![]() Things happened swiftly after she blundered into the wrong welfare office. Irene, stricken by fear and poor eyesight, finally fled in 1970. Wiley imposed silence with his fists and a piece of wood. When not harnessed to a potty seat, she was constrained in a type of straitjacket and wire mesh-covered crib. He brutalised John and locked his 20-month-old daughter alone in a small bedroom, isolated and barely able to move. When a drunk driver killed Wiley’s mother in 1958, he unravelled into anger and paranoia. A third, a boy named John, survived, followed five years later by the girl who would become known as Genie. The first, a baby girl, died after being left in a cold garage. A controlling man who hated noise, he did not want children. He married Irene Oglesby, a dust bowl migrant 20 years his junior. He grew up in foster homes in the Pacific north-west and worked as a machinist on aircraft assembly lines in LA during and after the second world war. The story begins with Genie’s father, Clark Wiley. ![]() He lived, in his own words, like a “dead man” and failed his own daughter – Genie’s niece – who in turn failed her daughters. There was Genie’s older brother, who also suffered grievously under their father. He moved to Paris to escape only for Genie’s story to follow him and manifest itself in other ways. There was the author who chronicled the saga and found it taking over his life. Their collaboration collapsed into feuds, vendettas and muck-raking. There were the scientists and carers who studied and, in some cases, loved her. Scarred psychologically and professionally in ways none anticipated, and which in some cases endure to this day. Has she learned to speak? To engage with the world? To be happy? Only a handful of people know.īut the story has an additional chapter: the fate of the other players. With Genie approaching her 60th birthday, her fate remains an enigma. “We would suggest that you contact Los Angeles County with your request.” LA County referred the query to mental health authorities, who did not respond to a written request.Ī portrait of Genie Wiley. “If ‘Genie’ is alive, information relating to her is confidential and it does not meet the criteria of information that is available through a PRA Request,” said Kim Tsuchida, a public records act coordinator for California’s department of social services. I think my last contact was in the early 1980s.”Īuthorities rebuffed Guardian inquiries. I’ve become powerless in my attempts to visit her or write to her. “They never let me have any contact with her. “I’m pretty sure she’s still alive because I’ve asked each time I called and they told me she’s well,” said Susan Curtiss, a UCLA linguistics professor who studied and befriended Genie. ![]() Four decades later, she apparently remains in state care. As she was a ward of California, authorities housed her in state-run institutions, her location secret. And gradually they, too, with a few exceptions, also lost interest.īy the late 1970s, Genie had vanished back into obscurity. Jostling for access, they took brain scans and audio recordings, performed countless tests, compiled reams of data, published papers. She was a prize specimen for having grown up without language or social training. Over time, Genie slipped from headlines – Vietnam was burning, the Beatles were in the midst of breaking up – but she retained the attention of scientists, especially linguists. How, asked Walter Cronkite, could a quiet residential street, Golden West Avenue, in Temple City, a sleepy Californian town, produce a feral child – a child so bereft of human touch she evoked cases like the wolf child of Hesse in the 14th century, the bear child of Lithuania in 1661 and Victor of Aveyron, a boy reared in the forests of revolutionary France? It made news as one of the US’s worst cases of child abuse. He had forbidden her to cry, speak or make noise and had beaten and growled at her, like a dog. Her deranged father had strapped her into a handmade straitjacket and tied her to a chair in a silent room of a suburban house since she was a toddler. Her name – the name given to protect her identity – was Genie. And she was, it turned out, 13 years old. She could barely chew or swallow, and could not fully focus her eyes or extend her limbs. She had two nearly complete sets of teeth - extra teeth in such cases are known as supernumeraries, a rare dental condition. She was incontinent and salivated and spat.
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