S35 E4: Helter Skelter | Allison after NXIVM

Speaker 1 Hannah Berner, are those the cozy Tommy John pajamas you're buying?

Speaker 2 Paige DeSorbo, they are Tommy John. And yes, I'm stocking up because they make the best holiday gifts.

Speaker 1 So generous.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm a generous girly, especially when it comes to me. So I'm grabbing the softest sleepwear, comfiest underwear, and best-fitting loungewear.

Speaker 1 So nothing for your bestie.

Speaker 2 Of course, I'm getting my dad, Tommy John. Oh, and you, of course.

Speaker 1 It's giving holiday gifting made easy.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Cozy, comfy, everyone's happy.
Don't wait. Shop Tommy John's biggest savings ever and get 50% off site-wide at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

Speaker 3 This is a CBC podcast.

Speaker 3 Campsite media.

Speaker 4 Just a note before we begin. This episode contains a discussion of suicide.

Speaker 4 There's a woman who joined Nexium in the early days.

Speaker 4 She's actually the daughter of the organization's second in command.

Speaker 4 And this is the first time she's spoken about what happened to her.

Speaker 5 I joined Nexium before Nexium was a thing. My mom met Keith Thanksgiving my senior year in college and basically was like fully indoctrinated and committed to him by spring break.

Speaker 4 This is Lauren Salzman, daughter of Nexium Prefect Nancy Solzman. She was high up in Nexium leadership herself and spent 20 years in the organization.

Speaker 4 She may sound forthright and matter of fact, but make no mistake, what Lauren experienced and did in Nexium was deeply traumatic, and it was a very big decision for her to speak to me.

Speaker 4 She remembers that spring break, her senior year, when her mom was deeply embedded with Keith already.

Speaker 5 She took us on this vacation. to Florida and she called it the transition from mother to friend vacation.
She spent the entire time,

Speaker 5 like the entire vacation in the hotel room reading Atlas Rugged and like on the phone with Keith, trying to like deprogram her children from being parasitic and to have real self-esteem.

Speaker 4 This was a theory of Keith's. According to Keith, children employed quote parasite strategies to get their mom to do things for them.

Speaker 5 They learn effort strategies and parasite strategies was how the theory went. And so a parasite strategy can start out as an effort strategy, right? Like baby cries, mommy comes.

Speaker 5 Baby cries louder, mommy comes comes faster. But then baby learns they can cry for a whole bunch of stuff and get you to do effort on their behalf so that they don't have to.

Speaker 5 And that's what they call a parasitic strategy

Speaker 5 versus an effort strategy, which creates self-reliance and builds self-esteem.

Speaker 5 So what he was saying is that my mom was undermining our self-reliance and our self-esteem.

Speaker 5 And then his solution for that was to ultimately come in and step in as the one who was going to solve that problem and then get everybody completely dependent on him and not self-reliant enough to ever leave.

Speaker 4 Of course, this idea flies in the face of attachment theory and doesn't actually build self-reliance. It shuts down one's intuition and instead builds reliance on Keith.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, Lauren's intuition was already screaming.

Speaker 5 When I first met Keith, every time I was around him, I would profusely start to sweat and stink. And like, I don't even know how to explain it.

Speaker 5 Like, my body had such a polarizing reaction to him that it took me a while to get over that.

Speaker 4 But she had to get over it because Keith and her mom were working together.

Speaker 5 So by the time I graduated, they were already coming up with a school. And when I came home from college, I was already in it.

Speaker 4 Lauren began taking classes and eventually teaching them too.

Speaker 5 I thought he was really smart. And when I started taking the curriculum, I really liked it.
It made a lot of sense.

Speaker 5 And my life got a little bit more internally organized, I think, and things started to work better.

Speaker 4 Around April 2001, when Lauren was about 24, Keith asked Lauren to be in a relationship with him. At the same time, he was running a company with her mother, who he also had a relationship with.

Speaker 4 But within about five years, Lauren says, Keith cooled on on her. The romantic part of their relationship was over.

Speaker 4 Of course, Keith told Lauren that that was her fault, that she needed to work on herself before they could be together for real.

Speaker 4 If she did that, Keith promised, he would have a child with her. So Lauren stuck around.

Speaker 4 Still, Lauren's a formidable presence. As time went on, she became a bigger and bigger force in the organization.
In some ways, Nancy, who was getting older, was receding.

Speaker 4 Lauren felt like prefect to some of the younger members. And yet, during this time, Lauren says Keith still found ways to needle her.

Speaker 5 I'm in a relationship with this person. We haven't had any intimacy or even interaction in a decade.

Speaker 5 And then I go and see him, and we're on a walk, and he passes Allison, and he likes makes a note to point out that maybe she doesn't have a bra on.

