Danielle Bregoli, aka Bhad Bhabie, is coming forward about her experience at Turn-About Ranch in Escalante, UT. She was placed in the troubled teen wilderness program following her viral appearance on Dr. Phil in 2016. In a YouTube video uploaded on Friday, she details how she was kidnapped in the middle of the night, handcuffed, and taken to the isolated ranch, where she was denied “necessity privileges” and witnessed troubling behavior, including other children being physically restrained by staff. Bregoli, who is now 18, was sent to the abusive program when she was just 13 years old.

“I was taken there against my will,” Bregoli shares. “[They] come in the middle of the night, they don’t tell [the kids] where they’re going. They just take them, handcuff them, and put them in the car. It’s basically like kidnapping.”

The rapper says that she was inspired to share her story after a fellow program attendee and Dr. Phil alum named Hannah Archuleta accused one of the Turn-About staffers of sexual assault. “When I had seen the punishments [Archuleta] was given, I knew I really had to say something … because I truly believe they did that,” she said in the video.

“It’s just our word against the staff’s word when you’re there, because there’s no witnesses, there’s no cameras, you don’t have a phone, there’s none of that,” Bregoli explained. “That’s why I was so scared to speak out, because I was like, ‘No one’s going to be believe me.'”

There are hundreds of these programs across the country, and they’ve been under intense scrutiny recently. Bregoli’s claims are comparable to Paris Hilton’s, who was also sent to a teen wilderness program in Utah, as well as Provo Canyon School, a boarding school for troubled teens. Hilton spoke out about the trauma she endured last year in her documentary This Is Paris and also works closely with Breaking Code Silence, a social movement organized by survivors of the Troubled Teen Industry that Bregoli highlighted in the description of her YouTube video. Sending “troubled teens” away to programs like this is “part of the whole Dr. Phil show,” according to Bregoli. In her YouTube video, the 18-year-old claimed that while her mother had threatened to send her away before, Bregoli never believed she really would — until she ended up at Turn-About Ranch.

Bregoli’s video includes many troubling details about her time at the ranch, which is still in operation, including being forced to sit up for three days straight — laying down and sleeping comfortably was apparently not allowed. “This place is all about taking away privileges, like okay yeah, the phone and the TV and all of that, but they take away necessity privileges, like sleeping on a bed, eating good food, not being cold,” she revealed. Program attendees were required to do intense manual labor, and would be punished if they broke any of the ranch’s numerous rules — or if a staff member was in a bad mood, Bregoli said. She also described being ignored after telling staff members that another student was being bullied or mistreated by a peer.

In one upsetting part of the video, Bregoli recounted hearing about the death of James “Jimmy” Woolsey, a Turn-About Ranch employee who was murdered by a teen enrolled in the program, through a counselor’s walkie-talkie, an experience she calls traumatic and scary.

“I’m not really sure why Dr. Phil still sends kids here. It really doesn’t make sense,” Bregoli says. “Are you trying to help them or are you trying hurt them even more?”

Representatives for Dr. Phil have not responded to Refinery29’s request for comment, and Dr. Phil — who has not renewed his license to practice psychology since 2006 — has yet to respond publicly to Bregoli’s claims.

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As the country continues to reel from the mass shooting in Atlanta that left eight dead, including six Asian American women, another upsetting detail is emerging. The husband of one of the shooting victims, who is Latinx, says that police harassed him following the attack. In an interview with Mundo Hispánico, a Spanish-language news outlet, Mario González claimed he was handcuffed and detained for hours by Cherokee County Sheriff’s deputies in relation to the shooting. He also claims he was not made aware of his wife Delaina Ashley Yaun’s death hours after law enforcement officers knew she had been killed.

“Maybe because I’m Mexican, I don’t know,” González told the outlet. “Because the truth is, they treated me badly.” González then showed the outlet the handcuff marks on his arm.

González says the couple decided to visit the spa because his wife was “tired of working so much, she was working every day.” They had finally found a babysitter for their 8-month-old daughter, per additional Jezebel reporting. Yaun was in the spa when 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, a white man, came in and opened fire.

