended Spring Ridge struggled with “substance abuse, addiction, physical abuse from the people they trusted most, and more,” Courtney said in her statement.

Meg Appelgate, the CEO of Unsilenced, an organization advocating for survivors, told HuffPost that programs like Spring Ridge only serve to amplify trauma many kids have already experienced.

“If you look really, really deep, almost every survivor I know had trauma before getting sent away,” said Appelgate, who herself was put in a troubled-teen program as a child. “And what happens is it compounds the trauma once you’re in there, and so now you have trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma.”

The now-abandoned Spring Ridge Academy is located in the remote, high desert town of Mayer, which has a population of less than 900 people. Saul, who attended the school from 2013 to 2015, said staff members who lived in the town had a name for the girls: the “hoes on the hill.”

Jeannie Courtney, 79, founded the program in 1996 and led it until her retirement in 2016, when she handed the reins off to her son, Brandon Courtney, and his wife, Suzanne. Despite retiring, Jeannie Courtney continued to play a role in the day-to-day operations of Spring Ridge, along with conducting workshops and seminars, former students allege. In a statement, Jeannie Courtney said she “continued to support the school in facilitating some workshops” but was not involved in the daily operations of the school. Brandon and Suzanne Courtney declined to comment for this story.

In the 2021 lawsuit against Spring Ridge that names Jeannie, Brandon and Suzanne Courtney as defendants, mother Kimberly Sweidy alleged she was duped by the program, which promised evidence-based therapy for her child but instead led to her daughter being “manipulated, coerced and abused by Spring Ridge.” Parents would pay up to $9,000 a month for their kids to receive therapy likened to cult practices, according to her lawsuit. Claims against Jeannie, Brandon and Suzanne Courtney were ultimately dismissed before the trial. Spring Ridge Academy, however, remained a defendant. At the trial, Jeannie Courtney testified that she is not a licensed therapist and has no background in psychology.

The facility’s so-called therapeutic practices “employed public shaming, food deprivation, bathroom privilege deprivation, isolation, administration of drugs and encouragement of physical violence and screaming,” the lawsuit said.

The practices of the school mirrored those promoted by David Gilcrease, Jeannie Courtney’s ex-husband and a former facilitator for Lifespring, a “personal growth” training program that has often been likened to a cult. Courtney was also employed by Lifespring and married Gilcrease six years after she left the program in 1986.

Critics of Lifespring include Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who became an anti-cult activist after getting involved with Lifespring in the 1980s.

“When you come away from a cult, you’ve got to find a balance in your life as far as getting involved with fighting the cult or exposing it,” Thomas told attendees at a Cult Awareness Network panel in Missouri in 1986. (In recent years, she has aligned herself with far-right conspiracy theories linked to QAnon, which has also been likened to a cult.)

After leaving Lifespring, Gilcrease started the company Resource Realizations, which did seminars for troubled-teen programs that involved “psychological responses to intense emotional distress,” an advocacy group for survivors of the industry said. The practices are strikingly similar to what many of the former Spring Ridge students said they experienced.

“The methods used by Resource Realizations and SRA are identical, as evidenced by years of reporting from parents and students who attended Resource Realizations workshops, reports from former SRA students, experiences of Ms. Sweidy and her daughter and SRA literature,” the 2021 lawsuit said.

The lawsuit, alongside former students, described a game in which students were instructed to beat a chair with a towel that had been rolled up in duct tape. The students were told that the towel represented their anger at their parents and that the chair represented their parents, according to the lawsuit.

Courtney directed HuffPost to two former students who both described the chair-hitting exercise as a great way to “release anger.” Other students felt differently.

Dickin, who said she had to beat a chair with a towel in 2015, said she and other students were expected to act overly emotional if they wanted to progress through the school’s ranks.

“We were instructed to scream things at our parents,” Dickin said of the activity. “Like things that we resented them for, things they’d done to us. We were instructed to get as aggressive and as emotional as possible. And I did not break, I guess. During that, I wasn’t crying. I was in shock and felt so uncomfortable.”

Dickin said she got in trouble for not crying. The lawsuit echoed a similar complaint.

“Those children who don’t participate in emotional hysterics are singled out as the group pariah,” the lawsuit said.

