A SURVIVOR of the abusive troubled-teen academy at the center of a shocking new Netflix docuseries has laid bare the horrors he witnessed during a nightmarish nine-month stay at the school.
Eddie Curley's traumatic entanglement with New York's Academy at Ivy Ridge began in 2002 with the flick of a light switch in the dead of night at his parent's home in Delaware, he told The U.S. Sun in an exclusive interview.
It was October, a week after his 17th birthday, and Eddie - a varsity golf and soccer star - awoke at 3 am to find two men, dressed in combat boots and fatigues, towering over him at the edge of his bed.
"Alright, you need to get up. You're coming with us," he remembers the men telling him as his eyes were still adjusting to the sudden invasion of artificial light.
When his vision finally recalibrated, Eddie noticed that one of the men was holding a pair of handcuffs.
He screamed out for his mom and dad, but his desperate cries for help went unanswered.
"The escorts then told me, 'We can do this one of two ways: the easy way or the hard way,'" recounted Eddie, who is now 39.
"I asked what the easy way was, and they said to come down the stairs voluntarily.
"So I walked out into the hallway and my mom was there cowering in the bathroom door crying, but she didn't look at me.
"And I don't recall seeing my dad there at all."
Before walking outside, Eddie told the men he wouldn't take another step until they let him find his shoes and put them on.
"I told them I'm not doing another f**king thing until I see my shoes," said Eddie.
"My mom told the escorts not to give me shoes because, 'He's going to run if you put the shoes on.'"
Against his mother's advice, the men obliged and placed a pair of sneakers on Eddie's feet.
As soon as they stepped out the front door, Eddie shrugged off his captors and took off into the surrounding neighborhood as fast as his legs could carry him.
"It was like a horror movie," he said of the ensuing chase in the dark.
"I could draw you an accurate picture of the terrain around that house, and there's one hill and I ran into that hill and just fell over.
"The guy tackled me, I flipped over on top of him and considered hitting him but thought it wasn't worth it.
"And now, honestly, my biggest regret in my entire life - and I've had a few - is not fighting even harder to get away."
Eddie was handcuffed and thrown into the back of a Ford Taurus, destination unknown.
The journey would last hours, and with only his thoughts for company, Eddie tried to make sense of the frightening chain of events that had unfolded that morning.
Eventually, he recalled an episode of Dr. Phil his mom had made him watch recently, in which problematic children were abducted from their beds in the middle of the night and taken to a boarding school.
It was then that he realized his fate.
But, refusing to go quietly, he attempted another escape when his escorts pulled over for a bathroom break at a service station in New Jersey.
As soon as the men opened the car door, he screamed out for help at the top of his lungs, shouting he'd been kidnapped.
Again, the pleas were made without reply.
"I just started f**king screaming because I'm in handcuffs with two strange men in a Ford Taurus that doesn't look anything like a cop car," Eddie said.
"And you would've thought someone would've done something, but they didn't."
Resigned and tired, Eddie fell asleep and awoke a few hours later at the privately owned, for-profit disciplinary boarding school in Ogdensburg, New York.
But a warm welcome at the Academy at Ivy Ridge was not forthcoming.
Instead, he was greeted by the director who was furious that he'd twice attempted to escape.
He was dragged by his collar upstairs and ordered to shave off his beard with a single-blade Bic razor and cold water.
As he tried to do so, the director kept pushing him in the back, causing him to cut his face and neck.
"Why don't you look out the window," Eddie remembers the director taunting him.
When he asked why, the director responded, "So I can tell everyone you tried to run again, and I'll put your face into the ground."
The Academy at Ivy Ridge opened in 2001 and billed itself as a disciplinarian boarding school.
The school's brochure promised hiking, team sports, horseback riding, group-based learning, and a place for troubled children to ultimately thrive and reach their full potential.
The reality was much darker.
He was just a nonfunctioning autistic kid and he was just f**king being abused every single day.
Eddie Curley
Ivy Ridge operated in affiliation with the controversial and scandal-ridden World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), founded by Mormon Robert Lichfield in 1998.
It was one of 20 WWASPS schools across three countries, giving it an aura of international scholastic authority. But it was, in fact, primarily a highly lucrative de facto prison where vicious abuse went unchecked.
At its peak, Ivy Ridge had 600 students all paying nearly $4,000 per month, allowing it to rake in over $20 million a year.
