All language subtitles for Genie Wiley - TLC Documentary 2003.en

- Officials in the Los Angeles
suburb of Arcadia

have taken custody of a
13-year-old girl and they say

was kept in such
isolation by her parents

that she never even
learned to talk.

The girl still wore diapers and
was uttering infantile noises

when a social worker discovered
the case two weeks ago.

But the authorities are
hoping she still

may have a normal
learning capacity.

- Among the first to
see the child was

Temple City Detective,
Sergeant Frank Linley.

- I already knew that
the child was 13 1/2 years old.

And I took one look at her..

and she wasn't much
bigger than my daughter,

Beverly, who had just
turned seven

about three months earlier.

And I really had a hard
time conceiving of the idea

that the child was the age
that she was.

The child obviously
had been severely mistreated

as she was still in diapers,
couldn't walk.

She had no verbal skills
at all at that point.

The last time I was
on this street was probably

30 years ago.

Yes there it is.
Hasn't changed much.

The back yard looks the same.
It's all weeds and dead grass.

Looks the same
as it did in 1970.

- The house belonged
to Clark Wiley.

A loner, Clark had turned
his back on the world

after his mother had been killed
in a hit and run accident.

After the accident,

things in the Wiley house
would never be the same again.

- The house was completely dark.

All the blinds were drawn
and there were no toys,

no clothes, nothing
that would ever indicate

to you that a child
of any age lived there.

The child's bedroom was
back in this corner.

That was the bedroom.

The windows were covered to
about three inches from the top.

Which were the only natural
light that had ever come in

there in all the time
the child was in the bedroom.

Entire furnishings of
the bedroom consists of a cage

with a pull down
chicken wire lid and some type

of piece of wire securing
it when they closed it down.

There was a potty chair

with some kind of
homemade strapping device.

- For 13 years, Genie had spent
her nights locked in bed.

Her days, strapped
to a potty chair.

During that time Clark had
ordered his son John

and wife Irene, never
to talk to her.

In her darkened room she had led
a life of near total isolation.

Even close neighbors were
completely unaware of her presence.

- We came home from work
and the police was here

and they came to question us.

That's when we found out,
you know,

what happened and, you know,
that they had a little girl.

Nobody knew, nobody knew before.

And when we found out

what happened
and how she was treated,

I mean, everybody was shocked
and just unbelievable.

- For their whole marriage,

Clark had imposed
his will on Irene.

And blind with cataracts,

she had been too
scared to resist.

But one day something broke.

While Clark was
out buying groceries,

she seized her chance and fled.

It was the first glimpse

the world would have of Clark
and Irene's dark secret.

- I met Clark and Irene at
Temple City Sheriff's Station.

They were both under arrest
at the time.

When we interviewed Irene
she would make no mention

of the family whatsoever,
particularly the children.

I attempted along with
my partner to interview Clark.

He refused to talk to us.
He wouldn't say a word.

He never even acknowledged

that he understood
what we were talking about.

- Mr. Wiley?
- Yes.

- Why did you keep
your daughter in a room--

- Mr. Wiley has no comment.
- No comment.

- We haven't had time
to discuss the charge

and we haven't even seen them.

- Unable to face the truth,

Clark took matters
into his own hands.

- This morning the authorities reported
that 70 year old Clark Wiley,

shot and killed himself just
before he was to go to court

and be arraigned
for child abuse.

- After 13 years,
Genie was at last free.

And for scientists,

she was just the case
they had been waiting for.

For 13 years Genie had lived
a life of complete isolation.

Raised in a city bedroom,
Genie was as much

a feral child as if she
had been brought up by wolves.

At 13 she was the size
of a six year old.

Worst of all she had never
been taught to speak.

The question now,
could she ever learn?

Genie's case was so
scientifically important

that the government funded
a team of scientists

to help answer the many
questions she posed.

Two of the scientists who would
become especially important

to Genie were
child psychologist James Kent

and linguist Susan Curtiss.

- [Curtiss] It's so wonderful
to see you. God.

- Neither had ever encountered
a case as extreme as Genie's.

- [Kent] We looked at her as a--

as a newborn in a way.

Even though we know she hadn't--

she came with 13 years
of memories and experiences.

Not all of them wonderful.
Most of them not, I think.

And so we thought we needed

to start to expose her to what
the world was going to be

like for her
outside the hospital bed.

- To Genie, everything
was a new experience.

- We did what you
would do with--

with your own kids.

If you were introducing
them to the world.

You'd take them out and
hold them up and show them.

