The Truth Behind The Experimental Therapy That Kids Say Starts With ‘Legalized Kidnapping' | Insider

Get away from me! No! No, no, no! Get the f**k off of me! Get off of me! You bastard! When this video of two kids being taken by force went viral, people were shocked. I can see it on film. Don't hurt her. You're f**king pulling down my pants. Legalized kidnapping. But actually, it had been ordered by a judge. And the same thing has happened to children across the country. I'm terrified. Tomorrow is the day that they're gonna try to take me, they're gonna try to force me to my abuser's house. I would mention the ways our dad abused us and they would say our mom must be telling us lies and manipulating us. I just wanna go home. I want mommy cuddles. We were being held against our will and I'm speaking out because I don't want anybody else to go through it. If anyone could just share this, just spread awareness for what's going on, that would be amazing. There's people outside and they're gonna try and get us so anyone who can, please come. Everybody, please. Okay. We're really scared. We have paperwork that is not going. Do you know where you're supposed to go? Do you know where? A reunification camp? Yeah. I was trying to process why these two adults were cornering my friends. I wasn't really thinking in this moment. I kind of just walked up and gave them a big hug. Maya and Sebastian were 15 and 11. Their parents had divorced and they were refusing to see their mother. And you have to help the judge to understand exactly... I have talked to the judge. I have been a witness before the judge. I have described exactly what my mother has done. The judge has done nothing. I put myself between the transporters and Maya and Sebastian. I really thought I could stop them from being taken. The day before she was taken, Maya testified that her mother was abusive. But the judge gave her mother sole custody, prevented her father from seeing her and her brother, and ordered the kids into something called a reunification program. Supposedly, this was to repair their relationship with their mom. I found in my reporting that judges have ordered at least 600 kids into these reunification programs. There is actually a very predictable pattern. There's the abuse allegation. There's the alienation rebuttal. There's the custody switch. And there's the program. One young woman, Allie Toyos, was one of the first kids to start posting about these programs on social media. Reunification camps are camps that are part of the troubled teen industry and allow abusers the ability to buy back the custody of their children through family court. So few of the abductions get videoed. The Maya and Sebastian video was shocking to me. It was very hard to watch as a survivor. I really was taken back to when my sister and I were transported. Maya and Sebastian were abducted from Santa Cruz, California and taken to Lynn Steinberg. Lynn Steinberg is a licensed therapist who runs a forced reunification camp to make money off of forcing kids back into the custody. What was put out on the internet was that I had somehow kidnapped these children and I was child-trafficking them and that they had just disappeared off the face of the earth. So in your opinion, did the transporters do anything wrong that night? They did nothing wrong. This was a court order and everybody had to obey court orders. The judge ordered for the children to be in my four-day therapy program. The children rejected their mother because they were brainwashed into rejecting their mother. Parental alienation is when one parent turns the children against the other parent following a divorce or separation. When I first started the judge or the lawyer would accuse me of peddling snake oil or they wouldn't allow me to use the word parental alienation. Now, when I go into a courtroom, they know who I am. I get the most severe cases. They always come to my program with false allegations of abuse the children do. They're pretty I hate to say laughable. There is no major medical or psychiatric or psychological or scientific organization that has stated that they consider parental alienation to be a valid scientific concept. Very often, when there have been allegations of parental alienation, the child is sent to a treatment program which is essentially an experimental treatment is not a proven effective or safe treatment. These venues are as I understand it usually a place in a rented apartment or a hotel or motel. We were taken to a hotel called the Come On In. I was 16 when I was taken to Family Bridges. The next three days really consisted of just watching YouTube videos. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. They were really chosen to make us not believe our own experiences. What is alienation? Not a nation of aliens. Welcome Back Pluto was a very interesting video. Alienated doesn't mean an alien ate something. They told us that if we learned about parental alienation, we would be cured and we would have a great relationship with our father. According to practitioners of the parental alienation treatments, if you don't have substantiated evidence, for example, a Child Protective Services investigation, the child's disclosure of abuse is not in and of itself considered to be evidence that there was abuse. It was all, oh you didn't experience abuse, it was all made up, your mom told you to say these things. Everybody knows children lie. The original writing about the parental alienation concept was by a child psychiatrist named Richard Gardner. Dr. Richard Gardner is a one man antidote to what he calls sex abuse hysteria. In the early 1980s I began to see a new phenomenon. It is a syndrome that arises in the context of a child custody dispute. Judges generally awarded women full custody. But that started to change in the 70s. Judges started to say, let's just see which parent will best serve the needs of the child. So judges started turning to mental health professionals for assistance and one of the most influential mental health professionals working in family court was Richard Gardner. He was an advisor to judges deciding custody cases. Consider what Dr. Gardner says a good mother would do if her child told her about sexual abuse. I don't believe you. I'm going to beat you for saying it. Don't you ever talk that way again about your father. Gardner thought that a lot of angry, mentally unstable women were brainwashing their children against their fathers. Step number one is to take the child away and protect the child from the indoctrinations and then to it requires a transitional site, an option and I'm very serious about this is to take the kid and put him in jail. A day or two. Juvenile detention center. Gardner's ideas didn't catch on right away. I have zero success in convincing courts to do this. Gardner had some successors that included Richard Warshak and William Burnett. There are many children out there who are being influenced and manipulated to take sides with one parent against the other. I am going to tell you about our effort to get this condition, this mental condition accepted as an