As punishment for her escape attempt, Dickin said, she and the two other girls were subjected to a “school-wide attack therapy session,” in which Dickin said other students yelled at them for running away. Their punishment then included no longer being allowed to speak to other students, she added.

The 2021 lawsuit also alleges the use of attack therapy several times, calling it a “humiliating” process for the kids. Courtney said in a statement that attack therapy “was never part of our program.”

Dickin described another group roleplay activity led by Jeannie Courtney in which Dickin had to take “accountability for my own rape,” she told HuffPost. That involved getting down on her knees while another girl took the role of assaulter, reenacting the traumatic moment in front of a room full of students, she said.

“I would have to hear the things that [my abuser] said to me — that I had shared during therapy — and the degrading things he said when he assaulted me,” she said. “I had to say, ‘I take accountability. I never should have let him physically overpower me and gotten myself into that situation. I never should have been wearing a dress that made it so easy for him to have access to me. I never should have allowed him to choke me.’”

Jeannie Courtney denied all allegations of abuse — including that she had Dickin reenact her assault — in a call with HuffPost that she ended after 15 minutes. She later responded in a statement to a list of emailed questions.

“We took rapes incredibly seriously,” Courtney said on the call. “In fact, a very high percentage of the young women coming to Spring Ridge Academy were raped. We would never ask someone, ‘How are you accountable for your rape?’ In fact, I have made the statement that I don’t care if you are sitting naked on somebody’s lap, you do not deserve ever to be raped.”

If girls were being abused, Courtney argued, why weren’t there reports?

“If we were in any way harming girls, it would have been reported, and we would have had reports of it,” Courtney said. “I find it kind of interesting that all of a sudden it comes out years later, when we didn’t get reports of this, or parents calling me about this years and years ago.”

HuffPost reviewed documents that show dozens of instances of students running away or attempting suicide over the years. The Mayer Fire Department, which handled dozens of self-harm calls in the years Spring Ridge was operational, declined to share additional information.

Still, more than 120 Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office incident reports from 1997 to 2022, obtained by HuffPost, give a glimpse into the desperation many of the girls said they felt and the limits of the program in providing the safe, stable environment it advertised to parents. It’s unclear exactly how many times the sheriff’s office was called to the school; a spokesperson acknowledged the batch of records released to HuffPost was not comprehensive.

One 2012 report describes how a student tried to kill herself.

In 2019, a deputy was dispatched to Spring Ridge “in reference to a 14-year-old female who attempted suicide,” according to a report.

Another student attempted to kill herself in 2021, a report said.

And as the 2024 GAO report points out: “Youth placed in residential facilities may not make reports for fear of prolonging their stay in the facility, being punished, becoming a target for additional abuse, or having privileges taken away.”

While Spring Ridge housed up to 76 students at a time, the total number of students who entered its doors over the years is unclear.

In her statement, Courtney called HuffPost’s reporting on the sheriff’s office reports “deeply misleading” and a “minor fraction” of the full Spring Ridge student body over two decades.

“The school rightly reported incidents of students leaving campus without permission or attempting self-harm to relevant authorities because their safety was always our top priority,” the statement said.

Despite the allegations from former students, Jeannie Courtney denies the facility ever mistreated girls in its care. She believes her accusers are making it up.

“This is what I think has happened: I think it took a few people to start the criticism of what I see throughout the internet, and that’s why I’m not on social media,” Courtney told HuffPost in a phone call. “I think that it became the thing to do: People say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.’ And they become angry, and they lash out and literally — literally — make things up. And this is not unusual, by the way, if you study group dynamics: They begin to mirror what they hear, and they believe it happened to them.”

For many kids sent to a troubled-teen facility, the story starts the same: Late at night, a child is woken up by strangers tasked with taking them to a for-profit institution, often out of state.

The strangers, usually two men, receive permission from a child’s parents to forcibly take them. They call themselves “transporters,” but survivors of the troubled-teen industry call them by a different name: goons.

Michaela Harrington, 27, said she was 13 years old when she was hospitalized for self-harming. When she came home, she said, she was woken up in the middle of the night.

“There’s two big men standing in my doorway,” Harrington said. “I’m screaming because I think I’m being kidnapped, and my parents are waiting behind them.”

The two men took her on a plane to Georgia, where she was sent to Blue Ridge Wilderness Therapy before eventually getting transferred to Spring Ridge in 2014.

