The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Deadly Cure | 2. The Bleach Hunters

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Fiona O'Leary is a fearless firebrand, and mother of four autistic children. She is also an online vigilante who will stop at nothing to take down proponents of MMS. She's part of a loosely affiliated group of keyboard warriors known as "The Bleach Hunters.” Her Nemesis is Kerri Rivera, a former real estate agent who created something called "The Autism Protocols", which promote using MMS as a "cure" for autism. Meanwhile, a tragic death in the South Pacific of someone using MMS alerts the FDA that something might be terribly wrong. 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

The Bench. blue eyes. She talks in a rushed but assured tone, like she's late to an important meeting. And she is, in a way, hurrying to a meeting, with people she'd tell you are some of the worst on the internet. Fiona was diagnosed with autism in the early 2000s. I have five children, and four of my children are on the autism spectrum. In 2013, she went to college in Ireland after the diagnosis. Awareness of autism was exploding in those days, and there were a number of bogus cures popping up. Fiona was especially interested in those. Most of which were benign, like broccoli therapy,

dolphin therapy, horses, and all of that kind of thing. Some of the stuff, like horseback riding, would eventually check out. But the point is, there were a lot of ideas out there about how to treat autism, and not all of them were exactly evidence-based. Fiona began to research these different therapies, made it a part of her studies. That's when she opened a door into a world that she would never close. It started with an assignment. Her teacher asked her to look into some of the more dangerous and unvetted autism treatments out there. Someone reached out to me through Facebook telling me that there was this group called

the Genesis 2 Church and that they were doing some kind of a talk in Ireland. The talk would include promotion of their product, MMS. A product, this person told her, the group claimed would cure children with autism. And they were actually giving bleach to autistic children. As a parent and a budding researcher in this field, Fiona was horrified. So Fiona compiles information about this talk. She shares it with a local reporter who writes the story. The article is published. And it was like, you know, autistic children being given bleach as headline,

and everything just exploded in Ireland. And I remember at the time thinking that this was like a dream, a nightmare, I suppose. But it was a reality. For Fiona, it was most definitely a nightmare. A nightmare she couldn't look away from. So I became this kind of, I don't know, worldwide activist. And she wouldn't do it alone. At least, not at first. Concerned mothers of autistic children, activists and keyboard warriors were beginning to band together. A loosely affiliated group running uphill to stem the tide of the bleach wave. A group that would become known as... The Bleach Hunters. 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 2, The Bleach Hunters. It's 2010. April 26th is when we started the church and we had our first seminar. In Barahona in the Dominican Republic, Genesis 2 has just offered its first seminar on a compound where Mark and his sons and Jim Humble have set up their operation. We had five, six, six days of classroom practice, making the stuff. And if you're trying to scam people, you don't tell them how to make it in their home so they can do it themselves. You don't do that.

But we did. We tell people how to make it. This seminar is the first of many. Hundreds hosted all over the world. Genesis 2 is expanding. The FDA was gearing up against Jim, against us. Humble and Grennan have just founded the Genesis 2 Church of Health and Healing. Spirits are high.

The congregation is growing. Until some visitors show up. They're knocking on my door with a military consumer protection agency. It's the local authorities. Called Pro Consumador in Spanish. And cameras and I open the door. I just happen to be the guy. Hello. Yes, this is who we are. We're going to, we hear you sell MMS. And Mark is like,

whoa, buddy, that's none of your business. I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're a church. They're a church. I'm a church. And this is what we do. We show people how to take care of their temple with natural products. Boom. Get out of here, basically. For the first time, Grennan tries out their legal defense. The reason they think they should be exempt from the laws that govern the distribution of a product like MMS. They're a church. And somehow, it works. The Dominican authorities leave, and Grennan has learned a very valuable lesson. The authorities might try to come for you, but if you're a church, Boom, get out of here, basically. they can't touch you.

Grennan and Humble come up with a system to create satellites of the church all over the world and ministers of the church to run them. The seminars would become a central piece of this expansion plan. When you attend a seminar like this, which might cost a couple hundred bucks or in later years more than 600, you become a minister of the Genesis 2 Church of Health and Healing. You learn to make MMS, And you learn to sell it. The idea functions a bit like a multi-level marketing scheme. Cascading generations of Genesis 2 members would get trained, fan out to their various countries,

and then train and sell to other people. Spread the miraculous myth of MMS. All with the protection of the Genesis 2 church. You're not a salesperson. You're a health minister. And the regional sales manager? They're an ordained bishop. Come on, everybody.

