S35 E3: The Assignment | Allison after NXIVM

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Speaker 3 This is a CBC podcast.

Speaker 3 Campsite media.

Speaker 3 Alison Mack is in her home in Knox Woods, outside Albany.

Speaker 3 She's moved from her townhouse to a freshly renovated apartment that's got two bedrooms, dark cardwood floors, and a new kitchen with marble countertops.

Speaker 3 It's furnished beautifully with a beige mid-century modern sofa, an antique purple rug, and lots of art on the walls.

Speaker 4 I thought it was pretty artsy-fartsy, you know what I mean? Like, my taste is still the same, you know. I mean, I brought my furniture from my brownstone in Brooklyn.

Speaker 4 This cool, like, antique Indian print chair that was mid-century, but with Indian fabrics, and then, like, this big, cool bookcase that was like a wrought iron circle with recycled wooden slats that had sculptures and books and candles and stuff on it.

Speaker 3 Allison lives here with her roommate, India Oxenberg.

Speaker 3 India is in her early 20s, about a decade younger than Allison. She's from Malibu, with a sun-kissed, blonde, dreamy California look.
She's an amazing cook, has done some acting.

Speaker 3 Her mom is Yugoslavian royalty with a very posh British accent, an actress who appeared in the long-running soap dynasty. India's lineage is one of money and beauty.
The pair are close.

Speaker 4 India and I shared all of our clothes. We called it the universal closet, and we just wore each other's clothes all the time.

Speaker 3 But it's more than that, because India is the first woman Allison has recruited to serve under her in DOS.

Speaker 3 She is Allison's slave.

Speaker 3 Now, Keith has told Allison she must give India a mission, one that is important for both of them.

Speaker 4 The logic behind it was like, oh, now he's going to work on me and my jealousy issues and my feelings of insecurity around this young, beautiful woman.

Speaker 4 And he's going to help India with her struggles around her acceptance of her sexuality and her body and all these things. And I was like, why? And he was like, well, hasn't it helped you?

Speaker 4 And don't you think that it's going to help her? And I'm not going to take advantage of her. That's not what this is about.
I'm not like other men.

Speaker 4 And so this is the opportunity for her to explore her sexuality and her body and be comfortable in herself without being exploited.

Speaker 4 I would never take advantage of her that way, and blah, blah, blah. And

Speaker 4 fucking, you know,

Speaker 4 I believed him and

Speaker 4 wanted to do a good thing and wanted to work on my own jealousy and wanted to, you know, do all the things.

Speaker 4 So I did. That was India.

Speaker 3 So sitting there on the couch, surrounded by by Allison's plush pillows and artsy items from her travels, Allison talks to India.

Speaker 4 I think I just said like, so what's the thing that you feel like the most nervous and uncomfortable about in your relationships with men, you know, and like how do you feel about seduction?

Speaker 4 How do you feel about getting close to someone? How do you feel about intimacy? Okay, so I have an assignment that's going to push you through that.

Speaker 4 You're going to seduce somebody. You're going to seduce Keith.
And I'd be like, he's the only man that you could seduce that's not going to take advantage of you, you know?

Speaker 4 And it's like, he's going to respect you.

Speaker 3 India is getting ready to fly home to her family in California, but Allison pressures her not to.

Speaker 4 I was like, you have to change your flight. You have to change your flight.
You have to do it before you leave. You know, and all the while I have Keith writing to me,

Speaker 4 pushing me to get her to finish the assignment, you know, before she leaves.

Speaker 3 Because the assignment had one specific task, one particular end point.

Speaker 4 The assignment was to seduce seduce Keith to the point where he would take a picture of you without your clothes on, and then they would text the picture to me so that I knew that the assignment was completed.

Speaker 3 Nude pictures weren't new to Allison. When she met with the other first members of DOS, the group had to take and send a new picture to Keith.

Speaker 4 It was always at the beginning of the meeting, so we didn't have to sit naked the whole time.

Speaker 4 We all had the common belief that if it's uncomfortable, it means we're coming up against our issues, and so that's that's a good sign. That means that we're growing, right?

