This episode contains mentions of disordered eating, mental illness, and suicide.

Please take caution while listening and check the show notes for resources.

It's June twenty second, twenty eleven, camper arrival day at Camp Shane.

It's also my twenty first birthday.

But there's no alcohol and there's definitely no cake.

And for the next nine weeks, I'm in charge of a cabin of a dozen or so thirteen year old girls.

It's my first time as a counselor at a summer camp, and I'm giving each and every camper an enthusiastic welcome to what will be, if I have anything to say about it, the best summer of their lives.

Some campers are excited, they know that good times and freedom from their families await, but some of the girls are apprehensive and uncomfortable, resistant to being left behind by their parents.

One camper is actively and inconsolably crying.

Her mother leaves and I sit on the bed next to her, trying to offer comfort.

I tell her what I've been repeating all day long.

Trust me, this is going to be an amazing summer.

I explain all the crazy activities we have planned, all the wacky counselors and the old camp traditions.

I figure she's just a little scared to be in a new place.

But eventually she takes a breath and says something that stops me cold.

You don't understand this is not my first time here.

She knew something about Camp Shane I didn't, something I would soon see for myself.

This is Camp Shane.

I'm Kelsey Snelling.

This episode we're zooming in on my summer at Camp Shane, the experience that set this whole podcast in motion.

Today we're talking about twenty eleven, a summer filled with disordered eating, mental health issues, and a giant pit of jello.

By the time I got there, Camp Shane's heyday was in the rear view mirror.

Fewer campers were signing up.

This was in part because the cultural tides were turning.

Traditional diet culture was starting to be overshadowed by wellness culture.

Super skinny was deprioritized in favor of fitness and strength, or at least that's how it was sold.

Wellness culture is just diet culture with a minimally disparate ideal.

Plus the aftershocks of the two thousand and eight recession meant families didn't have as much money to send their kids to summer camp anymore.

Shane was reaching a tipping point.

David was seeking bodies to fill the camp, and according to multiple sources, tensions were high between David and his right hand man, the hands on camp director, Simon Greenwood.

I tried to talk to Merryl about it when I interviewed her last spring.

What was Simon and David's relationship?

I would like to not go there?

Yikes.

In the spring of twenty eleven, I didn't yet know about any of camp's shortcomings.

I was a junior in college and I hadn't even heard of Camp Shane.

I'd seen the movie Heavyweights, but I didn't realize fat camps were a real thing that actually existed until one day when my older sister called me on the phone and said,

I found the coolest job ever and we need to apply.

So I said, okay, what is it?

And she sent me the link to the Camp Shane website.

I had finished college, I wasn't quite ready to get started on a career yet, but I had this laundry list of jobs that, for one reason or another, I had always wanted to try and at the top of that list was being a camp counselor.

That's my sister, Robin, but you'll never hear me call her that.

To me, She's just Bobby.

So I did an internet search and one of the very first results that came back was this camp that wasn't too far from where I lived.

It was in a beautiful part of the country, It had tons of celebrity endorsements, and it just looked like a really fun place to spend a summer based on all of the activities that they had on their website.

At this point, Bobby and I were drinking the Camp Shane kool aid or maybe crystal light in this case.

The way the website sold it, camp seemed like a fun, positive environment.

We looked forward to the chance to teach kids about fitness and how to love themselves, and maybe we'd lose a little weight ourselves.

Sign us up!

So we applied and both got jobs, her as a general counselor for the young adult women and me as the arts and crafts teacher.

I'd also be in a bunk with thirteen year old girls.

We were stoked.

I really was going in with a very optimistic view that this would be a place where kids that were struggling with their weight really could get some guidance on how to develop better habits, how to be healthier, develop their body image, that sort of thing.

There was one downside.

The pay sucked.

Base salary five hundred and fifty dollars, completion of contract stipend two hundred and seventy five dollars, travel stipend two hundred and seventy five dollars, for a total of one thousand one hundred dollars spanning about eleven weeks of work and about ninety hours of work a week.

That amounted to basically a dollar an hour.

But I didn't care.

I was young.

Any amount of money was exciting to me.

