Uncover - S35 E7: The Lotus Flower | Allison after NXIVM

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Six months out of prison, Allison Mack is trying to rebuild her life. A chance encounter at a dog park leads her to an unexpected relationship with Frank Meeink, a reformed neo-Nazi who understands the messy work of cult deprogramming. As Allison reflects on her role in NXIVM and the harm she caused, she confronts the question of whether she can trust herself again. Natalie accompanies Allison to a tattoo parlor in LA’s East Side, where Allison is covering her brand, transforming a mark of ownership into a symbol of renewal.

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Basic. A message from QP8125. This is a CBC podcast. Campsite Media. It's December 2020 in Southern California, where the perpetual sun suspends seasons, the only hint of mock winter curling its way into cool mornings and crisp nights. But Alison Mellon. is acutely aware of time. She's now about six months out of prison,

and her days are mapped out by what is still to be done, a thousand hours of community service and three years probation. She's using a voice recorder, given to her by director and playwright Stephen Belber, who Allison met when she was still in nexium, to keep a sort of audio diary. Allison is describing a conversation she had with an older man about trying to get a job after prison.

I was talking to an older gentleman there who was just trying to help me figure out what I could do for a job. Alison tells this man she's recently come out of prison. When he was saying, you know, is this something that's going to follow you for the rest of your life? And when he asked that question,

it made me take pause because I was sort of thinking, like, yeah, this is something that's going to follow me for the rest of my life. Because no matter what happens, no matter where I go, I can change my name, I can change my profession, I can change the direction in my life, but I can't change my face.

And my face is such a huge part of how I'm recognized, and you can't Google my name without seeing my face. Alison is realizing that what happened is here to stay. She's scared of what comes next, not just because of what everyone else will think. It's a weird thing to start to ease my way out into the world, because I don't want her to do anything again, you know? So, there's a part of me that's like if I just keep everything small, then no one will get hurt.

But I don't want to live in a box for the rest of my life, you know? So just rebuilding that trust in myself, I think, is sort of this next phase. How will people react to her now that she's a convicted felon who has had such a public fall from grace? And can she ever trust herself again? From Campside Media and CBC, this is Alison After Nexium, from CBC's Uncover. I'm Natalie Robamed. This is episode 7, The Lotus Flower.

One morning, Allison's walking her dog down by the shore of the Pacific Ocean. It's February 2024, about eight months since Allison left prison. She heads into a dog park. She notices an attractive, heavily tattooed guy in his late 40s with slick back hair. The first thing I heard was he commented, he said, your dog has such pretty pink skin. and he has like a very thick East Coast accent. And so I immediately was like, are you from New York? You know, because I love New York.

And he's like, nah, I'm from Philly. And I was like, ooh, I love Philly. And I started going on about like the art music and stuff in Philly. And he was like, yeah, I'm not from that part of Philly. I was like, oh, where are you from? He's like, I'm from South Philly. It's kind of the hood. His name's Frank.

Their dogs get along, and so do they. He invited me to come have food at his restaurant. He was a waiter at a Thai restaurant up the street, like a local neighborhood place. And he was like, you got to come to my restaurant. You got to come to my restaurant. You'll love it. You'll love it. So I was like, okay, maybe I'll come on Thursday with my mom.

That's like my date with my mom. We go out every Thursday. That Thursday, Allison and her mom go to eat at this Thai place and sit down at a table in Frank's section. He had told the whole staff that I was going to be coming in sometime this week and to call him boss because he wanted. and them to make it look like he was more important in the restaurant than he was. Frank spends the night talking to them. He let slip that he was recently in Atlanta. And I was like, what were you doing in Atlanta?

And he was like, oh, I'm a public speaker. And I was like, what do you speak on? And he was like, oh, just like tolerance and de-radicalization and police reform. And I was like, no way. I was like, I have done time. And like, I'm really passionate about prison reform. Like, that's crazy. And he was like, really?