Speaker 4 So, like, all of us fed into that, all of us believed that, and all of us supported each other in that.

Speaker 3 Taking these nude photos as a group almost became routine, but the individual pictures, the ones Keith had India and Allison's other slaves take when he was with them alone,

Speaker 3 these pictures went one step further. They often involved the women lying in a very vulnerable position, faces visible, legs spread, genitals on full display.

Speaker 3 These images would become trophies for Keith, a perverse collection of photographs he kept on hand.

Speaker 4 And in my understanding, the assignment never involved him touching them or him having any type of sexual interaction with them outside of them being

Speaker 4 unclothed and him taking a picture.

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

Speaker 3 This is episode three: The Assignment.

Speaker 3 So, in November 2016, something pivotal happens. Keith's long-term girlfriend, Pam Kafritz, dies.

Speaker 3 Keith is distraught.

Speaker 4 Keith wanted to have like a huge memorial service for her.

Speaker 3 But this wasn't just a traditional memorial service.

Speaker 4 He like wanted us to create stations that represented like different ways in which Pam

Speaker 4 expressed herself in the world.

Speaker 3 Keith wanted to set up an exhibition of sorts, a living shrine filled with Pam's belongings.

Speaker 4 And like made me in charge of making basically like a Pam museum.

Speaker 3 All of a sudden, Allison has a huge new role to play.

Speaker 3 She starts sifting through Pam's clothes, touching the decades of incidentals this woman's life has left behind, gathering the items so she can recreate Pam, Keith's favorite girlfriend, in different scenarios.

Speaker 4 You saw like her suits and like her colors and like this was what she looked like when she was doing this case and like this is where she was when she, you know, these were her pens and like it was like that.

Speaker 3 So for this memorial, which took place, Allison says, in a big ballroom, Allison and other Nexium followers dress up mannequins in Pam's clothes.

Speaker 3 Just imagine looking at these mannequins, like the ones you'd see in a clothing store, except here they're set up in different positions with this dead woman's clothes on them.

Speaker 3 And Allison was in charge of it.

Speaker 3 It's a bizarre tribute. and also a pretty revealing one because it seems as though Keith is having Allison stage the life she's about to inhabit.

Speaker 3 With Pam gone, Allison is now stepping up as one of Keith's main girlfriends, one of his most important partners.

Speaker 3 And with that, she has an important role to play in DOS.

Speaker 3 Keith told Allison and the other first seven DOS members, called First Line Masters, to replicate with their own slaves what they'd been doing in DOS.

Speaker 3 And what they'd been doing in DOS was pretty extreme. Here's what Allison's life looked like at this point.

Speaker 4 So I woke up at 5 a.m. and I got out of bed right away and I took a one minute cold shower.

Speaker 4 I remember once I was working on a TV show and I had to take a cold shower and the water was so cold in New York City that it froze the conditioner into my hair.

Speaker 4 And so I showed up on set and the hairdresser was like going to do my hair and she was like, what is in your hair?

Speaker 4 And that was just standard every morning. And I waited to weigh myself until after the one minute cold shower so that my body could settle and I could get an accurate read on my weight.

Speaker 4 When I go to bed, I always had to text my schedule for the next day to Keith,

Speaker 4 asking permission if that schedule was suitable for him.

Speaker 4 And part of that was I would write down everything I was going to do and at what time I was going to do it and then how it related to a character trait that I was trying to build in myself.

Speaker 4 So like discipline or compassion or care or curiosity or commitment. Like, so every single thing that I did was related to some purpose of my character building kind of a thing.

Speaker 4 And it was literally like to the minute.

Speaker 4 And then I would make myself breakfast, which was usually, not usually, always, kaboca squash, plain non-fat Greek yogurt, a little bit of honey, a little bit of almond butter, and maybe some blueberries.

Speaker 3 Lunch was a salad. Dinner was gloss noodles with kale, jalapeno peppers, and more kabocha squash.
Allison ate so much squash during this time that her skin actually changed color.

Speaker 4 Yeah, my palms turned orange, my face turned orange. My mom was like, you need to not eat so much squash.