Employees had staggered start days, and as the arts and crafts teacher, I had some setup to do.

So I arrived at Camp Shane a few days before my sister, and right away I realized the food was less than optimal.

All of the work Simon had put into elevating the cuisine at camp didn't seem to matter much when the portions were so minimal.

I remember you called us to let us know how camp was going, and this was of course, before all of the counselors and campers had arrived, in the early days of just getting things set up, and you said something about we had breakfast and it was one silver dollar pancake and five blueberries.

And I remember talking to Mom and saying this, she has to be exaggerating.

There's no way they would be feeding adults this for breakfast.

And then I got to camp myself and realized that was not an exaggeration.

It was quite accurate.

Thank you.

I get accused of exaggerating.

Well, not this time.

Another thing that needs no exaggeration: the camp was in complete disrepair.

My first three or four days were spent just cleaning with my new colleagues, rearranging mattresses, dusting and cleaning windows, and sweeping the floors, which had huge gaps between the wooden planks.

In some areas you could see down to the ground below, and when you looked up, the roof leaked too.

As the Arts and Crafts teacher, I also had my own classroom of sorts to prep.

It was in my favorite building on campus, tucked into the woods, away from the busiest parts of camp, with a big balcony looking onto the lush greenery below, but inside it was gross.

There were unclaimed art projects that had grown moldy from years in storage.

Bottles of glue had completely hardened and empty tubs of what was once glitter were filled with dead bugs.

I threw everything into trash bags and started from scratch, which included repainting the walls and sanding the splintering floors.

One day during this orientation week, a few counselors and I went down to explore the campground's creek, which was a bit of a walk from the main part of camp.

A dip into the cool crystal water surrounded by towering pine trees sounds idyllic, right?

Well in this case, no.

The creek was filled with trash.

There were old car parts scattered around, and at one point I felt something bump my leg.

When I looked down, I saw a bloated dead beaver carcass staring up at me.

I still think about its eyes.

Now here's the thing.

I'm all about, that rustic life.

Okay, I camp, I backpack, I'll sleep on the floor.

I don't care.

By twenty eleven, families were spending nearly ten thousand dollars to send their children to camp and at that price point, I was pretty shocked at the state of things.

Now I refer to this time as orientation week quite loosely, because really...

Training was just kind of like cleaning up the camp and getting to know each other, and we really weren't given any sort of formal training.

Like I think I knew what to do if there was a fire in the cabin, but I feel like that's probably where it stops.

Now, looking back, I'm like none of us were trained or qualified or really knew what we were doing, but like some of us really were there for the right reasons.

That's another Camp Shane counselor from my twenty eleven summer.

She requested to be anonymous, so we'll call her Casey.

Casey was hired to be a group leader at Camp Shane, meaning in addition to counselor responsibilities, she would also be managing other counselors in her cabin's age group.

When she arrived at camp, she was amped up and ready to bond with the girls in her bunk.

She had the sixteen year olds.

When the kids eventually arrived at Camp Shane, they were told to strip down to a swimsuit in front of everyone to be photographed.

This would be the before picture, which would showcase their inevitable big transformation over the summer.

And my campers were so anxious.

Understandable!

Can you imagine showing up to a completely new place where you know no one, and then you're asked to take off your clothes and show off your body, which is perhaps your biggest source of shame and insecurity?

And I went ahead and took my T shirt off and I had like a sports bra and shorts on.

I was like, come on, guys, we can do this, like we'll do it with you.

And so all my counselors all removed their outer T shirt and from that point on we were known as like the naked bunk because we were always like, you know, fuck what anyone cares, Like, okay, we have fat on our stomachs.

She even came up with a special name for her girls to help boost their confidence.

We called ourselves the Honey Badgers because like I would encourage them to like work out in the sports bra and just not care what anyone fucking thinks about them.

Honey Badgers named after that viral video that was everywhere in twenty eleven.

The honey badger has been referred to by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most fearless animal in all of the Animal Kingdom.

It really doesn't give a shit.

In addition to these photos, at the start of the summer, there were the infamous weekly weigh ins that tracked kids progress.

