November 4, 1970, a girl who would later be known as Genie Wiley and her mother walked into the Social Services offices of Temple City, California. Immediately, one of the social workers noticed that something was wrong. Genie appeared to be a severely autistic girl of around six or seven years old. She walked with an extremely odd gait, she drooled and spat constantly, she wore a diaper, and she seemed to be entirely incapable of making a sound.
The only thing is Genie wasn’t six; she was 13. And she wasn’t autistic or deaf or disabled in any way. She was the victim of one of the worst abuse cases in human history.
Genie isn’t this girl’s real name. It’s a pseudonym given to her by social workers in an attempt to keep her real identity out of the press. As we will learn, her alias is remarkably fitting: the idea of the genie confined to a magical lamp, bottled up for years on end, a symbol of confinement and isolation.
Upon seeing Genie’s condition, social workers contacted the police and Genie was taken into care. A medical examination revealed that she was severely malnourished, her hips were deformed, and her stomach was distended. She had a large black callus, a ring of worn flesh that extended across her buttocks and the back of her thighs. She was completely incontinent, and she seemed to shy away from any form of human contact or interaction.
The reason for her terrible condition was unclear at first, but over time, police interviews with the mother would shed more light on the situation. Slowly, the true horror of what had been done to Genie was revealed.
Now, to really understand what happened, we have to go back to before Genie was born. Genie’s parents were Irene and Clark Wiley. Clark was an overprotective, jealous husband. He was frequently violent towards Irene if he thought that she stepped out of line. Since getting married, Irene had found her life becoming increasingly restrictive as Clark imposed more and more limitations on what she could do and where she could go.
Clark didn’t want any children. Yet, after five years of marriage, Irene fell pregnant. Late into her pregnancy, Clark beat her so badly that Irene was hospitalized. It was as she was lying in hospital, recovering from her injuries, that she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. However, back at home, the arrival of a newborn child only heightened Clark’s controlling nature. See, he had a thing about loud noises. The house was deliberately kept extremely quiet at all times. He and Irene conversed mostly in hushed tones. A radio was sometimes played, but it would always be kept at a very low volume.
The screaming of this newborn baby would have enraged Clark. When she was just two months old, he placed the baby into the unheated garage for several days. Eventually, this child caught pneumonia and died.
Irene soon fell pregnant again, but this second child died soon after birth. This time, it was because of a type of anemia called RH disease.
Irene’s third child was a boy named John. John, it seems, had more luck and he survived, or perhaps was allowed to live. However, by the age of three, John Wiley wasn’t potty trained and he wasn’t walking well, a sign of the neglect that he was experiencing at home. Clark’s mother stepped in at this point, sensing that Clark and Irene were having trouble raising the boy. She took John Wiley into her home for several months in order to get his development back on track.
Clark, it should be pointed out, was a complete mommy’s boy. He was more devoted to his mother than his own wife. In return, Clark’s mother absolutely doted on her son. She spent a lot of her time at the house, lavishing attention on Clark and his family, something that Irene found quite irritating. Clark’s mother even financially supported the family during times when Clark was out of work.
In April of 1957, Genie was born. It appears that the first few months of her life weren’t too unusual, at least compared to what would happen to her next. She probably experienced a similar level of neglect to her brother, but it seems that in her first 20 months of life, she was generally doing okay.
In December 1958, disaster struck. Clark’s mother was hit by a drunk driver and killed. This seems to have been a trigger point for Clark Wiley, the beginning of his descent into madness. He was already a neglectful, controlling, and violent man, but his mother’s death sent him even deeper into the realms of paranoid psychopathy. Clark became convinced that he needed to protect his wife and children from the evils of the outside world, and he did this in the most extreme way possible.
He moved his family into his dead mother’s house. The house had two bedrooms. One had been Clark’s mother’s bedroom, which he ordered to be left completely untouched, preserving it as a shrine to her memory. The other bedroom Genie was kept in. Clark, Irene, and their son John confined themselves to the living room. At night, John would sleep on a pallet on the living room floor, whilst Clark and Irene slept in armchairs. Often, Clark would keep a revolver on his lap, ready for any intruders.
Apparently, during these first few months at Clark’s mother’s house, Genie was sometimes allowed to play outside in the yard or placed in a playpen. Although, in Susan Curtis’s book Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child, she says that Irene confessed that Genie, left in the playpen to play, would take it apart with her fingernails. One wonders how long Genie, a tiny toddler, must have been left in that playpen. How long she must have been neglected or forgotten to resort to this action.
