Lauren Chooljian from New Hampshire Public Radio reports on a widespread culture of sexual misconduct in the addiction treatment industry. Across the country, women seeking treatment are being harassed and assaulted by men in positions of power. The problem is so pervasive that it has a name among those in the industry: the 13th Step.
We begin with Chooljian explaining to host Al Letson the case that got her started on this investigation. It involved Eric Spofford, owner of New Hampshire’s largest addiction treatment network. After exposing allegations that Spofford was harassing patients, Chooljian, her sources and staff at New Hampshire Public Radio became the targets of intimidation and, in some cases, vandalism.
Chooljian then chronicles another case, this one in California, that illustrates how difficult it is to bring to justice wealthy, powerful people in the industry. Chris Bathum owned a network of treatment centers in California and Colorado and was routinely sexually assaulting clients and offering them drugs. He was also submitting false billing claims to insurance companies. We meet two women, Rose Stahl and Debbie Herzog, who were separately investigating Bathum. Bathum was once Stahl’s therapist, and she later worked for him. She pursued evidence that he was assaulting women at the centers, while Herzog was looking into insurance fraud.
Stahl blew the whistle about Bathum’s inappropriate behavior to leadership within the company, but the actions they took did not stop him. At the same time, Herzog was facing hurdles in convincing law enforcement to pay attention to the case she was building about insurance fraud. Then serendipitously, Herzog and Stahl learn of each other’s efforts and team up to try to bring Bathum to justice.
Correction, Feb. 16, 2024: An earlier version of this episode summary incorrectly described Rose Stahl’s relationship to Chris Bathum. He was her therapist.
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Listen: The 13th Step (New Hampshire Public Radio)
Credits
Reporter: Lauren Chooljian | Producers: Jason Moon and Najib Aminy | Editors: Taki Telonidis and Katie Colaneri | General counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Musical score: Jason Moon | Mixing and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis
The 13th Step podcast series was created by New Hampshire Public Radio’s Document team. | Reporter and producer: Lauren Chooljian | Producer and musical score: Jason Moon | Editors: Alison MacAdam, Katie Colaneri and Dan Barrick | Fact checker: Dania Suleman
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. In March, 2022, New Hampshire Public Radio broke a big story. It was about the founder and then CEO of New Hampshire’s largest addiction treatment network. |
| Eric Spofford: | I’m about as well-known of a drug addict. What a weird claim to fame. I’m a very well-known drug addict in this state. |
| Al Letson: | Eric Spofford built his business on his own story of substance use disorder and recovery. New Hampshire was hit hard by the opioid epidemic, and he’d become an influential figure in the state’s response to the crisis. Governor Chris Sununu considered Spofford one of his go-to guys, and Spofford testified before Congress. But then, reporter Lauren Chooljian had uncovered that Spofford was accused of multiple acts of sexual misconduct by employees and former clients. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | All these allegations raise serious questions about Spofford’s leadership, the company that made him wealthy, and New Hampshire’s reliance on Spofford to help address the addiction crisis. |
| Al Letson: | For her story, Lauren spoke to victims at one of Spofford’s facilities called Green Mountain Treatment Center, including a woman named Elizabeth. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | The day after she left Green Mountain, she says she started receiving messages on Snapchat from Eric Spofford. |
| Elizabeth: | He was already planning to come to see me, wanted to take me out, wanted to do explicit things. |
| Al Letson: | She also spoke with people on his staff. |
| Speaker 5: | I went into this knowing fully well that he had liabilities. I certainly didn’t know that he was going to turn out to be like Harvey Weinstein. |
| Al Letson: | After the story airs, Lauren continues reporting and she gets a call from a woman we’re calling Andrea. We’re not using her real name because other people who’ve spoken out have faced threats. Andrea’s in recovery. She tells Lauren she’d met Spofford at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and that he’d taken advantage of her too. |
| Andrea: | I fell right into it, right into it. You’re so vulnerable, and they say- |
| Al Letson: | But then she says, “This kind of behavior, it’s much bigger than just one man. It’s so common, there’s even a name for it.” |
| Andrea: | It’s because it’s so notorious and it’s so bad. There’s this thing called the 12 Steps. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Yeah. |
| Andrea: | Well, what they do, they made a joke about being a 13-stepper. And the 13-stepper is like when you take advantage of a newcomer, they joke like, “Don’t be a 13-stepper,” or something. So, it’s very prevalent, but he really had it down to a science. |
| Al Letson: | Today, we’re bringing you part of a podcast from Lauren and her team in New Hampshire Public Radio. It’s called the 13th Step. In this series, Lauren goes deep on this long-standing culture of sexual misconduct in recovery communities. And a heads-up. Parts of today’s story may be difficult for some listeners to hear. Lauren Chooljian joins me now. Hey, Lauren. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Hey, Al. |
