The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing difficulties or those close to them, by chat or by telephone at 988. 

This piece was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The post Mental Health Issues Spiked During the Pandemic. Medicaid Isn’t Much Help. appeared first on The Intercept.

This piece was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The post Ten Years Into the Fight for $15, Workers Are Still Fighting for a Living Wage appeared first on The Intercept.

As part of his third act, Suarez hosts “Insecurity,” a three-part documentary series produced in collaboration with The Intercept and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. The films tell the stories of three women who grapple for what they need after the pandemic upends their lives: social services, a living wage, or decent mental health care. Each woman is plagued by the American insistence on individual survival, where the pressure to be self-reliant hurts us, but it can seem like all we have to fall back on.

In the first film, “In the Red Tape,” Lisa Ventura, a social worker living in New Jersey, is overwhelmed by paperwork. She spends her days helping both clients and her newly unemployed father, whose primary language is Spanish, navigate the social services system. During the pandemic 1 in 4 Americans have received at least one unemployment insurance payment, but these checks can be hard to obtain. The baroque difficulty of getting unemployment money or other social services is sometimes known as “the administrative burden.” These entitlements were often created to be difficult to access, leading to low “take-up rates,” or artificially depressed levels of enrollment by those who are eligible. This baked-in obstruction is why Ventura’s own father ends up needing her help to apply for aid.

The second film, “A Fight for More Than 15,” centers on Eshawney Gaston, a young mother whose infant son was born prematurely, as she tries to piece together a sustainable wage as one of the more than 3 million fast-food workers in this country. The common wisdom of our mainstream pundits insists that in the time of the “Great Resignation,” anyone who hates their job can breezily quit and anyone who wants a new one can land one. This is not true for Gaston and others like her who scramble to find low-wage jobs they can survive on. 

Katie Prout is the protagonist of the third film, “Forgotten by Medicaid.” A poorly paid independent reporter in Chicago, Prout struggles to find psychiatric care covered by Medicaid when her mental health deteriorates during the pandemic. Prout’s story illustrates a broader phenomenon: The epidemic of anxiety and depression left in the pandemic’s wake is often under-treated because those who are suffering cannot actually find or afford help.

In spite of these hardships, each woman in our triptych ultimately finds some solace when they connect their individual circumstances to a broader systemic solution. Gaston joins “Raise Up,” a worker-led organization fighting for a $15 federal minimum wage. In becoming part of a larger national uprising that includes workers at giant companies like Amazon and Starbucks, Gaston shows what is possible for women like her, even as employers and public policy seem arrayed against them. 

Prout finds some redemption in working with people experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder. In a reversal of roles, one recommends a mental health professional who finally helps Prout get the treatment she needs. In Ventura’s case, she decides to quit her job to minimize burnout, conscious of the “invisible labor” that she routinely performs for her own family and community.

While the pandemic unduly burdened each woman in “Insecurity,” they all end up finding their way to something like hope.

The post Introducing “Insecurity” appeared first on The Intercept.

This piece was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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As directors Erick Stoll and Astra Taylor and the film’s cast demonstrate, a lack of intergenerational wealth and persistent wage discrimination force women, and Black women in particular, to borrow at disproportionate rates and struggle with repayment. Reactionary policy decisions have transformed education, long trumpeted as a ladder of upward mobility, into a debt trap.

This country’s 45 million borrowers will never pay back the nearly $2 trillion they collectively owe; it must be canceled. With the current moratorium on federal student loans set to expire August 31, these debtors are anxiously awaiting a decision from President Joe Biden, who campaigned on a promise to eliminate a significant amount of student debt. Citing economic and racial equity, Biden pledged to wipe out an “immediate” “minimum” of $10,000 for every person with loans, in addition to erasing all undergraduate student debt for millions of borrowers.

