Laine Justice's Extraordinary Story from Kidnapping to Fine Art Success
By Chadd Scott on
Laine Justice’s dazzling Electric Forest (2024) painting leaps at viewers like a dog reunited with its owner after a week away – all licks, and tail wags, and running in circles. Fantastically vivid colors. Pinks and blues. Trees. Water. Maybe even a little dog’s face.
An abstracted version of paradise.
Joyful.
Difficult imagining this cheery wonderland came from the mind of an artist kidnapped out of her bed by strangers in the middle of the night as a 14-year-old, drug down stairs, forced onto an airplane, flown across the county, and enrolled into a cult. A cult she’d spend her teenage years with being ritually physically, mentally, and emotionally abused, and sexually humiliated.
The details of Justice’s story are difficult to read. Imagine living through them. What follows recalls portions of her experience. Be forewarned. Throughout the article and following, links to resources for fellow survivors and advocates Justice shares on her website are included.
Laine Justice, 'Electric Forest 1,' (detail), 42 x 56. Oil, powdered pigment, flourescing paint, pencil, graphite and crayon on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
Kidnapped
When Laine Justice (b. 1981) was a teenager, she did teenage things. Experimented with alcohol and drugs. Yelled at her parents. Dressed goth. Typical angsty rebellion. She was a good kid, just full of hormones and emotions, and left alone at home for long stretches as kids in those days were. In hindsight, she believes she was neurodivergent. “Big emotions.”
Justice’s parents fell prey to what is known as the “troubled teen industry.” Organizations – some legitimate, others very much not – offering programs promising to return wayward kids to the straight and narrow. Justice became ensnared in one of the worst: CEDU.
“My parents found a very simple solution to a complex problem,” Justice told Essential West.
CEDU, from the cult Synanon, practiced pseudopsychology, around-the-clock thought reform, and abuse. Justice and her fellow “students” were habitually degraded. Dehumanized. Tortured.
All CEDU schools are not closed.
Upon arrival at the cult’s Idaho facilities and informing her captors she was vegetarian, Justice had a piece of meat hung meat around her neck which slowly rotted over the course of days. In a testimonial she’s writing for the “survivors of high-control environments” website IGotOut.org, shared with Essential West, she remembers, “10 weeks I survived off of only 1 pair of clean underwear and 2 bucket baths.”
That despite being forced to perform arduous daily physical labor and exercise – as a 14-year-old girl – exercise causing permanent shoulder damage. And sciatica. And trench foot. And giardia, a deadly parasite causing diarrhea for which she was given no medication.
Toilet “privileges” were withheld.
Vomiting was induced.
Her and her fellow inmates were denied education. Denied nutrition. Denied sleep. Denied medical care. Denied contact with the outside world.
Denied a childhood.
“I was just a 14-year-old kid that wanted to go home, to be loved, and wanted,” she writes in her testimonial.
She was constantly yelled at. She cried herself to sleep every night.
The sexual humiliation and emotional manipulation she endured, “set me up for a long line of abusive relationships later in life in which I confused control and a lack of boundaries for love.”
From this childhood came her extraordinary paintings. Reading them as escape checks out.
“At CEDU, I didn't get to draw very much,” Justice said. “Now, when I'm painting it, it feels really good to be able to create my entirely own world where I can feel and see everything that's happening compared to the actual world we live in.”
Getting Out
Justice was always creative. Always an artist. Prior to her kidnapping, she fondly remembers summers spent making things with her grandmother, a quilter, dollmaker, and ceramicist.
Then what happened happened.
Art was used by her captors as another device to control the teen’s behavior.
“It took me one entire year to earn the privilege to have my own set of art markers,” Justice’s testimony explains. “I was given oil paint on my 16th birthday, and only allowed to use it once, for half an hour, before it was taken away from me.”
Eventually, she was broken, coming to believe the program saved her life. She even gave glowing tours of the facilities imprisoning her to parents of perspective students. The mental, physical, and emotional torture she experienced for years worked. She was a kid who came to acknowledge her parents were coming to rescue her, no one was coming to rescue her, and as a defense mechanism, as a survival mechanism, it simply became easier to go along with the program than fight it.
