This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.

This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please take care.

In the mid twenty tens, Camp Shane was a shit show.

Literally.

I'm walking up the short hill to get to Boys Camp and I see a waterfall pouring out the back of my cabin and I'm like, oh, a pipe must have busted in the bathroom.

My room, My cabin blooded with about three feet of human waste.

Nelson Jancaterino, the camper-turned-counselor we talked to earlier in the show, spent his final year at Shane as a sort of pseudo-maintenance man.

He was well acquainted with some of the issues going on at camp.

Nelson had been at camp for years, but in the mid 2010s, things seemed to be getting worse.

Many buildings needed renovating, equipment was subpar, and cabins were overflowing with water and other – (cough cough) – less desirable substances.How the hell did we get here?

When I say that summer twenty fourteen was the worst summer of my life, it's the worst summer by far.

That’s Harrison Davies.

He was a Marketing Associate and part of the office staff at Camp Shane in 2014.

Because he was a salaried staff member and not a counselor, he was expected to work year round.

It was just a toxic work environment.

I've never had a work environment that would come nearly as terribly close on its worst day than any given day in that office down the hill.

What made it so bad?

(Sigh) Where to begin?

First, Harrison worked long hours.

You were looking at no less than a ten to eleven hour work day and sometimes six days a week at least.

As a marketing associate, Harrison worked in the office, which was attached to the dining hall at the bottom of the hill.

The conditions were not ideal.

For one thing, there wasn't much to eat.

Harrison told me that David policed how much food the office team got for lunch and didn't allow them to store much, if anything, in the fridge.

In the staff office and the tiny little fridge that we had in the storage cabinet.

The only thing I think that we were potentially allowed to have in there was maybe like Diet Coke or diet Sprite, and maybe coffee, all of which we had to purchase ourselves.

Many counselors we spoke with saw weight loss as a benefit to working at camp, but not Harrison.

He thought this was supposed to be a camp where the kids lost weight.

In a nutshell, you were given the same amount of food as the overweight campers were who were in their teens.

That's what you were given.

In fact, in the fine print of staff contracts, it stated that if employees exceeded the quote, Camp Shane designated guidelines for desired weight, they had to participate in the same program as the campers.

In reality, this extended to all staff because remember everyone was fed the same thing.

Now, some counselors and staff members were permitted to get seconds at meal time if leftovers happened to be available, But since Harrison was bogged down in the office, he rarely got to meals before extra helpings ran out, and once when he did successfully get more food, David reprimanded him.

I do remember David sitting me down one day saying, listen, Harrison, you're on salary here that that's awesome.

Just so you know, we do see you eating a little more than the campers, and you know we have to pay for that.

He would get very upset if we made alternative lunch arrangements, But then again he was also rationing how much we could he the office.

Actually we attempted to order out and David blocked our order, and he actually took our order and threw it in the trash.

So of course the food situation sucked, plus the job itself wasn’t really what Harrison had signed up to do.

He had originally been hired by David and Zipporah to do marketing work for something called the Shane Diet Resorts.

So you laugh a lot when you’re at Camp.

You really want to be here.

You get up in the morning and you say it’s so awesome.

Mmmmmmm awesome indeed.

In some of these videos, it seems difficult to prompt happy responses out of campers.

(Girls)We’re happy Camp Shaners how are you?

We're great, we all love each other.

(off camera voice) Say we love Camp Shane.

(girls)We love Camp Shane!

(off camera voice) what do you love about Camp Shane?

(girls) The friends-the hot sauce that always runs out...the one bottle of it.

One part of Harrison's job was editing out parts of the promotional material that didn't fit Camp Shane's brand.

The videos sold a version of Camp that did not fully exist, a version of Camp that had, wait for it, working go karts.

There was a lot of activities that they promised in their brochures and marketing that would cost money, and they just didn't do them.

I think Go Karts is probably one of the best ones that never happened.

As for the people riding the Go Karts, well, that depended on who was allowed to be in the promotional materials.

Harrison said that in one of his videos, David asked him to cut out a key member of the staff.

She didn't fit the body image of Camp Shane.

Videos, brochures and the website also so guaranteed that there would be a beautiful lake and other water activities.

But people like Nelson, the camper turned counselor who'd been at camp for many years, knew this wasn't quite the case.

The one big thing is people were like, oh, we were told that the lake was on Camp.

No, it's like a two mile drive away, Like you have to load in a van and you have to get bussed there.

Camp Shane also advertised an Olympic sized swimming pool, but in twenty fourteen.