official diagnosis. Judges didn't necessarily know that the theory hadn't been scientifically validated. We're actually hosting a family for a high road to reunification. So we're on day two. We have a dad and a couple of kids. Nowadays, as in the Maya and Sebastian case, fathers sometimes get accused of alienation too. The basic tragedy of parental alienation is that we have a cottage industry which thrives on increasing conflict between parents in child custody situations. If you include transport costs, some parents spend more than $70,000 on the four-day program. I'm not convinced that judges understand what they're ordering. We have children who are being given into the custody of parents who have been abusive in the past and are likely to be abusive again. How could you say no to that? That's true. That's cute. In 2016, this was all new at that time. Nobody had even heard of these programs. Do you think that summer of 2016 maybe? I said, what happens if I don't go? My mom told me that they would come take me by force. I was 14. The original ruling was the children stay with me because Michael's drinking was out of control. He had to blow into a breathalyzer prior to visitation so that I could be guaranteed the children's safety while he was there. When my dad was trying to get us back, I told Judge Ostrowski that I was afraid to go back there. I'd get screamed and yelled at. Locked in my room, locked outside, hit, pushed, thrown things at. Eventually, my dad resorted to self-harm. He would slam his head into the table or beat himself up when he was screaming at me. Judge Ostrowski eventually decided that we were going to do this parent reunification therapy with my dad and that my mom had alienated us. They were forced into the program called Turning Points for Families. Turning Points for Families places qualified confidence in the alienated parent to heal the child and therefore initially... Turning Points is run by a therapist named Linda Gottlieb. Gottlieb calls her program a therapeutic vacation. She claims almost 100% success rate, but once again, what's the success? What was the problem? No child rejects a parent unless they're influenced. We equate the process to a brainwashing and a cult. Some mothers whose kids had been taken from them and sent to Turning Points shared recordings of their phone calls. Your daughter is under your spell. What you did is criminal. I'm giving you an opportunity to change that with meaningful letters. Parents write the letters because they think that that way they're going to get to be able to see their kids again. And unfortunately, that's often not the case. You can free your daughter from believing her father abused her and as long as she doesn't recover, I will not recommend lifting the no contact period. Linda, I think I'm demonstrating that I'm trying. This is my third draft of this letter. No, it's too late for my football career. Ashton, he ran away prior to aging out of the program and came back and I know that was very hard for him because he had to leave his brother behind who he loves dearly and he struggles with that choice every day. Happy birthday. Today is your 15th birthday. I really miss you and I hope I get to see you soon. They were supposed to be sequestered there for a weekend but it's turned into six years. The baby, he was nine. I hope that I see him before he turns 18. Do I think it's going to happen? Honestly, probably not. It's still hard to believe that she's gone. It just doesn't seem fair to Maya and Sebastian that for the rest of their lives they're going to have to live with the memory of what they've gone through. We just don't know where she is, if she's safe. Even though it's been six and a half months, we're not stopping. We're not going to stop our fight until they're returned. We're pushing to fix the broken system by bringing light to the issues, sharing our story, sharing Maya and Sebastian's story. We published an article mentioning the children in the viral video and a few days later, Maya reached out to me. I haven't been able to talk to my friends or my grandparents or my step-siblings or my dad or my step-mom or any of those people who are actually supportive family in like seven months now. So are you concerned that this could go on until you're both 18? I'm pretty much expected it will. Later that night, they ran away from their mom's house. We finally got away, so this is an update and we're doing okay now that we got away. We can't tell you where we are, but we're safe and we're okay. These camps need to be shut down to prevent further trauma to kids and I think one way we can do that is through legislation. Some of you may have heard this particular instance from Santa Cruz where two children were ripped from their homes in the middle of the night, almost like a kidnapping. We will now turn to the witness. Hi, my name is Maya Lang. I'm 16 from Santa Cruz. We ran away from our mother last month. We still aren't allowed to live with our father because of the court order. The court called me a liar, ignored my testimony and gave full custody to my mother. Three large adults dragged us to their car. This was the start of reunification camp. The therapists interrogated us for four days. They threatened us, called us sociopaths and said we had, quote, false memories. This is our family court system and this was deemed in our best interest. I ask you to please vote yes. This bill will save lives and prohibits counseling that takes place in an unregulated, non-clinical setting, counseling that is coercive and threatening especially to children. I think it's now been nearly eight months since we've been able to see our dad. Can you tell me about what your lives have been like over the past few weeks when you've been in hiding? There's nowhere that really feels entirely safe because our mom's still out there and she still has custody of us. If they do try to take you, what will you do? I'm not getting taken again. And if I do, I'll run and run and run again. This is not a path that is healthy for any kid. To force kids into a relationship with any parent, whether they're abusive or not, is still very traumatic. I have severe emotional trauma that I'm going to have to live with probably for the rest of my life. I can't see a therapist because that just creates a panic for me. Once I'm free to go about my life, I want to be the person who can help protect other children and make this not a reality. I used to describe myself more as a quiet person, but now I've become a little bit louder. My friends have already been talking to lawmakers and trying to create this as a national movement, and I want to keep doing that work. I have some really, really amazing news. PK's Law, which is a law here in California that will keep kids safe from what happened to me and my brother, just passed the state senate. I stand here today with my brother, my friends Kirsten and Claire, who spoke for me when we could not. Governor Gavin Newsom, please sign PK's Law and protect me, my brother and so many other children like us in California. Thank you. Ayes 72, noes 0. Bill passes.