S35 E2: Little Dictator | Allison after NXIVM

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Speaker 2 Campsite Media.

Speaker 3 In 2011, after 10 seasons on air, Allison Mack's TV show, Smallville, came to an end. It's funny, it almost sounded like you were saying goodbye.

Speaker 3 I forgot how well you know me. My heart and my head have been playing Tug of War lately.

Speaker 3 But I made my decision. Allison had played Chloe Sullivan for a decade since she was a teenager.
By the time the final episode hit screens, Allison was 28.

Speaker 3 She was at a critical juncture in her career and her life.

Speaker 3 She'd been living in Vancouver, shooting the show, and then in Brooklyn at a lovely little brownstone in Cobble Hill. But it was time to make a change.

Speaker 5 Somehow, Keith, somebody, I can't even remember who put it in my head, that I needed to move to Albany full-time and let go of my brownstone. And I remember being so sad because I loved my brownstone.

Speaker 5 It's so silly to say that, but I made my love for the brownstone bad. I was like that's materialistic that's like non you're not values oriented you're superficial you're shallow um

Speaker 5 you need to prove to yourself that you're not these things that you're not shallow and superficial and materialistic and the way you're going to do that is by letting go of the brownstone and moving to albany full-time

Speaker 3 this was where the nexium true believers lived Around the world, thousands of people took their courses and workshops about how to be a better husband or a better employee or live a more ethical life.

Speaker 3 But in Albany, you could learn directly from Keith in person how to live your best life or to become deeply indoctrinated.

Speaker 3 To make it official, Allison bought a small townhouse just outside of Albany on a street called General's Way.

Speaker 5 And the day that I did that, I got shingles.

Speaker 5 So fucking weird, right?

Speaker 5 My whole chest broke out in like these huge welts that looked like somebody had taken acid and just splatter painted it across my chest.

Speaker 5 And I think it was my body being like,

Speaker 3 what are you doing?

Speaker 4 You know?

Speaker 5 But I was so

Speaker 5 hell-bent on the fact that I was fucked up and I was needed to be fixed and that this was the place I was going to get fixed. And the problems I've had in my past, they've been able to help me fix.

Speaker 5 So I need to come. I need to work through my narcissism.
I need to not be superficial, I'm gonna go there and, you know, get

Speaker 5 fixed.

Speaker 3 At this point, Allison had been attending Nexium workshops for about five years. But it was here at this home on General's Way that Allison would ascend to the next tier of self-improvement.

Speaker 3 Because Albany was the center of Nexium, where Keith Ranieri, Nancy Salzman, and all the other Nexium higher-ups lived. These people were Allison's new family.

Speaker 3 She was now at the Nexus, and this house became her home base. From here, she started teaching workshops, taking intensives, and spending time with Keith.

Speaker 5 I was like, he's my teacher.

Speaker 5 I thought of him as my guru.

Speaker 3 Keith lived a five-minute walk away, and Allison would often take strolls with Keith on these quiet, tree-lined streets.

Speaker 3 It's so suburban out here that there aren't even sidewalks, just lawns that curve straight into roads.

Speaker 3 This is where Keith would pound the pavement in sneakers and shorts, pontificating as he strode past mailboxes and manicured hedges, a sort of suburban Socrates.

Speaker 3 But Allison wasn't the only person Keith was taking walks with, because actually, many other Nexian women were living in the same neighborhood.

Speaker 5 I knew that there were lots of women that were around him, but I thought he was like a feminist who was helping women. That was was the perspective that I had of him.

Speaker 3 But of course, Keith wasn't just helping women. He was sleeping with them too.

Speaker 3 At various times, Keith actually lived with three women, all of whom were his girlfriends. Many of them had been with him for decades.
One of them, Karen Unterreiner, he had met when she was only 18.

Speaker 3 Nexim's leader was also the neighborhood's busiest tomcat, flitting from house to house. And unbeknownst to Allison, he was working on the next generation of his harem.

Speaker 3 From Campside Media and CBC, this is Allison Afternexium from CBC's Uncover. I'm Natalie Bobomet.