| Al Letson: | So, after your story goes out about Eric Spofford in March, 2022, he denies those allegations. What happens next? |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Well, a lot. We were sued by Spofford for defamation. And in fact, he sued us six months after the story came out. He sued myself, two of my colleagues, and so NHPR, where we work, but also three of my sources, which was particularly difficult for them. And so it’s been a pretty dark shadow over the reporting process, has really complicated things, but happy to report that recently we got some good news from the judge in the case who basically said that Eric has no basis for a defamation suit against us, but we’re still now waiting to see if Eric will appeal. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I’ve been following this case a little bit. And I mean, obviously as a reporter working on a story about powerful people, you don’t want to be sued, but it is definitely a thing that happens. But what is not expected is personal attacks that come to your home. Can you tell me about that? What exactly happened? |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Yeah. Unfortunately, a couple of months… it was a month actually, after the first story came out, there was pretty violent vandalism. The C-word spray-painted on doors and bricks and rocks thrown through windows at my parents’ house, a house I used to live in, and our news director’s house. And then a month after that, they figured out where I live and threw a brick through my window and spray-painted, “Just the beginning,” under the broken window, and also hit my parents’ house again. So, that was pretty terrifying, to say the least. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | And yeah, it’s been a lot. In the year plus since that happened, federal prosecutors have actually charged four men for their roles in the vandalism, including a guy that is really close friends with Eric Spofford, the guy that we investigated. |
| Al Letson: | The whole thing about intimidation tactics when people pull them out is that a lot of times they work. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Yeah, they do. |
| Al Letson: | People get scared. I mean, it’s scary. A brick coming through your house where you live with your child and your husband, attacks on your parents’ house. I’m curious, how did this affect your sources? |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Yeah. So, that’s the thing is that it’s one thing that it’s hard for me as a person, I can manage that, but for my sources, it was terrible. And I had people drop out when they saw what happened. And one person in particular told me, “You can’t protect me.” And it was just horrifying to hear because you know what? She was right. And so I respected any decision any source had to make, but it also really made me feel like for those who were willing to stick with the story, there was no choice other than just to continue doing the reporting. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. So, you went looking for answers about how to hold people accountable for unethical behavior in recovery communities. What’d you find? |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Well, it’s not an easy answer, I can tell you that much. I mean, it really depends on a bunch of different factors. It depends what state the facility is in. It depends on the kind of person at the place doing the harm. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | For example, you can open a treatment center in many states without having any sort of professional license or any sort of master’s degree or anything like that. That’s just how it is in many states. And so if the person doing the harm isn’t licensed, you don’t have anyone to report them to. And even in states where there are tighter restrictions and they maybe would ask for accreditation of a facility, those accrediting organizations aren’t coming around all the time. And so the likelihood that they might be able to catch something while it’s happening, that’s very low. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | And then the final factor here in what makes all this very complicated is not only is there not enough oversight, but we’re really putting a lot of onus on people who are in really vulnerable positions to come forward. And oftentimes, people with active addiction, they’re not going to go to the police because for a long time the drug that they were using is considered illegal and the police don’t often lead to help in many cases, right? |
| Lauren Chooljian: | And so the idea that they would call the police is probably not going to happen. And the idea that they would know who to go to in a facility, especially if it’s someone in a position of power at that facility, there’s just no pathways, it seems, that are actually going to lead to accountability. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. And so that brings us to the story we’re going to hear today. It’s about another case, but this one is in California where the CEO of a network of treatment facilities was accused of sexual assault and massive insurance fraud. And you tell the story of two women who go after this guy. What did you learn from Rose and Debbie? |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Okay, this story is wild. Just so you know. This story is so wild because Rose and Debbie taught me that you literally cannot give up if you want to find accountability in this industry. If you want to catch a predator, you better clear your calendar because it’s going to be years of your time, as Rose and Debbie taught me. You’re going to have to push through all kinds of bureaucracy. And even if you’re Debbie, and you used to be a federal prosecutor, as you’ll hear, she couldn’t even get law enforcement’s attention for a long time. So, you have to be dedicated, you have to really advocate for people and you can’t give up. |
| Al Letson: | Thanks, Lauren. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Thank you so much. |
| Al Letson: | Lauren Chooljian is an investigative reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio and the host of The 13th Step. Our story was produced by Najib Aminy. When we come back, a worker at a recovery center, his rumors about her boss offering drugs to patients. |
| Rose Stahl: | And at that point, it was like, “What?” I mean, I really had kind of a little mini nervous breakdown. |