“Freedom Dreams” offers a window into the financial and psychological costs of the president’s failure to honor his word — a word he could keep by signing an executive order. Just as importantly, the film evokes the jubilation that wide-scale cancellation would bring. Freeing people from the trap of student debt would have transformative consequences, enabling millions of Americans to support themselves and their families and to fully pursue their dreams. As Shamell Bell says at the film’s conclusion, “A system where Black women do not have to be subject to crushing debt is a system that would benefit everyone.”

This film was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The post Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

Following an uprising in 2019 that drew millions to protest across the country, and against the backdrop of a 15-year drought that has left over half of the country in an official water emergency, a popularly elected body has been tasked with rewriting the constitution from scratch.

With only a year to draw up the document, they must attempt to rectify the consequences of the lingering dictatorship policies and the devastating water code in their new draft.

The short film “Hasta la última gota,” or “Until the Last Drop,” follows the fight for water in Petorca province, the epicenter of Chile’s mega-drought, the economic center of Chile’s agricultural zone, and a hotly contested area within the constitutional debate.

The post In Chile, Even Water Is Privatized. The New Constitution Would Change That. appeared first on The Intercept.

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A collaboration between The Intercept; artist Molly Crabapple and her creative partners at Sharp As Knives productions; and writer Astra Taylor, this short film invites us to understand our debt in new ways. Our monthly payments are a source of profit, a form of wealth transfer from struggling borrowers to the well-to-do. These profits are a source of power; debt is never just about money. In the United States, debt has long been used as a form of social control and a tool of white supremacy.

Taylor is a co-founder of the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union. This film reflects Taylor and the Debt Collective’s conviction that debtors and their allies will need to get organized to fight for the political and economic transformations we deserve.

The post Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset appeared first on The Intercept.

I’d been communicating with Russell Dennison almost daily for more than six months when his messages suddenly stopped coming.

Dennison was a devout Muslim. He believed the time and place of his death were predetermined, that if a bomb were meant for him, it would kill him, regardless of anything he might do to avoid it. That bomb found him in the spring of 2019 in Baghuz, a small village in eastern Syria near the border with Iraq. I learned of his death months later, after a witness told Dennison’s Syrian wife, and she told me.

A red-bearded American who was raised Catholic in the Pennsylvania suburbs, Dennison was among the first Americans to join the Islamic State, or ISIS. I had initially tried to contact him in 2014, after hearing rumors that he’d left the United States to fight in the Syrian civil war. For years, I received no response. Then in August 2018 — after fleeing Raqqa as U.S.-led coalition forces approached ISIS’s de facto capital — Dennison emailed me. He wanted to talk.

In the months that followed, he sent me more than 30 hours of audio recordings through WhatsApp. Speaking mainly at night, with the rumble of coalition airstrikes in the background, he described his conversion to Islam in Pennsylvania, his drift to extremism in Florida, and his journey through the Middle East and across the Lebanese-Syrian border to join the world’s most notorious and feared terrorist group. As our conversation deepened, his recordings took on a confessional quality.

Today, The Intercept and Topic Studios are releasing American ISIS, an eight-episode Audible Original documentary podcast that provides the most detailed and critical account yet of an American who lived and died inside the ISIS caliphate. Dennison’s recordings offer a firsthand view of life in ISIS-controlled territory and reveal new details about how the terrorist group functioned, from its arrival in Syria as an insurgent force to its establishment of a quasi-state governing lands the size of Kentucky.

Nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks prompted the United States to launch its global “war on terror,” Dennison’s story also serves as a travelogue through a dark and treacherous period when the threat of Islamist terrorism was used to justify a crackdown on American Muslims and ISIS rose from the chaos and violence of the U.S. war in Iraq.

Dennison was imprisoned in his early 20s for selling a small amount of marijuana and later radicalized amid the beaches and strip malls of the Tampa Bay area, where he poured his frustration with U.S. policy into diatribes that won him a devoted following on YouTube — and unwanted attention from the FBI. Dennison told me that the bureau’s pursuit of him and other American Muslims in those years sent him looking for something he felt he couldn’t find in the country of his birth: freedom to practice his faith and lead a pure Islamic life.