Speaker 3 This is episode two: The Little Dictator.

Speaker 3 So, how did Allison, this smart, accomplished actor, get so deep in Keith Runieri's clutches?

Speaker 3 Well, it all comes back to the fact that she was a performer.

Speaker 5 I don't have a memory of myself in my life before getting arrested that didn't involve me being an actor professionally. That was my life.
Like that was who I was.

Speaker 3 And this is what's so interesting to me about how Allison enmeshed in Nexium.

Speaker 3 It's that Keith both profited from the fact that she was an actor, someone famous who could lure other people in with her charisma and the pure sheen of success she emanated,

Speaker 3 and also used it against her. Because one of the biggest accusations performers often face in their real lives, and I should know, I'm married to one, is that they are inauthentic.

Speaker 3 And this was exactly what Keith told Allison from the very beginning.

Speaker 4 I had

Speaker 5 have

Speaker 5 insecurities around being performative. And I think a lot of that is just like, I was trained from like a very young age to perform, you know, like that's kind of what I did.
And

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 was pointed out to me in the 16-day, like, we know that you're inauthentic and we know that you're like very self-absorbed and you don't connect to people in a very honest way.

Speaker 5 And the stripe path will help.

Speaker 3 Allison's talking about one of the first Nexium workshops she did, a 16-day-long, intense seminar.

Speaker 3 The stripe path was the name for the levels of progression within Nexium, which were delineated by different sash colors.

Speaker 3 You had to earn four stripes on your sash before moving on to the next color sash. Yes, sashes.

Speaker 3 When the Nexium people were in their seminar rooms, he liked them to wear colored sashes, designating their rank. And Allison's rank was not high.

Speaker 5 Keith and Nancy told me that I was a narcissist, that I had like narcissist personality disorder.

Speaker 5 And I was like appalled, you know, I was like, I don't want to be that. I don't want to have that.
So I was like, what do I need to do to like get myself around that?

Speaker 5 And so I was like, basically like, whatever Keith said, I was like, I'll do because I need to fix myself.

Speaker 3 Keith had correctly identified Allison's deepest fear, that her malleable, flaky sense of self, her identity as an actor who could also be performative, was preventing her from having genuine connections with human beings.

Speaker 3 This struck a chord with Allison, particularly in her relationships with men.

Speaker 5 I was sexualized from such a young age that the comfortable way for me to relate, especially to men in positions of authority, is through a sexualized lens.

Speaker 3 Like, what does that mean?

Speaker 5 Meaning, I'll flirt, I'll

Speaker 5 touch arm, I'll make comments to feel like I have some type of control or exchange, value exchange in the dynamic, in the conversation. And that started when I was like

Speaker 4 really little,

Speaker 5 you know, like just,

Speaker 5 oh, I can get you to pay attention to me and to listen to me if I

Speaker 5 make you feel somehow like you're like the coolest man in the room, or if I make you think about sex while you're talking to me. And I think I was doing that before I even knew I was doing that.

Speaker 5 It was just a part of my training in how to interact with men.

Speaker 3 Nexium was presented as the panacea to Allison's problems.

Speaker 6 In the first year,

Speaker 6 she was all in, and she could not get enough.

Speaker 3 That's Mindy Mack, Allison's mom. She's 74, wearing jeans and a floral pattern t-shirt and a denim jacket decorated with a handful of pins, like a little gold cowboy boot and a star.

Speaker 3 Her face is lined, it seems, for many years of smiling very widely.

Speaker 3 It's a hot day in May,

Speaker 3 and I'm sitting in a music room with Mindy at her home in Southern California.

Speaker 3 There's a gorgeous upright piano, a wall filled with memorabilia from her husband's opera career, and outside, a glistening blue swimming pool.

Speaker 3 Mindy has never spoken publicly about about what happened with her daughter.

Speaker 3 But she watched it all right from the very beginning.

Speaker 6 She didn't fuss around on the periphery for very long. She was brought in and she took every, she had endless resources because what does a 21-year-old woman need with

Speaker 4 you know a million dollars or however much?