And he goes, yeah, well, like, my story. is kind of unique, so I've, like, spent a lot of time in and around the system and, like, I really want to, you know, make some changes in it or be a part of that. And I was like, me too. And I said, you know, have you ever seen the documentary why we hate? And he was like, the Steven Spielberg documentary? And I was like, yeah, he's like, yeah, I'm in it. He wasn't bullshitting. He's actually in this documentary. This is the house I grew up in over 30 years ago. Frank Meek grew up in South Philadelphia in the 1970s. Because it turns out, the guy Allison met in the dog park is Frank Mink, a renowned former neo-Nazi who used to have the words skinhead tattooed across his knuckles and a flaming swastika on his neck to boot.

That night, Allison and her mom go home and re-watch the documentary. At 17, Frank was sentenced to three years in prison for nearly killing a man. They learned that Frank has done time for kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon. Like Allison, he's a convinced. evicted felon. He's also a former addict. Frank doesn't recognize Allison when he first meets her, but after they exchange emails, he Googles her. I was like, I seen a documentary. Like, I had seen that. Yeah. So I just was like, oh my

God, this is her, this, and that is her. He and Allison have actually both watched each other in documentaries without realizing. And it's just one of the unexpected similarities between the pair, who, on the surface, could not be more different. Frank speaks with a thick accent that belies his filly roots. He's got sleeves of tattoos, though the white supremacist ones have long since been removed, and he talks with the quiet confidence of someone who's been through some shit. Still, when he starts dating Allison, some of his friends are wary. My one friend was like, yeah, there's someone even saying and she was with Jeffrey Epstein.

So you hear all these, like, phrasey things, right? And my friend's like, I don't think it's true. But there's people that are saying, like, her name's on Epstein list and all this crazy stuff, right? And so I was like, no, no, I know it's not like that. Like, I can tell that this wasn't, you know, that it wasn't like a sexual deviant thing that they was going through. Like I can just tell by who she was.

And even by watching that it was like this, A lot of people that were really brainwashed into, not even so much about him. It's just more of the camaraderie, I think, that a lot of them had in this little thing of theirs. It's interesting that Frank says, this little thing of theirs. This thing of ours, as fans of the Sopranos will know, is a phrase often used to refer to the mafia. A nexium was a sort of mafia, a tight-knit group with its own internal logic. and a reputation for hurting people. And Frank's also right.

I do think a lot of the worst behavior in nexium came from women reinforcing and egging each other on, women who had been deputized to do Keith's bidding for him. Not long after their first date, Allison tells Frank everything. She wasn't defending anything. She's just like, here's the deal. A bunch of women got branded.

This is one of the reasons why I went to prison is, you know, we were part of this cult and it was this sex quote with this guy. She used that word, cold. She used the word, cold. She was like, and he turned into this cult. I remember she asked me, when we got done walking, she says, do you judge me?

And I just looked at her and said, you know, I'm a former neo-Nazi who used to kidnap people. Do you think I have any room to judge you? Are you in, no, I don't judge you at all. Allison may have just stumbled upon one of the very few people who can relate to having been in a cult, because the white supremacist movement is a sort of cult, in and of itself. I'm not just talking about the shaved heads and tattoos.

There's the very radical ideological thinking, oftentimes strict control of behavior and a tendency towards violence. Like Allison, Frank's involvement in an extreme group landed him in prison. If you've seen that film from the 90s, American History X, in which Edward Norton plays a recovering skinhead. Frank's real life sort of seems to have played out like that. Frank started to de-radicalize in prison when he was surrounded by lots of black inmates.

After he got out, he worked for a Jewish guy, the experience of which punctured many of his anti-Semitic beliefs. Frank left the white supremacist movement in the 90s and now works at a non-profit with unhoused people, connecting them with resources. He does public speaking and civil rights. rights activism on the side, even testifying in front of a House subcommittee in 2020 on white supremacy in policing. In some ways, Frank is a poster boy for changing your mind.

I completely at one time believed that because of the color of my skin, I was better than another human being on this planet and believe that with all my heart for years of my life and know now that that's one of the most idiotic things you could say. As I mentioned, he's also a former addict, and he's big into A.A. I live a life of recovery. There are rooms right now full of people who change their lives. Crackheads, drunks, heroin addicts, sex addicts, who got into life and got into recovery and have changed their life and they're now some of the best people you'll meet in your life. So people do change.

