What happened to Robert Litchfield from The Program docuseries? Current whereabouts explored

With the revelation of shocking new footage about Ivy Ridge Academy in Netflix's The Program docuseries, people are wondering about the fate of the institute's founder. The institute is one among many places of schooling that parents send their troubled children to, with the hopes that they might overcome their bad behavior. However, the dystopic nature of such schools often implies that the opposite happens and the students are scared for life.

Katherine Kubler, the director of this series - known in full as The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping - highlighted her own experience of being brought to Ivy Ridge in handcuffs. Similar incidents happened to her classmates, who had undergone harrowing torture.

However, despite all this, it is known that Robert Lichfield, the founder of Ivy Ridge's organization, has never been taken to prison. As such, people are left wondering about his current state which they hope to see in The Program docuseries.

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Where is Robert Lichfield now, according to The Program docuseries?

Kubler had spoken with Lichfield's nephew, Nathaniel Lichfield, as part of the interview. Nathaniel himself had criticized openly the programmes that once supported his family's income through the torture of impressionable minds in the name of discipline. In his own words:

Bob's gonna die someday, and this will all just pass on ... what was the point of any of it?"

Narvin Lichfield, Nathaniel's father and Robert's brother, appears in The Program docuseries; however, he does not of his own decision. Kubler had chanced upon him in Utah, during a local night of festivities and karaoke.

Narvin had had a more active role in the organization that Nathaniel, having previously assisted with marketing and admissions, as well as miscellaneous aspects of the organization.

Katherine and her team had even attempted to find Robert, visiting his Utah estate. However, he was no longer there. His current whereabouts are unknown to the general public, although Robert did appear several times after Ivy Ridge was shut down in 2009.

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Robert Lichfield's public appearances

While Robert Lichfield has yet to make his current whereabouts known to the general public - and for good reason - he did make an appearance in the year 2013. In it, he mentioned:

I wasn’t there, I didn’t abuse or mistreat students, nor did I encourage or direct someone else to do so. I provided business services that were non-supervision, care, or treatment services to schools that were independently owned and operated.”

However, to the permanently scarred victims of his institutions, such a testimony felt nothing short of an excuse and an attempt to evade responsibility.

The students of Ivy Ridge still have a long way to go before they forgive him, and Kubler rightly mentions at the end of The Program docuseries:

"Obviously, I’d love to see Robert Lichfield in jail for what he’s done, but I can’t do that. But what I can do is expose the methodology of these places in this documentary, so that other parents don’t get manipulated and sucked up into this scheme."

Kubler suffered through the hellscape of Ivy Ridge from 2004 to 2005, for about a year. Her experiences have motivated her to gather video proofs, interviews and eyewitness testimonials, to put together The Program docuseries, a three-part miniseries that aired on Netflix on March 5.