ELAN SCHOOL: New book seeks justice for former residents of Elan
Posted by:
rrmoderator
()
Date: January 10, 2013 12:53AM
January 8, 2013
After 40 years, troubling questions still remain about child abuse in Maine.
New book seeks justice for former residents of Elan.
They are souls still seeking justice, if not vengeance.
The former residents of Elan, tortured as teenagers at a center for troubled adolescents in Maine, want reparations for their abuse.
Elan operated for nearly 40 years in Poland Spring until it voluntarily closed in 2011 because many of its former residents - now adults referring to themselves " survivors" - waged a campaign to tell their experiences via social media and anti-Elan websites. Their negative publicity resulted in declining enrollment and the eventual shuttering of the facility.
Author Maura Curley hopes the survivors of Elan will find the resolution other victims of child abuse are granted, often belatedly. Her updated book, Duck in a Raincoat, sheds new light on a story that has never been fully explored or explained, and it raises even more questions about for profit residential centers for teenagers, their origins and the people who run them.
Two decades ago Curley wrote a scathing portrait of Joe Ricci, Élan’s founder, racetrack owner, and two-time candidate for governor. The book included interviews with former residents and investigators from three states that independently corroborated Elan’s bizarre punishments.
Now Curley has issued an Amazon Kindle edition with a new introduction, chapter updates and a dramatic epilogue. The Kindle edition includes new testimony from former Elan residents at Michael Skakel’s murder trial in 2002, a damning report by investigators from New York’s Department of Education in 2007, as well as Curley’s December 2012 interview with former Maine state senator Bill Diamond, who helped Elan renew its Maine’s Department of Education licensing for the past 15 years . Curley also includes reactions from former Elan residents, after the facility's closure.
The book includes stunning revelations of psychological manipulation, drug use, child abuse, and the alleged manipulation of a jury that awarded Ricci $15 million verdict from a suit he filed against his bank. Curley also reveals how Ricci got the iconic 60 Minutes to feature a flattering portrayal of him as a quintessential victim, while he was tyrannizing others.
Elan residents have previously posted excerpts from Curley’s original book via social media and on anti Élan websites, prompting more Elan’s survivors to tell their stories. Curley says she wrote the update, to provide another voice to the victims of Elan, many of whom she met after writing the first edition of Duck in a Raincoat.
She says, “ Many former residents have died by their own hand and others, devastated by their abuse, are still seeking justice from a system that repeatedly ignored their claims of well-documented and widely corroborated horrors.”
In the new edition Curley is more outraged by the continuation of abuse 20 years after she first documented it, because of what she has learned since.
She states, “Apathy and ignorance are inexcusable when it comes to regulating the
welfare of minors” and says “it’s not too late to hold the Elan administrators and the
state of Maine accountable…”
Elan made both Ricci and his partner Dr. Gerald Davidson millionaires many times over. It wasn’t until Davidson was dying of cancer that he finally revealed the truth about his partner. A prominent Massachusetts psychiatrist, and former Harvard University professor.
Davidson even lent Curley his medical textbooks to illustrate Ricci's psychopathic personality.
Curley states that In the final year of Elan's operation tuition was $54,000 per student.
Conservative math puts Elan’s four decades of profits in the hundreds of millions.
A journalist and insider, who once worked for Ricci, Curley meticulously chronicles abuses at Elan, which she didn’t discover until after she stopped working for Ricci. She also relays her first person account as a marketing consultant for Ricci’s companies and his campaign for governor. Ricci died in 2002, but Sharon Terry, Ricci’s widow continued to operate Elan with senior staff, dating back to the 1970s, until she closed it last year.
[www.amazon.com]
After 40 years, troubling questions still remain about child abuse in Maine.
New book seeks justice for former residents of Elan.
They are souls still seeking justice, if not vengeance.
The former residents of Elan, tortured as teenagers at a center for troubled adolescents in Maine, want reparations for their abuse.
Elan operated for nearly 40 years in Poland Spring until it voluntarily closed in 2011 because many of its former residents - now adults referring to themselves " survivors" - waged a campaign to tell their experiences via social media and anti-Elan websites. Their negative publicity resulted in declining enrollment and the eventual shuttering of the facility.
