Hot Mess Express: Karen Unterreiner on Dating Keith Raniere

[00:00:00] This winter, take your icon pass, North. North to abundant access, to powder-skiing legacy, to independent spirit. North we're easy to get to, meets worlds away. Go north to Snow Basin. Now on the Icon Pass.

[00:00:27] The views and opinions expressed by A Little Bit Culty are those of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. That's true. Any of the fire content provided by our guest bloggers, sponsors, or authors

[00:00:40] are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business, individual, anyone or anything. Unless you're abusing people then I have a problem maligning you. Also we're not doctors, psychologists, or wizards. We're just two non-experts trying to make you a friendly, informative podcast

[00:00:57] that helps you understand culty shit. Hey everybody, Sarah Edmondson here. And I'm Anthony Ames, aka Nippy, Sarah's husband, and you're listening to A Little Bit Culty, aka ALBC, a podcast about what happens when devotion goes to the dark side.

[00:01:21] We've been there and back again. A little about us, true story, we met and fell in love in a cult and then we woke up and got the hell out of dodge. And the whole thing was captured in HBO docu-series The Vow, now in its second season.

[00:01:35] I also wrote about our experience in my memoir, Scarred, the true story of how I escaped next to him, the cult that bound my life. Look at us, couple of married podcasters who just happened to have a weekly date night

[00:01:46] or we interview experts and advocates and things like cult awareness and mind control. Wait, wait, this does not count toward date night bait. We gotta schedule that, that's separate. So it's two days we gotta hang out?

[00:01:57] We do this podcast thing because we learned a lot on our exit ramp out of Nexium, still on that journey and we want to pay the lessons forward with the help of other cult survivors and whistleblowers.

[00:02:06] We know all too well that culty things happen. It happens to people every day across every walk of life. So join us each week to tackle these culty dynamics everywhere from online dating to mega churches and multi-level marketing.

[00:02:18] This stuff really is everywhere. The Cultiverse just keeps on expanding and so are we. Welcome to season five of A Little Bit Cultie, serving cult content and word salads weekly on your favorite podcast platforms. Learn more at alittlebitculti.com Happy holidays everybody.

[00:02:53] Hi, happy holidays everyone. How's it going? How are you my botanist? People might want to know why you call me botanist. No, no, no, no, we don't have to get into that. No? I feel like I should tell them. You don't think I should tell them? Nope.

[00:03:05] Okay, I'll save it for another time. I'll let you, I'll let it be a mystery. No, there's certain things that are always gonna remain private. Okay. We have a guest that we've been wanting to interview for a long time but we weren't allowed to. Oh my God.

[00:03:20] And we were originally going to use this slot to do a season two debrief. I know we've been doing a lot of that over on Patreon and we were gonna do it. But we haven't done a debrief for like the whole thing yet, for our peeps.

[00:03:33] Yes. So we're going to do a very, very, very special season two encapsulate the whole thing. We're going to ruminate on it over the holidays and record that for the new year for you. So stay tuned. Ruminating is our homework. Ruminating, marinating, percolating on season two.

[00:03:50] I think there's a little news flash for the peeps out there. We got our place. We're going to be able to finally record in the same room. Oh, it's going to be so good.

[00:03:59] Just so our listeners know, there's like a delay sometimes in rooms and like, it's hard to know like when Sarah stopped talking. So you're stepping on me.

[00:04:07] I'm stepping on you and sometimes our guest and just being in the same room and be able to look at you and have cues is going to be, I think going to make our content. Smoother.

[00:04:16] I wouldn't say necessarily better, but it's smoother to listen to, which I guess would translate to better, but I'm really looking forward to that and having a nice fat comfortable chair to kick back on. I can't wait. Oh no, I'm excited. I'm excited too.

[00:04:29] And I hope all of you are having a relaxing holidays. I know this drops the day after Christmas. So if you celebrate that, I hope it was festive and not stressful. And we are actually about to head back to Canada for the holidays.

[00:04:40] We're super excited about that, but see all of our friends and family. Yeah. Be sure to talk politics with your family. Yeah, don't talk politics. Just find the opposing view and run.

[00:04:51] We're just really like touched that this guest agreed to do her first big interview with us and she's somebody who is the goat. And yes, I'm so old. I only recently found out that does not make them a goat, but the greatest of all time. You're serious?

[00:05:10] She's a goat. I mean, recently, like within the last few months. What do you think Troy was asking me the last two, three years? Dad, who's the goat? You know what? I just had the times. Speaking of Troy, we actually had to have a heart to heart recently.

[00:05:26] He was helping us like stuff the book inside the hat that we were sending to the inner circle members of Patreon. Oh, you mean that time you got our son to stuff the book with you branded into it? Well, I was like, we had hundred books to stuff.

[00:05:39] And I'm like, he's just sitting around. Just like, you know what? You're like, Merry Christmas kid. And he's seen the book but for the first time he looked at the scar and was like, he wanted to know and we he knows the basics.

[00:05:51] But now he knows a little more than he knew before. He had an appropriate response. If I ever saw Keith, I would just knee him in the nuts. And I said, yeah, that's a good thing to do.

[00:06:01] And he was, or I just like put my foot right in his crotch, which sort of the same thing. But I gently reminded him you're not going to meet him until you're 125.

[00:06:09] So our guest today was 18 years old when she met Keith Ruderi at college at their college orientation. She then became his girlfriend, a companion and many years later, a top level next-term trainer and the subject of his infamous mind fuckery for nearly 40 years.

[00:06:26] It's important to note that the meeting was a few weeks after her father died and that's relevant. If you're caught up on season two of the Val, you remember Karen Untoriner as the lady that Mark Vicente visited with and had kind of the reconciliation.

[00:06:40] Only discovered Keith's mom's ashes in a box in her house. Keith's mom in a can. As one of the top three trainers in Nexium, Karen has faced some legal scrutiny and some public shade as we all have in the fallout of the trial.

[00:06:54] And it's important to note she's never been charged with anything and she was very helpful to the prosecution and was not shy about disavowing the man we call Alan.

[00:07:03] Karen's here today to share more about her experience in chat with us about what didn't make it into the Val. Please be warned, this is about the Vanduush. So this is our gift to our Nexium Uber Nerds. And here's our chat with Karen Untoriner. Hi. Hi.