Speaker 6 But she slipped away while she was doing that. She became immersed and she had all the answers for all life's challenges.
So she had the answer for everything.

Speaker 6 Keith says this and this. So she became unbearably arrogant.

Speaker 6 You know, John couldn't stand to be in the same room with her because she just had this level of arrogance about everything you say is like she, you know, she responds with just a look.

Speaker 3 John is Allison's dad.

Speaker 3 The pair are on good terms now, though around the time of Allison's arrest, he started exhibiting signs of cognitive decline and has since been diagnosed with dementia, which is why we aren't hearing from him for this this podcast.

Speaker 3 Back then, Mindy wanted to figure out what was going on with her daughter. So she actually started taking the OddNexium course with Allison, workshops that Allison would pay for.

Speaker 6 I did it only because Allison was so excited about it and I wanted to know what Allison was jumping in with both feet.

Speaker 3 One of the courses Mindy took with Allison was a women's program called Jeunesse.

Speaker 5 I really liked Jeunesse.

Speaker 5 I've always really wanted to help women. Like, I've always felt a really weird, ugly feeling of competition in my own heart towards women.
And I have always hated that about myself

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 wanted to be like,

Speaker 5 how do I be a good female role model? How do I get other women to feel good in themselves? That was always very important to me. And yet it was always the thing that was hardest for me.

Speaker 5 You know, I couldn't manipulate women the same way that I can manipulate men. So I was very attracted to Jeunesse because I liked the female female aspect of it.

Speaker 5 I liked feeling like I was going to help women. So I did a lot of weekend intensives with Jeunesse.

Speaker 3 Allison started working with other women, putting on Jeunesse weekends all over the country.

Speaker 5 It's so confusing because like

Speaker 5 my mom came to the intensives, the Jeunesse intensives. She still says so much of what I learned there has made my marriage better.

Speaker 5 has made it so that like I can have this relationship with my husband. There was a lot of building empathy.

Speaker 6 Try on the other person. You'll be much more compassionate.
You'll engage in a much more positive way if you can just have an experience of what it feels like to be that person.

Speaker 6 And it's great for marriage.

Speaker 3 A lot of what Jeunesse preached was a sort of men are from Mars, women are from Venus ideology. At its best, it advocated having more empathy for what men were going through.

Speaker 3 Here's Nancy Salzman, Keith's second in command, talking about Jeunesse.

Speaker 8 Men have to grow up and they have to be responsible in the world and men are responsible for women. And women don't really get that that's the case.

Speaker 3 But Jeunesse also had really strict ideas about what women were like and what men were like. One of those ideas was that women lacked discipline.

Speaker 5 Women are so indulgent of their bodies, so that's why women are struggling with weight.

Speaker 5 So the best way to get through that issue is to restrict your calories, you know, so you're not just impulsively eating all the time or indulging your emotions all the time.

Speaker 3 Back then, Allison thought she was part of a kick-ass feminist group that was helping women introspect and be better.

Speaker 3 But a lot of Jeunesse's views were very retrograde. Not that she realized it at the time.

Speaker 5 As I got deeper into the Jeunesse curriculum, it was more and more and more reinforced that it's the woman's job to make the men feel emotionally safe and vulnerable.

Speaker 5 And whatever you can do to like help them feel like comfortable and safe is like your job as a woman and all this stuff.

Speaker 3 One of the interesting aspects of Jeunesse was that it preached non-monogamy or a specific sort of non-monogamy.

Speaker 5 There's this backdrop of the Jeunesse curriculum, which is saying that, like, monogamy is equivalent to ownership.

Speaker 5 And if you believe that you own this person in their relationship and they're only beholden to you, then you aren't actually loving that person.

Speaker 5 You're just possessing them and you're objectifying them.

Speaker 3 This is actually similar to some Marxist ideas about monogamy. Engels wrote a whole treatise on how traditional monogamy and marriage subjugates women.

Speaker 3 The feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir was also famously non-monogamous. But that's not what was really going on in Jeunesse.

