Chet Hanks, son of legendary actor Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, recalled a time in which he was “kidnapped” at the age of 17.
Appearing on the Oct. 1 episode of “The Adam Friedland Show,” Chet Hanks recalled waking up during his junior year of high school to “two big a** dudes at the foot of my bed.”
“The lights go on, it’s 4:00 in the morning, they’re just standing at the foot of my bed.”
“And they were like ‘You’re coming with us,’” he stated.
Hanks said he was sent to the program due to his drug and alcohol use at the time, which concerned his parents.
The host of the show, comedian Adam Friedland, jokingly asked if his parents watched his “kidnapping.”
“No,” Hanks responded. “They were, like, ‘Your parents hired us to take you.’”
He told Friedland that before he was sent away, his parents grounded him “for the rest of high school” and told him, “If you go out, then your whole life is going to change.”
“And I’m like ‘yeah, whatever’ — a couple weeks later, you know, I’m blindfolded … in the desert.”
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Friedland asked about the impact this experience had on his relationship with his parents, and Chet Hanks said he is close with them.
He noted that at the time, roughly 2004 to 2010, it was not uncommon for children to be sent to camps like the one he was taken to. The practice only ceased due to lawsuits and whistleblowers about what occurred at programs like the one he attended.
Page Six reported Chet Hanks previously discussed this experience on another podcast in November 2022. At that time, he said he thinks his famous parents were being “manipulated the whole time,” as the camp would be paid per day he stayed there.
He equated his parents as being “whales” to the camp, as they had the funds to keep him there for a long time.
During the interview with Friedland earlier this month, Hanks said that at one point, “I tried to run, I tried to escape. That didn’t go well.”
He said that while at the camp he had to do “manual labor” and help take down miles of barbed-wire fencing.
The son of Tom Hanks said he was in the program for roughly four months before being sent to a different one for over a year.
“I was there longer than anybody else that I had seen come or go in the whole program, except for one kid who was there for six months,” Hanks said, according to Page Six.