The shooting came after a year of increased hate crimes directed toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. In the past year, there have been a reported 3,800 hate crimes against the AAPI community, 68% of which have targeted Asian American women. Authorities have not yet categorized the March 16 mass shooting — which was carried out at three separate Asian-owned spas — as a “hate crime,” despite the shooter targeting Asian businesses. Long blamed his “sex addiction” and claimed he was targeting “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Police also claimed that Long having a “bad day” was a reason that he shot and killed eight people.

AWKWORD, an artist, activist, and co-founder of Ten Demands For Justice, an organization advocating for the defunding and eventual abolishment of police departments and prisons, tweeted: “If the police response to the Atlanta shooting wasn’t racist enough: Mario Gonzalez, a Latino man, was in the spa where 8 were killed, and — instead of being comforted — was treated as a suspect and handcuffed for 2 hours. His wife was 1 of the women murdered.”

It’s horrifying that in the wake of a racially motivated attack, police treated a victim’s husband like a criminal — but it’s not surprising. This country has a long history of ignoring Black, brown, and Indigenous voices when they experience racism and race-based violence, and even blaming victims for the crimes committed against them. After a man walked into an El Paso, TX, Walmart and murdered 23 people, specifically targeting Latinx people and mirroring the former president’s racist, anti-Latinx, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, there were still people who debated whether his motives were racist.

And, Black people continue to be asked to prove the existence of white supremacy and anti-Black sentiments pervasive in this country. One would have hoped, though, that officials would give a little more consideration to a man who had just lost his wife — an experience far worse than just having a “really bad day.”

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AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company behind the latest COVID-19 vaccine to release the results of its clinical trial, is looking to join the ranks of vaccines already approved in the United States. On Monday, the company announced that their vaccine was found to be 79% effective against the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. and that they would be applying for approval for usage in April, according to the Associated Press.

The news of the AstraZeneca vaccine’s overall effectiveness comes after Europe enacted a temporary ban against it following reports of blood clots and unexplained bleeding in people who received it. Out of the millions of injections across the continent, about 30 cases of blood clots forming in the body came to light, prompting leaders from countries including France and Germany to stop the import of the vaccine out of public concern. However, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), after investigating the issue, concluded on Thursday that there were more benefits than risks in relation to the usage of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

“This is a safe and effective vaccine,” Emer Cooke, the executive director on EMA, said during a press briefing on Thursday, as reported by Al Jazeera. “If it were me, I would be vaccinated tomorrow.”

Although skepticism around this particular vaccine has reached the U.S., there’s no evidence to support it. Medical experts have stood in AstraZeneca’s corner throughout the pushback. Many have highlighted that the vaccine has proven to be effective in what it sought to do in the first place: protect people from the spread of COVID-19.

“Although the AstraZeneca vaccine is not yet approved for use in the USA, I hope that it soon will be,” Dr. Paul S Pottinger, MD, a professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, Division of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, told Refinery29. “This is because it has been found to be very safe and highly protective against COVID-19 in very large and well-designed clinical trials.”

On whether or not the AstraZeneca vaccine played a role in the development of blood clots in certain patients, Dr. Pottinger notes that they weren’t a side effect detected during larger clinical trials and is doubtful of a causal relationship between clots and the vaccine. “The risk of being harmed or even killed by COVID-19 is certainly greater than this theoretical and unproven risk of blood clots,” he added.

Despite the uproar caused by the few blood clots cases, the AstraZeneca vaccine isn’t even the first widely distributed vaccine to be connected to this side effect: Blood clots were reported to have formed in some patients after the usage of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil during the late 2000s to the mid-2010s. After further exploration from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 90% of people who reported blood clots had underlying risk factors, including genetic clotting abnormalities and smoking.