Speaker 3 In fact, the whole thing, it seems to me, was just a philosophical smokescreen. A lot of bullshit laying the groundwork to cover for Keith's sexual misbehavior.

Speaker 3 Because Because all the while Allison was living in Albany, going on walks with Keith, he was having relationships with multiple women.

Speaker 3 One of Keith's long-term girlfriends was a woman named Pam Kaffrits. Pam was slim with long brown hair and a slightly upturned nose.
She got involved with Keith way back in the 90s.

Speaker 5 I didn't know Keith was sleeping with all these people. I didn't know Keith had had all these relationships.

Speaker 5 I didn't know anything until Pam let it slip once that she was in a relationship with him and that at the same time he was in a relationship with Karen Untermeiner. And I was like,

Speaker 5 what?

Speaker 3 Now, Allison wasn't involved with Keith at this point sexually, but Pam and Karen's relationships with Keith were presented to Allison as a form of polyamory.

Speaker 3 It was exactly the kind of relationship Janess's ideology had set Allison up to accept.

Speaker 4 And I was like, whoa, okay.

Speaker 3 Still, Keith's relationship with Pam was of singular importance.

Speaker 5 Pam was like

Speaker 3 old, but beautiful still

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 so amenable. Like anything that Keith wanted, she was like, gonna be happy to do.
And she had a lot of money, and so anything that Keith needed, she would have.

Speaker 3 But in 2013, Pam got sick. She was diagnosed with cancer and given three years to live.

Speaker 3 This sent Keith into a tailspin.

Speaker 5 He didn't want her to die and he didn't want to be alone. He didn't want to be without a female presence.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 5 he made her the center of our world for those three years.

Speaker 3 He demanded that Allison and other Nexian members travel with Pam to Boston. for her cancer treatment.

Speaker 5 When Pam got sick, you know, there was a circling of the wagons and like I was required to go to Boston and stay with her while she was sick, but then like I would take the train into the city if I had an audition or a meeting, or I would go teach an intensive, or like I would kind of come, come and go.

Speaker 5 But the pivot point of our lives was Pam's illness. And Keith got more and more and more controlling as Pam got more and more and more ill.

Speaker 5 It was in tandem.

Speaker 3 But the lengths Keith would go to to replace Pam and exert control control would shock even some of Nexium's most loyal followers.

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Speaker 3 So Pam's sickness had a profound impact on Naxium and on Allison.

Speaker 5 Her illness was a central focus in the community at that time. And different people had different responsibilities and roles.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 5 in Tibetan Buddhism, there are different types of monks. There's like hermit monks whose their sole purpose in life is to meditate and raise the consciousness of the people in the whole world.

Speaker 5 So they sit in the mountains and they just meditate. Like, that's it.
They never leave.

Speaker 5 And then there are monks who are like the emissaries for different countries and their job is to go out and like spread the word and like interact with people who are not Buddhist and things like that.

Speaker 5 And so Keith likened the Nexian community to that.

Speaker 3 Some people in the Nexium community were homebody caretakers whose role was to care for others.

Speaker 5 And my role, Allison, because I was so like out in the world and was to spread the message and to like be in the world and like bring new people in and represent what Nexium is in the public eye.

Speaker 5 And because that was my personality and my constitution. And so that was like my role.

Speaker 3 So Allison's role, her purpose, was to go out and recruit.

Speaker 3 Remember, one of the things that Nexium specialized in were small, intimate self-growth seminars, usually held in their cozy seminar centers around the world, from Guadalajara to Vancouver, to Portland, Oregon, to Albany, New York.

Speaker 3 And they could be on many different topics, how to be a moral person in the world, or how to be a good partner.

Speaker 3 But after the group became popular in Vancouver, and a lot of actors began signing up for its seminars, Keith thought Nexium should offer a self-help course on acting, and Allison should lead it.

Speaker 5 Keith had come up with this curriculum for actors and artists, which was called The Source, which was all about taking acting exercises and exercises involving the arts and utilizing them to help people build more compassion in their lives.