[00:07:29] All right, all right, all right. We're so grateful that you agreed to do this with us. We have so many questions and we'd love to, and especially our fans and our listeners and our Patreon listeners want to ask you a bazillion questions about the Val specifically.

[00:07:44] But before we get into that, for those who don't know who you are, will you give us a little overview about who you are and how you got involved in this whole Nexium shit show starting with the beginning? The original origin story. I was thinking with the Val.

[00:08:02] I'm actually the prequel to the Val. Yes. Yeah, I met, what are we calling it these days? Alan? We call him Alan. And Alan, I know it just gives me chills every time I say the full name.

[00:08:13] Before college even started during freshman orientation, we both went to RPI. My father had passed a week before. I was already very shy and insecure from a lot of childhood, not good parenting, trauma, whatever you want to call it. And then my father had just died.

[00:08:28] So he noticed me when I arrived. I had a non-target moving me in. I was dressed like a hippie even though I was very withdrawn. He saw the contradiction in my personality and at RPI there was nine men to every woman, not a lot of us women there.

[00:08:44] I was on the only floor of all freshmen girls, my dorm. And he made the rounds down the dorm. He went and visited everybody. And when he stopped at my room, we talked for a very long time. He was very mysterious.

[00:08:56] He asked me if I liked older men because he was actually a year and a half younger than me. He would do lots of weird things like that. And then just slowly, slowly drop that he was Eastern Coast judo champ, which we're not sure.

[00:09:07] And different things about him. He could play piano and all this stuff. He just slowly dropped all that stuff in. But he was better looking back then. For those of you who say, how are you doing? Yeah, he was better looking back then. He was built.

[00:09:19] He was muscular? Yes, very muscular. Yeah, very, very, very big broad shoulders, small waist. He had been doing a lot of athletics back then. But he and the feathered back 70s hair. So I was just like, I can't believe this guy's talking to me.

[00:09:36] I was just overwhelmed by the attention, which now we know is called love bombing. We were inseparable pretty much through college. I eventually found out I was not the only one in his life, but I don't know how he found time because we were together so much.

[00:09:52] But he was fooling around with a lot of people. I broke up with him senior year because he slept with my best friend over the summer. But then he pulled me back. I got pulled back in.

[00:10:02] And he said that while I was separated from him, I had a little fling and that was supposed to be my ethical breach. Because he wanted us to never have been with anybody else. My ethical breach really was going back. He used the term ethical breach even then?

[00:10:16] No, it was used later, but he did say he made it like really, really bad. I left him because he screwed my best friend and he was screwing half the campus, but I had a one night stand and that made me awful.

[00:10:29] I mean, that's the standard Alan thing. That's what he does. I thought I was still dating him for the following years after college, but he was obviously living with other people and everything else. We're led to believe we were the important one, a special one in his life.

[00:10:44] He just lied. Later he blamed me for it. He told me I told him to lie to him. I'm not sure that's true, but... Because I'm sure that's what you wanted. Yeah, after college, I moved to Connecticut for a little while.

[00:10:55] I came in actuary and I found a job back up here and we moved in together up here. Eventually got what's now known as Flintlock. We both own that house, the condo, though I paid for the whole thing. Yeah, that's the usual. Of course.

[00:11:08] He technically owns half of it, but I paid for everything pretty much. But I was working as an actuary up here and he started consumers byline and I jumped ship from actuary. I'll work at some point and came on full-time at Consumers Byline,

[00:11:21] which kind of grew up in my living room as did Nexium too later. Right. He needed someone to do the work. Yeah, I would get out of bed, leave him in bed, go into the office.

[00:11:31] I knew damn well as soon as I did, he told me he wasn't screwing Pam that Pam was sneaking back into my room and replacing me. Well, I'm working at the office. They're having their time together. God. Backtrack, backtrack for a second. Yeah. You're living with Keith.

[00:11:45] Did Pam slip into the picture? Yeah, people were asking about Pam. Keith wanted to start a business called Life Learning Institute. It was not about ethics, but it was kind of the same format as Nexium ended up being with classes, more of like a knowledge network.

[00:11:59] I know that's what it's called around here. You just need to go take adult classes. He needed funding. So he was on a ski trip with his dad and they were on a gondola with a obviously wealthy man and his daughter, Pam. So Keith was going for money.

[00:12:13] People were asking, you know, does he looking for women with money? He definitely was at that point. He was looking for funding for that business. Her dad eventually did help us get the consumers' buy line started.

[00:12:24] He gave us a loan to get that going, but he was looking for money and that's when he met Pam and brought her in. How is that for you? Of course, he claimed he wasn't screwing her as usual. He was.

[00:12:35] At first she was just very unusual to me because she was from a very wealthy family. She was very ditzy, but she was a lot of fun. Yeah. And so we became friends pretty much. I didn't know and they would keep their relationship hidden.

[00:12:48] She was kind of angry about that, I think. We were friends for most of the time. How predatory did he feel at the time? Did it feel predatory or in hindsight, does it? In hindsight, yes. I can see all the gaslighting and the manipulation that was going on.

[00:13:02] It's weird looking back because it's very easy to look back and say, oh, that was a red flag. And I may have seen it as a red flag at the time, but he's able to get you to write it off so easily.

[00:13:11] Some people were asking about what happens when you confront him. One of the hardest times for me was Pam was living in our house with us and I found a contraceptive device of hers on the bathtub. She had left it there.

[00:13:24] And so I confronted him and you would think this is like, I mean, this is data. Smoking gun. Yeah, yeah, literally. I challenged him on it and the scene ended with me on his foot begging him not to leave.

[00:13:39] You know, that's how things went in between that he would give me some bullshit story that it was for something else, which is obviously even then I knew was obviously crap. He'll give you some lie that you can hold on to.

[00:13:52] And then he pulls the thing you saw him do with Camilla in the end with Lauren in the trial is he would say, oh, you're hurting my heart. I can't do this with you. You're killing me. He would say if you ask any more questions,

[00:14:06] I'm going to if you want me to answer, I can answer, but I'll never be able to talk to you again. Basically threats. His health was used a lot in those situations. So he's lying, which is different than saying, oh, I am being hurt.