Speaker 3 Her hand was like a light orange all the time. Mindy Mac, Allison's mom.
She said, it was just because that's all I eat. And I said, well,

Speaker 3 you probably ought to have some protein. And

Speaker 3 it was really difficult difficult for me. It was a tightrope walk

Speaker 3 because I didn't want to push her away.

Speaker 3 And she was right on the edge all the time of don't push me, you know, because I'll be gone.

Speaker 3 But Allison was already gone because she was asking Keith for permission for every single thing. including texting Keith for approval before she was allowed to eat anything.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 4 when I became a part of DOS, one of the commitments was that I would stay under a certain weight, under

Speaker 4 107 pounds. He wanted me between 105 and 107 pounds.

Speaker 3 Allison is five foot five, so 105 pounds is significantly underweight for someone of her height. To achieve this absurd goal weight, Keith put her on a 500 calorie a day diet.

Speaker 3 Less than a third of what's recommended for an adult woman. Basically a starvation regimen.

Speaker 4 I wasn't allowed to eat after five, so from five to five, I fasted every day. I was running six miles a day.

Speaker 4 I was like really into half marathons, so I was running at least six miles on 500 calories, and I was very into yoga, so I was doing yoga. I did yoga every morning for about six years.

Speaker 4 I used to chew so much gum because I was so fucking hungry all the time and so anxious, like so on edge all the time. And I only chewed cinnamon gum because cinnamon gum doesn't have asperitame in it.

Speaker 4 So I was still being healthy. But the inside of my mouth was raw from all of the gum because the cinnamon gum would like fry your mouth.
And I'd have like an entire pack in my mouth at one time.

Speaker 4 Like I obsessively chewed gum and drank sparkling water. I fasted every Monday.
That was my holy day or whatever.

Speaker 4 So I wouldn't eat the whole day on Monday, which is crazy because it was actually like a day and a half because I would stop eating at five o'clock on Sunday and then I wouldn't eat again until 5 a.m.

Speaker 4 on Tuesday morning. And I always had these huge scarves because I was always, always cold.
I was so thin that I could touch my fingers together around my waist. I mean, I was anorexic.

Speaker 3 Many of these women in Nexium had body issues, and I've often wondered if that may have been part of why Nexium appealed to them in the first place.

Speaker 4 In the Nexium community, there was a hyper-fixation on weight. Everybody was trying to be skinny, which is so ironic because Keith is fat.

Speaker 4 Because he believed that it was better for your health and better for your energy work and better for everything if you were very, very, very thin.

Speaker 3 In Nexium, being dangerously thin was not seen as an illness. It was a virtue.
Perhaps it made these women, many of whom had money and pedigrees, feel like disordered eating was okay or even good.

Speaker 3 If you had anorexia or bulimia in the past, on the outside, and your family members or friends were on your case about getting healthy, it was satisfying to know they were wrong all along.

Speaker 3 Calorie restriction was now praised as discipline, as self-control. Or maybe it was a chicken and egg situation where Keith instilled ideas that resulted in these destructive behaviors.

Speaker 3 Whichever way it went, there's no doubt that Keith benefited from having Allison on a 500 calorie a day diet for three years,

Speaker 3 for having all these women underfed, underslept, and physically exhausted. And this was all only part of Keith's plan.
The most insidious stuff to me were the mind games.

Speaker 4 Part of the commitment was that like you had to love your master beyond everything, in the the face of everything. And part of how you did that was like every morning you

Speaker 4 meditated on the goodness of your master.

Speaker 3 I can just imagine Allison waking up at 5 a.m., having to sit down, maybe on a plush pillow, maybe cross-legged, and shut her eyes, focus on her breathing, and meditate on the goodness of Keith.

Speaker 3 With every breath, she would inhale, thinking about all the ways Keith was pure, the embodiment of love, and exhale, release any negative feelings she might have towards Keith.

Speaker 3 When I tried to meditate the night Allison told me this, Keith's face kept popping into my head. Like Keith had found a way to slip a piece of stained paper under the door of my brain.

