School of Humans. Sanctum Unmasked is about a sex club and describes various sex acts. Please use discretion where and when you listen. So when we left you last episode, two women from Craigslist were fucking in a birdcage and the first Sanctum party was a huge success, and the club's founder, Damon Lonner, realized that his purpose in life was to curate sexually transcendent experiences for the one percent? But how could you forget? As word got around that
Sanctum was a hit, the press ate it up. The La Times wrote a steamy article about the club, along with the popular website Urban Daddy.
Behold the quivering majesty of Sanctum and invite only Beverly Hills night spot to begin. We can't tell you where it is, sorry, that would blow the whole secrecy thing. What we can tell you is how to get a admitted and what you'll see.
That's from the Urban Daddy piece from February twenty thirteen, right after the launch. But wait, it keeps going.
Go to their Facebook page. Send Sanctom a note if they like what they see in terms of your attractiveness, number of mutual friends, and artfully chosen cover photo. Congratulations, you're invited. We really can't say much else, but maybe you'll see a girl wearing latex and a bathtub pouring milk all over herself. Or maybe you'll see naked girls rubbing themselves with oil, and hey, maybe some guys doing the same. It's a real something for everyone, kind of place.
The press loved this story. They loved it.
They loved that Hollywood was involved, They loved that it was moneied and you know, powerful people. They loved that it was kind of this erotic vibe. And this played on myth It played on mythology, It played on spirituality and religion, It played on colt, It played on all of these things that people are intrigued by and interested in. It just felt like, especially in twenty thirteen, no one was pushing this envelope.
Welcome to Sanctum Unmasked. I'm your host, Carly Schortin. Out Off the back of the flurry of publicity, Damon starts hosting parties monthly at various nightclubs around LA. Every event sells out, and while Sanctum began as more of a sexy party with live erotic performances, it very quickly evolves into just a full blown sex party, which actually came as a surprise to Damon.
It got very sexual.
I mean there was sex at the tables in bathrooms, and I was like, whoa, what the you know, what's going on? Like, I didn't plan on doing that, necessarily throwing a sex party.
The problem, as you might imagine, is that nightclub owners don't love a bunch of people railing all over the place because it's illegal and grounds to lose their liquor license. So Damon spent the first months of Sanctum's existence just getting kicked out of clubs, and it became a bit frustrating. He knew he needed to find a way to throw a party where his desperately horny guests could just fuck
in public in peace. Goddamn it. He needed to find a private home where he could set up a bar, hire his own staff, and just let everybody purve out to their heart's desires. But finding homeowners to rent him their la mansions for raucous sex parties proved to be annoyingly difficult, and the people who were down tended to be a really specific type creepy rich guys in their fifties who liked the idea of a bunch of hot young women fucking in their infinity pool.
Dealing with the owners of these houses was always very stressful. The biggest thing was the homeowners feeling entitled to grope girls, to get drunk and be assholes, and it was their home. Plus I've got a staff of like twenty five people, maybe thirty people. These were like weddings, you know, flowers and chocolates and all the liquor and the champagne, all the glass were all that. I mean, these were major productions every single month.
Damon was not living it up at those early parties. Sometimes the homeowners would get cold feet and cancel last minute, leaving him struggling to find an orgy mansion at the eleventh hour. Not easy. Plus, at this point, Damon and Melissa, his wife and the mother of his two kids, were making just enough money to cover their overhead. The whole thing was.
Chaotic those parties. I was like running around for hours NonStop. I was making sure everyone was happy. I was making sure that there wasn't a drunk girl in some back room, you know, getting assaulted. I mean, this was a fucking sex party where people were wild and intoxicated, and if anything happened, I would lose everything. It was the wild West for me. I didn't have like insurance, I didn't have NBA agreements. In the beginning, it was just like, I mean, I was very exposed.
You know.
The parties were started at ten o'clock.
At like nine to fifty five, I'd be getting out of whatever I was working in and putting on my tuxedo and sort of like putting on my masks, so to speak. But like, you know, my mask that I put on was Okay, I've got to be this guy. I've got to be the guy that like leads these people into like sexual rebellion and freedom.