[00:14:19] You know, I don't think I think he knows he's not being hurt. It's just a tactic he used with every single one of us consistently. So that would be preying on your empathy and there need to be a good person.

[00:14:30] He set you up to think you're not a good person and then would play on that. Like you're desperately trying to be a good person. I mean, eventually in next year, he defines what a good person is pretty much.

[00:14:42] So he's setting you up to want to do what he wants you to do in order to be a good person. He makes those things line up. So he's double binding you into a definition of a good person.

[00:14:54] Who's going to do something that's going to give the person you care about a heart attack? You know, right? You back down in the back of your mind, you know, you've got a ton of competition for his attention.

[00:15:05] So you're not going to screw up and put yourself on the bottom of that list. Interesting. Even when I thought I was the one, you know, the only one or the one, I knew there was a ton of women in line waiting for my position.

[00:15:18] So you had to stay in line to maintain that attention from him, which eventually I lost all the attention from him. I barely saw him towards the end with no real explanation. Was there a time when he admitted about Pam or you just sort of like

[00:15:31] figured out, okay, well, this is my situation. And this is embarrassing, but I got desperate. I read Pam's diary. She was not happy about that. Yeah, no. And it was also at the same time that he was about to move in with Tony Natali.

[00:15:44] It was right around right before that. So he was having to come clean anyways. I mean, that made it obvious that he was having a relationship with Tony, but I kind of fought to get the truth out of him,

[00:15:55] but also kind of my way of dealing with it was to, if you can't beat him, join them. I got to be okay with it, you know, sort of nobody was really okay with it, but we had to act like that. Course of control. Yes. You got guilted.

[00:16:11] Barbara, Pam and I became very close while Keith first moved in with Tony. So when did Barbara pop in the scene? And how was that introduced? Barbara was recruited at the beginning of consumers byline. She was in a different multi-level marketing company

[00:16:23] and she got pulled over into ours. She met Keith and then moved herself from Ann Arbor to Albany and was there ever since. And then she helped with consumers byline marketing after it was started. So Barbara comes in and she's like this hotshot MLM whiz

[00:16:40] and I've seen pictures of her back then. She's like petite and long blonde hair. Yeah, she grew her hair longer because mine used to be down to my waist because Keith would hold me not to cut it. And so everyone else thought they had to do that too.

[00:16:53] I don't know if he told them to, but she was growing hers. And then she had a relationship with him. She would hang out in my house when he was over there and she would be massaging his feet for hours while he laid

[00:17:05] on that couch that you see on the vow. She would sit at his feet and massage his feet for hours. He's not getting any foot massages. No, I don't think so. No. Or other kinds of massages. He front loaded those. Yeah, he's got his chair. He's done. Karma.

[00:17:21] Karma's a real little bitch. Was his mom still alive at this point? No, I did meet her when we were in college. We went down to New York City to go to a yes concert. He was introducing me to rock and roll.

[00:17:33] We stopped at his mother's on the way. She was very eccentric. She was a dancer, a ballroom dancer, but she had a heart condition so she couldn't really do it much anymore, but she had that physique. She was a little weird.

[00:17:44] I was laughing because she made us craft macaroni and cheese, which was a staple we had at school. That's what all college students make. And that's what, go home and that's what she made for us. She was a very vibrant person, I thought.

[00:17:56] And then we went and visited his dad who lived in New York City with his new wife. I could see the tension. The mother would complain about him and he would say something about the mother. There was tension there, obviously. With his parents. Yeah, between them. Between them.

[00:18:09] Well, she's living in their old house and he's in this fancy apartment on 88th Street in New York City. His mother passed, I think our sophomore year of college. My father had just passed the first year we were dealing with that

[00:18:23] and then I think it was sophomore year his mother died around Christmas time. What's your take? By the way, everything I say is what he told me. I don't know what's true anymore, but what he told me was, his father was there so I think this was true.

[00:18:35] His mother was at her cardiologist's funeral and dropped and passed there with cardiologists all over the place and nobody could restore her. Her heart was damaged when she had surgery once. She'd just passed around a whole bunch of cardiologists. Do you believe that?

[00:18:50] Yeah, I think that was true because his father was there when I was talking to him about that and he kind of dropped out for a semester. He didn't really do the next semester. That's why he had incompletes for a while

[00:19:00] and he didn't get his degrees for a little while. Well, that's what he told me. Yeah, I was going to say. Back then even he thought the faculty at the college were watching him and talking about him and he was already in the conspiracy theory stuff back then.

[00:19:16] Oh, that started early. Well, the conspiracy theory stuff is really blame. Yeah, it gets him out of things. Little did he know that there would be a module called Blame and Responsibility years later. That he refused to take.

[00:19:30] So he could hold us to things, the standards that he did not. Right. Yeah, a lot of the modules I think are him hiding in plain sight. I think so too. Yeah, sequitur. Yeah, the fall expresses. The fall is a bit of a thing.

[00:19:42] I always say, how does he know so much about these kind of people? For our listeners, those are all names of modules that reveal certain tendencies and strategies in human psychodynamics that are clearly and reviews and are clearly key now that we know what we know now. Yeah.

[00:19:58] But back to the 80s, what were you doing with him for that decade after college? After college, I moved to Connecticut because it's the insurance capital world and I was trying to get rid of a recruiter one day and that was on the phone and I said,

[00:20:11] well, if you got a job in Albany, the next day he called back with a job in Albany in my field in a really good consulting firm. So I moved up thinking that, okay, we just move in with Keith and we'd have not realizing he was actually dating

[00:20:23] other people up here too. Okay. So back to CBI for those who don't know. It was a mess. It was a mess. Okay. But it was like, can you give us the cliff notes? It was a purchasing service, but it was also multi-level marketing.

[00:20:35] It was supposed to be different multi-level parking. So multi-level, yeah. Same old plan. Yeah. It ended up, well his idea was more the conspiracy theory is that we pissed off Amway and Walmart or something and some attorney generals came after us

[00:20:48] and eventually half the attorney generals came after us and we were in legal battles for years and years but he was like, we're the good guys and it eventually took us down. We won some of the legal battles

[00:21:00] because Keith was kind of smart in how he set things up but the money we paid to win the battles put us out of business. So the story that we heard was a bit different than that? No. Do you know the story, Sarah, about Arkansas?