The pool water was the consistency of lake water because it didn't have chlorine or any chemicals in it.

It was disgusting.

And then there were the online reviews, which should have been more reliable, but Nelson remembers that David would have him write fake Yelp reviews about how amazing the camp was, from different usernames and IP addresses, so that it looked like they were done by real customers.

We talked to two staffers who say they were asked to do the same thing.

He was obsessed with online reviews.

So he would say, you know, write one at camp and then go down to McDonald's for another IP address and write another one.I remember telling him about Facebook reviews and his face dropped.

He was like, you can review us on Facebook?!

Clearly, Camp Shane’s marketing could be misleading.

One particular example of this involved the medical support parents were told their children would be receiving while enrolled.

These experts, doctors and psychologists were giving their stamp of approval, would come that one day to you know, talk to the parents about all the important stuff, using their suppose medical expertise, you know, all the letters after their name, to give a verbal, you know, reassurance to the parents that everything was great.

So in the absence of an on-site Medical Advisor, Registered Dietician, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, who was actually on the ground, working day in- and -day out with these campers?

They billed the parents for this service, under the instructions of trained doctors and so on and so forth.So the parents were supposedly to be sent an invoice at the end of camp for all the sessions at the higher rate, which the parents could then turn into their own insurance companies with the hopes of getting reimbursement.

We don’t actually know if anyone was successfully reimbursed, but Camp Shane claims on its website that sessions were reimbursable between 40 and 70%.

And if insurance companies were indeed covering costs for therapy given by unqualified providers, that might be a little something called Insurance Fraud.And not only was Harrison watching this general dysfunction play out at camp.

He himself was struggling.

The combination of not eating enough and being overworked took its toll.

Harrison’s mom even came up from Florida to visit him at camp because she was so concerned.

And she goes, you know, well, Harrison, I'm a little concerned about you.

Let me.

You know, you look skinnier, you do seem stressed.

Let me come and check on you.

She took Harrison out for a day in the city to go see a Broadway show, but he couldn’t stop checking his phone because he was getting blasted with texts from David and Ziporah.

Even on this one day off.

I had already dropped a lot of weight, lost all my muscle mass that I had gained in my college days, and my hair was falling out.

I remember her crying, holding me, like what are they doing to you?

Like this isn't you.

So that was twenty fourteen.

It wasn't great.

But remember when I said that twenty fourteen was one for the books, Well that's because twenty fifteen hadn't happened yet, and twenty fifteen, well, it lit the books on fire.

Even though twenty fourteen was rough, to say the least.

Simon Greenwood was still at Camp as the director.

As I've mentioned before, many people I've talked to feel that Simon was what held Camp together.

Nelson is one of them.

He was an amazing director.

He had so much knowledge because he started there in like nineteen ninety and then by the time he's director, he ran Camp.

David ran the business part for the most part, and then Simon ran the day to day activities.

However, by twenty fourteen, tension between Simon and David had been mounting for quite some time.

The last few years, he and David would argue almost daily.

Often I'm told it was about how much to pay counselors.

Other times they argued more specifically about how much Simon was being paid.

According to staff who were there at the time, the tension between the two reached a boiling point, and in twenty fifteen, Simon did not return to Camp Shane.

It's unclear if Simon chose to leave or if he was forced out by David.

David, who hadn't fully managed day to day operations in decades, took over Simon's role.

He was now acting as owner and director simultaneously.

That was the first summer that Simon was not there, and you could tell.

The camp was already on its last legs.

And without Simon, counselors like Nelson watched as Camp Shane limped onward.

All the good stuff was Simon, all the bad shit was David, and as their relationship broke down and we saw it, it was like a loveless marriage by the time that they just went their separate ways.

The facilities had been damaged and degrading for years, and in twenty fifteen things got especially messy all because one of the international campers plugged in a converter to charge their phone, and well, the shit hit the fan or I guess the cabin.

So the shit from eleven through seventeen year olds had backed up into my room, came up through my toilet, through the sink, and through the shower.

Luckily I'm a slob and I had everything mostly on my bed… So my room is flooded, not with water.

I wanna make this perfectly clear.

Not with water, but with human shit and water.

I see turds floating in the water in my, I'm like, what the fuck?

It is disgusting.

And when Nelson called David to tell him what happened, this was the response he remembers getting.

He was like, oh my God.

So he sends-I felt so bad for them- two women who were like the cleaners.

Gave them masks and like some gloves to clean up the.

