By all appearances, Oscar nominated director Cori Shepherd Stern was both a Hollywood hit maker and a humanitarian. Whether it was directing Shiny, Happy, People for Amazon Prime, arranging medical care for African kids in extreme need, or starting a home for Liberian refugees, she developed a reputation for tackling the hardest cases in the hardest places. On paper, Cori Shepard Stern looked unimpeachable.

“Looked” is the operative word here. Because Stern is a PR ninja and a master manipulator. The following essay lays out the highlights (or lowlights) of her career.

Stern claims to have started her career in Hollywood as a tv executive. She references it in many interviews. (1:00:19)

“The actual way I got in, I didn’t major in this in college. I was an international relations major and a college dropout. And I ended up as a playwright. And then for being a playwright, I was like, wow, it looks like TV executives, executives can make more money than playwrights. And so I became a TV executive.”

That’s the PR spin version. The real version? “She and her husband moved to California in search of work. A Hollywood temp agency placed her with a company that later merged with the Fox Family Channel.”

In a public Reddit AMA comment, she enthusiastically tells us with triple exclamation points that she got her start in Hollywood working on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Haim Saban was her boss and he promoted her to executive. Through Power Rangers, Saban became a billionaire who is now regularly on the Forbes richest people in the world list. He was also Hillary Clinton’s top donor and is an enthusiastic funder of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Simon Cowell had this to say about him, “He’s scary. He taught me how to be scary. But he is the most loyal person.” Follow up question for Mr. Cowell, loyal to who exactly? It’s definitely not to the actors making Saban rich.

The Power Rangers set was a hotbed of abuse as the executives at Saban Entertainment exploited their cast and crew to extreme limits. The TV show Hollywood Demons recently released an episode about it called The Dark Side of the Power Rangers. If you think that’s hardly news, because everyone in Hollywood was abusive, think again. Because the working conditions at Saban Entertainment were so extreme, so physically, emotionally, financially, and psychologically abusive that in 1998, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Richard Masser, took the unprecedented step of launching a national campaign telling actors, do not work for Saban Entertainment.

Drinking on the job and threatening a minor with violence or harm is not is not a joke and it’s never okay. An environment where adults speak that way on a kids show, even jokingly, shows a dark, disturbing comfort with inappropriate behavior at best and child exploitation at worst. Even if it was meant to be funny, it normalizes a culture where serious misconduct gets brushed off.

You might assume the 90s were a different time with different sensibilities. We’ve all changed since then, right? Yet Stern provided this photo to CNN in 2015 and told reporters, “We had a party boat in the harbor in Vancouver and my mom came. Ryan asked her to dance. Ryan Gosling slow danced with my mom. He will have my heart forever”

If you flip the genders, the slow dance with my mom anecdote reads very differently. Name dropping her mother is a rhetorical laundering device, turning something that would otherwise feel off putting into something charming. It’s also a good example of how the director tends to blur professional and personal boundaries with her cast. Ever the storyteller, the director has narrated herself as the wise protagonist who oversees all. And if CNN prints it, it must be true.

The CNN article itself raises questions. CNN doesn’t normally publish a nostalgic fluff piece on a forgotten Canadian TV show for no reason. Clicking on the reporters name, Olly Williams, yields nothing. No other bylines, no contact info. This is their only article on the entire site and it has multiple factual errors, a misspelling, and no visible attempt to get Ryan Gosling on the record about a very sensitive disclosure. The sloppiness of this story doesn’t make any journalistic sense. It reads like a planted piece, not organic reporting. This is what narrative control looks like in miniature. A story shaped to conceal, not to reveal. And Stern is an expert at concealing.

She tells us so in this 1996 bio she wrote herself: “Cori Stern is a happy but twisted development executive at Saban Entertainment.”

What does twisted mean exactly? Luckily, she defines it for us in this interview when talking about a recent bill up for discussion at the time. (15:50)

Cori: That it’s legal to hate people and that it’s legal to restrict someone’s rights, like not just hate them. Yeah, and it’s so twisted, right?

… you know, in a screenplay, you want to take the thing from like love and then what’s the opposite of love, right? Somebody might say hate.

