The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Deadly Cure | 1. Genesis

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Meet Mark Grenon, Jim Humble, and the Genesis II church. Mark Grenon, a missionary in the Dominican Republic, contracts MRSA. He discovers the Miracle Mineral Solution, and claims that it has miraculously cured him of numerous ailments. This takes him to the founder of MMS, Jim Humble, a man who claims to be a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy, and has treated thousands of people with what he calls "my malaria solution.” Together, they start the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Smoke Screen, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Neon Hum Media, Bloomberg, & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. The Bench.

For emergency assistance, please call Poison Help at 1-800-222-1222 to speak with a poison expert or visit poisonhelp.org for additional resources. The story I'm about to tell you, it's as old as dirt. And yet, like any great story, it perfectly explains the moment we are currently in. It's a story about a man and a magical potion. Something he says will save the world for just a few dollars a vial. But there's a catch. That potion, it might also kill you. This is no run-of-the-mill elixir, though. It's a miracle cure. A cure that people all over the world believe in.

Factions form for and against it. Spiritual warfare has ignited, at least in places like Reddit and Telegram. Real damage has been done. Lies spread. Lives hang in the balance. This is the story of what happens when it's hard to sort the facts from the fiction. There's this one video I keep coming back to. It starts with a black screen, white text. It reads, a gross negligence of the First Amendment being observed in real time.

Real time is in all caps. It flashes on the screen like a warning and gives you the impression you're about to see some sort of shocking miscarriage of justice. You are not. Anyway, it's dated April 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. You're crossing property, okay? The video is a grainy, handheld recording, probably from a phone. We see an officer standing on the front steps of a single-family home with a front yard covered in dirt and patchy grass. It looks like the South. The camera is trained on his back,

about five feet away. He's posting a piece of paper to a door. And the man behind the camera, his name is Jonathan Grennan. Jonathan's dad, Mark Grennan, is that man with the magical potion, the salesman, the main reason I'm telling you this story. And the cops have just showed up to shut them down.

What's your name? Deputy. Deputy, okay, you too? The camera swings around to two other men who are watching over the scene. They're armed, badges hooked onto their belts. Okay, I got you guys. Guess what? I'm going to the sheriff with this.

The first constitution, the first amendment says Congress shall make no law. Okay? I don't have a law. And you are harassing me? The cops aren't just here for Jonathan. They're here for his family, too. Because the thing, this miracle product Jonathan's protecting, it's a family affair. Together, they've built a whole business empire around it. A church, global following, and a fortune. It's no wonder Jonathan is pissed the cops are here.

There's a lot at stake. You guys, you guys, you should search your souls. The three men start to walk away. Jonathan follows them, chasing them to the street. So guess what? You are going to be followed up, and we're going to talk to the sheriff. You should stay away from here. One of the cops gives Jonathan a thumbs up, dismissively.

He gets into his car. You should never be coming here again, because Jesus Christ is Lord, and he will come one day, and he's going to save us from this. You have no right here. You are nothing to me. You are nothing. But the police on that video did have a right. In fact, a responsibility. That piece of paper the cop posted to their door, it was a temporary restraining order, signed by a federal judge. For years, the family had been hawking their miracle cure

around the globe and in dark corners of the internet. It had brought thousands of people hope that it would fix any manner of things that ailed them. Often, though, the so-called cure did the opposite. It made things worse. The document pinned to the door ordered the Grennans to stop making and distributing their potion, what they called their sacrament. For years, the Grennans successfully shielded themselves from this kind of police intervention.

Over time, they'd come to believe that certain laws just didn't apply to them, would never apply to them. But Jonathan's camera captured something different that day. That's what I find so interesting about this video, why I keep coming back to it. There's this fury, this desperation in his voice, almost like he knew the jig was up. Jesus Christ is Lord and he is going to come back and he's going to save us from this evil empire.

The camera shakes as it follows an unmarked black sedan as it slowly rolls past Jonathan and down the narrow suburban street. You don't come back on my land again. This is the land of the Lord Jesus Christ. You stay away from here. They would be back. From Neon Hum Media, Sony Music Entertainment, and Bloomberg, I'm Kristen V. Brown, and

this is Smokescreen, Deadly Cure, a podcast about how a family on the fringe convinced tens of thousands of people across the globe to buy a miracle liquid made of poison, the international conspiracy it ignited, and the people who fought to take them down. Episode 1. Genesis. Mark Grennan, the patriarch of the Grennan family, is starting a podcast. First rule of podcasting, you need an earworm of a theme song. There's a thorn in the side of corrupt institutions. Check. Drop of chlorine dioxide.

