A New York City pharmaceutical heiress paid to undo personality and intellectual changes her daughter experienced at an elite university. She likened the process to a parent weaning a child off addictive substances, such as cocaine.
Annabella Rockwell was a child of privilege who lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, summered in Newport, and later moved with her family to Palm Beach, Florida.
At the time, she said, she’d grown up in a home with “traditional” values but considered herself open-minded. Then she enrolled in Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
“I was so excited about going to this renowned, respected school in Massachusetts,” she said, according to a New York Post report. “I literally arrived there bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I was just so happy.”
Rockwell reportedly said she wound up “totally indoctrinated,” viewing the world through the lens of a toxic patriarchy professors presented as truth. She reportedly came to view herself as an oppressed victim, and her mother went to great lengths to undo the alleged conditioning received at the ritzy all-female school.
Her mother paid $300-a-day for a “deprogrammer” to help her revert back to her previous self, according to a Fox News report. Rockwell said her mother paid for the service in belief she had been brainwashed by the elite liberal college. Her mother reportedly believed the college experience left the young woman estranged from her parents.
The joy she felt upon acceptance to Mount Holyoke had evaporated by the time she graduated.
“I left school very anxious, very nervous, very depressed and sad,” Rockwell, 29, told the Post. “I saw everything through the lens of oppression and bias and victimhood. I came to the school as someone who saw everyone equally. I left looking for injustice wherever I could and automatically assuming that all White men were sexist. My thoughts were no longer my own.”
Rockwell said she did not participate in the “MoHo chop” initiation ritual meant to shrug off gender roles by cutting one’s hair. She told the Post she noticed a shift in herself when she was in her junior year after taking a gender studies class.
“This professor tells me about the patriarchy,” Rockwell said. “I barely knew what the word meant. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I wasn’t someone that into feminism. I just knew that I felt I had always been free to do what I wanted. I never experienced sexism.”
“But I was told there’s the patriarchy, and you don’t even understand it’s been working against you your whole life,” she continued. “You’ve been oppressed, and you didn’t even know it. Now you have to fight it. And I just went down this deep rabbit hole.”
Her relationship with her mother — once her best friend — changed around that time, the Fox report noted.
Her mother, Melinda Rockwell, told the Post she believed that her daughter had been brainwashed. In addition to the costly “deprogrammer,” she also enlisted help from her daughter’s former tennis coach, Scott Williams, but was warned it might take seven years before Annabella would revert to her old ways of thinking.
“It was like walking a tightrope,” Mrs. Rockwell said. “I couldn’t push too hard or I’d lose her, but if I let go, I felt I might not see her again. It was as bad as trying to get a child off the streets who’s on heroin. Everyone is so sure it won’t happen to their child. But it will. [Professors and older students] tell the students they are special — it’s like they are anointed — then they tell them how oppressed they are and what victims they are and how they have to go out in the world and be activists to stop the oppression.”
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