| Al Letson: | You’re listening to Reveal. From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today we’re bringing you part of a series from New Hampshire Public Radio called The 13th Step. It’s about a culture of sexual misconduct in the addiction treatment industry. Most of the series is about how hard it is to root out that misconduct, but this story is about two women who team up to do just that. Their names are Debbie Herzog and Rose Stahl. Here’s reporter Lauren Chooljian. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | In 2013, Rose was living in Los Angeles, and she was talking to a friend about how she was thinking about drinking again. Rose had been in recovery for a while at that point, and this friend was like, “Oh, you should meet this guy, Chris Bathum. He’s a therapist,” this friend said, “He specializes in addiction and he might take you for free.” Free sounded especially great. So, Rose started seeing Bathum for weekly therapy sessions. What was he like? |
| Rose Stahl: | It’s funny. It’s hard for me to answer that question straight out without saying I am fully aware that many, many other people saw right through him right away. But for me, he was just really brilliant. And I always walked away every session just feeling this sense of ease that, “Okay, okay, everything’s okay.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | I met Rose at her home in Austin, Texas. That’s where she lives now. I was immediately struck by how vibrant and expressive Rose is. She beams this happy, chaotic energy. I was barely out of the car when she hugged me. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | But like so many of us, Rose also knows the depths of depression. She was in a real tough spot when she met Bathum. Rose was separating from her husband, trying to find her way through the world as a single mom without any family close by, no job, and there were all those swirling questions about her sobriety. But she says her sessions with Bathum felt powerful and thoughtful. She bonded with him quickly. So, for over a year, she’d drive to his office for an hour or 90-minute session and walk out feeling relieved. Although sometimes he did say things that Rose thought, “Whoa, what?” |
| Rose Stahl: | He did offer eventually to drink with me in a bar as a therapeutic tool to assess my, “Am I an alcoholic or not?” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | A therapeutic tool? Drinking with her therapist. Rose says it instantly made her feel nauseous. She didn’t take him up on it, but she heard him out because Bathum wasn’t only a therapist, he was the founder of a growing substance use disorder treatment company called Community Recovery Los Angeles. He ran facilities in many of the fanciest corners of LA, like Malibu and Calabasas, home of at least one Kardashian. Bathum would eventually own more than 20 sober homes and outpatient clinics in Colorado and California. So, surely he must know what he’s talking about. |
| Rose Stahl: | But it was also in a way, Bathum was great for Los Angeles because Los Angeles is full of those moments. All the time, you’re like, “Whoa, what? Who did what?” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | That moment could have been a bright red flag. She could have walked away, found a new therapist, but of course that is so hard to do. Instead, Rose would end up working at Community Recovery, Bathum’s treatment company. They call it CRLA, and most people refer to Chris Bathum as Bathum, so I will too. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Bathum offered Rose a job at CRLA during one of their therapy sessions. Rose definitely knew that was weird, but Bathum convinced her. They’d keep their distance from each other and stopped doing therapy together. Plus, CRLA was growing rapidly. It seemed on the outside like a place you wanted to be a part of if you cared about addiction. Bathum was seen as a visionary, a guy who was always talking about systems and theories. It felt like he was thinking differently about this seemingly unsolvable problem of addiction. |
| Speaker 8: | So, you really think that rehab is fraud? |
| Chris Bathum: | For the most part, I’d say that’s the case. I wouldn’t say that’s always the case, but I think that most of the work that’s being done and the money that’s being spent is wasted. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | This is an old radio interview Bathum did before opening CRLA, where he’s calling out other treatment providers. |
| Chris Bathum: | They very much are focusing on the next client and the next client’s cash, and how the next client’s cash is going to make the thing better. And it’s very much like a person who’s selling something and addicted in that selling process or a person who’s gambling, and anything goes as long as the client comes in. And I think that’s pretty sick. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | CRLA was all built around Bathum’s big idea that the best way to solve substance use disorder is with more affordable, longer-term treatment. He was also known for his holistic approach to treatment, like using sound baths or meditation sessions in sweat lodges. And there are still people who say that CRLA was the thing that finally helped them stop using. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Bathum felt like the usual 30 days of rehab weren’t enough, so he’d keep clients for 90 days of inpatient treatment. He didn’t invent that, by the way. Longer residential treatment is an idea that’s been around for a long time. Bathum even found ways to keep clients after their 90 days. He would offer clients “paid internships,” where they do odd jobs and chores at CRLA. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | And then after only six months of interning, clients could be hired as CRLA staff. Bathum hired Rose to help open a new community center, which would be the main hub of CRLA. And given how tumultuous her life had been lately, this new job felt like a fresh start. |
| Rose Stahl: | I was making decent money. It was enough for me to support myself and my daughter with the help of a little bit of child support. So, it was awesome. Actually, I was self-sufficient. I didn’t have any worries. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose could tell pretty quickly that CRLA was expanding. One minute, she’s working on the new community center, and then the next, she’s talking with a contractor about a new medical clinic. At the time, Rose had no idea how CRLA was funded. She didn’t think much about it. But in a small office, 35 miles away, a woman named Debbie Herzog was starting to get an idea. |