Speaker 3 The Source was Nexium's answer to the Stellar Adler Studio, or the Meisner technique.

Speaker 3 At different times, Keith offered leadership of The Source, which was a position of influence and respect, to several different female actors in Nexium.

Speaker 3 But Allison was the one put in charge, much to the chagrin of others. This was how Keith used her ability as an actor to promote Naxium.

Speaker 5 I think it's part of what made me a good actor, or at least made me able to survive in the industry as it is, which is incredibly cutthroat. I have a very fiery center that can be very like

Speaker 5 attack.

Speaker 5 I don't like confrontation, but if there's there's something I want, I'm very willing to go after it in a very aggressive way.

Speaker 5 And I call it the little dictator.

Speaker 5 When I was like five, playing with my brother and he wouldn't do what I wanted him to do, dictator came out and I became very like, no, we'll do this, you know, like willful and firm. And

Speaker 5 that part of my personality came out with my slaves.

Speaker 5 And that is a part of myself that I have to contend with, you know?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 5 that's where

Speaker 5 I went to prison for that.

Speaker 3 Because there was somewhere else Allison would have to recruit women to. Not just the source or Jeunesse,

Speaker 3 another secret women's organization that Keith was setting up to cope with Pam's sickness. But first, Allison would have to take the next step in her relationship with Keith.

Speaker 3 It's 2015, and Allison is on a trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts to see a play.

Speaker 3 Williamstown is a picturesque little mountain town in the Berkshires, filled with tree-lined streets and a quaint downtown. It's known for its theatrical play series.

Speaker 3 Allison's here with a Mexican woman named Danny.

Speaker 5 Danny was one of my like really, really good friends in Mexian.

Speaker 5 She was really beautiful and really fashionable and stylish and really curious curious and interesting and sophisticated.

Speaker 5 And she'd been to fashion school and she liked to draw and like there were all these crossovers in my things that I liked and things that she liked.

Speaker 3 Danny's got brown hair, full lips and dark eyes. She's always very well dressed and lately she's taken to wearing a peculiar leather necklace, even on casual strolls like this one.

Speaker 5 We were walking together and she said,

Speaker 5 are you happy with your life? And I said, yeah, like actually,

Speaker 5 I'm feeling really good in my life. I was teaching the source.
I was like doing all these things.

Speaker 5 And she said, well, you know, are there any things that you feel like you would want to change or want different? And I said,

Speaker 5 well, I struggle with my intimate relationships. Like, I think that there was some stuff that went on when I was a kid that like was inappropriate, but I can't really figure it out.
And

Speaker 5 so it's hard for me to feel comfortable in sexual spaces.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 5 she was like, have you talked to Keith about that? And I was like, that feels so inappropriate.

Speaker 4 I'm not going to talk to Keith about my sex life.

Speaker 5 Like, he's my teacher, you know? We own a business together, you know? And she was like, well, hasn't he helped you with everything else?

Speaker 4 And I was like,

Speaker 4 yeah.

Speaker 5 And she's like, well, why wouldn't he be able to help you with this?

Speaker 4 And I was like,

Speaker 4 okay,

Speaker 5 maybe you're right.

Speaker 3 I want to pause for a minute. Allison told Danny that there was some stuff that happened when she was a kid that was inappropriate.

Speaker 3 And before we go any further, I need to tell you a little bit about this.

Speaker 3 It's very difficult to talk about. And Allison's still trying to understand it herself.

Speaker 3 I'll let her explain it in her own words.

Speaker 5 I experienced different types of exploitation around myself and my sexuality

Speaker 5 in different occasions, yeah, as I was growing up from a very young age. I had some stuff happening in a more personal space, not on set,

Speaker 5 with people that I trusted that was not cool.

Speaker 5 And also, I was on set in an environment in a world where

Speaker 5 women are always exploited.

Speaker 3 Allison remembers one instance in particular.

Speaker 5 When I was 14, I was working on a TV show and a director was flirting with me.

