By TONY MESSENGER
TRIBUNE COLUMN
Published Wednesday, April 13, 2005
The problem with Robert Lichfield isn't that he breaks the law.
It's that the law allows him to do what he does.
Lichfield knows about the law. He's used the absence of laws in many states and Third-World countries as cover for a series of business ventures that by most accounts have made him a wealthy man.
The Utah businessman is founder of World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, an umbrella group connected to dozens of tough-love teen rehabilitation centers all over the world.
Many of the schools connected in some way to Lichfield have been accused by parents and authorities of child abuse.
Some of them have closed.
Now Lichfield has his eye on Missouri. Specifically, he and his partners, Randall and Russell Hinton, want to buy the former Kemper Military School in Boonville and turn it into another of their behavior modification facilities for troubled teens.
Long before Missourians heard of this plan, Shelby Earnshaw was trying to stop it.
Earnshaw is director of International Survivors Action Committee, a watchdog group that keeps an eye on the kinds of facilities Lichfield owns. She's not a fan of the growing industry that takes advantage of parents who are at their wits' end because they can't seem to control their teenagers.
The facilities are multiplying because many states, such as Missouri, have few laws regulating the activities at these so-called private schools.
Parents sign over their rights and agree to confidentiality.
Proving abuse is no slam-dunk. The Virginia woman's Web site keeps track of the various facilities across the world that have been accused in one way or another of abusing teens.
Stories from media reports and parents on the Web site tell of children held in animal cages, teens sprayed with pepper spray and the kind of emotional and physical abuse that many of us would consider torture.
Many of the teen centers are connected to WWASP in some way, and wherever there is WWASP, Lichfield generally isn't far behind. That's why, when Earnshaw heard about his intent to buy the Kemper property, she started to let folks in Missouri know a little bit about Lichfield and his various companies.
Her actions earned her a typical Lichfield response.
He sued.
On Feb. 22, in Washington County court in Utah, Lichfield sued Earnshaw and her husband, William, alleging defamation, invasion of privacy and interference with prospective economic advantage.
According to the suit, Earnshaw "contacted public officials in Boonville, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, and spread false, defamatory and misleading information about plaintiff with the intent to interfere with plaintiff's business relations and with plaintiff's prospective economic interests."
Earnshaw says the suit won't stop her from letting anybody who cares to listen know how destructive she believes WWASP facilities are to children.
"A lot of folks are intimidated by the man and the money he has," she says. "I'm not."
I called Lichfield's attorney to ask about the suit. He didn't call back. It's no wonder. He's a busy man.
Earnshaw is hardly the first to be sued by Lichfield and/or his associates.
Before her, there was Sue Scheff, and her organization, Parents Universal Resource Experts, or PURE. Scheff was sued for defamation in federal court by WWASP after she set up her own watchdog group and accompanying Web site.
A Utah jury ruled in her favor last year, and U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell denied a WWASP request for a new trial in November.
Scheff, who lives in Florida, had sent her teenager to one of the WWASP schools in South Carolina. It was Randall Hinton who sold her in an effective sales pitch on the phone, she says. "I was completely brainwashed," she says. "I completely fell for them."
Hinton talked about the school's effective therapy programs. He played up the horses that were advertised in the facility's brochure.
"Once she got there, I found out they didn't have horses," she says. "They didn't have therapy."
Scheff pulled her child and started researching Lichfield, the Hintons and everybody connected to WWASP.
She put up a Web site telling her story, and soon parents all over the country were contacting her.
She put up their stories, often under assumed names. WWASP sued. From the beginning, Scheff says, it's clear they wanted one thing: silence.
"I was telling true stories," she says. "In the end, the jury decided everything I said was true. They weren't out to do anything other than silence me. This is the way they do business."
In Boonville, Lichfield and his gang of pseudo-therapists want to convince a city in need of money and an alumni group that wants to preserve history that this time things will be different.
The paper trail says otherwise.
Like a parent with a troubled teen, Boonville has a choice. "WWASP preys on desperate parents," Scheff says. She knows. She was one. Now Boonville is in the same boat. The easiest solution would be to turn the city's problem child over to Lichfield.
Scheff made that decision once in her life, and she saw her child suffer badly.
She knows that the tougher call - and the right one - would be for a desperate city to tell Lichfield to take his checkbook and go home.
Tony Messenger is a columnist at the Tribune.
His column appears on Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday.
He can be reached at 815-1728 or by e-mail at tmessenger@tribmail.com.