Speaker 3 And that paper just steeps and stains and starts to wrap around every crevice of your mind, covering it with him, like when the paper wins in a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Speaker 3 Every single thing Allison and the other first-line masters did was framed as an act of care or service or denial, all for Keith.

Speaker 4 What could you do that day that was an act of care for your master? So how could you make their life easier? How could you make their world better?

Speaker 4 Like go grocery shopping for him or pick up his favorite chocolates and bring them to, you know, volleyball or help somebody helping each other get through their issues so that it was easier for Keith was like a way, like an act of care, you know, basically just doing whatever you could to

Speaker 4 make his life better. But the denial was like a self-denial.
So it was like, I'm going to give up something that I love in honor of my master.

Speaker 4 So it was like, I won't eat refined sugar in honor of my master. So anytime there was any dessert or anything sweet around, I was not participating.

Speaker 3 Their commitment to Keith took on another physical manifestation, a perverse wedding ring of sorts.

Speaker 4 We all had to wear a piece of permanent jewelry somewhere. I wore a belly chain because I could keep it on when I was acting.
And I was

Speaker 4 so thin and it was a way for me to maintain my weight.

Speaker 3 The idea was if Allison quote unquote ate too much, the belly chain would start to dig into her stomach.

Speaker 3 But Allison had a desire to be the best, to be the most committed to her master, to be really hardcore.

Speaker 3 So she took the belly chain a step further.

Speaker 3 As a form of punishment, she began wearing a type of salis, a restrictive undergarment designed to remind the wearer of their devotion to God, or in this case, to Keith.

Speaker 4 So it comes back, it's like the days of mortification from like nuns.

Speaker 4 and monks, you know, how they used to wear like

Speaker 4 burlap sacks because it was uncomfortable and itchy, like a a way of physical mortification.

Speaker 4 So, a Salis was like another form of that where you, um, it's like a strap, and the inside of the strap is sewn.

Speaker 4 Um, they're like giant staples like this, like pieces of metal that go like this with little spikies on the end, and they're sewn on the inside of the strap, and then you wrap that around your body so it's kind of poking you, like stabbing you, you know, all day.

Speaker 4 And so, I used to wear that around my waist, like under my clothes, if I overate as like a punishment

Speaker 3 At this point, Keith was not just Allison's coach or business partner. He was her sexual partner, her guru, her god.

Speaker 3 And so when he wanted Allison and the other first DOS members' dedication made even more permanent, it seemed almost logical.

Speaker 3 So they would be the first women, but not the last, to submit to being branded for Nexium.

Speaker 3 One day, Allison was in Albany when she got a call.

Speaker 4 It was lunchtime and they were like, the guy's here. We've all been done.
He's waiting for you. And so I was like, okay.

Speaker 3 So Allison gets in her car on her lunch break and drives to one of the DOS slaves' house.

Speaker 3 She walks inside.

Speaker 4 She had like this day room area and there was like a couch and I like laid on the couch and everybody was sucking on lollipops.

Speaker 3 Lollipops, a burst of sugar to make sure no one fainted. Most of the other first-line slaves are there, including Nikki Klein, the Canadian actress.

Speaker 3 Some of the women are watching TV in the other room.

Speaker 3 Allison lies down on the couch. She's wearing a pair of baggy pants.
A body modification artist, a man she can only identify as a tattoo artist from Arizona, sits down beside her.

Speaker 4 I think Nikki was talking to him, but we're just this part of a... we're part of a

Speaker 4 you know a sorority i think is what we said and we want to do this as part of our sorority initiation thing

Speaker 4 I pulled my pants down to show the my hip which is where it was and then he branded me and I like put the he put the tape over it and gave me a lollipop and I buttoned up my pants and went back and taught the rest of the intensive

Speaker 3 Allison carries on like normal but her body is in shock She's just been branded with a cauterizing pen without any sort of pain medication or numbing cream.

Speaker 4 My body was like shaking in shock, you know, like obviously my body was still trembling. But I was so good at like

Speaker 4 cutting that off and just focusing on what I was doing. And I'm just not gonna feel this right now.
I'm just gonna dissociate completely and be somewhere different.

