Author Topic: Possible assault at Turn-about Ranch  (Read 3460 times)

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Possible assault at Turn-about Ranch
« on: February 25, 2021, 03:24:05 AM »
Quote from: Deseret News
Inspired by Paris Hilton, woman says Utah ranch punished her for reporting assaults
By Annie Knox, Deseret News, February 21 - 2021

SALT LAKE CITY — Motivated to come forward after Paris Hilton’s allegations of abuse at a Provo center for troubled teens, a Colorado woman is suing a different Utah program.

Turn-About Ranch in Escalante punished Hannah Archuleta after she reported sexual assaults by an employee, she alleges in her lawsuit filed Wednesday in Garfield County’s 6th District Court.

Archuleta joins Hilton and several others now advocating for better state oversight of the centers where they say employees victimized them, but they couldn’t get help because they didn’t have access to the outside world.

“There appears to be a major problem in Utah,” Archuleta’s attorney, Gloria Allred, said in reference to the residential rehab facilities for teens.

Turn-About Executive Director Michelle Lindsay did not immediately return a phone message left Wednesday for comment.

Archuleta said she was inspired by Hilton to come forward. She and Allred urged Utah lawmakers to pass the same bill Hilton endorsed earlier this month in at-times tearful testimony at the state Capitol.

“I am here today to spread the message to every parent in America: Do not send your children to these places or endorse them,” Archuleta said.

SB127, which awaits a vote in the House, would require the treatment centers to submit monthly reports to the Utah Office of Licensing, among other changes.

Archuleta alleges she was whisked to the ranch in southern Utah in 2019 when she was 17, just after appearing on a TV segment of “Dr. Phil.” He’s a proponent of Turn-About who recommended the program to her family, the lawsuit says.

At the time, Archuleta had recently learned her mother was terminally ill with liver failure, she said Wednesday.

She says she was too scared to tell anyone the first time the man groped her in a kitchen about a week and a half after she arrived.

But after the same employee “aggressively” and inappropriately touched her in late November or early December 2019 while she was retrieving a dish from a cabinet, Archuleta told three female employees about the incident. She was told to write a detailed letter describing the assaults, according to the lawsuit.

She provided the letter to someone in management that described what happened, but claims in the lawsuit that the man she identified as her aggressor didn’t face meaningful discipline and the ranch didn’t notify police.

Rather, its staffers forced her to sleep on a wooden plank with no pillow, verbally abused her, threatened violence and forced her to work outside in below-freezing temperatures, the lawsuit says.

She claims she was denied access to the bathroom and was assigned her “reflection” time, which consisted of picking up horse manure, walking in circles around a horse corral for hours, or staying at a desk facing a wall for hours.

One employee, a “residential coach,” accused Archuleta of lying “because you’re crying so much” and “only liars cry,” the suit says.

After writing home to describe the abuse, her father, Tony Archuleta, retrieved her from the ranch in December 2019. Although he filed a report with the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office, the case isn’t moving forward, he said.

“I had sent her there because I was told she would receive the education and therapy that would help her,” he said.

The man remained at work and had one-on-one interactions with other girls, despite another also reporting that he sexually assaulted her, Archuleta alleges in the suit.

She’s suing for negligent hiring and supervision, assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and she’s seeking damages to be awarded at trial.

The ranch is facing an earlier lawsuit from the widow of a counselor who was beaten to death by a teenager who was suicidal and addicted to drugs in 2016. The suit alleges the ranch wasn’t equipped to handle someone with those issues.