School of Humans. Sanctum Unmasked is about a sex club and describes various sex acts. Please use discretion where and when you listen. So as we've talked about in the past, there was a lot on offer at Sanctum. The sexual
menu was, shall we say expansive. Are you interested in the foursome with two skinny white women dressed as woodland nymphs, sex with a limptic billionaire under an oil painting of an all seeing eye, or perhaps being whipped by a mass stranger with a diamond encrusted flogger that costs more than your undergrad Sanctum's got you covered, and as the overlord of this world, Damon was constantly being propositioned for more than just sex, and it could be hard to say no.
I had experiences early on where someone that was heavy into BDSM ask me point blank. She was like, may you're a piss in anyone's mouth? And I was like no, And she was like do you want to? And I honestly I was like no, not really, it doesn't really interest me and yeah, and she was like, well, let me explain it to you. If this is something you would want to do, I would get down on my hands and knees, and I'd get naked first, I'd put my hands behind my back and I'd stick my tongue out.
You could piss in my mouth and it would drip down out of my mouth, down my breast, down in my pussy, and you can do whatever you want after that. And I was like, Okay, let's do this. Why wouldn't I She's asked me to, she wants to, And honestly, why have I never pissed in anyone's mouth? I don't know.
I'm a forty year old man. What am I doing with my life?
Exactly?
Welcome to Sanctum Unmasked. I'm your host, Carl Schortino.
Okay, so are we ready to Are we rolling? Okay? Cool? So what's what's my first question?
Starting really light today? Do you consider yourself a sex addict?
Are you fucking serious? That's really where we're starting. Wow, here we go. Well, I consider myself a I guess, recovering sex addict. I undoubtedly was. I mean, I want to say rule, that's the wrong word. But sexuality had a lot of control over me, rather than me having control over my own sexuality, especially you know during the
sanctum years when it was just all around me. I mean, I guess like if you're into drinking or into like, you know, drug use, it would be like you have this mansion and it's just filled without calling drugs, and you're like, this is easy. So you know, I was really in a position where it was easy for me to explore that stuff and feel like it was okay.
Right. It's like having a drinking problem and then moving into a giant free bar where the liquor bottles sleep in bed with you in slutty lingerie and beg you to drink them. Doesn't sound easy. Oh and by the way, I don't think engaging in piss play necessarily makes you a sex addict. We just thought that peace story was funny and wanted to get it in before the end of the podcast. Anyway, back in our first episode, we pose the question what happens when you shed societal expectations
and just unapologetically pursue personal sexual freedom? But a kind of necessary part two to that question is where is the line between sexual freedom and sexual compulsion? What is engaging in healthy exploration of your erotic self in the world, and what's just being a full on sex Maniac from Help. Honestly, it's a question that I've asked myself many times over the course of my adult life, and the answer isn't
always so clear. When we left you last, it was twenty seventeen and Daemon was hitting his breaking point with Sanctum. The logistics of running a sex club at that level had become overwhelming, particularly navigating the messy world of sex work, morality, and consent amid a cyclone of money and ego. But Demon was also doing some reflection about how the culture of Sanctum was impacting his personal relationship to sex and
to alcohol. He was drinking too much, increasingly as a form of escape, and being so immersed in a world where sex wasn't just constantly available but also a currency, was starting to feel toxic. This space of so called sexual freedom had now become a prison of his own desires, and it didn't help that his life was basically well this.
A constant stream of videos, photos, DMS, messages showing up at my mind doorstep, showing up at my parties like just straight up, Hi, my friend and I really want to fuck you? Will you fuck us? Like that?
It's a lot whether the girls were genuinely attracted to him, or they just wanted to brag to their friends that they fucked the founder of Sanctum, or they were just trying to get an invite to the party. It just sounds exhausting to be that fuckable.
It felt fucking amazing. It mitigated the fact that I was not with my favorite person in the world. It mitigated the fact that I left Melissa and my children to pursue this thing. You know, it was my drug. I was like a crack addict. I mean I got so high off of it all. But then you know, just like if you smoke crack, it feels real good when you're high on it, but then you come down from it and you're like, oh, I'm such a fucking piece of shit, Like, what the fuck is wrong with me?