Second rule, a catchy opening line. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Check. This is Mark Grennan with the G2 Voice and it's September 25th in the year of the Lord, 2016. Mark's podcast is available as a video too, so you can watch it

as well. In the pilot episode, a single camera is mounted above Mark and his co-host Joseph. Joseph, brother of Jonathan, who you heard yelling at the police a couple minutes ago. Mark and his sons are a tight-knit family.

Joseph Grennan. Joseph Grennan. Appreciate him being here, working the computer and stuff. Mark has on his signature white Panama hat with a long-sleeve white polo shirt. A few buttons open. Joseph's in a short-sleeve white polo shirt. A few buttons open. Joseph's in a short-sleeve polo and khakis. They look like they should be golfing in New Hampshire. And I should say, I think that's part of Mark's appeal.

He's not fit or superhuman. He's got a bit of a gut. Gray stubble. Kind of a vacation dad look. Instead, they're in this cramped room with two tables squeezed next to each other, thin sound paneling hanging from the wall and microphones in front of them.

Merc and Joe are coming together on the mic because they want to sell you something. It's a whole way of life, really. Genesis 2. They call their group Genesis 2. Merc's kind of a natural, approachable, casual, but speaks with authority, but also never talks down to you. Sort of a Joe Rogany vibe. Mark retains this kind of casual-like ability, a charisma, whenever he's talking to people about Genesis 2.

And to him, this group isn't just any group. It's about... Freedom for all mankind. Sounds nice. I want health freedom and physical freedom and economic freedom and energy freedom. And spiritual freedom. Spiritual freedom and food freedom, right?

All the freedoms you can eat. And the key to this freedom, a kind of sacrament, is a liquid they call the miracle mineral solution. And if you listen to the Grennans, this miracle mineral solution, or MMS for short, it can cure just about anything. It can replace basically any medicine. From cancers to AIDS to herpes to malaria to autism to high blood pressure to prostate problems. Go to MMS testimonials and look at those videos. And then, in case you don't believe them, Mark and Joe drink some MMS themselves. Live, on tape.

Now, before father and son drink up, a necessary disclaimer. Do not try this at home. The U.S. requires that medications be proven safe and effective before they are sold to anyone, and this concoction definitely does not meet any of those requirements. It's not medicine. It's a solution. Or a supplement, they'll tell you. Or a cure. And there's no regulatory body that oversees cures. Mark Grennan and his sons didn't respond to our request to be part of the show. So, you got your one drop. You fill your glass up. They make it look so easy. Mark shakes the cure into a cup of water like he's mixing cream into a cup of coffee. This performance has a casualness to it. Like, what they're doing is as pedestrian as, you know, asking someone to pass the butter at the dinner table.

A normal part of life. Then they drink it. But what they don't tell you is if you put too many drops in your water, it could be lethal. And now, if you put three drops in, add four ounces of water, you would have.004% of sodium chloride in this water. Totally way, way below the lethal dose for rats. Sodium chloride. Miracle mineral solution is bleach. Very diluted industrial bleach. And this is where things start to get weird.

And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning. This was a watershed moment. You could stop nearly anyone on the street right now and say, remember the whole Trump bleach thing? And people would know what you're talking about. At least they'll remember that while millions of Americans were stuck indoors under quarantine,

scared, scared, uncertain, worried about the future, the leader of the free world was on national TV pondering the benefits of injecting disinfectant into your blood to cure COVID. What you didn't know at the time was that this idea, drinking a disinfectant or injecting it, was already in circulation. Mark Grennan was spreading the gospel of bleach far and wide. Dear Mr. President, sir, I pray that this letter gets you to you and finds you well. All we want is the right to choose, sir. Less than a week before Trump's famous bleach speech, Grennan had sent him a letter, pitching him on it.