Speaker 5 She was wearing, like, you know, I don't know, free people onesie, like those cute little jumpsuits. And he's like pushing it off her shoulder.
So like I can see there's nothing underneath.

Speaker 5 and I'm like that's the kind of shit he does so you're there feeling as small as small can be you know while he's flirting with somebody younger prettier more famous more popular more you know whatever than you and

Speaker 5 you really start to realize you aged out before you're even 30

Speaker 4 This is something Keith would do. Play women off each other.

Speaker 4 Remember, Allison and Lauren met at Allison's very first intensive in Vancouver when Allison flew back to Albany on Claire Bronfman's private plane.

Speaker 5 I think she taught me to knit and we talked the whole way. And I remember my mom saying like she hadn't seen me get along with somebody so well since I was really young.

Speaker 5 And that was one of the things that Keith brought up when he spoke to me afterwards, which is, I heard you guys got along really well and that that was unusual for you.

Speaker 4 Allison felt similarly.

Speaker 7 I really liked

Speaker 4 But space soon grew between the two. Remember, Allison was being told by Keith that she was a shell of a person, psychologically.

Speaker 7 I was so ashamed by

Speaker 7 being inauthentic and self-absorbed and stuff. And I thought that Lauren could see that.

Speaker 7 And so then I just got weird. I couldn't like be natural around Lauren.
I like didn't know how to act and I just became very hyper-insecure around her.

Speaker 4 By the time Allison had become Keith's star pupil and central to DOS, Lauren had drifted a little from both of them. Lauren says she was recruited into DOS later than the other first-line members.

Speaker 4 But when she was eventually brought on board, her and Allison started spending more time together.

Speaker 4 And when Nexium members began speaking out about the branding and leaving the group, Lauren and Allison remained loyal to Nexium and to Keith.

Speaker 4 But they wouldn't be on the same side for long.

Speaker 4 From Campside Media and CBC, this is Allison after Nexium from CBC's Uncover.

Speaker 8 I'm Natalie Robomet.

Speaker 4 This is episode four,

Speaker 4 Helter Skelter.

Speaker 4 Keith and Claire Bronfman are starting to talk to lawyers because it's becoming clear that they could be in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 4 And so they decide to do something people in crisis often do, an almost shoot the moon type of strategy. They decide to open up to a reporter for the first time in nearly a decade and a half.

Speaker 4 The reporter they speak with, Vanessa Gregoriadis, is our executive producer on this show. She's first authorized to talk to Allison and given an address to go to in Brooklyn Heights.

Speaker 9 So it was a very cold day in New York City. Allison is actually living in an apartment building, not quite a brownstone, but beautiful, right near the water and the Brooklyn Promenade.

Speaker 9 And I buzzed up to her apartment.

Speaker 9 It was an old building. I walked up the stairs.

Speaker 9 And she was standing at the door.

Speaker 4 Vanessa's been granted unparalleled access in the hope that she might present a different angle. Tell the other side, as it were.
But she's still suspicious, to say the least.

Speaker 9 When we walked in, I heard a man's voice and was kind of confused by what that was. And she said, oh, I'm just playing a podcast.
I have to turn it off and went to her computer.

Speaker 9 And since I knew that Nexium members tended to listen to Keith's recordings, I wondered, was that actually Keith speaking, that man's voice?

Speaker 4 The apartment is sparsely furnished because Allison is still in the process of moving in.

Speaker 9 It was a studio apartment, so just like one big room with really high ceilings,

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 a bunch of the art was off the walls and just sort of resting on the walls, on the floor.

Speaker 4 Vanessa settles down onto a couch with Allison.

Speaker 9 She looked beautiful, because she is beautiful. She had on

Speaker 9 sort of a strange outfit, extremely loose. At that time she and Lauren wore these very loose clothes.
She was very skinny, painfully too skinny.

Speaker 4 They make small talk about Allison's running route, their subway preferences, and the incense Allison is burning.

Speaker 10 Something smells so good in here. What did you do? I just burned Palo Santa.

Speaker 9 She was incredibly friendly and I was nervous. She was nervous.
So we're sort of laughing and talking and feigning intimacy to cover up how weird the situation was.

Speaker 4 As the Palo Santo wafts through the studio apartment, Vanessa starts asking Allison about the branding, about the secret sorority, about all the rumors that are beginning to bubble up about Nexium and DOS in particular.

Speaker 4 And Allison tells her, no, she's got it all wrong. Her voice gets harder and harder as she explains that DOS is actually just a cool women's feminist group.

Speaker 10 There's so many things that we depend on men for and so many ways that we default to men to feel strong, to feel affirmed and to feel solid and to feel whatever.

