Exclusive | Art critic who died in Brazil hotel was forced to eat her own vomit at hellhole Baptist boarding school: I will never be healed

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 f...