He set off for Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon before crossing into Syria in 2012. Once there, he found that the caliphate established by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had its own problems, from unaccountable security forces to bad decisions that contributed to the loss of territory and the deaths of hundreds of ISIS fighters, along with thousands of civilians. Dennison’s relationship with ISIS was complex. He wasn’t a blind follower, yet in his conversations with me, he danced around his own culpability for the death and destruction ISIS wrought.

Eliciting Dennison’s story was one of the most intense reporting efforts of my career. He challenged what I thought I knew about the Islamic State and its fighters and what drove them to Syria, Iraq, and other nations in conflict. Even as I came to know him intimately through months of secret communications — and even as I empathized with some aspects of what he told me, like his attempts to smuggle his wife and small children out of ISIS territory as bombs fell around them — I knew there was only one likely ending to our relationship: Dennison would be killed.

In fact, I’d agreed to Dennison’s single term in exchange for his full cooperation with my reporting for American ISIS: I wouldn’t reveal his identity or tell his story until he was killed or captured. But our deal was in truth contingent on Dennison’s death, because he had also told me that he’d never be taken alive.

“Being captured is the last thing that any brother here would want to happen to him,” Dennison told me. “So your option is fighting until the death.”

Dennison’s request presented a host of ethical concerns. Clearly, his goals in sharing his story with me were not the same as my goals in telling it, and I was wary of becoming the vehicle for an attempt to justify or glamorize his choice to join a brutal band of religious extremists. Ultimately, I decided that Dennison’s rare, candid testimony — including his firsthand account of the group’s abuses — would enable me to give listeners a unique and contextualized look inside the ISIS caliphate.

Left/Top: Russell Dennison, right, holds the ISIS flag with another militant in Syria.Right/Bottom: Russell Dennison's photo of the destruction from the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria's Deir Ezzor province. Photos: Obtained by The Intercept

Reporting on ISIS is uniquely challenging. The areas of Syria that the group controlled at the time were largely inaccessible and shrouded in a fog of war. There was a chance that this was a hoax: that the person I was communicating with wasn’t Dennison, or that Dennison wasn’t an ISIS fighter.

To ensure that he was who he said he was — and where he said he was — I asked him for details few others could know. His accounts of his interviews with the FBI matched those I obtained from his FBI file, which is not publicly available. He also sent me photos: pictures of himself as a child in the United States and in Syria with other ISIS fighters, as well as snapshots of documents, including his laminated ISIS identification card and pages from his U.S. passport. He passed every test I devised to authenticate him.

Information Dennison provided from the ground in Syria, in real time, provided further proof of his identity. At the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, he lived through the U.S.-led bombing campaign that was intended to dislodge ISIS from the final territory the group controlled in eastern Syria. I reported on these bombings at the time. My stories revealed that the U.S.-led coalition had targeted a hospital, that the bombs had leveled a small town in eastern Syria on New Year’s Eve, and that the United States had stopped providing detailed information about targets in the bombing campaign as it was also dropping propaganda leaflets on surviving ISIS fighters. I can now reveal that one of my sources for these stories was Dennison, who first told me about the attack on the hospital and sent me pictures from the ground. The U.S. Defense Department later confirmed most of Dennison’s information, including the bombing of the hospital.

As I was working on American ISIS, the podcast “Caliphate” — a series about ISIS from the New York Times — imploded, with its primary subject, Shehroze Chaudhry, charged criminally in Canada for perpetrating a terrorist hoax and the Times concluding that the podcast “should not have been produced” with Chaudhry as its protagonist. I knew that comparisons between “Caliphate” and my own project would be inevitable. Its collapse was yet another reminder of what could happen if I wasn’t thorough enough in verifying Dennison’s identity and interrogating his account.

