How a Ranch Became a Revenue Stream Built on Unpaid Child Labor

Jerry and Angela Woodward opened Trinity Teen Solutions in 2002 in Park County, Wyoming, integrating it directly with their working cattle ranch. Angela held a nursing license. Jerry had no mental health credentials whatsoever, only ranch experience. Together they built a business out of taking in troubled adolescent girls and putting them to work on land they owned through a separate LLC called Dally-Up.

Their adult children, Kyle and Kara Woodward, also worked at Trinity. The entire Woodward family co-owned, managed, and held membership in Dally-Up LLC, the entity that owned the property where Trinity operated. This was a family enterprise, top to bottom, and the girls who arrived there were both the product and the workforce.

Trinity advertised a therapeutic program built around “animal assisted therapy,” “individual care plans,” and a “wilderness ranch setting” designed to challenge young women to “create healthier lives.” The minimum stay was 45 days, but according to court records, typical stays ran 12 to 18 months. The longer a girl stayed, the more labor Trinity extracted.

The “Legal Kidnapping” Pipeline

Trinity arranged what plaintiffs describe in court filings as a “legal kidnapping” transportation method. With a parent’s or guardian’s consent, girls could be removed from their homes with no notice given to the child. They woke up and found themselves en route to Wyoming before they understood what was happening.

Once at Trinity, residents’ contact with their parents was restricted to supervised phone calls and letters reviewed by Trinity staff. They could not speak freely. They could not leave. The program operated on a six-level system where residents started at level one and had to earn their way to level six to graduate. Failure to comply with program requirements resulted in level demotions, which directly extended how long a girl remained confined at Trinity.

That description comes directly from plaintiffs’ motion for class certification, filed in federal court. The structure was airtight: refuse to work, get demoted, stay longer, work more. The ranch got its labor. The Woodwards got paid. The girls got nothing.

What the Work Actually Looked Like

The court record is specific about the labor. Upon arrival, every new resident received a Ranch Policies and Procedures Manual covering how to fix fences, irrigate fields, care for animals, birth lambs, stack hay, feed hay, use a wood-burning stove, prepare food, and wash dishes. This was not a therapeutic curriculum. It was a worker onboarding document.

Residents also received the “Holy Cowgirl Manual,” which informed them they would be “assigned outside chores and duties according to [their] abilities and the needs of the ranch.” The manual was explicit: “The indoor and outdoor chores around the ranch are important, they matter, and if [the residents] shirk[ed] off during chores, [they] [would] be held accountable.” The language of threat was baked into the welcome packet.

Daily routines included full ranch operations: stacking and feeding hay, caring for livestock, moving irrigation lines, building structures, cleaning barns and corrals, performing veterinary tasks including roping, branding, and assisting with labor and delivery of animals. Inside the house, residents cooked every meal, cleaned dishes, and did all laundry. When they failed to complete assigned tasks, consequences included push-ups, running up and down a hill, or level demotion resulting in extended confinement.

What No Settlement Will Ever Give Back

These were children. The court record is precise on this point: Carlie Sherman, Anna Gozun, and Amanda Nash were all sent to Trinity as minors by their parents. Ms. Sherman was there not once but twice, confined from May 2012 through July 2013, and again from July 2014 through October 2015. That is nearly three years of her adolescence spent working a Wyoming ranch without a single dollar in wages. Ms. Gozun was there from February 2012 through July 2012. Ms. Nash from May 2015 through November 2015. None of them chose this. None of them were told in advance. They were removed from their lives by adults they trusted and handed to strangers who handed them a ranch manual and told them to get to work.

The psychological expert engaged by the plaintiffs, Dr. Sara Boyd, a licensed clinical psychologist, interviewed six former Trinity residents. Her findings: their “injuries were highly similar.” Six different girls. Six different families. Six different home states, presumably. And the same injuries. That is what a system produces. That is what you get when the harm is not incidental but structural, baked into the daily schedule, the consequence charts, the level system, and the Holy Cowgirl Manual handed to every new arrival.

The betrayal operates on multiple layers. Parents signed consent forms that disclosed the physical demands of ranch life, including veterinary procedures, branding, roping, and animal labor and delivery. But parents were not sending their daughters to work a ranch. They were sending them to get help. Trinity sold itself as a therapeutic program built on “individual care plans” and “animal assisted therapy.” The gap between what was advertised and what was delivered is the mechanism of harm. Parents consented to a treatment experience. Their daughters got a labor extraction operation dressed up in Christian ranch language.

And once a girl was inside, the architecture of control ensured she could not easily leave or speak. Her letters home were reviewed by Trinity staff. Her phone calls were supervised. She started at level one and had to work her way up to level six before anyone considered her ready to leave. Every infraction, every refusal to complete an assigned chore, every act of resistance dropped her back down a level and added time to her sentence. The system did not just extract labor. It punished the refusal to perform it with more confinement. Thirty-four additional former residents submitted declarations describing similar experiences. Thirty-four. That is not a few bad days on a ranch. That is a documented pattern of institutional coercion applied to vulnerable minors who had nowhere else to go.

Straight from the Documents. No Spin.

This Isn’t an Isolated Incident. This Is an Industry.

