Idaho local and state agencies directed federal funding to safe house despite complaints and contractual violations
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Editor’s note: As concerns about sex trafficking escalate, one prominent Idaho nonprofit is providing a form of rescue that some survivors say leaves them trapped in another cycle of control and coercion, funded by questionable Medicaid billing. This is part two of a three-part series called “Savior Complex.” Read part one here. Part three will be posted Thursday.
(InvestigateWest) — Within days of leaving the safe house, Ally decided she needed to put it all in writing — the control, manipulation, the feeling like she’d been “trafficked and exploited” by the very place that was supposed to help trafficking survivors like her.
She’d been at a safe house run by Community Outreach Behavioral Services, or COBS, an Idaho anti-trafficking nonprofit, for little more than a month in fall 2023 before she found the courage to leave. She hoped to prevent other women from falling prey to the program by filing a complaint to the Idaho Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance, a state granting agency for programs serving crime victims.
“I would not recommend the COBS program to anyone at all and they should be investigated,” wrote Ally, 25.
The detailed complaint describing the restrictive and unsafe environment at the COBS safe house wasn’t the first time a state or local agency in Idaho heard red flags about the program, which opened its first safe house for trafficking survivors in 2020. Nor was it the last. The Idaho Attorney General’s Office received a complaint about COBS’ conflict of interest with a for-profit company owned by Barthelmess’ son in 2022. Since 2023, three complaints were submitted to the state council for victim assistance.
InvestigateWest has found that several former safe house residents had similar complaints as Ally, and that the program’s founder was self-dealing and billing residents’ Medicaid for services that residents say they never received. But despite the complaints, InvestigateWest found no government agency that investigated whether other survivors or COBS employees could verify the allegations.
“Does somebody have to die in her care before we start to really investigate the legitimacy of her program?”
In fact, COBS, which has denied that it has a conflict of interest or exploits trafficking survivors, pointed reporters to the investigation conducted by the council as evidence that the victim complaints lacked merit. The program continues to receive government funding and partner closely with police for client referrals.
Currently, unlike for youth homes, there’s no regulatory entity to license and monitor safe houses or sober homes for adults in Idaho. The gap in oversight means that short of going to police, residents can only file formal complaints through government agencies that direct money to the program. The most severe consequence a program could face from these agencies is having its funding reduced or eliminated.
Today, COBS receives federal dollars for victim assistance through two sources: the state council for victim assistance, and the Nampa Family Justice Center, run by the city of Nampa. A review of government contracts, transactions and complaints reveals, however, that COBS has violated multiple conditions to receive funding from those entities.
Other service providers who have long been wary of COBS and its founder, Paula Barthelmess, say they’re perplexed by the inaction from both entities, which either work closely with COBS or have been alerted to potential breaches of contract.
tai simpson, a citizen of the Nimiipuu tribe who doesn’t capitalize her name because there are no capital letters in the Nez Perce language, is an organizer and advocate for Indigenous trafficking survivors in Idaho. She said she would “never over my dead body send my Indigenous relatives” to any of Barthelmess’ programs.
“Does somebody have to die in her care before we start to really investigate the legitimacy of her program?” simpson said.
Rule breakers
After filing her complaint in October 2023, Ally said the state victim assistance council never interviewed her to verify the claims.
The council had been administering funding to COBS for less than a month — a total of $180,000 in state and federal grants — when it received Ally’s complaint.
The funding comes with standards, set forth by the council, to ensure that a program’s policies align with federal and state law. For example, COBS can’t impose restrictive conditions on survivors in order for them to get services, like requiring sobriety. It also must avoid conflicts of interest and protect the confidentiality of its clients.
Ally’s complaint laid out five pages’ worth of concerns — feeling unsafe, having her personal information shared without her consent, and the conflict with the for-profit Advanced Clinical Trauma Services, owned by Barthelmess’ son, that provides therapy and case management for safe house residents, among other issues.