I'm disgusting, Like what am I doing? And you can't get enough of it.
Of course, Melissa was watching this all play out, and she was genuinely worried for him.
Yeah, he has an issue. He definitely needed to work on himself with his sex addiction situation. How he came to even like know that there was a sex addiction problem was because when we were separated. He was living at the Sincton mansion. I mean, Damon told me this himself, that he had sex with like one hundred and eighty women, And this isn't a span of a year, so you
do the math, Like that's a lot. I remember sitting in the car in front of his house and he's telling me this, and I'm like, are you like really? And also the emotion what lies beneath all of that, Like why are you seeking out that many women? Why do you need this much validation and continuous attention? It was like an addict needing a drug, and his was women and the attention he got from them.
Now, this is pretty relatable, probably not the one hundred and eighty women part, but the part about sex being validating. So many of us have felt at times that our worth, at least in part, is caught up in our attractiveness, our sex appeal, our datability. I mean, I've certainly looked to sex or just attention in general to regulate my emotions.
On more than one occasion, it's like I feel bad about myself, I'm going to have sex with someone to boost my ego, or I feel insecure in my relationships, so I'm going to cheat to make myself feel less vulnerable. It's certainly not great, but it's unfortunately human.
I felt important and I felt loved, and I felt less empty when someone was coming at me and telling me that they want to fuck me, or telling me how handsome I am, or orgasming underneath me, you know, like that made me feel good. That was one of the only things that made me feel special or worthwhile.
And Damon's specific background, being a survivor of child sex abuse, only exasperated this issue.
Sexuality and my identity were so wrapped up together from the time, you know, I was a little kid, from the time I was six years old and I discovered way too young what sex was, you know, And then when I was sixteen seventeen and I was starting to do modeling and commercials and getting so much praise for the way I look. It's like all of the praise was like external, and a lot of it came from women.
I remember when I was younger, just like, you know, I'm sixteen or something and I go over to my girlfriend's house and their mom would meet me, and their mom would be like, you know, oh, he's a keeper. You know, he's so cute, and the mom's looking at me, you know, wanting to eat me alive. And I loved it. It was like, oh, wow, I'm really special.
You know.
I can see now with hindsight that these women wanted a piece in me, not so much for me, but for them. I was the feather in their cap.
The experience of being objectified is something we often think of as a more traditionally female experience. It's more rare that we see this, or at least talk about this from a male perspective, and it's interesting. Objectification is complicated because it can feel good to be desired in that way, and yet when people don't see you as a whole person, especially in your formative years, that can have lasting negative effects.
I think it's well publicized that there's sort of this pretty girl syndrome, but I think it's less well publicized that there's pretty boy syndrome. In the same way.
That's our pal journalist Mike Seger.
It's a little bit of a handicap to be so pretty because people just come to you, so you don't develop skills of how to deal with people as well, and then people are like curious to you you're not quite sure how they work, because like the rest of us, have to like give people what they need in order to get what we want.
In other words, being really hot can inhibit your ability to develop certain social skills. It can make you a bit of an idiot. No offense, as much.
As I wanted to escape into this world of my addictions, and that's what Sanctum was above all, was a world where I could fully engage in sex, drugs, and rock and roll more like house music, where I could fully engage in all of that and not only like revel in it, but sort of be put on a pedestal for it. For an alcoholic and a sex addict, being the king of Sanctum was like the ultimate position. At some point, living that way got to meet.
We throw around the term sex addict a lot these days. This idea of a dark, overwhelming sexuality has become a hot topic in mainstream culture. Hollywood has been increasingly broaching the subject, For instance, Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed film Shame. There's also twenty fifteen's Sleeping with Other People, which funnily enough,
is a sex addiction rom com starring Ted Lasso. They also recently dealt with the topic on season two of The White Lotus, in which Michael Imperioli's character struggles with sexual compulsion. And there's one of my favorite films of all time, Lauras Bontrier's Nymphomaniac. If you like this podcast, I really insist you watch. And then there's the various celebrities checking into sex rehabs, both on and off VH one, like David Duchovny Russell Brand, Tiger Woods, etc. Sex addiction
it's the new trendiest problem. But what does it mean to be a sex addict? What does that look like? And can you actually be addicted to sex in the way you can be with drugs or alcohol? Well, according to the DSM, you can't. You might be familiar with the DA if not, it's essentially the Bible of Mental Health Disorders, used by health professionals in the United States as an authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders.
