What Happened To Hell Camp's Steve Cartisano
The Netflix documentary Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare centers around Steve Cartisano’s camp for troubled teens – what happened to him after it shut down?
Summary
- "Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare" sheds light on the controversial Challenger Foundation, a therapy camp for troubled teens founded by Steve Cartisano, who faced backlash after the truth about the camp's conditions came out.
- The Challenger Foundation subjected teens to awful treatment and forced them to hike 500 miles in the desert, resulting in the death of a 16-year-old girl from heatstroke. Cartisano was found not guilty of child abuse charges but settled a lawsuit with the girl's parents.
- Despite the closure of the Challenger Foundation, Cartisano opened more abusive therapy camps for troubled teens. He eventually died in 2019, but his legacy lives on through the existence of other controversial rehabilitation programs.
Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare on Netflix brings awareness to the Challenger Foundation, a therapy camp for troubled teens founded by Steve Cartisano, who faced much backlash after the truth behind his program came out. In 1988, Cartisano created the wilderness therapy organization, which had the goal of rehabilitating "out-of-control" teenagers by utilizing negative reinforcement and forcing the campers to learn survival skills. However, conditions at the camp in the Utah desert were horrid, and the staff certainly did not make the children's lives any easier, as the victims reveal in the 2023 Netflix documentary.
Parents would pay thousands of dollars for workers at the Challenger Foundation to kidnap their teenage children from their homes and drag them to Utah, where they experienced awful treatment and had to hike 500 miles in the desert. They believed their kids would be reformed from their rebellious ways when they returned home, but most cases were not success stories. Following the death of a 16-year-old, Kristen Chase, in the summer of 1990 due to heatstroke during a brutal hike, the Challenger Foundation was shut down. However, Cartisano had to face the music and answer to the numerous allegations of abuse following the wilderness therapy program's end.
Steve Cartisano Was Found Not Guilty In Child Abuse Charges
After Kristen Chase died while under the care of Steve Cartisano and the Challenger Foundation, the founder faced child abuse and negligent homicide charges. However, according to Rolling Stone, a jury found Cartisano not guilty, and he was free to go about his life. But Chase's parents sought justice for the death of their child, so they filed a federal lawsuit against the therapy camp and Cartisano. The lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1994 for $260,000. Aside from that, Cartisano was essentially shunned from society, seeing that he had ruined his reputation by creating the controversial Challenger Foundation. But that didn't stop him from trying to continue his work.
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Following the closure of the Challenger Foundation and the not-guilty ruling, Steve Cartisano opened more therapy camps for troubled teens and continued to leave a trail of abuse in his wake. He founded HealthCare America, which was shut down when teens under Cartisano's care were found tied to a car and had been abused. Once again, the organization's closing didn't stop Cartisano. He later opened Pacific Coast Academy, a pricey therapy camp in Samoa that the United States Embassy put an end to after a video exposing the horrific conditions the teens experienced was leaked.
Cartisano died of a heart attack on May 4, 2019, at the age of 63. However, the Challenger Foundation founder evidently left his mark on the world. Numerous teen rehabilitation programs exist today, and many of them have been accused of abuse over the years, just like the one at the center of the 2023 Netflix documentaryHell Camp: Teen Nightmare.
Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare is now streaming on Netflix.
Source: Rolling Stone
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