[00:21:15] Yeah, Arkansas is the people that came after us that he said was a conspiracy because Amway or somebody. Right. And Walmart, because that's where Walmart was founded. Yeah. One of Clinton's attorneys came after us. Yeah. Well, the reason I brought it up

[00:21:27] was that it feels like people who are still loyal, I think we all know who they are, but they say that this is like not the first time this has happened to Keith that he's gotten in the crossfire of unethical businessmen and the world's out to get him.

[00:21:39] Right. This was the beginning of that type of conspiracy, right? Yeah. I mean, he obviously had it back in college a little bit too but yeah, that's the first time he started saying that there's forces out there against him. He's done that with everything that he's failed at.

[00:21:51] Yeah. He did that even with the stock market thing that he did when he lost everybody's money. He said there were forces that were teaming up against him and that's why he lost. And people who are like still believing in the next year

[00:22:02] in tenants, how can they say that Keith's the victim? Like did he not cause this in some way? Did he not do anything to bring this upon himself? When you're that deep in it, there's so much crap coming at you from him

[00:22:16] that you don't see that inconsistency generally. Right. Well, also every single behavior is proof that he's being persecuted. Yeah. It's not evidence that he's averting responsibility. It actually fortifies their resolve because they go see, they're doing it again. He's got a response to everything. The women are lying.

[00:22:37] I knew the women weren't lying because I had the same conversations with Keith that they claimed they had. Lauren with the baby, I was promised a baby. Everything is the same. I'm sure they weren't lying because the exact same words he used with me were used with them.

[00:22:53] So CBI was a huge success and then it fails. Oh, it was huge. We doubled in size every two months. It was growing so fast. Wow. Which is what also supposedly scared the different groups because we were moving so fast. Sure.

[00:23:07] We could have swayed the vote in New Jersey. So what was the scam up there? What was the problem with it? I mean, it was definitely multi-level. Every single person was both a customer and a distributor. Everything was set up so that you bought and then you sold.

[00:23:22] They had to think just get two people. So it was this tree of all two by two by two by two by two. And a lot of money was made by the people at the top of the tree and very little money at the bottom. Typical.

[00:23:32] People did save, and I heard lots of wonderful testimonials of people that benefited from the service itself, but it wouldn't have survived Amazon. Right. Because that's the early 90s before the interweb. Yeah, before the interweb. That Keith invented. Yeah.

[00:23:50] No, he invented the browser is what we were told. Where did that come from? No, telemarketing. No, the both. We heard he invented the browser too. Oh my gosh. He was busy. This is the golden age of cult recovery. The more we speak up and share our stories,

[00:24:05] the more we realize we are not alone. Your voice and your story can empower others. This is Sarah, and I'm proud to be a founding collaborator of the hashtag I Got Out movement. Learn more at IGotOut.org. The perfect influencer family, but everything wasn't as it seemed.

[00:24:34] I just had a 12 year old boy still appeared asking for help. He's emaciated. He's got tape around his legs. Ruby Frankie is his mom's name. Infamous is covering Ruby Frankie, the world of Mormonism, and a secret therapy group that ruined lives.

[00:24:53] Listen to Infamous wherever you get your podcasts. Meals bring people together, but for many families providing their next meal can be a challenge. You can help by participating in Macy's annual Feeding the Hungry Food Drive. All proceeds go toward local food banks and families. Now through January 31st,

[00:25:13] you can purchase an icon in store or online, or watch out for the blue Feeding the Hungry Shelf tags where a portion of your purchase will be donated to local pantries. Together we can combat hunger in our local communities at Macy's. Wet year did CBI fail,

[00:25:31] and when did Nexium come into fruition? There was something in between. We started in 90, around 94, 95. I think it closed up at that time. Tony Natali was in the picture, and before it ended, he started going into some healthcare products, vitamins and things like that. The vitamins.

[00:25:49] And so when it went down, he and Tony created National Health Network, which was basically stores that sold vitamins and things like that. It was also, it wasn't in them, I don't know if that one was an MLM, but it had like cat,

[00:26:03] you get rebates and things like that. Tony was developing that with him. It wasn't doing that great. It wasn't growing very fast. And when she left him, the business just ended and just closed down. He had already met Nancy, so there was a little bit of overlap,

[00:26:18] and then he started up, actually no, there was overlap. ESP started when National Health still existed, because Tony was in the... It's funny, her book says she's the fall of Nexium, but she wasn't actually in Nexium. She was in ESP for about six months to a year.

[00:26:32] Because ESP came first? Well, National Health staff was going, he would meet Nancy at the National Health Network at Tony's. So there was a little bit of an overlap. They were starting up ESP. He must have known that the Tony thing wasn't going well,

[00:26:46] because he was starting up the next one before National Health crashed. A lot of the questions from our Patreon fans, I'm not going to read them all, but there was a lot of them just wondering how it was for you at different...

[00:26:57] I guess it changed over the years in terms of the women and how you felt about it. When did it become an agreed upon thing that we're just doing this? Did you use the word polyamory or...? No. It was all tacit.

[00:27:10] You can tell when you listen to some of these women, Tony or Barbara, me up to a point, they all thought they were the one when they were the one. Some of them still don't realize that while he was with them,

[00:27:21] there was a lot of other sex going on. A lot abortions and everything else were happening while he was with them. Some of them still don't get it. You saw in the vow where Barbara Boucher got that he was with other women while he was with her,

[00:27:35] but she doesn't really understand the extent to it. That's a hard thing for a lot of us to really own that we were never, ever special to him. Now you look at it special to that. Who cares? But back then, it's still hard to believe

[00:27:51] that you were being conned that much. Particularly when it's so personal and invasive. It's one thing to reconcile being conned or something like that, but a relationship and it's personal and it's sexual and intimate and then to have it just be like,

[00:28:06] it's the worst, it's the very worst. Some people came in knowing, Pam knew that he was living with me. She knew also that she had a hider relationship with him from me. But some people knew coming in, but some of us thought we were it

[00:28:19] or that he had left the others. That's one of the saddest things because I know there's a lot of people that, I know their healing isn't full because they haven't realized that yet. I listened to some of them and they don't quite get how bad it was.

