S35 E6: Orange Is The New Mack | Allison after NXIVM

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Campsite Media.

On an overcost June day in 2019, in the same Brooklyn courtroom where Lauren Salzman testified during the Nexium legal saga, Keith Ranieri's trial comes to a close.

A jury in New York has found the leader of a self-help group guilty of seven counts of sex trafficking and racketeering.

His sentence, 120 years in prison,

which he'll serve in Tucson, Arizona. Judge Garifus gives Claire Bronfman the second highest sentence to Keith because, in part, her money funded Keith's twisted vision.

She receives nearly seven years in prison. Nancy Salzman, prefect, gets three and a half years.

Her daughter, Lauren, gets time served for the period she spent on house arrest, plus five years probation and 300 hours of community service.

And Alison Mack, she makes a deal so late in the process that she must wait to hear what sentence she will receive. She flies back to California until then.

I've pled guilty. I was wrong.
We were wrong.

Okay, I need help. Like, how do I, I don't, I'm drowning.
I don't know what to think about this or how to think about this. I was wrong.
What the fuck is right then?

She's on house arrest at her parents again.

One morning, she walks out.

My dad has this sculpture of the Buddha in his garden, and I went outside at like five o'clock in the morning, and there was mist everywhere, and the head of the Buddha had fallen off.

Like an animal or something had kicked it, and the head of the Buddha fell. And I had this thought in my head of like, your God is dead.

And now now prison is calling.

How is Allison going to get back to reality?

How will she leave the cult?

And can she change her mind?

From Campside Media and CBC, this is Allison after Nexium from CBC's Uncover. I'm Natalie Robomet.

This is episode six: Orange is the New Mac.

Here's the thing about leaving a cult. It's not like flipping a switch.
I'm reminded of that thing people say, that it takes half the time you were with someone to get over the breakup.

Allison was in Nexium for 12 years, and her decision to leave and turn on Keith was an evolution. It wasn't like I felt processed and clear and then pled guilty.

It was like, I'm going to plead guilty because I know that I'm guilty. And a jury is going to find me guilty and I did something really bad.

And then I'm going to know that the next decade or two of my life is going to be the process of unraveling what I did and truly understanding that so that I can heal and move forward in a positive way.

First, she had to realize that Keith, her guru, wasn't who he'd said he was.

That was chipped away at by all the things Allison learned during the lead up to the trial trial and the trial itself. But it was also revealed in what Keith did or didn't do.

If Keith just said that he was responsible for this, all of you guys would be let go. There's no reason why you and Lauren and even Claire and Nancy and Kathy are involved in this.

Like, this is not because of you. This is because of Keith.
And if Keith just said that, all of this would go away. And I remember thinking, yeah, why the fuck isn't he saying that?

This was something that had stuck out for Lauren, too. It didn't fit with what a leader should do, because the leader he convinced us he was takes the hardest consequences for everyone.

But the problem for both Allison and Lauren is that if Keith wasn't who he said he was, a noble intellectual acting only for the good of others, then neither were they.

When you do something that is so against your true nature, it is

really hard to verbalize that that's what you've done. Going through everything with the, proffering everything with my attorneys and with the prosecutors and everything, it was like

admitting, yes, I thought these were young, beautiful women, and yes, I was

excited by the power that I felt having these young, beautiful women look to me. and listen to me.
And yes, the sexuality of it was exciting and felt powerful.

So articulating that about myself, something that I feel like

shame for, you know, continues to be a process and a challenge.

Allison retreats into house arrest. She starts going to therapy and she begins trying to pull apart what's real from what Keith told her was real.

Allison isn't allowed to talk to Lauren or anyone else from Nexium and actually still isn't today.

Likewise, Lauren cannot be in contact with Allison either.

And during this time, Lauren goes into a tailspin.

Testifying on the stand broke something in her.

Very difficult to go through the trial because I had Keith's indoctrination running through my head the whole time.