The pied Piper of debauchery, one might call him if bad jokes are your thing. In that first year of the club, Demon and Melissa were building Sanctums brand and really just figuring out what the party was in real time. They started putting on bigger and more intricate live shows, which meant hiring erotic performers, makeup artists, costumers, et cetera. Demon also brought on a creative director, Alina Ratuska, to
help with the choreography of it all. We reached out to Aleena multiple times, by the way, but she didn't want to talk to us. There was also an increasing fetish presence at Sanctum. Remember this was twenty thirteen, aka a year after every basic Bitch on the planet went s and m hysterical over fifty Shades of Gray. So Damon hired a dom to work the party to educate the guests about BDSM. Here's Melissa remembering it.
We had like a professional dom, like he was this, like that's what he did for a living, and you as a couple, you guys could go over to him and he could talk to you about like different tools that are like tintalizing on the skin or something that's going to be a little more firm or a little you know, like what do you like, And then he would walk you through what that was and you guys could experiment that together.
The overall goal was to create an environment that felt sophisticated while also being a place you'd feel inclined to bend a stranger over an end table. It's a delicate balance because Damon's very attentive to detail. He also created more unexpected roles for his performers to add to the ambiance and fantasy of it all.
It didn't feel like a sex party. It felt like an event that people had sex at.
That's Claudia, one of Sanctum's early hires. She's a big presence, a platinum blonde with a bright smile, and she's not afraid to be blunt, which is a quality that I personally love. She ended up working at the club for three years, and the story of how she got her start is pretty interesting.
When I started Sanctum, I was I was young. I was twenty twenty two, twenty three, so I feel like I got into that right where your brain really starts developing, like into thinking about sex and like thinking about what do I like, what do I not like?
What's my sexuality?
You know, my straight and my vice actual Like I was very naive living in La So that.
Was like a very shaping period. I think when Claudia heard about Sanctum, she was working at the Playboy Mansion, getting paid to swim in the infamous grotto and look hop. Basically, she got word that a new exclusive club was looking for girls who were fun and open minded, but it was all very hush hush, gets crazy. She was intrigued and was given an address to meet for an interview, but when she showed up, she didn't even know what she was applying for.
So I went and I met Damon at this like small little club on I think it was like on Melrose. And I go in there and it was just him. The whole place is pitch black, literally pitch black. I'm like, okay, I'm definitely in the wrong place. And I go in there and he's sitting there just like literally just him, no papers, no no mad nothing like.
I'm like, okay, like what is this?
And I go in and he introduced himself and he's like are you comfortable being naked? Like one of his first couple questions, and I was like, yeah, for sure. And he's like, okay, get naked, like literally like that. And I was like there's literally nobody here, like this is okay whatever. So I literally I stripped down like to my underwear and he's like, okay, you're hired, and I'm like hired for what?
I don't even know, Like what am I hired for the job. It turns out was to be an atmosphere girl. I'll just let her explain it.
And my job literally ninety nine percent of the time was just walking around and just existing as like the party started progressing for me, Like he would then like say, okay, get dressed up. We're gonna drape you in like diamonds and rhinestones, and your job's just gonna be You're gonna walk around with like a feather and like just dust. People don't talk to anyone. You're just there to like
look beautiful. Or if Damon was like, I want you naked today, then you know I would just PLoP down on a chaise lounge somewhere naked and say hello to the world.
Claudia speaks of her time at Sanctum so fondly that the experience was extremely fun and eye opening, and she clearly has the perfect temperament for the job. I mean, she's the sort of person who genuinely finds it amusing to show up for an interview and be asked to strip naked by a strange man sitting in a dark basement like a vampire. However, not everyone found Damon's hiring practices so charming. For instance, another early hire was Ambrose.
Damon was looking for someone to play the quote bunny role at the club, which basically meant dressing up in skimpy lingerie, donning a bunny mask with cute little bunny ears, and following Damon around the party as his little pet. Ambrose is shy with a sweet, nervous laugh. He's a trans man, but during his years at Sanctum was still presenting as femme. Ambrose, which by the way, is a stage name, not his real name, heard about Sanctum from a friend who was already performing at the party and
thought he'd be a great fit. Here's Ambrose.
Well, so initially she was like, you need to meet up with this guy Damon and just like set up an interview and he'll ask you some questions and whatnot. And she did mention that they were looking for model esque type fem people or women or whatever. And since I was like pre transitioning at that point, you know, I kind of fit that mold. And at the time I had really long brown hair into my ass.