We could take the best chemists in the world and do an open debate about the efficacy of chlorine dioxide because there is so much evidence proving it is a wonderful detox through oxidation that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body. It's tough to say whether Mark's letter influenced President Trump. Did he read the physical letter? Maybe. But there were a bunch of other ways that idea could have reached him. During the briefing that day,

a government scientist had given a presentation on how effectively disinfectant killed COVID on surfaces. And the world that MMS lived and spread in is the same world as Trump's, the right-wing mediasphere, the fringe. One thing we do know is that after Trump's statements,

sales of MMS skyrocketed, a symbiosis between the president's words and activity across shadowy corners of the internet that we've become all too familiar with. That's where Mark Grennan thrived. Word of Mark's bleach cure would reach the ears of millions of Americans after a divine intervention in his own life. The Genesis of Genesis 2, next. As a reporter at Bloomberg, I've covered the intersection of health and extremism for years. I've seen how vaccine hesitancy, alternative medicine, and quack cures can often be fueled by distrust in established medical care and public health authorities. We look for new answers when the answers we're given aren't enough.

Or when we're still sick. Mark Grennan was sick when he found MMS. He was in his middle age, living in the Dominican Republic as a missionary, he says, when he contracted MRSA. It's MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, MRSA, which is a staphylococcus infection, bacterial infection that eats the flesh. MRSA is horrible stuff. They cut off arms and legs, people die.

Mark certainly seemed to think he might die, too. And by his account, he had quite a bit to live for. Mark Grennan was raised by Catholic parents in Massachusetts. Faith, and it seems a fluid approach to that faith, has defined Mark's life. As a young man living in Boston, he'd go on to start his first church in the back of an Italian social club.

Angels had intervened in his life multiple times, guiding him towards the right choices, saving him from peril. He makes a sound like that movie Wings of Desire, where the angels are just following around their assigned people like invisible chaperones at a high school dance. Mark sees his life as inspired and informed by unseen divine forces. After starting this church, he feels called again to become a missionary in the Dominican Republic. He claims that he started working there as a surgeon, despite having no medical training.

Some people thought I was a surgeon because I was, I'd be cutting people open because I knew the surgeons. They'd come back, they'd let me do stuff. For this, like many of the claims Mark Grennan makes about his life, we have only Mark's word. You'll have to take it or leave it or take it with a healthy dose of salt. That's how you learn how to fix a car. That's how you learn how to do surgery, is you do it. Mark thinks he got the MRSA from his work with doctors, which sounds reasonable. MRSA often spreads in hospitals.

And MRSA is a nasty disease. It can start as small, painful bumps that spread and balloon into boils. All things that, by the way, Mark is happy enough to talk about. He is not a squeamish man. I had it bad, in a very bad place. I'll say to my crotch area, huge boils, and nothing touched it. MRSA can be really hard to treat.

Luckily, Mark is well-placed to get it treated. He's working directly with doctors. He's got access to all kinds of fancy antibiotics, he says. And I had Keflex and we had Rocephin. But the fancy antibiotics weren't working. Mark got sick first. Then his kids. Things started to get bleak.

Mark was desperate, so he did what so many of us have done before. He Googled. And I started searching frantically to find a cure for MRSA. And as he's searching, something catches his eye. This book kept popping up from a guy named Jim Humble, the miracle mineral. I'm thinking, eh, it's a scam. It sounded like snake

oil, Mark says. You get these clever little assurances from Mark. It's the exact moment in the story where some might start to grow suspicious. But, like a true salesman, he addresses the concerns quickly, deflects, and moves on. This product, and the book on its many curing powers, kept coming up, over and over as he searched, calling to him. Jim Humble, Miracle Mineral Supplement.

The Miracle Mineral Supplement. Sometimes they call it Miracle Mineral Supplement. The Miracle Mineral Supplement. Sometimes they call it Miracle Mineral Solution, too. MMS for short. A copy of the book arrives. Bright yellow cover. Part one written in big, clunky lettering like the typeface on a PC from the 80s. This became Mark's holy writ. He was like Joseph Smith, discovering the golden plates.

To me, I don't know. The cover has a lot going on. It's hard to take it all in. There's a colorful illustration of a molecule of chlorine dioxide below the giant part one letters. And under that it reads, "'In the human body, this ion is the most powerful killer "'of disease that has ever been known.