So I'm saying things that I believe are reality and that are reality that I learned and that I discovered.

And at the same time, I have a running dialogue of how he gaslighted me out of that in my head while I'm testifying. And so I felt like I was going crazy.

It's like there are two tones playing at once. A horrible discord between real life and Nexium brainwashing.

And at the same time, Lauren's coming to terms with what she's done. I saw how people could go crazy and not come back.
I saw it. Like I saw the choice for myself.

and I didn't want that for me and I wanted to fight for myself.

In the end, after I testified and I like legit had a real breakdown, I went to work with animals because I was like, I need to have reflected back to me somebody who sees me in a pure way, not in a slanted way,

and in a way that I could trust, like find my way back to myself because

it caused so much doubt. It caused so much self-doubt.

She gets a job working with dogs.

On the worst days of my whole life, I would just go into the small dog daycare and I would lay down on the floor, and all the puppies would just jump all over me.

And I felt like they understood that I wasn't a bad person. I think that's essential.
If you can't believe in your own goodness, there's nowhere to go.

This was Lauren's coping mechanism. And Allison?

Well, Allison is a doer and an optimist. Like she's got her own personal reserve of sunshine that she's crumpled up and put in her pocket for a rainy day.

If I'm honest, it's one of the things about her I find hardest to relate to.

If I were in Allison's situation, awaiting sentencing, having been at the center of a headline-grabbing sex trafficking case, I think I would turn inwards, not get out of bed, probably contemplate darker things than I'd like to admit.

But Allison keeps going. Maybe the same personality trait that drove her to be a harsh master, that inner little dictator, propels her forward.
She starts going to school.

I enrolled at Long Beach City College. In class, she begins teasing apart the ethics and morals she learned in Nexium, finding the source material that Keith cripped his ideas from.

Keith said a lot of shit that was very true, you know, and that's another thing that was so confusing. It's like pulling part string cheese, you know?

It's like, okay, this was like corrupt and this was like really good. And like, let's keep this and let's move this.
Aristotle also said it. She starts meeting people, hosting study groups.

She bikes to class, 14 miles. That's unheard of in LA.

One of the new people she meets is a woman named Christina. I even remember saying to our mutual friend Mike, if I'm friends with her, her, like, is she safe?

Christina starts hanging out with Allison more one-on-one and gets close to her.

So I started going over to her house just for backyard chats, like every week, because she couldn't do any more than that. We just really hit it off.

At that point, she didn't have many friends.

Allison's sentencing, originally scheduled for a few months after the trial, has been pushed back. She's waiting to hear her fate.

She was processing a lot and she was coming up and down in these moments of despair and longing and like, what the F did I do to my life and clarity for sure, but then just feeling so confused by how to trust herself again.

She really was struggling with, how do I ever know which way is right and wrong or up and down or anything anymore? Like I thought I...

I thought I knew everything and everything was turned upside down. I think that wounded her and made her very

scared to like

have thoughts and opinions again and be her true self again.

By the time COVID hits, Nexium has completely crumbled. The cult is over, or so you would think.
But believe it or not, there are still people loyal to Keith.

While Keith is in detention, a group of Nexium followers start holding nightly dance vigils outside his jail.

They blast music, writhing and gyrating, to party songs, supposedly to lift the spirits of the locked down inmates or to titillate their master.

Because one of the dancers is Nikki Klein, the Canadian actress Allison married and a fellow first-line DOS master.

In one video, she wears a t-shirt and black shorts, her knees bent as she steps to the beat. She's got on a cloth mask because of the pandemic, and she's wide-eyed, shaking her arms.

She looks like a Pentecostal congregant, giving praise to the Most High, which, in a way, she is, because Keith is inside.

While her wife is dancing outside Keith's detention center, Allison is hitting the books. She transfers from community college to Berkeley, a very prestigious school up in Northern California.