Ambrose was twenty at the time. For his interview, Damon set up a meeting at a hotel restaurant in Beverly Hills.
And then he asked me this very interesting question, which at the time, you know, if I was very young, innocent, naive like. He asked me if he could see my body without clothes on to see if I was fit for the role that he was wanting.
And I was like, well, how would that happen.
He's like, there's bathrooms upstairs above where we are, and no one ever.
Really goes in them.
So we went upstairs with this bathroom.
Area, and sure enough no one was in there, and we went to like the handicap stall. He stood on one side and I tried to stand as.
Far away from as claus as we could.
I got down to like being naked. He asked me to do a little spin around and he was like, all right, brilliant, perfect, We'd love to have you. And I was like, all right, cool, this sounds good.
At the time, Amberse found this kind of uncomfortable, but he was young and just starting out in the industry and thought, well, I guess this is just how this stuff works, and to be real, in some corners of the sex industry, this can unfortunately be how this stuff worked. But Ambrose was curious about the job and decided to take it. Despite this, he started out working the floor in various atmosphere roles.
They asked you to work the crowd essentially, but it was always like implied, do it in a very flirtatious, like sexual kind of way, and like I was really good at it, Like there was a lot of people that I knew and recognized and recognized me, and like I feel like would look forward to seeing me and vice versa at the parties.
To give you a picture of how this all operated, each Sanctum event had a cast of about ten to twelve performers. Most of them were atmosphere models, basically people who were paid to roam around in costumes acting as different characters, like maybe you were the bunny that night, or sometimes they'd have a girl dressed up as a lamp. Loull Damon calls this interactive performance art. These performers would be paid between three hundred and fifty and five hundred
and fifty dollars a night. But then there'd be a few cast members who would have sex in front of the guests as part of the live sex show, and these were the highest paid performers at Sanctum. You can think of the sex shows almost like porno ballet, dramatic strings, impressively flexible women smoke machines, and lots of lube obviously.
For example, they sometimes did ritualistic type performances where the atmosphere girls would hold candles and lead out the virgin or the princess or whatever character it was on the night, who would then be fucked to death by a guy with an eight pack. You got the idea. After working for a while as an atmosphere model, Ambrose wanted a pay jump and started working as a live sex performer. I love how he recalls how the cast members would prepare for going on stage.
So we're getting ready for the performance and we go back in the green room. If someone is getting something inserted into them, like penetration wise they like kind of like a fluff themselves or someone helped them out back there.
I'd always have my little Hatachi, like.
Okay, I'm good Hatachi meaning his faithful vibrator of course, a tried and true classic. Mike Saeger, who we met last episode, is the journalist from Esquire who followed Damon around for a few months back in twenty sixteen. He gave us his take on the live sex show.
At a certain time of the evening they would have the show and it was basically choreographed fucking, but yet also artsy and lit and costumed. It's almost like you get the impression you're watching like the Follies or or something. But it was a sex act and it was very much a vibe like cabaret, you know that kind of like welcome ladies and gentlemen to the sex show.
So like Sondheim meets eyes wide Shot. Honestly, I'm down.
I remember one had a piggy mask being led by a chain on, another who was wearing like an eye cage, and another one with like a leather police hat with a flog. And they would go among the visitors. Instead of handing out cannapas, they would like say, you know it said stroke me or hit me or whatever, so they could stroke her, you know, fondle her, or they could like hit her with a whip, whatever their predilection was.
As time went on, characters began to emerge within the world of the club. One of Damon's favorite regulars was this male porn star who, according to Damon, had one of the biggest dicks in the industry. Glamorous and this guy had a very special party trick.
He would just like, lay on one of the master beds in the bedroom and there would be a line, I'm not fucking with you, a line of women and he would just put on a condom and he stayed hard because he's a fucking porn star. Whatever they inject into their dicks or whatever they're on, I don't know, but you know, four hours five hours of a heart on, which seems like.
It would be painful.
But he would lay on the bed like a fucking amusement park ride and women would walk in and there would be a line and they would get on him, they would ride him. They would come and they would get off, and the next woman would step on.
And it was like this.
Guy treated me like I was his hero, and I was like, bro, what the fuck? Like, you're like this god, you know, like you're welcome any time.