| Debbie Herzog: | So, is it better if we sit next to each other or- |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Sure. We can do that, next to each other is just fine. Yeah. |
| Debbie Herzog: | Okay. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Debbie was a federal prosecutor for nearly two decades. It’s a key part of who she is, despite many of the other prestigious jobs on her resume. For example, she also investigated fraud for some federal agencies like NASA and the postal service. So, suffice it to say not much gets by Debbie Herzog. In 2023, as Rose was in therapy with Bathum, Debbie left government work and started a job as an insurance investigator at Anthem. It was a lot of bill collecting, way more than she had hoped. But then one day, she ran out of assigned work to do. |
| Debbie Herzog: | And when that happens, we’re supposed to try to come up with our own. And the best way to do that is to pick a certain procedure, a certain billing code, and run it through the computer and ask the computer to find the providers that build that code the most and see what pops up. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Debbie thought, “Why don’t I try the code for preventative medicine?” That covers things like a primary care doctor sharing information on how to prevent a heart attack. |
| Debbie Herzog: | Or things to avoid so you don’t get cancer. So, I stuck preventative medicine in and community recovery popped up at the top of the list and had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more billings than any other provider on the list. And it’s a drug and rehab center. Why are they billing for preventive medicine? |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billings at CRLA, Chris Bathum’s place. Debbie realizes she might be onto something here. |
| Debbie Herzog: | So, I started looking at the patients that Anthem Blue Cross had at Community Recovery, and I could pull up the patients and see the different things that they were billed for. And it was just all kinds of stuff: smoking cessation, group therapy, individual therapy, all kinds of services that actually should have been covered under the umbrella of drug treatment. If you check into a treatment center, they tell you it’s going to cost $30,000 a month, and that $30,000 is going to cover all services at that facility. So, if those services are being billed individually as well, that’s double billing, and that’s fraud. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Fraud. Basically, patients were being billed once for all their treatment, and then billed again and again and again and again for each individual service, which they’d already paid for. Debbie starts digging hard. She tries to drill down to see just how deep this problem goes. Turns out there was much more than just the double billing scheme. |
| Debbie Herzog: | Chris Bathum, the guy who owned Community Recovery, had opened up places in Colorado pretty recently. And I discovered, looking at these individual patient billings, that some of them were being billed for services rendered in Southern California and Colorado on the same day. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | That’s not possible. |
| Debbie Herzog: | Right? So, there was triple billing. And then I started running these patients through social media to see what I could find out about them, and on Facebook and on LinkedIn. They listed their jobs as jobs at community recovery. So, he was billing for interns, billing for full-time employees, billing for part-time employees, as if they were all patients. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Chris Bathum was taking out insurance policies in the names of his employees, as in creating accounts for them and then billing those fraudulent accounts for addiction treatment services that no one was actually receiving. And to add another layer, it was sometimes former clients hired to work in the CRLA billing department, who did that paperwork? What did it feel like to see that? |
| Debbie Herzog: | Wow, I found not just paper fraud. It’s kind of a dull case, paper fraud. But really interesting fraud. I mean, fraud that might get somebody’s attention. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Or so she hoped. What did you know about the recovery world at that point? |
| Debbie Herzog: | Unfortunately, more than one might expect. I had a son who was in recovery at the time. I had just sent him away for the first time for treatment and was well aware of the expense, the billing, what services were provided. And the longer he was in and out of recovery, the more I got to know. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | So, in 2014, while she sat in her new office clicking through fraudulent billing after fraudulent billing by CRLA, an addiction treatment provider, all she could think of was David. |
| Debbie Herzog: | I mean, I am thinking, “This could be me. This could be my kid who’s supposed to be getting services that he’s not getting.” Yeah, it was completely on my mind and I think that’s why I was so rabid about the whole case and still am about the whole industry. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose didn’t stumble on a gold mine of data like Debbie did. She was on a different journey. She was close with Bathum, she was working for him, but then she started to hear some rumors. This is the part of the story where we will start to talk about things that are especially hard to hear. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | The rumor was that Bathum was having sex with female clients, and that he was using drugs with those clients. There was also word going around of some fraud, that Bathum had defrauded a former investor. |
