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Cassia and Ashley felt ‘dehumanized’ at the Re-Creation Retreat in Arizona, one of the many teen rehab facilities across the US. They knew they had to get out – but didn’t expect staff to come after them
Girls who arrive at Re-Creation Retreat (RCR) begin at level one. At level one, girls are not allowed to look out of the window. They are not allowed to talk to each other or look each other in the eye. “Your microexpressions were controlled,” said Carissa Reyes, who joined the programme soon after it first opened in 2008.
Girls climb up the ranks with good behaviour, accruing points and privileges. Girls who reach higher levels are able to wear their own clothes or speak with permission. Eventually they reach level five, and are allowed to leave.
All contact with the outside world is monitored by staff, so if a girl attempts to talk to her parents about what it is like inside RCR, she risks being dropped to level one, and having to start the programme again.
Cassia Cilento was coming down from meth and ecstasy when she first arrived at RCR, a therapeutic treatment centre for girls with “behaviour problems”, in April 2010. She was 14. Earlier that morning, she’d woken up to two strangers in her childhood bedroom in Olympia, Washington. “We’re going to be taking you to your new school,” they said.
Cassia was in her underwear, so the strangers began throwing clothes at her to put on. Her parents were nowhere in sight so, feeling like she had no choice, Cassia got into the car with the strangers.
They rode to Seattle–Tacoma international airport, took a flight to Las Vegas, then drove through the desert to Arizona, pulling up outside RCR, a refurbished motel and restaurant in Fredonia – a sparsely populated town on red mountainous terrain.
“I just remember feeling dehumanised,” said Cassia, who is now 29. “Anything that makes you an individual is gone.” Cassia was told to take out all her piercings and change into an orange T-shirt, grey sweatpants and flip-flops.
“It’s like a prison sentence, but you didn’t commit a crime,” said Cassia.
Cassia felt lonely and depleted, but one warm memory stands out from her first day at RCR. It was evening, and staff had gathered a group of girls into a circle for a reflection session. Cassia caught eyes with a girl across the circle, who had dirty blond hair and cool blue eyes. Cassia was immediately attracted to her. “I could just tell that we were on the same vibes with the way that we thought. That was before I’d even talked to her.”
The girl’s name was Ashley Ciciliano. Ashley, who was then 15, remembers seeing Cassia for the first time too. “I knew she was very special the second I saw her,” she said. After the session, the girls found out that they’d be sharing a room.
That night, Ashley sat down next to Cassia when no one else was around and asked her what had brought her to the centre.
Cassia had been sexually abused when she was six years old. “I no longer felt safe in this world,” she said. Aged 12, she began taking hard drugs to disassociate.
Cassia said that her parents never actually asked her what was wrong. Talking to Ashley felt different. “I felt safe with her and I didn’t feel safe most of my life.”
The following night Ashley and Cassia were lying in their bunk beds, when they heard a loud shattering noise. A girl in their dorm had smashed a mirror with a toilet seat and stabbed herself with the shards of glass.
It wasn’t until the following evening that staff formally acknowledged what had happened, Ashley said. She remembers Randy Soderquist, the owner of the facility, calling them into a room and telling them that they weren’t allowed to talk to anyone about what had happened – not to the other girls and not to their parents.
The girls were terrified. But as days, then weeks passed and the girl didn’t return to RCR, Cassia’s mind began whirling. It might have taken seriously injuring herself to do it, but the girl had managed to escape the facility. Cassia didn’t know it at the time, but she and Ashley would eventually hatch their own escape plan from RCR.
Across the US, between 120,000 and 200,000 young people live in “troubled teen” facilities – a network of therapeutic boarding schools, religious academies, wilderness programmes and rehabilitation centres. The centres pledge to support teenagers experiencing addiction, mental illness and behavioural challenges, but many have been accused of abusive practices and stripping residents of their basic human rights.
Martha Carol, a former associate attorney at Justice Law Collaborative, said that while “in all 50 states, it’s illegal to abuse children”, there is no national regulation of these facilities, and the specific laws that govern them differ from state to state. (The firm is representing “survivors of abuse” at RCR but said at this time “no legal action” had been filed against the centre.)
In recent years, the “troubled teen industry” has garnered mainstream attention, in part due to the Netflix documentary The Program and Paris Hilton’s advocacy. After years of campaigning, the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act was finally passed in December 2024, with a plan to develop national recommendations. While the bill is a “monumental step towards accountability”, Kelly Guagenty, a partner at Justice Law Collaborative, said: “The true success of this bill will depend on how it’s implemented.”