Over the following weeks, Clark’s paranoia intensified. Genie’s time in the playpen was reduced. She was progressively confined to the small bedroom more and more, until eventually, she was no longer allowed out of that room at all. A small child, not even two years old, confined to a single tiny room, neglected and forgotten. Such inhumanity hardly bears thinking about, but I haven’t even begun to describe the true horror of it.
She wasn’t just confined to that room; she was restrained there. This room had three pieces of furniture: a cupboard, a cot, and the potty chair. Clark had constructed a special harness that attached to the potty chair. During the day, Genie would be strapped naked into the chair. The strap was designed to stop her from moving her arms and legs too much. Apparently, this was to stop her from reaching into the potty and playing with her own feces.
Her cot also was essentially a cage. It had a wire mesh over the sides and the top to keep her locked in there. It also had a sleeping bag that could be pulled so tightly closed that Genie’s arms would be kept immobilized by her sides. If she was lucky, at night she would be placed into this cot, but more often than not, she would just be left sitting overnight in the potty chair.
The walls of the room were bare, the curtains on the window were kept drawn, and the door was always closed. Irene was discouraged from interacting with her daughter. The only real human interaction that Genie got was when Clark beat her for making a noise. In fact, he kept a large stick in one corner of the room just for that purpose.
If Genie got fed at all, it was done as quickly as possible to limit the amount of time spent with her. She was only ever fed slop, gruel, things like baby food or soggy cereal. The food would be spooned into her mouth as quickly as possible. If she choked or spat any of it out, it would be rubbed into her face as a punishment.
And it was like this, starved and alone, tied to the potty chair, that Genie remained for days, months, years on end. Years spent staring at the same blank walls, conditioned to remain completely silent, the restraints slowly deforming her body. According to Curtis’s book, there were other horrible abuses, the details of which haven’t been made public. I can’t even imagine what could be worse than what we already know.
Think of how many things you experienced between the age of two and the age of 13. Genie spent that period of her life in total isolation and deprivation.
During this time, Irene had gone almost completely blind. Even if she had wanted to help Genie, she was completely helpless. That is until October of 1970. At this point, Genie was 13 years old and still bound to the potty chair. Irene and Clark had a violent argument, and Irene threatened to walk out if he didn’t let her call her own parents—an interesting insight into the kind of coercive control that Clark held over her. Clark eventually relented, and he allowed Irene to make the call to her parents. Later that day, whilst Clark was out the house, Irene freed Genie from her restraints, and the two of them went to live with Irene’s parents.
Three weeks later, Irene and Genie made that fateful trip to the Social Services offices, where Genie was taken into care.
Genie’s condition when she first went into care was shocking to see. This comes from Susan Curtis’s book once again:
Genie was pitiful, hardly ever having worn clothing. She didn’t react to temperature, heat or cold. Never having eaten solid food, and Genie didn’t know how to chew and had a great difficulty in swallowing. Having been strapped down and left sitting on a potty chair, she could not stand erect, could not straighten her arms or legs, could not run, hop, jump, or climb. In fact, she could only walk with difficulty, shuffling her feet, swaying from side to side. Hardly ever having seen more than a space of 10 feet in front of her, the distance from her potty chair to the door, she had become nearsighted exactly to that distance. Having been beaten for making a noise, she had learned to suppress almost all vocalization save a whimper. Suffering from malnutrition, she weighed only 59 pounds and stood only 54 inches tall. She was incontinent of feces and urine. Her hair was sparse and stringy. She salivated copiously, spitting onto anything at hand. Genie was unsocialized, primitive, hardly human.
The way she walks is one of the most disturbing aspects for me. It became known as her “bunny walk.” To me, it looks like she’s permanently assuming a sitting position, as if she’s still in the potty chair. The years of confinement, bound in one position, has twisted her body into that shape forever.
The silence, too, is disturbing. Even when in pain or extreme anger, Genie wouldn’t cry, neither would she laugh when she was happy. As time went on, Genie did begin to imitate some of the words spoken to her by her carers, but she would always utter them in a strange, high-pitched, breathy voice, getting out the words as quickly as possible, as if she was terrified to make too much noise.
“Tired.”
“I, yeah.”
“You sleepy?”
“You jump good. Can we jump some more?”