[00:28:33] Three-sums, four-sums. Did you and Pam ever talk about that? Like did you ever confront her after the diary thing? She was real mad. Like I said, I kind of did the kingdom join them thing. So I went the other way.

[00:28:47] I started participating in some of the group activities for a little while. The cupcake making. Yeah. You bake together, right? Yes, we bake together. Just since you brought that up and I won't go into details, but one of the things that did strike me from the trial

[00:29:03] finding out that this was going on and that it was happening often during lunch breaks, during trainings. And it always struck me as like, how rude that we're all flying in for these, you know, sometimes 8,000, $15,000, $20,000 trainings. And we take a break for lunch at all the higher ranks

[00:29:21] or late. Everyone from the, not the whole executive board, but certain key members in the executive board or the upper ranks are coming back late from lunch. Like you don't need two hours to have lunch. No, you need two hours to... Wow. Yeah.

[00:29:35] Even then you don't need two hours. I think what's important too is, I mean, you make light of it, but that's the abuse in a lot of ways. That's the collateral. He's getting to do things against your will coercively and he's abusing you and it's collateral

[00:29:47] and he's making it look like, oh, you know, this is normal. It's hard to hear, you know, it's hard to hear because I consider a lot of you guys my friends and like, it just chaps my ass. What was going on?

[00:29:57] The worst part is what they call the devaluation phase because you're replaced. Like he became a threesome with Pam and Mariana at one point, one of the sisters. Jesus. I mean there was one time where I saw, this is funny, Mariana had stolen cake out of the fridge.

[00:30:16] So Keith and I set up a camera to catch her, you know, it was like a joke, but I looked at the film and I see Pam and Mariana kissing in the kitchen and I show it to Keith. He then disappears in their room for two hours.

[00:30:28] I felt so humiliated. He got turned on by seeing them kissing on the film and then just went off with them and left me sitting there. Because you all lived together? Yeah, yeah. Pam and her shared a room. I was never told, they all kind of just left.

[00:30:41] They didn't move out. There was a fight with him and Mariana and then they just left and they never came back. I'm still waiting. I was on post for years, something he always talked about leaving someone on post was a bad thing. Never told why.

[00:30:53] It was just implied that I was not a good enough person to be around him all the time like that or for him to be with. Yeah. It's just implied. So you're always trying, well, maybe if I'm good enough, maybe if I get skinny enough,

[00:31:07] maybe if I whatever enough and you're left struggling and trying to get that back. The behaviors you saw where people got really skinny and did other things we're trying to hold on. I mean, Karen, I can't tell you how many times we'd be in a training

[00:31:21] and there'd be someone coming in late crying or whatever and I'd be thinking, what's going on? And they'd be like, I'm working my issues and I'd be like, it's really not that emotional. But now we know. To do this. And now we know.

[00:31:36] It's like they were off getting literally abused. We also couldn't talk about our issues. You couldn't mention any displeasure with Keith. You couldn't mention any kind of unhappiness. Even in the early days, like before an ex-yam? Yeah. Well, it got worse. Well, if you did,

[00:31:56] then the other women would get you like Barbara Pam would attack if I said something negative. The system kept it in place. He set it up that way. But in the beginning you had that and then later you had Nancy.

[00:32:08] If you had a red flag and you're upset about it, you went and got a ne'am from Nancy and she basically helped you feel bad for seeing the red flag and for having a problem with it and getting you to feel okay with it.

[00:32:20] Which took her a few episodes to come clean up. Not completely though. When she describes how she was sent in to put us back in line, she acted like it was something that was bad for her. Which it is. I mean, I understand that,

[00:32:34] but she doesn't look at what she did with us. The lies she said to us making us feel bad for something that we should have felt bad about. But there was a lot of that keeping us in line.

[00:32:44] One of the worst things anybody has said since I got out was, well, the women around Keith were thriving. I cried. Who said that? A certain ex-doctor male. Right. Oh, gotcha. We had to make believe we were happy.

[00:33:00] I was always in trouble because my state was too low. I was depressed. Yeah. I remember thinking that when I met you in 2005. My state was too low, it's too low. And your harming Keith because your state is too low is what we were told.

[00:33:14] You're supposed to act like you're happy about your situation. But we're not, none of us. Pretending. Nobody was happy. Yeah. Right. It read as much. When we go to Albany, we'd be like, we'd be leaving places going back in. I was like, I would joke with Sarah.

[00:33:30] It's like we're going to a funeral every time we go to Albany. It still was an awful environment. Yeah. So CBI ends, Tony Nutali is in the picture. She breaks up with him. Keith meets Nancy. How were you brought into next year?

[00:33:42] What was your role at the beginning? The beginning used to talk about the five people that started it. I was not one of them because I don't do sales. I wasn't going to be a recruiter. So they took five people that were recruiters.

[00:33:53] I got in a month after it started because in my living room, Barbara Jeske was doing things like, you know, making fun of me because I didn't get the joke. I may have said something that was out of cause or something, and they all go, huh, huh, huh.

[00:34:05] So I got, I'm going to go figure out what this thing is. So I went in and started with it. I quickly went in and started developing the computer system that held the thing together, you know, that charged people and did all the basically everything.

[00:34:19] My role was that and a little bit of the administration because it was tied to my computer system in the beginning. At some point I couldn't deal with running the operations of the company anymore because he had you running things with your hands tied. You couldn't pay people.

[00:34:33] You couldn't, you know, compensate people for work. You couldn't hire people to do things. I mean, you had to hire people we knew who were not confident because we didn't want to hire people that we didn't know because he was paranoid. It became an impossible job.

[00:34:46] And at one point they offered me to give it to Claire. And I said, sure, take it. They were a little surprised. I was so willing to. That was number of years later when she took over as CFO. It started in 98.

[00:34:57] I didn't come until 2005, but I remember being so like, how is this a success program with this website that's like so mid 90s? Even when we brought in, you know, talented people like Mark Vicente, he would not let us hire and pay people to do something good.

[00:35:14] Why do you think that was? Because I have my theory, but I think you know better. My theory because we don't know what was going on in his head because I saw it at the end as things were falling apart.