It's periodically updated by the American Psychiatric Association, and for years people have been arguing about whether sex addiction or some type of hypersexuality disorder should be included, but it's nowhere to be found in the most current version. However, the ICD AKA the International Classification of Diseases, which is the rest of the world's equivalent to the DSM, recently did include compulsive sexual behavior disorder. In other words, sex
addiction is a polarizing topic. Additionally, the idea of sex addiction can be considered problematic because it has been used to pathologize gay men or to moralize about the use of pornography, or I'm a sex addict can be offered as a cop out for not so great sexual behavior. According to doctor genre Rangalova, the reason we're so divided on this issue is because we don't understand the problem,
in part because there's so much stigma around sex. Remember doctor Jhanna is a sex researcher and the Human Sexuality Professor at NYU.
The whole concept of sex addiction is so fraught.
My take on that is that there is no doubt some people are having sex in ways that are self destructive and other destructive.
The difficulty in distinguishing what is what.
Is that we live in a world that pathologizes the high end of the sex drive and sexual novelty seeking spectrum by default that in and of itself, you know wanting to have sex every day, or wanting to have sex with multiple people in a lot of these different, new, kind of crazy, wild environments, that in and of itself is not a problem.
There's nothing pathological about.
That, right, Having a high sex doesn't inherently mean you're mentally ill. It feels important to note that.
And yet, because we live in a culture that pathologizes that end of the spectrum, no matter what, it doesn't give you a healthy way of doing it.
All of that lack of proper information training.
Tools makes them end up doing it in these destructive ways and excessive ways.
Essentially, if you want to have a lot of sex with different people, you're a slut with a problem, you know, according to society, And because so many people think this way, if you are one of these slutty people, chances are that your friends or family or even your partner are expressing concern about you or treating you like you're a bad person, and then, unsurprisingly, you're left feeling guilt and
shame about your desires. So basically, the question is how much of the shame or negativity we feel associated with sex is inherently ours and how much of it is a social construct well, it's often difficult to know. And like we talked about in a previous episode, what happens when your sexual desires are suppressed for a long time, but then you open the floodgates, as Damon experienced, you can kind of go berserk. And according to doctor Jhanna, that's actually not all that surprising.
The excessiveness itself can be a product of the repression.
It's like a kid in a candy store. And if you keep a kid away from the candy store forever, they walk by and they see it, like, oh my god, I want some.
No, you can't have it. It, can't have it, can't have it. And then once you let them in, they're going to eat every single candy in the store. It's just human nature, you know.
Just look at binge drinking prevent people from doing it for a very long period of time, an unreasonable period of time if you ask the Europeans, and then when you let them drink, yeah, they're going to drink themselves to death.
When talking to Damon about the fragmented you of the validity of sex addiction, he had a very strong opinion.
I don't care how it's recognized. Sexuality is something that can be highly addictive. To think that there is no sexual compulsion or that it couldn't be an addiction, I think that's ridiculous because, well, just from my own experience feeling like it was a compulsion at times, and comparing that to my addiction or compulsion to alcohol, they are exactly the same. And the relief I would get from taking a drink or the relief I would get from having sex are so similar. When I would take a drink,
I would feel better about myself. I'd feel like, you know, I'm a little bit more handsome, I'm a little bit more special, I'm a little bit more whatever. The same thing would happen with me with sexuality. I would get that same feeling, that same like ego up boost or whatever. They're so similar to me. It would be terrible if there's a stigma on it, like, oh, no, you're not a sex addict, You're just a fucked up person. I mean, maybe that's true, but imagine saying that to an alcoholic.
You know, you're not an alcoholic, you just can't stop drinking. You're a fucking asshole. That's the wrong way of looking at it.