So after Dennison’s death, I tracked down people he had known. Most agreed to be interviewed for the podcast. A religious mentor in Florida described Dennison’s embrace of Salafi jihadism, a hard-line Islamist ideology. A friend of Dennison’s in Michigan told me about visiting him in Iraq, just before he traveled to Lebanon and crossed the border into Syria. One of Dennison’s relatives agreed to talk to me, so long as I didn’t record her or use her name. Everyone I talked to confirmed Dennison’s story.

I also discovered information about Dennison that he had been reluctant to share, including that he was married briefly in Syria to Tareena Shakil, the first British woman to be prosecuted for joining ISIS and a bona fide media sensation in the United Kingdom, where newspapers published photos of her posing with an assault rifle and a handgun.

In addition, I vetted Dennison and his story with a CIA and FBI informant who has close connections to ISIS. I’d sent her a photo of Dennison and asked if she recognized him; she said she didn’t. Months later, after ISIS leader Baghdadi blew himself up in a tunnel in Syria, she contacted me. She said the FBI was taking a new look at Americans who had joined ISIS, and federal agents had showed her a bunch of photos, including one of a red-bearded man.

She recognized Dennison from the picture I’d sent her. Long after Dennison’s death, the FBI was still looking for him.

Sign up for a free 30-day trial and listen to the full American ISIS series on Audible.

The post An American ISIS Fighter Describes the Caliphate’s Final Days — and His Own appeared first on The Intercept.

Three hours later, huddled on a dirty, noisy street by a bridge, most still seemed disoriented. Some thought they were in the United States.

“What’s it called here?” a skinny man with a 4-year-old asked me.

“Ciudad Juárez,” I said. “The state of Chihuahua.” Mexico.

Around us, toddlers wailed, older children stared, and mothers quietly wept. The skinny man summed things up: They’d each been “engañado” by the U.S. government. “Deceived,” he said. His verb choice might have seemed strong, but it wasn’t just migrants who were misled. So were Americans just north of the border.

In February, just after Joe Biden took office, Border Patrol agents on the southwest border encountered about 19,000 people traveling in families with children. Of those, 41 percent were immediately returned to Mexico, including to dangerous border cities. They were returned under Title 42, a health law activated in March 2020 by the Trump administration, nominally to help prevent the spread of Covid-19.

The unprecedented application of Title 42 against asylum-seekers was seen by many public health experts and human rights organizations as having nothing to do with public health and everything to do with anti-Latinx racism. Immigrant rights proponents hoped that Biden would immediately retire the policy. He didn’t.

Still, most people traveling in families were initially let in. They were held for a few days by Border Patrol and then often taken to church-affiliated shelters where they could call family members already in the U.S. From there, they went to bus stations and airports, especially in far South Texas cities like McAllen and Brownsville. They got tickets and started their trips into America.

Not surprisingly, word spread in Central America — which has been wracked by hurricanes, in addition to coping with poverty and violence — that parents with children could turn themselves in to officials at the U.S. border and have a decent chance of acceptance into the asylum process. More families started coming.

In March, the Biden administration started to backpedal. Border Patrol stations were too crowded with families, the government said. Shelters in South Texas were overwhelmed. On March 8, an overflow plan was announced: Beginning that day, families seeking asylum would be flown west to El Paso, where they would be taken in by Annunciation House, a venerable Catholic organization with multiple shelters that has long offered respite to refugees. The group issued a call for El Pasoans to volunteer at “A-House,” as the shelter network is affectionately known. The city felt proud that it could do its humanitarian bit for the people doing what they have a right to do under international law: seek asylum.

Meanwhile, the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, repeatedly announced to would-be migrants that they should stay away. “The border is closed,” he said.