The weigh ins had been around since the camp's inception, and kids were desperate for their number to go down each week.

Sometimes they'd completely starve themselves the day before.

They'd refuse to drink water, they'd cram in a couple of extra sit-ups, and they'd even make trips to the nurse, claiming to be constipated so that they'd be given laxatives or prune juice.

Now, laxatives are a huge red flag of disordered eating.

You'd think a nurse at a weight loss camp would recognize that and not pass out laxatives willy nilly.

But it happened, and Casey remembers the toll these weigh ins took on her campers.

My girls would not want to eat Saturday night, they wouldn't want to drink water so that they would weigh more with water weight.

It was a giant obsession with the number on the scale, and so there was always a lot of anxiety walking over to weigh ends, and there was tears, and there was high fives, and there was just a mix of disappointment and pride depending on the kid what they saw when they got in.

Casey had her own struggles with weight, which had inspired her to apply for a job at Camp Shane in the first place.

As she tells it, she started gaining noticeable amounts of weight when she was around twelve.

I grew up in a house which was a pretty conservative house, I would say, and I hid a big secret for a while to my family, which was that I struggled with my sexuality.

I started gaining weight right around the time I realized that I was gay, or maybe after.

I mean I think I knew when I was younger, but I'd say around the age of twelve thirteen, it got pretty out of control.

Struggling emotionally, Casey turned to binge eating.

Just reading other people's testimonies.

As an adult, I'm like, man, that's like a thing where you actually eat your feelings.

Throughout high school and college, Casey continued these habits and continued to gain weight.

It didn't stop until one day she had a difficult conversation with a close friend.

I kind of had a hard conversation with a friend of mine in college who was like, why don't you ever go to the beach with us, Why don't you ever go on cruises with us when we go for spring break?

You're really missing out.

And I would always come up with these horrible excuses like, well, I have a really big thing I have to study for, or I just want to go hang out with my family, or oh, I have other plans, and I really didn't.

I just didn't want to be in a bathing suit or in shorts or anything showing any body part.

So at about twenty one, I just decided enough is enough, threw away all the food in my apartment, and I went to the grocery store and just like started from scratch.

Now it's important to say that big changes like this don't always lead to big weight loss.

In fact, they usually don't, But for Casey, changing her eating habits and exercising more did lead to significant weight loss.

By age twenty four, she was in a completely transformed body.

A colleague then suggested she apply for a summer job at Camp Shane, and Casey thought it was a great idea.

I wanted to inspire people, as cheesy as that sounds, and use my transformation as like an inspiration to pass it on.

And that's really why I was there.

I wasn't, I definitely wasn't there to find a hookup.

I wasn't there for the money, because god knows they didn't really pay.

But I thought making friends would be fun, and I thought being a good model for these kids was a great idea since I never had one.

I also had struggled with eating and body image throughout my life.

Casey, Bobby, and I were all at Camp Shane for similar reasons.

We thought this was going to be a body positive, progressive environment, teaching kids to love their bodies and enjoy active lifestyles.

But Camp Shane being Camp Shane, that's not how things panned out.

Camp Shane wasn't what my sister and I had hoped it would be.

First, the meal plan.

We've talked about the food plenty already, but as Casey pointed out to me, there didn't seem to be a specific strategy around the small portions.

It wasn't low carb, it wasn't about filling up on greens.

It was random food in a calorie deficit.

Their motto was live, laugh, lose, But I wasn't really sure, you know what they if they agreed or aligned with a certain nutrition philosophy or weight loss management philosophy.

It was just no one really knew like how to lose weight health in a healthy way and keep it off, and so people just did their best with their own knowledge.

The Camp Shane no strategy strategy didn't sit well with Casey.

I didn't feel like the kids were learning how to maintain any sort of weight loss, which led me to start having thoughts like, oh, they want kids to gain weight back so that they come back next summer.

It makes sense, it's a business.

Throughout the years, the camp advertised on its website a professional chef on staff, as well as licensed nutritionists to put Shaners on the path toward a better lifestyle.

But Casey noticed that the people teaching nutrition classes didn't seem qualified to make sure her girls were getting the education they had signed up for.