Speaker 4 We didn't want any of that bullshit. We wanted to stand on our own.

Speaker 9 She was telling me that

Speaker 9 the sorority, which was the phrase that they were using to talk about DOS, to try to give it

Speaker 9 something of a more normal name, I think, was good in that it was all about achievement and setting rules for yourself and goals and boundaries. And it was a way of women regaining power in the world.

Speaker 4 Allison defends the master-slave dynamic, which has been getting a lot of attention, as a spiritual practice of devotion.

Speaker 10 The concept of the slave, which has gotten so spun out, is that we can either be enslaved to our fears and our attachments, or we can be enslaved to our higher selves and the things that we love.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 10 The idea was that you are a slave to your master. Your master is your highest ideology,

Speaker 11 essentially.

Speaker 7 And you wear a piece of jewelry to symbolize it.

Speaker 4 Allison lifts up her shirt to show Vanessa her gold belly chain, which she says she got on Etsy. The message is, this is all normal and above board.

Speaker 4 It's just a bunch of women doing their version of a male brotherhood.

Speaker 10 I mean, like the Masons and

Speaker 10 the fucking skull and bones, bones, right? Omega society.

Speaker 10 Like men,

Speaker 10 the Marines, men have a thing about brotherhood and they come together and they stick together. And

Speaker 10 a lot of what, I mean the branding and all of that stuff was looking at those structures and those, that culture and just being like, what would happen if women did that?

Speaker 10 What would happen if women were ballsy enough to brand themselves in the name of honor and commitment?

Speaker 10 What would happen if women were ballsy enough to, you know, stand up for each other in the face of greatest adversity?

Speaker 8 What would that be like?

Speaker 4 Vanessa turns the line of questioning to the brand, which has apparently been burned right near each woman's hip bone.

Speaker 9 Nobody knew what this bizarre sort of hieroglyph was that had been branded on these women's bodies. So I asked her, what is the nature of this brand? I asked her, did Keith know about the sorority?

Speaker 9 I asked her, did Keith know about the branding? I asked her all these questions and she was just sort of saying no.

Speaker 10 I thought it would be cool to have something more meaningful and something that took more guts. But why Keith's initials then if he's not involved in Keith's initials? Oh, it's just like a...

Speaker 10 Bar alpha mu, which is another name for our sorority. So the bar is the line straight across, which is the infinity symbol.
This means infinity. Alpha, which is the A.

Speaker 11 I can put the line right there.

Speaker 10 So that is alpha is beginning, right?

Speaker 4 Like first new birth.

Speaker 10 And then mu is an M that comes through there. Yeah.
And that is something I see. But why does it look like a KR with an AM? Because, and with, I know, with a fucking AM.
No, it's not.

Speaker 10 But it can look like anything you want it to look like. It was not deliberately intended to look like

Speaker 10 Keith's initials.

Speaker 4 Allison lies.

Speaker 4 She says the brand is not only not her initials, which it isn't, but also not Keith's initials, which it definitely is.

Speaker 4 She says Keith has nothing to do with the group, even though the group was, as we now know, Keith's idea. Not only that, Allison actually takes credit for the brand.

Speaker 10 We wanted to do something that was physical, something that would be painful, that would signify our commitment to each other. And the idea was tattoos.
And I was like, that's lame.

Speaker 10 Like, that's pussy. Like, I don't want to do that.

Speaker 10 And I was like, I, you know, I think we should do something more intense. We should do something that's more, that's more meaningful, that's more symbolic.
And so I came up with branding.

Speaker 10 And at first, everybody was like, you're crazy. And I was like, no, but think about it.
Like, it's the four elements. Fire burns it into your body.

Speaker 10 This is the horizon. This is a mountain.
This is water.

Speaker 10 The lines themselves are the seven chakras. And it's also far out from you.
I was like, it's so symbolic all in that one little thing. And the whole process of doing it is so symbolic.

Speaker 10 It's like burning it into your skin. Like the fire of burning something into your body.
Like, that's amazing.

Speaker 4 After her interview with Vanessa, Allison calls two other women in DOS and plays them the recording of the conversation because she recorded Vanessa too, a common practice of Nexium members who recorded everything obsessively.

Speaker 7 And I remember being like, I think I did a good job and da-da-da-da.

Speaker 4 She tells them she took credit for the brand, that it was her idea.

Speaker 7 And then they were like, you did what? You said what? Oh my God, Allison, I can't believe you did that. And I was like, well, I didn't know.
I didn't know what she was going to ask me.

Speaker 7 I didn't know what I was supposed to say. I thought I was making it sound good.
And like, I'm going to take the heat for it. Like, it's fine, you guys.
Don't worry about it.

Speaker 4 Allison thinks taking credit for the brand would make it sound better. It's something she's doing for Keith.