This is a religion. Fiona O'Leary and the Bleach Hunters, they had their work cut out for them. Meanwhile, over the next few years, with Mark and Jim in Barahona, Fiona creates a network for herself of activists and parents across the globe. We really developed, I suppose, a grassroots movement. She says established autism organizations and advocacy groups,

they didn't pay enough attention to this issue. So she had to take it into her own hands. It really is a movement that was developed by autistic people, parents of autistic children, and together we just, you know, put everything we had into stopping these people. For Fiona, everything she had was quite a bit. She's given her life over to this movement. And for her, there's good reason. You can't unsee what she's seen.

And let me give you a fair warning here. I'm going to go into some detail about what Fiona was seeing online. And it's not for the faint of heart. Or stomach. So Fiona's meeting other activists and concerned citizens online. She didn't have much of a strategy at first. She'd borrowed a friend's Facebook profile and quietly join online groups where MMS was being discussed or promoted. At that time, I suppose the worst group was CD Autism.

CD stands for chlorine dioxide, which is what this product really is. This group is a good example of how Jim and Mark's global mission of promoting MMS was expanding beyond Genesis 2. This Facebook group, Fiona says, had thousands of people in it. It was organized by an American. The Facebook group doesn't exist anymore. A lot don't. They dissolve and become new groups, migrate to new platforms.

Sometimes it's to evade the people looking for them. Sometimes it's to widen the net. It was parents mostly, looking to use chlorine dioxide, what MMS is made of, diluted bleach, to quote, treat the quote, symptoms of autism. And some of the people in there were like professional people. There were nurses, people in the medical profession that were able to help parents by getting equipment to carry out these abusive protocols. The bleach hunters would take screenshots from these groups, take down the names and information of the parents posting, and share that information with the authorities. Fiona says sometimes this results in prosecution of parents.

Most of the time, the sellers were the target of law enforcement. But Fiona thinks the parents should be targeted by law enforcement. She's turned in, she says, about 50 parents in Ireland, none of whom face prosecution. Some investigations happened. Nothing happened to the parents. It's up to the legal system of each country. This led her to take more extreme measures

to expose Sellers and parents. Her vigilance alienated her from some of the other bleach hunters, too. One person agreed to go on record with us, on the condition that they didn't have to be in the same room with each other. Her tactics for some were just too much. Bridge too far. Yeah, I've had that said to me. I mean, I don't care about their opinion. Children have their own bodies and their own rights. As a parent, you're meant to look after

your child. You're not meant to poison them. Fiona has been accused of doxing some parents as well. At the beginning, I just want to make it clear, I did try to educate parents. But the real reality is, the majority of these parents don't listen to you. And it's very sad, but it's very true.

So you have to kind of then go to plan B. If the parents don't listen to you, then what do you do? These are autistic children in these groups. So she did what it took. But the parents who frequented these groups were scared. They would try anything. Their child would barely eat, couldn't stand being in loud spaces or nonverbal.

They say these poor parents, they're at their wits' end because the narrative is so damaging and the description of autism is so frightening that they get that pity. And proponents of MMS were offering a solution. It was rooted in a dangerous theory that was far more widespread than the MMS universe.

Autism was a curable disease. And it spread from places like Ireland and the UK to the Dominican Republic, and now even stateside. There was an American figure at the center of this false claim too. Another rising star in the bleach movement. You could say, in a way, she's Fiona's nemesis. Everything Fiona's not. Her name is Carrie Rivera. The best way to describe Carrie Rivera is that she's ready for TV. Hello, my name is Carrie Rivera and welcome to BrideyOn.TV. BrideyOn.com and BrideyOn.TV.

She has black hair. She favors a very bright red lipstick. She dresses in pretty bright colors. She is sort of fluent in English and Spanish. She's a very charismatic figure. She's a former real estate agent. On the many videos you'll find of her, she appears well-dressed, well-lit. She didn't respond to requests to talk to us for this podcast, but generally, she speaks with confidence.