I've changed. He's also a very matter-of-fact kind of guy, which, for someone still coming out of Keith's esoteric way of speaking, and frankly, his brainwashing, is really important. For example, one of Frank and Allison's first ever arguments was over a donut. Frank had been trying to watch his diet, and one day he came home with a jelly donut. And she just goes, I thought you weren't going to do that. more. And I'm like, okay, like, again, I'm a recovering drug addict alcohol. It's not like a relapse

to me. I'm like, okay, well, it's a jelly donut. And she's like, it's not just a jelly donut. It's your health, and I want you to be healthy, and I want you to live better. And I'm like, yeah, it's just a jelly donut. Apparently, Frank had had a donut for breakfast and was planning on having the second for lunch. And I was like, that's just like really indulgent and unhealthy. And he was like, I don't need you to tell me what I can and can't eat. And I was like, you don't respect yourself, therefore you don't respect me. To Allison, it's not just a donut. I'm seeing disrespect.

I'm seeing indulgence. I'm seeing impulsivity. I'm seeing lack of discipline. I'm seeing all of the things. And I'm not even seeing those things. I'm just feeling my body in fight or flight. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not even logically being like, but you know, like I'm just freaked the fuck out.

You know, and he's like, it's a fucking jelly donut. You can't tell me what I can. can't put in my mouth. Like, that's fucked up. Like, who do you think you are? You know? And so I went back to my therapist and I was like, I freaked out about this jelly donut. And my therapist was like, well, yeah, you had been punished pretty intensely for many years. So the three years in DOS, it was like I was wearing the salis and I was having to ask for calories. But 20 years leading up to that, I was constantly on a diet, constantly trying to figure out how to be thinner and be smaller and food was the enemy, you know?

And it was after that that I actually hired a therapist to help me with eating disorders so that I could properly understand food. The pair decided to commemorate Donut Gate. We now have an artist picture of a donut in our house now. Because if

there's one thing Frank knows, it's the cult-like thinking takes a long time to unravel. From the work that I've done with former jihadist, former gang bangers, former neo-Nazis. I mean, I've worked in that world for a long time. I just think people don't understand what it's like

when you get stuck in something like that, and it's the one thing that, like, validate you. It's hard to get out. Frank is a deeply spiritual guy. When I met him for the first time, he was wearing a star of David necklace. Several people had told him he looked Jewish over the years. When he'd been getting into a neo-Nazi gang,

An uncle even sat him down and told him the minks had Jewish heritage. Frank really is a believer, and he sees God in Allison's struggles. Whatever your beliefs are, higher power creator or whatever, he really uses the broken vessels. What do you mean by that? I think that, I mean, you just look, you know, whatever, you take even the stories from the Torah or from the Bible, and the people that God uses are always people that went through hard. Joseph was sold into slavery, thrown into a pit, then falsely accused and went to prison.

And he had King David, who was anointed king, and then he was hiding and cave from King's like. And I have also seen in my life where the people who helped the most are people that have gone through really dark times, the people that were in the valleys of life and learned how to get out of the valleys. I always feel that God uses those people the most to help others.

I've got to be honest. When Vanessa Gregoriatis, my frequent writing partner and our executive producer, first told me about Allison over a year and a half ago when this whole project started to take shape, I did not share Frank's opinion. Not at all. Vanessa had called me while I was in the car,

driving somewhere, like I always am in L.A. She said she'd gotten a call that Alison Mack was newly out of prison and interested in telling her story and she thought I should host a podcast about her. And I said something like, I have no interest in being a tool in Alison Mac's redemption arc.

Like everyone else, I only knew the version of Allison I'd seen in documentaries and the press. That is a villain. And I did not want to put my credibility, my career, on the line for her. Vanessa said, just meet her, and then tell me what you think. So not long after, I got dinner with Allison in person, alongside writer and director, Stephen Belber, who first thought Allison had a story to tell.

We met outdoors at a nice restaurant in downtown L.A. I didn't record the meeting because we didn't yet know if we were making this podcast, but I remember walking. in, feeling skeptical, to say the least. I was prepared to be hit with a Hurricane Force Apology Tour, a pre-packaged PR campaign wrapped in the bundle of a former actress desperate to get back into Hollywood. When Allison walked in, there was an element of the star in her. She arrived, beautiful and wide-eyed, incredibly effusive and over-emphatic in the way

lots of female actors are. But I've interviewed lots of actors and I'm around a lot of Hollywood types so I'm used to dealing with this base element of performativity and oftentimes there isn't much past it. But when we sat down, I discovered with Allison there was. We started talking about therapy and trauma

and our respective tattoos. Allison didn't have visible tattoos before but now that she doesn't have to be on TV anymore, she's been getting them. It turns out, Alison and I have both been doing a similar sort of therapy. It's called Internal Family Systems. It's an increasingly popular therapeutic model, and actually has nothing to do with families. It's based around the idea that there are different parts within us, the good, the bad, the anxious, the mean.