And he would come to almost every party.
So this is the kind of stuff you'd see at Sanctum, And for a lot of the guests, this was all pretty shocking. The club attracted a specific crowd, often the sort of people who never imagined they'd end up at a sex party, but because it had this upscale reputation and was being covered in mainstream public locations, they thought, fuck it, maybe I am one of those depraved sex party people. Just like the rich version, Sanctum felt approachable,
almost safe. Basically, there were a lot of Orgie virgins. One notable Orgi virgin was David Winkler, a Hollywood movie producer. He's in his fifties and has this really warm, non judgmental energy. When he heard about Sanctum, he was recently divorced and looking to explore his sexuality. He'd never been to anything resembling a sex party and described his sex
life then as pretty vanilla. After he went through Sanctum's application process, he spent months feeling way too nervous to actually go, But eventually he started dating a woman who was intrigued and encouraged him to make the leap.
Here's David, the girl I was dating, and I decided, okay, well, well I needed a new tuxedo if I'm going to go to my first sex party. So we went and spent a whole weekend beforehand shopping. I bought like this platinum four hundred dollars masks, and we ended up at a famous lingerie store Welcome, and we found this beautiful outfit for her, and the saleswoman says, let me ask you something. Is this for a specific event? We kind of looked at each other and we didn't know what
to admit. We said, yeah, we're going to a party tonight. Oh she said, oh, you're going to Sanctum. Yeah, she said, yeah, I do really well on the fourth Saturday of every month. I sell whiffs, I sell chains, I sell blindfold so much laingerie like she made her entire commission on the fourth Saturday of every month.
Love that for her. For David, who considered himself pretty conservative, even just having this conversation with the stranger was crazy.
Well, what was incredible is is just that what sanctums showed me is that there's this whole world of people who know about things and just don't talk about them. Everybody's afraid to talk about everybody's afraid to talk about the kinky things they do. But the minute you open up and you start talking about it, people feel comfortable and they start sharing.
When David finally did make it to Sanctum, let's just say first impressions were good.
You know, the first time you go to a sanctum, it's like walking into a private, victorious, secret catalog runway party. You know, you're met at the door by the most beautiful women in these huge feathered headdresses and you know, gold capes and nothing else and high heels and walking around was just unbelievable.
But the appeal extended beyond just the opportunity to leer at models dressed as horny exotic birds. Personally, I think the goal of any sexual space is to create an environment where people can explore their sexuality without judgment or shame. And unfortunately there aren't enough places like that in the world. But as many guests and performers recall it, David included, Sanctum was starting to build a community that resembled something of this sort.
That's the one thing that I got from it was just like you walk into a club where people are having sex and there's no shame. But I think for the most people, even open minded people, you know, going to a party where there's you know, dozens of people naked and having sex in front of you and everybody thinking oh that's cool and talking about it make me feel like I was not the only perverent town.
Honestly, kind of wholesome when we come back after a break, Damon tries to bring his work into bed with him. So by this point, Damon and Melissa have been running Sanctum for over two years, and the bigger the club gets, the more it starts to spill over into their personal lives. Sanctum is becoming something that they, or at least Melissa, often feels like she needs to hide.
Like we're living in Beverly Hills. We're friends with all of those parents and families, and you know, going to birthday parties and like living that kind of domesticated lifestyle all the while, on the down low, my husband runs this naughty ass sex club in the hills, like double life. No one knew, so as soon as this shit started to get successful, I was like fuck.
Basically, they were the orgy masters and a sea of cardiologists and entertainment lawyers, and it was getting kind of awkward. At this point, Melissa was still heavily involved in managing the club with Damon, and her tasks were shall we say why I ranging.
In the beginning stages I was working in the club. I would do the door, I would cast the girls. I'd run out to the valley and buy a bunch of dildos and like nippleshit and floggers. Like I was doing the deal and like helping him with with this fucking sex club, and I was like big supporter once again after.
Years of building the club. She's sick of getting awkward stairs from other mothers on the playground and she's sick of foraging for nippleshit in the valley. One night, she hits her breaking point.
There's just one party that we had in bel Air. It was like at a huge mega mansion that was like empty because it was like being sold or something. And I was doing the door with like two other people and managing bottle service for all of these high rollers that were coming in and Damon was nowhere to be found. They literally couldn't find him anywhere for hours, and I felt like I was holding it up and you know, trying to put out fires left and right.