And you can see why, especially like a parent, especially a mother who is looking for answers would find her to be a reassuring presence. Anna Merlin is a journalist for Motherboard, Vice News' tech site. Back in the early 2000s, Carrie Rivera became a prominent voice in the MMS movement. She promoted a very particular use of MMS. Rivera thought a strict dietary regimen,

nutritional supplements, and MMS could combat what she saw as a reversible disorder, autism. Too many of us are given a diagnosis of autism, and the person who gives the diagnosis knows nothing about the actual illness that is labeled autism. I believe it's a vaccine injury. So I started kind of looking at MMS and chlorine dioxide from that angle and seeing the ways that it was being marketed at places like Autism One, which is a conference for the families of autistic kids. In 1998, a now-discredited researcher named Andrew Wakefield

published a paper in The Lancet, a prominent scientific journal, that falsely tied autism to the rise of certain vaccines. And then, of course, there was also another big boost with Jenny McCarthy. Without a doubt in my mind, I believe vaccinations triggered Evan's autism. So I think they need to wake up and stop hurting our kids. It gives you a sense of the conversation swirling around the public discourse when Rivera came onto the scene. She spoke at that conference, Autism One. It's where she first really gained attention.

Carrie Rivera is one of a sort of group of women who say that they have successfully treated their own children with, you know, various, what she calls, biomedical interventions for autism. And so these moms are a huge presence at conferences like Autism One, and they're a huge sort of component of the anti-vaccine movement because all of them have these stories that essentially are, you know, I believe my child was injured by vaccines, and then I came to discover a cure. Just so we're clear, there's no evidence that vaccines cause autism. Rivera says she

discovered Jim Humble and MMS around 2010. She'd been experimenting with a number of alternative treatments for autism at the time. She ran a clinic that promoted a wide variety of unsubstantiated treatments. Like she doesn't have any medical training. She didn't conduct any tests. But she became convinced of the efficacy of chlorine dioxide after reading Jim Humble's bright yellow book and through an increasingly common means of diagnosis, Googling.

She just Googled all of the autism symptoms she was seeing in her son with the term chlorine dioxide and decided that it would work. And so she, by that point, was running an autism clinic in Mexico. So she started treating children at that clinic with chlorine dioxide. That's essentially how chlorine dioxide became a, you know, faux treatment for autism, it really was, as best I can tell, it was Carrie Rivera. And Rivera already had infrastructure in place to sell MMS through her biomedical interventions and clinic. I think she's very good at selling her products. You know,

she has a very attractive website and it's very professionally laid out. She's very good at, most of the time, but not always, skirting the line of what she is legally allowed to say. In 2014, she published a book that consolidated all of these different treatments. The book is a kind of calling card for what became known as the Autism Protocol. So when I started using chlorine dioxide for my son 10 years ago this month, it was only positive things because chlorine dioxide only does positive things. So Carrie obviously started to attract a lot of press attention for the claims that she was making

in the same period of time that journalists started writing about the claims that were being made at Autism One more broadly. And a year later, the authorities started looking into her claims. And in 2015, a year after the publication of her book, she signed an agreement with the attorney general in her home state of Illinois. Promising not to market MMS in Illinois. And that was the first kind of big pushback that she received. And so functionally what that meant also is that she could no longer appear at Autism One because Autism One was happening every year in the Chicago suburbs. So it was a huge speed bump for her. But I'm always

reporting Rivera to the FDA. We had her shut down in Chicago at Autism One. Fiona O'Leary says she worked with authorities in Illinois to get Rivera barred from marketing MMS. I've always wanted Rivera prosecuted. I mean, to me, that's why I keep fighting. But like, she is the one that has been attacking my community, the autistic community. Rivera expanded her operations to Mexico, while also focusing on personal consultations with clients, areas where she could pursue her protocol with less pushback from authorities. But trigger warning here before I go into detail.

The practices Rivera espoused can be pretty gruesome. And the FDA started warning pretty early on, in like 2010, that it was leading to these incredibly severe reactions. The main thing it can do is cause intense dehydration, vomiting, you know, diarrhea, even like liver failure. It's a very strong and sort of noxious and sounds like a very unpleasant substance to consume. The mixture is then administered via droplets. But also, Rivera and others started encouraging parents to administer the bleach to their children

in another way, via the rectum. Yeah, there's a lot of enemas. It's, you know. Enemas. Performed on children with autism. Sometimes nonverbal children. Children who lacked the faculty to communicate when a treatment might be harming them. It's no surprise, then, why Fiona was so upset when she found Carrie Rivera's group, Autism CD, online. Even the wording of like families saying they had to all come together to pin their child down because they were running away. They were running away when they saw mommy coming with the enema kit. Parents would share images from these enemas, images that some experts at the time said showed signs of intestinal damage, bleeding. It's these images that some in law enforcement told us compelled them to pursue criminal charges

against people promoting the substance. Carrie has essentially claimed that, you know, children with autism often have hookworms or, you know, tapeworms, and that if you give them these treatments, they will start, you know, passing these worms in their waste. And so you see these, any of these groups, you see them posting photos of like their children's, you know, stool with these substances in it that to me look like, look like stomach lining. Carrie Rivera is also one of the first purveyors of MMS that Fiona encountered when she started investigating the autism protocols.

