[17][29][39] At night, he usually tied her into a sleeping bag and placed her in a crib with a metal screen cover, keeping her arms and legs immobilized, and researchers believed that he sometimes left her on the child's toilet overnight.

When the family first moved into the house, he occasionally allowed her to be in the backyard inside a small playpen, but she reportedly angered him by breaking it down to get out; the people who later worked with her interpreted this to mean she was left alone and unsupervised in it for extended periods of time.

[7][40][9] Throughout this time, Genie's father almost never permitted anyone else to leave the house, only allowing her brother to go to and from school and requiring him to prove his identity through various means before entering, and to discourage disobedience he frequently sat in the living room with a shotgun in his lap.

[12][22][51] Around three weeks later, on November 4, their mother decided to apply for disability benefits for the blind in nearby Temple City, California, and brought Genie with her, but on account of her near-blindness she accidentally entered the general social services office next door.

[58][59] News of Genie reached major media outlets on November 17, receiving a great deal of local and national attention, and the one photograph authorities released of her significantly fueled public interest.

[71][72] Her movements were very hesitant and unsteady, and she had a characteristic "bunny walk", in which she held her hands in front of her like claws while ambulating, which suggested extreme difficulty with sensory processing and an inability to integrate visual and tactile information.

[9][78] Doctors noticed her extreme fear of cats and dogs very early during her stay, but initially thought this was due to her being incapable of rational thinking; they did not discern its actual origin until years later.

[41][56][95] Over the next year and a half he came on three three-day visits to conduct daily observations and to carry out a sleep study, hoping to determine if Genie was autistic, whether she had sustained any brain damage, and whether she was born mentally retarded.

[9][41][96] Shurley concluded she was not autistic, with which other doctors who worked with her during that time and later researchers concurred; he noted that she had a high level of emotional disturbance, but wrote that her eagerness for new stimuli and lack of behavioral defense mechanisms were uncharacteristic of autism.

[41][101] Kent quickly realized there would be a large number of people working with her, and was concerned that she would not learn to form a normal relationship unless somebody was a steady presence in her life, so he decided to accompany her on walks and to all of her appointments.

That month, David Rigler obtained a small grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to do preliminary studies on her and began organizing a research team to submit a larger request.

[125][126] Beginning in January 1971, scientists conducted a series of neurolinguistic tests on Genie to determine and monitor the course and extent of her mental development, making her the first language-deprived child to undergo any detailed study of her brain.

[93][132][133] Coincidentally, the François Truffaut film The Wild Child, which chronicled the life of Victor of Aveyron in the years immediately after his discovery and the efforts of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard to teach him language and integrate him into society, also premiered in the United States only a week after Genie's rescue.

[140][141][142] Curtiss quickly recognized Genie's powerful nonverbal communication abilities, writing that complete strangers would frequently buy something for her because they sensed she wanted it and that these gifts were always the types of objects she most enjoyed.

[146] Child psychologist David Elkind, who was involved in the grant meetings, evaluated her in May 1971 and reported that she was in the concrete operational stage of development, noting that she understood object permanence[d] and could engage in deferred imitation.

[75][155][153] Soon after moving in with Butler, Genie started showing the first signs of reaching puberty, marking a dramatic improvement in her overall physical health and definitively putting her past Lenneberg's proposed critical period for language acquisition.

[178] Curtiss wrote that she often gave conflicting statements about her married life and Genie's childhood, seemingly saying what she thought people wanted to hear, which the research team believed was out of fear of reprobation or ostracism for telling the truth.

[183][184] In contrast to Ruch's writings, the Riglers observed she still acted out her anger on herself and noted that certain situations in particular, such as spilling containers of liquid, sent her into tantrum behavior, which doctors attributed to her having been beaten for these actions as a child.

The research team considered her language acquisition to be a substantial part of their larger goal of helping to integrate her into society, so although they wanted to observe what vocabulary and grammar she could learn on her own, out of a sense of obligation they sometimes stepped in to assist her.

[218][93] Eventually Curtiss and Marilyn convinced her to stop attempting her most extreme haplologies, but she continued to delete sounds when possible, causing linguists following the case to refer to her as, "the Great Abbreviator".

[230] Sometime during mid-1972, Marilyn observed that a magazine picture of a wolf sent her into a terror, after which the Riglers asked her mother if she knew a possible cause for this reaction; she then informed them that her husband had acted like a dog to intimidate Genie, making the underlying reason for her fear apparent to the scientists for the first time.

[142][262] During this time, Curtiss wrote to Miner that Genie did not understand the reasons she was moving and believed it was her fault for not being a good enough person, and said the frequency with which her living arrangements changed further traumatized her and caused continued developmental regression.

"[163] Curtiss said that in late December 1977, she had been asked if she could be Genie's legal guardian, but, after she met with her on January 3, 1978, her mother suddenly stopped allowing her and the rest of the research team to see her, which immediately ended all testing and observations.

According to the investigator, she was living a simple lifestyle in a small private facility for mentally underdeveloped adults and appeared to be happy, and reportedly only spoke a few words but could still communicate fairly well in sign language.

[4][12][17] A story by journalist Rory Carroll in The Guardian, published in July 2016, reported that she still lived in state care and that her brother died in 2011, and said that despite repeated efforts Curtiss had been unable to renew contact with her.

[4][12][17] The research team and outside scientists also contrasted her with a case in the 1950s of a girl, known by the name Isabella, whose first exposure to anyone besides her deaf non-speaking mother came at the age of 6 but who successfully acquired language and developed fully normal social skills within a year.

[9][282] During the grant meetings in May 1971, some of the scientists, including Shurley and David Elkind, voiced concern that the prevailing methods of research pursued scientific study at the expense of Genie's well-being and could cause love and attention to be contingent on her language acquisition.

[295][109] Rymer contended that the roles of everyone involved in her life became progressively less clear, citing the starting point as the appointment of Miner as legal counsel for her mother, and that personal friendships prevented them from recognizing it.

He argued that this interfered with providing her the best possible care and compromised their objectivity, in turn contributing to the case study's lack of coherence, and both he and Harlan Lane emphasized that making David a foster parent accelerated this breakdown.

[5][163][296] They also said they genuinely loved her and always provided her the best care possible, pointing out that she had made substantial progress in every aspect of her development while living with them, and they and Curtiss both said her mother had prevented them from continuing to work with her as they had wanted.