"'Save your life or that of your loved ones.'" And in the bottom right, a drawing of a Tasmanian devil. Mark decides to try this MMS. It's calling to him. He orders the solution online. It was kind of hard to find a place that sold it, and it took a while to arrive, he says. But finally, at long last, it came.

A small glass vial with a dropper. Before giving it to his ailing son, Mark takes it to make sure it wouldn't kill him. I was taking 15 drops of that stuff three times a day, and guess what? I got rid of my MRSA. MMS was a miracle. It cured life-threatening diseases. How did nobody know about this? Mark and his children were all very religious. They immediately saw this as divine inheritance, something unmistakably God-given. This revelation, if you will, would be the building blocks of a new movement, another divinely inspired moment in Mark's life. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back in 2011, Mark is still just an excited missionary who's newly discovered a hidden treatment for all kinds of ailments. So he goes out and starts spreading the good word. So when I found this MMS and did it and it cured me, I stole all my medical friends and they ran. His medical friends, the doctors.

Don't get around that. You're going to get, you're going to go to jail if you start telling people that. I said, we say Jesus cures, Jesus heals. There's a quick turn of phrase here that if you blink, you might miss.

Mark says, Jesus cures. Why would anyone persecute a missionary? Why can we not say this? Because they'll throw you in jail. They'll throw you in jail. It was a prescient observation, but it didn't discourage Mark.

If anything, he doubled down. Well, then I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm just going to stand for what's right. I have to. As we will find time and again in this story, Mark Grennan has an unusual idea of what it means to stand for what's right. And in this case, Mark standing for what's right met Mark and his son Joe launching an operation to make MMS

out of their apartment in Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic. Mark says that he bought $700 worth of materials from a chemical company in Santo Domingo and followed the formula from the book he'd found online. It was easy enough to follow a scale, he says. And he started bottling up the formula. Let's try this on other people, because we're up in the mountains. We're out giving literature, talking to people, helping dig wells, build houses. So we're always around people. Cancer's being cured.

Dang-A fever's being cured. This was just the beginning. Mark had a missionary's mindset about MMS, and he wasn't going to limit himself to Santo Domingo. Mark was about to bring MMS to the entire world. But first, he needed to track down the genius, the creator of the miracle cure that saved his life. He needed to find the father of MMS. Next, Mark meets the man who delivered the Oracle of MMS,

a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy, or, as some people know him, Jim Humble. By the time Jim appears on Mark's podcast in 2016, he's a slight older man, a bit frail in appearance, often wearing his signature fedora. So, Jim, can you hear me? Yes. It's hard not to make jokes about the irony of Jim Humble's name, because the man is anything but humble. He's a former Scientologist who has, at different points,

claimed to be a space alien, as I mentioned, the inventor of a groundbreaking system for tracking nutritional deficits, and an aerospace engineer. He claims that he once healed his own broken neck with magnets. Through his family, Jim Humble declined to talk to us for this series.

But the discovery that would bring Jim Humble the most fame and also the most strife was MMS. It all started in 1996. Jim was sitting in his living room in Las Vegas when he got a phone call inviting him to join a group of people

prospecting for gold in Guyana, which, you know, doesn't happen every day. I arrived in Guyana during a very rainy day. Jim says they stayed in Georgetown, the capital, for a couple of days before heading into the

jungle. The jungle is actually a rainforest jungle. A little unusual because it's both a rainforest and a jungle, and it's extremely thick growth. They traveled upriver for two days. They were two days away from civilization, with no malaria medication. Jim dispatched a couple of men to the nearest mining camp, which was eight hours away. And meanwhile, his crew is getting pretty sick. They were in their hammocks and they were throwing up and they had pains in their arms and legs and stomach and they had a high fever and they were shaken violently and they really, really looked bad.

This is all according to Jim Humble, of course. And somehow, he says, he thought to give these ailing prospectors a liquid he'd brought along with him for purifying water. Stabilized oxygen, he called it. Bleach water. He told them it was a health drink from America. And magically, they started to feel better. They had an appetite, ate dinner, went to bed, woke up in the morning. No malaria. I treated more than 2,000 people with my malaria solution.

For almost 15 years, Jim Humble promoted some version of MMS across Africa and beyond, before meeting Mark Grennan. It was 2009. Mark's marriage seemed to be on the rocks. He was looking for a change. So he wrote to Jim, and he proposed moving across the world, leaving his life in the Dominican Republic, to be with Humble in Malawi, to learn from him, his prophet.