I think that makes sense, and like with drinking, if you have one too many drinks, you might become a little reckless, less aware of or sensitive to what is healthy boundary behavior and what's crossing a line, and sexual compulsion can be the source of a similar type of recklessness. It's what doctor Jhanna was just saying. Whether you believe in sex addiction or not, there are definitely people who are having sex and ways that are self destructive and
other destructive. Damon personally contends that he's never overstepped anyone's boundaries.
I know in my heart and soul that I was never abusive towards anybody. I never tried to get anyone to do anything they didn't want to do. I never, like, I just didn't do that. I didn't cross any lines. I mean I felt very desired, you know, if someone was to have sex with me because they wanted something from me. I mean, that's not really on me. Everything I ever did was done with consent and as much like love and sense quality as I could muster, you know. And some of it wasn't. I mean, some of it
was just like crazy fucking you know. But as far as I knew, as far as I was aware of. That's what we were all there for.
Of course, our experiences of sex are subjective. Something that's fun for one person might be kind of off putting or even scary for another person. We'd be remiss not to mention that in reporting this podcast, some people didn't speak very highly of Damon. Some said that he made them feel uncomfortable or they didn't want to be associated with him on this show. They have their reasons for that, and I'll know they didn't want to go on record
to explain those reasons anyway. For Damon, once he was able to admit to himself that he had a sex addiction problem, he tried to get some help and so.
He started to dive into therapy and I think he was going to go away to this clinic for men. The guy that ran this clinic is like in this other state. He got on the phone with Demon and Damon was telling him about his you know, what was going on with him. And then the guy was like, wait, wait,
you're Demon from Sanctum. No, we can't take you denied going to a goddamn like clinic to like heal because this guy already had these other men and he was like if you bring this dude in, he might trigger all of these other guys to relapse because of the sex club, because of just the access to all of these women and all of this, like it was just too easy. So he was denied that access to go to that place.
Okay, that's definitely sad, but also objectively kind of funny. Now Demon wasn't the only one going through a transition. There was also a major shakeup happening at Sanctum More gossip after the break. Now, Damon's internal reckoning was happening as he was being kicked out of the Sanctum mansion.
If you remember when Damon signed the lease on the mansion in twenty sixteen, the reason he got such a good deal on the rent was because the house was said to be demolished, and the owner let Damon move in while he waited on permits. And thirteen months later the permits came and soon Damon would have to pack his things and get out, and that meant he'd also have to go back to finding a different rental mansion every month to host the party, which was a ton
of work and clearly not ideal. This transition marked the end of an era for sanctum and for Damon, but he took it as an opportunity to pursue a different priority. While preparing to leave the mansion, he had formulated a plan to get Melissa back.
I was really intent on putting my family back together and trying to go back to my life as it had been before. It wasn't so much like, oh, I'm like bored of having sex with beautiful women now. It wasn't that, but there was certainly a feeling in me that having my wife back was more important to me than having sex with lots of people. I spent twenty years with the love of my life. I have two kids that there's nothing on the planet that I care about. I love more than them. I just wanted it back.
I was willing to give up this dream, because when I walked into the dream, I was willing to give them up. That's fucking horrible to say, but I have to cop to it. I was willing to give them up.
And it's kind of obvious to Melissa at least why her absence really made Damon reevaluate things.
I was the matriarch, I was the mother, so to speak, in a way like I was holding down the house and how it functioned, and I made our life move and flow and work all the thousand invisible domestic fucking things that a woman does that no one sees. I think Damon and his childhood being so messed up and not having a great mother, he did not have great modeling for parents at all, and so when I provided that for him and then it was gone, I think that it brought him back to his childhood and that
was very scary. It's very scary for him. You know, he started as spiral as well, and he got into a really dark place and you know, would call me and be so sad or on the floor crying, and I'm like, you know, I I'm not going to do this.
Remember by this point, Melissa was dating her old neighbor Billy, but Damon would not be deterred. He insisted, look, I've changed, I'm not that guy anymore. And apparently he was pretty convincing.
And so I broke up with Billy, devastated him, got back together with Damon, moved into the Saincton Mansion with the girls, and started to live like this domestic.
Life there at that house.