Speaker 5 And the producers pulled me into the office with my mom and said that I I was being inappropriate on set and that I needed to go and if I wasn't in the classroom or working I needed to be in my trailer and now at the time I totally internalized it and I was like oh my god I'm so bad and wrong I had just gotten my period y'all like I was a kid Allison's mom remembers this too Allison didn't understand what was happening because she wasn't savvy that way and I think he had her sit on his lap or something like that.

Speaker 6 I mean, it was in front of the whole crew and everything and you know it made her cry because she didn't ever want to do anything wrong and so she felt like she had done something wrong in buying into what this director was doing.

Speaker 6 This is before me too.

Speaker 6 Somebody should have pulled him aside and said what you're doing is inappropriate. Leave her alone.
She was the innocent.

Speaker 3 When a child experiences sexually inappropriate behavior, these wires between sex and authority and power and autonomy all get crossed. It can be very difficult to untangle.

Speaker 3 As an adult, it can lead victims to have difficulties in their intimate relationships, to sometimes be inappropriately sexual and also sexually naive, often in quick succession. Allison felt this.

Speaker 5 So I

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 not

Speaker 5 able to maintain a good relationship romantically. And I

Speaker 5 felt super detached from my sexuality to the point where it was like people would tell me like, oh, you're so sexy or I'd get hired to play these like sexy roles.

Speaker 5 And I'd just be like, what the? There was like this chasm of experience, you know, between my, I don't know, cardboard cutout that was people were interacting with

Speaker 3 and then me.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly. And I was like, this

Speaker 5 feels, there's something wrong.

Speaker 5 Like this is not normal normal that i have so much shame around my sexuality so much disconnect around my sexuality so much fear around my sexuality like what is that i had kind of decided at that point there's something wrong with me and i need to figure out what that is

Speaker 3 the conversation with danny planted a seed for allison So when Allison returned to Albany, she went to Keith.

Speaker 5 And so that's when I approached Keith and I said, you know, I feel like I really struggle with my sexuality. I think that there were things that happened when I was a kid that weren't okay.

Speaker 5 I can't feel myself connecting to my sexuality. I feel ashamed of my body and my sexuality.
Like, I don't understand how I can get around this. And he was like, well, I can help you with that.

Speaker 5 And I said, yeah, Danny told me that you might be able to. And he said,

Speaker 5 but in order for me to help you with that, we're going to have to be physically intimate because it's an experiential problem that you're having.

Speaker 3 This might sound strange, but for Allison, it's somehow tracked with Nexion logic. Logic she'd been knee-deep in for nine years at this point.

Speaker 5 One of the things in Nexion, like one of the things they always said was like,

Speaker 5 you can have a theoretical understanding or you can have a visceral understanding. And a visceral understanding is true learning.
And a theoretical understanding is just like knowledge.

Speaker 5 The example that they always said was like, you can read a book about skiing, but that doesn't mean that when you get to the top of this mountain, you're going to know how to ski.

Speaker 5 You don't know how to ski until you get on skis and you go down a mountain. And so that was consistent.

Speaker 5 That logic fit with what he was saying, right?

Speaker 3 And now Keith is telling her that he can help her with a physical solution.

Speaker 3 So that night, he came over to her apartment.

Speaker 3 It was winter, cold out. Keith walked into Allison's little living room.
Again, he repeated the same thing.

Speaker 5 He said, we're going to have to be physically intimate because it's an experiential problem that you're having. And so I can't just theoretically help you through it.

Speaker 5 Like you have to have the experience of going through it. And I was like,

Speaker 4 okay,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 4 I'll try that.

Speaker 5 And that was how the physical relationship started with us.

Speaker 3 As it was happening, Allison thought, this is fucking weird.

Speaker 5 Like, this is very weird. But I was also like,

Speaker 5 he's going to help me. He's my teacher and he's going to help me.
And

Speaker 5 that was sort of what was happening in my brain was I was like, he's going to help.

Speaker 3 On some level, Allison felt that this was wrong, but she convinced herself to push through it. Because even during the very act, Keith was justifying it as therapeutic.

