Ashley rhodes courter biography of barack

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Dallas CASA

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Foster trauma left girl scarred, savvy

CRYSTAL RIVER - Ashley Rhodes-Courter, full of poise and grown-up words, pauses among the cardboard boxes and piles of official documents that occupy a corner of her adoptive family's spacious home on Kings Bay.

"This is my life," the 18-year-old high school senior said, frowning down at the reams of paper generated during her at-times harrowing decade in the state's beleaguered foster care system.

Before she was plucked out of a Tampa orphanage by a couple of empty-nesters six years ago, Rhodes-Courter had lived in 13 different homes, most for less than nine months, since the state took her from her drug-abusing mother at age 3.

Some of the places were OK. In some there were neglect, overcrowding and dangerous people. In one, in Plant City east of Tampa, beatings and bizarre physical and mental abuse were shockingly routine.

"There were times I was ripped off the top bunk by my hair and thrown to the ground and kicked," she said. "We always had bruises and marks."

Although it was years ago, vivid memories of that eight-month ordeal lurk just below the polished surface of the charismatic young woman she has become. She speaks frankly about the lingering emotional disconnection resulting from years of being shuffled from one home to

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A difficult journey

At the tender age of 22, Ashley Rhodes-Courter is living a pretty fantastic life. She's attractive, well-spoken and college-educated, with doting parents and a newly published memoir that's generating national buzz.

But how she got there is the real story, vividly chronicled in a book that recounts her journey from neglected, abused orphan stuck in Florida's overburdened foster care system, to articulate, respected activist who has commanded the attention of judges, members of Congress and even the president of the United States.

For Rhodes-Courter, writing the book - called "Three Little Words'' - was an intense journey into the dark corners of her childhood, the events of which were pieced together from her wispy memories and some 80,000 pages of documents generated by the court and state child welfare workers as they shuffled her through 14 different foster homes in nine years.

At best, the places were crowded, the foster parents harried. In one, she and other kids were beaten, yanked by the hair and deprived of food. She later sued the state of Florida and the abusive foster parents, winning an out-of-court settlement that helped pay for college.

Part of her research involved revisiting some of the places and interviewing former foster parents. M