Harrington would soon find herself in a worse situation while at Spring Ridge, she said.

In spite of Spring Ridge’s hefty tuition, the 2021 lawsuit alleged Sweidy’s daughter “trained” herself not to eat after seeing cockroaches in the salad bar and ultimately developed an eating disorder. Courtney said in her statement that it is “false and unimaginable that there would ever be cockroaches in our food areas or that students would be ill as a result of our kitchen services.”

Records with the Arizona Department of Health Services show the facility was cited in 2019 after a student grabbed a knife from the kitchen and used it to self-harm.

“During an interview, [a staff member] acknowledged the resident did not receive continuous protective oversight,” the report said.

In 2021, Spring Ridge was cited after a student was able to gain access to an unlocked medicine cabinet and reportedly swallowed several ibuprofen tablets. The facility was cited for failure to “ensure residents did not use or have access” to materials that “present a threat to the resident’s health or safety.”

Spring Ridge was also cited $500 that same year over staff members not providing proper documentation “before the personnel member provides behavioral health services.”

“Three personnel members’ skills and knowledge were not verified and documented,” the report said. “This is a repeat deficiency.”

A 2013 sheriff’s office report details Suzanne Courtney’s suspicions that a faculty member was taking items from students and giving them cigarettes. (The report said the school decided to handle the situation internally. In her call with HuffPost, Jeannie Courtney said that over the years she personally fired two people for breaking the facility’s rules but did not elaborate on the nature of the firings.)

“Spring Ridge Academy held staff to high standards, and we took action if staff did not meet them,” Jeannie Courtney said in a statement. “Of course, if staff broke our rules, we terminated them — just as anyone would expect for an institution charged with caring for students.”

To finish the program at Spring Ridge, students were expected to complete four phases, a difficult process at a facility that demanded absolute compliance, former students said.

During Phase 1, where every new student started, girls were not allowed to speak to anyone other than students who shared the same therapist. At Phase 2, girls could have one 15-minute phone call with their parents each week and occasionally go off campus to visit them. At Phases 3 and 4, students could have internet access, watch movies and play games like basketball and tennis without staff supervision, according to a 2010 student manual obtained by HuffPost.

Moving up in phases could take weeks or even months, and required grueling emotional games that involved students verbally tearing each other down if they wanted to rise in the ranks, former students said.

The process could feel arbitrary. Caro Maltz, a 27-year-old who uses they/them pronouns, attended Spring Ridge from 2014 to 2015 and said Jeannie Courtney gave them homework asking what two gifts they would give their “inner child.” Maltz chose a stuffed animal and a seashell. At a group session with students and Courtney the next day, Maltz presented their gifts and explained what they meant to them.

The other students, under the gaze of Courtney, “determined that I was inauthentic,” Maltz said.

“And so I was sent out of the training — and this is a training that you needed to do to phase up,” they said. “So I had to then wait a couple months to do the training again.”

Jeannie Courtney said in her statement that students were required to repeat therapy exercises if they engaged in “destructive, defiant behavior.”

Former students who spoke to HuffPost described an isolated, regimented environment with draconian rules enforced by uncaring staff. Maltz recalled an incident in 2014 when a girl shattered a light bulb on a bathroom mirror and cut herself with the shattered glass. Staff told Maltz to pick up the pieces of blood-stained glass scattered over the floor, they said.

“That’s when I knew in my brain that this wasn’t OK,” Maltz said. “But there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t refuse.”

In her statement, Jeannie Courtney said the incident described by Maltz “could not have happened because of precautions we took at Spring Ridge,” including covering light bulbs.

Police were called to the school in 2015 over a separate incident in which a girl smashed a light fixture with her hand, according to a sheriff’s office report. The girl, who needed a bandage for her bloody right hand, told an officer she became angry after “being picked on by other students.”

“[Redacted] stated that she took out her anger by hitting the glass lights instead of making physical contact with the other students,” the report said.

Sarah Olsen, 26, who was sent to the school in 2014 when she was 14 because of poor grades at school, said she reported other students for breaking rules in an effort to rank up. Anything to survive, she said.

“I played the role,” Olsen said. “It was like being a method actor, and you’re in character 24/7. It really comes down to how deeply you can internalize it, because it’s like brainwashing.”