So, but the true gut punch of a really great script like a Chinatown…is where you go from the positive to the negation. So love to the negation of the positive value, hate. And then the true gut punch is when you do the negation of the negation. So the deepest worst thing is hate masquerading as love.

That is the true taking it all the way through. So when you look at that and you’re like, what that really, it’s under freedom of religion or freedom of artistic expression and the things that we all really do care about… the opposite is being achieved in the name of the exact thing that you care about.

Personal History

Before she became part of the abusive Hollywood machine, who was she? A glowing profile in this magazine gives us some insight into her personal history.

She had been intermittently homeless, sleeping on various couches and using a garden hose to shower. “When people think homeless, they think you have a shopping cart on the street, but it’s really about not having a stable place to live,” she said.

Home life was tumultuous. Her mother and siblings survived what Stern described as a difficult situation with her father. They fled Florida for California, where Stern, her mother, and three siblings settled in Montclair. Stern developed severe depression in her new surroundings. In high school, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she received treatment for 11 months.

So, as a child, she was displaced from her home because of an abusive father, developed depression and had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Those kinds of wounds often leave a deep mark.

Off to Africa

After Saban sold his channel to Disney, Stern sets off to Africa. The online image she creates via her blog is a sort of hard scrabble, do it yourself humanitarian worker unafraid to tackle the hardest cases in the hardest places.

Each trip to deliver supplies or facilitate a workshop built another rung on an escalating ladder of publicity. First blogs and radio. Then National Geographic. Then ABC News. That publicity wasn’t incidental; it was structural. It’s what transformed personal travel into professional identity.

Following her trajectory is a masterclass in social engineering. This twice homeless girl from Florida with big dreams but no connections has created her own network. She recognized that institutions vet each other, not the individual. If each person or organization assumes the last one vetted her, no one actually does. And that the gap in accountability is wide enough for anyone determined enough to slip through.

Because no single institution owns the whole process, responsibility evaporates in the spaces between them. This strategic leveraging of borrowed legitimacy allows her to move from rung to rung, vertically through networks of credibility, access, capital, and power. It’s a system built on the illusion that credibility equals integrity. And the one thing that a system built on illusion can’t stand? The truth.

Because Stern’s public résumé contains no credentials in mental-health care, child development, social work, or cross-cultural trauma training, yet she was able to gain custody of multiple refugee children over a period of several years. And the credibility of those news media placements is exactly how a completely unqualified, uneducated person gets access to vulnerable children in a foreign country.

Strongheart Fellowship

In 2006, Stern registered her own non profit organization: Strongheart Fellowship. The articles of incorporation describe it as “a social-entrepreneurship residency program designed to develop exceptional young people from extremely challenging circumstances into leaders that can effect significant social change.”

So a one year residency program where you work full time for free because you want to effect change? A program to become a world changer, if you will. It sounds like the same basic mechanics of the cult I was part of as a teenager.

She selects her first recruit, 12 year old Lovetta Conto, and brings her to America, taking temporary custody.

Her project right now is to help raise enough money to build a Strongheart house for a group of kids in the refugee camp who have no parents and family left.

Building a Strongheart house is part of the way Lovetta is trying to pay back the help she’s received before and since coming to the United States last Christmas.

This is a major red flag. No child should feel indebted to people who are providing her basic needs.

Lovetta handcrafts jewelry out of spent bullets leftover from the Liberian war and Stern gets her placed in the press: NBC, CNN, Oprah, etc. Together, they sell over $300,000 dollars’ worth of hand made jewelry. So where did that money go?

The official explanation was that “Lovetta’s Strongheart Project—the jewelry line—funds her education and contributes to the house.”

But that phrasing blurs an ethical line: when a minor’s labor funds the organization that houses her, the relationship stops looking like mentorship and starts looking like dependency. In most systems, that’s exactly what child-labor protections are designed to prevent.

Meanwhile, the director often emphasized her own financial precarity, writing in her blog multiple times that she was struggling to stay afloat as a producer. So who was supporting whom?

If Strongheart’s operating costs were covered by a child’s creative labor, that’s not empowerment that’s child exploitation.

Orphan Home or Surf Hostel?

Cori Shepherd Stern, visits a refugee camp in West Africa, perusing the orphans like a shopper at a farmers market, looking for the best piece of produce. She says she wants to give them a permanent home.