Casey took matters into her own hands.

The girls would come in and be like, I'd be like, what'd you do a nutrition class and they're like, we learned how to bake chicken with certain seasonings.

And I'm like, okay, that's good, but why is the chicken healthy?

And they're like, oh, they didn't tell us.

So I used to sit down with my campers like a couple times a week, and they would bring their notebooks and I would share what limited knowledge I had.

I tried to introduce them to like nutrition one oh one, like from a scientific sort of thing, but also how you could incorporate it into like a regular life, like instead of going for fruit loops, you could eat hard boiled egg or whatever in the morning yogurt or Greek yogurt because it's very low in sugar and high protein.

And they were just furiously taking notes, and I'm like, this is what you should be doing a nutrition class, but I did it on my time off.

Casey wasn't a licensed nutritionist or dietitian, and some of her tips were still steeped in a diet culture mindset.

She was just using her own experience to try to fill in some gaps in the camp's programming.

She also got special permission to cook her girl's dinner one night so they could get a taste of a meal that was healthy, nutritious, and didn't leave them starving afterwards.

I was allowed to go to the grocery store with a couple of my counselors and we did like, you know, baked Greek chicken.

We did like a side of roasted vegetables and Greek yogurt for dessert, sweetened with like stevia or something like that.

It was.

It was really good.

It was a really healthy, very protein packed and that was probably the most special night I ever had with my girls.

I think these kids needed a safe space to divulge their sort of emotional issues surrounding food.

I feel like they needed education.

I feel like they needed a lot of love, a lot of forgiveness.

Outside of her ad hoc nutrition lessons, kids at camp that summer were subject to a whole host of problematic approaches to food.

Camp Shane prided itself on unique and immersive activities throughout the summer, many of course attributed to Simon and his head staff.

There was a Vegas casino night, a carnival, and something called Fear Factor Day inspired by the NBC game show.

For the most part, these were creative and memorable experiences for the kids, but sometimes they turned out to be memorable in all the wrong ways and only reinforced negative relationships with food.

Like the jello pit: a truly unsettling site to behold.

A few counselors were asked to dig a four foot deep pit in the ground, then fill it halfway with red jello.

This was for an activity where kids could jump in two at a time and compete in a wrestling match.

Many of the campers were shirtless, sweaty, and covered in mud, but that didn't stop them from attempting to sneak a little taste of the dessert, in which they literally swam.

As you can imagine, this posed a threat to that week's weigh in, so staff started mixing soap in with the jello to discourage any snacking.

This deterred only about half of the attempts.

Then there was the Apache Relay, the last part of the famed Color War, which we talked about last episode.

This race was the culmination of summer and every single person on campus was involved.

Essentially, everyone was assigned a different leg of the competition.

You might be tasked with a dizzy bat run or rolling an orange across a field using only your nose.

My sister Bobby was assigned the second to last stretch of the relay race for her team.

And so the baton is passed to us.

We're running the end of the course and we turn the corner and the end of our leg of the race is two picnic tables.

One is full of blueberry pie, the other is full of watermelon.

I'm talking full watermelon, not slices of watermelon.

And I had to watch my female co counselor eat an entire blueberry pie as fast as she could, and one of my male co counselors eat an entire watermelon in front of all of the campers.

This is pretty messed up, right, Like someone decided at a weight loss camp they were going to have counselors down as much food as they can while all the kids are watching and cheering.

After my co counselor ate the blueberry pie, and I did watch her make herself throw up, we had to swim together on a raft across the pool.

Bobby wasn't the only one who witnessed puking.

The counselors couldn't help but throw up publicly in trash cans in front of the crowd.

I have photo evidence.

But beyond being gross, these events were reinforcing dangerous ideas about food.

We've already established that Camp Shane's diet was problematic to say the least.

There were the minuscule portions, the ever present weigh ins, the pig out room, and now the pie eating contests and giant pits of jello.

All of these things set up a damaging cycle of restriction and excess.

It encouraged campers to covet forbidden foods and then feel guilty afterwards for eating them.

All of this, combined the lack of nutritional education, the restrictive diet, the emphasis on food without taking into account the mental toll it takes on kids, it's dangerous.