Public Health: What Happens When “Treatment” Is the Harm

The entire premise of Trinity Teen Solutions was therapeutic care. Parents paid for treatment. The United States government has codified the concept of “serious harm” in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to include not just physical injury but “psychological, financial, or reputational harm” serious enough to compel a reasonable person to keep performing labor to avoid it. Dr. Sara Boyd, the plaintiffs’ expert clinical psychologist, concluded after interviewing six former residents that their psychological injuries were “highly similar.” That uniformity of injury is a public health signal. It means the harm was not random. It was produced by a consistent institutional environment.

The court record describes a consequence system that included forced physical exercise (push-ups, running hills) as punishment for work refusal, alongside a level-demotion structure that extended confinement. Applied to children who were already vulnerable enough to be sent to a residential treatment center, this system layered coercion on top of preexisting distress. These were not healthy teenagers seeking adventure. These were minors in crisis whose parents were desperate enough to consent to having them removed from their beds without warning. Trinity exploited both the vulnerability of the children and the desperation of the parents.

Thirty-four additional putative class members submitted declarations describing similar experiences. If the class is eventually certified and proceeds to trial, the scale of psychological harm across the full class period, November 27, 2010 to the present, could be substantial. The minimum stay was 45 days. Typical stays ran 12 to 18 months. Every month represented unpaid labor performed under a documented threat system. The cumulative psychological toll of that exposure across dozens of girls is a public health problem the residential treatment industry has largely been allowed to self-regulate.

Economic Inequality: A Business Model That Monetized Other People’s Children

The economic structure here deserves a hard look. Trinity collected payments from families for a therapeutic program. The Woodward family owned the ranch through Dally-Up LLC. The girls performed the agricultural labor that kept that ranch operational. Trinity was not paying wages to its workers. Trinity was charging tuition for the workers it received. The labor that maintained the Woodward family’s agricultural enterprise was extracted from vulnerable minors whose families were paying for the privilege of sending them there. That is not a treatment center. That is a vertically integrated labor extraction operation with a religious branding layer on top.

The families who sent their daughters to Trinity were almost certainly not wealthy enough to be indifferent to the cost. Residential treatment programs are expensive. Parents who resort to them are typically at a point of genuine crisis, with limited alternatives and limited leverage. Trinity, and programs like it operating across the country, target precisely that population. The economic inequality embedded in this system runs in multiple directions: families pay what they cannot afford for services that were not delivered, while the operators pocket tuition revenue and free agricultural labor simultaneously. The Woodward family built a ranch-based business model that insulated itself from labor costs by classifying workers as patients.

The proposed class covers residents from November 27, 2010, to the present. The Woodwards opened Trinity in 2002. That means at minimum eight years of this operation preceded even the class period now being litigated. The residents who came through Trinity’s doors before 2010 are not part of this class action. Their labor is not part of this accounting. The full economic extraction across Trinity’s entire operational history may never be fully quantified, and the families who paid for treatment they did not receive may never see restitution for what they spent trusting an operation that the federal government’s own lawyers ultimately argued ran afoul of anti-trafficking law.

The People Running This, the Regulators Who Should Be Watching, and What You Can Do

Named Defendants in This Case

• Angela C. Woodward: Co-founder, licensed registered nurse, co-owner of Trinity Teen Solutions, Inc. and member of Dally-Up LLC.
• Jerry D. Woodward: Co-founder, no mental health credentials, ranch experience only. Co-owner of Trinity Teen Solutions, Inc. and member of Dally-Up LLC.
• Kara Woodward: Adult child of Jerry and Angela. Worked at Trinity. Co-owner and member of Dally-Up LLC.
• Kyle Woodward: Adult child of Jerry and Angela. Worked at Trinity. Co-owner and member of Dally-Up LLC.
• Trinity Teen Solutions, Inc.: Wyoming corporation. The operating entity of the treatment center.
• Dally-Up, LLC: Wyoming limited liability company. The land-owning entity. Co-owned by the Woodward family.

Regulatory Watchlist: Who Has Jurisdiction and Who Should Be Paying Attention

• U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division: Already filed an amicus brief in support of survivors. This investigation should not end with one case.
• Department of Labor (DOL): Unpaid agricultural labor performed by minors falls squarely within DOL enforcement jurisdiction. The wage theft here is documented in a federal court record.
• Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): Residential treatment programs for minors operate in a regulatory gray zone. HHS has authority over facilities receiving federal dollars and over child welfare programs.
• Wyoming Department of Family Services: State-level oversight of residential programs for minors. Trinity operated in Wyoming for over two decades.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Trinity’s advertising claimed therapeutic treatment. The court record suggests the product delivered was agricultural labor extraction. That gap is the definition of deceptive marketing.

The Industry Problem No One Regulator Owns

Trinity Teen Solutions is one facility. The “troubled teen industry” operates hundreds of programs across the country with minimal federal oversight, inconsistent state licensing requirements, and a business model that depends on parents who are frightened, desperate, and often legally stripped of their right to keep their child home. The Alliance for the Safety of Children and Youth in Facilities, Breaking Code Silence, and local mutual aid networks run by survivors of residential programs are doing the organizing work that regulators have refused to do. If you or someone you know survived a program like Trinity, those networks offer legal referral resources, community support, and survivor testimony coordination that can feed into ongoing litigation. Do not wait for a regulator to fix this. They have had twenty years and have not done it.