Marlena (6:51)

Okay, I just listened. I just finished listening to episode one and I am so blown. Like I don't even have words.

Alex Goldman (7:01)

This is Marlena. She's a hyper fixed listener. She lives in Oregon and the reason she reached out to us was really just to get a bit of clarity on this weird experience she had about a year ago when one of her cats, this little one eyed kitten named Otto, I've seen pictures, Otto is very cute. Was suddenly diagnosed with this fatal disease called fip. And if you were with us last time, you probably remember the story about how the emergency vet told her there was no legal treatment for the disease and then immediately turned around and said but if you want to get treatment, here's a Facebook page where you can find it. That moment triggered a months long ordeal for Marlena filled with unmarked packages, mysterious vials, precisely timed injections, which was all part of a treatment plan that was dictated by an anonymous online chat box. Marlena told us that the whole thing felt weird and creepy, but in the end her cat was cured. Which was wonderful of course, but also unbelievably strange because it just left her wondering what the hell did I go through and why. So in our last episode we did our best to explain both what the hell she went through and and why she had to go through with it. We told the story of why this life saving cat drug is actually illegal in the US and how in spite of that fact, a group of renegade cat lovers called the FIP warriors devised a way to import it from China and get it to sick cats all over the country. We also explained that because licensed veterinarians were unable to treat these cats without risking their license, these same cat lovers became the de facto experts in the treatment of this disease.

Marlena (8:41)

This is so much crazier and so much deeper than I thought it would be. I just. This is so incredible. Thank you, guys.

Alex Goldman (8:48)

But there are a few things we still haven't explained, both to Marlena and to you guys. And one of those things is why Otto the cat did not get his drugs from the FIP Warriors Facebook group, even though we know that Marlena was sent to this group. Over the last few months, we've interviewed nearly a dozen people for this story, some of them multiple times. We've spoken to current and former members of this group. We've spoken to pet parents, which is what they call cat owners, and we've spoken to veterinarians. And one of the things we learned is that FIP warriors no longer functions the way it once did. If you go to the Facebook page today, you'll still be greeted by a moderator who will still pass you to an admin that's based in your area. But one thing you should not be able to do is get drugs from these admins. And this all goes back to July of 2022, when, after three years of distributing drugs seemingly under the radar of feeling really good about this work they were doing and this impact they were having on the world, the FIP warriors experienced something terrible, an event so sudden and cataclysmic that when we asked about it, it seemed like everybody in this group remembered where they were when they got the news. Do you remember, like, what you were doing the moment that you first heard what happened?

Unknown (10:08)

Oh, I do. I remember it very well, because I was at work, and I was in an exam room with a veterinarian at the time, and a text came through on my smartwatch, and I just. I think I went white.

Alex Goldman (10:23)

Oh.

Nicole Randall (10:24)

I was home in Tennessee, minding my own business, and it came across the admin chat, and I remember reading it and going, holy shit.

Celeste (10:35)

We get a message saying, nicole Randall's been raided.

Unknown (10:38)

It said that Nicole got raided.

Nicole Randall (10:41)

Nicole Randall?

Robin Kintz (10:42)

Nicole Randall, yeah. Of course.

Alex Goldman (10:45)

Nicole Randall was one of the admins based in Texas. She'd been with the FIP warriors since 2019, the same year that a woman named Robin Kintz founded the group. And Nicole Randall had become pretty well known in the community, not just because she'd been around so long, but because she had come to serve a critical role in the way this network was able to function. You see, even though the FIP warriors had a whole list of approved brands of medication, many of the admins in this group kept only one or two of those brands stocked at their homes. And we'll talk more about this later, but for now, the point is that if a pet parent told their admin they were interested in ordering some brand of medication that their admin wasn't stocking, the admin could turn to someone who kept a much larger inventory of the medication stocked at their home. And Nicole Randall was one of those people. And in the ecosystem of the FIP warriors, she functioned like a regional hub for shipping these medications from China to pet parents in different parts of the US that meant a lot of the admins were connected to her. They depended on her, and they frequently sent her money. So in July 2022, when word got out that FDA inspectors had raided Nicole Randall's home in Cedar Park, Texas, the Warrior admins started freaking out.

Nicole Randall (12:05)

I mean, we were all absolutely in disaster mode.

Celeste (12:08)

So I was like, for sure I'm gonna be caught up in this, because she was shipping, like, 15 other brands for me.

Unknown (12:15)

For all we knew, everybody was gonna get radiant. Like, she could have been the first, and everybody else was next. Like, we had no way of knowing where this was gonna start.

Alex Goldman (12:23)

Stop. But it turns out nobody else got raided. In fact, nobody we spoke to even got a phone call from law enforcement. So when things started to cool down, there was a point where it seemed like, okay, maybe things can just continue to function the way they always had. But then, over the next several months, the details of the raid began to slowly trickle out to the Warriors. And in the fallout of the revelations from the raid, the group would begin to unravel. The warriors would be exposed not just to the rest of the world, but to each other in a way that would undermine the very DNA of the group.

Celeste (13:03)

They didn't dawn on us that this was happening. We didn't realize this was what was going on.

