Artists Receive Settlements After Alleging Exploitation in Former Ghost Town

The owner of a former ghost town has paid four- and five-figure settlements to three workers who filed wage claims with the California Labor Commissioner’s Office, the plaintiffs told KQED.

Betsy Ann Cowley, 36, purchased Pulga, a 64-acre wilderness property that once operated as a mining town near Chico, with the help of her stepfather in 2015. In the years since, she’s branded Pulga as an intentional community of artists and enterprising “lady leaders,” running it as a business that rents cabins and hosts weddings and corporate retreats.

But in interviews with over a dozen former Pulga residents and workers, six people accused Cowley, 36, of refusing to pay them for their labor after they completed projects. Three former workers accused her of depriving them of food, and two said that she entered their private spaces while they were undressed. Many of these accusers are low-income artists from the Bay Area who came to Pulga after Cowley made offers of flexible work in a beautiful setting, and left feeling exploited and, in some cases, traumatized.

KQED first reported these allegations in December 2022 after two former workers filed wage claims with the California Labor Commissioner’s office. After the story published, a third worker filed a wage claim. As of last month, Cowley paid all three of them settlements between $2,200 and $16,000, the workers said.

“I feel that economically, yes, I have justice, because I took a big personal risk doing this,” said architect Danny Wills, who arrived in Pulga in September 2021 to work as Cowley’s business manager with aspirations of expanding its arts programming. In his complaint to the state, he noted that his workload quickly snowballed from office duties to 12- and 14-hour days of manual labor for which he was never compensated. He also accused Cowley of failing to reimburse thousands of dollars of business expenses that he charged to his credit card.

“I really trusted her and believed her,” Wills said. “And when she said, ‘You’re my friend as well’ — it’s like, friends don’t do what she did.”

In interviews for KQED’s December 2022 story on Pulga, Cowley denied all wrongdoing and said her accusers only represent a handful of the 100 people who’ve worked and stayed on her property. “I am only trying to help people and provide a safe space,” she said last year. “And it’s amazing that people can say whatever they want to hurt somebody.”

Reached by phone about the wage settlements she recently paid to former workers, Cowley declined to comment further. She also offered no comment in response to a detailed list of emailed questions.

‘I was being gaslit’

Wills filed his wage claim against Cowley last December. After he inputted his unpaid hours using the state’s online form, he received an official letter from the California Labor Commissioner’s Office that estimated his claim at $44,230.95.

Wills said he spent three months working overtime for Cowley in 2021. “I felt like I was being gaslit in a certain sense that I wasn’t even worth the money that I was asking for,” he reflected of his conversations with Cowley after she allegedly refused to pay him.

At Wills’ May 4 settlement conference, mediated by a deputy labor commissioner, Cowley brought a lawyer. Wills could not afford to do so and represented himself.

Cowley and Wills reached a settlement of $16,000. He received the final installment of his payments in July 2023, nearly two years after he left Pulga.

Two other workers, Sosha Young and Ricky Ybarra, filed wage claims against Cowley in September 2022. In June of that year, Cowley recruited Ybarra to Pulga after the chef had been laid off from Starline Social Club, the now-shuttered Oakland bar owned by Cowley’s then-husband Adam Hatch. Young, Ybarra’s girlfriend, soon followed him there to work as sous chef. The two agreed to design menus and cook for Cowley’s private-event services, which advertise bespoke offerings such as “farm-to-table catering.”

Young and Ybarra said they worked hundreds of unpaid additional hours cleaning Airbnb cabins, taking out garbage and running overnight security. They said Cowley derailed discussions about payment. They also detailed an incident in which she walked in on them while they were undressed and threw a $50 dollar bill at them, asking if they were “good” for their unpaid wages.

“She essentially began treating us like her personal indentured servants,” Young wrote in her complaint to the Labor Commissioner’s Office. After she and Ybarra filled out their unpaid hours, the Labor Commissioner’s Office estimated Ybarra’s wage claim as $25,610 and Young’s at $19,830.

Young and Ybarra ultimately settled with Cowley for a total of $5,500 — about 12% of their claim estimates. Cowley paid Young and Ybarra in February. “They got us to basically go down to the bare minimum [of] what you would pay an unskilled 15-year-old,” Young said, “not two people who have been industry professionals for 10 or 15 years a pop.”

