Chet Hanks Says Parents Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson Sent Him to Controversial Camp for Troubled Teens: It Was ‘As Harsh as F*cking Possible’
Actor Chet Hanks claimed his parents, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, sent him to a controversial wilderness camp for troubled teens.
According to Page Six, Hanks spoke about growing up with famous parents and teenage rebellion during a recent interview on The Ivan Paychecks Podcast.
He explained that when he was acting out as a teenager and dabbling with drugs and alcohol, his parents sent him to a camp for kids in the middle of the Utah wilderness.
Hanks said, “May 30th, 2008. I’ll never forget the date. I was about to be in my last week of my junior year. I wake up in the morning… My lights go on at four in the morning. I turned in my bed. I see the clock — four in the morning. I look at the foot of my bed and there’s two huge dudes standing at the foot of my bed. Bald heads, looking like bouncers, you know.”
“They’re like, ‘You’re coming with us. We could do this the easy way or the hard way,'” Hanks added.
“Holy shit,” host Ivan Pacheco said.
Hanks claims the two men put him in the back of a car and drove him nine hours to Southern Utah to begin a wilderness program for troubled teens.
Hanks compared the experience to the 2003 Disney film Holes where kids are sent to a fictional correctional camp and made to dig holes all day.
“It wasn’t like Boy Scouts where like, ‘We’re gonna go do fun shit. It’s like, no, that — it was like punitive,” Hanks said.
“When you get there, they tell you that, they can keep you as long as they want,” he added. “They get to decide when you leave, right. Your therapist or whatever is the one who gets to decide when you leave. And they can keep you there as long as they want. As long as they want. ‘Cause your parents sign over legal guardianship to, you know, the facility.”
Hanks claimed the camps are operated privately with no state or federal oversight and the kids were made to do forced labor including taking apart miles of barbed wire fences and going on long hikes while carrying 80 pound backpacks.
“At that point it was like the hardest thing I’d ever gone through in my life,” he said. “I mean, ’cause the worst part was just not knowing when you’re leaving. And it’s extremely uncomfortable, right?”
“It’s not like camping or it’s like Outward Bound or it’s like, you know, you get like a nice, you know, tent or like a mattress to sleep on. There’s campfires and you drink hot chocolate and fucking eat s’mores. Like, there was nothing like that. It was like designed to be as like, harsh as fucking possible,” he added.
Hanks elaborated that the camp charged parents by the day. He was aware that the camp knew his parents were famous and believes he was kept at the facility longer than anyone else because of it.
“They knew that my parents were whales and they’re manipulating the parents the whole time. You know, like, ’cause you don’t have any communication. They’re the ones communicating. So they knew my parents were fucking whales and they had the resources to keep me here for a long fucking time. And that’s exactly what happened. I was there longer than anybody else,” Hanks concluded.
Wilderness camps like the one described by Hanks have come under scrutiny in the last few years after socialite Paris Hilton spoke out about her experience at a similar camp.
Hilton attended Utah’s Provo Canyon School for troubled teens at age 16 in 2000. She had claimed that treatment at the school was unconstitutional.
Testifying before Utah lawmakers, Hilton claimed kids were “restrained, thrown into walls, strangled, and sexually abused regularly.”
Listen above via The Ivan Paychecks Podcast.