I got vaccinated and by late February was primed for a more normal life. For me, “normal” means once again visiting El Paso’s sister city in Mexico, Ciudad Juárez. On March 15, I walked south across the international bridge to take a stroll downtown. I went to haunts I hadn’t visited since before the pandemic: the sing-song outdoor fruit market, the cheese vendor who slices tasting samples, the plaza where two old men in zoot suits dance to a boom box blaring Pérez Prado. It was a glorious day until I walked back over the bridge. There I saw two Border Patrol agents herding dozens of young adults stumbling disconsolately toward Mexico, toddlers clunking from their chests.

Over the next few days, journalists started reporting that some families flying from Brownsville to El Paso were subsequently being expelled. But, they said, Annunciation House had also received families from the airplanes. On March 16, I went to a remote part of the airport and peered through holes in a burlap-covered fence to watch a plane land. A Reuters photographer was there, and we saw mothers and tiny children disembark before the cops shooed us away. The photographer then went to Juárez. Two hours later, he saw the same families.

On Sunday, I learned a plane was coming in from Brownsville at noon, so two hours later, I again walked south on the bridge. That’s when I saw the weeping people who’d been told they were landing in Miami.

A group of Mexican government workers usually comes to offer the families help. They provide information about shelters, though Mexican officials have told the press that capacity has been overwhelmed and a gymnasium is being refurbished to make more space.

The woman in the black jacket, as well as others who’d been on the plane, told me they feared Mexican shelters because they might be funnels for deportation back to Central America. The streets are dangerous, the government officials warned. She said she had no idea how to get off of the street. I asked them how many families were still being processed in El Paso. They said they had no idea.

“No one,” said some of the expelled people. We didn’t see anyone chosen to stay in El Paso. We all got sent over the bridge.

Back in El Paso, I asked around. I heard from an activist that when the flights first started coming from Brownsville, some passengers were immediately removed to Juárez, while some were released to Annunciation House. But lately, I was told, every single family was immediately being expelled.

I asked the Border Patrol to confirm this, and El Paso Sector Chief Gloria Chavez responded by email. “Our priority is to process them and expel them into Mexico under Title 42,” she wrote of the families being sent to El Paso from the South Texas Rio Grande Valley region. While the agency had been working with local officials and NGOs to house families in El Paso, she explained, as of a little over a week ago, “the government of Mexico has been able to receive all family units from RGV under Title 42. Therefore, limiting the amount of individuals released to Annunciation House.”

El Paso’s respite facilities have their beds, yet asylum-seekers are being sent back to Mexico. Across the bridge, meanwhile, the good people of El Paso — the local officials and volunteers ready to welcome the families — can do nothing to help.

The post Asylum-Seekers Expelled by Biden Administration Say They Feel Deceived appeared first on The Intercept.

After nearly a decade of grassroots organizing, the Debt Collective, a union for debtors that I helped found, succeeded in making student debt a central issue in the Democratic presidential primary. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigned aggressively on canceling various amounts of student debt while expressing varying commitments to higher education as a right.

Our movement had entered a pivotal moment that seemed worth documenting. We needed to figure out how to advance and expand our agenda. Of course, we had no idea what was just around the corner. In many ways, “You Are Not a Loan” is more resonant now than when we shot it. The pandemic dealt this country’s fragile higher education system a potentially existential blow, making the issues and solutions raised in the film more urgent and mainstream. Meanwhile, the call to cancel debts — student loans and also medical debt, past-due mortgages, and back rent — can now be heard emanating from struggling communities and echoed by progressive representatives in Congress. Even President Joe Biden has embraced the necessity of student debt cancellation. Though his proposal is inadequate — he has promised $10,000 of “immediate” relief along with more substantial cancellation for students who attended certain schools and meet certain income thresholds — it is a notable development for a former senator of Delaware, the credit card capital of the world, and a man who played a key role in pushing legislation that rolled back bankruptcy protections for student borrowers.

The pandemic dealt this country’s fragile higher education system a potentially existential blow, making the issues and solutions raised in the film more urgent and mainstream.

