Mother seeks retrial for boarding school emotional abuse claims

PHOENIX (CN) — A Ninth Circuit panel appeared unlikely to grant a new trial to a mother who says her daughter was subjected to extreme emotional and psychological abuse while enrolled in a boarding school in central Arizona.

Though Kimberly Sweidy told the three-judge panel Monday morning that her daughter was prevented from contacting her for weeks, the judges said the accused behavior isn’t extreme or outrageous enough to merit a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“This was an attempt at parental alienation and severance of the parent-child relationship,” Sweidy’s attorney James Decker told the panel in a Phoenix courtroom. “Under Arizona law, we believe that’s enough at least to be taken to the jury.”

While enrolled at Spring Ridge Academy, a school and home for troubled girls in Mayer, Arizona, Decker said Sweidy’s daughter experienced “ritualized shaming, being singled out and blamed for a divorce and coercive exercises dressed up as treatment.”

Spring Ridge is one of many youth residential treatment centers known collectively as the “troubled teen industry.” Before its permanent closure in 2023, it was subject to numerous health department investigations, including claims that it failed to prevent a teen’s multiple suicide attempts.

Defense attorney Tim Eckstein said there’s no proof either Sweidy or her daughter experienced lasting distress.

“It is not simply some insults that somebody suffered, a strong disagreement with the therapy and education that was provided to the plaintiffs’ daughter,” he said. “It is something that truly shocks the conscious. And the facts here don’t support that.”

Per Arizona law, intentional infliction of emotional abuse must “go beyond all possible bounds of decency and be utterly intolerable in a civilized society.”

U.S. Circuit Judge Milan Smith Jr., a George W. Bush appointee, suggested that disagreements between parents and schools like Spring Ridge are too commonplace to hold to the standard Sweidy asks them to.

“It seems to me that if we rely upon these conclusions, no academy would survive,” he said. “It’s distressing, but it’s more ordinary.”

Sweidy enrolled her daughter at Spring Ridge Academy in 2019, but removed her six weeks later after learning the school wasn’t what she thought. In her original complaint, Sweidy says Spring Ridge misrepresented its program as sophisticated and “evidence-based” care, but in actuality, the girls were subjected to public shaming, food deprivation, bathroom privilege deprivation, isolation, administration of drugs and encouragement of physical violence and screaming.

One time, Sweidy claims her daughter and other girls were held in a van in a Target parking lot for multiple hours, allowed only to go inside and use the bathroom when her daughter began urinating in the parking lot. Another time, her daughter was told to use a wrapped-up towel to violently beat a chair that represented her parents, all while being berated by both the girls and the group leaders.

“For parents, the threat was: If you don’t devote yourself 100% to this program, your kid will be dead, insane or in jail,” she wrote in her complaint.

After Sweidy removed her daughter, she says Spring Ridge colluded with Sweidy’s ex-husband to return their daughter to the school via a California family court order. Once back at Spring Ridge, she was cut off from all communications with Sweidy.

“To this day, she is mentally and emotionally in their grasp,” Sweidy said. “My relationship with my daughter is not existent today because of them.”

Sweidy sued Spring Ridge and a handful of executives in federal court in January 2021, claiming fraud, breach of contract, negligence, racketeering, intentional infliction of emotional distress and conversion.

U.S. District Judge Steven P. Logan, a Barack Obama appointee, granted summary judgment to the defendants on all claims but fraud, and dismissed all individual defendants except for admissions director Kate Deily.

A jury later sided with Sweidy on the remaining fraud claims, ordering Spring Ridge to pay more than $2.5 million in damages.

Sweidy now appeals Logan’s decision, hoping for a new trial on all of her original claims. If the panel agrees, then only the fraud claims against Spring Ridge and Deily would be retried in court.

Milan told Sweidy that her complaint should be before California family court, not the federal district court of Arizona. Sweidy argued that Spring Ridge inserting itself into a family court proceeding of one of its students was a clear violation.

U.S. Circuit Judge Johnnie Rawlinson, a Bill Clinton appointee, agreed with Milan.

“The fact remains that the California court ordered her back,” Rawlinson said.

Rawlinson and Milan were joined on the panel by U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Hawkins, a Bill Clinton appointee. It’s unclear when the panel will issue an opinion.

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