Welcome to indoctrination, a weekly conversation series about protecting yourself from systems of control.

I'm your host, Rachel Bernstein.

In my first conversation on last week's episode with Megan, she talked about being part of an avant-garde theater company where she was

given the idea, as a lot of people are given, unfortunately, that unless you put up with very

bad behavior, you will never have a career in that business, whatever that business is.

And she talked about how she was taking advantage of in every way and had her sensitive information

extracted from her in kind of clever ways and then used against her as a means of control and how

the director manufactured within his theater, a drama within a drama, as I see it, of conflict

and competition, abuse, threats, and zero boundaries.

Today we get to hear from Megan again, where she talks about going to the police and how

dismissive they were, which I am so frustrated to hear about over and over and over again

in these situations, and how her theater director's suicide threats were used as a manipulation and also

what the catalyst was for her finally leaving and what her life is like now. I really look forward

to having you hear the continuation of her story today. Here's Megan.

So I took a lot of notes while you were talking because I wanted to come back to this idea of the, the irony to me, and I'm sure a lot of people listening, of the idea of somebody manufacturing drama in a theater company,

right?

Oh, yes. We're famous for this.

This is what we do.

Okay.

So I think when you have that, when you have someone manufacturing drama, that you are not

necessarily going to have a way to differentiate, like you're saying, if it's for your

benefit or not, or if it's part of it or not, if it's to push you or not. But then when someone

...