There’s also the matter of delayed reaction. The carers found that if they gave Genie an instruction, perhaps 10 minutes later she would respond to the instruction as if she’d just been given it. To me, it’s as if the utter monotony of her isolation gave her a warped sense of time.
Genie’s speech, or lack of, made her particularly interesting to researchers in the field of linguistics. You see, science has done many, many inhuman things in the name of studying how the growing mind develops. This experiment shows that if you raise a kitten in a drum for five months where it can only see horizontal lines, then they lose the ability to perceive vertical lines, so when you let them out into the real world, they’ll walk around bumping into chair legs and things. The wire mother experiment, which I’ve done a whole video on, it was designed to prove that contact comfort is more important than milk giving in the mother-child relationship. Inadvertently, it also showed what a devastating effect social isolation has on rhesus monkeys.
The thing is, these experiments are always done on animals. To experiment on humans in this way would be unthinkable, and you can’t really use an animal to study human language acquisition. There’s a reason why Genie became known as “The Forbidden Experiment.” Her parents had done what scientists couldn’t. As a result, psychologists, neurologists, and linguists were falling over themselves to get a chance to study her.
Now, it would be easy to paint Genie’s treatment from here on out as complete exploitation, a bunch of scientists circling this human tragedy like vultures trying to extract whatever information they could, but I’m not sure if this paints a fair picture. Over the following few years, she was passed between various foster homes, each one having a different idea on how best to rehabilitate Genie. She was subjected to a barrage of tests and experiments by those who wanted to study her, but it also seems like those scientists were genuinely fond of Genie and wanted to study her in order to try and help her.
In the end, though, it did become a bit of a tug-of-war between competing egos, with Genie at the center. I’m not going to go too much into this because there’s way too many people involved, and I really just wanted to focus on Genie herself in this video. Russ Rymer’s book, Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, is a good source for this period of her life if you wanted to learn more about what was going on with the researchers.
The reports that came out of those studies from the people who cared for Genie give a good indication of what her personality was like:
When I arrived, she was having her breakfast. Although she sat at the table with two other children who were engaged in fairly typical childish conversation and play, she had nothing to do with them. It’s difficult to put into words the feeling I had about what she did. I don’t think it would be accurate to say that she actively ignored or rejected them; rather, it seemed to me that it was as though for her they were no different from the walls and furniture in the room. Genie had many distasteful mannerisms, and her behavior was often disconcerting and unpalatable. She salivated copiously and spit out her saliva onto anything near her: her body, her clothing, even onto her companion’s clothing or body. Since her body and clothing were filled with spit, she reeked of a foul odor. Her eating habits were also disturbing. Never having had solid foods, she didn’t know how to chew. When given solid foods, Genie would typically stuff her mouth with food and wait, cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk storing nuts, until her saliva could break down the food. Genie had a habit of walking around during mealtime, stopping at other children’s places at the table, sometimes attempting to take the portions of food that she especially liked: applesauce, milk, ice cream, etc. She often walked around with her mouth stuffed with food, and during her journey around the dining room, she would sometimes spit it out onto the nearest plate. Perhaps, in her bizarre unsocialized way, she was giving the other children an offering of food to make up for the offering of what she was about to take from them. In any case, her offering was never welcome, and mealtime with Genie was usually not a pleasant event.
Having been released from her prison, Genie seemed overwhelmingly curious about the world around her. Although she couldn’t speak, she would point to objects and want to know the name for them. Over time, she began mimicking these words.
“Is four.”
“Pour water. Get a glass of water.”
“You can. Show me the shoe that’s untied.”
“Untie.”
By 1971, she was able to use one-word phrases to describe what she wanted. A year later, she was able to put two words together. A year after that, and she was putting phrases of three words or more together.
“I will see Mama Saturday, right?”
Sometimes she would use physical gestures in place of words to form more detailed sentences. It was hoped that eventually she would learn to talk properly, but at some point, it’s as if she hit a wall with her learning.
You see, simply learning the meaning of words isn’t enough to form a language. There’s all kinds of rules and structures that we don’t even realize that we’re using, but we just seem to know intuitively. For example, and this comes from Russ Rymer’s book, the sentence “I gave the book to John” can be reversed to say “I gave John the book,” and that still sounds okay. But the sentence “I donated the book to John” feels a bit awkward if we change the words around in the same way; “I donated John the book” sounds weird. This is because “gave” is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, whereas “donated” comes from Latin. And for some reason, even though we’ve never really had these rules explained to us, we know that Anglo-Saxon verbs can be switched around in a way that latinate verbs cannot. And that’s just one example of the myriad weird language rules that we instinctively know.