Speaker 4 She gave that interview to Vanessa for Keith 2.

Speaker 4 The next thing Vanessa is supposed to do is go to Albany to interview Keith. She's planning to take a train.
But at the last minute, Nexium's publicist tells her that Keith is not in Albany anymore.

Speaker 4 Due to some vague problem with a Nexium member's visa, he is is in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Speaker 4 If you've seen any of the big cult documentaries from the last few years, or read about any of the famous cults from the 70s and 80s, you'll know there usually comes a moment when the group retreats, recedes from society further into its own isolation.

Speaker 4 Maybe they hunker down in a bunker. or flee to an exotic location.
And to me, that seems to have been what was happening here.

Speaker 4 Remember, Nexium has a lot of members in Mexico, and some of them are very powerful, the sons and daughters of the Mexican 1%.

Speaker 4 Perhaps, Keith figures, if they're under fire in the US, maybe they'll be safe here.

Speaker 4 And Vanessa, she's chasing the story. So she flies to Mexico, too.

Speaker 4 I flew into Guadalajara.

Speaker 9 It's very hilly, sort of cool looking, has an LA vibe.

Speaker 4 The thing is, at this point, Vanessa knows that Nexia members are going to be indicted for some crimes. And she thinks that Keith knows that too.

Speaker 4 The United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York is likely debating as well if they're going to indict Allison and Lauren.

Speaker 4 Lauren was responsible for aiding Keith in keeping a young woman who'd expressed romantic feelings for someone other than him in a room she did not not leave for two years.

Speaker 4 It is unclear whether Keith cares about charges for Allison and Lauren or only his own charges. We did not interview Keith for this podcast, so we are not able to speak to that.

Speaker 4 But it seems to Vanessa there is a reason he is in Mexico, and it might not only be about a visa.

Speaker 9 Pulled up at this pretty nondescript white high-rise near a park.

Speaker 9 I went into the lobby, which was one of those sort of marble, echoey

Speaker 9 lobbies,

Speaker 9 relatively humble, not fancy,

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 Claire was in the first-floor apartment there.

Speaker 4 Claire Bromfman, one of the heirs to the Seagram's fortune.

Speaker 4 Claire is thin, with blue eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. Claire has bankrolled Nexium for many years, sinking an estimated $100 million

Speaker 4 into it. She's a full devotee, and hardly anyone except Vanessa has talked to her.

Speaker 9 Claire was also very, very skinny. She was wearing white jeans.
She had a really soft voice to the point where you almost felt like she was whispering part of the time.

Speaker 12 We have so many strategies to not

Speaker 12 feel the things that are uncomfortable for us. And the whole basis of our program is to feel those things so that you can work them through, right? And then they're not uncomfortable anymore.

Speaker 4 Claire tells Vanessa Keith is taking a nap. So she and Vanessa talk for a bit.

Speaker 6 Her

Speaker 9 attitude and what she wanted to communicate to me was that they were a program about executive success coaching and that she was a businesswoman.

Speaker 4 Keith was as well

Speaker 9 and that she had devoted her life

Speaker 9 to proselytizing his message and that there was nothing to see here.

Speaker 4 Is Keith really good at volleyball?

Speaker 12 Keith's really athletic.

Speaker 12 He's different than most people, I'll tell you.

Speaker 12 A lot of people, and I know this because I'm an athlete, like, well, I'm a former retired athlete, I should say correctly.

Speaker 12 You get lazy, you know, especially if it's the 10th game, you get lazy. I mean, I'm lazy, you know.
Keith will try, like, he'll throw himself on the floor.

Speaker 12 Like, he really tries to play full out when he plays. It's kind of how he does life.

Speaker 4 It's kind of how he does life.

Speaker 4 What Claire's saying is an echo of what Keith asked Alison the first time he met her. Oh, is that how you do life?

Speaker 4 As if everything can be judged by one's behavior on the volleyball court. I mean, Claire's a former professional show jumper.
That's the sport with horses where you jump over brightly colored poles.

Speaker 4 And she's calling herself lazy, even though Keith's the one taking a nap in the middle of the day right now.

Speaker 4 Keith, it seems, used to sleep very little at night and then nap in small increments during the day. It's all just more evidence of how delusional everyone is right now.

Speaker 4 I mean, Keith and Nexium are in serious trouble, and yet no one Vanessa's spoken to, not Claire, nor Allison, seems to understand that.

Speaker 4 Now, standing in this apartment, Vanessa wonders, will Keith?

Speaker 9 And then he just appeared. He sprang out from

Speaker 9 the bedroom.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 it's hard to explain how underwhelming it was to meet him after so much buildup.