And finally I find him and he's like upstairs in some room with all these different people and like two porn stars. They weren't doing anything sexual, but like they were all just like hanging out up there, partaking and drinking, and like he's like upstairs just like living his best life, you know, So that was the last party I attended, worked at, went to any of.
It from then on. She tells Damon she's going to stay home with the kids on the nights of the parties. Also, it's relevant to note here, despite them hosting these big events at mega mansions, Damon and Melissa are still struggling financially because they're putting almost all the money they earned back into the parties. So that adds this whole other stress on top of the whole secret sex cult leader thing.
Once the house party started, my budgets were in the area of like twenty five thousand to thirty five thousand. That was about what I was making, and I would basically just spend it all on the party. I would probably walk away with enough money to pay my rent, buy groceries. So if I took out five thousand a month in profit, I was okay.
I was fine.
And so any ticket sales, any membership sales, anything we had went into the party, and it was really not ever enough to do what I wanted to do.
Damon knows he has to figure out a more stable long term plan for the club. Finding a different rental house for the party every month was expensive, and exhausting, like literally lugging a whole sound system and a giant cage for your sex slaves in a thousand boxes of wet wipes into a different house every month. Like No, he was over it. So he and Melissa come up with a plan to rent a house where they could
both live and host the parties. Plus this had the added benefit of getting their family out of their cramped apartment. So they start house hunting and they get insanely lucky.
I found this incredible nineteen sixties Tudor mansion in Hombee Hills that was going to be torn down. They were going to put up a SuperMansion on it. And the guy told me, he's like, we're going to tear this house down. So I had twelve months.
Damon was in love with this place. It was his Barbie dream house, the orgy version.
You know, seven bedrooms, eight nine bathrooms on an acre, grand staircase. You know, just a beautiful nineteen sixties totally original, but very opulent.
Mike Segar remembers the mansion a bit differently.
No, it was not genuinely opulent or genuinely impressive, but the people were genuinely into it and having a good time obsessed. It's like if you're there in the daytime, it's like this is moldy, and this cabin is shitty, and like it had this gross carpet. But at nighttime with the uplighting and the candles and I mean, they did a wonderful job setting stuff up.
House, which would come to be known as the Sanctum Mansion, would be theirs for just over a year and what would be the height of the club's success. And opulent or not, it was perfect for what they wanted to do, AKA, throw a giant party where people get drunk and break things and come all over the place. Melissa couldn't wait to get out of their apartment. She went into interior design mode, you know, making mood boards, fantasizing about wallpaper,
all that fun stuff. However, as she would come to find out, Damon wasn't exactly on the same page.
I was excited because I as like the mom and the wife and the domesticated person that I was, was like, oh my god, finally we get out of this apartment and we get into a house that was my Oh you going to decorate it. I'm going to buy a couch I'm going to do this. It's going to be great. So that was where my brain was. But pretty much the whole time that was happening, I think in his head he's like, now, y'all aren't moving in here.
Okay, let's zoom out for a sec. After dedicating nearly three years to the club, things are starting to shift for Damon. The day to day struggles had given way to a larger, more internal struggle. Up until now, Damon was behind the scenes, the charming host, facilitating other people's indulgence, but he never participated himself. He and Melissa had been monogamous for two decades. But now he's starting to become
interested in getting involved, like sexually. He's being tempted by the world that he created and he wants to experiment. Like literally, he's constantly surrounded by hot women and smm bunny costumes and he's a man with a dick.
There was like this kind of BDS something creeping in where you know, I was kind of learning a bit about shabari, how to tie someone up, like how to spank someone, what flogging was, you know, like all this stuff because the performers were doing it. You know, we are choreographing everything, and I was around it and someone would hand me a paddle and say like this.
Is how you do it, and I was like, oh wow, that's kind of cool.
But I remember asking Melissa, like, are you okay with me experimenting with this? Like it's not sexual, there's no kissing, there's no fucking, there's nothing like that. I'm tying someone up, or I'm flogging someone, or I'm spanking someone with my bare hand. You know, that is erotic in nature. And I asked her, like, how do you feel about that? And it was an interesting discussion, you know, and she said she decided to like allow that.