I've had many confrontations with her, mostly online, not in person, but, for example, you know, she has put out disgusting, defamatory posts about me. She has shared my private information in Facebook groups, which we shut down. And, you know, it was just shocking what we saw there. And I suppose I actually at first didn't believe, you know, that there could be such cruelty towards autistic people.

I've seen these photos. It's hard to imagine it getting any worse than what some of these kids have gone through. But it can. And it does get worse. Child abuse, internal bleeding. These were unimaginable. Horrific stories.

But not the worst. Drinking MMS could be fatal. The story of Doug and Sylvia Nash, next. Doug Nash is still angry, like it was yesterday. So there's two guys I would strangle if I could get my answer on their neck. One is Brennan, and one is Luke. Mark Brennan and Luke,

the man who sold him and his wife Sylvia MMS. Oh, God, I just, I will never forgive him, ever. Because he knew better. He knew what he was doing. Doug Nash lives in an elder care home now. But back in 2008, the year Mark Grennan first reaches out to Jim Humble, Doug and Sylvia were busy and in love. In photos, they were leis and ball caps, arms around each other, tan from the sun. We were in Vanuatu, capital city of Port Villa, and it was there that we first encountered MMS. They were on an incredible journey, sailing around the world.

When Doug first met Sylvia, he wasn't looking for romance. He was looking for a crewmate, somebody to assist him on the boat. After a 30-year career with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, he wanted to set sail on more ambitious voyages. Sylvia had the skills he was looking for, a nunsome. She was cute. Doug and Sylvia just fit. Nautical domesticity.

Sailing around the world on their own little island. Together. They were passing through places with malaria risk. It's very serious and deadly. So they took precautions. We tried several and she didn't like the side effects of it.

It didn't bother me. Anti-malarial drugs. But the side effects were awful for Sylvia. And the side effects can be bad. Stomach pain, nausea, vomiting. By the time they anchored in Vanuatu, Sylvia was desperate for an alternative. That's when they met Luke. My very first impression was positive. Knowledgeable guy, from Belgium.

Luke was a sailor, a world traveler, like Doug. We tried to find him to interview him for this series, but couldn't. At the time, though, Doug says Luke was in Vanuatu with his wife, offering his services to fellow travelers. Videography, directing, electronics. I still remember that he had a, I'd say a half a dozen of things that he was selling. And, it turns out, MMS. I did not like it. Even though she bought it, even though Luke was a friend, Sylvia didn't just take it right away. She did her due diligence.

She was very thorough on her research. Sylvia reached out to a bunch of people asking about MMS, including her son, Joaquin. So Joaquin did his best to Google MMS when his mother asked him about it. But he didn't find much. Just that it seemed to somehow be related to chlorine. I think that I might also do a similar thing that she was doing. Just kind of like do a quick review on sources, obviously, on the internet. The internet didn't have as much data as it has today.

Eventually, the FDA would post a dire warning about MMS online. But when Joaquin searched, the FDA warning hadn't been posted yet. There wasn't much information available online about MMS at all. No major red flags. Nothing to suggest it could be dangerous. The next stop on Doug and Sylvia's around-the-world journey was the Solomon Islands. The malaria risk was high. No time to waste. Sylvia decided it's time.

So she got it out, and she was sitting there, and all of a sudden she was reading this instruction pack that came with a little packet of liquid and a powder, I think. She and Doug are sitting having breakfast on the boat. Sylvia has the whole kit out in front of her. Two dropper bottles, the instructional booklet. She had to mix stuff and follow a set of instructions. And she was, so she was just, every once in a while she'd say a word to me. I don't understand.

So I overheard her say that. I was like, well, if you don't understand, just get on the radio and call Luke, the guy that sold it, Luke and his wife, Jackie. So I, she said, okay. Sylvia feels like she gets it. So she mixes together the drink. All of a sudden I heard her gasp and go, oh, shit, or something like that.