“I wasn’t safe to not act ‘not ok’ there,” she chillingly writes in her testimonial.
The Laine Justice who first arrived at CEDU was gone.
Almost.
“I definitely have some parts of myself that are left from before I went there, but they're very hard to find, and probably the biggest piece would be painting and drawing,” Justice said. “That is something that even when they would say you're only allowed to draw this much, and you can only draw these things, it still didn't take the joy away from me when I would be doing it.”
Justice left CEDU a few months before her 18th birthday. Over many years following her release, talking to close friends and then medical professionals, what she had been programmed to perceive as “normal” she came to remember as abuse.
“Knowing the abusers forced a trauma bond is something I remain ashamed and frustrated with,” Justice shares in her testimonial.
Laine Justice, 'Electric Forest 1,' 42 x 56. Oil, powdered pigment, flourescing paint, pencil, graphite and crayon on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
Recovery
Today, Laine Justice is not merely an artist, she’s a successful artist. Justice was selected as one of 50 artists from over 470 submissions to participate in the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, CA’s True North, a biennial juried exhibition of North Bay artists on view through February 16, 2025. Electric Forest was her submission.
Extraordinarily, after leaving CEDU, Justice went on to earn a BFA in painting from the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York in 2003.
“I was a sculpture major first and I wasn't very interested in painting, and then when I went to Italy, to Florence, the art supply store, they had all these really beautiful pigments and gold leaf,” Justice said. “At that point, I got really fascinated by painting because I could make my own paint and control what the surface looked like. It felt much more physical, like sculpture or collage.”
Over time, she added more and more reflective items to her paintings like mica, muscovite chips, and glass chips, enjoying how these surfaces reflect light, giving her paintings different luminosity when seen from different angles.
Her unusual painting process has her working on roughly 20 canvases at any one time.
“When I'm painting, I'll put a few marks on each canvas instead of focusing on one. I like to give all the different marks time to dry so that I can layer them, and just sit with the pieces,” Justice explains. “Often, after a few marks, I'll see an animal or a way that things are connecting, then I'll start drawing on the canvas, and then I'll switch back to painting. I enjoy the fantasy aspect where I can sit there and imagine what do I really see there?”
Painting in this way typically has Justice taking a year to complete pieces. Electric Forest took even longer. It began before her pregnancy and was completed after. A pregnancy she considers miraculous considering her suffering from lupus.
Justice lives with lupus and ME/CFS, both of which cause severe fatigue. She believes her childhood trauma contributed to the afflictions.
“I used to be incredibly prolific before I had lupus, and now, I have to be really careful with my energy level,” she said. “The spoon theory (states) you only have like 10 spoons of energy in the day, and if you spend more, they're just coming from the next day. I try to be careful about how much I exert myself so that I don't get sick. I had a difficult adjustment period when I became really sick because so much of our culture is about how are you going to get better, how are you going to continue to do what you always do?”
The push through, hustle culture. Just do it!
Slogans and mindsets designed and promoted by corporations and capitalism to deny people their pain. Deny people rest. To promote productivity over everything else.
“I used to feel very guilty even taking a nap, and my doctor (said) your body actually needs that,” Justice remembers. “It's about taking care of yourself, and you're not very useful if you don't take a nap because then you can't function.”
Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. After nearly 25 years of hard work deprogramming her teen years, Justice now describes her life as “beautiful.” Not idyllic. Not normal, whatever that means, but beautiful.
“I wish I felt like how I observe some other people feel, things are simple for them, and they're able to enjoy something so basic like watching a sports game on TV with friends. I have never been that way,” she admits.
In addition to her art practice, Justice performs advocacy work focused on raising awareness about institutional child abuse within congregate care. Follow her efforts on social media, and follow the hashtags #Unsilenced #ISeeYouSurvivor #UnitedWithOneVoice #KidsOverProfit #LetsTalkAboutIt #ThinkOfUs #IGotOut #breakincodesilence
Unsilenced.org helps advocate for children caught in the troubled teen industry.
Lathrop Lybrook’s survivor story of the Rocky Mountain Academy CEDU school.