He would come to me.
And be like, mel what do you think if I just flogged this one girl, you know at the party.
I think it's good.
It's a good show, Like this is my brand, and you know, let me just like spank and flog this girl. Like, okay, I think it's fine. I didn't. I didn't have an issue with it.
So they begin to experiment with pushing the boundaries of their relationship. For Damon, this is all really exciting. He's been spanking up a storm at the club and loving it, and he's hoping this can spice up his sex life with Melissa, so he tries bringing some of his new skills into the bedroom.
I kind of wanted to kind of, you know, push some of that in bed a little bit, and I don't know, I put my hand on her neck or something, and.
She just like slapped it away and was like, what are you doing?
And I was like, you know, I don't know, I'm like experimenting, and she's like, no, I'm not into this, not at all, Like I don't I don't like this, I don't want it.
And I was like okay. So our sexuality remained what it was.
For a while anyway, but suppressing his desires only made things worse, and it wasn't long before his desires extended beyond BDSM light.
He kept pushing the boundary, pushing the boundary and wanting more and more and more, until he was finally like, I think we should fuck other people. I'm like, no, dude, Literally, we're already barely hanging on, financially strapped, two kids, tiny little apartment. This new club thing idea that he's conceptualizing it was already like way too much. And I was like no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing that.
Okay, he gets it. Everything Melissa is saying makes logical sense, and yet he just can't get the idea out of his head. The conversation about opening up their relationship keeps coming up, and Melissa feels like she's stuck in a loop, saying no over and over again, like she's the uptight bouncer of their relationship.
We wanted to open up our marriage all the time. He would like, at the dinner table, so what do you think about opening up our marriage and even with other people? And I think, you know, it's a good idea, and he would try to pitch me.
This until finally she changes her strategy.
And this one night at dinner and when the girls left the table, they went to their room, and I try to call his bluff. I was like, okay, yeah, let's do it. Yeah, I know exactly who I want to have sex with. And you know, it's like seeing what you would do. And He's like started to get uncomfortable.
Damon's squirming, which, let's be real, is kind of predictable, but this is ultimately the conversation he's been wanting to have. So he goes with it.
And so we actually did this, We actually open up our marriage. We agreed that this one night he would go do whatever he wanted to go do, and I had that same freedom. And we did that when we had those intimacies with other people.
After the break, can you have your cake and fuck it too? So, after Damon's persistence about opening up their relationship, he gets his wish for one night only they would each bang other people and then they'd come back together to discuss how it felt. And they each already had someone in mind.
Did open it up, and she was okay with it.
You know.
I told her what I was gonna do.
I left for the evening, and of course my first experience, you know, I had a threesome, you know, like I'm like really adventuring, you know, Wow, I get my hall passed, so I'm gonna go for it fun.
And then it was Melissa's night, And how did that turn out? For everybody?
When it was her turn?
She made love with with her like her personal trainer, and it fucking destroyed me.
I couldn't deal with it.
Wow, I've just got to interject here, fucking your personal trainer both extremely cliche and extremely hot. But anyway, dame and spiraling.
I don't know what it is.
It feels like animalistic, it feels like it's an ancient feeling, like a feeling of I'm a lion on the on the wherever the fuck they are, you know, and I'm just like ah ah no, and min you know, like no, you know, this is fucking I'm fucking this.
You go fuck something else.
He's kind of regretting this whole thing. And I get it. I mean, we've all had that feeling of wanting to have personal sexual freedom while our partner stays locked in a cage. Right. That can't just be me. But for Melissa it was a little different.
You know, in like glass breaks and it's just this little crack and then it just starts to slowly slowly the crack gets bigger and bigger and bigger until the glass breaks. And that's kind of how I pictured that. We were still together and we were still living this life together, but it was punctured and it just kind of was a downhill from there.
So in the aftermath of all of this, they're trying to find a path forward. They'd been together for twenty years, they'd always figured it out. Why would this time be any different. Meanwhile, Sanctum's expanding and they're doing their first party in New York. So Melissa goes along with Damon to make the trip of vacation for the two of them. One she says, they desperately needs. So we go to New York.