Meanwhile, RCR continues to run as it always has. Visit its website today and you’ll see a slow-mo video reel of trickling water fountains and smiling girls playing football and speaking to the camera about their positive experience at the programme. But in interviews with more than 17 former attendees of RCR over the past year, a different atmosphere was described to me. Many former residents are demanding accountability and reform within RCR and the “troubled teen industry” as a whole. This is the first time many of them are making these allegations publicly, beyond sharing videos on social media.
RCR was set up by husband and wife Randy and Toni Soderquist, who – according to their website – were inspired to set up the facility after helping one of their daughters through an abusive relationship.
Former residents said their stays at RCR cost tens of thousands of dollars, but they received inadequate therapy and were made to do manual labour. Carissa said that when she arrived at RCR, girls were forced to renovate the facility, building a walkway and spending “at least six hours every day for a week” pulling out weeds in 100F (38C) heat. She said that girls were made to work without compensation at the neighbouring restaurant.
When asked about the allegations in this article, Randy Soderquist said that “due to medical privacy regulations” he was “unable to discuss specific treatment methods or even to confirm or deny that any of the people … interviewed were actually students in our care”. However, he emphasised that “as an organisation we have always been deeply committed to the wellbeing and safety of our residents” and that “our core values of care, respect and dedication to each student’s growth and success have remained unwavering.”
But most of the former residents I spoke with didn’t feel their wellbeing was prioritised. “We were herded around like a bunch of sheep,” said Sophie Olsen, who was released from RCR in February 2023 after a 17-month stay. “If we had to use the bathroom, they could just ignore our hand for as long as they wanted,” she said. “It’s just complete denial of any sort of humanity.”
Girls also described being subject to violent “restraints” for minor wrongdoings, such as refusing to put on their socks. Ashley remembers a triple amputee who used to be “physically restrained as a means of convenience” until she began “wailing”. Yet staff neglected her hygiene needs, meaning that the girl’s roommates had to change her soiled underwear. “Staff didn’t want to deal with it,” Ashley said.
Soderquist’s five children (and later, their spouses) worked at RCR, even though some were younger than the boarders themselves. “Sometimes Randy would leave us alone and we would have to ask his 10-year-old daughter Emily permission to talk,” said Delaney Migues, who attended RCR in 2008.
Girls described having to take part in humiliating, “bogus” therapeutic practices, like having to wear a “busty red dress” and re-enact The Lady in Red (the well-known Chris de Burgh song about a seductive woman dressed in red) or stand in a group banging a towel on the ground and saying the word “mommy”.
Siobhan Kelly Fogarty, now 32, who boarded at RCR from July 2009 to April 2010, remembers once having to lie on the floor wrapped in a sheet for eight hours, imitating a cocoon, until she broke down crying. She said it seemed as though the point of these workshops was “to make you the most vulnerable and weak you could be so that they can build you back up and say: ‘See, the programme is here for you.’”
Girls describe their bodies going into overdrive from stress at RCR. One former resident said that she didn’t get her period for the entire eight months she was there.
Girls said they couldn’t speak their mind during therapy sessions, as whatever they said could be used against them, resulting in them staying longer. “It’s a complete conflict of interest,” said Delaney. “Do you really think I’m going to be honest with my therapist, when you can decide if I go home or not?”
While almost everyone I spoke with described being negatively affected by RCR, one 18-year-old woman, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, told me that she loved her therapist at RCR and that he “helped me and my family more than words can describe”. The woman, who attended RCR last year, more than a decade after many of the other women I spoke with, said that staff would “try everything” they could before using a physical restraint. “It’s treatment,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s not summer camp.”
For many former residents, however, one of the worst things about the programme was feeling like you couldn’t trust anyone – creating an environment where residents were incentivised to snitch on one another and were punished for not reporting rule-breaking. “To this day, I have no doubt my trust issues come from this,” said Delaney, who has since been diagnosed with PTSD.
Still, girls found ways to connect with one another. During music therapy, when the teacher was playing the piano, facing away from the class, Ashley and Cassia would look at each other and giggle. Or on outings, they would sit next to each other on the coach back. Slowly, they got to know each other. “She was the only person that I could trust,” Cassia recalled. “The only person that I thought really saw what was going on with me.”
By fall, it was clear that the girls had feelings for one another. They still hadn’t kissed, but sometimes, when they hugged, they’d hold each other for a little longer. In October 2010, Ashley was released from RCR. Cassia was released a few months later, but spent the next few months yo-yoing between home and RCR. Any time she tried to talk to her parents about RCR, she felt like they didn’t listen: “They were totally convinced that it was better for me to be there.”