“Nothing was private and everything was monitored,” the complaint says.
The state council had heard these concerns before. A few months earlier, in March 2023, Jennifer Zielinski, director of the Boise-based nonprofit Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition, submitted a 48-page formal complaint to the council describing survivor safety issues at COBS and Barthelmess’ alleged conflicts of interest. Nothing ever came of the complaint, said Zielinski, who thinks council staff wrote off her concerns as part of an ongoing rift between the two anti-trafficking organizations.
Dana Wiemiller, the council’s executive director, said the agency is “not a regulatory body.” It doesn’t have the power to shut a program down, only cut off its funding.
“So we aren’t going to be going in and looking specifically at quality of care issues only because that’s not our role, and our staff here isn’t qualified for those types of assessments,” Wiemiller said.
Rather, the council attempts to educate and support victim service organizations so that they can meet federal and state requirements for funding, she added.
“We prefer to work with programs to improve policies and procedures, rather than refuse or cut off funding,” Wiemiller wrote in an email response to InvestigateWest. “Please be aware that, for most of the programs we fund, our funding represents a large percentage of their operating budget. We take this responsibility very seriously and we would never do anything to put our federal funding at risk.”
Still, the COBS’ program didn’t align with the council’s service standards for years before the council began administering funding, InvestigateWest’s reporting shows. COBS has been requiring sobriety of victims at its three safe houses since opening the first house in 2020.
Barthelmess has exposed personal information about clients in public settings, according to survivors and formal complaints submitted to state agencies about COBS. She’s posted survivors’ stories on Facebook, though the posts don’t include names. Survivors say that while at the program, they felt pressured into sharing their stories with the media and at public events. InvestigateWest was able to identify several safe house residents through public Venmo transactions to COBS.
And COBS had been referring clients to ACTS, the mental health company owned by Barthelmess’ son, which experts say is likely a conflict of interest. Two whistleblower attorneys also told InvestigateWest that ACTS is likely committing Medicaid fraud by billing safe house residents for services they didn’t receive.
According to the council’s own policies, grievances should be investigated through an “unannounced monitoring site visit of the program involved,” resulting in a written report and recommendations by council staff.
But that didn’t happen in response to Ally’s complaint or, months later, when another former resident submitted a complaint. Council staff never visited the safe houses during its investigations, according to the council’s records.
Council employees scheduled a meeting with COBS staff at the program’s office in Meridian — an office space that it shares with the for-profit ACTS — and reviewed the program’s policies as part of its investigation into Ally’s complaint. The review identified 11 instances of noncompliance with federal and state funding standards, including deficiencies in the program’s policies regarding confidentiality, informed consent, conflicts of interest, staff training and client complaints.
The council advised COBS that it can’t require clients to meet restrictive conditions in order to receive services, like participation in a detox. It gave the program 30 days — until Jan. 8, 2024 — to remove the detox requirement from its policy and address the other areas of noncompliance.
Yet in March 2024, when a second former safe house resident who goes by Franky submitted a complaint to the council alleging that COBS clients are forced to go to substance abuse therapy, the council still didn’t do an unannounced site visit, and this time, it didn’t even review all of COBS’ policies, records show.
Instead, Wiemiller sent COBS a summary of the allegations brought against the program, and COBS denied the allegations. COBS sent the council its safe house rules, which include “no substance use,” as well as other conditions that clients must follow to receive services — participation in random drug tests and property searches, no cigarettes, no social media, no romantic relationships and no contact “with anyone from your past without approval.”
Records give no indication that the council for victim assistance interviewed any other residents to verify the allegations.
After receiving COBS’ response, two council employees called Franky to tell her that Barthelmess denied the allegations, Franky remembers.
“They just asked her, and she denied it. That’s it,” Franky said. “Didn’t even investigate it.”
Wiemiller noted that the council doesn’t expect victim service organizations to be fully in compliance with all funding standards right away.