| Rose Stahl: | And at that point it was like, “What?” I mean, I really had kind of a little mini nervous breakdown. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | There are a lot of choices you can make when you hear such a wild rumor. You could dismiss it, shrug it off. You might spread it around, see what other people say. Or you could be Rose and think, “I need to confront Chris Bathum about this right now.” |
| Rose Stahl: | Oh, it wasn’t an option not to. That’s just kind of me. I mean, there was no freaking way I could not investigate and find out. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose told me she’s always been like this. She has to intervene. She’s a rule-follower to the extreme. Her mom once told her, “You’ve always been a little whistleblower.” There was one story she told me that I’m potentially obsessed with. Rose was six, maybe seven, and she has a vivid memory of being deeply disturbed by other kids littering. |
| Rose Stahl: | I remember being the litter police, some kids were littering and we had this commercial. It was like, “Don’t mess with taxes.” And I just remember being like, “Don’t mess with taxes.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose was not the kid that pretends they don’t see the ice cream wrappers on the ground. Rose was the kid that yelled out, “Hey, you can’t do that.” |
| Rose Stahl: | And I think they kicked me or something like, “Shut up, you twerp.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | The litter police thing never left her. So, when rumors were spreading that Chris Bathum was having sex with clients and using drugs with them, the biggest question for Rose was, “What’s the best way to confront him?” Rose had a friend named Jane, who was living with her at the time, so they processed all this together. I can imagine Rose pacing in their small apartment in Hollywood. Her friend, Jane, is sitting on the couch, totally blown away. |
| Rose Stahl: | I was telling Jane, “This is just crazy. I don’t know, but I have to confront him.” And so Jane was like, “Well, my ex-wife worked in the field and maybe we can talk to her about it.” Because Jane had told me years before, and even she had, I remember when I met her, she was going through it with this place, and she was like, “The owner is smoking crack with clients, sleeping with clients, trying to give the staff drugs.” It was really insane. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Jane, she figures, “Might as well shoot my ex-wife a text. ‘Who was that old boss you had who slept with clients?'” Meanwhile, Rose gets up the courage to send a text to Bathum. She thought back to their therapy sessions, and realized she had the perfect way to lure him to meet immediately. Rose started typing. |
| Rose Stahl: | I was panicking, and I was just like, “I’m feeling like drinking. Can we meet?” And he said, “Actually, I think a drink is a good idea.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Bathum and Rose make plans to meet at a restaurant. Jane offers to drive Rose there. |
| Rose Stahl: | Jane and I get in her car and we’re driving there and it’s kind of a long drive, and she’s really uneasy about me confronting my boss, and I’m just like, “I don’t care. I got to do it.” Because she’s like, “What if it’s true? What then?” And I must have really held out hope that it wasn’t true. Well, no, I did, because right as we’re pulling into the restaurant and I see him standing in these shorts, which was weird, I’d never seen him in shorts, just kind of waiting for me outside, the ex-wife text, “Chris Bathum.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | As in, “Oh, that former boss I had that slept with clients? Chris Bathum.” No. |
| Rose Stahl: | Yeah, yeah. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | So, what did you do? |
| Rose Stahl: | Unfortunately, I end up believing him. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose sits down at the restaurant bar with Bathum. They order drinks. Rose said he looked mildly nervous, but when Rose confronts Bathum about everything she’s heard, he denies it all and he’s got an explanation for everything. The person who passed along the rumor, she’s unstable. The person who started the rumors, it’s that former investor. Bathum says he’s been trashing him, making all sorts of accusations online. Rose had actually seen the investor’s posts on social media. And then over the next few days, Bathum had the company’s CFO tell Rose how absurd the whole thing was. |
| Rose Stahl: | I mean, I just felt so bad and started crying, “How are you ever going to trust me?” Scared that I changed our wonderful dynamic, all of it, wondering if my job is at risk now. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | You have to understand, Bathum had an incredible power over Rose. She felt he knew her inside and out. He gave her free therapy. He gave her a job when she was in crisis. No rumor or coincidental text message could change all that. Plus, now he was forgiving her. He even moved her into a new role at CRLA. Bathum asked her to be an investigator, gather information about this investor, who he said was harassing him. She would be saving the company so they could help more clients. That was the idea. |
| Rose Stahl: | What I was being told was that the investor was even hiring people to come work at CRLA, hiring people to pose as clients and things like that. And so I really was passionate about stopping this guy from putting out these rumors. They’re sick and hurting people. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | And the rumors kept on coming. As Rose is doing her investigating, she comes across a video on social media with a big allegation. There are two people in this video. One of them is the former investor. He’s standing beside a young woman. The video is only 14 seconds long, and it’s alarming, but it’s also really weird. |
| Speaker 11: | Hailey. |
| Hailey: | Hello. |
| Speaker 11: | Now, Hailey was a client over at Chris Bathum’s place. And would you mind saying on camera that you were drug and raped? |