Bobby started witnessing disordered eating from her campers.

One of them had a total breakdown because she in quotes, slipped up and ate a single potato chip and she wanted to go talk to the counselor about it.

So there were there were a number of little things like that that were happening all around me that, you know, I started to realize this is not just a group of people who are looking to lose a little bit of weight, like there are some deep seated things here that this camp is not not only is it not able to address, but is doing things that may actually be detrimental by pushing the weight loss and pushing the restricted eating and really spending no time on the deeper issues.

And again, Bobby was not a trained psychological professional.

She didn't know how to handle this kind of distress kids were experiencing, so she brought it to Simon.

I was having a conversation with a couple of other counselors and staff members.

I was saying how distressing it was to learn about the trauma and the eating disorders and the body dysmorphia that a lot of my campers were revealing to me, and I didn't necessarily know how to handle it.

And he said something along the lines of, oh, everybody at camp has an eating disorder, and he said it in such an nonchalant way, and I just remember thinking, I never want to get to the point where I normalize children having eating disorders.

I just I couldn't get over it the way that it was just breezed over like it was totally normal.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone left camp with an eating disorder just by the nature of the camp environment.

Here's weight inclusive physician Dr.

Lisa Erlanger, who you've heard from throughout this series.

Dieting in childhood and adolescence is one of the best predictors of disordered eating behaviors later in adolescence.

Behaviors like binge eating, fasting alternating with eating, compulsive exercise, and eating disorders rob people of life.

They're like any other mental health disorder.

They consume so much time and they become solitary pursuits.

It makes it hard to eat with friends, it makes it hard to exercise in public.

People develop so much hatred of their body, they don't want to be with other people, and it becomes hard to do things that we know support health, and that's not what any of us want for kids.

Many people don't understand the severity and danger of eating disorders.

They are not to be taken lightly.

Eating disorders are the most lethal mental health disorder, second to opioid use disorder.

Anorexia, which is under recognized, vastly underrecognized in larger bodied kids, is a deadly illness.

So not only does it rob kids of joy and wellbeing in their childhood and their adolescence.

It kills them.

More than five percent of anorexia patients die within only four years of initial diagnosis.

Symptoms of anorexia include thinning bones, dry and yellowish skin, low blood pressure, slowed pulse, heart damage, brain damage, infertility, and organ failure.

People with anorexia are at risk of dying from medical complications associated with starvation, and suicide is their second leading cause of death.

Anorexia is perhaps the best known eating disorder, but bulimia or binging and purging is also common and can have physical, emotional, and even financial effects.

Stripped tooth enamel, esophageal issues, shame, and of course other poor health outcomes from eating piles of fetishized foods.

At Camp Shane, I succumbed to binging myself.

Counselors were on the same restrictive diet that the campers were, so my fellow counselors and I used our nights off to visit the local diner and gorge ourselves on all the foods that were forbidden at camp.

Once the evening activities were over, a percentage of the counselors were sort of set loose to go out into town, get off of the campgrounds for a couple of hours, and do whatever they needed to do.

So we're in the middle of nowhere.

There's not a ton to do.

But the one thing that every single counselor wanted was to get as much food as they could as quickly as possible.

For our elaborate binge missions.

Bobby, our friends and I would drive down the street to the Liberty Diner.

My meal of choice was usually French fries, a plate of buttered toast, chocolate milk, and a big brownie sundae complete with four scoops of ice cream and a brownie of magnificent size, served on a literal silver platter in a moat of whipped cream, topped with a cherry.

This was meant to share with I'm going to say six people.

People would eat it by themselves, no problem.

During the production of this podcast, I actually went back to that diner and thank god, they still sell the brownie sundae.

The diner was like the place that you went to just find comfort in food, but then also just all of the emotions came out.

We'd dig into our food and let out our frustrations about how dysfunctional camp was.

Then we'd go to the gas station and buy pastry cakes and candy bars.

If we had any leftover time, we'd hit up McDonald's for quadruple topping Rollo McFlurries, and sometimes we'd even venture to the grocery store for a few tubs of Nutella.

