Katherine Kubler Is Living Out Her Dreams as a Filmmaker

Katherine Kubler Channeled Her Trauma Into a Documentary About the Troubled Teen Industry

"The program was so traumatizing, a lot of us tried to forget about it and pretend it didn’t happen," mentioned Katherine Kubler.

Mar. 7 2024, Published 1:38 p.m. ET

The internet can also be both a blessing and a curse but one thing it has gotten right is the way it has supplied survivors with the ability to find every other. There are Reddit threads, Facebook teams, and whole web sites dedicated to people coming in combination to heal. One such site is WWASP Survivors, which aims to lend a hand anyone who has been sent to a boarding school for troubled teens.

The World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP) is the umbrella group that oversaw several allegedly abusive establishments aimed at turning bad youngsters into excellent youngsters. Many youngsters were essentially abducted from their own homes and delivered to are living in a single for months and even years at a time. Katherine Kubler (nee Daniel), who is now an adult, was once one of the most many children whose existence was destroyed via her experience at a troubled teenager boarding school. Where is she now? Here's what we know.

Where is Katherine Kubler (nee Daniel) now? She is processing her trauma via movie.

According to Katherine's website, she is a "Los Angeles-based writer, director, and editor" who is additionally the landlord and Executive Creative Director of Tiny Dino, an award-winning creative agency whose clients come with Paramount Pictures, United Artists, and MGM, to name a few. In March 2024, Netflix released a documentary directed and govt produced by means of Katherine referred to as The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping, which takes an unflinching look at the bothered youngster trade wherein she was once an unwilling participant.

"For a long time, I wasn’t going to include my story because I just wanted to be a filmmaker and make it about this issue, not me," mentioned Katherine in dialog with Netflix's Tudum. "But after all the years of research, when I found my own file and learned that it’s my very own program that left all this evidence behind, I was like, 'Oh no, I’m going to have to be in this now.'" Katherine, in conjunction with other survivors, takes audience on a tense trip down reminiscence lane as they sift thru recordsdata left behind at the college they attended.

Long since abandoned, the Academy at Ivy Ridge is falling apart but stays completely preserved in surprising techniques. At one level, Katherine and her friends stumble upon a field of DVDs of outdated safety photos. Together they sit and watch scholars being bodily assaulted as they try their very own trauma responses. Over and all over again, one in every of them unearths an outdated handwritten piece of paper documenting their worrying time at Ivy Ridge. It's both validating and heartbreaking.

Why was once Katherine despatched to Academy at Ivy Ridge?

Like maximum scholars of Ivy Ridge, Katherine's father and stepmother did not know what to do with a teen they felt was once on a trail of self-destruction. Unfortunately, we'll by no means know whether or not or now not that was once true for the woman who at 2 years previous, lost her mother to breast most cancers. Her father remarried when Katherine was once handiest 7 years outdated, which is when she says things "turned horrible."

In the documentary, Katherine remembers a time her stepmother yelled at her when she was in the fourth grade. "Thank God your mom is not alive to see the person you've become," she screamed. To take care of this, Katherine began appearing out as a teen in the conventional means some teens do. She grew to become to smoking and ingesting to manage her hectic lifestyles at house.

In 2004, Katherine was once transferred to a private Christian boarding faculty in Long Island, N.Y. however left after two months when they discovered her with Mike’s Hard Lemonade. The day she used to be caught, Katherine used to be sitting within the predominant's place of business waiting for her dad when two men walked in with handcuffs. "We’re here to take you to your new school," they said. That used to be the beginning of 15 months of torture for Katherine who in the documentary, loved a bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade in the faculty that tried to damage her.

"The program was so traumatizing, a lot of us tried to forget about it and pretend it didn’t happen," stated Katherine to Tudum. "But now, people are starting to speak out." It's a irritating documentary that leaves viewers asking themselves how this is still going down. This business isn't regulated in any respect and as Katherine issues out, there are "more regulations in place to get a license to give manicures than there are to house and treat children in residential treatment." One factor you'll do is achieve out on your representatives and push for exchange.

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