Children who attended Ivy Ridge were subject to crowded living quarters, physical restraint for minor infractions, solitary confinement, brainwashing, and, in some cases, physical, psychological, and even alleged sexual abuse.
The school also had a bizarre and convoluted points system designed to keep students in "the program" for as long as possible to ensure their parents kept shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition.
However, many of the faculty members weren't even qualified to teach children, and the "diploma" that students received upon graduation from Ivy Ridge was worthless and not officially recognized by the state of New York.
For Eddie, his first few days at Ivy Ridge are a blur 22 years later.
But he remembers the burning resentment he felt toward his parents for sending him to such a facility.
Though conceding he had typical rebellious teenage tendencies - attending parties and enjoying the occasional drink with friends - Eddie was a good student, a very talented athlete, and by no means a troubled teen.
"I'm not gonna say I was some perfect angel because I wasn't, but I wasn't doing anything outlandish either," he admitted.
"I was a rebellious teen, but who wasn't?"
Eddie said no one catalyst event led to his parents enrolling him at Ivy Ridge.
But his father is a prominent family attorney in Delaware, and Eddie believes he was sent away as a precautionary measure rather than a reactionary one.
"The issue lays with the fact that my dad is a family court attorney in the state of Delaware, who's probably soon to be considered for a position on the bench as a judge," he said.
"So he couldn't have any kind of bad representation of our family name.
"I just don't know how they could do it," added a tearful Eddie.
"Just trying to trust anybody, ever, after your parents do that to you.
"I was kidnapped out of my room with the blessing of the people that f**king made me.
"And trying to heal from that, I just can't.
"I don't know how they slept at night. But, honestly, they probably slept better, no longer having to worry that I was going to threaten to tarnish the family name."
Eddie remembers Ivy Ridge as a militant environment where students were instructed to walk in single-file lines and forbidden from talking to one another or showing emotion.
Teachers encouraged students to snitch on one another for any infraction, however minor, and they rewarded them with points for doing so.
Those points could be used to redeem rewards and climb the ranks of the program to unlock special privileges, including monthly phone calls home and the ability to talk.
However, points would also be frequently deducted by staff if any student was deemed to have disobeyed Ivy Ridge's extensive code of conduct.
Those without enough points to cover their infraction would be subject to hours of writing out the school's rules over and over again and in some cases subject to physical punishment.
"If you got in trouble and you had no points, you would be asked to lie down on a tile floor on your stomach, with your legs straight out, your chin laying on the tile floor, and your arms by your side," Eddie said of one such penalty, known as observed placement (OP).
"You'd have to lay in that position for 15 minutes and not move while a staff member watched you.
"And if you moved they'd restrain you."
Eddie said barely a day went by when he didn't witness staff physically restraining a child.
Students would be pinned to the ground for the smallest infractions, including looking out of the window for too long, Eddie said.
He remembers one student, Brad, who was punished and restrained more often than any other.
"Brad would probably, today, be diagnosed with nonfunctioning autism, and he was restrained daily," remembered Eddie.
"For nine months, I don't recall him ever being unrestrained. He was taken to the OP room all the time.
"This kid had been restrained in that room for so long, he had a boil the size of a half-dollar on his chin from an infection that I'm sure left him physically deformed.
"He would be physically thrown around the room, and onto his chest, in almost the George Floyd position, with knees dug into his spine and neck."
Today, Eddie is part of a Facebook group with other attendees of Ivy Ridge where survivors share memories from the school and offer support to one another.
None of the several hundred members has ever heard from Brad since leaving, he said.
"He was just a nonfunctioning autistic kid and he was just f**king being abused every single day," added Eddie through tears.
"It's disgusting, it's unforgivable."
Eddie did his best to keep his head down during his stay at Ivy Ridge.
At the time of his enrollment, he was 51 weeks away from turning 18, and by that point, he'd be able to walk out of Ivy Ridge on his own accord.
He counted down the passing weeks, doing his best to hold himself together.
His resolve was tested one winter's day when he and other students were instructed to shovel snow in the school's parking lot to clear the way for staff.
The remote town of Ogdensburg is on the Canadian border, and the temperature at the time was way below freezing.
I was kidnapped out of my room with the blessing of the people that f**king made me. And trying to heal from that, I just can't.
Eddie Curley
But Eddie and his classmates weren't permitted to wear gloves, nor were they provided with lotion to prevent their skin from cracking in the bitter cold.
"My hands were like chapped lips, where they'd crack and you'd bleed because of it. So I was struggling, as my fingers were in that condition," he said.