Sort of judge from how they reacted

to whether this was too much

or not enough and you could
move on and do the next thing.

- Genie was making
amazing progress.

As the experts looked on,

they realized that she might
be the answer to the question

that had troubled science
for so long.

- [Curtiss] So we seized
this wonderful opportunity

that she provided us
in as loving a way

as we could but using it
to finally get our chance

to address head-on
specific hypotheses

and notions about human language
and the human mind.

- These hypotheses were based
on the latest ideas

about how children's
brains developed.

According to the theory,

young children could only learn
certain things at certain times,

called critical periods.

Language was one of
these critical periods

and according to the theory,

Genie who was now a teenager,
had missed her chance forever.

But incredibly, Genie seemed
to be proving the theory wrong.

As this footage shows,
Genie was blossoming.

Not only was she
delighted by the world

around her but she
was learning the words

for the new things
she was seeing.

- [Curtiss] She was extremely
interested in everything around her.

She wanted to know the word
for everything around her.

She wanted to engage
people all around her.

She was not mentally deficient.

Her lights were on and everyone

who worked with her from
teachers to therapists to me,

knew that she was not retarded.

It was clear as day.

And as she began to learn more
and more words,

hundreds of words, much more
rapidly than I ever imagined.

And string them together, I began
to think maybe I will be wrong.

Maybe she will be the one

that will prove that
this hypothesis is incorrect.

- But Genie could not
escape the effects

of her past so easily.

She was still haunted
by her traumatic upbringing.

Trapped by the memories of
the awful fate she had suffered.

And linguistically she
had stopped making progress.

- [Curtiss] She learned
tons of words.

She has an enormous vocabulary.
But language is not words.

Language is grammar.
Language is sentences.

How do you make a sentence?
What can be a sentence?

What is a sentence?

How do you automatically
know something's a sentence?

So it wasn't because she
was cognitively deficient

in other respects it was because
she was cognitively deficient

in this island of human mind.

The mental faculty
that we call grammar.

- At the time Genie was found,

brain science was
in its infancy.

But today we have a much
clearer picture

of what actually
happens in cases

of extreme neglect like Genie's.

- [Perry] In Genie's brain,
the left part of her brain,

her cortex, that has
those neural systems responsible

for speech and language.

Because she never
heard any words

and because she
was never taught--

spoken to very often.

They didn't get stimulated.

And because they
weren't stimulated,

they got smaller
and less functional

and disconnected and ultimately

that part of the brain
literally physically changes.

- Today with modern
imaging technology,

we can actually see what happens
in the brains of feral children.

And the effects are shocking.

Without normal stimulation,

their brains are smaller
and malformed.

And the earlier this neglect begins
and the longer it carries on,

the worse the damage will be.

Starved of stimulation,

Genie's brain had simply
not developed

the capacity for language.

And now that she was a teenager,

she would never
be able to learn.

Despite this, Genie continued
to be a close part of everyone's life.

But there was more
trouble ahead.

- [Kent] Children have to belong
to somebody when they grow up

and she was still a child.

And she needed a
family to belong to.

So that's what we
would have liked,

a family that she
could belong to.

And that's not what
happened unfortunately.

What did happen
is about the worst outcome

I think we would
have envisioned.

- On her 18th birthday,

Genie moved back with her
mother, Irene, into the house

in which she had been
so terribly abused.

But after only a few weeks,

it was clear that
Irene couldn't cope.

From here, Genie was
moved into state care

with terrible consequences.

- [Curtiss] I was a student and
people wouldn't listen to me.

People who needed to intervene
did not listen to me.

And so I spent lots and lots
of time on the phone pleading

with people to intervene
and save this person

who had had the worst experience

of deprivation and isolation
in all recorded medical history.

- Genie moved from home to home.

Sometimes with the very people
who served as her therapists.

This potential conflict
of interest raised tensions

among the many
people involved in her life.

And a tug of war erupted
over the child.

As Genie's
condition deteriorated,

Irene decided that Susan Curtiss

and the other academics had
become too close to Genie.

A lawsuit followed.

- [Curtiss] I went from being asked
to be her guardian to one week

later being prevented
from seeing her or phoning her.

And ever since then
I've been prevented

from having any contact at all.

So although I have lots of,
you know, I'm still a scientist,

I'm still interested in knowing
things about her language now.

And all kinds
of interesting things

I would like
to pursue academically,

primarily I would
just like to see her.

- Now a ward of the court,

Genie lives in an adult
care home somewhere

in Los Angeles, prevented
from seeing the people

who once meant so much to her.