Author Maura Curley hopes the survivors of Elan will find the resolution other victims of child abuse are granted, often belatedly. Her updated book, Duck in a Raincoat, sheds new light on a story that has never been fully explored or explained, and it raises even more questions about for profit residential centers for teenagers, their origins and the people who run them.
Two decades ago Curley wrote a scathing portrait of Joe Ricci, Élan’s founder, racetrack owner, and two-time candidate for governor. The book included interviews with former residents and investigators from three states that independently corroborated Elan’s bizarre punishments.
Now Curley has issued an Amazon Kindle edition with a new introduction, chapter updates and a dramatic epilogue. The Kindle edition includes new testimony from former Elan residents at Michael Skakel’s murder trial in 2002, a damning report by investigators from New York’s Department of Education in 2007, as well as Curley’s December 2012 interview with former Maine state senator Bill Diamond, who helped Elan renew its Maine’s Department of Education licensing for the past 15 years . Curley also includes reactions from former Elan residents, after the facility's closure.
The book includes stunning revelations of psychological manipulation, drug use, child abuse, and the alleged manipulation of a jury that awarded Ricci $15 million verdict from a suit he filed against his bank. Curley also reveals how Ricci got the iconic 60 Minutes to feature a flattering portrayal of him as a quintessential victim, while he was tyrannizing others.
Elan residents have previously posted excerpts from Curley’s original book via social media and on anti Élan websites, prompting more Elan’s survivors to tell their stories. Curley says she wrote the update, to provide another voice to the victims of Elan, many of whom she met after writing the first edition of Duck in a Raincoat.
She says, “ Many former residents have died by their own hand and others, devastated by their abuse, are still seeking justice from a system that repeatedly ignored their claims of well-documented and widely corroborated horrors.”
In the new edition Curley is more outraged by the continuation of abuse 20 years after she first documented it, because of what she has learned since.
She states, “Apathy and ignorance are inexcusable when it comes to regulating the
welfare of minors” and says “it’s not too late to hold the Elan administrators and the
state of Maine accountable…”
Elan made both Ricci and his partner Dr. Gerald Davidson millionaires many times over. It wasn’t until Davidson was dying of cancer that he finally revealed the truth about his partner. A prominent Massachusetts psychiatrist, and former Harvard University professor.
Davidson even lent Curley his medical textbooks to illustrate Ricci's psychopathic personality.
Curley states that In the final year of Elan's operation tuition was $54,000 per student.
Conservative math puts Elan’s four decades of profits in the hundreds of millions.
A journalist and insider, who once worked for Ricci, Curley meticulously chronicles abuses at Elan, which she didn’t discover until after she stopped working for Ricci. She also relays her first person account as a marketing consultant for Ricci’s companies and his campaign for governor. Ricci died in 2002, but Sharon Terry, Ricci’s widow continued to operate Elan with senior staff, dating back to the 1970s, until she closed it last year.
[www.amazon.com]
Re: ELAN SCHOOL: New book seeks justice for former residents of Elan
Posted by:
corboy
()
Date: January 23, 2013 10:31PM
bump
Re: ELAN SCHOOL: New book seeks justice for former residents of Elan
Posted by:
psyborgue
()
Date: June 30, 2013 04:47AM
I know a few people personally who went through Elan. Has anything more about the Michael Skakel trial been posted here? RIchard Ofshe testified for the defense. Long story short, the disclosure circle confession from inside the program was used in part to hang him in court. As I understand it, Ofshe argued (rightly) that because it was common for people to confess to things they didn't do (for a variety of reasons), the confession should not be considered to be reliable.
It's sad programs like this operate so long without being shut down. "Troubled" teenagers make the perfect victims. Who does an investigator believe. Somebody whose parents say they lie (what teenager doesn't), or somebody who has spent their lives "saving" kids. I wish Elan were the only program out there like this but it's not.
It's sad programs like this operate so long without being shut down. "Troubled" teenagers make the perfect victims. Who does an investigator believe. Somebody whose parents say they lie (what teenager doesn't), or somebody who has spent their lives "saving" kids. I wish Elan were the only program out there like this but it's not.
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