One 18-year-old former student and victim of rape wept while recounting what happened to her during a Lifesteps seminar. Jane, who asked not to be identified by her real name, left the school in March. "They had me dress up as a French maid," she said, describing an outfit that included fishnet stockings and a short skirt. "I had to sit on guys' laps and give them lap dances," while sexually suggestive songs, like "Milkshake" by Kelis, played at high volume.

"They told me I was dirty and I had to put mud on myself for being raped," she said in reference to another Lifesteps session. "They basically blamed me for getting raped."

Amber Ozier, now 23, attended Mount Bachelor Academy from the summer of 2002 to October 2003 — at about the same time as TA. Her parents enrolled her after she started sneaking out at night and drinking as a teenager. She had also begun smoking marijuana, and her grades were suffering. Several years earlier, Ozier says, her 10-year-old sister had drowned in a lake during Amber's 12th birthday party.

Ozier describes being made to retell the harrowing story of her sister's death repeatedly in groups. In a role-playing session, Ozier says, her closest friend was asked to pretend to be her sister, so Ozier could again relive her death.

According to Ozier and others, in a Lifesteps seminar called Forever Young, students were placed on a mattress and taunted with painful information about their childhood that they had previously revealed, an apparent attempt to trigger regression to infancy. Once more, Ozier was instructed to recall her sister's death against her will. "That was probably the thing that traumatized me the most," she says, describing how she thrashed on the mattress until she vomited. "They prey on people who have already been hurt."

A former student, Melissa Maisa, now 32, married and a mother of two young children in San Diego, had a similar response when informed of the present investigation. Maisa attended Mount Bachelor between 1992 and 1994 under largely the same management that runs the school today, and graduated the school with honors. She was sent there in part because of promiscuous behavior as a teen, which Maisa associates with being a victim of child sexual abuse and date rape. "Mount Bachelor made me feel even more dirty and more shameful than either one of those experiences ever did. I just want to make sure the things I suffered through there never happen again," Maisa says.

She describes a Lifesteps session in which she says she was required to perform an exercise called "the holidays." "I had to stand up in the sluttiest way possible and strut over to every male in the room," including the counselors, Maisa says. She was instructed to sit on the floor before each man, place her left foot on his right knee and say, "This foot is Christmas." She then placed her right foot on his left knee and said, "This foot is New Year's. Do you want to meet me between the holidays?"

Maisa says she performed the exercise more than 250 times. When she failed to show sufficient enthusiasm, Maisa says, she and her peers were punished, each having to repeat their own humiliating skit. When Maisa tried to tell her mother about it on the phone, she says, a staff member terminated the call.