She's still on house arrest, and the campus is locked down for COVID, so she's doing classes on Zoom. So I'm like

in all my classes with my camera on, interacting and engaging as myself, Allison Mack. And I was a gender and women's studies major because I love feminist studies.

That's really genuinely what I'm most interested in before DOS and everything, you know, and my minor was in human rights.

The fact that Allison says this without a hint of irony is sort of unbelievable.

I mean, here Allison is, having pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy charges for her role in a cult that abused women, wanting to major in gender and women's studies.

From the outside, if you didn't know Allison had changed her mind, one could see this as nefarious. And it didn't take long before someone did.

One of the students in one of the classes I was in had mentioned that she wanted to do research on feminism and Christianity, and I had written a paper about a story in the Old Testament, and so I had it from a feminist lens.

And so I had done a lot of research, so I knew some names of good researchers, published people, you know. So I private messaged her and I said, listen, like, check out this

person, this scholar, like, you might be able to find some cool stuff for your research paper. And she was like, thanks so much.
And I was like, yeah, no problem.

And then she apparently thought I was nice, like, liked me, you know.

And so she looked me up on social media and found my Instagram and like all my followers and then read all the comments and then read all the story about me and got like really freaked out and made a TikTok video.

She did this like thing where it was like, put five fingers up, put a finger down if you have ever known somebody who was committed of a crime.

And ultimately her skit led to Allison Mack is a sex trafficker and is in school at Berkeley and is trying to recruit through Zoom. or something like that.

And she posted it and then sent it to all the kids in the class.

I looked for this video, but it seems like it was deleted or made private by the originator. Still, safe to say, plenty of Berkeley students saw it when it was first posted.

And that was in the summer. And then in the fall, I enrolled in a class called Gender, Sex, and Power.

Probably not a good idea for me to be in that class, but I was fascinated by the topic and I wanted to take it.

And the students in all the classes started emailing the teacher saying that they didn't feel safe being in the class with me and they couldn't believe that Berkeley would expose them to somebody like me and they were going to drop the class if I was going to stay in the class.

Some students in a black feminism class Allison was taking go one step further. Other students got together and went to the Title IX office.

That's the office that prohibits sex-based discrimination on campuses.

And said that they felt threatened by my presence in their class and they accused me of recording the class conversations and utilizing the information that I got from what they said during the class conversations to somehow extort them or hurt them.

Allison says this isn't true, that she'd never been recording them without their consent. The teacher at the beginning of the class said, if you are not a black woman, please step back.

Like just listen in this class, because this is a class for black women. And so I was like, okay, so I just listened, took a fuck ton of notes because I was learning, I was in school.

And then the final project was we had to create an art piece that was reflective of what we had learned that semester.

So I went through my notes and and I took pieces of what all of the women had said and I created a poem. Allison makes a paper mache heart and writes a poem on it with quotes from women in the class.

And then I read it and it was a tribute to them basically saying, what I learned from this class is like what your experience was and that's like on my heart. Like that will, I'll take that with me.

And that was, I think, where they got the idea that I had recorded them and that I was going to do something with it. It's another example of Allison's good intentions going so so completely awry.

A repeat of the gulf between what she hoped for and how it was received.

The Berkeley Title IX office was like, okay, if we come back to campus and you come onto our campus, you are not allowed to be in the presence of other students without a professor there.

Like you have to be like in a place on the campus and you are not allowed to record classes without everybody knowing that you are doing this.

And there were like, there were just like all these restrictions. You know, that happened and then the gender and women's studies professor was like you should probably change your major

i've got to be honest i see both sides of this if i was 18 taking a small feminism seminar i'm not sure i'd want allison mack in my class Her presence threatens the idea of college as a safe space, a little bubble where you go to learn before you're thrust into the cruel world.

Then again, if college is where you go for intellectual rigor, being in the same feminism class as a felon from a sex trafficking case could be a real learning opportunity.

At least that's what Allison might have hoped. I didn't expect it, and it was a real experience of this is how the world is going to receive me.
I'm going to be seen as a danger and a threat.

