Grenville Christian College closed in 2007. For some students it was a kind of prison where they were held back by a kind of cult organization.
It sounds like it was not a fun place to be as a teenager.
Ms. Buddington’s account of abuse began on the trip to Canada from the self-styled Anglican Community of Jesus, which her hippie parents had joined when they were barely out of their teens (her mother is still a community nun; her father was later kicked out).
She tried jumping out of the car, but was restrained.
Within 48 hours of her arrival at Grenville, Ms. Buddington, now 33 and living in Portland, Me., was pulled from her bed by three staff women in the middle of the night, dragged into a room and berated for several hours for allegedly criticizing the leaders of the Community of Jesus, which had close ties with Grenville. (The cult leaders, known as Mother Cay and Mother Judy, were at the time living on the Grenville campus.) She was then placed on “discipline,” not allowed to talk or attend classes or wear the school uniform and spent her days scrubbing pots, floors and toilets and asking God to change her heart. The several-week sentence, she said, ended only after she wrote a series of letters to the headmaster saying her heart had indeed been changed.
That event, Ms. Buddington said in an interview, was the beginning of four nightmarish years at Grenville, where she experienced constant psychological abuse, isolation, punishment and humiliation at the hands of school staff before eventually running away.
“I was treated as less than human,” she said. She said she lived in constant fear of punishment and was depressed and frequently suicidal. Repeated requests to get psychological help were denied by school authorities.
Sources:
- Born into abusive grip of a cult International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) message board
- Grenville Christian College (Wikipedia)