Speaker 4 I don't know when or where I developed that survival mechanism, but when other women would say like, that's really painful or whatever, I was like, what do you mean?

Speaker 3 Like, it's fine.

Speaker 4 It's just what you did. It was just like another day.
And so the callousness by which I handled that and handled myself in that is the same callousness that I had with the other girls.

Speaker 3 And Allison is being manipulated by Keith too in a callous way.

Speaker 3 Allison has never talked to anyone about this publicly. But for about a year, from 2015 to 2016, Keith was having sex with Allison every day.

Speaker 4 In the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, you'd have a meeting, didn't matter, he'd come interrupt the meeting, you'd do.

Speaker 3 Keith framed this sexual coercion as energy work, part of her healing.

Speaker 3 Remember, Allison told Keith that she struggled with her sexuality, that there were things that happened when she was a kid that weren't okay.

Speaker 3 But through the brainwashing of Nexium, the sick piece of paper folded around Allison's mind like a glove, Keith programmed Allison and the other women to ignore their their gut.

Speaker 3 Now, any reluctance Allison felt to having sex with Keith was positioned as her fault. To hit this point home, after each time they had sex, Keith would debrief with Allison at length.

Speaker 4 An orgasm or like any type of physical reaction that your body is having when you're having an intimate experience with somebody.

Speaker 4 It's not always an orgasm, but it's just like different, you know, physical experiences, right?

Speaker 4 And so he would, he would take ownership and responsibility for what was happening in my body and what was happening for me emotionally, so that it all came back to him being the source of these experiences that I was having, right?

Speaker 4 And then it was like, no other man will be able to do this for you.

Speaker 3 And now Allison must provide Keith with more women, not just India, so he can heal them too.

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Speaker 3 So Keith viewed Allison as a sort of project. She was not high up in the organization, but she was a rising star, a pet of his.

Speaker 3 And her commitment to Keith and the lengths she was willing to go for him set her apart.

Speaker 3 There's no getting around the fact that within DOS, Allison was one of the most extreme members and one of the most, if not the most, extreme master.

Speaker 3 She became a very accomplished recruiter, racking up several slaves, starting with India Auxenberg. And she was a very demanding taskmaster.
It's something she's still slightly defensive about.

Speaker 4 Nothing that I did with my slaves wasn't something that I had already done with our group.

Speaker 3 But by all accounts, Allison meted out punishments to her slaves with force.

Speaker 4 Most of the time it was like, okay, one minute cold shower for everybody in

Speaker 4 the group, including me. And so I would take my standard one minute cold shower and then I would add another minute.

Speaker 4 Standing in the cold for

Speaker 4 like a certain amount of time, an hour, yeah, something like that, in the middle of the night. I mean, planks.
So holding a plank for a period of time, for like a minute or two minutes.

Speaker 3 She believes she's in charge of a badass group of empowered women.

Speaker 3 And Allison, who's competitive, who wants so deeply to be liked, to do a good job and obey her master, sees these women as a way for her to succeed.

Speaker 3 The harder she pushes her slaves, the better she sees herself reflected in Keith, her god's eyes. There are no boundaries she won't nudge past to get there, including sexual ones.

Speaker 4 My experience of his perversion was him teaching me how to be okay with my sexual experience.

Speaker 3 As part of that, Allison ended up having three sims with both Keith and Danny. I got involved with her and him a few times, and that was always like,

Speaker 4 what the fuck am I doing?

Speaker 3 This feels so weird. But again, in my head, I'm like, it's just because you're so limited in your ability to love, you know, and like,

Speaker 3 like, sex is just an

Speaker 3 extension of love. And like, why are you so limited that you can only feel love for a person in this one small way? Like push yourself, love harder, love more, you know

Speaker 3 Then all the while it's like this fucked up sexual fantasy

Speaker 3 That I'm just like

Speaker 3 you know

Speaker 3 In a twisted way Allison had come to believe the sexual exploitation of Nexium was a form of empowerment Not everyone took part in the sexual side of things and and some did more than others.

Speaker 3 In Nikki's slave line, there was a lot of reported sexual activity. In Lauren Salzman's slave line, there was none.
She would not have any of her slaves go see Keith.

