A terrifying look at the the Troubled Teen Industry

Liz Ianelli was a lonely, troubled teenager struggling with attention deficit disorder and depression. She had been sexually abused for years by a relative. In 1994, when she was 15, her parents brought her to a place in rural New York called the Family Foundation School. Over the course of 993 days at the school, Ianelli says she was subjected to emotional abuse, starvation, physical violence, and rape.

The Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) is largely unregulated, but a 2021 article from the American Bar Association estimated that between 120,000-200,000 kids are currently in the system at an annual cost of $23 billion. One popular program, Sequel Youth & Family Services, received 90% of their revenue from Medicare, Medicaid, and additional federal, state and local programs. Similar programs emerged during the 1980s and 90s, with the advent of the US war on drugs and the idea of “tough love” presented as a way for frustrated parents to deal with difficult teens.

The Family Foundation School advertised itself as a place for at-risk teens with an emphasis on addiction and recovery, even though the founders and staff had no expertise or qualifications in this field. In her disturbing new memoir, “I See You Survivor: Life Inside (And Outside) the Totally F*cked-Up Troubled Teen Industry” (Hachette), Ianelli recounts her time at the Family Foundation School, which closed in 2014.

I woke up on a long downward slope with no idea where I was. A two-lane road stretched to the bottom of the hill, then up the other side. My two uncles and parents had picked me up from Four Winds, an adolescent psychiatric facility, after lunch. My parents were in one car, my uncles in another.

My parents were scared of me, I’ve been told. They brought my uncles for muscle.

We were a long way from home. I didn’t like this at all.

A dirty farmhouse, siding missing and windows wrapped in plastic, hovered over a steep rise. I panicked. 

“What is this place?” I was trying to be calm. Trying to be good. “What are we doing here?”

My parents got out of their car and walked toward the front door. A woman stepped onto the porch to greet them. She was tiny, with big hair and pink shoes. 

Two boys came out a different door. I was 15; they were a few years older. They ripped open the car door. “No,” I screamed as they jerked me to the ground.

“Please,” I shrieked, kicking frantically as they dragged me into a windowless room, then slammed the door behind them.

Two girls were waiting for me.

“Take off your clothes,” the senior girl said.

“No,” I said. “There’s been a mistake. I’m not supposed to be here.” She slapped me in the face. “Take off your clothes, or we’ll take them off for you.”

I pushed her. She pushed back. There was a fight: a full-on punching, scratching, kicking fight. I wasn’t taking off my clothes, not like this. So they threw me against the wall. I charged. They punched. I punched.

They kicked me a duffel bag. “Put those on,” they said. Inside there were two sweatshirts, a couple of shirts, underwear, socks, two pairs of pants.  

They made me clean up so the blood wouldn’t show. The bruises, they knew, wouldn’t be visible until later. They walked me down a hallway to the office.

My parents were inside with the woman from the porch and a very tall man.

“Hello, Lizzy,” the woman said. Lizzy wasn’t my name. My parents called me Elizabeth. I called myself Liz. So they took my name, too. 

“This is where you’re going to be from now on, Lizzy. Your parents have had enough of you.”

And my parents: they turned to go. Maybe a sad look in their eyes. Maybe. But no hugs. Not even a goodbye. I lost it. They must have seen my distress. That was the betrayal. They saw terror grip their child, and they didn’t seem to care.

When the door closed behind them, I went wild, like a caged animal. I don’t know what happened, but I know I punched the big guy. I was 5-foot-6, big for a 15-year-old girl. He was about 8 inches taller. Mine was a glancing blow to the chin. He sledgehammered me in the side of the head. He hit me so hard, I slammed into the wall and slumped at its base.

“What is this place? What are we doing here?”

Author Liz Ianelli

But I could see the little woman, Robin, smirking behind him.

“Girls,” she said, “come get Lizzy.” The girls picked me up. 

“Lizzy,” Robin said as they held me facing her, “welcome to the Family.”

They took me through a sunken side entrance into what had been the house’s underground garage. There were eight wooden bunk beds in a space no bigger than a small bedroom. The walls were crudely finished, the mattresses plastic. “That’s your bunk,” they said.

I had arrived around 4:00 p.m.; by now it was time for dinner. The girls walked me to the second floor of the main building.

There were about 50 kids, but nobody spoke. A few glanced at me, carefully, but nobody stared.

The wait staff, also teens, brought out our dinners: two stuffed peppers, one red, one yellow. I stared at my plate. I was starving but nauseous from the fear. And I hate peppers.

Bang. It was the sound of heavy metal hitting wood. Immediately, every kid put down their fork and sat up straight. Eight adults were sitting facing us. I saw Robin. The big guy who had punched me, Bob Runge, was dropping the knife. Every time its metal base hit the table, it made a ferocious bang. 

Bang. Bang.

It stopped. The room was silent.