And that's when she ingested this mix. Within 10 minutes, Doug said, Sylvia was nauseous. Within 20, she was on the toilet with bad diarrhea. At one point, Doug decided to ask Luke for help, but the quote-unquote antidote Luke suggested to Doug, vitamin C, didn't help. Hours passed. Sylvia was really sick. Doug was scared. She'd soiled the back room, and I was trying to clean her up and I remember holding her in my arms, lifting her and getting her back up on the bunk. And she was staring at me. I still remember one of the most awful things I remember.

She was staring at me with big white eyes. She had really big eyes. It was like she was shouting at me, help me Doug, but she couldn't talk. And I felt her all of a sudden go limp while she was... I remember this. It's one of the most awful memories I have, is that her eyes rolled back in her head. Literally, just... It's when her body went limp and her eyes rolled back and disappeared.

And that's when I went back to the radio and called, help, help, I need emergency help, anybody. Some people come on the boat, including Luke and his wife. They perform CPR, but it doesn't work. We worked on her for several hours, and she didn't survive. Sylvia, after taking MMS to prevent malaria, is dead. This cure, in Doug's eyes, has taken what appears to be its first victim. Fiona O'Leary, the bleach hunter, would later appear on a TV expose about MMS with Doug. She says it was the first time she'd heard about someone dying from consuming the product.

You know, Doug was kind of instrumental, I suppose, in telling a story of what it does to your body and how his poor wife suffered. After Sylvia died on the boat in Vanuatu, Doug, wracked with grief, found himself launched into a bureaucratic nightmare. Doug wanted an autopsy to find out why Sylvia had died, whether it had been the MMS. It took about two weeks to get an autopsy for Sylvia.

Local officials wouldn't do it. And while he was waiting, word of Sylvia's death and its potential connection to MMS hit the press. That's when the abuse started. It is my suggestion that Mr. Nash be completely investigated. This is part of an email by Jim Humble, written shortly after Sylvia's death. It was published on a blog in October 2009. This isn't actually Humble reading. It's an actor.

I'm sorry, but Mr. Nash is trying too hard to blame it all on MMS. He is screaming MMS so loudly, no one is looking at him. I can't do anything from here in Africa, but I suggest that the police take a good look at Mr. Nash. Every decision that Doug made in that haze of grief, in the weeks and months after Sylvia's death, they were all called into question. All second-guessed.

Jim Humble, and later Grennan and other Genesis 2 church members, implied the worst things you can imagine about Doug Nash. I don't like Doug Nash. I'm very upset about this thing, okay? Doug Nash lied. Boldface lied. That's Daniel Smith.

We'll hear about him soon enough. Finally, back in the South Pacific, Sylvia's autopsy comes back. And it's inconclusive. They gave me a chance to review the autopsy report. And so when I reviewed it, I found a whole bunch of, I consider, discrepancies in the report that weren't done very well. We should note that, as of yet, we haven't seen a copy of the autopsy report, and Doug is not a medical expert.

But whatever the result of the autopsy, Doug's not about to just let this go. His wife is dead. So he sends a formal complaint. The first domino to fall. He files the complaint with the FDA, the only organization that can do much of anything about MMS and its sellers. I remember receiving a response from somebody at the FDA who was an investigator. The FDA agent was working on a case to prosecute a man selling MMS. A man who was, at the time of Sylvia's death, a top supplier of MMS to people around the

world. People like Luke. And also, people like Mark and Joseph Grennan, mounting a little MMS business out of their apartment in Santo Domingo. I got it from Daniel. Yeah. Yeah. Project Green Life.

Daniel. Daniel Smith. Thank you, Daniel, for having that store there. For everything you see going on now. Daniel Smith was one of the top suppliers of MMS in the world at that time. This is when the feds really start to get involved in the sale of MMS in a meaningful way. They're, we should say, pretty bossy.

They use the line from the TV shows, we can do this the easy way, the hard way. Daniel Smith wouldn't talk to us for this podcast. But the case against him is really only the beginning of the story of MMS. And this case would open up a Pandora's box of misinformation, hatred, and lies. They're in it for money. If they weren't making money, all the protestations about, oh, they want to help society, that's bullshit. They're in it for money, okay?

And he thought he had a way that he could make money. The Church of Bleach and the U.S. government were officially at war. And the war was about to enter its next phase, hand-to-hand combat. Next time on Deadly Cure. Smokescreen 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, 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 V. Brown. Be sure to rate and review the show. It helps more people find and hear this story. Thanks for listening. 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.