Utah man sues over Netflix’s ‘The Program,’ saying its portrayal of his ‘troubled teen’ career defamed him

A Utah man has sued Netflix and the director of the miniseries “The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping,” saying they defamed him in their documentary when they accused him of abusive tactics in his “troubled teen” programs, called him a “villian” and secretly recorded him while he was out with friends singing karaoke.

Narvin Lichfield filed the civil lawsuit in Utah’s U.S. District Court on Tuesday against Netflix and director Katherine Kubler over their the popular three-part limited series — which in its first five days of streaming had racked up 22.7 million viewing hours.

The result of all of this negative attention, Lichfield argued in his lawsuit, has caused him anxiety and had a “negative impact” on his quality of life — including anonymous online threats of violence, group harassment campaigns targeting him and “being the victim of specific death threats across varying degrees of credibility and concern.”

Neither Kubler nor Netflix immediately responded to a request for comment for this story.

In the series, Kubler details her own traumatic experiences at the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a program in New York that was part of the Worldwide Association of Programs and Schools (WWASP). Lichfield’s brother, Robert Lichfield, started the first WWASP program in Utah in the 1980s. The network of programs grew around the world until the company dissolved in 2010, after it was plagued by allegations of severe abuse and torture.

Narvin Lichfield was tied to two of these programs, Carolina Springs Academy in South Carolina and Academy at Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica. He was arrested in 2003 in Costa Rica, facing accusations that residents in the Dundee Ranch program had been deprived of their civil liberties; he was later found innocent of abuse charges in that case. (The Tico Times, a Costa Rican news publication, reported at that time that a three-judge panel found that while the children at Dundee Ranch were abused, the evidence and testimony didn’t show that Narvin Lichfield ordered that abuse.)

Narvin Lichfield attempted to distance himself from WWASP in his lawsuit, saying that his association with the umbrella of troubled-teen programs was “essentially that of a franchisee” and that he paid dues to WWASP for membership and did not share in WWASP’s profits.

He said in his lawsuit that he had no supervisory or executive control over Ivy Ridge, the program Kubler attended and which was the focus of much of her three-part series.

Narvin Lichfield’s new lawsuit alleges that the Netflix show crossed the line into defamation, saying that it implied he “directly facilitated and covered up or outright committed murder” when his photo was displayed prominently next to a newspaper clipping from The Salt Lake Tribune with a headline about a child’s death in a wilderness program.

He further alleged that Netflix presented the documentary as “objective,” and that the show presented Kubler’s animus against him as “a reasonable and well-educated journalistic take” and that it presented him “in a false light with half- truths, outright lies, and deceptive editing practices.”

“To this end of presenting itself as an objective documentary,” the lawsuit reads, “the Production focused on the most troubled and disenchanted former students of Ivy Ridge and then presented these students’ attitudes and exaggerated experiences as a universal experience for all past students who have attended programs Narvin was involved with, when none of the students depicted had ever attended a program Narvin supervised, chose staffing for, or directed.”

His estranged adult son is also featured in Kubler’s documentary, and he speaks about witnessing abuse at the schools his father ran. Narvin Lichfield accused Kubler and Netflix of manipulating his son.

Narvin Lichfield is seeking monetary damages — including punitive damages — and is asking a judge to order that “all defamatory and disparaging” media content be removed.

The Utah man also alleged that the documentary defamed him by including a headline about his Costa Rica arrest, without the additional context that he was found innocent of those charges. He said that he has never been “involved in the staffing, supervision, or directing of a youth program that was formally and judicially found to involve child abuse as defined by any legal standard while he acted in such a role.”

Narvin Lichfield also argued in his lawsuit that Netflix and Kubler assassinated his character in the documentary when Kubler says that Narvin is a “great name for a villain” and that he was a “weak link” within the Lichfield family. They also invaded his privacy, he argued, when they secretly filmed him at a karaoke event he attended with his friends and included that footage in the documentary.

This is a developing story and will be updated.