“It was the Danes who put the kibosh on Gardasil several years ago over a very vague pain syndrome,” said Dr. John D. Grabenstein, RPh, PhD, the general manager of Vaccine Dynamics, noted in his defense of the AstraZeneca vaccine. “Stopping a vaccination program should take more than the identification of an adverse event, it should be when it’s rising above a baseline value, not just when something bad happened in a vaccinee.”

Popular forms of birth control pills, which are widely available and commonly used, are also known to increase the risk of blood clotting in a woman’s body up to four times thanks to the increased production of estrogen, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Still, even in their defense of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the cautious approach taken by European medical experts has been understood to a degree by experts here in the U.S.

“It’s early and so I think we have to be cautious,” said Dr. Norman Baylor, the President and CEO of Biologics Consulting. “They were very clear this was out of an abundance of caution. You can look at the science and you can also look at perception. I’m only speculating, but I think they felt perception-wise, this was the best thing to do. The verdict is still pending.”

Should the AstraZeneca vaccine get approved for usage in the U.S., it certainly won’t be the first vaccination that comes with a risk of some sort. In the long run, its hypothetical approval will lead to more vaccine accessibility for those who need it.

Additional reporting by Molly Longman.

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After the massive success of Netflix series Ginny & Georgia, breakout star Antonia Gentry, who plays Ginny, appeared on The Ellen Show to talk about the project, her role, and how her personal experiences with racial microaggressions made their way into the show.

The segment was guest-hosted by tWitch, who was eager to hear about how Gentry wove her own personal stories into the dialogue of Ginny & Georgia — in particular, he said, as the father of children who identify as biracial. Throughout the 10-episode series, Ginny addresses multiple aspects of her identity, like race and the beauty standards that have oppressed people for centuries. Ginny is put in situations where she’s pointed out as different, or is subjected to unrealistic and damaging expectations when it comes to her appearance.

“There are moments where Ginny’s friends have microaggressions that they put on her, and some of that comes from my own experiences,” Gentry explains. “There was a character named Samantha, for example, and she asks Ginny questions that are pretty insensitive like, ‘What are you? You look so exotic!’ or ‘Which one of your parents is white?’ or ‘I want to have mixed babies, but I don’t want to deal with all that hair.’ And I think another character, Brody, when Ginny has straight hair, he tells her she looks a lot better with her hair straight. If only she had a butt, then she would be perfect.”

Gentry goes on to explain how these scenes are all too relatable to her own life. “Those were things that were said to me by some of my peers growing up and they didn’t realize how hurtful those comments were,” she says. “To include them in the show, I think, was really important to bring up discussions.”

Not only did her character’s experiences mirror Gentry’s own in many ways, but being given the opportunity to revisit them proved to be a therapeutic experience for her.

“When I was that age, I was confused,” the now-23-year-old star explains. “I didn’t really understand why I felt so much like an outcast sometimes. I feel like a lot of people, they experience things where something is said to them that is hurtful, or something is done to them that is hurtful, but in the moment, you’re kind of just surprised. You don’t really know how to process it. You don’t really know how to address it. And it’s not until later on that you realize, ‘Oh, this is what happened. Oh, I wish I had said this.’ And so, definitely, playing Ginny and playing those moments was very cathartic for me. I forgave myself, essentially, for not sticking up for myself. I forgave my friends for not being aware of what they were doing.”

The true-to-life nature of Ginny & Georgia is part of what makes it so impactful, and why it’s been sitting in Netflix’s Top 10 for weeks. Moreover, it shows that the more natural hair is both celebrated and not shied away from, the more these conversations have an opportunity to exist and be discussed openly.

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Kylie Jenner is in the hot seat after asking fans to donate to her makeup artist’s GoFundMe over the weekend. Samuel Rauda, a celebrity makeup artist whose clients include Jenner, Bella Thorne, and Bebe Rexha, was recently involved in a serious accident, reportedly leaving him with $60,000 in medical bills. Rauda’s family created a GoFundMe page to help pay for the expenses, which Jenner posted the link to on her own Instagram Story. “Swipe up to visit his family’s GoFundMe,” read the call to action.