Though Young and Ybarra only received a small fraction of their claim, “the biggest thing was being able to end it, because we found out that if we didn’t settle, then it would have taken two years to get a court date,” Young added.

Accusations of ‘systematic’ abuse

After KQED’s story ran in December 2022, an additional nine people contacted this newsroom to share negative experiences about working for, renting from or doing business with Cowley.

Michael Giedd, an Oakland artist, was friends with Cowley for approximately six years. Their relationship soured after she refused to pay him for a project he completed for her nearly 15 years ago, he said. In the time since, he said he’s heard from several other creatives who say that Cowley enticed them to Pulga with offers of work and then refused to pay once the jobs were completed.

“It’s been systematic to so many people that don’t know each other, but are similar types of people,” Giedd said. “They’re always someone trying to be creative, whether it’s a chef or a woodworker or a mural painter, whatever she needs.”

“I feel because she does it so predictably — you are preying on a marginalized group,” he added. “Trying to be a working artist is really risky, and it’s very hand-to-mouth.”

Lenora Pritchard, who did demolition work for Cowley in a work-trade agreement in 2015, said she witnessed Cowley mistreat volunteers from the organization World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF. The organization pairs volunteers with hosts who are required to provide three meals a day and adequate shelter.

“She was barely feeding them. She was hardly housing them. She was abusive,” Pritchard said of her time at Pulga in 2015. A WWOOF volunteer who spent time in Pulga in April 2022 relayed similar accusations, adding that Cowley used the program — whose purpose is to provide educational opportunities in farm work — as free labor her Airbnb business, and assigned dangerous work such as handling fiberglass without proper safety equipment.

As for the artists who filed wage claims against Cowley, their ordeal in Pulga put them in dire financial predicaments. While pursuing settlements from September 2022 to February 2023, Young and Ybarra worked multiple jobs in order to secure permanent housing, pay off overdue bills and repair thousands of dollars in damage to their car incurred by work on Pulga’s rocky terrain, they said. (They’re now fundraising on GoFundMe.)

“To have your only job withhold two months of pay and then kick you out of your home — I don’t even know how to explain the severity of that,” Young said. “If we didn’t stay with my mom for a month, we would have been under a bridge in West Oakland or something, living in my car.”

“We’re still feeling the repercussions, a year later,” Ybarra said.

Workers try to move on after Pulga

Since paying the wage settlements, it’s unclear if Pulga is an active business. Cowley is no longer a WWOOF host, a representative of the organization confirmed via email. Her cabins are no longer listed on Airbnb. The Pulga social media accounts haven’t been updated since February.

But Pulga’s website still advertises cabins and venues for corporate retreats and weddings, with photos of guests dancing under the stars and floating down the Feather River. And Cowley’s two LLCs, Town of Pulga Management Company and TOP II, are still active.

The artists interviewed for this story worry that more people could be enticed by Pulga’s natural beauty and offers of flexible work. Unless one files a public records request, or navigates a hard-to-find wage claim search tool on the Labor Commissioner’s website, it’s difficult to ascertain whether a prospective employer has faced accusations of wage theft or other kinds of abuse.

Attorney Kim Ouillette of the nonprofit Legal Aid at Work says the Pulga workers’ stories are important because they show other laborers that they have recourse against non-paying employers. “It’s good for workers to know this process is out there. If you have not received your wages, you can file a claim. And even if you don’t have an attorney, you can file online,” she said.

For the former workers, the emotional scars of their ordeal have begun to fade. Wills has a career in teaching. In hindsight, he now sees how he and other artists get lured into abusive workplace dynamics. “It’s really tough as an artist to not give yourself away when you’re passionate about creative things,” he said. “But the ways that we were trying to get those passions fulfilled, we were meeting the wrong people.”

Young and Ybarra now play regular shows with their band YY Gray, where they have the last word with their song about Pulga, “Apocalypse Ranch.”

The rock ’n’ roll ballad begins with an invitation to an enticing new land, where “your dreams have a chance / everything’s provided.” By the second verse, the promise is good to be true: “It crumbles to the touch / every time,” Young sings.