When Maggie Drew was 15, her family’s pastor in Oklahoma falsely claimed that she was getting into sex and drugs and secretly instructed her parents to send her away to a Baptist boarding school in Missouri. Shortly after, in October 2007, her father and stepmom told her they were going on a family road trip to an exotic petting zoo.
But they dropped her off at Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch instead.
“I was very confused whenever I first got there,” Drew told The Daily Beast of the day she arrived at the school, which shuttered in September 2020 amid a criminal investigation against its founders, Boyd and Stephanie Householder. “The fear set in pretty quickly. When they told me I was going to be staying there I was immediately terrified.”
Over the next several years, Drew says, she survived an environment where she was sexually abused, beaten, and brainwashed—and forced to administer punishments to fellow students at the religious school.
Drew details these accusations in a new lawsuit filed this week which accuses Circle of Hope and the Householders of sex-trafficking and racketeering.
This is the first time the couple, who is awaiting trial on more than 100 charges related to the alleged sexual and physical abuse of teen girls in their care, is being sued in federal court and accused of violations of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 and the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Since 2020, the Householders have faced eight other lawsuits from ex-students, including their estranged daughter Amanda, who alleges they beat her and her brother with golf clubs and whips and pummeled her for their own sexual gratification.
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SOURCE: The Daily Beast, Kate Briquelet