Before the Story had a chance to expire, Jenner was already getting dragged on social media. Immediately, fans questioned why, given her billionaire status, Jenner’s contribution to her own makeup artist’s medical bills was only $5,000 — and why she was soliciting her followers to put forward their own funds. A breakdown by Business Insider of how much well-known billionaires make in an hour estimates that Jenner rakes in approximately $19,000 every 60 minutes. By that metric, Jenner’s income over roughly three hours would have paid for Rauda’s medical bills in full. With her $5,000 donation, she paid the equivalent of about 15 minutes of her time. 

For reference, the current median income in the United States — the wage at which half the workforce is either paid more or less — stands at $19.33 an hour or about $40,000 per year. If someone making that wage, which could easily be a considerable swath of her fans, paid the same percentage of their respective hourly wage as Jenner did, it would come out to donating $4.83.

Even without sitting down and doing the math, fans immediately got the impression that Jenner’s contribution fell short. Twitter quickly filled with people sharing their thoughts on the matter.

So Kylie Jenner who apparently earns over $450k A DAY and is a billionaire shared the 60k gofundme of her friend who got in an accident for us poor people to donate to? Celebrities are a different breed.

— Queen of the Universe 🧚🏾‍♂️ (@tobeebayb) March 20, 2021

wait so kylie jenner’s make up artist got into a car accident and needed $60k for emergency brain surgery and she asked her fans to donate???? and then only donated $5,000 when she’s a literal billionaire? the wrong people have money.

— nataleebfitness (@nataleebfitness) March 20, 2021

Kylie Jenner, who makes $19K/hr asking for $$$ from her fans to help her make up artist pay for a $60,000 surgery, is an excellent example of why we need universal healthcare. Even billionaire employers like Kylie and Walmart aren’t willing to pay for their employees’ healthcare.

— Moumita for City Council D24 (@disruptionary) March 21, 2021

Jenner has not yet responded to fans or commented on the situation, and her Instagram Story has since expired, but with followers engaging in an important conversation around celebrity status and healthcare inequality, it seems like this backlash will last a lot longer than the next 24 hours. 

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A new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has concluded that women are more likely to experience side effects after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. According to the “First Month of COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Monitoring” study published last month, 79% of reports of the more serious symptoms caused by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines came from women.

The monthlong study followed the first 13,794,904 Americans who received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, noting how they reacted to the shots from December 14, 2020, to January 13, 2021. People reported symptoms using the vaccine adverse event reporting system, or VAERS, for the study; the VAERS system also monitored the vaccine’s effect on the body. During this time, the most frequent side effects reported were headache, fatigue, and dizziness, along with 62 cases of anaphylaxis. One hundred and thirteen total deaths were also reported by the study’s end, including 78 among long-term care facility residents taking part. By the end of the study, it was found the vaccine’s side effects were overwhelmingly reported by women. Only 62.1% of the actual study participants were women.

Experts have pointed to differences in immune systems between men and women as a reason why one sex reported more symptoms. “We see more autoimmune diseases in women than we do in men and we know the effects of pregnancy on the immune system can be significant,” David Wohl, MD, an infectious diseases physician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, told ABC7 on Saturday. He also explained that women are more likely to report their symptoms to a medical professional compared to men.

Microbiologist and immunologist Sabra Klein, PhD, who works at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, echoed the “sex difference” in how people are affected by vaccines in The New York Times earlier this month, stating that it was “completely consistent with past reports of other vaccines.” She also noted that “there is value to preparing women that they may experience more adverse reactions. That is normal, and likely reflective of their immune system working.”

Since the study’s end, Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine has been given approval for usage in the U.S., and AstraZeneca is applying for approval in April. Vaccine eligibility currently varies by state, but many frontline workers, public-facing government and other employees, and people over the age of 60 are among those being given priority. President Joe Biden announced earlier this month that all adults in the U.S. would be eligible to be vaccinated by May 1 in an effort to get the country largely back to “normal” by July 4.

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