The theory is, by zeroing in on these different parts in identity, isolation, and questioning what each part is really trying to communicate, you can get deeper into understanding your actions. The aim of doing this integrated parts work, it's called, is to bring all these parts into the correct relationship with each other. One of the parts that Allison was working on was her desire to be the best. She made a dark joke about how she'd always had this drive to be the best daughter, the best actor, and then the best cult member. which, of course, in the case of nexium, meant being the worst. After dinner, I called Vanessa back. She had talked to Alison extensively after their experience when she was writing her New York Times story,

but now she asked me what I thought. I said, I see a lot of myself in her. That might sound odd, but I meant it. Like Allison, I'm a people-pleaser. I always want people to like me, to be told I'm good. It has its pros. It made me a straight-A student, a pleasure to have in class, and as an adult, a LinkedIn-endorsed pleasure to work with.

But it also means that I've spent a lot of my life contorting myself, twisting who I really am into who I thought people wanted me to be, maneuvering my real ambitions and desires into a malleable substance that could be poured into anything that gave me. praise. And the thing that scared me most about Alison's story was that she had thought she was doing good. And that in her case, wanting to be good and do good actually resulted in bad things, the most evil things. She represented the gulf between intent and actions. And I wanted to understand it.

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You can take action to help protect your home from extreme weather. Discover prevention tips that can help you be climate ready at keep it intact.ca. Here's the thing. However much we all think we wouldn't fall for it, no one sets out to be in a cult. And Allison knows that better than anyone. I was at the Broad Museum in downtown LA, and there's a very stark piece of art

that has an image of three of the Manson followers shaving their head and sitting vigil outside the courthouse during the sentence of the women. and it was like a kick in the gut when I saw it because I was like, holy shit, that was me. I've been thinking about the Manson family a lot while working on this podcast. Charles Manson, as a cult leader in L.A. in the 1960s,

had contorted the free love counterculture of the time into a violent, drug-fueled group. He recruited and manipulated a slew of followers, many of them young women, who eventually went on a killing spree. murdering multiple people, including the actress Sharon Tate. There are often comparisons drawn between the Mansons and the Nexian, and that's a very scary connection because of what ended up happening.

Both of these cults were run by men who largely relied on women to do their dirty work. Like the Manson family, most cults do end with some sort of violence, if not bloody murder. And while the brandings and sexual harm in Nexium were forms of violence, I've often wondered how far an axiom might have gone if it hadn't been stopped. If instead of being indicted, Allison and the others had hold up in Mexico, sealing themselves off from the world and reality. I asked Allison this. When you ask me, like, do you think you would have gotten violent?

There's a line in King Lear where he's freaking out about how his daughters are turning on him and all of this, his life is being destroyed because his family wants his wife. or whatever, and he starts to go down this description, and then he goes, I, that way madness lies. Like, I can't think about that because I'll make myself crazy. And I said that to myself so many times. Like, if I really start to think about where we would have gone, had we not been stopped, it gets a little too scary.

And it's like, I, that way madness lies. It's scary to think your fanaticism could lead you so astray, that your own mind could do that. And this is part of what Alison's been struggling with. How can I ever trust myself again? When I made a decision and another decision and another decision that were so antithetical to the things that are significantly important to me. Like female empowerment has been like my jam since I was like 12 years old. You know, like the character I played on Smallville was like the epitone of like the feminist kind of idea for me at least.

back in that day, you know, I wanted to make women awesome. And yet I destroyed that, you know, like over and over and over again for a man. What's happening in my head? Like, what the fuck is going on? Alison hurt a lot of people in Keith's name, but it was still her who did it. recruiting women, giving them the assignment to go to Keith, coercing them and belittling them all in the name of self-growth, which was really harm.