And then I helped them clean.

So that was at Ferndale.

And it doesn’t seem like the other locations were much better.

Counselors like Derek, who worked at the satellite camp in California in 2015, were thrown in the deep end without any warning.

She was like, don't believe everything you've read about David, And at this point, I haven't read anything about David.

And then she tells us that he went to prison, and were like, what what happened?

To be clear, David hadn't actually gone to prison, as I mentioned before, He had been sentenced to four years of probation and four hundred hours of community service in two thousand and four for dodging income taxes related to the camp.

Nevertheless, Derek didn't really trust David.

As he tells it, Derek fought every day to keep the camp afloat and the kids entertained without any training schedule or guidance from the Ferndale headquarters.

It felt like every day we'd sit down at breakfast and be like, what on earth are we going to do today?

Derek and his fellow counselors weren't working with much.

We opened the supply closet and it was literally a, a single rubber made container with like seven, you know, double XL, triple XL Camp Shane shirts, a promotional Frisbee, two baseball gloves, and then like a basketball that had, you know, literally survived the Reagan administration and was still kicking… And it's like, oh my God, we're in real trouble here.

Like, we are in serious trouble.

We have no idea how we're gonna do this for six weeks.

And that equipment was supposed to be enough for the roughly 60 kids attending the California camp in 2015.

Camp in California lasted six weeks that summer, and for each of those weeks Derek and his staff improvised.

He told me that it was a lot of walking around aimlessly and a lot of basketball.

But at least they kept the camp running.

It's one of those things where I guess if you go and see like a, Blockbuster movie that comes out on July 4th weekend and it's got a $250 million budget, you're expecting these great things and like, it has to live up to that expectation.

And so were we the summer blockbuster?

No, absolutely not.

But for what we had in the group of people that we had, like we were the, the indie picture that punched way above its budget, like, we somehow put something together.

As counselors like Derek and Nelson struggled to navigate a path forward without Simon, Camp Shane’s happy facade was getting harder to maintain.

They then called this little girl who was around Sadie's age and said, take Sadie to her room and show her parents around.

So we found that very odd.

So we went up to the dorm room and, the little girl was saying, I've been here almost all summer.

She goes, I hate it.

You’re gonna hate it.

She goes, you know how they advertise on the pamphlet that you go horseback riding and you do this and you do that.

She goes, you don't do any of those things.

For Kellye, this was not a promising start.

And it only got more ominous.

A lot of the campers who were much older than Sadie seemed to be struggling with more than just their weight.

In the dorms, there were much older boys that had their rooms like right down from her, and she said that she had heard that one young man that he was disturbed and that he was telling everybody that he tried to kill his family, tried to set the house on fire.

Kellye begged her daughter to reconsider.

But Sadie was determined to stay.

It had actually been her idea to go to a weight loss camp in the first place.

She told her parents she would be fine.

So Kellye chose to trust her daughter and reluctantly left.

She hoped she was overthinking it and things were better than they seemed.

Finally we got connected and Sadie is on the phone with her dad at the time, and she just breaks out crying, come get me, come get me, please come get me.

She told her dad.

She said she was scared.

She said, I'm scared.

And so he's like, oh my god, guys, I gotta go.

I got, I was like, go, go, go.

John raced from South Carolina back to Florida to get Sadie.

The entire time he drove, neither parent could make contact with the main office in New York to get David on the line.

Luckily, when John finally arrived, Sadie was safe.

When he did eventually get David on the phone to demand a refund, David pushed back.

As Kellye and John remember it, David insisted that it wasn’t the camp’s fault if certain children – like their daughter – couldn’t handle the “Camp Shane experience.”

There was no guidance.

It was more or less throw a bunch of kids at a place, call it a fitness camp by starving 'em.

Naturally, they would lose some weight after two weeks.

Sadie wasn't the only camper who left early.

Derek had a similar experience in California with one of his campers.

At this point, Derek was thinking about quitting his job at camp, having grown so frustrated with the working conditions.

Around the time he decided to leave for good, a camper in his care was also reaching a breaking point.

The director and myself had taken a kid to the hospital and the doctor said, like he's lost way too much weight, he's extremely dehydrated.

And like, if he's going to stay at this camp, he needs to get supplemental nutrition.

Derek figured the camper couldn't stay at Shane any longer, so he went rogue.

I had called the parent of this kid that had gone to the hospital and I said, I don't think your child is safe here.

I think that he is in risk of going to the hospital again because he's being denied like the nutrition that he needs and the calories he needs.