Speaker 3 But Allison did, which is where the assignment comes in.

Speaker 3 Allison gives the assignment to several of her slaves, and one of those women has an experience that should have set off even more alarm bells than any of the others. Here's what happened.

Speaker 3 Allison gave a slave of hers, a woman identified only as Nicole, the assignment to do whatever Keith says. So Keith summoned Nicole in the middle of the night.

Speaker 3 He blindfolded her, took her to another location, and told her to get on a table, nude. And someone else started performing oral sex on her.

Speaker 3 After it was over, Allison says Nicole came back to Allison's house.

Speaker 4 She came back and had like, you know, indentations on her face from the mask. And I was like, Are you okay? And she's like, Yeah.
And I was like, What happened? And she told me, and I was like, Fuck.

Speaker 4 You're really brave. That was all I could say.
I was like, I don't think I would have had the guts to do that. Like, you're really brave.

Speaker 4 She was like, yeah, that was really crazy.

Speaker 3 Allison says on the inside, she was shocked.

Speaker 4 Like, blew my mind.

Speaker 4 And it's, but I'm, but how naive for me to be surprised at that, given the nature of how he, the disgusting text messages that he would send to me and the ways that he wanted all of us to take pictures of our bodies, close-up pictures of our bodies to send to him.

Speaker 4 Like, what was I, what did I think he was doing?

Speaker 3 It's really hard to understand how Allison could have possibly thought that Keith was just taking naked pictures of her slaves, that nothing sexual was happening.

Speaker 3 It just, you know, it's very like naive in some ways to like think that it would be.

Speaker 4 Incredibly naive.

Speaker 4 Incredibly naive, but it also just shows you what I thought of.

Speaker 4 I trusted that Keith would not do anything.

Speaker 3 Allison did not register that what had happened to Nicole was sexual assault. Because she also didn't register that what was happening to her was anything other than consensual.

Speaker 3 Did you think you were consenting? Totally.

Speaker 4 Totally.

Speaker 3 100%.

Speaker 4 And one of the first things, and I mean, that was a big thing for Keith in teaching, training us, and grooming us through DOS is like, this is the anti-victim mentality. None of you are victims.

Speaker 4 All of you are here because you want to be here. All of you are here because you're committing to your growth.
You are not victims in this.

Speaker 3 But sex was not the only currency in Naxium.

Speaker 3 If you talk to anyone who knows anything about intimate partner violence or cults or any sort of controlling relationship, they'll tell you that the perpetrator seeks to control every aspect they can,

Speaker 3 including finances.

Speaker 3 So at this point, Allison has been in Nexium for nearly a decade. She's been paying for course after course.

Speaker 4 I mean, I was blowing through

Speaker 4 $60,000, $100,000 on intensives and trainings, and then every EM is between $250,000 and $300.

Speaker 4 And I was getting an EM like once a week, at least.

Speaker 3 EMs are the exploration of meaning, the name for the Scientology-esque sessions we talked about in episode one. It's a way of sort of going clear in this cult.

Speaker 4 I was like blowing my money out of my bank account for

Speaker 4 Nexion.

Speaker 3 Allison has been spending ridiculously on Nexium.

Speaker 3 She's been working on Nexium pretty much full-time since Smallville ended, developing curriculum and leading courses, but she hasn't really gotten paid in any meaningful way.

Speaker 3 Her money is drying up.

Speaker 3 Allison estimates she gave Nexium hundreds of thousands of dollars, but honestly, looking at the numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if it was more like millions.

Speaker 3 She handed over basically everything she'd ever made to Nexium. and to Keith.
And she wasn't the only one. Not by any means.

Speaker 3 In In fact, two women in particular, Claire and Sarah Bronfman, have been bankrolling Keith for years.

Speaker 3 They are the daughters of billionaire Edgar Bronfman and heirs to Seagram's fortune. Claire and Sarah were some of Keith's earliest backers and his most ardent supporters.

Speaker 3 It was Claire's jet that Allison flew back on to meet Keith from Vancouver for the first time. And since the early 2000s, estimates suggest the Bronfmans have poured about $100 million into Nexium.