[00:35:24] I was putting my fingers in all the holes of the dam, you know, he kept us busy trying to keep things going in such a bad environment. So you were spinning your wheels all the time trying to make things happen.

[00:35:37] You always felt like you were told it was you. You're the reason why things weren't succeeding. So you felt bad about yourself and you're very busy. That's someone who's really controllable. I think that was the motivation.

[00:35:48] He wanted it to be a mess so that he could keep things spinning and also keep us feeling like we're shit because it's not his fault that things are a mess. It's ours. Right. He would do it perfectly.

[00:35:58] He used to threaten to like write a program overnight that would replace what we did or something. Yeah, that would have been the principal's office. He outsourced the punishment. What were some of like the biggest red flags along the way?

[00:36:12] Either that you e-m'd away or that you rationalized away or that you didn't understand what you were looking at now that you know what you know. Oh, there's so many. But a lot of it had to do with knowing he was telling different stories

[00:36:25] to different people like I'm a scientist. My religion is science. Then you've got people who are very much the opposite and hooky spooky. When he talked to them, he'd buy into the energy and all that kind of stuff and make it look like I was just spiritually deficient.

[00:36:42] When he's talking to me, he would say, yeah, I'd say, what are you going to do? There's people they believe in, you know, fairies and say, yeah, I'm doing the best I can. I'm trying to get them in line. So it's whoever he was with.

[00:36:53] You saw the discrepancies and how he was talking to people. The biggest thing I think was in some ways, Mariana saved me because we talked about integrity. We talked about you can't move up the straight path unless just, you know, the program within Nexium.

[00:37:11] You had to earn your way. Everything was integrous. That was our big spiel, except when it came to Mariana. And that discrepancy in what he said and what he did really stood out because it was right in front of me. In what way?

[00:37:25] She felt special when she got away with things and he'd let her get away with things. He'd let her throw a temper tantrum and feed into it. And I'd be like, with everyone else, that's a bad thing, but with her it was okay.

[00:37:34] And then she was promoted a number of times where she didn't have the qualifications because he wanted it to happen. There were just things in there that just weren't consistent, you know? She and Pam just slept all day. They didn't produce anything.

[00:37:48] But then he gave him a company. Genese. Yeah, Genese. Too many inconsistencies around her that just didn't go along with what he was teaching. And I could not come up with a rationalization for what he was doing. He'd say it's more complicated. That would be his answer.

[00:38:04] It's more complicated than you can be a little pre-unibrain can understand. Right. Making it seem like he knows more than you. You just reminded me of something Pam and Esther asked me to help them once during a training. They pulled me out of a training,

[00:38:15] which I was super relieved to be out of the training, but to help them make the phone calls to get people into one of the Genese tracks. And I sat with them for a couple hours, and I was like, these two are completely inept. Terrible recruiters, no follow-through.

[00:38:30] And I was trying to help them even be like, can we get you an assistant or somebody to get you food and coffee? Because they'd be like, let's go get a coffee. Let's go get nothing done. I'm like, they're green sashes.

[00:38:43] They were higher ranked than me or purple. Pam was a purple. With Mariana, it's really sad because Mariana is actually... I mean that whole family, everyone saw Danny in the trial. It's terrible. They are brilliant. They are really, really smart. Both Daniela and Mariana,

[00:39:00] it's not as many people recognize how smart she is. I saw her in training come up with some things that are really bright. And I could converse with her when I was trying to help her with Genese in a way where she understood.

[00:39:11] I recognize she's really smart, but she was stunted. Stunted, yeah. That has gone completely to waste. Have you heard anything how she's doing? No, I know she was friends with Edgar's wife. Edgar was one of the top people in the company,

[00:39:24] top salespeople, and I know they were friends. Someone wrote me personally and said that they're still trying to teach the curriculum down. I heard Edgar was still doing explorations of meaning with people. But technically he never passed. Still trying to. Yeah, I'm not doing them. We're there.

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[00:42:04] Not from our Patreon, but from me. What do you think about EMs? Do they have any merit? Are they based on anything? And were they ever measurable? And what's the deal? They weren't measurable. We couldn't reproduce it, obviously. First of all, the tech, I believe that was stolen.

[00:42:17] I was shown another organization, a gentleman, named Morty Lefko, who has a method that's very, very similar based on the same concepts. And he predates us. So I'm pretty sure it was stolen and then modified a bit, made it more difficult.

[00:42:32] So if anybody wants an EM, they can go find a Morty Lefko trainer. Yeah, it's not an EM, but yeah, it's basically the same process. Similar. Same theory. I stopped at some point. I could have used the money. I had people asking me for them,

[00:42:46] but I stopped about six months after Keith was arrested. I started to realize so much of what we called tech was distorted. I just didn't feel good. And I was getting real therapy for myself and I was seeing the difference of dealing with a professional versus us amateurs.

[00:43:02] There's just so much that is distorted and used for not good, I couldn't do it. People talk about all the classes and everything, they gain things out of it. The classes were great. Pegnesi says how could someone like Keith create this wonderful thing?

[00:43:16] As I've looked back at all the different things we taught, all the different concepts, I see how so, so many of them were used to manipulate people. They could have a good side. Ethical breach could be a beautiful concept,

[00:43:29] but someone else telling you what your ethical breach is is not an ethical breach. No. Because it's your ethics. It's total abuse. So so much of this was used in that way, every little piece. So if someone got something out of it, great,

[00:43:45] but don't ever bring this tool back up. EMs were often, I tried very hard not to do this. I refused to work with some people because of it is you were told to get somebody to think a certain way. The exact opposite of what we taught. Yes.

[00:44:00] We were sent in to work with Barbara Boucher. We had to get her to realize she was in the wrong with respect to Keith. I refused to do that. At the end, they sent in me because they gave up, but I wasn't going to try to do that.