The idea for this project emerged out of conversations with Paul Holdengräber and his team at Onassis Los Angeles, a newly opened center for dialogue around social change and justice. With their support, I was able to convene a group that included Debt Collective organizers, student debtors, and esteemed scholars, including political theorist Wendy Brown, historian Barbara Ransby, economist Stephanie Kelton, and others. The dialogue that ensued is personal and philosophical, historically grounded and engagingly hypothetical. The film offers an intimate view of the ongoing and growing grassroots struggle to transform our broken, profit-driven education system and also reveals some of the challenges facing the effort. There are insightful and humorous moments as participants attempt to speak and strategize across cultural and class divides.

As a documentary filmmaker, I’ve long been a fan of political cinema from the 1960s, especially fly-on-the-wall accounts of impassioned meetings and intimate conversations where people share grievances and plan next steps. I share this sensibility with my main collaborator on this project, the multitalented Erick Stoll, who shot and edited the project. We wanted to give viewers a sense of being immersed in an activist milieu while showing the ways that these milieus naturally create space to ask big questions, blurring the supposed divide between theory and practice. As the brilliant historian Robin D. G. Kelley once wrote: “Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression.” That has certainly been my experience collaborating with the Debt Collective.

With the Debt Collective’s core demands of student debt cancellation and free college being discussed on the national stage, my aim was to prompt the group to step back and reflect on the big picture to help us figure out how to keep moving forward. How did we get to this point? What would truly free college — meaning free as in cost and free as in aimed at liberation — be like? How have racism and capitalism sabotaged public education as we know it? What do we mean by the word “public”? Where is our power to change things?

Little did we know how much things were about to change for the worse. Within a matter of weeks, college campuses across the country would shut down, and tens of millions of jobs would disappear, causing students to question the value of Zoom learning and pushing countless people deeper into debt. An already dire situation suddenly became much worse. In the wake of the pandemic, additional budget shortfalls are already leading to hiring freezes, faculty layoffs, tuition hikes, and mounting student debt.

“You Are Not a Loan” puts current events and the deepening crisis of higher education into a broader context. It explores past decisions that set us on our current path while pointing toward a utopian horizon we can still reach for — a horizon where education is decommodified and democratized, available to all who want to learn. Most importantly, it offers a reminder that we will only shift course if regular people organize and fight back.

The Debt Collective proposes one approach that we hope will assist such an endeavor. We believe that engaging debtors in campaigns of strategic economic disobedience (a concept I discussed at length with Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted podcast) can yield novel tactics to tackle inequality and strengthen other established social movement strategies. Just like workers need labor unions to secure higher wages and benefits, borrowers need debtors’ unions that can engage in collective campaigns to secure debt write-downs and cancellation and the provision of social services, such as free college and universal health care, to ensure that no one is forced to take on debt to survive. The dominant idea that debts have to be repaid is a bedrock principle of modern financial capitalism — as long as those debts are held by regular people and not bankers, big corporations, or Donald Trump, of course. By insisting otherwise, we pose a profound challenge to the economic status quo.

Putting our principles in action, the Debt Collective launched the first student debt strike in this country’s history in 2015, ultimately helping tens of thousands of borrowers defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges secure over $1 billion in student debt discharges and winning changes to federal law. Some of the original debt strikers appear in “You Are Not a Loan.” Their ranks have since grown. On January 20, the day of Biden’s inauguration, 100 student debtors declared themselves on strike. The Biden Jubilee 100, as they call themselves, demand that all $1.7 trillion of student debt be canceled within the Biden administration’s first 100 days. They come from all over the country and represent all walks of life. They are educators, doctors, graphic designers, gig workers, and even a pastor. What they have in common is that they can’t — and won’t — pay their student loans.

