"Very well, then. Here's another chestnut."

[captainsblog]

The weekend's office mail was pretty humdrum, or so it seemed. The actual copy of the lawsuit served on my bankrupt client; a subpoena response confirming an opponent's possession of both diddly and squat; and a big one from one of my favorite Rochester law firms, who I fondly refer to as Lazy Crappy Rotten and Miserable.  This would be the final resolution of a case I had with them in November, right?

Erm, no. It's a motion from their bankruptcy department in a case that they filed in 1990. That is positively ancient as these cases go. Even better, while it's a case known to the court, innocuously enough, as Gates Community Chapel, it actually involves a property, and a rather redneck philosophy practiced on it, known as Freedom Village USA.

----

Don't take my word for it, though. Look it up on Wikipedia, where everything must be true:

Freedom Village (FV), an intensive care home for troubled teens operated from a Christian Fundamentalist perspective and founded in Starkey, New York in 1981. The campus building was the site of the defunct Lakemont Academy, a secular boys boarding school. Freedom Village also operates an office in Burlington, Ontario and has many students from Canada.

Patterned somewhat after the reform homes established by Lester Roloff, FV uses a physical discipline similar to the Roloff Homes and other Fundamentalist recruit training programs. Representatives of FV have been invited to speak at public schools in the USA and Canada.

Parents are only allowed to visit their children on a prearranged basis after three months, and students are asked to commit to remain in the program for one year. In addition all mail incoming and outgoing is read by a staff member. Children are required to write one letter a week to their family. No letters from former friends are given to the children. Phone calls are limited to one a week made in the presence of a staff member.

The intake process is the interview process where children individually meet with a staff member who will ask several questions regarding their application to Freedom Village. While information about past criminal history, drug use, etc., are factored into the decision to accept a child, the primary criteria for acceptance is a stated willingness to cooperate with the rules and guidelines of the program.

During all meals, chapel sessions, school and church sessions the teenagers are segregated by gender. Dating is only allowed among program students once they have obtained a certain privilege level, and with staff approval.

Freedom Village abides by very restrictive standards of personal dress and conduct. Young people are to wear proper fitting, modest apparel. Pastor Brothers also preaches against secular music and has been outspoken against "Christian rock" as well.

I've been by this place many times on the road back and forth to Watkins Glen, and it's as scary looking as that article would suggest. Nothing in any of their Protestant Ethic/Prosperity Gospel horseshit would clue you into the fact that the entity behind this-all has been in bankruptcy for going on 20 years.

The papers I just got are, if anything, just as weird. They involve the sale of a different property than the probably armed camp on Route 14, one that was "donated" to Freedom Village by one of their long-term guests. Proving that God has a sick sense of humor, the donor chose to put the property in a trust, and named an attorney from the aptly-named town of Candor, New York as trustee. The lawyer wound up in bankruptcy himself, failed to disclose that fact to the Freedom Village people, and caused a crisis of title that the state board of law examiners would've been pressed to top as a bar exam essay question.  "This motion," as we say, "resulted"- a decent attempt to make right all that went wrong and get everyone's bankruptcies resolved. 

Feel free to come to the Schuyler County Courthouse on the morning of January 28th and see how it all plays out. Maybe by then I'll have remembered who my feckin' client from 1990 actually was.

Comments

[horizonchaser.livejournal.com]

"Freedom Village" ... As a restrictive care home for troubled teens... run by Fundamentalist Christians...

O.o

[bktheirregular]

Am I off base if I worry that the sort of program you're describing is less likely to bring a teen out of troubled circumstances, and more likely to wire in the cork while the pressure builds up until a seam blows?

Or something like that?

And yeah, it looks like the sort of thing that might have motivated someone to drive a car into a tree at sixty miles an hour.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the whole thing kinda struck me as "Holes" perhaps before "Holes" was even written.

Hey, maybe we can sue Disney for copyright infringement;)

[bktheirregular]

Never heard of "Holes", and now I'm kind of scared to even look it up...

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holes_%28film%29

You really don't want to go Googling that term, especially if your office has any kind of filtering going on;)

[firynze.livejournal.com]

Yikes. Just yikes.

Also, makes me wonder what exact kind of indoctrination and little army-building venture that group might be up to.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I'd wondered if you ever ran into any of their AWOL boys hanging around the Mister Chicken down the road.

[firynze.livejournal.com]

It is entirely possible...

[floundah.livejournal.com]

Holy shit. @_@

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

Those boot camp places are scary. There was one here in OR where a girl was beaten to DEATH while the other residents were forced to watch. I am deeply deeply suspicious of anything which removes people from their support systems, isolates them, and force feeds them religion. That bit described above about the interview process sounds like weeding people in and out for the cult. Yikes.