Sent to the Premier, the Ministers of Justice, Child Services and Community and Social Services, the Calgary Police Commission, and the Mayor:
Given the response of the Mayor's office, that they cannot intervene in a case of institutional child abuse, unlawful practices as defined by the Alberta Health Professions Act, and the assignment of a serving member of the Calgary Police Service to a posting in an unlicensed, unregulated private facility, and that this officer has been accused of abusing clients during his employment with that private facility, accusations that have never been investigated, I have to assume that your response is essentially canned, and like the response of the Provincial Government, reflects prior awareness of this situation.
I will address this correspondence to all of you, as it applies to the City, CPS, and the Provincial Government. The Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre has perpetrated a fraud on the people of Alberta, and that fraud has entailed the abuse of over seven hundred people, most of whom were minors at the time. Essentially every piece of information that has ever come out of AARC is false, so while we wait to see what the Federal response to this cover-up will be, I will endeavour to inform you about the real nature of AARC. From the time I first looked at this phenomenon in 2007, all I have been after was a public inquiry into AARC in order to stop the harm being done, to facilitate proper care for AARC's victims, and to ensure that this does not happen again in Canada.
To begin with, AARC is a franchise of a completed discredited cluster of quack treatment facilities. Currently, AARC is before the Court of Appeals claiming that to reveal this information constitutes defamation:
"In addition to the Sensationalism, the Powerless Production contained a number
of other defamatory statements, allegations, innuendos and criticisms of AARC,
including, without limitation, the following:...
(d) AARC is connected to the Kids program run by Miller Newton in Bergen County,
New Jersey, USA (the “KIDS Program”), which was eventually shut-down due
to, inter alia, the abuses that occurred in that program;"
It is beyond dispute that AARC is Kids, as is demonstrated by this excerpt from the Alberta Hansard:
"MR. NELSON: Mr. Speaker, AADAC has been involved with
assistance in developing the program of the Alberta Adolescent
Recovery Centre since its inception originally as Kids of the
Canadian West."
Alberta Hansard, March 24, 1992
So that there is no confusion, Kids of the Canadian West was a franchise of Miller Newton's Kids:
"The KIDS centers in El Paso and Orange County closed last year because of financial difficulties, but the facilities in Hackensack and Salt Lake City are still operating. In addition, Newton has authorized the opening of KIDS of the Canadian West in Calgary this spring. The Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission has agreed to allocate $600,000 toward setting it up. Private donors are expected to match the government grant. More than 40 Canadian youngsters are currently under treatment at KIDS of Bergen County in Hackensack."
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-24/news/mn-711_1_treatment-centerSo it is crystal clear that AARC is lying when they state that they are not connected to Kids.
Please see the following so that there is no confusion as to just what Kids was.
Keeping 'Cult' Out of the Case
How do you convince a jury that your client was a victim of a cult?
New Jersey Law Journal/July 7, 2003
By Tim O'Brien
For Philip Elberg, you don't present expert witnesses and you don't utter the word. Through witnesses and records, you let the story tell itself.
For the past three weeks, the partner in Newark's Medvin & Elberg has been presenting evidence to a Hudson County jury about why his client should be compensated for the 13 years she spent in a rehabilitation center.
Lulu Corter of Wanaque was signed into Kids of North Jersey Inc. in Hackensack by her parents on Oct. 27, 1984, when she was a 13-year-old with learning problems. In August 1997, she bolted from what dozens of teenagers have described as a living hell.
Like many participants in the program, Corter had no drug or alcohol problem. Today, those who ran Kids of North Jersey cannot say why she was admitted because her records have disappeared. They say only that she had behavior problems, though they cannot recall the specifics.
Elberg, who won a $4.5 million settlement for another Kids of North Jersey patient in 1999, did give the jury a road map in his opening on June 12 before Superior Court Judge Maurice Gallipoli.
"This [program] is not about tough love. It's about destroying families as they existed, and creating a new family with [V.] Miller Newton as the father and Ruth Ann Newton as the mother," Elberg told the eight-member jury hearing Corter v. Kids of North Jersey, L-3578-00.
The suit is seeking compensatory but not punitive damages because Newton is in bankruptcy in Florida. It alleges that Newton violated Corter's civil rights, provided treatment that deviated from the standard care, and caused emotional, physical and psychological damage.
Newton is the 63-year-old rehabilitation guru who ran Kids of North Jersey from 1984 to the early 1990s, then moved the operation to Secaucus after stiffing the landlord for $400,000. State authorities finally cut off his Medicaid payments in 1998 and sued him in 1999 for $1 million in Medicaid overbillings. Kids of North Jersey closed in 1999.
Newton's operation was also shut down by state officials in California, Florida and Utah, where a prosecutor called the program "a sort of private jail, using techniques such as torture and punishment."