Speaker 3 A lot of that has gone into paying for legal fees against various anti-Nexium detractors, and Keith spent a reported $66 million playing the commodities market with it too. Yes, you heard that right.

Speaker 3 And there were immigration fees to be paid as well, because as we've already mentioned, Nexium had large Mexican and Canadian contingents.

Speaker 3 Keith wanted several of these foreign members to live in Albany. One of them was Nikki Klein, who we mentioned last episode.

Speaker 4 Nikki was another one who didn't really like me very much.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I was too much for her. Like she was, like, didn't like how performative I was and didn't like how

Speaker 4 outgoing I was and loud I was and sort of boisterous and gregarious and stuff.

Speaker 3 Nikki is another of the frontline DOS slaves, one of those first eight.

Speaker 3 Now Allison and her are spending a lot of time together in DOS. Keith is actually having sex with both of them.

Speaker 4 We were like sister wives, essentially. You know, that's ultimately like what it ended up being.
Even if that's not what I initially thought it was, that was ultimately what it ended up being.

Speaker 3 Allison desperately wanted Nikki's approval.

Speaker 4 It was like, how can I get her to like me?

Speaker 4 And I was the only American citizen in the group.

Speaker 3 So in 2017, Allison agrees to marry Nikki so she can stay in the country.

Speaker 4 Everybody else was Mexican, except for Nikki, who was Canadian. And so I was like, fuck, I'll marry you.
I already know I'm not going to marry somebody else.

Speaker 4 What's the difference? Like, we're basically married anyway. So why not? Her mom and her and I went to like a Justice of the Peace

Speaker 4 courthouse in LA somewhere, I think. And her mom was there to witness it.

Speaker 3 Allison doesn't tell her mom until the papers have been signed. My mom was just like, what is happening with my daughter? You know, I was horrified.

Speaker 3 I was hurt that she didn't trust me. Mindy Mac, Allison's mom again.
Well, I think it's because she knew that I would say, what the hell are you doing?

Speaker 3 Because it was Keith's idea, of course. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So I was,

Speaker 3 you know, there was some stuff going on that was hurtful to me that was extremely out of character for Allison.

Speaker 4 I was like, it's fine, mom, stop asking questions.

Speaker 3 And to Allison, at the time, it did seem fine, because weirder things were happening than getting married to a woman she wasn't in love with for a green card.

Speaker 3 This was a topsy-turvy world where she's barely eating, sleeping a handful of hours a night, and having coerced sex with Keith every day.

Speaker 3 And the thing is, All of this was secret.

Speaker 3 Keith was spending pretty much every hour of his day tomcatting around around between these different women, triangulating them, having sex with them, manipulating them.

Speaker 3 Then he would pontificate in these wide-ranging, absurd speeches that were taped for Nexium members to pour over.

Speaker 3 People like Nancy Salzman, his prefect, the second in command, really still believed in what he was doing, that Keith was a good man, doing good in the world.

Speaker 3 Information about what is really going on is siloed. Most women in DOS aren't doing sexual stuff with Keith, and they don't know that he's doing anything sexual with the others.

Speaker 3 Even Allison only knew bits and pieces. But little by little, she starts to hear about weird things happening with other women too.

Speaker 3 Like paddling each other, that is, hitting each other with a thick wooden instrument. He's making them record videos of themselves doing this and send them to him.

Speaker 3 And while this is going on, more and more women are being branded. And these brandings are being filmed too.

Speaker 3 In fact, they've been codified into rituals, not the slapdash business Allison got on her lunch break.

Speaker 3 These new recruits had to request the procedure with specific language, saying, Master, will you please brand me?

Speaker 3 DOS has grown to about 150 women, with the slaves recruiting their own slaves, a repeating cycle of collateral and readiness drills and branding.

Speaker 3 Of those women, Allison estimates that between 20 20 to 30 were branded. That is a horrifying number.

Speaker 3 But Nexium has thousands of members, and most people have no idea that DOS even exists, let alone that people are getting branded, even those really high up in the organization.

