A 14-year-old rape victim was ordered to strip and touch her toes while three people stared at her from behind for no apparent medical reason.

When the girl resisted, the staff at Adolescent and Family Institute of Colorado threatened to tell other teens at the treatment center that she had a sexually transmitted disease — even though she didn’t. She then submitted to the “humiliating” exam, a lawsuit alleges.

The girl is one of four teens who, with their parents, have sued the Wheat Ridge facility in Jefferson County District Court. A parent of a fifth former resident has filed a separate lawsuit.

Former residents of the home that was created to address psychological and behavioral issues of unruly teens allege a laundry list of recurring issues.

They claim agency officials took them off medications for diagnosed medical and psychological conditions without justification; ordered them to lie, including claiming they wanted to kill relatives, to justify treatment; and isolated parents from children and fostered familial rifts, sometimes by claiming incestuous relationships that didn’t exist.

AFIC’s attorney Michael Drew released a statement saying that the allegations in the lawsuit against the agency are false and misleading. The agency will contest the claims in court, not in the media, he said.

Drew said the facility has been accredited by t

he Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations since 1984 and licensed by the Department of Human Services’ Child Care Division and the Division of Behavioral Health’s mental-health office.

“Through its years of experience and dedication, AFIC has pursued its mission of caring for adolescents with difficult and complex behavioral health problems,” Drew’s statement said.

Request for damages

The latest lawsuits seek injunctive relief to stop AFIC from abusive conduct because “defendants’ conduct is capable of repetition.” Plaintiffs in both lawsuits seek more than $100,000 in damages.

Between 1990 and 2000, several civil suits were filed against AFIC, according to court records and a news report. Robert Rouse, a father of a former AFIC resident, said he settled a 1991 lawsuit against AFIC.

AFIC is led by president Alexander Panio, an unlicensed therapist who obtained his doctorate from California Coast University, a distance-learning program that has been described as a diploma mill by federal regulators.

“AFIC is essentially the alter ego of Panio,” according to the lawsuit filed by Denver attorneys Jerome M. Reinan and Jordana Griff Gingrass.

The plaintiffs say Panio has a mercurial temper, often lashing out at residents and their parents when he feels challenged by them, and that he has a penchant for saying outrageous things about residents and their parents that are lies.

The 14-year-old girl, who entered AFIC in December, was in a group-therapy session shortly thereafter when Panio allegedly told her and the other teen residents that he once caught the girl’s father masturbating to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“It was a salacious, outrageous remark,” intended to reinforce Panio’s overall negative assessment of him, the girl’s father said in an interview. His young daughter, who had been raped a few months earlier, was deeply humiliated but laughed nervously along with other residents, he said.

When the same girl’s mother asked Panio why he constantly used vulgar language, Panio’s face got red, and he told her that “the stupid f—— parents just don’t get it,” she said in an interview.

Panio calls students “retards, … morons” and vulgar names, the lawsuit says. He also told residents that he holds a black belt in mixed martial arts and would not hesitate to use physical force on them, the lawsuit claims.

As a disciplinary tool, the lawsuit claims, he allegedly threatened to call the police on a 12-year old boy and have him transferred to a tougher facility, where older kids would molest him. Panio was so threatening on another occasion that the same boy wet his pants in fear, the lawsuit claims.

Staff lies alleged

Aimee Donabedian said in an interview that when her 16-year-old son Christopher returned home after leaving AFIC, the boy said, ” ‘You just want to have sex with me.’ ” A staffer at the facility had told the boy that she had an incestuous interest in him, she said.

Donabedian also said a staff member told her that Christopher was a sociopath, like 1970s serial killer Ted Bundy.

According to the lawsuit, Panio and his staff routinely take residents off psychotropic medications intended to control sometimes-dangerous tendencies.

After Christopher Donabedian stabbed his mother in the face with a knife, a psychiatrist at Penrose-St. Francis Hospital in Colorado Springs diagnosed him with major depression with psychotic features and prescribed two medications, the lawsuit says.

The day after he was admitted to AFIC, Panio “baselessly” changed his diagnosis to malingering and mixed personality disorder and discontinued his medications. Panio claimed to be a doctor while consulting with Christopher’s insurance company, the suit says.

“They treated him like he was a narcissistic drug addict,” Donabedian said.

Another boy entered the facility diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had diabetes. The facility significantly tapered his insulin and took him off psychotropic medications. When his blood sugars were too high, staffers told him to drink more water and exercise, the lawsuit says.

When students first enter the residential home, they are subjected to “institutional sexual abuse conducted under cover of a routine physical,” the lawsuit says. The exams allegedly included touching and measuring sexual organs for no medical reason.

Panio and his staff allegedly often blame parents for their children’s sometimes-bizarre behavior, even when the children have diagnosed psychological conditions. They are often accusatory, insulting and rude right from the first meeting with parents, several parents said.

In many cases, AFIC staffers identify one of the parents as the “bad parent” and restrict or forbid access by this parent to the child, according to the lawsuit.

Chris Nordstrom sued AFIC in a separate suit after the agency essentially destroyed his relationship with his son, his lawsuit alleges.

The “bad parent”

In the case of the 14-year-old girl, she allegedly was told that her father didn’t want to see her, but her parents said staffers had barred him from the meetings because of his use of medical marijuana for chronic back spasms.

Staffers allegedly told the girl’s mother that his primary relationship was with marijuana.

“They stomped on her mentally and tried to destroy our family,” the mother said in an interview.

What attorney Reinan found particularly troubling was that families had sued AFIC decades earlier for similar outrageous behavior and within weeks of filing the most recent claims, he heard from yet another family with hauntingly similar claims.

“They don’t learn,” Reinan said.