Biden has the power to cancel all federal student debt with a signature. Congress long ago granted the executive branch the authority to do so. A movement is building to make him act. This film reveals how we got to the point and, hopefully, helps illuminate the possibilities that still lie ahead.

The post You Are Not a Loan appeared first on The Intercept.

The allegations of sexual abuse against the Boy Scouts include highly violent attacks. More than half of the claimants, according to Tim Kosnoff, an attorney who has spent years representing victims of child sexual abuse, described behavior that would constitute a Class A felony — “the most serious child sex offenses,” Kosnoff said. Cover-ups by Scout officials were frequent. Instead of informing authorities, the officials told the subjects of the allegations to quietly leave the organization. Many went on to join other troops, only to face more allegations of child abuse. The young people targeted by abuse were often told by Scouting officials not to tell their parents.

There are few historical comparisons to the large-scale moral and ethical failure of the Boy Scouts organization. Arriving at our present moment — which in some ways has begun a process of healing — has not been easy.

Take the case of Adam Steed, a young man I met while directing the short film “Church and the Fourth Estate,” and the journalist Peter Zuckerman. Theirs is a tale of a long struggle for accountability, a protracted battle against the massively influential forces of the Boy Scouts, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and monied interests that went to great lengths to defend those institutions. Ultimately, it became a story of grave abuses, a story about getting a public hearing about those abuses, and about the freedom of the press to report on a massive string of alleged crimes against powerful interests.

In 1997, while at a Boy Scout camp in Idaho, Steed was sexually abused by a Scout leader and Latter-day Saints mentor named Brad Stowell. (The Boy Scouts have historically been closely connected to the Church of Latter-day Saints, often known as the Mormon church.) When Steed sought to report the abuse, leadership at the camp failed to act, so the then-14-year-old boy took it on himself to call the police, who descended on the camp and arrested Stowell.

“That should be the end of the story,” Steed told me when I interviewed him, “where the good guys come in and fix it. But unfortunately, that was just the beginning.” Steed was shunned by people in his community and targeted by people in his school and church. Worse, Stowell, who confessed to molesting 24 boys and pleaded guilty to molesting two, was initially given a 150-day jail sentence — roughly one week for every boy he abused. Compounding things, the filings for a civil case relating to Stowell were erased from the public-access court docket — meaning that people could not get a full view into the events.

The full story would only come to light because of the work of Zuckerman, a reporter with the Idaho Falls Post Register. Acting on a tip, the paper sued for access to the court file and then published the story of Stowell and the Idaho camp in a series of investigative articles called “Scout’s Honor.”

The community of Idaho Falls was rattled — but some people saw the stories as an attack on cherished institutions.

“That should be the end of the story, where the good guys come in and fix it. But unfortunately, that was just the beginning.”

Billionaire Frank VanderSloot, one of the richest people in the state, funded a series of full-page ads in the Post Register. Taking aim at the “Scout’s Honor” series, the first VanderSloot ad was headlined “Responsible Journalism or Misleading Propaganda?”

The attacks in the ad kept coming. He called attention to Zuckerman’s sexual orientation, saying that Zuckerman “declared to the public that he is homosexual.” While saying it was “unfair to conclude” that Zuckerman was biased because he was gay, the ad raised the possibility that Zuckerman’s reporting was biased because of the Boy Scout’s opposition to gay Scout leaders and the Latter-day Saints’ opposition to gay marriage. (In court proceedings, VanderSloot adamantly denied that he ever intended to question Zuckerman’s reporting on the basis of his sexual orientation.)

The harassment against Zuckerman before and after the publication of VanderSloot’s ad was enormous. He said someone left notes at his house and that an anonymous caller threatened to “rape me with his handgun.” In a sworn deposition, Zuckerman said it was “one of the darkest periods of my life.” In the end, life in small-town Idaho Falls became untenable, and Zuckerman moved away.