She admits it. So I was the go-between between him and this person, you know, and it was my job to relay what she needed to do with him for her growth, right? And the more that she said, I'm scared, I don't want to do it, the more I would say, that means you need to do it. And the longer you wait, the more consequences there will be. And so then there was like the coercion started to get involved in the pressure and the pressure and the pressure. And I was at the helm of that because I was under the belief that this is sexual liberation

and this is going to cause her to be so much more powerful and free in herself and in her life. And so we have to do this, you know, and then it's like rape, you know. But what compels me most about Allison and why I ultimately decided to do this story in the first place is that she's a person who's willing to grapple with the bad things she's done. What do you say to claims that you were a harsh master? It's true. I have certain people in my life who are lovely and love me

and are like, you don't belong in prison. And I'm like, you weren't there. I was not kind and I was aggressive and I was abusive. And yes, I didn't like hold anybody down or physically force anybody into anything. But I was so aggressive emotionally. And whether or not somebody else thinks that that deserves a prison sentence or not, it doesn't really matter because that's my conscience and that's on me. And that's not okay for me to be that way, you know?

And so I was harsh and I was callous. And I was aggressive and forceful in ways that were painful for people and did make people feel like they had no choice and was incredibly abusive to people, traumatic for people, you know. So I think 100% all those allegations are true. And also, I am someone who cares deeply and wanted very much to grow and wanted very much for everybody that I was involved with to grow. and so being able to recognize like both of those things are true about me it was like when I was like proffering and getting ready to go to prison and in therapy and stuff it was like I would

flip-flop between like I'm this horrible heinous villain who was hurting these beautiful innocent people and I was corrupt and I was I was this right hand of Keith and I was all of these horrible things you know and my therapist would be like what what are you saying right now like that wasn't what we were talking about last week when we were talking about the vision that you had for what you thought you were doing and the thing that motivated you to go and seek out help and the thing that motivated you to commit your life to next thing in the first place that is not a horrible heinous person that's a person that has these values that was incredibly misled and manipulated I definitely recognize and admit that I was abusing my power and that I was mean and I was forceful but I

also can't negate the fact that there was a part of me that was altruistic and when I was desperate to help people and wanted to be better, and wanted, I was willing to do anything to be better in myself and to help other people be better, you know? So that makes me human. This is the idea of internal family systems that I was talking about earlier, that were comprised of all these different parts. But the thing is, very few people's parts are as extreme as Allison's or have done quite so much harm. How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma to other people? I mean, I don't even know how to answer that question. I don't feel like there's a way to answer that appropriately, I guess,

because it was the opposite of what I was trying to do. Do you know what I mean? I was trying to heal sexual trauma. and then I turned around and was someone who was supporting it. I mean, that was why it took me a year to plead guilty because I was like, I can't face that fact. I can't face that truth. And I think the only way that I sit in a place where I feel like okay moving forward

is to recognize that I was also dealing with it. Just like any person who's committed a crime, like you have to get to a place where you recognize the brokenness in yourself and why you chose to do the bad thing that you chose to do. There's this phrase, one that I've thought about often while making this show. Hurt people, hurt people.

That can sound like an excuse, but I don't mean it that way. I think it's an invitation, an opportunity to grapple with the ways we've been hurt so as not to repeat them onto others. But what about hurt people? people who have already hurt people. The answer for Allison is to try to metabolize the harm she's caused. Maybe the pain that I inflicted on people and myself, I can turn into wisdom so that I can

try and mitigate that pain for a future of generations or other people. How do you fucking put back together a glass that you break? You can't. You can't. And also, you can't live the rest of your life staring at shattered glass. And so then you go, okay, I broke the fucking glass. That was the best glass I had. And that was like the last thing I wanted to do. What do I do?

Like how do I make things better? Not ignoring the glass, not pretending like it didn't matter. But also moving forward, you know. move forward. She enrolled in women's and gender studies at Berkeley. But, as we've already heard, that didn't go over well with her fellow classmates. So Allison ended up changing her major to psychology. She's now pursuing a master's in social work. If that concerns you, I get it. Hearing that might make you think Allison could be using everything she learns about how the mind works to manipulate people once again.