Nicole Randall (13:08)

Well, that was when I realized how much money people were making.

Nicole Jacques (13:15)

The amount of money was not your money. It was huge amounts of money.

Alex Goldman (13:19)

Through her work with the FIP Warriors, Nicole Randall had been making millions of dollars in profit. And there was reason to believe that she wasn't the only one doing it.

Celeste (13:29)

That's when we sat down and we're like, how is this happening? What is this doing? I mean, what in the world are we doing?

Alex Goldman (13:36)

This is the Cat Drug Black Market Part 2. The Cat Coo for the FIP Warriors. The Nicole Randall Raid was the moment that divided the before from the after. It drew a line in the stand and forced the admins to reckon with a side of the group that some of them would have rather kept hidden. And you know, this isn't the kind of show that goes out of its way to air people's dirty laundry, especially when they're people like the folks in this group, people who've done some truly superhero level good work in this world, who have basically taken on a second job's worth of work in order to save the lives of cats. But it was through this internal reckoning that the story of GS441524, the drug these cat owners were using to cure FIP and how it gets into the hands of the people who need it, people like Marlena and her cat Otto, would take another stunning turn for the better. And so today, that's the story we're going to be telling. And I can think of no one better to tell it than the person who is responsible for that turn, who unfortunately is also named Nicole. But she's not the person who got raided. Nicole Randall was the person who got raided. This is Nicole Jacques. Thank you so much for doing this, Nicole. We really appreciate it.

Sari Safer Sukinek (14:56)

Did you. Did you have any idea the rabbit hole that you were going down when you started this?

Alex Goldman (15:03)

Nicole is an engineer in Silicon Valley, and the person who connected us to her was actually Dr. Niels Peterson, the guy who discovered the antiviral drug that could be used to treat fip. He told us that Nicole has been very big in this FIP warrior movement and that she's done a ton of research on the application of GS. They've even published a couple white papers together. But before she did any of that, Nicole was just a woman who spent an inordinate amount of time volunteering with her local cat rescue.

Nicole Jacques (15:32)

So in rescue, we deal with FIP all the time. And it was just this really heartbreaking situation because I swear it's always the sweetest cats that would be the ones that would get it, and then it would be, there's nothing you could do. It was like, well, this cat has fip. Try to give them some quality of life, if you can, for maybe a week or two, and then that's probably it.

Alex Goldman (15:54)

So when Nicole first heard that there was this black market treatment you could get through Facebook, her first thought was, that sounds pretty sketchy. And her second thought was, oh my God, how amazing would it be if we didn't have to euthanize another cat for fip? So she finds her way to FIP Warriors. She orders some of the drugs, and when she starts treating cats at the rescue, Nicole is blown away.

Nicole Jacques (16:17)

It was a miracle treatment. You went from these cats that were on death's doorstep, and a few days later, a week later, they're bouncing off the walls. So I became really invested in sort of like, okay, well, how do we. How do we get the solution for more cats?

Alex Goldman (16:36)

Like so many other people who got heavily involved with the FIP warriors group, Nicole realized that the best way to get this treatment to more cats was to become an admin herself. By helping other people with their cats, she could supercharge her volunteer work and save the greatest number of lives. But the moment she becomes an administrative, she realizes that this isn't exactly a volunteer operation.

Celeste (17:00)

So I became an admin in probably end of spring 2020.

Alex Goldman (17:05)

This is Celeste. She spent three years as an admin in FIP Warriors.

Celeste (17:10)

And then later on that year, we had a new brand that came out. And it was mentioned to me that if I wanted to, I could sell it. And I was like, what do you mean by sell it? And Robin was like, oh, you could, you know, carry it and sell it. That's what we do here. And she started talking to me about how the. How the profit margin worked. And the thing that made it kind of exciting for me is because my rescue was not very big, and we were spending a lot on treating these FIP cats. The more FIP that we got, the harder it became. And I was like, well, this would be exciting because if I sold it, I could fund my FIP treatment this way. I could actually take in more FIP cats that way. And that's what we ended up doing. And so how it worked is that she set me up with the seller for Oscar.

Alex Goldman (18:04)

Oscar was one of the brands that was on the warriors approved list of medications.

Celeste (18:09)

And Oscar seller in China would send me so many vials, and then I would sell them. Like, I would sell them for $40 a vial. And I think it might have been 60 when it first started. And then I would turn around and wire back all but $10 worth of what the vials cost.

Alex Goldman (18:28)

I hasten to add that not every admin in the group was involved in this system. There were some admins that didn't want anything to do with shipping, but the admins were generally aware that some money was being made. And the reason they knew that is because the moment they signed up to be an admin, one of the first things that would happen was that they'd be given a rate sheet that clearly showed the cost to the pet parent was different from the cost to the admin. And the difference between those two prices was this commission fee, which was going to the admin that shipped the medication. Now, in Celeste's case, the markup wasn't a lot. And like Celeste said, a lot of the money was going right back into her rescue work. But even if it wasn't, there's an argument to be made that these people were doing an insane amount of work. And I personally don't feel like there's any problem with the idea that they were being compensated for all their time and effort. But where the problem arises, according to some people we spoke to, is that this compensation structure generally wasn't being disclosed to pet parents or even the moderators working inside of this group. Group. In fact, on the group's Facebook page, it very explicitly said, quote, we do not make any money or otherwise receive any profit or incentives from this group. The other problem, besides this lack of disclosure was that this obviously just creates a massive conflict of interest.