Speaker 5 He called it energy work. So when he was sleeping with you, he would say, I'm moving energy through your body, like tantric kind of a thing, you know.

Speaker 3 Afterwards, he went over what had just happened with Allison.

Speaker 5 It's like going over the experience and capitulating what that was and what that meant and how that was working in my emotional and energy body. What was that like? Where did you feel that?

Speaker 5 How did you, what did you think?

Speaker 5 It was like dissecting it, you know, like a dissection of the experience right which is linking certain ideas and concepts that he has that he wants to the experience for me right so then the next time i have that experience and i feel that in my body i think oh that's him pushing that energy through my body

Speaker 3 this is so sick so insidious justifying coercive sex as therapy But what's even worse is that the curriculum of Nexium had Allison beating herself up for even questioning this.

Speaker 5 In my head, I'm going, this is weird. And then in my head, I'm also saying, but that's just how dysfunctional you are.
Because this is the safest man that you could be with.

Speaker 5 And this is a person that just wants to take care and love you. And he doesn't even want anything from you.
He just wants to make sure that you're okay. He wants to help you.

Speaker 5 So the fact that this feels weird, Allison, is just an indication of how dysfunctional you are. Like you're just really messed up and really broken.

Speaker 3 After that night, Allison reached out to Danny, the woman she'd spoken to in Williamstown, who had suggested she go to Keith for help in the first place.

Speaker 5 And I was like, I don't know, it just feels really weird. And Danny was like, well, why? What does it mean?

Speaker 5 And she would EM me about the discomfort that I was having in my sexual relationship with him.

Speaker 3 About a week after Keith and Allison had sex for the first time, Allison met up with Keith for a walk.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he said,

Speaker 5 I have a new curriculum that I'm developing that I think you might be interested in.

Speaker 4 And I was like, okay, cool.

Speaker 5 I'm always up for a new curriculum, you know? And he was like,

Speaker 5 it's really intense. It's only for women and it's only for like a very select group of women.

Speaker 4 And I was like, what? Oh, okay.

Speaker 5 And he was like, have you noticed anything different about anybody in our community recently, any of the women in our community recently?

Speaker 5 And I noticed that Danny was wearing this weird fucking necklace and Nikki had lost a fuck ton of weight.

Speaker 3 Nikki is Nikki Klein, a Canadian actress. She's got blonde hair, big blue doe eyes, and a sort of round, moon-shaped face.

Speaker 3 She's best known for playing Kelly Henderson on the TV show Battlestar Galactica. She's another Nexium follower, another actress, and as Allison had noticed, had recently lost a lot of weight.

Speaker 5 And he was like, yeah, they're a part of this curriculum.

Speaker 4 And I was like, huh.

Speaker 5 Okay, and he was like, it's very serious and it's a life, it it takes a lifetime, lifelong commitment.

Speaker 5 And it's really basically designed to make you push through all of your greatest fears so that you can become the strongest and most empowered version of yourself.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 because usually people will only work on whatever it is that they're most comfortable working on, they never actually get to the root of their biggest fear. Whereas with this,

Speaker 5 You are bound to somebody whose job it is to push you into your greatest fear so that you will actually grow through that and not just dance around it.

Speaker 6 And I was like, that sounds great.

Speaker 5 I want to work through my greatest fears. I want to be the strongest version of myself.
I want to be pushed as hard as I can be pushed.

Speaker 5 And so he was like, okay, well, it's a lifetime commitment and it's a master-slave dynamic because you're going to learn how to be completely humble and completely subversive because that was the other thing.

Speaker 5 Women are self-absorbed and arrogant and they don't consider other people. And so this is is going to put you in a position where you're 100% considering your master all the time

Speaker 3 Allison's narcissism her performative self-centeredness Keith says this will finally be the thing to rid her of all that

Speaker 5 he's like so if you're interested if you want to do that like the first thing that you need to do is offer me collateral so that I know that you won't break your commitment to us and to this.