Allison is incredibly conscious of this. I'm looking at PhD programs in something called expressive arts therapy because there's one thing that I learned in all of this craziness is that the mental landscape is incredibly fragile. Just because you're like a good listener doesn't mean that you should be somebody's therapist.

You know what I mean? Like that's like saying like I'm a good cook so I should be a surgeon. Like no, nice skills are different. Listening is different. friendship is different. If you're going to really get into somebody's mental health and really work to help somebody in a very deep way, you need to be armed with education and regulation and constant checking. Is this ethical? Am I doing the right thing? Am I hurting

somebody? Because we're so complicated in our heads and we're so fragile and we just don't understand that. I do want to be a therapist, but I want to be like a PhD therapist. Like, I want to be a very well-educated, very, like, knowledgeable, you know? Like, I don't want to be haphazard with somebody's mental health. It makes sense that after you've been brainwashed, been in a cult, you'd want to understand your own brain. I think a lot of former Nexium members, those who were in really deep, are still trying to understand how they got there in the first place. Lauren Solzman certainly seems to be doing so. I think I was in a very abusive situation

that I didn't have the self strong enough sense of self to understand and I think he took advantage of that yeah I think he abused me for a number of years and unfortunately my family dynamics propagated and perpetuated a lot of it and that's been really hard when Lauren said this to me

I heard an axiom in it the emphasis on personal responsibility that it was her fault she didn't have a strong enough sense of self to see through Keith's bullshit but I also heard accountability. When you've hurt somebody, I think, I mean, at least for myself, I have a responsibility to myself and those people to understand what happened and to try to fix it to the best of my ability.

And I believe the way to do that was to keep my eyes in my own lane and just take full responsibility for what I did above and beyond, as if it was all me, not even keep me. And that's what I did in federal court. She's now married and living in upstate New York with her wife. I met my wife through the process. And she said to me at one point, she's like, people fuck up.

People make mistakes. We're fallible. You have to go on. It's making you sick. It's making you crazy. And it's not healthy. You have to stop with the ethical breach stuff. You're doing the best you can every day.

You can't live like this anymore. You have to stop. Not everyone from Nexium is in the same place. Even after all this time, Keith still has some supporters, who point to what they view as ways the case was mishandled by the federal government. Claire Bromfman has never publicly renounced Keith. She served out the end of her nearly seven-year sentence at a halfway house in New York City and was officially released at the end of June,

It's not clear where she is now. Nikki Klein, the Canadian actress who was dancing outside Keith's detention center, publicly renounced Keith in 2023, but ultimately did not respond to requests to participate in this series. According to her personal website, she has an agent and seems to be trying to act again. Her bio reads, I have had the good fortune of learning a lot of things the hard way. My hope is that the wisdom I've gained through my experiences can provide

prevent others from going through the same, or, in the very least, not go through them alone. Healing and learning is a common theme among former nexium members. India Oxenberg, Allison's former slave, and one of the people who Alison hurt the most, wrote this to us. It's not the right time for me to take on something like this. I just had a baby, and my energy is going towards my family and our restaurant. It's a really difficult story that's impacted a lot of people, including myself, in very severe ways. If I come back to talk about it again, I hope it will be more about what healing and recovery look like after compound trauma, especially in such closed communities. Both Lauren and Allison still have a deep desire to help people.

Like a lot of former inmates, Allison's personal experiences with the criminal justice, system has really impacted her. She's now working at a non-profit, teaching the arts in prisons, and using them to help people readjust to life on the outside. The work that I'm doing now is bringing creative arts, theater, music, poetry, all of that into the prisons and basically injecting humanity into an incredibly dehydrated place. There is a way in which this is healing for Allison, too. Working with the incarcerated population is so incredibly rewarding

and being able to say, like, I've been where you are, you are not a forgotten human, your life is not over. It's like she's trying to say it to herself. So now we've come to the end of our series. And I want to end on one hot day. day, last summer, when I went with Allison to a tattoo shop on L.A.'s east side. I just wanted something that was like not going to touch my hip. You know what I mean?