Allison is going to be seen as a threat.

Because part of what the students are reacting to is the perception that Allison was a master recruiter, a sphangali of sorts who would use all sorts of methods, including the internet, to get new members.

This idea was furthered by social media posts while she was still in Nexium, in which Allison seemed to try to recruit celebrities online.

In 2016, when Allison was already in DOS, the official Allison Mac Twitter account tweeted at Harry Potter star and noted feminist Emma Watson.

The message said the following, and this is a voice actor. I'm a fellow actress like yourself and involved in an amazing women's movement I think you dig.
I'd love to chat if you're open.

When I asked Allison about this, she had no recollection of ever sending this message. No, I don't, and I'll tell you why.
Because somebody else ran my social media.

And the person who ran my social media was in Jeunesse. Not in DOS, but in Jeunesse.

It's kind of wild that Allison would hand over her Twitter account with more than 100,000 followers to another Nexium member, but that's the level of naivete Allison had.

And now that naivete is being punctured as she's beginning to understand how she's going to be received.

In June 2021, more than three years after she was first arrested, Allison flies back to New York for her sentencing.

She travels with her mom and her friend Christina, which you heard about at the very beginning of this series. Christina sings to her as she walks in.

I think I might have sang the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you.
I just remember her trembling, like she was just like shaking like a leaf, like so much fear and adrenaline.

And she just kept her head down. And I remember singing to her, which makes me cry because there's like at that point, there's nothing left to say.

It's like, you don't know what you're walking into and you don't know what the outcome will be. All I could do is be present for her in that moment of like utter

lack of control.

Inside the courtroom, Judge Garifus sits behind the bench. Allison could be facing more than 14 years in prison.

Prosecutors have asked the judge to go easy because of the assistance she's given the federal government. Allison's attorneys, meanwhile, are hoping for no prison time.

Judge Garifus looks down at Allison and reads his decision.

He tells her she was an essential accomplice, but he also acknowledges Allison's own victimhood, saying, in the language of DOS, you were a slave as well as a master. Then he sentences Allison.

In my head, I had told myself, as long as it's less than five years, you'll be okay. You can do less than five years.
So when 36 months came out, I was like, cool, I can do that.

It's that same rigorous optimism, Allison's favorite coping mechanism kicking into gear. But will it and Allison survive prison?

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On a hot September day in 2021, Allison and her mom drive up to a small bland city about an hour inland from San Francisco.

Allison is here in Dublin, California, to report to a low-security women's prison that once housed Patty Hearst. It was like old army housing with the slivered windows and the barbed wire everywhere.

And because it was not maximum security, it would just look like kind of like a rundown camp, you know?

And actually, Allison does think she's going to camp, sort of. Camp is prison slang for the low-security part of a prison that houses non-violent inmates.

There's no locks on the doors, like they open the doors at 6 a.m. and like the doors are open until 9 o'clock at night.
So you can come and go as you please.

Like there's just a lot more freedom and flexibility camp is typically designated for white-collar criminals people like felicity huffman the actress who was in camp at dublin for her role in the college admission scandal this is where allison thinks she's going

my mom and i drive up and we pull into the parking lot and i had to call my probation officer before she cut the ankle monitor off and say like you know i'm i'm out sitting outside of dublin she was like yes i can see because it's like the gps tracker on my ankle monitor, you know.

And I was like, we're about to walk in. And she said, okay.
And I said, can we cut the monitor? And she said, yes. And so my mom took the scissors out and cut the ankle monitor off, which was a trip.

The first time I felt my ankle bare in like three and a half years. And my mom was like, okay, let's let's go.
Let's go in. They walk inside together.
And then I got to a certain point.

And the guard was like, you can't come any further to my mom. And so my mom was like, okay, I guess this is where I leave you, you know.
Mindy, Allison's mom mom again.

So I walked as far as I could walk and

she walked and then she turned around and waved to me.

