Therapy Student Makes Waves in Her Profession, Fired From Internship for Revealing Sexually Explicit Lessons at University

Therapy student Naomi Epps Best was fired from her internship after she exposed her university’s program for forcing her to share sexual information with the class and take a tour of a BDSM sex dungeon.

Her courage cost her time with her children and the ability to graduate on time, but Best says the sacrifices are worth it as messages pour in from other concerned therapists who were previously too scared to speak out.

“My goal to raise the standards of training in psychotherapy and also raise the standards of care for clients,” Best told The Daily Signal.

Best, 26, began her studies at Santa Clara University to become a marriage and family therapist in January of 2021. She immediately noticed the program’s radical ideology, but it wasn’t intolerable at first.

As the program progressed, the Christian wife and mom felt the school becoming more and more hostile to worldviews that aren’t grounded in critical social justice. This culminated in a human sexuality class where Best was subjected to pornography and told to give personal sexual disclosures to the professor and her fellow students.

“I was prompted to write something down I disliked about my genitals and to have it read aloud to the class,” Best said.

She was also asked to discuss her private marital sex life and their “erotic goals,” and to make an action plan to achieve these goals.

The final straw for Best was when a professor showed a video of a female “influencer” engaging in sexual bondage activity in a BDSM sex dungeon.

“I just said, ‘I’ve had enough. This is inappropriate. This isn’t clinically relevant to becoming a good therapist.’ And I walked out,” Best said. “So I wrote the op-ed, and then a week later, I was fired from my job.”

Best met with the director of her internship program to discuss her Wall Street Journal opinion article, which was headlined “Santa Clara University’s Crazy Idea of Human Sexuality,” and published June 6. The director encouraged her to get together with other junior therapists in training who share her concerns. Best was required to do an internship in order to graduate from Santa Clara University, but the internship she participated in was at a separate organization that she is choosing not to name.

“My article just spread like wildfire across this organization with all of these junior therapists in training,” Best said.

She was summoned to a meeting with the director and 15 therapists in training.

“I explained myself, but character attacks were locked at me. I was called unsafe,” Best said. “Somebody said that I might cause a client to kill themselves.”

Two hours later, Best received a call from the director telling her she could not continue at the organization “due to the intolerance of the staff.”

“There are junior ideologues in this field who are now bullying the old guard, therapists and professionals who are 65 and above, and who have been who were trained and have different ethos or are in the humanistic tradition,” Best said.

She was in the final year of her program, and the internship was a requirement to graduate. Best didn’t have enough time to find another internship, so being fired will delay her graduation an entire year.

The young woman is still considering all of her options for the future.

“It’s sobering because the more I speak to people, the more I realize that this problem has been so systemic in the field for actually decades now, and I’m in contact with people who have been thinking and writing about this problem,” she said.

“So it’s very stressful. I’m spending a lot of time away from my husband and my baby and my two stepchildren to try to pursue this but at the same time,” she continued, “I’m encouraged by the number of people who have reached out, who want to mentor me, who I actually respect, who value pluralism and who value scientific rigor in the field.”

Best said the normalization and promotion of BDSM and pornography as part of a normal, sexual ethic is standard across therapy programs.

“I’ve received literally dozens of messages from people across the country who are saying, ‘I’m dealing with something similar. I’m too scared to speak out. It’s gonna ruin my career,'” Best said.

University of Santa Clara did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

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