Speaker 9 He was just a middle-aged guy with a sort of feathered haircut, and he's wearing this business casual outfit I would describe it as like blue polo shirt, gray slacks, just your average car salesman.

Speaker 9 Claire and Keith and I sat down at a dining room table. You know, they were there to answer these questions.

Speaker 4 But right away, Keith starts spewing gobbledygook.

Speaker 13 I'm the person who, if I'm asked, a real I don't want to hear the answer and I work and work and work and work.

Speaker 4 You can hear Vanessa mm-hmm throughout this, trying to encourage Keith to keep talking, but not really sounding as if she's believing it.

Speaker 13 So I built a real capacity to consider things in depth. I can concentrate on an issue for hours and go forward on it for hours because I've built that capacity.

Speaker 13 So what makes me different is I just think I work harder than others at it. I may not be as good or as talented as an end result but I do work hard.

Speaker 4 He starts psychoanalyzing Vanessa and what he calls her leadership position.

Speaker 13 I was contemplating your leadership position. I believe you are a leader.
I think that the advantages of human having empathy is our hearts jump a little when we see that. And that's leadership.

Speaker 13 It's how you conduct yourself in the world as a type of leadership. And then there's the more direct power leadership.
Like you have a certain power over your readers, some more so, some less so.

Speaker 13 Not complete, but

Speaker 13 you lead that way.

Speaker 13 And you lead your children. They're independent and

Speaker 13 all of us do. So I was thinking about the distinctions between like leadership through power, leadership through inspiration, and we just had some contemplations relating to that.

Speaker 4 This is how Keith talks, weaving disconnected rhetorical paths that hint at grandeur and something deeper, but never actually make any real or insightful points.

Speaker 4 During all of this, Claire Bromfman, the deep pockets of the organization, sits quietly. When he would talk, she would just nod along.

Speaker 9 She was just, you know, never going to say anything to contradict what he was saying.

Speaker 4 Vanessa steers the conversation back to the brand.

Speaker 10 If these initials were yours and Allison's, and

Speaker 10 but they have to be some because you can see that they're there, though.

Speaker 14 No, but they're not.

Speaker 10 Is that just like weird that they you do you believe that's a coincidence?

Speaker 14 Of what?

Speaker 10 The initials are in the

Speaker 14 well. I mean, you can see there's also,

Speaker 14 I mean, at one point, someone showed me all the different letters those things can be.

Speaker 14 This symbolism of why they put those things together. Yeah, I guess they're my initials if you like flip it in a mirror image and round it off.
But that's not how I sign my initials.

Speaker 14 And as far as I know, when I first heard that

Speaker 14 it was interpreted my initials, my first thought was I was shocked and I didn't feel good about it. And then I thought about it and I said, okay, well, what if they put Albert Einstein?

Speaker 14 Or they tattooed Albert Einstein? Would I care? And I said, no. I said, well, all right, because it's my name.

Speaker 14 So the other part of me said, well, what if it was my name? Who cares? And I've said this to people.

Speaker 14 It's not my name. I would feel funny if it were my name.

Speaker 14 I don't think it's particularly right that I feel funny if it's my name. I'm not quite sure.
I haven't worked that out completely.

Speaker 14 But no, it's not. The bottom line is, it's not Allison's initials.
It's not my initials.

Speaker 4 In fact, Keith thinks the fixation on the brand is actually sexist.

Speaker 14 I don't know, a group of 10 or 15 women in a suburbia, their average age is like 40, getting together and deciding to have a little hip brand.

Speaker 14 If that were guys, it would make news. The fact that it's women and the fact that it makes news is reinforcing, unfortunately, a negative stereotype of women, I think.

Speaker 10 In terms of what? What negative stereotype?

Speaker 14 Well if women or men are equal

Speaker 14 group of women getting a brand should get the same attention as a group of men branding each other and we see that's not the case and the more we treat them as different right the more we say in a sense women are weak they can't make their decisions themselves they can't do this sort of thing this is mutilation this is their if there's a guy it's fine women no they're a delicate flower

Speaker 14 And that reinforces this type of stereotype that I think we struggle with in society.

Speaker 4 Keith tells Vanessa that he's polyamorous. Vanessa asks him if he's sleeping with the woman in the sorority.
And Keith basically says, sort of, but not really.

Speaker 14 I have at least one polyamorous partner in the sorority, but this was a woman that we haven't been very sexually active.

Speaker 4 This interview is taking place just a few months after the Harvey Weinstein allegation sparked the Me Too movement, and that seems to be part of Keith's framing.

Speaker 9 The way that they were positioning was: we're an anti-Me Too group. We don't actually want women to be victims.

Speaker 4 We don't like what's going on in culture.

Speaker 9 We are here to tell you that we're strong, and the brand is just a way of us bonding with each other like men in a fraternity and being strong together.