I'm like a fucking crazy n I don't know what I was doing, but I guess I would have done anything to keep my family together, literally anything. So I moved back in and then he's in the shower and again the phone is on the nightstand and I see all these fucking texts coming in and he's texting these girls, and I lost it. I fucking lost it. I opened
the shower door. I'm like, what the fuck, and I freak out and I show him the phone and he's like so sorry and so apologetic and like he's standing there naked and wet, and I'm like, I'm then I'm out.
I guess old habits die hard. And for Melissa, that was the final straw.
Now I can't hold your hands anymore. Like it's time to grow up and it's time to figure it out and do the work, and leaving that is actually the greatest gift you could give that person. Otherwise you're enabling and they're never going to grow and learn, and neither are you, for that matter. Like, I was really out and it was really done, and I never revisited that again.
I'm sure many of us have been in a situation like this. You go back to an X and you're like it's going to be different this time. You're in the honeymoon phase again and you're having great sex, and then the old problems reappear, and suddenly you're hit over the fucking head with all the reasons you left in the first place. It's like a microcosm of your entire relationship. But sometimes going back is what provides the clarity you needed about why this really truly no, actually, this time
it's over. For Damon.
This was a real wake up call. I was always conflicted with the reality that I was giving up my family for this, And once I realized that I could not have my cake and eat it too, I let go of sanctum. I stopped drinking the kool aid. I was looking around, and I was kind of like, you know, hmm, what are we doing exactly? Is it the kind of spiritualized eroticism that I was seeking and made this thing so special? Or is it just money and young girls and sex and rich guys and just a bunch of
fucking bullshit. At this point, and at some point I had to admit that that's what it was. For me, it was official.
It was time to leave the party.
At one point, you asked me like, would you let your daughters go to Sanctum? And I think my immediate gut reaction was fuck no. And that says a lot to me too, because you know, these girls that were working for me were probably you know, in their twenties and there were kids. As a father, I would never subject my own kids to that experience. I just would never.
Mike Sager definitely noticed a duality in Damon.
He was providing a service for people, There's no doubt about that. At the same time, he was conflicted about the service he was providing, and at the same time he wanted to be loved. It's almost like he's got this sort of sensitivity that he's pulled toward, like certain universal truths, and then he like goes too far into the volcano and he's got to come back out, and he's creating torture for himself. So it's like he's constantly in opposition with good Damon and bad Damon.
Or Damon versus Demon as Damon himself sometimes refers to this unfortunate reality.
Just money and power and ego, and I was just in it. Nothing was enough. It was like the crazier I got, the more everyone in the mental institution was just like, you know, cheering me on, like we're all in this asylum together, and it was like, yeah, get fucking crazier. You know, you're you're you're the cult leader. You know, whatever you do, we're gonna do. But around twenty seventeen, I started to emotionally detach and it's time for me to get the fuck out of the asylum.
Now that the veil had lifted for Damon, he had a new mission. He had to get the club to a place where he could sell it for what he thought it was worth, at least seven figures, but there was some work he had to do to get it to that place.
The next year of my life was how do I separate Damon from Sanctum. How do I make Sanctum someone that someone could buy? Because Sanctum was Damon. People came to the events to see Damon, you know, they came to the events to, like well, to party and have sex. But like, I was like that guy, and that took me over a year to just sort of get things in play so that this was not about me anymore.
So we mentioned previously that a couple of years into doing the club back in twenty fifteen, Demon started doing occasional Sanctum parties in New York, but over time it started to expand even further. Over the years, they did one off events in places like Miami and Kiev randomly, and after leaving the Mansion, Demon was asked to come through a party in Moscow and he jumped at the offer, feeling like it could increase the value of the brand.
Moscow came along, and that was this incredible opportunity to do something I never dreamed I would ever do. They were the best parties that Sanctum ever did. The guy who was kind of funding the whole thing, there was no price tag. He didn't care what he spent. He was like an older groc He didn't give a fuck. So you know, we could spend whatever we wanted to spend.
I don't know what's going on over there on Russia, but you know, you've got these like beautiful men and beautiful women, and you fill a room with them and give them this night of freedom, which they really took to heart and they really appreciate it more so than in the United States.
