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The Sunshine Place · Audacy Podcasts | Team Downey

S2|E7: KIDS

December 4, 2024·52 min·4 clips
Wendy, a 30-year-old mother, asked to leave a New Jersey rehab and was physically slammed to the floor — then told by Dr. Miller-Newton that she wasn't going anywhere.
Fear comes first. Wendy, a former Straight staff member, remembers Dr. Miller Newton as a master manipulator, and not in some distant, abstract way; the fear still lives close to the surface. The episode does not dress that up. It sets Newton's public authority beside accounts of debasing, humiliating, and degrading treatment, and lets the mismatch sit there. By the time Katie reached Kids, Newton had already been forced to close Kids of Bergen County. Three other locations in Texas, Utah, and California had folded after similar investigations. Still, he kept moving. The shutdown did not end the operation. Newton reopened under another name: the Kids of North Jersey. Katie feels it right away. Her mother takes her across a parking lot, up cement steps, and into a sterile office building that already tells her she is trapped in another institution. The door closes behind her. The intake feels wrong almost immediately. There are no medical staff in sight, just a teenage girl handling the first encounter. Katie had known regulated facilities where nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and a treatment team helped set goals. This place does not match that world. Girls in odd-fitting clothes gather around her, scared before Katie even understands why. Then Newton arrives as an accusation. Girls pull Katie upright. He yells. She does not yet know his role, but she knows this man is not there to help. The hour turns one girl's intake into something colder: a look at how a program can survive exposure by changing names and locations.

As heard by us

A grim account of a program that kept renaming abuse as treatment.

This episode follows the long afterlife of Miller Newton's abuse machine, from Straight to Kids of Bergen County and then Kids of North Jersey.

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Why you'd press play

You want a story where care keeps curdling into control.

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