Saul said that students who were gender nonconforming or “not feminine enough” would be forced to wear makeup and dresses. Dickin also recalled the “femininity assignment” in which she said she was forced to wear “bright red lipstick and heavy makeup.” Jeannie Courtney declined to comment on the assignment.

“They loved to control every little thing that we did,” Saul said. She added that every kid “had to be an addict of some kind,” but because Saul had no history of drug abuse, she was told she had an emotional addiction.

“I wanted to be loved, but they convinced me that I was addicted to relationships,” she said. “So it was hard for me to adjust to being in romantic relationships [after Spring Ridge].”

As hard as it could be to move up in phases, dropping down phases was a common punishment employed by staff.

Harrington, who said she had made it to Phase 4, was dropped to Phase 1 after staff discovered she and another girl were in a relationship and had kissed. Harrington wrote about the kiss in her journal, which was confiscated and read by staff after another student told on her.

As punishment, the two girls were forbidden to speak to each other. At a “feedback” session with other students about the incident, Harrington said, she was berated by her classmates.

When she was caught kissing the girl again, she said, Brandon Courtney made her shovel gravel by herself in the sweltering Arizona heat over the course of two weekends to make a walking path.

Harrington, who was then 15, said her hands started to blister and bleed as she shoveled gravel into a wheelbarrow. Staff would not give her gloves, she said.

Courtney denied the allegation in her statement, saying, “This is false.”

Olsen said she saw Harrington struggle in the triple-digit heat.

“We’re not allowed to have shorts because shorts are too sexual, apparently,” Olsen recalled. “And her hands were bleeding; she wanted to stop.”

During her own time at the school, Olsen described living under constant surveillance and likened the structure of Spring Ridge to a “totalitarian government.”

“Staff were shining a flashlight in your face every 15 minutes while you slept,” she said.

“This is false,” Jeannie Courtney said in her statement. She added that while Spring Ridge staff checked students’ rooms at night, it was “to ensure student safety and health and wellness, not to disrupt their sleep.”

Olsen said she often went to bed hungry, eating watermelon-flavored toothpaste to reduce her hunger pangs. “It was the best-tasting toothpaste that I could get,” she recalled.

Even the parent manual, obtained by HuffPost, seemed to acknowledge the “horrendous circumstances” that a girl at the facility would “undoubtedly describe.”

“Do not negotiate, placate, or promise,” the manual told parents. “Do not acknowledge concern about any of the horrendous circumstances and events she will undoubtedly describe.”

One of the earliest documented runaways took place Nov. 7, 1997, just months after the school opened. A 14-year-old girl ran away and was missing for six days before police found her at an apartment complex with an unknown person, according to a sheriff’s office report. She was handed back to school staff.

Reports of runaways continued to roll in for years, with nearly 40 police reports detailing students escaping from the time the facility opened until it closed in 2023.

Raelynn Bumgardner, now 27, was one of those runaways.

After arriving at Spring Ridge in 2014, Bumgardner said, she was forced to strip naked in front of staff. She said she was given a pregnancy test, and her body was inspected to document her self-harm scars.

In her statement, Jeannie Courtney said students “always wore undergarments and a hospital gown” during the inspection.

While at the facility, Bumgardner claimed she was overmedicated. As a result, she felt “more docile,” started to hallucinate and had panic attacks, she said. At last year’s trial, Dickin testified that Spring Ridge put her on medication for bipolar disorder even though she had “never shown any signs of bipolar disorder.”

“My medication was frequently increased, once three times in one week, despite adverse side effects,” Dickin testified.

The facility was also cited in 2019 for “failure to ensure that policies and procedures for medication administration are reviewed and approved by a medical practitioner.”

Roughly a year into Bumgardner’s stay, she was dropped from Phase 3 to Phase 1 as punishment for sneaking in photos of her friends after a home visit.

The drop meant her stay would be prolonged by months, at a minimum. Bumgardner decided to take her chances at running away. She planned to convince someone — anyone — at the local motel to take her to Texas.

After walking for miles on the night she escaped, Bumgardner was picked up by sheriff’s deputies. She was sent to a juvenile detention center after threatening to run away again if she was returned to the school, a sheriff’s office report confirmed.

Bumgardner didn’t mind.

“Jail was fun compared to what I had been doing, because I was allowed to speak freely,” she said. “If I was hungry, I could just ask for food, and they would feed me. They really just left you alone, and I had more alone time in jail in those 24 hours than I ever did at SRA.”