At the time, this ritual was the only thing getting me through the stress and calorie restriction of working at Camp Shane.

Casey, on the other hand, felt an obligation to her new body to stick to the Camp Shane diet, but she sometimes got dragged along to other counselors binge missions.

One involved a Dunkin Donuts and a trash bag.

Dunkin Donuts has this policy, or at least they used to.

If you rolled up to the Dunkin Donuts drive through at like eleven fifty five as they were closing because they closed at midnight, they would give you donuts for free.

One time, I went with some counselors and we rolled up and there was a literal like huge garbage bag.

I'm talking like the size like four feet tall garbage bag, like very big for those big industrial trash cans filled with Dunkin donuts.

It was literally like pounds and pounds and pounds, and they brought it back and snuck it in.

The donut syndicate was a clear indication that things were out of control.

How were we supposed to help kids develop healthy habits when many of us were dealing with our own disordered eating.

And eating disorders weren't the only mental health issues campers were struggling with.

Cole Perry was a staff member in twenty ten and twenty eleven.

I think that eating disorders and or being overweight, or having body issues, or having a hard time with food, they're not a singular issue by any means.

I think that those issues are often fueled by depression, self esteem issues, anxiety.

They relate to each other very heavily, and I think a lot of the kids that came to Camp Shane definitely had one or the other.

Cole was the camp videographer.

They didn't directly oversee any campers, but they got to know many of the kids quite well as they walked the grounds each day gathering footage for promotional videos.

At Camp Shane, there was definitely a lot of kids who had a lot of self esteem hardship, and a lot of them were bullied in school.

A lot of them got made fun of.

A lot of them had parents who were upset with the fact that they were not a skinny kid and would shame them.

They were looked at as a product that could be changed.

That mentality wasn't just the fault of the camp.

Most kids were receiving the message that they'd better lose weight all year round, sometimes from their own families.

After all, these kids wouldn't be at Camp Shane if their parents didn't sign them up and bring them there.

There's one example of this that really struck me.

One of my campers was thin, but still sent to Shane to lose weight.

Her brother was sent too.

Their mom told them whoever lost the most weight would get a five hundred dollar gift card at the end of the summer.

There were plenty of parents who bribed their kids with shopping sprees, gifts and vacations and somehow had absolutely no idea how messed up it all was.

Pretty quickly into that summer, the pressure of caring for a bunch of tween girls was taking a toll on me.

Us counselors were acting as parents and coaches and nutritionists and therapists for dozens of kids at once, in many cases, while still being kids ourselves.

Even if campers wanted to talk to their parents about what they were going through while at camp, they couldn't.

The whole summer, campers didn't have their cell phones.

They were taken away on the first day, supposedly to promote a fun environment where kids aren't just sitting around texting all day.

Kids could use corded landlines to call their parents once a week, but counselors would be standing steps away, listening in on the conversation.

If the camper said anything negative, counselors were supposed to hang up the phone.

I ignored this rule, but the fact that it even existed is absurd and left us counselors offering what emotional support we could.

You're basically taking care of this kid.

You are their parent for twelve weeks.

They look up to you for absolutely everything.

They are going to you for when should they eat food, when should they go to sleep?

What am I doing?

When they're going to you for all of their love and care that they want from a parent that they're not receiving at home.

You are everything to them as a staff member at a summer camp, and especially at Camp Shane, because these kids are not getting what they need from their parents most of the time.

Remember I was freshly twenty one, and I'll be the first to say that at that age I was not equipped for the things that were thrown at me.

I had a camper run up to me screaming about how another camper was cutting with a razor in the shower.

My co counselor was battling a serious case of bulimia, and there was absolutely no support for her, for me, or any of us.

And on top of all of that, it might not be surprising to hear that threats of suicide were popping up among campers.

About three weeks into camp, the head counselor called a staff meeting.

We were told that an eighteen year old male camper had been sexually inappropriate with a thirteen year old girl at camp.

The male camper was not asked to leave because he had a bit of a developmental disability and the higher ups didn't want him to feel bad.

That evening happened to be my night off, so my friends and I went to the diner.

