Joan Borsten Vidov was born and raised in Los Angeles.  Her father was a film industry executive.  Her mother was one of the Navy’s first female officers, a lieutenant commander based in Hawaii during World War II.  She graduated UC Berkeley with a BA, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Panama and earned a master’s degree from USC.   She then spent 11 years as an investigative reporter, working first for the Jerusalem Post and then the LA Times Calendar (entertainment) section.  In 1985, in Rome she met her husband to be, Oleg Vidov, the “Robert Redford of the USSR” who had come to Italy to defect. With Oleg she produced and distributed films for more than 15 years.

Joan and Oleg entered the addiction treatment industry by chance in 2006 after Oleg’s son  Sergei married the daughter of a famous Russian who had developed a unique addiction treatment methodology, based in great part on a 1990 landmark UCLA study by American neuropsychopharmacologist Kenneth Blum and biochemist/clinical psychiatrist Dr. Ernst Noble.  Blum and Noble were the first to demonstrate a link between drinking and a genetic predisposition to addiction, causing the American Society of Addiction Medicine to redefine addiction as a treatable, chronic medical disease as opposed to a social disorder.

Joan and Oleg co-founded Malibu Beach Recovery Center in the fall of 2007.   In conjunction Dr. Lisa Benya, DO, who will serve as doctor for Corral Canyon Recovery, they learned to quickly detox patients off their drug of choice, and off the drugs used to detox them.  Their success rate was higher than the average industry success rate, enough so that the medical investment branch of Wells Fargo Bank bought Malibu Beach Recovery Center (MBRC) in 2014.

During those years, Joan become a successful advocate for the addiction industry. In 2016 she co-founded with Sergei and others the Addiction Treatment Advocacy Coalition (ATAC).  In 2017 Sergei became vice-president (now owner and CEO) of a small 6 bed (now 16 bed) facility in Silicon Valley, which has been named 3rd or 4th best in CA by Newsweek 4 years running.

In 2023 Joan was approached by First Responder Ambassador Care Jo Vaughan to re-open the Malibu house exclusively for First Responders and military veterans, and offer them the same high level care previously offered to actors, musicians, and Silicon Valley employees.  She immediately agreed.