The art critic who died surrounded by pills and a liquor bottle in a Brazilian hotel room was traumatized from her time in a hellish boarding school where she was forced to eat her own vomit during stomach-churning humiliation rituals.
Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, who died May 31 in São Paulo, spent her teenage years in isolation and fear at Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy in Missouri, she once claimed.
She confessed she would likely “never be healed” from the torture, according to a chilling 2024 Substack autobiography titled “Hilde’s Story.”
“It was a cult,” the 40-year-old California-based artist wrote.
“The treatment I endured involved being forced to eat my own vomit in front of hundreds of people throwing food at me.”
Mountain Park opened its doors in 1984, promising wealthy families their rebellious kids would be whipped into shape in rural Patterson for a hefty tuition of about $1,000 per month.
Parents signed away their power of attorney to twisted administrators – allowing them to do whatever they wanted to instill the fear of God in the pupils.
“It was mind control, physical control,” Mountain Park survivor Nathan McDonald, 43, told The Post. “They knew exactly how to make you feel like the most vile piece of sh-t ever.”
Helphenstein, who climbed to art world fame under her satirical online persona Jerry Gogosian, was shipped off to the barbed-wired facility two hours south of St. Louis when she was just a preteen.
Unlike many of the delinquents surrounding her, Helphenstein’s only offense was acting out because her parents were splitting up.
“She was just a normal 12-year-old struggling that her parents are getting divorced,” her friend and fellow Mountain Park survivor Meaghan Richter, 44, told The Post.
“Her getting sent there was not deserved.”
Helphenstein, who described her family as lower-middle class, was also readjusting to life in the US. When she was 9, her family moved to Russia for about a year for her dad’s job, according to her Substack.
Richter remembered the fear in Helphenstein’s eyes when she was put on full display in the school’s dining hall as her peers were forced to heckle her.
“The staff would just torture her,” she tearfully said. “They were forcing her to eat and hold in her vomit.”
The anxious little girl inexplicably couldn’t keep her food down when she arrived, but instead of being taken to a doctor, she was allegedly terrorized.
After puking, the terrified child was allegedly manhandled and dragged across the floor, Richter said.
The nightmare continued even when Helphenstein managed to stop throwing up.
“When finally it just stopped, they’re like, ‘See, you’re faking,’” Richter said.
Helphenstein wrote that staff made an “example” out of her, placing her “on silence” — meaning she was not allowed to speak to anyone.
Being constantly surveilled during calls to her family, she couldn’t beg for help.
“In truth, a part of me did break there that I am afraid will never be healed, but I have learned to channel the pain and redirect it,” she wrote.
Mountain Park shuttered in 2004 amid heinous child abuse allegations and lawsuits against the sadistic couple who ran the facility – Rev. Bob Wills and his wife Betty Sue Wills – and their daughter Deborah Gerhardt and son-in-law Sam Gerhardt.
In one class action lawsuit, victims claimed they were drugged, abused and imprisoned at the school. The jury ruled in favor of the former students, who did not receive compensation, according to court records.
In 2005, another former student named Jordan Blair won $20,000 after suing school administrators for horrific abuse including forced sleep deprivation, forced labor and attacks by staffers.
The Wills and Gerhardts also ran two other schools — Palm Lane Baptist Boarding Academy in Arcadia, Florida, and Bethesda Home for Girls near Hattiesburg, Mississippi — which shut down following similarly despicable accusations.
The Wills and Sam Gerhardt did not immediately respond to requests for comment while Deborah Gerhardt declined to comment.
Compounding the trauma she endured at Mountain Park, Richter said soon after Helphenstein re-entered the real world, she was sexually assaulted.
Helphenstein opened up about battling substance abuse – specifically binge drinking – in a 2023 Artnet interview about sobriety.
She said she was tired of blacking out and the “misery” that came along with hitting the bottle, and got sober at 33 – around the time when Jerry Gogosian was taking off.
“I felt like all of a sudden I had this project worth living for and I knew that if I kept drinking, I would never live to see what came of it,” she told the outlet.
“I just think people need to know how much she overcame,” Richter said through tears.
The pair reconnected around 2004, when by chance when they crossed paths at Palm Beach Community College.
They maintained their relationship for years, most recently seeing each other in person about a year and a half ago at one of Helphenstein’s art shows in Miami.
Richter even brought her 12-year-old daughter along to meet the successful artist, who ran art galleries, traveled the globe and held an MBA from New York University.
“[Mountain Park] taught us that women went to college to get their ‘MRS’ degree,” Richter said, recalling how girls were taught to feel lesser than men at the school.
She described Helphenstein’s success as a “F–k you” to Mountain Park.
Aside from their final in-person meeting and life updates via text, the last conversation Richter had with Helphenstein was about Mountain Park.
“She had called me. I was like, ‘I’m going to write about Mountain Park and can I just read it to you? I’ve never even written this down or felt okay to share with somebody,’” Richter said.
“I just let her read and be vulnerable, and I just listened. I just let her cry.
“It’s hard to feel like that was our last long conversation.”
Helphenstein, who was in Brazil for a cosmetic procedure, was found dead after her plastic surgeon called hotel Rosewood São Paulo because he couldn’t get in touch with her, according to local reports.
The doctor told police he previously brought her into the hospital after a possible overdose.
Her official cause of death has not yet been determined, but police have ruled it a “suspicious death.”
“There’s no way that someone had that much planned, that was that motivated, that cared that much about other people … meant for that to happen,” Helphenstein’s manager, Daniel Wurzbacher, said.
“She had so much going for her — the special projects, the exhibitions, the people that she had in mind and the collaborations and the future of Jerry.
“We lost somebody who was really gonna turn this f–king business on their head.”
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