And yet VanderSloot followed: Later, after Zuckerman suggested on cable news that Vandersloot “outed” him in the series of adverts, the billionaire sued the reporter. It became a lengthy battle that ended with Zuckerman conceding in an affidavit that he had discussed his sexual orientation in public before VanderSloot’s ads; that he had been the subject of attacks before and after those ads ran; and that VanderSloot did not intend to cause people to harass Zuckerman.

VanderSloot’s attacks on the press did not end with Zuckerman. Mother Jones magazine reported about donations from VanderSloot’s company to Sen. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, noting that VanderSloot was one of Romney’s national financial chairs. VanderSloot sued the publication, the author of the article, and the magazine’s then-co-editor-in-chief for saying that he “outed” Zuckerman, as well as a magazine employee for describing VanderSloot in a tweet as “gay bashing.”

Eventually, a judge granted a summary judgment in favor of Mother Jones, but the suit cost the magazine and its insurers $2.5 million in legal fees. (The Press Defense Fund, now known as the Press Freedom Defense Fund — which is part of First Look Media, The Intercept’s parent company — helped cover Mother Jones’s legal fees.) Zuckerman, in the affidavit that was part of his settlement, disclaimed the label: “Taking out ads critical of someone’s reporting is not gay bashing in my mind.”

It was an all-out attack on the press: using a deep wallet and the court system to go after journalists who dared to cover the Boy Scout scandal and VanderSloot’s intervention in it.

VanderSloot would eventually soften his tune on the Boy Scout scandal, including conceding that there was a cover-up. After speaking with several of the abused, he published another ad that said, “We never intended to cause additional pain to the victims. For that we are truly sorry.” But the effects of his efforts still matter and could continue to cause harm. Publicly questioning accounts of cover-ups of sexual abuse — especially in widely distributed media, something that the powerful have greater access to — can make survivors more scared to come forward.

Meanwhile, Zuckerman and the team at the Post Register never received any requests for corrections on their “Scout’s Honor” series. Zuckerman won a Livingston Award, the largest all-media, general reporting prize in American journalism. The reporting was essential for blowing open the enormous scandal at the Boy Scouts — so enormous that Zuckerman, at the time, could not have possibly known how huge it would be.

There was always a wholesome glow of Americana and promise surrounding the Boy Scouts, but soon a darker, parallel history of child abuse and cover-ups stretching back to the organization’s founding would come to light. The media dug up early news reports — some as far back as 1935 — documenting the Scout’s internal files of “degenerates.” Though incomplete because some were destroyed, they contained the names of nearly 5,000 perpetrators who were expelled from the Boy Scouts in all 50 states on suspicion of sexual abuse. The pattern will be familiar: Incidents were kept quiet, police were kept out of it, and parents were kept in the dark.

“Everyone wants to know if the Boy Scouts are going to survive. But the real question is, should they survive?”

On February 18, citing nearly 300 lawsuits in state and federal courts across the country, the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy. Revenue has collapsed. And the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose membership constituted nearly a fifth of the Scouts, broke away to start its own youth groups, called Vanguard.

The Boy Scouts may yet survive. Its 1960s insurance policies did not include exclusions for child sex abuse or aggregate limits.

Whatever happens to the organization, what its collapse means for the more than 92,700 survivors who came forward is tough to say. (In “Church and the Fourth Estate,” we reported that more than 82,000 survivors had come forward, but the number grew between the close of production and its release.)

This much, though, is clear: Their sagas were largely preventable. The Boy Scouts made it almost certain that thousands of people would continue to be abused, its actions made sure the pain would continue. Thousands of people have suffered in silence or were made to somehow believe that it was their fault. Now, month by month, an organization that has held itself up as a moral and ethical leader is being destroyed by an awful truth.

“Everyone wants to know if the Boy Scouts are going to survive,” Kosnoff, the lawyer, told me. “But the real question is, should they survive?”

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This project was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and was made in association with Wisconsin Watch and the PBS World Channel.

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