She and I are standing in the nicely decorated waiting room, chit-chatting while we wait for her appointment. Allison's wearing a loose black dress. It looks like it's made of linen or some other natural fabric, and she's glowing. She's got a nose ring and a pretty new tattoo on her shoulder, a string of flowers, to represent the wildflowers she picked in prison. She's here to get another one, from the same tattoo artist. Sounds good. Hi, June. How are you? Nice to meet you. I like your hair. It's nice to see you. Alison lies down on the black table. I sit down beside her. The tattoo artist, a

petite Korean woman wearing black gloves, pulls out her stencil to show Alison. So you want it lotus? Mm-hmm. And so I try to make a shape, like... Similar to the scar. Allison hitches up her dress, and the tattoo artist places the stencil above Allison's hip. Because Allison is getting a tattoo to cover her nexium brand.

I lean over, from where I'm sitting on the other side of Allison, to get a look at the brand. It's small and ugly. After all these years, it's still there. It's less of a welt. It's sunken into the skin now, but it still looks hard. harsh, and angry.

The tattoo artist pulls nearer. It's a little gun thing. It's so cool. That's good. That's good. That's so much more delicate. Right? A strange calm descends over the room.

Allison stares at the ceiling. I love it. She has stars on the ceiling. She did this all herself. Oh, cool. After the first few strokes, Alison and I start chatting about music and the Shakespeare production of 12th night she just saw and therapy. Gradually, the conversation shifts to where she is now. I've said this to a few people before, but it's like my whole life I spent living into other people's expectations because those expectations felt good.

Like everyone expected me to be successful. They expected me to be a nice person. They expected me to be fun or whatever, skilled or whatever. Like, they were all these, you know, I got, like, most promising newcomer in my freshman year in high school and, like, you know, stuff like that. And I was like, yeah, I'll totally live into your idea of me. Your idea of me sounds great. And it wasn't until everyone's idea of me was horrible, you know, that I was like, oh, wait, I actually don't want to be anything that you were saying I am at all. As the tattoo artist pulls back, I'm able to see the image that will soon be permanently covering Allison's brand.

It's a pink lotus flower, nesting in a. a huddle of leaves, a symbol of rebirth and renewal. This is Alison's attempt to reclaim her body and her story, to transform a mark of coercion into a symbol of healing. After a while, I excuse myself. Well, I think that I should go and leave you to it. Yeah, I think it's good. You have anything you need?

Yeah. As I leave Allison, I find myself thinking about whether we can ever really move on. The uncomfortable truth is that all of us, at some point in our lives, are likely to hurt someone. Not brand them with a quarterizing pen, sure. But chances are, even with the best intentions, we're going to hurt someone's feelings, break someone's heart, accidentally scar our children with something we don't even remember.

But the way I see it, the only thing we can do, is try our best to repair the hurt we've caused, to be accountable for what we did, and to make amends where possible. Some things can't ever be forgiven, and I don't expect Alison's victims to absolve her. Some hurt is just too deep. A few months ago, Alison and Frank got married.

She may not be able to change her face, but after this wedding, she did decide to change her name. To Alison Mink. I think of Alison's lotus tattoo, now fully healed. It completely covers the nexium brand. You can no longer see the scar at all. The scar is still there underneath the layer of color. It always will be, but it's beautiful now. Delicate pink petals with a yellow center.

A permanent portrait of a flower. Emerging out of muddy waters and reaching towards the light. If you liked this show, Uncover, Escaping Nexium, is a powerful story of the beginning of the unraveling of Keith Reneery's cult. Listen to Escaping Nexium at the link in the show notes, or by scrolling. to Season 1 of Uncover, wherever you're listening right now. You've been listening to Uncover, Allison After Nexium, from CBC and Campside Media. It was hosted by me, Natalie Robamed. Our executive producer,

were myself and Vanessa Gregoriatis at Campside Media and Stephen Belber. Our senior producer was Lily Houston Smith, and our associate producer was Emma Simeonoff. Sound design, mix, and engineering by Mark McCadham and E. Wynne Lai Tremuon. Thank you to Colin Campbell. At CBC, our story editor is Derek John, and our senior producer is Kate Evans. Our coordinating producer is Emily Connell.

Our podcast art was designed by Good Take, studio. Our cross-promo producers are Amanda Cox and Kelsey Cueva. Our video producers are Evan Agarad, Tamina Aziz and John Lee. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager. Arif Naurani is the director and Leslie Merklinger is the executive director of CBC Podcasts. If you enjoyed Uncover, Alison After Nexium, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.