“Lizzy.” Robin’s voice. “Stand up.”

I stood up. “Over there.” She pointed to a spot in front.

“Lizzy is here because her parents are tired of her,” Robin began, launching into a flat, emotionless takedown. 

Lizzy’s fat. She’s lazy. She’s ugly. She’s a prostitute, a drunk, a drug addict. She’s hateful. She’s lucky she’s not dead. 

“But we will save her, won’t we, Family?”

“Yes, Robin,” the kids said.

When she was done, another adult started insulting me.

When he was done, they went to the next adult, and the next. Each took a turn insulting and degrading me, even though they’d never met me.

Then the kids raised their hands, and Robin called on them one by one.

“You’re a slut, Lizzy,” a boy said. “You have a stinky vagina. It’s disgusting. I can smell it from here.”

What? Is that true?

“Stand up straight, Lizzy,” Robin barked.

“You’re selfish, Lizzy,” a girl said sadly.

“You’ve hurt everyone who tried to love you. I’m ashamed to be around you.”

“You’re a sinner, Lizzy,” another girl said. “You don’t deserve forgiveness. But if you follow the program and believe in the Family way, you won’t die.”

After thirty or forty minutes, when it was finally over, I was so disoriented and confused — and embarrassed — and hurt — that I didn’t know what to do.

“Eat your dinner.”

There was no way I was eating those cold stuffed peppers.

“You will eat your dinner.”

I stared down at my plate, afraid to lift my eyes.

“You two.”

Two kids jumped up and tried to force-feed me. They pushed my face into the plate. I wouldn’t give in. This wasn’t defiance.

My mind and body had shut down. And I really, really hated peppers. 

“Lizzy doesn’t have to eat her peppers,” Robin announced.

Robin had shown me something truly rare: a morsel of pity.

I was there for more than two and a half years. I never saw it again.

It was Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1994. Day 1 of 993. It would only get worse from there.

DAY 2, 5:00 a.m., lights on, as always. The senior girls ripped me out of my bunk. “New girl, clean the bathroom.” I scrubbed the toilet, sink, drains, shower. Then morning prayer on the third floor of the main building, my stomach rumbling. I hadn’t eaten in fifteen hours. 

After breakfast in the second-floor dining room, I was taken by Robin to a room on the first floor with a table, a few pencils, and a stack of loose-leaf paper.

“Make a list of all the things that landed you here,” she said.

“Please,” I said, “let me talk to my parents.”

“Write,” she said, and left me alone. This was Inventory. Every new kid had to do it. It was based on the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. This place was loosely based, I learned later, on AA. An angry, violent, fundamentalist Christian version.

So I made a searching and fearless moral inventory: I ran away with a group of boys to ride bikes. I hit my sister. I hated my mother. I skipped school. I didn’t talk to my therapist.

Then I waited for Robin to return.

“Not enough,” she said, and left.

I thought up a few more true things. I was kicked out of school. I had a bad attitude. I hit my mother. I screamed at my father. I smoked cigarettes a few times. I sipped a beer.

“You won’t get out of here, Lizzy,” Robin said, “until you write down every sin you have committed and every terrible thing you have done.”

“Like what?”

“Like your drug addiction.”

I wasn’t a good kid. I admit that. I was every parent’s nightmare. I talked back. I snuck out of the house. I “made a scene” and embarrassed my mother. I stopped going to school. But I never used drugs. 

“You’re an alcoholic,” Robin said.

“I’m not,” I said. I had spiraled, but not into alcohol. I was twelve. I was too young. I sipped a few beers at family barbecues at fourteen, fifteen, when someone was passing a can around, but that was it.

“You’re an alcoholic, Lizzy,” Robin insisted, “and the fact that you are denying it proves that it’s true.”

By now I had been at the table for four or five hours without food, water, or bathroom breaks. The only thing they allowed me to do was write, and since I didn’t have anything true to write, I wrote what Robin wanted.

“That’s right, Lizzy. Alcoholics drink every day. They do drugs and have sex. You’re going to tell me about the sex, Lizzy. All of it.”

I entered in the morning and came out after dark. By the end, I was so exhausted that I confessed to whatever Robin wanted me to confess: alcohol abuse, heroin addiction, prostitution, armed robbery. Everything short of capital murder. It wasn’t my story. It was the story Robin gave me.

The story that place gave everyone, because to them there was only one story: You were an addict. You were disgusting and debased. You had destroyed yourself and hurt everyone who loved you, and you were lucky to be here — because left on your own, you were weeks away from being dead and burning in hell.

Oh, we were in hell, alright. Believe me, this was hell.

We just weren’t dead. Yet.

From the book I SEE YOU, SURVIVOR: Life Inside (and Outside) the Totally F*cked-Up Troubled Teen Industry by Liz Ianelli with Bret Witter. Copyright © 2023 by Elizabeth Ianelli. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books, an Imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.