Eventually, at the end of 2011, Cassia moved back home to Washington, where Ashley was also living. The girls began hanging out more regularly and their relationship became official. But, a few months later, after Cassia’s mother walked in on her and Ashley sharing a bed, Cassia feared she would be sent back to RCR. She suspected that her parents had spoken with Soderquist, who her dad highly respected, “so much so that I even thought my dad was in love with him, because he put him on a pedestal like he was his God”.
So Ashley made Cassia a promise. If Cassia was sent back to RCR, Ashley would do whatever it took to help her escape.
Not long after, Cassia’s brother asked her if she wanted to meet up at a local mall. Ashley was suspicious that it was going to be a set-up, but agreed to drive over, waiting in the car while Cassia met him inside. Moments later, Ashley looked out the window to see Cassia being dragged by a man towards an SUV.
Ashley jumped out the car. “What’s going on?” she said. “Why are you taking her?” She got back into her car, started following the vehicle, but lost sight of it after a few traffic lights. Ashley drove to the airport, purchasing a plane ticket to get past security, then checked the gate of every flight to Las Vegas.
Little did she know that Cassia’s abductors were taking her on a different route, having probably anticipated that Ashley would follow her. She was at a different gate, awaiting a flight to Salt Lake City.
‘I had no idea what I was going in for, but I knew it’d be better than the hell I was living in’
Back at RCR, Cassia cried for two days straight. Being back at the facility felt like jail, but worse, “because with jail, you have a set date you can get out”.
A new dynamic had evolved that was making Cassia feel uncomfortable. A female staff member in her 30s called Helen (not her real name) had begun paying extra attention to her – letting Cassia off chores, doing her little favours, even rubbing her feet during a movie. Helen told Cassia that she was also gay.
“I loved it at first,” Cassia said. “Until it started to get weird.” Cassia found Helen’s behaviour triggering. “It was very conflicting internally,” she said, reflecting on the trauma of being groomed and sexually abused as a child. “I knew what it could lead to because of what had happened to me.”
Numerous former residents describe sexually inappropriate behavior between staff and residents of RCR, such as “footsie” under the table or one staffer writing his number in a girl’s Bible.
Helen’s behaviour towards Cassia had the added layer of hypocrisy, given RCR’s anti-LGBTQ+ stance. “The people that were gay or bi or whatever were very afraid to express that,” said Siobhan. If girls were found to be in an “inappropriate” relationship, she said, “it would be very harshly punished, straight back to level one.” Some former residents describe being pressured to misgender a trans attendee, having to write a 1,000-word essay if they called him by his correct pronouns.
Helen’s advances towards Cassia eventually abated when another girl reported it to a staff member. Cassia said she received the blame: she had points deducted and had to write a 1,000-word essay. “I think their exact words were that I shouldn’t have accepted the favours.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, Ashley was desperately trying to get in contact with Cassia. She had worked out the password to her online study portal and was posting cryptic notes on the discussion board, hoping to get Cassia’s attention without alarming staff. For a while, Cassia didn’t seem to register her messages, so Ashley typed out something more explicit: she was coming to RCR to help Cassia escape.
Not long after, in April 2012, Soderquist told Cassia that he had intercepted their messages. Cassia remembered him telling her that it was an unhealthy relationship and that if Ashley set foot on property, they would have “rights to shoot her”. Ashley said Soderquist left her a voicemail relaying a similar message. She needed a new plan.
Ashley began scouring Facebook and saw that RCR had a swim team. Her mind started racing. Cassia was a big swimmer. Ashley looked up swim meet schedules near Fredonia and her eyes narrowed in on an upcoming competition in St George, Utah. It was a gamble, but Ashley felt like she was on to something. “I was willing to bet that Cassia could find a way to convince them to let her go.”
In June 2012, Ashley and her friend Cindy (not her real name) drove for 15 hours from Washington to the recreational centre in St George. “Even recounting it now, my adrenaline’s through the roof,” said Ashley. They arrived in the early hours of the morning, carrying burner phones with wire headsets. Ashley sat in the car, titling her Yankees hat over her face so she wouldn’t be recognised, her heart pounding, and sent Cindy inside to look for Cassia. Inside the changing room, Cindy caught Cassia’s eye.
“Are you ready to go?” Cindy said.
“I didn’t even think about it,” Cassia remembers. “I had no idea what I was going to be in for, but I knew it was going to be better than the hell that I was living in.”