Speaker 9 So the fact that you are trying to say these women are victims of me when I didn't even have anything to do with it is you're just painting me as like one of these me too guys and I'm not.

Speaker 9 But of course it was far more complicated and worse than anything me too.

Speaker 4 Because the brand isn't empowered.

Speaker 9 The brand was right near women's genitals to the inside of your pelvic bone and Keith was performing oral sex on a lot of these women and he wanted to have this brand right there.

Speaker 9 I mean that's the reality.

Speaker 4 It's ownership.

Speaker 8 Women branded like cattle.

Speaker 4 Vanessa goes back home but she doesn't publish her story yet. She's heard from key sources that Keith is about to be indicted by the U.S.
government. She's waiting for that to happen.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, in Albany, there's also movement to Mexico. Claire Bronfman has rented a villa for Keith by the sea.

Speaker 4 Allison and her supposed wife, Nikki Klein, plus Lauren Salzman and others, are going to join them at that villa. And they're going there for a special purpose.
Here's Lauren Salzman again.

Speaker 5 I got a call from one of the first line DOS members who basically laid out a recommitment ceremony.

Speaker 4 A recommitment ceremony.

Speaker 5 Keith wants to know why we've stopped taking naked pictures and stopped sending them to him. And he wants to know why we've stopped DOS.

Speaker 4 According to this other DOS member, Keith is upset that DOS activity has slowed because of all the uproar with Sarah Edmondson and people leaving Nexium.

Speaker 4 And he wants the frontline DOS members, which includes Allison and Lauren, to renew their commitment to him.

Speaker 4 Sort of like renewing your vows after 20 years of marriage, but it's after three years of DOS.

Speaker 5 And it's becoming very clear that indictments are coming down the pike and we don't know who's in trouble. And he's not really having a good pulse on it.

Speaker 5 I really started to feel like he lost the plot. Like he was getting really crazy in a lot of areas.

Speaker 4 But the recommitment ceremony isn't a typical vow renewal.

Speaker 5 Basically, this woman lays out that we need to do this commitment ceremony and she lays out this like orgy concept and I lost my shit.

Speaker 5 And she said to me, no, no, it's not my understanding that we're going to be having sex with each other. It's my understanding that we're going to be pleasuring him.

Speaker 4 Keith apparently wants the DOS members to have an orgy in which they pleasure him. Lauren calls Keith and confronts him.

Speaker 5 And he's like, no, no, that person misunderstand. He blamed it all on her, said she lied, said she's crazy.
And that's why he doesn't talk to her.

Speaker 5 But then he says, he says this sentence that are all English words, but it doesn't make an actual sentence. And I said, I don't understand what you just said.

Speaker 5 And he said, you are so controlling that I should just talk to you like this all the time, because if you don't learn to surrender, you are never going to be able to grow.

Speaker 5 And he said, this person is at least committed.

Speaker 5 And I said, you think that they're more committed than me and he said they're more committed to growth you're more committed to me and i said they're committed to getting attention and having sex with you for that attention and he said well they could use that to grow and i'm like you just conceded the point

Speaker 5 you know so i was like fine I'm going to go to this recommitment ceremony and confront you.

Speaker 4 So Lauren travels up to Guadalajara for this recommitment ceremony. But she could never anticipate what was about to happen or how it would test her loyalty.

Speaker 1 Hannah Berner, are those the cozy Tommy John pajamas you're buying?

Speaker 2 Paige de Sorbo, they are Tommy John. And yes, I'm stocking up because they make the best holiday gifts.

Speaker 1 So generous.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm a generous girly, especially when it comes to me. So I'm grabbing the softest sleepwear, comfiest underwear, and best-fitting loungewear.

Speaker 1 So nothing for your bestie.

Speaker 2 Of course, I'm getting my dad, Tommy John. Oh, and you, of course.

Speaker 1 It's giving holiday gifting made easy.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Cozy, comfy, everyone's happy.
Don't wait. Shop Tommy John's biggest savings ever and get 50% off site-wide at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

Speaker 15 Hi, I'm Sarah Nicole Landry, and I'm the host of the Papaya podcast, where each week I ask curious questions to people with incredible stories or expertise in their fields.

Speaker 15 I'm somebody who has found so much inspiration in storytelling and learning from them, and I wanted to bring that to a podcast where each week we walk away learning something that might just change our lives for the better.

Speaker 15 Check us out every Monday on the Papaya Podcast.

Speaker 2 See you there.

Speaker 4 So when Lauren gets to Guadalajara, she starts hanging out with Allison. They're spending a lot of time together.

