I arrived at Hephzibah House when I was 15 years old.
I was there for 29 months.
I got there August 1989.
I stayed til November of 1990.
From November 2015 to March 2017.
We walked in and the lady shut the door
and started locking several locks
and I just knew something was wrong.
The first thing you'll notice
when you walk in the main door
is instead of going upstairs you go downstairs.
We never lived anywhere else except that basement.
Everything was shuttered.
Every blind was shut.
The windows were sealed.
They had screws so you couldn't open them.
I knew right away that it had
a very overwhelming and oppressive feel to it.
[Woman In Pink Shirt] We were absolutely locked in.
I feel like there would have been more freedoms
if I did go to the juvenile delinquency center
that I was threatened with.
The very first day the nurse
came and took me into a closet where there was a bed.
She tried to pull my dress up, I protested.
She pulled my dress up anyways
and then this guy did a forced pelvic exam.
I do know that it was all done against my will.
[Woman In Pink Shirt] You couldn't go
to the bathroom alone.
There were times that girls would have
to wake up in the middle of the night
to use the bathroom, the staff member
would have the rollaway bed
that they would sleep on right next to the bathroom.
There were assigned times only to use the restroom.
The girls that couldn't hold it and would wet their beds.
They would really just be made a spectacle of.
They would have to wear diapers.
The food at Hephzibah House was absolutely disgusting.
We would have sprouts that had
all these bugs in them, gross.
The bread came in a box
and it said on the side "bird feed".
I got put onto a work crew.
It was hard labor, it really was.
We hung wallpaper, we laid tile.
We built that fence around the back of the property.
We would be forced to clean the floor
on our hands and knees with rags and bleach water.
It would burn our eyes, it would burn our nose.
Pastor Ron Williams had 26 girls
and he used them as free labor.
But it wasn't just bad food and nailed down windows.
These former students say there was far worse
going on behind those doors.
The blue room was the punishment room.
It is where we were paddled.
It was a big paddle.
Enough to that when I went downstairs
it was hard to sit and I definitely had bruises.
The first four months I was there
I would say nearly everyday I was paddled.
It did slow down once they decided I was broken.
A paddling would entail a girl
laying on her stomach on the floor,
a full grown woman would straddle your legs
and a full grown woman would sit on your back
and hold your arms up.
Your face smashed into the carpet.
The amount of times you were hit
was dependent on what you'd done wrong.
Sometimes it was three, seven, 10.
Usually after 10 they would stop
and they'd get you up and they would pray
and talk and yell at you.
And then if they didn't think your attitude was changed
you went back down on the floor.
You could end up having 30, 40 or more swats
over a period of a couple hours.
Well I'm glad you guys are here
and I know you want to talk about this
because you don't want this happening
to other people, right?
That's right.
So you want to shed a light on this.
I'll tell you we reached out to Pastor Ron Williams,
the founder and director of Hephzibah House in Indiana
and he respectfully declined the opportunity
to participate today.
He also adamantly denies
that there's any abuse in this boarding school.
He says that for 48 years the ministry has received
troubled teen girls from their custodial parents
and he says while some of their past students
are now in full time Christian service
and are godly wives and mothers,
others have gone back to their old way of life.
So he says it works for some, doesn't work for others.
But he denies any abuse whatsoever.