“We recognize that new applicants, especially those who may be new to federal funding requirements, will need guidance to bring all of their policies into compliance,” she wrote in an email response to InvestigateWest.
But still to this day, Barthelmess openly advertises COBS as a clean and sober program where safe house residents are drug tested “all the time.” “No pot, no suboxone, no drugs, no alcohol,” Barthelmess told InvestigateWest.
Part of the system
COBS first started getting federal funding for its safe houses in 2021, part of a $350,000 grant awarded to the city of Nampa for victim services and community trainings about human trafficking.
According to a memorandum of understanding signed in April 2021 by COBS, the Nampa Family Justice Center has “primary administrative oversight of the grant.”
The Nampa Family Justice Center, an organization within the city’s government that partners with agencies like COBS to serve survivors of human trafficking and other forms of abuse, is familiar with how COBS functions. The two organizations work together on a federally funded human trafficking task force. Taylor Cook, the Nampa Family Justice Center’s human trafficking task force manager, said she’s visited the program’s safe houses several times. Cook and Barthelmess co-facilitate group sessions for COBS clients, held in the office space shared with ACTS, according to Barthelmess.
The federal grant money, like the funding administered by the Idaho Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance, comes with rules prohibiting conflicts of interest and ensuring client confidentiality, outlined by the U.S. Department of Justice. But the memorandum of understanding between COBS and the Nampa Family Justice Center seems to bake COBS’ potential conflict of interest with ACTS into the agreement itself, stating that case management provided by COBS is “funded by ACTS and medicaid reimbursement.”
Cook said no survivors have ever raised concerns or submitted a complaint to her about COBS.
“We have not navigated anything that has warranted concern on our end at this point. And if we did, we would address it,” she said.
Cook also emphasized to InvestigateWest in an email response that the center does not administer or oversee any of COBS’ funding.
“They simply provide services, along with many other MOU partners, that we compensate using grant dollars allocated for that specific service,” Cook wrote.
The memorandum of understanding specifies that the Nampa Family Justice Center is responsible for collecting data that “measures the effectiveness of the grant-funded activities, grant progress and financial reporting.” Additionally, a working agreement between the center and COBS signed in March 2023 says the center “agrees to be responsible for the performance of the project work” regarding the grant.
“From our experience, COBS has been a really proactive partner,” Cook said. “They have been providing numerous services to victims and survivors, and from what I have heard, it has been overwhelmingly positive.”
Other anti-trafficking advocates, however, have argued that the Nampa Family Justice Center itself has broken rules that accompany the federal dollars.
In October 2022, Cook, Barthelmess and a Nampa police detective, Chad Benson, presented at an annual conference in Boise hosted by the Governor’s Task Force on Children at Risk. After the conference, Zielinski with the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition submitted a complaint to the Idaho Attorney General’s Office about the presentations. The presenters had shared personal information about victims who were trying to hide from their traffickers, including details about victims’ stories, their medical injuries and their children, and had included photos of victims in the presentations, the complaint says. The Nampa Family Justice Center used the grant money to pay Barthelmess about $160 for training she provided the day of the conference, an invoice shows.
Barthelmess continues denying and discrediting the complaints.
“There’s always going to be disgruntled victims. There’s always going to be victims that have severe mental illness,” Barthelmess said. “This is just part of any system, and it’s OK.”
In interviews with InvestigateWest, she repeatedly shut down InvestigateWest’s questions about how the government money was used by saying she didn’t know how the funding of COBS worked.
Pressed on a potential conflict of interest with ACTS and on the way the company billed safe house residents’ insurance, she again declined to answer.
“This is why the funders said to be careful in speaking with you guys,” Barthelmess said.
She wouldn’t say which funders gave the warning.
InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reach news and investigations editor Wilson Criscione at wilson@invw.org. Reach investigative reporter Kelsey Turner at kelsey@invw.org.