[00:44:10] Well, I can say Karen, when I sat down with you, you didn't have a vested interest in having me believe or think a certain way. So you actually got me to introspect and think about things. I had to walk a really fine line between getting in trouble

[00:44:24] for not getting somebody to think a certain way and helping me actually feeling like I'm compassionate towards the person, helping the person, giving them what they want. I had to make it look like I was doing what the other guys want

[00:44:36] and then do what I thought was right. It was a really hard line to balance. When Bonnie was waking up, she had an altercation with Nancy and she came to me and asked me for help. And when I found out it was about Nancy, I'm like, oh shoot,

[00:44:52] there's no good way this is going to end for me. And so I said, I can't really help you with respect to her, but I will help you with respect to you. But then Nancy found out I was working with Bonnie

[00:45:03] and I got in big trouble because I hadn't fixed Bonnie the way she wanted her fixed. Really? Wow. Yeah. There's that pressure that was going on. And I'm sure Nancy had that from Keith's at some level, but she went above and beyond.

[00:45:16] I was considered weak because I wouldn't do those things. I wasn't sent in to like deal with Edgar or people like that because I was too weak. When I realized later, it wasn't weakness. What happened with Edgar? He was writing a book. Oh, his Guru book.

[00:45:29] They were thinking he was stealing content. Stealing the tech. It was so esoteric. I don't know how you could think that was stealing anything. It was so out there. Well, you couldn't do anything. You couldn't do anything without having to pay tribute to Keith, right?

[00:45:41] Everything was his responsibility that was good and everything that was bad was our responsibility. That's basically the right way. Red flag. Yeah. Red flag. I wanted to also ask and a lot of our listeners want to know, what did you feel like when all these,

[00:45:55] like, you know, I know you did the documentary about the lost women and had your hair tested? That was me. That was me. Yes. That was you. I did answer that. So there's a time period where a lot of young women, their 20s and 30s were being recruited

[00:46:10] and I'm sure it was obvious to you at this point that he was sleeping with them or was that not? Some of them. Was that hidden? Some of them. Like, I didn't know about Claire. My mind didn't go there. I don't know. But some of them, yeah.

[00:46:21] Do you feel comfortable talking about what your theory is around that being poisoned? Oh, yeah. I haven't gotten tested again. I really need to. I mean, people extended it further than I think. I mean, Kristen, who lived with us for a while,

[00:46:33] the mother of his first child had one type of cancer. Barbara Jeske had brain cancer. Those things, I think those are different. What was suspicious is Pam died of what started as kidney cancer and I had bladder cancer. Those two things are really close, literally connected.

[00:46:49] And that sounded suspicious. Keith himself when I got cancer said with his usual conspiracy theories, somebody might have been trying to get to kill me, him, meaning Keith, that maybe we should have the water tested at Flintlock. I'm the only one still living at Flintlock at this point.

[00:47:06] And he didn't want me moving out of there. I'm like, you think it's possible that it's bad here, but you don't want me to move out. But he's the one that brought up the idea of testing stuff. When Frank Peralado called me with the results of the hair,

[00:47:18] I was pretty surprised that we actually came up with something. And then of course he immediately drew the conclusion at that point. I wasn't seeing Keith for what he was fully enough to go there. Now I think it's possible,

[00:47:33] but we don't have any real proof that he could have been trying to get rid of us. I mean, he basically had written us off. We've barely got crumbs as we got older. Barbara, myself, others barely got crumbs from him. So it's possible.

[00:47:46] I mean, the question is, was he trying to kill us? I don't know, but it's possible. It's definitely possible. I think it's for sure possible. Nothing surprises me now. So I got him back. I survived the bladder cancer. Yeah. And he's in jail. Yeah. And I'm 10 years cancer-free.

[00:48:03] So 12 years cancer-free. Yay! That's awesome. Okay, so everybody wants to know, how did you finally wake up? What was the final straw? It wasn't like a moment. There were a couple things. One, the fact that it was Marc Vicente. I had EM'd Marc Vicente.

[00:48:17] I had heard his stories from his childhood. I had heard what he was doing in Mexico and how scary it was. I believed he was a very honorable, upright man. And when they started saying, Mark is the one tearing this down, I went, there's something wrong here.

[00:48:33] Marc talks about, I ran into him at an event for the Tourette's thing. And it was the hardest thing ever. I had to shun him at that because that was the rule. And it was the hardest thing.

[00:48:44] I think he said to me, like, when did you start not liking me? And I wanted to say, I didn't! But yeah, that was hard. And that made me think there's something not right here. The biggest moment for me was Pam's memorial. I had a meltdown.

[00:48:59] That was fucking bizarre. It was a bizarre event. We talked about Pam didn't do crap. She was very hooky spooky. She would help people, but she'd be just basic going on intuition. I mean, I loved her, but she was not this incredible humanitarian or whatever else.

[00:49:16] She was actually very mean to me at times. Even when I had cancer, she was like mean. That was so over the top. And I would look at it and like, this is not Pam. There were videos and descriptions of her that were like,

[00:49:29] and the thing cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They got special flowers brought in. The flowers alone were like $80,000. Oh my God. I saw the money move between companies. It was just so surreal that this is not Pam. Why are we taking this person

[00:49:47] and putting her up so high on a pedestal? And Barbara Jeske got like a little thing at Apropos. She got like a little gathering, you know? But this was like... It was a very sad funeral. Oh my God. Yeah, in comparison. It was so over the top.

[00:50:00] And there was that whole weird thing where I had to walk around pretending she was alive for a month. Oh yeah. What was that about? I totally forgot about that. I don't know. Just so our listeners know real quick. This would have been January.

[00:50:11] This would have been like three weeks or so before Lauren invited me to DOS. This event that we're talking about. That's right. She died in November. Yes. She died in November. So why did they not tell people that she died? I don't know.

[00:50:24] They said Keith needed time to process. That's all I heard. But I was getting my information through Nancy at that point. So I don't know. I was in front of a training when it happened.

[00:50:31] And then she and I had to go to a Genese training in New Mexico. And people would say, how's Pam doing? And we had a lie. It was killing me. My friend that had for 20 years has died. And I have to pretend she's alive.

[00:50:43] But there was no consideration of what that meant for the rest of us. That's so crazy. I was so upset at the memorial service. Memorial. At one point I was with someone and I said, take me home. I can't handle this. I'm about to pass out.

