Rocky's Horror Show? Stallone-backed Kids' Charity Faces Sex-abuse Allegations

Sylvester Stallone Kept His Association With the Devereux Foundation, Now Mired In Abuse Litigation

Sylvester Stallone at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)

Sylvester Stallone, best known for his breakout role as the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, endorsed a mental healthcare provider called the Devereux Foundation, while claims steadily amassed against Devereux’s facilities for sexual and other abuses.

Now, as Paramount promotes the second season of The Family Stallone, Devereux is facing a congressional investigation and class-action litigation.

Devereux opened its first residential school, for developmentally challenged children, in Philadelphia in 1912. According to some, that was the start of “the troubled teen industry,” a group of juvenile residential facilities that has been accused of torture, killings, cultism, quackery, neglect and other abuses in reports and testimony by the Government Accountability Office, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, American Bar Association, psychologists, psychiatrists and former patients and parents.

Devereux expanded rapidly, acquiring real estate in California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Arizona.

Stallone was born in 1946. A complication left part of his face paralyzed, affecting his speech and causing him to be bullied. He went by the name Michael to avoid a disparaging childhood nickname.

Stallone’s home life was also volatile. By the time he was five he had been in and out of foster care. At 11, his parents divorced.

Frequently expelled, by 17, Stallone has said, he had been “to 13 schools in 12 years.”

Then, in 1963, Stallone went to Devereux’s Hall Manor school, about 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia. It was considered a “high school of last resort for socially and emotionally disabled teenagers.” But Stallone did well enough there to get into The American College in Switzerland.

Ever since Rocky, Stallone has been portrayed as a “Devereux success story,” an image that, according to Stallone’s agent in 1984, Stallone embraced.

(Philadelphia Inquirer, May 7, 1987, fair use)

“He’s been very supportive of it,” Stallone’s agent told the media after Stallone accepted a 1984 award from Devereux for his support of the mental health field.  “He has very strong feelings about it.”

Today Devereux is one of America’s largest behavioral healthcare providers. It reported $516.8 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending in June 2022. Nearly all of it reportedly came from government contracts. Its C.E.O. Carl E. Clark made $823,916 that year.

Devereux is registered as a nonprofit. It runs residential institutions in 10 states: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Devereux staffers in Pennsylvania sexually abused victims with IQs as low as 50 and as young as 12. In December 2019, a Devereaux staffer in Texas was charged criminally with sexually abusing four children. In all, dozens of plaintiffs have filed suit.

Two Devereux staffers were arrested in New York when 14-year-old Romelo Cruze was killed by a car.

Fifteen-year-old Andrew Potter’s parents sued Devereux when he, too, was killed by a car while attending Devereux’s Advanced Behavioral Health residential facility in Colorado. The facility has since closed.

In Arizona, 15-year-old Orlena Parker died when six or seven Devereux staffers pinned her to the ground.

Broadly speaking, the accusations against Devereux nationwide include physical abuse, neglect, solitary confinement and grooming. As those allegations mounted, Stallone continued to attend Devereux’s events, including a May 2018 photo-op with its staffers.

Sylvester Stallone appeared at a Devereux event in May 2018 (Devereux Foundation, Facebook, fair use).

Though Devereux has publicly acknowledged the abuse, these writers found no record that Stallone ever has. His recent biopic Sly mentions Devereux, but not the federal class-action lawsuit pending against it.

“I am in the hope business,” Stallone told Netflix.

The same may be said of Devereux, according to court filings.

“Devereux boasts that it ‘changes lives–by unlocking and nurturing human potential for people living with emotional, behavioral or cognitive differences,’” says one of the pending lawsuits.

“Plaintiff Jane Doe 8 was approximately 16 or 17 years old,” the suit continues, “when she was sexually abused by a female staff member at Devereux’s San Diego facility.”

That staffer “would retaliate if Plaintiff Jane Doe 8 refused to perform a sexual act or cooperate with the staff member’s demands.”  Eventually, “Plaintiff Jane Doe 8 ran away from Devereux.”  But, when she “called another Devereux staff member” from “a pay phone for assistance,” that staffer allegedly “picked up Jane Doe 8 in her car, drove Jane Doe 8 to” the staffer’s home, “and initiated sex after providing Jane Doe 8 with alcohol.”

The suit makes similar allegations about a young, male plaintiff, Jacob Wright: “On his first night at Devereux, Plaintiff Wright woke up to a male Devereux staff member standing over his bed.  The staff member tried to rape him and punched Plaintiff Wright repeatedly in the face and abdomen when Plaintiff Wright tried to fight him off.  Another male staff member came into the room and together, the two staff members held Plaintiff Wright down and tied his arms behind his back with a zip tie.  The staffers left Plaintiff Wright tied up for the remainder of the night shift.”

Thereafter, according to the lawsuit, “The same male Devereux staffer continued to rape Plaintiff Wright throughout his stay at Devereux.  The staffer would taunt and irritate Plaintiff Wright at school to provoke an outburst so that Plaintiff Wright would be sent back to his room, where the staffer would sexually abuse him.”

One set of plaintiffs claims that “decades” of “sexual, physical, and emotional abuse” at Devereux were so common as to require a class action.  Devereux has repeatedly moved to dismiss the suit, without success.

Some who associate Devereux with trauma hope that Stallone will change course from his past endorsements of the foundation to advocate for them. One approached MartyG Reports with the following open letter:

Mr. Stallone:

I am skeptical that you yourself did not witness abuses at Devereux. Your promotion of the same corporation that abused me and hundreds of others is completely unacceptable.

Devereux left us with scars that will never heal. Our captivity there was horrendous.

You should apologize.

Stallone’s publicist Michelle Bega did not respond to an email requesting comments.

Leah S. Yaw, the Devereux Foundation’s Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, also did not comment prior to publication.

Nora Ashleigh Barrie coauthored this report. She maintains https://thetroubledteenindustry.com/ and manages The Surviving Abuse Podcast.

Alexei Lindes, Chelsea Maldonado and Max Rosenberg contributed research to this report.