Newton's wife, Ruth Ann, served as a clinical director and second in command. Both are defendants, along with their organization, under several names, and four psychiatrists. Elberg and his partner and co-counsel in the case, Alan Medvin, previously gained settlements from carriers on behalf of three of the psychiatrists. The fourth, now dead, was dropped as a defendant.
Though Elberg has assiduously avoided the "cult" word, three witnesses testified to being brainwashed. He says that even an expert for the defense said in a report that Lulu was brainwashed.
Testimony was elicited that Miller would routinely require patients to shun their families, or parents to shun their children who left the program before graduating. For example, Lulu Corter testified that Newton discouraged her and her mother from attending her older sister's wedding because that sister had left the program prematurely.
Last Thursday, one of the questions from a juror to another psychiatric expert for Newton asked about whether teenagers could be conditioned to think a certain way.
And there seems little doubt that the three weeks of testimony -- which includes tales of escapes, kidnappings, beatings, and physical and mental punishment -- have had an impact on Gallipoli.
Last Thursday, shortly before lunch break during Newton's cross-examination, Gallipoli began a series of sharp questions for the witness. Noting that Lulu was in Kids of North Jersey for years for an eating disorder and compulsive behavior, Gallipoli asked Newton whether such disorders and compulsive behaviors could be treated on an outpatient basis.
Newton said they could.
When the jury was ushered out, defense attorney John O'Farrell objected to the judge's queries, saying they were "too skeptical."
Gallipoli responded, "They are skeptical." When O'Farrell, of Morristown's Francis & O'Farrell, pressed his objection, the exasperated judge snapped, "We're just about walking through a fantasy land, and there comes a time when the court just can't sit there and accept this like a bump on a log."
Asked by a reporter whether he thought the judge went too far in expressing his opinion, O'Farrell said only, "What do you think?" adding that he had high regard for Gallipoli.
The exchange followed 90 minutes of cross-examination by Elberg that included a rundown of Newton's qualifications, including a Ph.D. in 1981 from The Union Institute in Cincinnati in public administration and urban anthropology. The school bills itself as an "alternative learner-directed" organization without classes or the need to show up anywhere.
Newton has described the degree on resumes as being in "medical anthropology" and then "clinical anthropology." Newton says those titles describe what he studied. He also says he is a "board certified ... medical psychotherapist." When pressed, he says it is a "peer certification."
Setting Up The 'Doctor'
Before the cross examination of Newton, with backers on one side of the courtroom and angry former patients and staffers on the other, the jury heard from five former patients who say they were victims of Kids of North Jersey. Elberg says he was able to call those witnesses by invoking a rule of evidence allowing him to rebut testimony he contends is not true.
When Ruth Ann Newton was on the stand, Elberg pressed her about comments by former patients in the past two decades in court, on television shows and to reporters.
Specifically, he asked four questions: Could patients leave when they turned 18? Did Kids of North Jersey routinely try to get parents to sign in siblings once one child was admitted? Did the program encourage kidnappings of those who escaped from the program? And was it common for patients to offer false or exaggerated confessions about how bad they use to be so they could advance through the program's phases and ultimately graduate?
Ruth Ann Newton said no to each query, at which point Elberg put on his rebuttal witnesses. "If she had admitted those things, I could not have brought those victims on," Elberg said in an interview.
The five told their horror tales, which included sitting in chairs, ramrod, for 12 hours of group therapy each weekday. Those in the first phase of treatment could not speak, and most could not write letters, read, make telephone calls, talk to each other or make eye contact.
There was no privacy. "Old-timers" or "peer counselors," those who had graduated but were coerced to stay on as staff, accompanied newcomers to the bathroom, where there were no doors on the stalls.
The tiniest infraction, such as eating a cookie, could send patients back to the first phase. This, the victims testified, was the ultimate hammer, causing many to lie in the hope of getting out.
Jeffrey Stallings, for years the No. 3 official at the facility, testified that he quit to avoid breaking the law. He had testified in an earlier case that Newton altered records in anticipation of visits by regulators and withheld some records.
Two weeks before Elberg filed his complaint in the current case in 1999, he filed a show cause order, ex parte, with Gallipoli, asking that Kids of North Jersey's records be seized to prevent the disappearance of more files. The judge signed the order, and the state's Office of Insurance Fraud Prosecutor seized the records from a warehouse in Glen Rock.
Stallings said he stayed for years and remained loyal. "Looking back, I realize I was brainwashed."
Janna Holmgren-Richards testified that she made up stories while "relating" during group therapy because when she told the truth she was told to sit down, thus harming her chances of advancing. "Lulu admitted she ate sugar, but she didn't, and I said I pushed my poop out because I was there for anorexia, but I lied." Lulu, in fact, made up stories of having sex with a dog and being molested by her uncle so she could move up, she testified.
Stallings testified that many patients had only three options: sit tight and try to go along; rebel; or lie to move through the phases.
As to why so many patients went along with such abuse, many have said that if they told their parents, their parents would go to Newton and he would convince them that their child was lying.