| Hailey: | I was drugged and raped by Chris Bathum. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | That’s it. That’s the whole video. Rose watches it and she still doesn’t believe it because she’s focused on the investor. He seems to be prompting this client to speak, and Rose thinks, “Wow, what insane length this guy is going to. Making up a rumor about sexual assault? He’s got to stop.” |
| Rose Stahl: | I had the fear that other clients or other staff would have the same just wildly bad reaction to hearing the rumors and relapse. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Bathum has redirected the litter police. He’s convinced Rose he’s not a bad guy. He’s the good guy. |
| Al Letson: | As Chris Bathum deflects accusations against him about sexual misconduct, Debbie continues to build her fraud case against him. But authorities, they don’t seem interested. |
| Debbie Herzog: | And I was going bonkers. I mean bonkers, literally banging my head against the wall. How can nobody be paying attention to this? Why doesn’t anybody care? |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today, we’re partnering with New Hampshire Public Radio to bring you part of their podcast series, The 13th Step. It’s about two women, Rose Stahl and Debbie Herzog, who independent of each other, are investigating the founder and owner of a chain of addiction treatment centers, including one in Los Angeles, called CRLA. |
| Al Letson: | Debbie’s an insurance investigator, and she’s uncovered hundreds of fraudulent billings by the company. But when she writes up a report and sends it to state authorities, they refuse to investigate. Reporter Lauren Chooljian takes it from here. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Debbie Herzog was not off to a great start. Debbie used to be a federal prosecutor, so she thinks, “All right, maybe I’ll have better luck with the Feds.” So, she takes the case over to them, tells them how deep it seems to go, and that doesn’t work either. |
| Debbie Herzog: | In LA, they’re really picky about the cases they take, and they’re only looking at really, really large dollar cases, and it wasn’t a large dollar case yet. And when I say large dollar case, I mean they’re looking at a million dollars or above, and I was probably in the thousands at the time. |
| Debbie Herzog: | Then I went to other insurance companies and said, “Hey, look at this. Check out your billings.” And started getting the other insurance companies on board. The dollar amounts obviously started getting higher as we got more Community Recovery clients from other insurance companies, but it still wasn’t reaching the threshold for federal investigation or prosecution. I was kind of stalling, and her call came at the right time. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | One day in February of 2015, Rose Stahl was with her boss, Chris Bathum, in his Tesla. She was a few months into her new job as a sort of investigator for the company, keeping an eye on that investor who had turned on Bathum. |
| Rose Stahl: | I don’t remember what the investor was doing at the time, but it was something that was really upsetting to Bathum. And so we were driving in his car and he told me that he had basically, in a roundabout, hired someone to murder the investor. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | What? |
| Rose Stahl: | Yeah. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Yeah. |
| Rose Stahl: | He’s like, “Wouldn’t it be better if he were just gone?” Well, yeah, it would, of course. “Well, wouldn’t it be… What about him having a car wreck? What if he had a car wreck in two weeks?” I’m like, “What? What the (beep).” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose’s mind starts moving fast, “Is he joking? What is he saying? A car wreck? Is this some weird therapy thing?” |
| Rose Stahl: | It was like he was trying to literally coax me into buying into and agreeing with having the investor murdered. And so I said directly. I said, “Are we talking about murder?” And I looked at him in the car and then I saw it for the first time. I was like, “He’s high.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose could see it in Bathum’s face. Beads of sweat, eyes wild, twitching, things that before she just wanted to see as Bathum’s mannerisms. Now, it was obvious. Rose was scared, but she’s also Rose, the rule follower, the litter police. She was determined to find out if she was right. The next opportunity she gets to use Bathum’s car by herself, she takes it. It’s days later, she hears Bathum asking a client to go charge the Tesla for him. Rose intervenes, “Let me charge it for you.” So, she gets in Bathum’s car alone and starts driving. |
| Rose Stahl: | I was just looking around. I was looking while I was driving, looking down, and you could see it and you could see little devices like pens that sometimes people would use smoking heroin or meth. And this handprint on the window that was in a bizarre position where it looked like it was like a handprint placed in a way that no natural position, nobody would ever sit… while the car was moving. And so of course I was like, “It looks like a sexual position.” It was (beep) devastating. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose also found drugs in the car. Methamphetamine. She took a short video and some pictures, and then suddenly Rose remembers the rumor about the client. The client who made a video where she said, “I was drugged and raped by Chris Bathum.” |
| Rose Stahl: | My first thought was, “Oh my God, oh my God. She was probably telling the truth. And I have been, for however many months, a part of the machine that is trying to make people believe that she’s a liar.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose calls a manager at CRLA and tells them what she’s found. And maybe because she’s found hard evidence, this manager takes her really seriously. Bathum is kicked out of the company, but that is not where the story ends. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | At first, Rose says, it seemed like all the remaining managers were a unified front against Bathum. Everyone agreed what he did was wrong, and if he tried to come back, Rose says, they would go to the police. That lasted, Rose says, for maybe three days. Rose learns Bathum still has access to the company’s systems, to the clients, even when he wasn’t at his facilities. |