It's like our first time that we're actually like on a vacation away from La. My mom's got the girls. It was fabulous for me. But little did I know that he was actually like on Instagram and on all these different sites like corresponding with girls. He invited this one girl. He flew her in from Texas to come to New York, put her up in a hotel. He's like, mel I'm going to go to a meeting, why don't you go shopping? And so I'd go into Soho and go shopping. But he was really willing to see her.
After the New York party, they come back home to LA and Melissa is still in the dark about all of this, And then, like a scene out of some cheesy Lifetime erootic thriller, Melissa's at home and she starts hearing all of these texts dinging, and she doesn't know where they're coming. From So she starts searching the house and she realizes that it's coming from her daughter's iPad, and spoiler alert, she finds Damon's texts with the girl from Texas.
And I start to read it and then I start to go back into the history and it goes back far and I start shaking. It was the first time I felt deceived in a way. You know, we'd always talked about everything, and I just didn't feel like he would deceive me like that. And just to see the love that he was pouring out in the words and the little emojis and the hearts and the roses and all those things that he was throwing out at her hurt. It just hurt. I'm like running out the door, crying,
running around my block. He was like running after me, and it was it was hugely devastating, heartbroken just to see all of that stuff. Even though I knew he was running the Sanctum, I knew he was a part of the sex club. I knew it was going on at the clubs, but in my delusioned mind, I just thought that that was that and he was mine.
You know.
It's it's interesting because that was a very devastating experience for her. And what's so strange is that this girl is so meaningless to me. I think I met her in New York and she was going to come to a Sanctum party. She probably applied, said.
You flew her out from Texas.
Oh, maybe I did fly her out. Maybe I did. Whatever Melissa said is probably is true. I mean I don't I don't remember the details. Yeah, I mean that makes it even worse. Yeah, I probably flew her out from Texas.
You know I would.
I would meet up with her and like hang out with her and then go back to Melissa. It was completely fucked up. Yeah, and then I think Melissa found out. I don't remember how. I don't remember if she saw us talking.
There was a Sanctum party, then you went back to La and then she found texts between you guys because they were like going to your kid's iPad.
You're reminding me that I went into like full blown sex addict mode for a while. For years, just.
That was me.
Sanctum was almost like my excuse, but I was really just like a full blown sex addict. It was the perfect job for me because I was so fucking into it. Finding all these girls and contacting all these girls and like fucking all these girls.
I was a liar. I was hiding things.
I probably had tons of videos and pictures and messages. Yeah, I was a really fucked up, fucked up individual.
And then that glass that Melissa mentioned it finally shattered.
After that, a lot of other stories came out that he became honest and truthful with that went back to our days in Hancock Park when I was, you know, having the babies. At that point, the infidelity in what he had done was just like it was part of a huge explosion. I was just gonna go off because I just couldn't handle the lifestyle anymore. And I just fell alone in the house with the kids, and like
it was just imploding and crumbling from underneath us. And the infidelity was the nail on the coffee with that was it.
In the midst of all of this horror, they signed the lease on the sanct Di mansion, but the plan of turning the house into a place of both domestic bliss and sexual liberation doesn't pan out. Instead, Damon moves into the sanct Di mansion alone. Melissa stays in the apartment with the kids and Thus Damon begins his era of sexual freedom or reckless sexual abandon depending on how you look at it. Next time on Sanctum Unmasked.
Okay, well we saw this person getting whipped. Is that something you're into? And what if you're like, Hell yeah?
He was discovering himself as a hedonist and he actually said that to me.
I was like in a bedroom, high on molly and cocaine, you know, and this porn star says, I want to suck your cock like it's never been sucked.
In your life.
Therein lies the reason this story is so fascinating, because in betwixt and in between, there's the devil and the Angel.
Sanctum Unmasked is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts, hosted him written by me Carl Schortino. Edily's Prez is our lead producer and story editor. Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Sound design scoring mixing by George Hicks. Original music composed by Jesse Niswanger, fact checking by Austin Thompson. Logo illustration by Linda McNeil. Graham Gibson and Doug Bame are recording engineers. Recorded at iHeart Studios. In Los Angeles, California.
Executive producers are Nick Stump, Jason English, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and me Carly Schartino. If you're enjoying the show, help us get the word out by leaving a rating in your favorite podcast app. You can keep up with Damon on Instagram. He's at Father Damon. See you next week. School of Humans