Cassia followed Cindy out the back entrance of the changing room but another RCR girl started following her, asking where she was going. Cassia shouted at her: “Go back! What are you doing? You’re not staff. You don’t need to follow me.”
The girl turned around and Cassia bolted towards the car park. Ashley was there, sitting behind the steering wheel of her Mazda SUV. Cindy bundled into the passenger seat and Cassia followed, squishing her body next to Cindy’s feet.
Ashley hit the gas.
“Oh my God, Cassia, are you OK?!” said Ashley, hitting the road towards Las Vegas, throwing her sim card out the window, worried she might be tracked. Cassia, wedged beneath Cindy’s feet, could barely see out the window – just glimpses of red desert, blending into grey freeways dotted with cars. She told Ashley that she almost hadn’t been allowed to go to the swim meet; Soderquist had been worried she would use it as an opportunity to run away.
When they hit Mesquite, 40 miles from the swimming pool, the girls began to relax. Ashley had brought Cassia her Ed Hardy perfume, her Juicy Couture bag and her stuffed toy, a skunk called Alex. “Those things just made me feel so cared for,” Cassia said.
Ashley asked Cassia what she wanted to eat. It was still morning, but Cassia, who had spent so much time at RCR dreaming about food, wanted cheesecake. They drove to Monte Carlo casino on the Las Vegas Strip, where the girls sat in a booth, surrounded by middle-aged gamblers smoking in front of slot machines. Cassia ordered a cheesecake with Graham cracker crust, topped with strawberries and a dollop of vanilla bean ice-cream.
The girls spent the next few weeks on the road. They drove to Venice Beach and filled up their car with art – dream catchers, a painting of a little pink house on the beach – unloading it into their Motel 6 hotel room as if it was their own apartment. “Every moment was enriching,” says Cassia. “I was experiencing life in a way that I had never been able to do before.” Still, the dread of being caught and returned to RCR was on both their minds.
At the beginning, the girls would drive around blasting EDM, until they ran out of money and Ashley sold her car sound system to a man from Craigslist (the girls subsequently joined him at an underground rave in a sewage tunnel).
In San Francisco, Ashley and Cassia went to their first Pride event, ending up at a block party. Cops turned on fire hoses, but people continued dancing in the water, grooving in the glittering spray until the early hours. “It was very empowering, going from being deprived of anything” to a world that was suddenly “full of rich, colorful, diverse life”, Ashley said.
But money was tight. A couple of weeks into their time on the road, Cindy decided she couldn’t do it anymore. She went back home, leaving Ashley and Cassia alone. The girls would ask for money at gas stations, explaining that they had got lost on a school trip in California and wanted to get back to Washington. Sometimes kind strangers would fill up their tank. They slept in car parks or on the beach, buying a loaf of bread and a can of beans to sustain them for the week.
Going back was never an option. “I would rather have died in that car than go back to the programme,” Cassia said. Still, the nights were scary. “Every time I fell asleep, I’d wake up because I was terrified somebody was going to come to our door,” Cassia said.
Then, one morning, in mid-July, they did. Ashley and Cassia were staying at a Motel 6 in Bellflower, a city near Los Angeles. The day before, the girls had bought a four-week-old chihuahua-dachshund mix from Craigslist for $20. They named her Cookie Taco. “It was like we were starting our own home,” said Cassia. “I wanted to get a job. I wanted to have an apartment, I wanted to raise my dog. I just wanted those basic things.”
The next day, the girls had planned to wake up early to go to the beach for sunrise. But they ended up sleeping in. At about 9am, they heard a knock on the door. Cassia felt sick. She started crying and shaking.
“I just wanted to be free,” she said.
The girls looked through the peephole and saw a man standing on the other side of the door. It was a staffer from RCR, who had come to take Cassia back. A few days earlier, Ashley had contacted a family member to ask her to book the motel room (Ashley would learn later that she called another family member, who called Cassia’s parents, who in then arranged for the staffer to pick her up).
“I was ripped away from that puppy,” Cassia said. “That was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through.”
Driving back to RCR, Cassia said the staffer put his arm around her. “He was saying things like: ‘You’re really pretty.’” Cassia didn’t fight back. “Because of the trauma I’ve been through,” she said, her instinct “was just to take it and not argue, so it doesn’t get worse”.
Back at RCR, Cassia’s world felt darker than ever. She said that she was made to sleep in the classroom with the lights on so she could be watched at all times, and kept “on silence” for about two and a half months, which meant she wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone, except for Soderquist. She wasn’t allowed to journal. “I felt like I didn’t exist,” she said.