"I never told my dad," testified Jessica Calderone, a former patient. "He would question it, and call up the Newtons, and I'd be accused of manipulating and would be put back to phase one."
As for why so many patients would stay on as trainee staffers and later as paid peer counselors, many say Newton coerced them by telling them they had to "give back [and] carry the message" as is done in Alcoholics Anonymous.
"He guilted you," Erica Goodman, a former patient, staffer and program nurse, said in an interview at the courthouse. Just out of nursing school and lacking experience, Goodman ran the laboratory and developed the eating disorder protocol after speaking with seven patients who allegedly had eating disorders, she says.
Newton and his operation have been sued many times, and his carriers have paid out more than $5.8 million. He's been investigated criminally in Florida and New Jersey, but never prosecuted. But one by one, agencies have cut off the payment of claims, sometimes after exposes by the television shows "60 Minutes," "20/20" and "West 57th Street."
As for Lulu, the real tragedy is that she was the victim of sexual abuse by her older brother before she entered the program, and the program knew that, according to documents and testimony. Yet, she was not diagnosed as an incest victim until 1990, six years after being at Kids of North Jersey.
Newton testified it is often difficult to determine whether a young girl is just experimenting or participating in sexual play.
Throughout Kids of North Jersey's stint in New Jersey, the staff psychiatrists, according to their own depositions, rarely saw patients, let alone treated them. In his complaint, Elberg accuses Newton of "renting licenses," with the peer counselors using rubber-stamps to sign the psychiatrists' names to reports to collect private and Medicaid insurance.
"I never saw a psychiatrist once," says Christine Johnston, a former patient and staffer who traveled from San Diego to watch the trial.
Newton admitted on the stand that his program routinely does not talk to a potential patient's teachers or doctors before making a diagnosis, saying it is not that important and takes too much time.
The jury in the case has been active, taking notes and asking hundreds of questions through the judge -- dozens of Newton alone. Based on those questions, they appear skeptical.
Elberg did call Newton a cult-like leader in court papers in the case that led to the $4.5 million settlement in 1999, Ehrlich v. Kids of North Jersey, HUD-L-4592-95. And he had a cult expert ready for both cases.
"But I decided not to call him or use the term 'cult' because that could have turned the trial into one about the meaning of a cult, rather than about this girl who was yanked out of school and forced to go through what she went through."
Nobody has ever been held responsible for the torture of the forty Canadians in the US Kids programs. Instead, the people in Calgary who were sending them to the US set up Kids here, and when they got caught, they renamed it the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre.
In addition to Dean Vause, the sect leader of AARC, five Kids clients served as Peer Counselors at AARC: Brian Neil, who committed suicide; Peter Sorckoff, who used his wife's position as a probation officer to divert clients into AARC; Janne Holmgren; Simi Bate, whom AARC sued after she appeared on the Fifth Estate; and Lisa Luciano, who rose to be a clinical director at AARC and was involved in the unlawful abduction of Levon Mckillop into AARC. Dean Vause has no standing as a healthcare professional of any kind.
Crucial to understanding this unlawful phenemon is the fact that Dr. Martin Atkinson, who at the time was President of the Council of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Atkinson was named the head of Kids of the Canadian West, and when the sect adopted the AARC alias, Dr. Atkinson served on the board of AARC. He remained involved with the sect, and participated in the cover-up after the 2009 Fifth Estate program aired.
Dr. Atkinson and Dr. Neil Stewart were both responsible for recruiting and shipping people to New Jersey, and later Salt Lake City, to be tortured by Kids. This seems very much like trafficking to me. It is my understanding, although I do not have confirmation of this, that AARC has sent people to US facilities. Again, this looks very much like trafficking.
As I stated previously, I began to look at this phenomenon in 2007. I asked then-Minister of Justice Ron Stevens to investigate AARC, prior to discovering that Stevens was in fact heavily involved in promoting the sect. It took twenty-three months from the time I began until the Fifth Estate program aired and the Provincial Government had to resort to covering up the abuse in the sect. The Government has given AARC millions of dollars since the initial $600 000 payment arranged for Kids by Jim Dinning.
The defamation trial for my partner, the CBC and other victims of AARC is scheduled for 2021, twelve years after Christine was first sued. Until that date, unless there is an open and public investigation into AARC, it's relationship to the Provincial Government and to the Calgary Police Service, I am going to use every means at my disposal to push for that long-overdue investigation. To be clear, AARC is a child abuse cult and the tax-payers have been conned out of millions. Male AARC graduates, none of whom are even fifty years of age yet, with most under forty, are dying at a minimum rate of otwo per year, many from suicide. Nobody has ever undertaken to determine just how many people subjected to AARC are dead. The methods used in AARC are proven to cause significant psychological harm, and the unregulated nature of the sect produces random acts of violence against the AARC subjects as a matter of course
It's child abuse, it's unlawful, and you don't have the right not to intervene.
Regards,
Greg Elliott