[00:50:56] I was just so overwhelmed by how ridiculous the whole thing was. They made people from all over come into town for it. Yeah. It was in a very fancy hall. Yeah. But the final wake up. The final wake up was during that period of time

[00:51:10] where Keith had been arrested. I was awake. They knew it. They were worried about me turning on them. I have nothing else in the world. Right. And I was told I was weak. So I didn't think I could handle going out on my own.

[00:51:21] I was like, I'm going to break off. Where I could was when they were trying to deal with Keith being arrested. I made a comment that the company needs to shut down. And I was attacked with virtue blackmail, loyalty and all this kind of stuff.

[00:51:35] And by Lauren and Claire. And I was like, I'm done. I quit the board a week later and started seeing a therapist immediately. And the first words to the therapist were, make sure I don't go back. I had to keep my head down for a little while,

[00:51:49] but I was out at that point. And I remember you telling me about your last interaction with Keith. Do you mind sharing that? I spent a little bit of time with him. I went down for the first weekend of where they were

[00:51:58] when he got arrested in that Mexico town. And I just went for a couple of days because the company was in crisis. I didn't understand why we were taking a vacation. But I had some time with him. I was challenging him.

[00:52:08] I told him I wanted to help with part of the company. My only requirement was I didn't work for Claire and he went against that. He said, no, I can't do that. I would have to work for Claire. I would have to work for Claire.

[00:52:20] I was like, well, I ain't doing it. And I challenged him that the man that Danny got in trouble for kissing, I didn't know that's why he didn't like him at the time. But I was like, you got to be this guy's a good guy.

[00:52:32] You got to be nicer to him. And I asked him about Doss and he was still claiming not having much to do with it. Because Doss is the name of a computer system, the original computer system when computers, PCs were started.

[00:52:44] And I'm like, oh, you had to create that. You know, a little pun like that. And he said, no. So but I had a very nice time with him right before I left because we were talking about music because I was learning

[00:52:53] to play the bass guitar and I took the chance to give him one last kiss. Not knowing it would be the last one, but I also had a feeling at that point that I was done because I was getting so much what I now know

[00:53:06] to be gaslighting from him in the conversation. Nothing made sense. He stopped trying to explain it to me. So I was done. So many people want to know, did you dispose of his mother's ashes since the filming of the Vow? I don't live in my condo anymore,

[00:53:21] but the condo next door was Pam's and all her stuff was in it. And I had them move his piano into there so I could empty out my house and I snuck the ashes over there at the same time. So they're in Pam's condo?

[00:53:33] Well, I don't know what they did, but the lawyers of Pam's trust are now in possession of all that. I got it out of me. You offloaded the ashes? I offloaded the ashes. I didn't want to have to deal with them. Yeah, they're not in my possession anymore.

[00:53:46] Mom and a can. Well, I got my mom and a can up there, but yeah, not his. That makes more sense. Is there anything that you've been this from Sabrina Allison, anything that you've been chopping at the bit to say or

[00:53:56] share publicly that you want the listeners to know? I think that what the Vow didn't show is the depth of the manipulation. I know you saw a lot, but it was just the tip of the iceberg of the depth of the manipulation this man could do

[00:54:08] with you and understanding that you understand Lauren's choices and other people's choices a lot better. Is there anything else you've been doing that you can share about how you've gotten your life hands on? As much therapy as I can afford anything. I'll try anything.

[00:54:23] I've been following a lot of different people that are knowledgeable in this area, some of whom you have interviewed, but the best thing has been the friends that I ended up with. I've had the most lovely people from the whole company

[00:54:35] are still in my life, you two included. And they have been incredibly, incredibly supportive. I have people that call me every day. That's awesome. One gentleman calls me every day and I ended up with the best of the people, the people I thought were

[00:54:47] my friends and they weren't, but these people are just the most lovely people. And I'm very, very grateful they're in my life. You deserve it. Yeah. You deserve it. For sure, Karen. Thank you. All our listeners have said, and I hope you

[00:54:59] read the comments because we're going to read them all here. They're beautiful. They think you're amazing. I think it's really true that you're, you know, you have a good heart. Nippy, I know you, this is something you say often about Karen. Do you want to close it out?

[00:55:10] Yeah, the people don't know I coach Nippy for a while. Yeah. Look, I mean, you put out a lot of goodwill and I think it's the goodwill you're getting back is because of that, even though it was under an abusive regime, you were able to be loving.

[00:55:22] Thank you. That's one of the things I always remembered about it. You tried. Again, in such an awful regime. Yeah. Thank you. You both have been an inspiration. You saved my life. I can't say that enough. You guys saved my life.

[00:55:34] I'd still be sitting in a foot walk. So thank you. That means a lot. It means a lot. It means a lot, Karen. Big hugs to you. Well, I think we figured out that there's going to have to be a Karen on to run her part due, right?

[00:56:00] Because we didn't really get to unpack the vow. We had so many questions. We were going to unpack the vow and... We have to punt that to the new year. We had to pick up Ace. So thanks, Ace. Hashtag parent life.

[00:56:16] And I really want to thank Karen for being so open and honest with us and look forward to more with her. And yeah, just take guts. Yeah. She always has good insight. Yes. All right. Hopefully we'll schedule part due. Until then, see you again in the new year.

[00:56:30] Thanks everybody. Happy New Year. Hope you liked this episode. Let's keep the conversation going and come hang out with us on Patreon where we keep the tape rolling each week. Special episodes just for Patreon subscribers and where we get

[00:57:00] deep into the weeds of unpacking every episode of the vow. And if you're looking for our show notes or some sweet, sweet swag or official ALBC podcast merch or a list of our most recommended cult recovery resources, visit our website at alilibitculti.com.

[00:57:15] And for more background on what brought us here, check out Sarah's page-turning memoir. It's called Scarred, the True Story of High Escape Nexium, The Cult that Bound My Life. It's available on Amazon, Audible, Narrated by My Life, and at most bookstores.

[00:57:28] A Little Bit Culty is a talkhouse podcast and a Trace 120 production. We're executive produced by Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Nipy Ames with writing, research, and additional production support by senior producer Jess Tardy. We're edited, mixed, and mastered by our rocking producer Will Rutherford of Citizens of Sound.

[00:57:45] And our amazing theme song, Cultivated, is by John Bryant and co-written by Nigel Asselin. Thank you for listening.