I have six more exceptional young people that I want to bring into the program immediately. They’re amazing But I need a place to shelter them as we do this work – a permanent homebase for their healing.

The first six Fellows have already been chosen – they’re amazing young people from a refugee camp in Ghana and will be moving to Strongheart House to experience the first home of their own that some of them have ever known.

But what qualifications did Stern have to run a home for orphans? She was a tv executive for one of the most abusive children’s programs ever created. She openly bragged about enabling abuse of a minor Ryan Gosling on set. She is not remotely qualified or licensed to work with traumatized, vulnerable youth in a cross cultural setting.

When someone raises funds under the banner of “trauma healing,” the public has a right to ask what professional qualifications and oversight were in place— and whether adequate safeguards existed to protect vulnerable children risks that can arise from inadequate expertise or blurred emotional boundaries.

Proceeds from the necklace sales are helping to build Strongheart House, envisioned to be a home and school for children who’ve come from extremely challenging life experiences in different countries, to live together, receive an education, and learn to build a better life. Fundraising for the project is ongoing – Strongheart volunteers are renovating a 10,000-square-foot former hotel, used as a rebel headquarters during the war.

The PR ninja strikes again. In print, it’s a boarding school. But in reality? It’s a shell of an old hotel with no running water, no electricity and no professional oversight. Daily living was at subsistence level. So, why Liberia? With all these horrific drawbacks, why choose Liberia?

According to this 2008 article:

Cori soon teamed up with Zoe Adams, a former TV executive colleague and fellow activist, and set out to find the ideal location for the home. Robertsport, with its incredible potential for ecotourism, especially as a surfing and beach destination was exactly what they were looking for.

Ecotourism potential — not infrastructure, oversight, or safety — was cited as the deciding factor.

If you were starting a center for orphaned refugees, would you choose a place with no infrastructure, no child protective services, no rape prosecutions, no grocery stores, no electricity, and no running water? Stern did.

Robertsport was a small fishing village of roughly 4,000 people. Medical services were abysmal and rape culture was strong. Yet, this was chosen as the headquarters for an international child-rehabilitation program.

So what does ecotourism have to do with a healing center for refugee children? Nothing, as it turns out. Because once volunteers helped fix the place up, that permanent home base of healing lasted barely more than a year before the kids were kicked out and the property was converted to a surf hostel called Kwepunha Retreat. A couple of the kids stayed on to work as labor. One of the kids talked about it here:

Grace – now I’m here (in America) for school. I’m not sponsored by Strong Heart organization. because Strong Heart organization who promised to help kids who pass through trauma and stuff, they didn’t fulfill that purpose as they said that they were gonna do for my entire family. My entire family and I were kicked out of the program.

Grace goes on to discuss exactly how Stern fooled them and the UN. If Strongheart had been formally accredited with the UN, UNHCR would have assigned a case officer to monitor the minors after relocation, verifying housing, education, and the vetting of any caretaker. There is no public record or documentation indicating that such oversight occurred.

Refugee children are one of most vulnerable classes of people in the world. Standard programs working with displaced minors must have:
• Written host-family agreements and liability insurance
• A formal child-safety policy with mandatory-reporting procedures
• Qualified staff—a program director, case manager, and, if the youth is trauma-affected, a licensed mental-health professional.

From the available records and the Strongheart staff’s own public writings, there’s no clear evidence that any of these systems were in place.

Normally, caring for traumatized or displaced minors requires certified training and oversight from licensing bodies that can enforce professional standards. Those mechanisms exist precisely to prevent harm that falls short of criminal conduct but still breaches ethics or duty of care.

But perhaps her co-founder has the appropriate credentials? The co-founder of Strongheart Fellowship, Zoe Adam was a contemporary of the directors at Saban Entertainment. Adams was Haim Saban’s First Executive Assistant and founding member of HR, before being promoted to Head of Human Resources.

It’s worth asking what that background brings to a trauma-recovery program for destitute orphans. In most large corporations, HR departments are tasked primarily with risk management and legal protection for the company. That lens may not translate well to therapeutic or humanitarian environments.

Its clear that Strongheart was created not by trained clinicians who cared for children but by two former television executives looking to make a profit.

More to come…