Damon did six parties in Moscow over roughly the next year and a half, and around that same time came another opportunity. He was offered to be the subject of a docu series for Showtime that centered around his life and the club. Again, he was like, well, this seems like it will be good for the brand, so he went with it. The show, which aired for one season, was called Naked Sanctum. While it was pitched to Damon as being more documentary, the result leaned far more reality show.
I only made it through like seventy five percent of an episode, but our producer Ata Lee's watched the whole thing and says, never again. It's kind of like The Hills, but the sex club version. It's very staged, lots of people who aren't actors trying to act like themselves and failing, plus an ungodly amount of red lighting. It's basically the opposite of this podcast, which is obviously very deep and
meaningful and hysterically funny. When you bring up Naked Sanctum with Damon Now he gets triggered.
It was all fake and bullshit and set up. The television show created this sort of like false reality of what Sanctum was. There was nothing real about it that was not like the legacy of Sanctum that I wanted to have.
When he decided to sign on and do the Naked Sanctum reality show for Showtime, I freaked the fuck out.
I was like, no, do not do this.
It's going to ruin the family. It's going to ruin everything. We're already divorced. I have these two girls, and I have to always keep the best interest in alignment, and Damon is a part of that. So like, that's just a visual that now the entire world will be able to see. And I just forecasted a horrible future and just like a lot of like more bullshit to deal.
With with people and my kids.
I didn't want me or him or Mike children to live under that institution.
And she was right.
In fact, the effects of the show were even worse than she feared.
Olivia was in sixth grade and was getting teased at school. She was also getting DMed on social media by submissives that had been fired from Sanctum who were disgruntled and angry. And this one girl wrote her Olivia sixth grade, what a piece of shit her dad is and all of the things that happened to her at the nightclub, and Damon is responsible to a little girl, and at that point we were going to fucking sue everyone on the planet.
I was freaking out and pulled Olivia out of school because she was having social anxiety, like she couldn't even go to class anymore. My homeschooled for the rest of that year. I mean, you fuck with people's kids, and it's like war.
I had my children, and I knew that what I was doing was affecting them negatively. The poster guy for the sex club. My oldest was about to enter high school, so I made her a promise, and I said, listen, when you enter high school, I will have sold Sanctum. It'll be announced in the press, and you know, it'll be behind us. If your friends, your friend's parents, you know, doesn't your dad run like a sex club. You can say he sold it. He's out of it. He doesn't
do that anymore. So I would say that that was probably the biggest factor for me to sell Sanctum.
So, like we said, DEMON spent a long time setting up the club to be something worth buying, but when it came time to pull the trigger, it wasn't that simple. For multiple reasons.
When I went to start to field offers or the idea of a sale of Sanctum. It was really hard. You know, this is not it didn't have a brick and mortar location because if we would do it in homes, it wasn't a commercial establishment. So what you were buying when you were buying Sanctum was you know, a website, a name, a contact list, and sort of a good idea.
You know, that's what you were buying. And then in addition to that, you were then faced with, if you were a legitimate businessman, you were faced with like, wow, this is risky, you know, like something could go wrong here. What if someone gets raped? What if someone says I was sexually harassed? Try getting insurance for a sex club.
And then there was the issue that there's just a lot of stigma around sex in general on this hellish earth that we're living on. Despite Sanctum pulling in millions of dollars a year, the logistics of managing the financial component of a sex club could be super annoying and therefore unsurprisingly not so appealing to buyers.
And then trying to find someone to run credit cards for me, traditional banks won't do it. It was really complicated. I first ran Sanctum using PayPal. I had over thirty thousand dollars in PayPal to do my next party, and I was not doing anything wrong in any way. But we were running a sex club, and so someone at PayPal I guess at some point looked on the website and they wrote me a letter and they said, we've rosen your funds. There's no recourse at all.
This is truly fucked and something that is actually pretty common if you're someone who works in any facet of the sex industry. Financial institutions like Venmo or PayPal can and do just randomly shot people's accounts without warning or due process, to the point that the ACLU has actually gotten involved, saying that PayPal and Venmo targeting and freezing
sex workers accounts is a civil rights issue. Sorry, that's a bit of a tangent, but I just think it's worth pointing out how much of a puritanical Big Brother nightmare that is. But anyway, eventually Demon did get an offer to buy the club that he couldn't refuse. He won't disclose what exactly the number was, but it was reported as being at least seven figures. After more than
six years of running, Sanctum. He officially gave over the reins, and just to complete the ridiculousness of this whole thing, Sanctum was purchased by an anonymous inv group the we refers to itself as the Circle, obviously.