It seems like it’s only in childhood when our brains are malleable enough to take all these rules on board. According to the linguist Eric Lenneberg, natural acquisition of a first language occurs during a critical period that begins at the age of two and ends in puberty—exactly the years that Genie was isolated. No matter how much they taught her, she was never going to acquire a full language.
This video gives a good example of some of her language problems:
“Let me see the log. Oh.”
Genie is saying, “I like log. I like Davey,” but this doesn’t necessarily mean she likes the thing. She might mean, “This is a log. I saw Davey.”
“I can draw a circle.”
She used the phrase “I like” as a generic way of beginning a sentence without really knowing how the phrase “I like” related to the word that followed it.
Despite her difficulties in acquiring language, she was sometimes able to express things about her past, and it revealed how much her past still haunted her. Phrases like:
“Father hit big stick.”
“Father hit Genie big stick.”
“Father take piece wood hit cry.”
Other disturbing aspects of her past were revealed through her behavior problems. She had an obsession with plastic containers, Tupperware, buckets, beakers, and she would hoard them in her room. Genie’s mother would later reveal that on rare occasions, whilst Genie was strapped to the potty chair, she would be given an empty cottage cheese container as a toy to play with.
Genie was also deathly afraid of dogs, even puppies. If she saw one in the street, she would run into traffic to avoid it. Eventually, they discovered the reason for her phobia: as she was growing up, her father would stand outside the bedroom door and make growling noises like a dog in order to keep her quiet. Some reports even state that he grew his nails extra long so that he could scratch her face.
And as for Clark Wiley, you might be wondering what kind of punishment he faced for his treatment of Genie. Well, none really. A month after Genie was rescued, just before Clark was scheduled to appear in court, he shot himself dead. A note was found on his body that stated:
The world will never understand. You want to see your father, father is not living.
Genie’s story doesn’t really have a happy ending. She was making good progress up until the age of 18, and then Genie moved back in with her mother. She went back to that house where she’d spent all those years imprisoned in a dark room. However, Irene Wiley found Genie’s behavior problems too much to handle. She contacted the California Department of Health, and Genie was taken into care once again.
This time, though, the care houses that she was placed in weren’t those loving families that had previously cared for her. These were strict foster homes where Genie was subjected to vicious verbal and physical abuse. Pretty quickly, she began to shut down. All the progress she’d made over the last five years started to undo itself. Genie was regressing.
At the end of Russ Rymer’s book, he relates a time when the psychologist Jay Shurley showed him a box full of photographs of Genie:
The last two photographs were of someone else, or so I thought. A large, bumbling woman with a facial expression of cowlike incomprehension. In one picture, the woman sits in a car pretending to drive, her eyes half-masked, her front teeth protruding in a drawn grin. In the second, the woman is indoors; she is about to cut a birthday cake with white frosting. Her eyes focus poorly on the cake. Her dark hair has been hacked off raggedly at the top of her forehead, giving her the aspect of an asylum inmate. Shurley watched grimly as my recognition dawned. “Her 27th birthday party,” he said. “I was there. And then I saw her again when she was 29, and she still looked miserable. She looked to me like a chronically institutionalized person. It was heart-rending. The way I think of Genie, she was this isolated person incarcerated for all those years, and then she emerged and lived in a more reasonable world for a while, and responded to this world, and then the door was shut and she withdrew again. Her soul was sick.” Without looking away from my face, he pointed to the photograph of the woman in the car. “This is soul sickness,” he said. “There’s no medical explanation for her decline into what appears to be organic biological dementia.”
The last report on Genie’s condition comes from a Guardian article from 2011. It says that four decades later, she apparently remains in state care. It also says authorities rebuffed the Guardian’s inquiries. If Genie is alive, information relating to her is confidential, and it doesn’t meet the criteria of information that is available through a FOIA request.
So I’ll leave you with this drawing by Genie, drawn in 1977, two years after she had been sent back into care. The labels were written by another person, but they were dictated by Genie:
“I miss Mama.”
“Mama’s hand.”
“Baby Genie.”
I’m not sure if this is a happy memory or a wish for a childhood that never was.
“You remember what it was like when you lived at home? What were you sitting on when you ate the cereal?”
“In the potty chair.”
“Where did you stay when you lived at home? Where did you live? Where did you sleep?”
“You slept in a potty chair.”