I ordered the brownie sundae I loved so much and overwhelmed, cried into it.

Sitting with me was Bobby, my friend Amy, and it felt abundantly clear that no one was going to protect our kids and that that responsibility fell on us alone though we were powerless.

It was a heavy and hopeless weight.

There was a silence between tears, and that's when Cole announced they were quitting, along with the other videographer, Danielle.

For the two of them, the incident with the young girl was the last straw,

So we were just waiting to see if anybody had said anything about like police were called, maybe a professional was called to talk to the kid, or like were the girl's parents even called.

Absolutely nothing, to our knowledge was there that should have been done for this poor girl.

So we just were like, what do we do?

We are here as a videography team promoting this camp, and it is our job to promote a camp now that is essentially condoning behavior that we don't agree with, that is actually really fucked up behavior.

So we just didn't feel good about being there.

And Danielle really the point for me that like drove it home was she was like, I have a young daughter, if I ever sent her to a camp and this happened to her and nobody called me about it like I would raise hell, I would, I don't even know how I'd react.

And I was just like, you're right, like that's absolutely fucking terrible.

And she was like, I have to leave, like I just I can't be here anymore.

I have to go.

And I was just like, you're right, like we're leaving, pack up your stuff.

Looking back, knowing what I know now about Camp Shane, this situation wasn't just one egregious misstep.

It was a whole series of poor judgments, starting with letting in kids that had higher needs than the camp staff could handle.

Then add on top of that, not supervising campers enough, not training staff to prevent these situations from occurring, not kicking out campers when they should have definitely been kicked out, and then not providing support to the victim.

I wish I knew what David told himself in order to go to sleep at night.

You might remember when I mentioned my Camp Shane contract had a completion stipend.

David would pay counselors half of their paycheck at the midpoint of the summer.

The final half of their payment was to be received at the end of the summer, so if counselors quit before one of those two payments, like Cole and Danielle did, they were shit out of luck.

They never received payment for the work that they did put in, and tons of staff members despite this system, quit.

By the end of the summer, Camp Shane was operating on a skeleton crew, and as the session neared its close, counselors were suspiciously fired.

This happened summer after summer, including twenty eleven.

Here's Casey.

He would fire people at the end of every camp session so he wouldn't have to pay them.

And we're talking like twelve hundred dollars like it wasn't you know, and kids paid something like nine grand to go there for a few weeks, and so, you know, to withhold of a thousand bucks from like a twenty year old kid who just worked for all these weeks seemed a little ridiculous to me.

And I definitely was like, well, that's not going to be me, because I'm going to follow the rules and be good and you know, show who I am.

One of the people who got fired just before payday was Casey.

Casey wasn't interesting and hooking up or drinking after hours like some of the other counselors.

She was really trying to make a difference with her kids.

She's the one who just said.

That's not going to be me because I'm going to follow the rules.

It all started during the last week of camp when she took a day trip to New York City with a group of counselors on their day off.

On the way back from their day of debauchery, as often happens when driving in or around New York City, they hit traffic.

Casey was driving.

Curfew was midnight for the counselors and it was one in the morning for group leaders, so I knew I was okay, but I was worried about getting the counselors back on time.

And anyway, we rolled up to camp and it was a negligible amount of minutes that we were late.

So we went to the girl's head counselor's office and everyone was extremely apologetic that we ran into traffic.

It was an accident and I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

I felt bad, but I was also like, wow, this sucks.

We're probably going to get a slap on the wrist, and so I went back to the bunk.

Woke up the next morning and I was called into the office again and she was just she looked at me and she was like, you're done, and she slapped a piece of paper in front of me and made me sign it.

It was a termination paper, and I remember my heart was beating so fast, and I was like, what does this mean.

She was like, get off camp as soon as possible is what this means.

And I've said, well, I mean all my stuff is in my bunk.

She was like, yeah, don't care.

You can just grab it and here's trash bags.

It was a flimsy excuse.

People came in late all the time.

It wasn't a firerable offense, at least based on precedent, and Casey hadn't even missed her own curfew.

But she felt like there was nothing she could do.

She went to her room, collected her things, and then got picked up by a staffer in a golf cart to remove her from campgrounds.