That was horrible. And I, you know, I said goodbye.
She called my name, you know, and I turned around and she just said, I love you and like waved, you know.

It was such a weird experience. And I was like, Okay, like it felt like walking into the gates of hell.
Like you don't know what you're going to find on the other side, but you just gotta go.

It turns out Allison isn't in the lower security camp. Her intake officer tells her she's what's called inside the fence.
She is seen as a threat.

She's put in the higher security part of the prison, where movement is much more controlled.

So they lock the doors every hour on the hour, and you have to stay for wherever you are for a full hour, and then they open the doors for 10 minutes.

You have something called a 10-minute move, which means that you can move from one place to the next on the prison. You all have to move in one direction, so it's much more regulated.

And you have 10 minutes to get there, and then they lock the doors behind you wherever you are. Allison is taken to her cell.

It was like a wooden door with a little skinny window and then tile floor, and it was six feet by nine feet.

And you walk in, and to your right is a toilet, and above the toilet is a clothes hanger where you keep your uniforms hung. And then to your left is a sink and a mirror.

And then you take another step in and you've got a locker and a locker and then a window but the windows were painted up until about a foot from the top so you couldn't see out the window and then on the left were two bunk beds.

She has a bunkie, a roommate of sorts. In female prisons, they don't allow single man cells because they say that it's bad for women's mental health, but I think it's to avoid rape charges.

A friend of mine was raped because she was in a solitary cell because she had COVID and an SEO went went in and took advantage of her and then left.

And so like to avoid that, they always keep women together in cells.

Allison Spunky is a short woman from Arizona.

The woman who I had been put in a room with was well known and well respected and kind of stocked because in prison you pay with commissary so food food and toiletries and stuff that you can buy from the commissary is how you pay your bills.

And she came back from work and was just right away like so kind.

The pair start talking about their families, about home. In prison, nobody asks what the other person is in for.
To Allison, there's something fraying about that. But the anonymity doesn't last long.

Every day at four o'clock and at nine o'clock, you have count. And the assistant warden was doing the count, which was like random.
She never does count.

But she was walking around doing count and she stopped at our cell and she looked at me and she said, How are you doing? And I was like, I'm okay. And she was like, Do you have everything you need?

And I said, Yeah, my bunky is generous. And she goes, Well, your bunky's not supposed to be sharing anything.
And she was like, But I'm glad you're doing okay. And then she kept counting.

And my bunky looked at me and went, Who the fuck are you?

Like, why would the warden stop in front of our cell and ask if you're okay? Allison explains. I was like, Well, my case was kind of high profile and I was kind of known, you know.

And then there were a few people on the compound that were fans of Smallville that knew about me.

Then people would be like, you're an actress. You're famous.
Like, why didn't you tell me you were famous? It's not just her fame that singles her out. The inmates are majority people of color.

It was the first time I'd ever been identified as my race. You know, like, oh, you know the white girl.
And like, why are you listening to that weird white people music? You talk like a white person.

Like, why are you using all those white girl words? I was like, what does a white person talk like? And my bunky was like, you use words like fabulous and lovely.

And I was like, oh, those are white people words. Okay.

Her bunky looks out for her. My first bunky was like, she's not about the life.
She's not about you. Like, back off, leave her alone.
Don't give her drugs. Don't offer her drugs.
Don't hit on her.

She's not about it. And that kind of like spread through the unit.
And so I didn't really have to deal with advances that I didn't want or offers that I wasn't comfortable with.

Allison befriends another inmate named Pam Pam and soon becomes bunkmates with her. Pam was probably

15, 20 years older than me. She was super intelligent and super funny and had already been down for like three years.

The two spend lots of time together, listening to NPR, especially when the prison goes on lockdown for a COVID outbreak. Allison feels much of this time crocheting.
I crocheted fingerless gloves.

I got really good at crocheting.

It seems like a lot of women get into crochet in prison.