Unable to communicate verbally, Cassia needed to find a way to stimulate her mind to hold on to reality. She began counting things. She would count the number of rooms in the building. The number of chairs. The number of brunettes. “A lot of it was survival mode,” she reflects. “Unfortunately, that is the trauma that stuck with me into adulthood. I’ve been on survival mode since I left.”
A few weeks after arriving back at RCR, Cassia said, Soderquist decided to do an exercise with her. She remembers him asking her to write Ashley a letter, “basically saying that I didn’t care about her, I didn’t love her, I didn’t want her in my life.” Cassia complied, not knowing at the time that the letter was going to be sent to Ashley.
At home in Washington, Ashley opened it up. “Dear Ashley,” the letter began. “I’m sorry that it has to be this way, but I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.”
Ashley’s first thought was that Cassia had been forced to write it, but then she began doubting herself. “I started to get concerned, maybe they are shifting her opinion on things,” she said. “Maybe she really doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
But as she continued reading, Ashley noticed a shift in tone. “I just pray to God that it isn’t the end forever,” Cassia wrote. “Never forget me, for you will never leave my heart.” The letter felt like it was brimming with secret signs and signatures – “Cassisms”, Ashley called them. Still, she couldn’t be sure. “You start to feel paranoid,” she said. “You’re like: ‘Am I reading into this too much?’”
Cassia said she spent months back at RCR before Soderquist allowed her to take a home visit, a few days before Christmas 2012. Back at home, Cassia said she begged her parents not to make her go back. “They never gave me a chance to see if I was going to get better.
“I wanted to do it right,” she said. “I wanted to live the normal life. But my dad told me: ‘No, you’re going to stay there until you’re 18.’”
Cassia got in contact with Ashley. “Are you ready to do this again?” she said. Ashley drove to Cassia’s parents house on Christmas Eve. Her house had a big driveway and Ashley parked outside it, at the bottom of a hill. Cassia walked down and got inside the car. The initial plan was to wait until after Christmas to run away, but the longer Cassia sat in the car, the more she felt they had to leave there and then. She didn’t even go back into the house to get her bags. They drove away that night.
They got married on Valentine’s Day in 2014, 10 days after Cassia turned 18.
‘The spark in my eyes left’
A few months ago, on 12 November, Ashley did something she never thought she’d do. Twelve years after she helped Cassia escape the programme for the first time, she drove from Las Vegas to Fredonia, back to RCR.
It was afternoon, and a dozen survivors had traveled from across the country to protest outside the facility. The group held up signs that read “people over profit” and “RCR gave me PTSD”, chanting and livestreaming testimonies by the roadside until the sky turned purple and pink.
“I came with the hope of getting help,” Ariana Morales, a former resident, said into a shiny megaphone. “The spark in my eyes left and became a part of Arizona’s sparkly, starry night sky.”
Ashley said: “When I got out of this facility in 2010 there was not a forum for us to speak. The world did not understand what we were trying to communicate.”
In response to the allegations in this article, Soderquist said that RCR had been “licensed by the state of Arizona for the past 15 years”. He said: “Each year we have met and exceeded their rules, regulations and standards of care and conduct.” He added that the facility had “received accreditation from CARF International, an independent, non-profit accreditor of health and human services organisations and received a three-year accreditation”.
Cassia’s father refused to be interviewed for this story unless Soderquist approved him doing so. When I spoke to Cassia’s mother, Andréa, she told me how hard it was seeing Cassia using drugs as a teenager. “She was dying right in front of us,” she said. Having spent hours talking to Cassia about what she described as horrific experiences at RCR, it was jarring to hear the gulf between her recounting and Andréa’s very different version of events. “It’s an awesome place. It was the best place to send Cassia and Randy is fabulous,” Andréa told me over the phone. “He was really was in touch with the girls,” she said. “You could tell how much they respected him.”
The law firm Justice Law Collaborative has since released a statement, which states: “RCR needs to be held accountable for the harm and injuries they have caused our clients and other students.” Martha Carol, the former associate attorney, said that when residential centres are shut down after allegations of abuse, it’s common for owners to simply open up a new facility under a different name afterwards. “There needs to be a lot more community-based support so that kids can get help when they’re at home,” she said.
In September 2023, Ashley and Cassia got divorced. They remain on good terms. This year, Ashley hopes to go to law school and Cassia will do a masters in psychology. Both cite their experience at RCR as a motivating factor in their careers, galvanizing them to help adolescents who may face similar issues that they did.