But just in those few minutes, word had spread to Casey's campers and they were not going to let her leave without putting up a fight.

And then like this swarm of kids runs out of like all these buildings and they were just like stop the golf cart and they just surrounded me and they were like jump, jump jump.

I told him, I was like, can you stop.

I want to say goodbye to my kids.

I was like, they're my kids.

I need to say goodbye.

He was like I can't, I can't, and he was so nervous.

He's like, I'm not supposed to.

And I was like, well, you know what, I'm gonna jump and he was like uh, and the kids were like jump, jump, and so I did.

And then they just flocked around me and just huge hugs, all these tears and they're like, don't let them do this to you.

And it was like it was like a lot of love and support, and I was very overwhelmed.

Casey was fired days before last payday.

She never got that completion stipend.

You may be wondering at this point, why didn't we all just leave?

Why didn't I leave?

There were red flags from the very first day, and the pay was a joke anyway.

I spent eleven weeks straight overwhelmed, overworked, and underfed.

I talked to my sister about this.

Did you ever consider quitting and why did you not quit?

Oh boy, there were many times I thought about quitting.

Honestly, if you hadn't been a counselor, I think I would have been out of there because it was just too overwhelming for one person to process without having somebody that they trusted to talk through it with.

What kept me there at the end of the day is like knowing that it would be easy for me to walk away, but that my campers would still be there, and that I trusted myself more than I trusted the quote unquote professional staff to give them a memorable and positive experience.

So you know that's not great.

I have no background in this, I have no training on how to deal with some of this trauma and these like really challenging situations that campers are coming from.

And yet just by being a moderately mature and like sensitive person, I felt like I could change their experience if even a little bit.

Bobby and I made it the entire summer, and once campers were gone and the days of cleanup had gone by, we collected our pathetic paychecks and left with ero desire to ever go back.

I realized that camp had really no understanding of the situation its campers were in.

It certainly didn't have the solutions that they needed, and it didn't really seem like owners were invested in making it better.

They had a model that worked and they were sticking to it.

I felt like for a short period of time, all I thought about was food.

That was like a new thing.

Luckily, I kind of with time got out of that stage, but I completely looked at food differently, and not in a good way.

After the summer ended, I was messed up for a while.

Depression?

PTSD?

I never got an official diagnosis.

Camp Shane felt like a fever dream.

What I saw left me exhausted and empty.

I felt like I couldn't go to the police necessarily, but maybe I could create something that would reveal what was happening to these kids, something that would expose this place, which is just one cog in a huge societal machine that teaches people to feel shame about their bodies.

So I started interviewing everyone I could.

I've also wondered about Simon's role in all of this.

Despite his missteps, nearly every person I've spoken to characterizes him as the absolute heart and soul of the community and magic of Camp Shane.

I'm left wondering how someone so revered could also allow such terrible things to happen.

But maybe Simon was in the same position as me, financially under David's thumb and emotionally bound to Camp Shane through the campers.

Maybe Simon was exhausted and depleted, but was sticking around to make sure things didn't get worse.

Next time on Camp Shame.

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, she told her dad she said she was scared.

We reached out to David Ettenberg, his wife Zipporah Janowski, and Simon Greenwood for comment.

At the time of this recording, we have not received a reply.

If you or someone you love is struggling with an eating disorder, you can call the free hotline of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders.

The number is 1-866-662-1235.

Camp Shame is a production of iHeartPodcasts.

I'm Your host, Kelsey Snelling.

Camp Shame is produced by Brittany Martinez, Taylor Williamson, Sarah Schleede, Luci Jones, and Alyia Yates Grau.

Our editor is Courtney Hameister, with additional editorial support from Lindsey Kratochwill and Grace Lynch.

Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rudder and me Kelsey Snelling.

For iHeartMedia.

Our executive producer is Christina Everett.

Fact checking done by Madeline Gore, Luci Jones, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Lauren Williams, and Fiona Pestana.

Our theme music is produced by Sean Petell.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram @campshame.

That's with an M.

If you or anyone you know went to Camp Shane, reach out with your camp stories.