In March 2013, Alyssa C., 29, planned her escape from the school because she “couldn’t take it anymore.” After an Easter visit with her family in Texas, the then-17-year-old purposefully missed her connecting flight in New Mexico and instead went with a stranger — a man roughly in his 30s, she said — on a train to California.

“That’s how badly I did not want to go back to that school,” said Alyssa, who asked that her full name not be used for privacy reasons. “I got off a plane at 17 years old with a random man who said he would take me to California.”

On the train, she said, the man sexually assaulted her in a bathroom. During the assault, Alyssa recalled thinking to herself: “Just get through it, and you don’t have to go back to the school.”

“I definitely disassociated, went out of my body,” she added. Alyssa said that the two of them went back to their seats after he assaulted her, but he got up about 30 minutes later and never returned.

She sat in her seat until the train reached its last stop in California and broke down in tears as she told the train attendant what happened. Alyssa said she told police what happened to her, and they took her to the hospital to have a rape kit done. The man who assaulted her was never arrested for the attack, she said.

She was sent back to Spring Ridge, where she found herself in “a shit ton of trouble,” she said. Once back, Alyssa said, she had to write a thorough “trauma narrative” describing her assault in detail.

“I had to describe my own rape, and then they made me read it to my parents over the phone,” she said.

Her story of escape is backed up by a treatment plan school staff put her on when she returned.

“Alyssa admitted that she had lied and got off the plane with an unknown male voluntarily and accompanied him to LA consensually,” said the report, obtained by HuffPost. “She stated that he engaged sexually with her in the restroom on the train and that she told him no, but he continued to do so despite her asking him to stop.”

The report added that Alyssa should take “accountability” for what it called her “pattern of poor sexual boundaries and dishonesty coupled with a lack of accountability and a very immature stance that as long as she denied misbehavior, she would not be ‘found out’ or have negative consequences.”

The document also misdiagnoses Alyssa with histrionic personality disorder, which her recent medical records confirm she does not have.

Jeannie Courtney acknowledged assigning “trauma narratives” to students but declined to comment on Alyssa’s allegation.

“It is important to note, however, that many students came to Spring Ridge Academy facing mental health challenges and with a history of problematic behavior that included running away from home, being dishonest with their parents, and taking high-risk unsafe actions within their own lives,” Courtney said in her statement.

Appelgate, the advocate for survivors of troubled-teen programs, said that the mental and behavioral health concerns programs like Spring Ridge claim to address should be held to the same standards as other health care facilities. (In her statement, Courtney said Spring Ridge provided “high-quality education and therapeutic services” to its students.)

If “hundreds of patients” accused a hospital of abuse, it would be shut down, Appelgate said.

“So why aren’t we treating [the troubled-teen industry] in the same way?” she asked.

As stories of abuse have gone public since Spring Ridge shuttered, Jeannie Courtney believes she did nothing wrong. Many of her former students disagree.

“She was incredibly cruel,” Dickin said. “She knew how to exploit trauma and insecurities.”

In group sessions led by Courtney, Dickin said, the school founder would draw out personal details about the kids, only to use those against them.

“It was used to control us and keep us compliant and keep us stuck in shame,” Dickin said. “It didn’t feel like it was to benefit us. It felt horrible.”

Courtney called the allegation “completely false” in her statement to HuffPost.

“Why would I have given my life to this only to ‘shame’ these same women I was trying so desperately to help?” the statement said. “At Spring Ridge, we did everything we could to help our students, and my only regret is that we were not able to do more for those who are clearly still struggling in their lives.”

Olsen described being in a group session with other students in which Courtney lectured them about sex and relationships.

“I was 14, and she started screaming at us that we were never going to experience an orgasm if we didn’t do exactly what she said, and that none of us knew how to properly climax because of our unhealthy relationship habits,” Olsen said. Saul, who was also in the group session, said Courtney had “branded it as a sex education intensive.”

Courtney denied that ever happened in her call with HuffPost.

“There would be absolutely no reason for me, with my philosophy of working with girls — and over 1,000 girls — to have ever said that,” Courtney said. “I would never have talked about girls’ orgasms or anything of that nature. And I don’t scream and yell, either.”