Speaker 3 Nancy Salzman, prefect, is in the dark, and so is Claire Bronfman, Nexium's main financier. But it's all beginning to bubble up.

Speaker 3 Especially when some of these DOS members realize that the videos of brandings are going to Keith, they start to freak out. They thought this was women's empowerment.

Speaker 3 Only the first eight slaves seem to know that Keith is involved.

Speaker 3 One of the women whose branding is filmed is Sarah Edmondson.

Speaker 3 She's the founder of Nexiem's Vancouver Center. and is actually one of Lauren Salzman's slaves.
She got branded in a ceremony at Allison Mack's house over the winter.

Speaker 3 Afterwards, her husband sees her brand and he flips out. He shows up in Albany at a restaurant called Apropo.

Speaker 3 Apropo is a middling Italian joint frequented by the Nexium set. It's off the highway in a single-story building with a facade of painted pillars outside and tacky cheap construction inside.

Speaker 3 In this restaurant, in the spring of 2017, Sarah's husband tells everyone that Sarah has been branded.

Speaker 3 He makes a stink, causes a huge scene, and gets the word out about DOS.

Speaker 3 And it works.

Speaker 3 Other Nexium members do freak out. They start to pack up and leave Albany.

Speaker 3 Sarah begins making calls to people's family members, warning them about the brand and the sex stuff and that their loved ones might be involved in a cult.

Speaker 3 Claire Bromferman tries to stop her with a private investigator and legal maneuverings, but Sarah continues to warn people. Mindy Mac remembers getting one such call from Sarah.

Speaker 3 Sarah Edmondson called me and she said, I'm a mother now and I know I understand the level of care and concern that you have as a mother and I observe you and your care and concern of Allison and I just want you to know that bad stuff's going down at Nexian.

Speaker 3 I want you to know that that's happening and that Allison needs to get out.

Speaker 3 I'm like, oh my God, what's happening? And

Speaker 3 so I went to Allison and I said, Sarah Edmondson called me and told me that bad stuff was going on and that concerns me. And she said, Ma,

Speaker 3 and she just talked me off the ledge. She told me everything that Keith told her about why Sarah left.
Sarah left because she wasn't getting what she thought she was going to get.

Speaker 3 Don't Don't worry about it. These are people that are just disgruntled.

Speaker 3 This was Keith and Nexium's party line. That all this bad stuff people were saying, they were just making up because they were unhappy with their own lives.
Victim mentality.

Speaker 3 Allison believed it wholeheartedly.

Speaker 4 It was like,

Speaker 4 everything's fine. It's going to be fine.

Speaker 3 But it's not going to be fine. Because many members are leaving, disavowing Nexium, hurt and angry.
Because Sarah and the others are giving interviews to the New York Times.

Speaker 3 And when they run that story, it gets a lot of attention.

Speaker 3 And some people, including India's mom, Catherine Oxenberg, are starting to talk to law enforcement.

Speaker 3 And then the federal government decides to take up the case for sex trafficking and other issues.

Speaker 3 Still, Allison thinks nothing is wrong.

Speaker 4 I remember when, like, the FBI is getting involved and things like that, like, those kinds of conversations were coming up. I was just like, it's fine.

Speaker 4 They're going to understand, you know, that we're not doing anything wrong. And it's like completely disconnected from reality in my delusional belief that everything is fine.

Speaker 3 But Keith, Keith realizes they need to mount a public defense.

Speaker 3 And Allison will play a key role.

Speaker 4 I thought it would be cool to have something more meaningful and something that took more guts.

Speaker 6 But why Keith's initials then if he's not Keith's initials?

Speaker 8 The bottom line is it's not Allison's initials. It's not my initials.

Speaker 4 They just basically storm the property.

Speaker 9 They're wearing masks, bulletproof vests, machine guns.

Speaker 9 And I go on this high alert, like, I'm going to protect Keith.

Speaker 4 And I look down, you know, and I thought,

Speaker 3 this is too much.

Speaker 4 I think I can just jump.

Speaker 3 Tune in next week for an all-new episode of Allison After Nexium.

Speaker 3 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. 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 Robomet.

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 Ewyn Lai 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 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.