Boonville needs to think twice
before getting stung by WWASP
April 13, 2005
By Tony Messenger
The problem with Robert Lichfield
isn’t that he breaks the law.
It’s that the law allows him to do
what he does.
Lichfield knows about the law. He’s
used the absence of laws in many states and Third-World countries as
cover for a series of business ventures that by most accounts have
made him a wealthy man. The Utah businessman is founder of World
Wide Association of Specialty Programs, an umbrella group connected
to dozens of tough-love teen rehabilitation centers all over the
world.
Many of the schools connected in
some way to Lichfield have been accused by parents and authorities
of child abuse.
Some of them have closed.
Now Lichfield has his eye on
Missouri. Specifically, he and his partners, Randall and Russell
Hinton, want to buy the former Kemper Military School in Boonville
and turn it into another of their behavior modification facilities
for troubled teens.
Long before Missourians heard of
this plan, Shelby Earnshaw was trying to stop it.
Earnshaw is director of
International Survivors Action Committee, a watchdog group that
keeps an eye on the kinds of facilities Lichfield owns. She’s not a
fan of the growing industry that takes advantage of parents who are
at their wits’ end because they can’t seem to control their
teenagers. The facilities are multiplying because many states, such
as Missouri, have few laws regulating the activities at these
so-called private schools. Parents sign over their rights and agree
to confidentiality. Proving abuse is no slam-dunk. The Virginia
woman’s Web site keeps track of the various facilities across the
world that have been accused in one way or another of abusing teens.
Stories from media reports and
parents on the Web site tell of children held in animal cages, teens
sprayed with pepper spray and the kind of emotional and physical
abuse that many of us would consider torture.
Many of the teen centers are
connected to WWASP in some way, and wherever there is WWASP,
Lichfield generally isn’t far behind. That’s why, when Earnshaw
heard about his intent to buy the Kemper property, she started to
let folks in Missouri know a little bit about Lichfield and his
various companies.
Her actions earned her a typical
Lichfield response.
He sued.
On Feb. 22, in Washington County
court in Utah, Lichfield sued Earnshaw and her husband, William,
alleging defamation, invasion of privacy and interference with
prospective economic advantage. According to the suit, Earnshaw
"contacted public officials in Boonville, Missouri, and Salt Lake
City, Utah, and spread false, defamatory and misleading information
about plaintiff with the intent to interfere with plaintiff’s
business relations and with plaintiff’s prospective economic
interests."
Earnshaw says the suit won’t stop
her from letting anybody who cares to listen know how destructive
she believes WWASP facilities are to children.
"A lot of folks are intimidated by
the man and the money he has," she says. "I’m not."
I called Lichfield’s attorney to
ask about the suit. He didn’t call back. It’s no wonder. He’s a busy
man.
Earnshaw is hardly the first to be
sued by Lichfield and/or his associates.
Before her, there was Sue Scheff,
and her organization, Parents Universal Resource Experts, or PURE.
Scheff was sued for defamation in federal court by WWASP after she
set up her own watchdog group and accompanying Web site. A Utah jury
ruled in her favor last year, and U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell
denied a WWASP request for a new trial in November.
Scheff, who lives in Florida, had
sent her teenager to one of the WWASP schools in South Carolina. It
was Randall Hinton who sold her in an effective sales pitch on the
phone, she says. "I was completely brainwashed," she says. "I
completely fell for them."
Hinton talked about the school’s
effective therapy programs. He played up the horses that were
advertised in the facility’s brochure.
"Once she got there, I found out
they didn’t have horses," she says. "They didn’t have therapy."
Scheff pulled her child and started
researching Lichfield, the Hintons and everybody connected to WWASP.
She put up a Web site telling her story, and soon parents all over
the country were contacting her. She put up their stories, often
under assumed names. WWASP sued. From the beginning, Scheff says,
it’s clear they wanted one thing: silence.
"I was telling true stories," she
says. "In the end, the jury decided everything I said was true. They
weren’t out to do anything other than silence me. This is the way
they do business."
In Boonville, Lichfield and his
gang of pseudo-therapists want to convince a city in need of money
and an alumni group that wants to preserve history that this time
things will be different.
The paper trail says otherwise.
Like a parent with a troubled teen,
Boonville has a choice. "WWASP preys on desperate parents," Scheff
says. She knows. She was one. Now Boonville is in the same boat. The
easiest solution would be to turn the city’s problem child over to
Lichfield. Scheff made that decision once in her life, and she saw
her child suffer badly. She knows that the tougher call - and the
right one - would be for a desperate city to tell Lichfield to take
his checkbook and go home.
Tony Messenger is a columnist at
the Tribune. His column appears on Sunday and Tuesday through
Thursday. He can be reached at 815-1728 or by e-mail at
tmessenger@tribmail.com.
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