| Rose Stahl: | He was looking on the video, the surveillance cameras, and contacting clients, texting female clients like, “I see you on the camera.” And so when I thought that that would be handled, I was made aware that that would not be handled and there was nothing we could do about it. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | So, Rose becomes an investigator again, but this time against Bathum. She confronts other members of Bathum’s team, trying to get someone, anyone in management, to take her seriously. She’s pushing a lot of people, asking a lot of questions, but it doesn’t seem like anyone cares. They didn’t believe her. |
| Rose Stahl: | I just knew that the cards were stacked against me, so I felt like I was on a mission to find somebody who could represent better than I could. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | But you’re the litter police. |
| Rose Stahl: | I’m the litter police, but I have the body of a woman. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose starts saving everything she can get her hands on, and I mean everything. When a colleague leaves the company and takes his laptop with him, Rose tracks him down to see what data he has. And then that former colleague connects her with another CRLA employee, and they both claim Bathum is running an insurance scam. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose will believe anything at this point. So, she starts collecting documents. She’s pulling string wherever she can find it. She knows she needs to call someone else outside the company for help, someone with power. But who? Who do you call if your boss is threatening to murder someone and maybe running an insurance and is also using drugs and is sexually assaulting the clients of his treatment center? She tried calling the FBI, but they didn’t get back to her. So, what about the State of California? Rose thinks, “Maybe there’s some licensing body that I could turn to and file a report about Bathum.” So, she starts researching, |
| Rose Stahl: | And then it was a devastating blow to realize, “Oh, he’s not even a therapist.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Chris Bathum was not even a therapist. In fact, he wasn’t personally licensed to do anything. All he had was a certificate for hypnotherapy, hypnosis. He didn’t need a license to be a CEO of a drug and alcohol treatment center in California, so there was no licensing board to report him to. Rose says that was one of the most interesting, infuriating and frustrating things about this case. |
| Rose Stahl: | Whatever else had transpired in those couple of weeks, it had become very evident that nobody in the company cared to stop him from having sex with all of his clients. And nobody outside of the company could care in a way that mattered. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose was stuck. She thought hard. She started flipping through old paperwork and documents, like the evidence she had compiled to prove that the investor was harassing Bathum. And that’s when Rose stumbled on a screenshot from the investor’s Facebook. He had posted a phone number for an Anthem investigator, a woman named Debbie Herzog. Where were you when Rose called? |
| Debbie Herzog: | At my desk and that was in Oaks, California. And Rose talks fast, so she was kind of throwing out a lot of stuff, and she was an insider. And as a prosecutor, you know you always need an insider to have a successful prosecution. You need a talker. You’re always looking for a talker. And so I was really anxious to get in touch with her. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Where’d you meet? |
| Debbie Herzog: | At a Starbucks. And we sat there for hours. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose begins with the story she heard from her colleague that there might be insurance fraud. She starts handing over documents, screenshots, emails that she collected. |
| Rose Stahl: | I had all my papers and I’m trying… I have no idea about insurance fraud, but I’m like, “Look at my little case that I put together and I’m trying…” And that moment though of watching her kind of sift through the limited amount of paperwork that I had was that fear and anticipation and anxiety of, “What is she going to say when she looks up?” |
| Debbie Herzog: | I mean, I was just scribbling, taking down notes and listening to her at the same time. |
| Rose Stahl: | And she looked up and she was like, “I think we got… I think this is something, I think this is something, Rose.” |
| Debbie Herzog: | And then she told me about the girls and the information she had about sexual assaults or possible sexual assaults. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | What was it like to hear that? |
| Debbie Herzog: | Pretty horrifying. You’re talking about one of the most vulnerable populations: addicted young women. And so it’s easier to take advantage of them because the predator knows that nobody’s going to believe them. It’s going to be an addict’s word against theirs, so that makes them much more vulnerable and much easier prey. |
| Rose Stahl: | It felt like I had officially blown that whistle that I had been threatening to blow, and that it was now in the right hands and that it would be only a matter of weeks and ta-da, everybody would be safe and protected and he would be gone. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Except… |
| Rose Stahl: | Except that was February, 2015. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | And Bathum wasn’t convicted until February, 2018. In the moment, Rose and Debbie’s Starbucks meeting felt like such a breakthrough for both of them, and yet they still had years of work ahead. CRLA fired Rose around this time. Rose believes it was retaliation for investigating Bathum. In part because Bathum faxed a three-page letter of threats to Debbie’s office at Anthem entitled, “Please give to Rose Stahl.” And yet, despite all of this, Rose kept going. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Rose spent months after the Starbucks meeting going back and forth with the Health Department. She’d write reports, submit documents, find other CRLA people to submit documents. There were a hundred emails. |