Speaker 5 Allison is very

Speaker 5 childlike in a lot of ways. She's very sweet and artistic and creative and believes in the best in like humanity.
So she's like out

Speaker 5 buying flower. We're in Guadalajara.
It's gorgeous, right? The weather is nice. She's buying flowers.
She's shopping. Everybody's fucking recognizing her because she's famous in Mexico.

Speaker 4 Lauren and Allison are staying together in a seaside home rented by Claire Bronfman.

Speaker 5 It was a villa. It's a poor fishing village on the coast.
There is a

Speaker 5 gated community of very high-end homes.

Speaker 5 So there's kitchen on the ground floor, a couple of suites off the kitchen, and some upstairs, downstairs, like units, big patio, pool, and overlooking the ocean.

Speaker 4 The recommitment ceremony hasn't happened yet.

Speaker 4 In the meantime, they're all just doing their thing, working remotely, if you can believe, responding to emails and refining workshops as if nothing's wrong.

Speaker 5 And Keith isn't feeling good, wants to take a nap. We lay down to take a nap.

Speaker 4 While Keith and Lauren nap, Allison is in another room on her laptop. She's working on curriculum for the source, the acting program she's in charge of.
She too is carrying on as if nothing's wrong.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, Lauren begins to stir.

Speaker 5 I wake up and we're in this room. It's white.
Everything's white. This is one of the weirdest experiences of my whole life.

Speaker 5 The doors to the beach are open. And there's white curtains and the whole room is white and it's silent.
And the curtains are silently blowing.

Speaker 5 And I think to myself, this is the place between two worlds.

Speaker 5 We woke up. I went to the kitchen.
I was making a smoothie. He asked me to bring him some food.
I brought him some food. And Loretta comes running into the kitchen.

Speaker 5 She's like, the police are here for Keith.

Speaker 5 And then they just basically storm the property. They're wearing masks and

Speaker 5 some of them are bulletproof vests, machine guns, and I go on this high alert like I'm gonna protect Keith.

Speaker 5 So I go into his suite and I lock it down and I'm like get the fuck out of here like go out the window and all I can think of is just protect Keith.

Speaker 4 Lauren thinks these guys are hired thugs sent by an enemy of Keith's to kidnap him because Keith has told her that important people are after him.

Speaker 5 He went and hid in the closet and he told me to go deal with them to ask them if they had a warrant. I started talking to them through the door and I'm like, show me a warrant.

Speaker 4 Lauren is standing in this all-white room, the space between two worlds, where minutes earlier she'd been napping with Keith.

Speaker 4 Now Keith is hiding in the large walk-in closet and she's here, all alone, shouting through the door at men who have guns pointed right at her.

Speaker 5 And they're like, if you open the door, we'll show you the warrant. And I said, show me the warrant and I'll open the door.

Speaker 5 And I keep running to the door to talk to them and then moving to the side because I was afraid they were going to shoot the door down.

Speaker 4 This is not a woman who's afraid of much, but now she's ducking to the side, terrified of getting shot while Keith is still hidden away.

Speaker 5 And then they came in, they burst in, they put me on the floor face down, and they start asking me who's in there with me, and I'm not responding.

Speaker 4 Lauren is face down on the floor, guns pointed at her, frozen in shock.

Speaker 5 I thought they were going to start physically assaulting me.

Speaker 5 And so I expected I was about to start being like hit and kicked, but it didn't happen. They didn't need to.
I was on the floor with guns. Like I wasn't fighting them.
I just wasn't answering.

Speaker 4 Lauren's terrified, so she does what anyone would do.

Speaker 4 She calls for her partner, the guy she's been in some sort of relationship with at this point for 17 years, who's still hiding in the closet, not defending her.

Speaker 5 I called Keith's name, and he, at the same time as that happened, came out of the closet.

Speaker 4 But not voluntarily. Lauren says the police break down the door to Keith's walk-in closet and take him out.
They found him.

Speaker 4 But they're not done with Lauren. They let her get up from the floor and they start questioning her.

Speaker 5 They let me sit on the bed and then they started demanding to know what was in Keith's suitcase. And I said, it's clothes.
And they're like, it's guns. And I'm like, no, we're peaceful people.

Speaker 5 It's not guns. It's clothes.
So they're like, open it. So I open it and Mariana had packed Keith's suitcase and it had all of these little packages of chiclets in all different colors.

Speaker 4 Chiclets, the brightly colored candy. Keith didn't follow a diet, of course.
He liked sweets, but others weren't supposed to know.

Speaker 4 One of his partners, a woman named Mariana, had packed chiclets for him in his suitcase. And now Lauren and these police officers are staring at this bag filled with candy.

Speaker 5 So I open this fucking thing up that they think are drugs and arms. And it's like underwear and candy.

