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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