| Rose Stahl: | Just the red tape and the evidence. It just seemed never ending. Everybody always had somebody above them who needed more. So, you get the Health Department, whoever their supervisor is, needs more, more, more, more. And so you get more, more, more, more. And then her supervisor is like, “Oh, now we need more, more, more.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Debbie, meanwhile, focused on law enforcement. She hoped, because of her background, she’d have an in there. She asked Rose to put her in touch with the client who said in that video that she was raped by Bathum. |
| Debbie Herzog: | She and I met for coffee as well. And after I finished getting all the information from her, I said, “Are you willing to go to the police?” And she said, “Yes.” And I remember this. We were literally standing on the corner outside the Starbucks that we met at, and I started dialing, standing there. I dialed and dialed and dialed for days and weeks and months and could not get anybody to work with me on the assaults. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Why? |
| Debbie Herzog: | First reason, drug addict victim. Not reliable. Second reason, many of the victims, after I spoke to other women, many of them were assaulted in different towns. Some were LA City, some were LA County. There’s different… County is the Sheriff’s Department. City is LAPD. If they’re out in the burbs, it’s a local police department. And they kept saying, “Well, we can’t do that. We can only investigate what’s in our thing.” I said, “I don’t think so. I mean, bank robberies across jurisdictions all the time. And you guys investigate those.” |
| Debbie Herzog: | “Well, then you’re going to have to call the first place that it happened.” Then I call the first place that it happened and, “Nope, nope, nope.” We had a couple of retired law enforcement officers on our investigative staff at Blue Cross, so I went to one of them. I said, “I can’t be doing this cold calling. Nobody’s listening to me. I need a name. Can you give me a name of a sex crimes detective I can call?” |
| Debbie Herzog: | So, he gave me a name, a woman. I was all excited. Maybe somebody will listen. No, she gave me the same run around and I was going bonkers. I mean, bonkers. Literally banging my head against the wall. Like, “How can nobody be paying attention to this? Why doesn’t anybody care?” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | But Debbie, ever the prosecutor, presses right on. |
| Debbie Herzog: | I have all these spreadsheets and all this stuff, showing all the fraud and thinking, “Okay, if I can get them at least interested in the fraud, get my foot in the door in the fraud…” which was really all I could pitch to them, given my job at the time. And I literally walked myself into the DA’s office, asked to see the head of the fraud section, and sat down with her and her deputy for hours and laid out this scheme. And they took it, and they eventually got the sex crimes over to the sex crimes unit, and they took that. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Finally, finally, law enforcement is listening. The LA District Attorney’s office takes the case. And over the next few years, multiple agencies would get involved: the FBI, the California Department of Insurance, the LA County Sheriff’s Department. And what they found, it’s almost beyond comprehension. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | The total amount of fraud? $175 million. Bathum and his chief operating officer were charged with leading the scheme. It was one of the biggest healthcare fraud cases in California, and 13 women came forward and said Bathum sexually assaulted them. The trial was gut-wrenching, filled with traumatic, agonizing testimony from women in their 20s and 30s, who hoped to finally find recovery at CRLA. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | Bathum sexually assaulted one client during a guided group meditation in a sweat lodge. Many women said Bathum gave them drugs: heroin, meth, and cocaine. In 2020, five years after Rose and Debbie first met at Starbucks, Bathum was sentenced to 52 years in prison. In the sentencing memo, the LA District Attorney wrote, “The crimes committed by this defendant impacted so many lives and is a shadow that will likely continue to follow the victims for the rest of their life.” |
| Lauren Chooljian: | In order for someone to be caught for sexually abusing clients of a treatment center, the thing that client needs most, Debbie says, is someone to stand up for them. People with substance use disorder already face so many obstacles like shame, stigma, not being believed. |
| Debbie Herzog: | And there’s only so many times you can get beaten over the head and you just stop complaining. So, somebody needs to be their advocate. |
| Lauren Chooljian: | That’s the key. An advocate. |
| Debbie Herzog: | Yes, somebody needs to be their advocate. |
| Al Letson: | Thanks to reporter Lauren Chooljian for sharing this story with us. The 13th Step was recently honored with the duPont-Columbia Award. You can listen to the entire series wherever you get your podcasts, and you’ll find a link to it at RevealNews.org. |
| Al Letson: | Taki Telonidis and Katie Colaneri edited today’s show. The 13th Step was created by New Hampshire Public Radio’s document team. Lauren Chooljian reported and produced the series with help from Jason Moon, who also wrote the original music for the series. It was edited by Allison McAdam with help from Katie Colaneri and Dan Barrick. |
| Al Letson: | The fact-checker was Dania Suleman. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production managers are Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb. Mixing and sound design by the Dynamic Duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man yo, Arruda with Jason Moon. Our CEO is Robert Rosenthal. Our COO is Maria Feldman. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Comorado. Lightning. |
| Al Letson: | Support for Reveal’s provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |