Troubled teen school survivors say students ‘driven to suicide attempts’ by sick abuse & were forced into slave labor
SURVIVORS of a military-style trouble teen academy subject to decades of abuse allegations say conditions inside the school were so horrific kids were allegedly driven to suicide and treated like slaves.
The Bethel Boys Academy was founded in 1978 by Reverend Herman Fountain in Lucedale, Mississippi, and operated for 30 years before it was ordered to shut down following years of scandal.
In various lawsuits spanning three decades, Bethel Academy staff were accused of administering extreme physical punishments, including whipping, waterboarding, imprisonment, drownings, dog attacks, and brutal beatings – all while allegedly denying students access to necessary medical care.
For years, the school – which charged $2,800 per month for tuition – was also accused of forcing children into slave labor on the school's grounds and in the surrounding community.
In a class action lawsuit filed in 2003, former student Morgan Stuble claimed he didn't attend classes at the academy and instead was forced to work cleaning the school grounds, maintaining lawns, and doing construction work in private homes and a nearby farm.
Former Bethel cadets Allen Knoll and Dave Bowsher both told The U.S. Sun they, too, were subject to forced labor in the late-to-mid 1990s.
"I paved streets, I sanded a rusty dump truck for them, all while my parents were paying them thousands of dollars a month," said Bowsher, who claimed the labor was unpaid.
"They would put us on roofs and contract us out to farmers, picking pecans, building houses, paving roads and driveways, and charge those people while turning a profit."
In lawsuits, other students complained of being forced to work as overnight security for the school, catching any would-be runaways, among assuming other job roles without pay.
Life inside Bethel was brutal and at times terrifying, Bowsher and Knoll both said.
Daniel Edwards, who enrolled in Bethel in 1997 as a 14-year-old, agreed.
When cadets weren't forced to carry out exhausting physical exercises, or instructed to work without pay, they were allegedly being terrorized by staff and encouraged to physically assault one another.
The litany of allegations included beatings, locking kids nearly naked in isolation rooms, depriving them of food, sleep, water, and bathroom privileges, and training dogs to bite them in the crotch.
He also told the allegations laid out in the suit were "hogwash."
CLEARING THE AIR
In 2018, the pair began crowdfunding for a documentary about Bethel, which was eventually picked up by HBO.
The three-part documentary, Teen Torture Inc., aired on the streaming platform earlier this month, chronicling dozens of accounts of abuse at Bethel Boys Academy and other troubled teen facilities like it nationwide.
It follows on from Paris Hilton's 2020 documentary, This is Paris, in which she detailed allegations of abuse during her time at Provo Canyon, a Utah-based troubled teen boarding school.
In March of this year, Netflix also released its immensely popular docuseries, The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping, chronicling allegations of abuse at New York's since-shuttered troubled teen school, Academy at Ivy Ridge.
Knoll and Bowsher said they hope their series helps to bring sweeping reform to the troubled teen industry to help protect future generations of children from being exposed to the same horrors they witnessed and endured.
"I don't have a time machine, so I can't change what we went through, I have to deal with it," said Knoll.
"But what we can do is make a difference with political change."
The two men say they also hope the docuseries brings peace and relief to others like them who suffered for years in silence.
Bowsher shared, "The biggest validating thing we've had in this whole process is to see these people that haven't been believed for so long and have had so much trauma in their lives finally get love and validation from the people they love and from those that once didn't believe them.
"It's great to have the truth come out and come together as a large voice to be heard and to be validated as a whole, that what we went through was real and we're not liars.
"Because often that's the narrative that gets spun, that when these kids get out and try to share what happened to them, they are called liars because they're 'bad kids' and 'troublemakers'.
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"Well, they're being heard now."
Teen Torture Inc. is now streaming on MAX.