Evan Wright
Bad Therapist
(Amazon Original Stories, May 2019)
Inside the biggest scandal in the history of America’s $40 billion drug recovery industry: a predatory Malibu rehab guru—and the fearless female patient who exposed his empire of deceit.
Chris Bathum was a respected therapist, addiction specialist, and founder of one of the fastest-growing rehabilitation chains in America. But Bathum was a total fraud: he was a meth-head with a history of sexually abusing his patients, scamming insurance companies, and eliminating whistle-blowers. Like Rose Stahl. But this intended victim would be his last. Stahl would risk her life to bring down the monster she and so many other people in need had once trusted for their salvation.
Evan Wright’s Bad Therapist is part of Exposure, a collection of six incredible and true stories of American double lives from millionaire CEOs and suburban teens to undercover investigators and scam artists—all for whom secrets are a way of life. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single astonished sitting.
Praise for Bad Therapist
“Bad Therapist is an outrageously good story, a warped marvel of contemporary noir set in the rehab culture of California, featuring a villain so monstrous that he could only be real. Evan Wright describes an underworld that was all around us but went unnoticed, a realm of lost souls like nowhere you’ve ever been before—I hope.”
—Walter Kirn, New York Times bestselling author of Blood Will Out, and The Stones, the Crows, the Grass, the Moon
“What if Dirty John founded and ran one of America’s most prominent, profitable drug rehabs? Evan Wright’s Bad Therapist is an all-too-true tale of deception, shameless corruption, and unbridled sexual predation. Prepare to be shocked both by the malefactor himself and by the broken system that let him get away with it.”
—Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery
“Evan Wright is one of America’s best journalists, his work a freak amalgam of obsessive, fearless reporting and elegant, compulsively readable prose.”
—Chris Goffard, author of Dirty John and Other True Stories
“Evan Wright has given us an absolutely riveting piece of long form journalism, at once a soul-deep character study, meticulously reported criminal expose, and real-life, weirdly hilarious, edge-of-your-seat thriller—replete with sex, drugs, murder, malfeasance, and plenty of seamy, drugged-out, 12 Step-adjacent malice. As he did in Generation Kill and Hella Nation, Wright proves once again that he is one of our greatest living investigative reporters. To read Bad Therapist is to truly understand how America has relapsed.”
—Jerry Stahl, Pushcart Prize-winning author of Permanent Midnight
“I binged on Bad Therapist, Evan Wright’s story of a creepily charismatic California rehab scammer and the misfits who bring him down. Reading the book is like a glorious free fall through a new hard-boiled Los Angeles whose denizens have spent their lives in the quicksand of the addiction—and recovery—underworlds. But none of them know themselves, despite years of self-examination. They sleepwalk through lost weekends of sex, sweat lodge investment pitches, home recording studio fantasies. Wright is the best kind of journalist, colloquial yet unobtrusive, morally aware but never judgy. His energetic, regular-guy compassion seeps into every rathole, laps over the delusions of victim and villain alike.”
—David McConnell, author of American Honor Killings
Read Evan Wright’s article about BAD THERAPIST on The Daily Beast
Evan Wright is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for journalism and is the author of the New York Times bestseller Generation Kill, which he adapted into the miniseries for HBO. Wright has worked as a writer and producer on Homeland, Dirty John, and Homecoming for Amazon Studios. He is currently at work on The Seed, a memoir of brainwashing, for Penguin Random House.