The two former students that Courtney put HuffPost in touch with had only positive things to say about the school’s founder. The two women would only speak on the condition of anonymity over fears of retaliation from other former students.

“She saw me in a way that others didn’t,” a 28-year-old woman who attended the facility from 2013 to 2015 told HuffPost about Courtney.

At 16, she said, she’d developed a heroin and Xanax addiction and “there weren’t a lot of girls I could relate to because I was in so deep at such a young age.”

“I always felt like there was something wrong with me,” she added. “And she really, really took me under her wing.”

A 35-year-old woman who went to Spring Ridge from 2007 to 2008 said Courtney has gotten a bad rap.

“I just wish that I could make you believe me,” she told HuffPost. “I’m sure there are so many people saying shit [about Courtney] that you don’t, but I wish I could, by myself, change the perception of Spring Ridge and Jeannie. I wish that a lot of these people would just stop.”

Maltz said that despite their traumatic experience at the school, they don’t harbor a grudge against Courtney.

“I don’t have a lot of beef toward Jeannie, because I think she is kind of a kook that genuinely thought she was helping people initially and then got carried away by the amount of money you can get in the troubled-teen industry,” Maltz said.

Olsen was less forgiving.

“She was the all-powerful cult leader — God,” Olsen said of Courtney. “She knew it. She loved it. She’s a malicious, evil woman.”

Courtney said if her former students were so upset after their time at the facility, they should have called her.

“I am saddened that anyone feels that they were harmed at Spring Ridge Academy,” Courtney said in a phone call. “What I do wish they had done is picked up the phone and called me. Because I have over the years — even after I retired, after 2015 — I still get calls from girls all the time, not only talking about their experience at Spring Ridge, but asking for help with a problem they might have.”

Before ending the call with HuffPost, Courtney questioned how so many former students could dislike her when her 2016 retirement party was such a hit. If Courtney had an abusive facility, why were there almost “500 people” at her party, she reasoned.

“When I retired — and I didn’t want them to do anything — they did a retirement party at Camelback Inn in Paradise,” she said. “There were almost 500 people: students, parents, staff, even people from other programs that came to honor me.”

Karen Bumgardner, who said she regrets sending her daughter Raelynn to Spring Ridge, said Jeannie Courtney should pay for the harm her program inflicted on kids.

“I do think she should be in prison,” she said of Courtney.

Karen Bumgardner said she thought she was doing the right thing by sending her daughter to Spring Ridge over what she described as poor grades and “not being nice at home.”

“I obviously have regrets, because it’s affected her so much, but again, we didn’t know what else to do,” Karen Bumgardner said. “We listened to the therapist, we listened to her school counselors, my husband listened to Jeannie [Courtney] and believed that that was the best place for her.”

The mom admitted she put her trust in the wrong people.

“You’re putting your faith in these people that you don’t know, but you’re hoping that they’re legitimate,” she said. “You have no recourse.”

Raelynn Bumgardner said she tried to tell her parents what was happening at Spring Ridge, but they didn’t listen.

“Not a single adult stood up for me,” she said.

Saul said her mom was “doing the best she could with the information she had” when dropping her into the unregulated, abusive, multibillion-dollar industry.

“She was preyed upon by an industry that makes its money off of people like her,” she said.

A recent law school grad, Saul said she wants to work to help the vulnerable. Already, she has repeatedly publicly sounded the alarm about the dangers of the troubled-teen industry.

“It made me want to advocate and fight for people who don’t have power and control,” she said.

Maltz recently left their job working with adolescents with substance abuse problems to begin a graduate program in counseling. Dickin said she also works in the mental health field. Both separately noted that their jobs were nothing like their experiences at Spring Ridge.

Alyssa has worked as an educator for over a decade, a career that she said she finds fulfilling after her time at Spring Ridge.

“I think it heals part of my inner child working with kids,” she said. “I would lay down my life for any of the kids that I’ve watched in the 11 years I’ve been doing this.”

Raelynn Bumgardner lives in Sweden, where she is studying to become a histotechnologist. She echoed what other former students have said: The trauma of Spring Ridge will stay with her forever.

“I’ve been two different people,” she said. “There was Raelynn before SRA, and then there’s Raelynn post-SRA. And they do not know each other.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org for mental health support. Additionally, you can find local mental health and crisis resources at dontcallthepolice.com. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention.