A North Carolina wilderness therapy group where a 12-year-old boy died earlier this month faces new allegations of mistreatment, this time from a former female participant who says a program therapist instructed her not to tell anyone she had been sexually assaulted by another camper.

In a federal lawsuit filed Friday, the former camper said she was 12 when she was sent to the camp in Transylvania County, 140 miles west of Charlotte. She soon learned — and reported — that a girl in the program was sexually assaulting others, she said. But, she alleged, staff members did nothing to prevent it from happening again.

“The most upsetting part for me is the trauma I experienced was preventable,” the former camper, now 20, told The Charlotte Observer, which usually does not name survivors of sexual abuse.

A spokesperson for Trails Carolina said in an email Monday that the program had not yet been served with the lawsuit, “so we won’t be able to respond to its allegations.”

The former camper’s allegations come on the heels of a similar federal lawsuit filed in 2023 by a former participant who claims that Trails Carolina did too little to stop an older fellow camper from sexually assaulting her in 2019, despite her repeated requests to be separated from the assailant.

Concerns about Trails Carolina have been voiced for years. In 2014, 17-year-old Alec Lansing died after running away from the program. The state Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates therapeutic programs, has cited the program with multiple deficiencies in recent years.

And on Feb. 3, a 12-year-old boy from New York was found dead at a camp cabin. He had arrived at the program less than 24 hours earlier.

How the boy died has not yet been determined, authorities say. But the death appeared “suspicious,” according to a news release issued by the Transylvania County sheriff’s office. A forensic pathologist told investigators that the death did not appear to be natural, the sheriff’s office said.

Trails Carolina has disputed that characterization, contending that preliminary reports indicate the boy’s death was “accidental.”

Could sexual assaults have been prevented?

On its website, Trails Carolina says it was founded in 2008, largely on the belief that a wilderness setting enhances the benefits of therapy.

Participants in the for-profit program typically enroll for 85 days, the program’s website says, and tuition is $675 to $715 per day.

Trails Carolina takes children ages 10 to 17 on wilderness expeditions, and its therapists meet with children on a weekly basis, the website says. The program helps minors with a variety of conditions, including depression, anxiety and anger management problems, it says.

In the most recent lawsuit, the former camper said a girl in the program told Trails Carolina staff that she had been sexually assaulted by another participant in the program. This occurred about a week after the girl arrived in May 2016.

But Trails Carolina didn’t remove the alleged assailant from the girl’s group and instead “took away all of the children’s tent ‘privileges’ and made them all sleep in a line under a tarp instead,” the lawsuit says.

Soon afterward, “Jane Doe” sexually assaulted the same victim, the complaint alleges. After campers reported that to the staff, the staff members failed to report the assaults to regulators or law enforcement, as the law requires, the lawsuit states.

And a therapist in the program dismissed the complaints as “drama in the group,” according to the lawsuit.

The therapist could not be reached for comment Monday. A spokesperson for Trails Carolina did not respond to an email asking for the program’s response to the suit’s allegations.

After the former camper who filed the recent lawsuit informed her parents about the alleged assault, they reached out to the therapist, who responded that she was “certain that student’s story is an embellishment,” the lawsuit states.

The therapist urged the former camper to befriend “Jane Doe,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed by Columbia, S.C. lawyers Shaun Blake and Jenkins Mann.

Several weeks later, “Jane Doe” sexually assaulted a second camper – and soon afterward did the same thing to the former camper, the lawsuit says.

The former camper who filed the lawsuit told The Charlotte Observer that she informed the therapist that she’d been assaulted, but the therapist did not report that incident to authorities, the lawsuit states.

Instead, the lawsuit alleges, the therapist made the former camper promise not to tell anyone else about the assault and told her she was “equally at fault.” The therapist also told the former camper that crossing physical boundaries “was not ok,” according to the lawsuit, but what the former camper did was “worse because she caused additional ‘drama’ by disclosing her sexual assault to others.”

‘Feeling worse instead of better’

The former camper, who lives in New England, told The Observer that her parents had sent her to the program to get help for depression.

“I couldn’t understand why I kept feeling worse instead of better,” she said. “…The trauma has been very hard to live with. It impacts me every day.”

Now, the lawsuit alleges, the former camper suffers from PTSD, panic attacks and other problems as a result of what happened to her at Trails Carolina.

The former camper alleges that she was also mistreated in other ways during her time with the program. She wasn’t given enough food on long hikes, she said, and wasn’t allowed to shower for her first 10 days at the camp.

She also said she wasn’t given prompt medical attention for infections. Painful staph infections developed on both her arms as a result of insect bites, she said. But she said she was not taken to a physician for treatment. She still has scars from the wounds, she said.

The former camper said concern for other children ultimately led her to file the lawsuit.

“I didn’t feel like the kids at Trails would be safe unless I did something about what happened,” she said.

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