Speaker 5 And I was like, okay, so like i am going to keep my word to you and if i don't the collateral is um you can have my car for a weekend or like you collateralize at the bank you know what i mean like you give something in exchange for your word so that was that concept was already in my head i had already collateralized my word for different things and intensives and stuff

Speaker 5 so allison prepares collateral And then it became like, well, the collateral is another way to elicit your greatest attachments. Like, what are you most afraid of destroying?

Speaker 5 What are you most afraid of losing?

Speaker 3 oh that points to your most your greatest attachments you know and ultimately like you want to have no attachments this is a very common idea across religion and philosophy in buddhism it's known as non-attachment the practice of letting go of our attachment to material possessions relationships even emotions Ascetics have long practiced renouncing material possessions.

Speaker 3 Think of monks and yogis. It's a similar kind of thing.

Speaker 5 So I came up with a collateral that was like

Speaker 5 really intense.

Speaker 3 It's to do with her family. Allison doesn't want to disclose what exactly.
But she hands over her collateral to Keith. And at his command, she begins calling him master.

Speaker 3 A short while later, Allison is sitting in Danny's living room in Clifton Park.

Speaker 5 Danny had this like cute little townhouse where everybody lived.

Speaker 3 Allison's with Danny and three other women. Loretta, the woman who drove her to the volleyball game the first time she met Keith.
Nikki, and a woman named Cami. They're here under Keith's instruction.

Speaker 5 He was like, you guys all need to meet and decide what this is going to be. Like you need to decide how this is going to work and what this is going to look like.

Speaker 3 Because Keith has an idea for an all-female group. One where these women are going to be accountable to each other.

Speaker 3 Move beyond their petty feminine traits, like being inconsistent or dramatic or performative or any of the other things Nexium's gendered programs taught women were.

Speaker 3 These women would get deep.

Speaker 5 And ultimately we come down to this idea that like we all wanted to grow, we all wanted to get through our biggest fears and we all wanted to help other women do that.

Speaker 5 Like that was like the focus of it.

Speaker 3 This meeting is the creation of DOS. It's short for dominus obsequious sororium, a Latin phrase that loosely translates to lord over the obedient female companions.

Speaker 3 They're creating it in part because Pam is dying, and this is Keith's plan to make up for losing her, his way of exerting control.

Speaker 3 It's an all-female sorority run by Keith that will give him dozens more Pams, obedient, beautiful, loving women who will be completely subservient to Keith.

Speaker 3 But now Keith says these women have to go out and recruit other slaves.

Speaker 6 I felt so angry with myself because Catherine, she worked and she saved her kid.

Speaker 7 She saved her kid, and I didn't.

Speaker 5 It was this like insidious little pool of grooming and manipulation and brainwashing away from your own sense of what's right and what's not right.

Speaker 11 They burst in, they put me on the floor face down, and they start asking me who's in there with me. And I called Keith's name.

Speaker 3 Tune in next week for an all-new episode of Allison After Nexium, or you can listen ahead to the full series now by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts, or by subscribing to the CBC True Crime channel on YouTube.

Speaker 3 Links in the show description.

Speaker 3 You've been listening to Uncover, Allison After Nexium, from CBC and Campside Media. It's hosted by me, Natalie Robemed.

Speaker 3 Our executive producers are myself and Vanessa Gregoriatis at Campside and Stephen Belper. Our senior producer is Lily Houston-Smith, and our associate producer is Emma Siminoff.

Speaker 3 Sound design, mix, and engineering by Mark McAdam and E. Wynne Lyde Tremuen.
Thank you to Colin Campbell. At CBC, our story editor is Derek John and our senior producer is Kate Evans.

Speaker 3 Our coordinating producer is Emily Cannell. Our executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.
Tonya Springer is the senior manager. Arif Nurani is the director.

Speaker 3 If you enjoyed Allison After Nexium, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 3 If you liked this show, Uncover Escaping Nexium is a powerful story of the beginning of the unraveling of Keith Ranieri's cult.

Speaker 3 Listen to Escaping Nexium at the link in the show notes or by scrolling to season one of Uncover, wherever you're listening right now.

Speaker 2 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.