Speaker 4 Underwear and candy. Nexium's great leader, the man who is supposed to be the smartest guy in the world, had been reduced to empty calories and cotton briefs.

Speaker 4 He'd hidden in a closet when the police came looking for him, leaving a woman to stand up to armed men pointing guns at her. He hadn't stepped in to help, not even when Lauren called his name.

Speaker 4 The Federales arrest Keith and take him away.

Speaker 4 After the arrest, Lauren and the others realize this is really serious. They all moved to the same condo building where Vanessa interviewed Keith in Guadalajara.

Speaker 4 Except when Vanessa was there, they only met her on the ground floor. They are now in the penthouse.

Speaker 5 Once all this happened, Nikki put Allison on lockdown.

Speaker 5 Like she wasn't allowed to go out or she wasn't allowed to go out without Nikki babysitting her her because she kept getting recognized and we didn't know if we were safe.

Speaker 7 We posted up in the penthouse to try and like figure out what to do, like what's going on and what do we do. And

Speaker 7 that's when we found out that Keith had been extradited and was

Speaker 7 arraigned in front of a judge in Texas or something like that.

Speaker 7 And that it was like really bad. Like he had like a ton of charges.

Speaker 4 Keith has been charged, finally.

Speaker 4 He's charged with forcing women to engage in sex, according to a 22-page complaint filed on Valentine's Day of all days in 2018.

Speaker 7 And then there was a New York Times piece that came out that was talking about the indictment against Keith and talked about me as co-conspirator and India as co-conspirator one and two.

Speaker 7 And then it also talked about the fact that I put up a collateral that involved my family.

Speaker 7 And when Danny read that on her phone, I passed out. I fainted.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 it wasn't like I like went all the way down to the ground. I just like, my knees buckled and I fell back and Lauren caught me.

Speaker 7 And as we started talking to everybody in New York, talking to Claire, talking to Nancy, talking to everybody,

Speaker 7 it became clear that I was the one that was going to be in the biggest trouble

Speaker 7 because my name was in the indictment,

Speaker 7 but that everybody else could go back home.

Speaker 4 Lauren heads back to the U.S.

Speaker 4 So do the others.

Speaker 7 And so one by one, everybody started leaving the penthouse until it was just me.

Speaker 4 Allison is in purgatory, a penthouse apartment in Guadalajara, waiting to hear what's going to happen, whether she's going to face charges herself.

Speaker 7 It was like I I was walking above reality. You know what I mean? Like, I was just doing all the things that I knew to do to like stay.

Speaker 7 I was doing my yoga every morning. I was, you know, like

Speaker 7 just doing my life, you know, waiting for this to blow over. And I was by myself.

Speaker 7 And that was

Speaker 4 fucking bizarre.

Speaker 7 And I was like, this is just like some big, crazy misunderstanding. Like, it's going to get figured out.
It's going to get figured out. And then Claire found me, an attorney.

Speaker 7 I sent them the last of my money to secure them.

Speaker 4 Allison forks over $40,000 to pay the lawyer's retainer fee.

Speaker 4 Now she's broke, alone, in crisis.

Speaker 7 And I remember there was one point that I think is important where I walked out on the balcony of this like big giant white apartment. I called it my Ivory Tower.

Speaker 7 And I looked down, you know, and I thought,

Speaker 12 this is too much.

Speaker 7 I think I can just jump and then everything will be better

Speaker 7 and then I was like

Speaker 4 but but then I won't know what happens you know it's like not not a super logical thought but I was like I

Speaker 7 want to know what happens

Speaker 4 She has no idea what she's done because he kept telling her everything was on the up and up.

Speaker 7 And I laid down and I went to sleep in the paddy wagon. My body was like,

Speaker 5 you're done. I chose Keith, Keith chose Keith, and then Keith continued to choose Keith again and again and again.

Speaker 4 If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, help is available. You can call or text 988 for free 24-7 support.

Speaker 4 You're not alone.

Speaker 4 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 4 Links in the show description.

Speaker 4 You've been listening to Uncover Allison After Nexien from CBC and Campside Media. It's hosted by me, Natalie Robomet.

Speaker 4 Our executive producers are myself and Vanessa Gregoriadis at Campside and Stephen Belper. Our senior producer is Lily Houston-Smith, and our associate producer is Emma Siminoff.

Speaker 4 Sound design, mix, and engineering by Mark McAdam and E. Wynne Lai Tremuyin.
Thank you to Colin Campbell. At CBC, our story editor is Derek John, and our senior producer is Kate Evans.

Speaker 4 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 4 If you enjoyed Allison After Nexium, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 4 If you liked this show, Uncover Escaping Nexium is a powerful story of the beginning of the unraveling of Keith Ranieri's cult.

Speaker 4 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 3 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.