"And in class, during a test, I was dragging my fingers across the page on this equation and blood started spilling out all over the page and I turned it in anyway."
Through tears, Eddie remembered feeling frightened that his teacher was going to write him up for "vandalism" because of the blood smeared across his test.
"But he didn't even acknowledge it," said Eddie.
"He just looked at me and said, 'OK, we're going to Chapter 16, so you passed it.'
"I wanted to just break down but I knew I couldn't because you'd get into trouble for showing emotion in there."
He added, "I never saw anyone walk into that building that wasn’t a representative of the school.
"No social services checking on the kids, there was never a doctor in there, there was no oversight; we were alone.
"The thinking was these kids in here - let’s never check on them ever."
Eddie left Ivy Ridge in July 2003 after a nine-month stay.
He went back home to Delaware and moved out of his parent's home for good after just nine days.
Eddie never told his parents of the horrors he witnessed at Ivy Ridge and never confided in his friends about his experiences either because he thought nobody would believe him.
It was only recently - after Netflix announced it would be teaming up with Katherine Kubler, who attended the school in 2004 at the age of 16, for a new three-part documentary about Ivy Ridge - that Eddie felt comfortable enough to discuss his story.
He told The U.S. Sun he was speaking with one of his old soccer buddies on Facebook just the other day about the time he spent at Ivy Ridge.
His friend was none the wiser about where Eddie had disappeared to in October 2002.
"There's a reason they call it suburbia's dirty little secret," said Eddie.
"My buddy said to me the other day, 'Your f**king parents told us you got a soccer scholarship to a boarding school in upstate New York. We thought you got this amazing scholarship - we had no idea.'
"But you just didn't feel like you could tell anyone at the time, because nobody was going to believe it," continued Eddie.
"My parents wouldn't have believed it either - and I didn't want to give them the power or satisfaction by telling them."
Readjusting to life outside of Ivy Ridge was hard for Eddie.
The months he spent in silence, forbidden from communicating with his classmates, had a profound psychological impact on him, the effects of which he continues to feel today.
For a time, he ran afoul of the law, but he has since gotten himself back on the straight and narrow, marrying the love of his life, becoming a stepfather to two children, and launching a successful painting business and BBQ restaurant.
He is no longer in communication with his parents and hasn't spoken to either for them for seven years.
The cruelty he was subjected to and witnessed others endure at Ivy Ridge still occasionally weighs heavily on his mind.
Eddie sees himself as one of the lucky ones.
Many of his classmates claimed their own lives, died of tragic overdoses, or wound up in prison with lengthy sentences.
But he struggles to accept the positives in his life, at times because of the sense of worthlessness instructors at Ivy Ridge attempted to drum into him.
"I’m in a great place in my life but it’s just that stuff from school, it’s like a golf handicap," Eddie said.
"But I'm in a better place and it’s because of this s**t coming out [on Netflix]. All I've ever wanted since walking out those doors is for the abuses to be exposed.
"I needed to get it off me. I don’t want to be under it anymore [...] but it's just something I've had to f**king deal with.
"Being completely blindsided by the people I love - or the people I used to love because I won't have a relationship with them again - was so hard.
"I'm in the best financial situation I've ever been in my life, I have an amazing wife and family, but mentally that's a different story.
He continued, "We struggle with this s**t every day [...] life after Ivy Ridge, I don't look forward to anything, I'm not sad about much, except for this s**t apparently.
"There’s no reward in feeling and always thinking I should be doing more; making more money, having a bigger house - there's just no feeling of gratitude.
"But I hope [that one day I'll feel different], honestly, maybe, but it would take a lot."
Of the more than 20 WWASPS facilities once spread across the US, Czech Republic, and Costa Rica, not one remains.
The Academy at Ivy Ridge shuttered its doors in 2009 after years of controversy.
However, the troubled teens industry remains a money-making machine in the US, and numerous similar programs still operate today.
It's estimated that upward of 100,000 teenagers are currently enrolled in programs akin to the kind experienced by Eddie.
Eddie says he wants to see all such facilities close for good.
Appealing directly to parents considering sending their child to a troubled teen program, Eddie said, "I would probably ask if they’re doing it to help their child, or if they’ll enjoy the convenience of their child’s solitude.
"Because that kid is going to be alone — for the rest of his life."
The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnappings debuted on Netflix on March 3.
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call RAINN (Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network) at 800-656-HOPE (4673).
