Genie (Secret of the Wild Child)

>> Tonight on NOVA, the shocking story of a girl
who spent her childhood locked in a bedroom.

>> The girl reportedly was still wearing diapers

when a social worker discovered
the case two weeks ago.

>> Raised in isolation, Genie was a wild child,
uncivilized, barely able to walk or talk.

>> The indications are that she
was beaten for making noise.

>> With footage never before seen on television,
NOVA follows the controversial efforts

to unlock the "Secret of the Wild Child."

[ Music ]

>> Once in a great while, civilized society
comes across a wild child, a child who has grown

up in severe isolation with
virtually no human contact.

This is the story of such a case.

The story begins in Los Angeles
on November 4, 1970.

>> Officials in the Los Angeles
suburb of Arcadia have taken custody

of a 13-year-old girl they say was
kept in such isolation by her parents

that she never even learned to talk.

Her elderly parents have been
charged with child abuse.

>> This is the scene of the crime.

The child was locked in a room and tied
to a potty chair for most of her life.

Completely restrained, she was forced to sit
alone day after day and often through the night.

She had little to look at and no one
to talk to for more than 10 years.

>> The girl reportedly was uttering
infantile noises and still wearing diapers

when a social worker discovered
the case two weeks ago,

but the authorities are hoping she still
may have a normal learning capacity.

>> Here was a 13-year-old who seemed like an
infant, a girl who would be known as Genie.

[ Music ]

Genie was taken to Children's
Hospital in Los Angeles

where she immediately won the
hearts of doctors and scientists.

>> She was fragile and beautiful,
almost haunting, and so I was pulled,

I was very drawn to her, even though
I was nervous and had no idea,

in many respects, what to expect.

>> Genie was about to test an idea
important to science and society;

that a nurturing environment could make
up for even the most nightmarish of pasts.

[ Bells ]

>> If you make up a sentence in your head,
or you write it down, and it has, say, 10,

12 words in it, chances are you can
listen for the rest of your life

for someone else to say the sentence.

You can go to the library [inaudible].

>> Here at UCLA, Susan Curtiss teaches students

about a crucial human trait,
the ability to learn language.

>> At the library and chances are, you
will never come across that sentence.

>> The students begin their
study through a famous case.

>> The case name is Genie.

This is not the person's real name, but
when we think about what a genie is,

a genie is a creature that comes
out of a bottle or whatever,

but emerges into human society past childhood.

We assume that it really isn't a
creature that had a human childhood.

>> Susan Curtiss has a special connection
to the story she's telling, 20 years ago,

she was asked to join a team
working to rehabilitate Genie.

>> I was literally at the
right place at the right time.

I was a new graduate student
interested in language acquisition,

unencumbered by family ties or responsibilities,
and they asked me if I would be interested.

>> When Curtiss first joined the
case, Genie had a strange bunny walk

and other almost inhuman characteristics.

Genie constantly spat.

She sniffed and clawed.

She barely spoke or made any noises.

>> The indications are that she was
beaten for making noise and consequently,

had learned basically, not to vocalize.

And she really didn't vocalize very much at all.

When I first met her, she
was silent most of the time.

>> Genie also received daily
visits at Children's Hospital

from James Kent, her psychologist.

Kent recalls first meeting his new patient.

>> I was captivated by her.

I was not the last person
to become captivated by her.

The story, as we began to learn about it,
was sort of one of the things, of course,

that would reach out and grab you anyway.

But she had a personal quality that seemed to
elicit rescue fantasies, and this in a group

of people who were interested in taking care
of kids and who specialized in early childhood,

who were going to be sort of
powered by rescue fantasies anyway.

She reached out and grabbed lots of us.

>> One of Genie's most captivating qualities
was the intense way she explored her

new environment.

Oddly, even strangers who knew nothing about
her story seemed to sense her need to do so.

>> One particularly striking memory of those
early months was an absolutely wonderful man

who was a butcher, and he never asked her
name, he never asked anything about her.

They just connected and communicated somehow.

And every time we came in-and I know
this was so with others, as well --

he would slide open the little window and
hand her something that wasn't wrapped,

a bone of some sort, some meat, fish, whatever
and he would allow her to do her thing with it,

and to do her thing, what her thing was,
basically, was to explore it tactilely,

to put it up against her lips
and feel it with her lips

and touch it, almost as if she were blind.

>> Word of the Wild Child spread, attracting
scientists from all around the country.

One of them was Oklahoma
psychiatrist Jay Shurley.

>> When introduced, I extended my hand.

She reached out with her fingers
and delicately touched my hand,

and then, in a sense, that was it.

She had made my acquaintance.

She was satisfied, for herself, about me.

But my reaction was, I had a
thousand questions, immediately.

Who? What?

How? How does this come about?

Why is this?

Why do I see what I'm seeing?

>> Shurley was an expert in social isolation.

Genie was the most extreme case he'd ever seen.

>> Solitary confinement is, diabolically the
most severe punishment, and in my experience,

really quite dramatic symptoms develop
in as little as 15 minutes to an hour,

and certainly inside of two or three days

and try to expand this to
ten years boggles one's mind.

>> Shurley wanted to assess how well Genie
had survived her long years of isolation.

He directed the team to gather
information on her brain waves.

For four nights running, they
wired Genie to instruments

that measured the electrical
activity in her brain while she slept.

What they found was an unusually high
number of so-called sleep spindles,

the dense bunching patterns that look
like spindles on a spinning machine.

This was an abnormal brain wave pattern.