And after that call, with parental permission, Derek and the kid snuck out of camp.

Everybody was asleep, and I went into this camper's room and I said, pack your things, we're leaving.

The duo escaped together to meet up with the camper's father in West Hollywood.

If a counselor and a camper fleeing the premises isn't a sign that things were falling apart, I don't know what is.

Derek actually express his concerns about the lack of care at Shane early on that summer before he quit.

When David asked him to be the new director of the California Satellite Camp,

I said, well one of my concerns, David, is that you promised these parents that there was going to be a nurse on staff and there's no medical personnel at all, and me being the director, like, I don't have plausible deniability.

I sit at the top of this thing.

The buck stops with me.

It may seem surprising that more parents didn't catch on sooner, but it seems that communication was restricted at the satellite camps in a similar fashion to the main camp in Ferndale.

It may have been hard for parents to know what their children were experiencing.

So you had five minutes to call your parents, and the director from the New York office is if they start to say anything negative about camp, you hang up the call and move on to the next kid.

And that was like, that was the directive of what we were supposed to do.

So if a kid says like I hated hear this or that, to hang up all right, next person in the office.

So yes, some of this stuff would have probably been impossible to know.

Even a thorough parent could be tricked by advertising, Yelp reviews, and the reality that sometimes kids exaggerate about their experiences.

And if this were any old camp, maybe parents WOULD have noticed the red flags sooner.

But there’s another piece of this – a piece that I think has been pervading since well before 1968, when Selma Ettenberg first opened the doors of Camp Shane.

There's a huge amount of industry around weight and weight loss, in the medical establishment and in the commercial diet industry, and in the sort of like health and wellness world.

That’s Tigress Osborn, the Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance or NAAFA, a non profit that advocates for fat peoples’ civil rights.

She suspects that the longevity of a place like Camp Shane is all about our continual obsession with being thin.

Definitely one of the differences between body size and some other forms of discrimination is that people think you have a choice about it.

That if you don't want to be discriminated against, if you don't wanna be treated poorly in your community, at your school, at your church, at your, you know, job, whatever, well then just change your body and then you won't have to worry about that anymore.

But putting the burden of weight loss on the individual doesn't address the root issues.

When we locate the problem in the body, not in the discrimination.

We do that across the life span of people, all along the spectrum of your whole life.

If you are fat at one point on that spectrum, or if you're fat for the whole spectrum, people will locate the bad things that happened to you in you instead of in the bad behavior that is happening to you.

Nearly 50 years after it opened, Camp Shane was finding ways to exploit society’s obsession with weight, as well as the belief that it could and should be managed at an individual level.

As long as that formula made sense, many people were willing to pursue thinness by any means necessary.

Who's direct?

Who's this?

Who's doing, what happening?

Blah Blah.

He didn't hire the right people.

Didn't hire enough people.

As usual, it seemed like David was cutting corners.

Not to mention, David was also getting older.

Counselors like Nelson started to notice that he couldn't keep up with Camp like Simon had.

It really went from someone with 20 years of experience who like ran that camp to David trying to step in and do something he hadn't done for 20 years at like 70 years old.There was a like few times where we were like, is David gonna make it?

Like he's exhausted?

And then there was, there was one time where I'm like, on the golf cart on the four wheeler and I see him just like, like leaned up against the building.

I was like, is this guy gonna die?

Like, does he have a heart attack?

And like David, the camp seemed to be getting weaker too.

It was, like I said, slowly watching something you loved in a place you'd called home like die in front of you in real time.

As Camp struggled onward, Nelson remembered a conversation he'd had with Carl, another camper turned counselor years before.

I remember talking to Carl and I said, Carl, you were here for so long.

When did you know it was time to leave?

And Carl said, it's the summer after the summer you spent trying to chase the summer before.

Simon was gone, buildings were in disrepair, and David was now in his 70s.

Parents were getting fed up and children were getting hurt.

It was deserted.

Like all the stuff in the office was gone.

Everything that we like, knew and loved about it.

Like all the plaques from all from like, from decades of college days and color war and the bunk plaque, everything gone.

But maybe the utopia Nelson and others were mourning never existed in the first place.

Next time on Camp Shane.

And he just kept chipping away and chipping away, chipping away, and I really wish I could remember how it started, and it's sort of escalated from there.

We reached out to Simon Greenwood, David Ettenberg and his wife Ziporah Janowski for comment; at the time of this recording we have not received a reply