So he comes over to my house, he sit at my table and he tells me he's going to sell Sanctum, and I one part of myself was like relieved, and I was so happy for him that he could get out of this thing that I knew kept pulling him into this dark place and it wasn't healthy for him. On the other hand, I was like, Okay, so my support payments are probably going to go down, you know, like I'm dependent on alimony and child support on a
lot of levels at that point. And I was like, shit, so that's going to mean I've got up my game and I've got to figure out, like what am I going to do to support myself and the girls. All in all, it come back to our kids, like I want them to have a healthy, functioning, stable, secure father that is modeling a good male figure for them, because now that they're teenagers, they're gonna go find a dude that's like their dad, Like that's what we do. We seek out what we saw and were modeled when we
were young. And I'm like, damn it, I don't want them to really do that. Like I love him on so many levels, but then his dark shadow site is also so large and glaring at times.
I mean, she has a point. Anyway, Damon agrees to sell Sanctum to this ominous sounding investment group, and I'm going to kill him for telling me this part of the story when the mics weren't on But according to Damon, the circle said they would only pay in cash, so in order to get the money, he had to charter a private jet to New York in order to fly
the two suitcases full of cash back to LA. Somehow, this feels like an appropriate end to his Sanctum journey, like even the way he sold the place was on brand for him. And it's also interesting to note the Demon sold Sanctum in August of twenty nineteen. Six months later, COVID hit and the club was shot down throughout the height of the pandemic. Yet again, Damon's dumb luck served
him well. After letting go of the club, Damon did end up getting help with the issues he was struggling with and this time he stuck with it.
He saw a therapist, started to walk that path of healing from what was a sex addiction. It's kind of how we have been able to stay amicable and stay friends now is because I was able to see his pain, and I know his childhood and I know how he was raised, and I know what's in him, and so I was able to see that that's his darkness, that's his shadow self, and I could compartmentalize and I could remove that from the person that I know and love
and as the father of my children. It's about being enough, you know, for anything.
If you're an.
Alcoholic, a drug addic, a sex add a chopoholic, whatever it is, it's like you're filling a void inside yourself with this outside stuff. But really it's like you have to work on yourself with are you enough? And then fill your own cup with your own you know, love and spirituality, whatever it is. And so I think he's doing that now.
Ugh, I feel like you're enough? Is hard? You know, I got it. What came next for Damon and his suitcases full of cash was embarking on a period of sobriety celibacy and single them. I don't know about you, but I certainly couldn't have predicted that.
It took years from me to sort of come down off the Sanctum high and separate myself from Sanctum. You know, I don't get literally hundreds of messages coming in on an almost daily basis from women who want to fuck me.
So I asked, Damon, what does it feel like to not have that? Now?
Fantastic? That was like a drug for me. So, you know, how does it feel for me to not be getting drunk? I guess I miss it a little bit, but I love the clarity. I love that I know I'm a stand up person now I'm I mean, not drinking and having dealt with the sex addiction. It's completely changed who I am. So I guess I like myself a lot more now.
Next, on our final episode of Sanctum Unmasked.
You should get collateral on these people. You should hide cameras. You know you've got these billionaires fucking you know, these girls, you've got like all these celebrities. If you had that collateral, man, you'd control Hollywood.
It encourages you to continue wearing the mask, not literally, but symbolically for lobsters.
Right you put them in the water and then it starts boiling. They don't realize they're in the boiling water till it's killing them.
Sanctum Unmasked is the production of School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. Posted and written by me Carly Schortino. Edie's Perez is our lead producer and story editor. Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Sound design, scoring and mixing by George Hicks. Original music composed by Jesse Niswanger, fact checking by Austin Thompson. Loco illustration by Linda McNeil. Josh Hook is our recording engineer. Recorded at iHeart Studios in Los Angeles, California.
Executive producers are Nick Stump, Jason English, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and me Carly Schortina. 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 been in next week
MHM.