And just carry your bags, Jim. Show me what you're doing in Africa. Let me help you. Whatever I can do to help you. I want to learn more. I want to practice with this stuff with you. Only problem was Humble had gotten himself into hot water over

his MMS activities. Mark says Humble was facing criminal charges in Malawi for practicing medicine without a license. So Humble said, no, don't come here. I'll come to you. He said, but you know, I'd really like to get out of Africa right now. It's heating up here. Some people don't like us and the medical community is attacking me. This movement started, as so many do, at a compound. The property on the edge of the city of Barahona, a seaside town about three hours down the coast from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Well, that's great. So I got the place. So he came and he sent me $25,000 when only writing emails. Remember?

We got the generator. We got some air conditioning put in. We got a satellite dish up. We try to get it all ready set up because, you know, a big part of what we do is on the internet. Jim was fleeing the authorities in Africa and Mark was looking for a change.

Right place, right time. They both believed in MMS, touted its virtues. They lived together in Barahona. They even adopted a uniform of sorts. White shirts, white pants, sometimes a white suit jacket. And then there was the hat. A white fedora with a turquoise stone set in it. A Larimer stone from a mine just a couple miles away.

They were building something big. Really big. Just go slow, infiltrate the countries, train up people, grassroots, word of mouth, and that's how it's been. At the center of the enterprise lay its product, Humble's discovery, the Miracle Mineral Solution, MMS. And this is where the myth of MMS truly becomes a runaway train. They were no longer just roomies with strange ideas. Jim and Mark? They were about to start a church,

the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing. And at the center of that church, their sacrament, the Miracle Mineral Solution. Jim Humble and the Grennans had no idea the dangerous ride they'd signed themselves up for. You should never be coming here again because Jesus Christ is Lord. A ride that brings me back to that video of the authorities showing up at their door. And he will come one day and he's going to save us from this. You have no right here. You are nothing to me. You are nothing. A ride that would spark international controversy.

Austin emergency room doctors are urging people not to drink bleach. Very important warning for parents. The FDA now is urging people not to drink bleach. Products are known as miracle mineral solution. They have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to cure anything. In fact, the FDA says the ingredients inside

are incredibly dangerous. A ride that would stir the pot where conspiracy, anti-government, anti-media rhetoric boils. You're a disease. Bulls**t. Who owns that? The Rothschilds? What? What are you talking about? Are you really serious? You're really lost. Your governments are just prostitutes of the pharmaceutical companies. They want to control who makes money off this stuff. We want it free to the world. The propaganda you hear from lies, lies.

This is what I like about Trump. You're lying. The media's rigged. But most importantly, they would ignite a legion of keyboard warriors, moonlight activists, and anti-MMS crusaders who would stop at nothing to take them, and the entire MMS operation, down. Warriors and advocates that had a reason to fight. The enemy wasn't just the MMS operation. It was the people inside it, who wanted to give MMS to children, and in some cases, prescribe doses that would be deadly.

So I would probably just say to Mark Groening, fuck you, that would be it, because he's trash. We'll learn about them next. Smoke Screen Deadly Cure is an original production by Neon Hum Media, Sony Music Entertainment, and Bloomberg. It was written and produced by Carla Green, Kate Mishkin, and Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producers are Navani Otero, Kate Mishkin, and Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producers are Navani Otero, Zoe Kulkin, and Anne Lim. Production assistants from Stacey Wong, Gilda DiCarli, and Magnus Henriksen. Editing by Jonathan Hirsch, Catherine St. Louis, and Maureen McMurray.

Catherine St. Louis is our executive editor. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Theme and original music composed by Asha Ivanovich. Catherine Nguyen is our fact checker. Our production manager is Sammy Allison. Alexis Martinez is our podcast coordinator. Our executive producers are Jonathan Hirsch, Katie Boyce, and Jared Sandberg. Thomas Buckley's reporting on Genesis 2 for Bloomberg informed the development of this series. Special thanks to Chloe Chobel, Krista Ripple, Stephanie Serrano, Odelia Rubin, Liz

Sanchez, Shara Morris, and Jeff Grocott. I'm Kristen B. Brown. Be sure to rate and review the show. It helps more people find and hear this story. Thanks for listening.