This column has often made reference to Bush family friend Mel Sembler, and to his group Straight, a mind control cult disguised as a drug rehab clinic for teens. Sembler has a long-term enemy named Richard Bradbury, a former "client" of Straight who is out for vengeance.
Somewhere along the way, Bradbury discovered a penis pump in Sembler's garbage. Lots more here.
1 comment:
Thank you Joseph for continuing to follow and expose the terrible abuses inflicted upon innocent teens in the defunct STRAIGHT program by a very close friend of Bush, Sembler. It's horrible to think what happened and what might be happening in new "teen re-education" camps that wealthy conservative parents send their rebellious teens to break them and end up destroying them in the process.
Poor Richard Bradbury, he really suffered a tremendous amount as a teen, read this from the frontpage article of today's Florida Tampa based St. Petersburg Times:
Poor Richard Bradbury.
read this excerpt:
The fight goes back more than 20 years, to a massive warehouse in Pinellas Park with blue plastic chairs and too many peanut butter sandwiches.
There, at a drug treatment center called Straight, Inc., 17-year-old Richard Bradbury landed in a world that he says was part Lord of the Flies, part Abu Ghraib prison.
Sembler and his wife, Betty, helped found Straight after they found out one of their sons was smoking pot, according to news reports.
In a book published this year, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, journalist Maia Szalavitz contends that dehumanizing practices at prisons and mental hospitals have been repackaged as therapy and sold to parents desperate to control their children. The first two chapters feature Straight, and Richard Bradbury.
Bradbury says a fireman molested him when he was 11, abuse that continued for three years with a high school principal and other men the fireman brought around. He dropped out of school but says he was not hooked on drugs when his adoptive parents brought him to Straight.
Other teens further along in the program forced him to sit up in a plastic chair for 10 to 12 hours a day, he says. If he leaned back, he was thrown to the floor and others sat on his arms, legs and chest. Forbidden to use the bathroom, he would soil his clothes. He says he was beaten.
He graduated, joined the staff and inflicted beatings on other teens. He left Straight in 1985, after he said he learned other counselors were sexually abusing teens and tried to report it, only to be told to shut up or be returned to the program as a client.
Post a Comment