Martha Stewart famously learned to crochet when she was serving time back in the 2000s and actually walked out of prison wearing a huge gray poncho made by a fellow inmate. I understand why.

Crocheting takes time. And in prison, that's all there is.
There's a mundanity to the days that warps clocks, shifts calendars, changes the scale of ambition. I swept and mopped the floors

on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, which was wild.

I was like, this is the first time in my life that nothing that I do

has any real bearing or meaning on like my success as a human being on the outside. And I was like, I have never not had

somewhere I had to be. And I was like, I want to see what that feels like.
It's a different form of releasing attachment, the underlying philosophy that the collateral inexiom had so bastardized.

Allison decides to release expectations around parts of her physical appearance, too.

I actually ended up shaving my head and I didn't wear makeup because the freedom that I found while constrained was so intense with respect to just the opportunity to shed

any sort of need to

look a certain way or be defined in a certain way by my appearance. And I ate chocolate, I ate prison cheesecake, I enjoyed myself.

Allison's mom, Mindy, visits Allison regularly in prison. She was humbled like you can't believe.
Like

she said, mom, the women in here are

Probably two-thirds of them here are here because they helped a man do something wrong and they are punished for it.

Like they held the bag or they drove the car or they, one woman, an elderly woman, they stuffed the lining of a car with drugs and sent her to a destination to deliver the car and she didn't know there were drugs in the car and they arrested her and she got like 20 years in jail or something and she's 60 something now.

Slowly, Allison is coming to realize that she too was in trouble because she'd helped a man do something wrong.

She's thawing out and she sees things that makes her realize her relationship with Keith was not what she thought it was.

He created this environment where everybody was like at his feet, literally and figuratively, and everybody was looking at him like this perfect human being.

Like he created that and then capitalized on it and then made me feel like I wanted that.

Even as Allison is distancing her mind from Keith and no longer following the obsessive DOS protocols that she did for so many years, there's still some habits she cannot shake.

On Sundays in prison, there was a 6 a.m. move to the wreckyard and nobody would go because it was 6 a.m.
on a Sunday. And I was always up early.
And

that's something I couldn't ever kick.

So I would go by myself and I would sit in the yard as the sun was rising and it was like foggy and outside the fence, so like beyond the barbed wire, you could see like deer grazing and stuff, you know, and I would bring my journal and my Barry Oliver book of poetry.

And there were wildflowers that would grow out there that they couldn't pick faster than they would grow.

So I would collect wildflowers and I'd stick them in my sleeves and there were these little tiny pink flowers that were super pretty.

Allison would take the flowers she collected back to her cell. Yeah, we had little pill bottles that, you know, you could buy vitamins on commissaries.

So we bought vitamins and then we kept the pill bottles and we would, we would wrap them in tissue paper and then either wrap clear tape around them if we could get our hands on clear tape or use glue to stick the tissue paper down.

And those were our vases. It's Allison's way of exerting control, putting little wildflowers in old pill bottles, like a dollhouse miniature craft project.

But as Allison's time inside draws to a close and she has to face the outside, she starts to get nervous.

I remember like two months out from my release date in prison being like, fuck, like now I have to go be in the world. Like, how is the world going to receive me? Like, I don't know, you know?

And now she must go out and face it.

In June 2023, After serving two years of her three-year sentence, Allison is let out early for good behavior.

They released me in the the middle of the night so that we didn't, nobody would be there to take pictures of me leaving prison. Allison goes back to her parents' house, now on parole.

Technically, she has paid her debt to society, but she's still a public pariah and now a convicted and notorious felon.

How will the rest of the world receive her?

There's a line in King Lear, I, that way, madness lies. Like, I can't think about that because I'll make myself crazy.
She says,

Do you judge me? And I just looked at her and said, I'm a former neo-Nazi who used to kidnap people. Do you think I have any room to judge you?

There's like this image of three of the Manson followers shaving their head and sitting vigil. I was like, Holy shit,

that was me.

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.

Links in the show description.

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

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.

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

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

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

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