Sari Safer Sukinek (19:54)

So it's just sort of like, okay, I don't really like that, but whatever, maybe, maybe I will give the benefit of the doubt because, you know, this seems to be such a great group.

Alex Goldman (20:06)

While Nicole might not have been a massive fan of taking commissions on GS441524, she also didn't feel like it was a big enough deal to leave the group. Because when she looked at FIP warriors, the thing she saw the most was all the potential it had. She told us that, you know, when you're doing rescue work, it can feel like you're trying to drain the ocean with a teacup. You can help all the cats you can possibly manage in one day, and the next day there's going to be just as many that need your help. And she knew she could never drain the ocean. But with the help of this FIP warriors group and the network they were building, she saw the potential to turn her teacup into a bucket, to reach the greatest number of people, to save the lives of the greatest number of cats. And when she got to work and started guiding pet parents through the treatment program, it really did feel like she was at the center of something beautiful and pure.

Sari Safer Sukinek (21:00)

And then the mution thing came out, and that was like, whoa.

Robin Kintz (21:03)

Yeah, the mution thing was something that came up in a lot of our interviews as, like, the first major breach of trust in this group.

Alex Goldman (21:10)

This is Hyperfix producer Sari Safer Sukinek, who reported this story.

Robin Kintz (21:15)

So, Mution, or Mutane, everyone pronounces it differently, but it was one of the Chinese drug companies manufacturing GS, and at the time, they were the most well known, the most expensive. This was the brand that Robin actually used to treat her own cats.

Alex Goldman (21:29)

Okay.

Robin Kintz (21:29)

But in the summer of 2020, their relationship started to sour for some reason. And apparently a mution rep started posting accusations about warriors in a couple of their own Facebook groups, claiming the warriors take commissions and retainer fees. Now, Robin publicly denied those allegations in a post to one of the FIP Warriors Facebook subgroups, calling the accusations hateful and untrue and insisting the group is all volunteers. But that mution rep was like, oh, hell no. I have receipts. Yeah. So this rep started sharing screenshots of what appear to be text messages between them and Robin. So this was posted on another blog, and those texts look pretty bad for Robin. One of the most damning accusations is that Robin herself is being paid by the company.

Alex Goldman (22:18)

You mean being paid by Mution.

Robin Kintz (22:20)

Yeah. So those screenshots, they show Robin very clearly discussing the terms of a business arrangement with Mution. It appears she allowed sales reps for Mution to operate inside the warriors group, presumably so they could coax unsuspecting pet parents into buying their brand of drugs. As long as they continue to pay Robin $3,000 a month for the privilege.

Alex Goldman (22:41)

Okay, so I'm trying to come up with a comparison here, and the best I can come up with is, like, when you go to Home Depot and there are people who work for, like, Maytag who, like, prowl the corridors and try and get you to buy the Maytag brand.

Robin Kintz (22:53)

Exactly. Except that in these text messages, Robin admits that the company's chief rival is also paying her.

Alex Goldman (23:00)

Oh, damn.

Robin Kintz (23:01)

Yeah, and I think one of the most skills scandalous things about the text messages is that you can see from the timestamps that this conversation is happening all the way back in 2019.

Alex Goldman (23:10)

2019 is like when the FIP Warrior started, right?

Robin Kintz (23:14)

Yeah, exactly. Which means that even in its infancy, the head of this group was reportedly shilling for these black market drug companies.

Alex Goldman (23:22)

We reached out to Robin to see if she could verify the authenticity of those texts with the mution rep. She didn't answer us. But even though Robin publicly denied the allegations and said that no one in warriors has ever taken a retainer fee or commission for a vial sold by someone else in one of the admin's private chats, which are generally on signal, her story was a bit different there. Robin admitted she'd taken money from Mission. She said she was misguided and that it would never happen again.

Sari Safer Sukinek (23:53)

And people, people kind of gave her some grace. It was the first thing and it was like, okay, we've built this thing, we want to keep it going. And there was this sense of if things came out that hurt the credibility of FIP warriors, that you were going to hurt cats or kill cats because they would lose access to this resource.

Robin Kintz (24:20)

So even though this is obviously a big deal and a lot of people are very scandalized by it, there was a sense that if the end game is to make sure that they can save the lives of as many cats as possible, then maybe the best thing they can do is move on, focus their energy on this life saving work they're doing and forget the whole thing ever happened. And for the most part, that's what people did.

Alex Goldman (24:42)

Nicole told us that over the next two years, she spent most of her time actively ignoring the politics of the group. Between her full time job and volunteering at her local rescue organization, and helping pet parents through their FIP treatments and collaborating with scientists like Dr. Peterson to produce treatment guides for unregulated GS. Nicole was pretty busy. The warriors group was getting bigger and bigger, thanks in no small part to the quality of care that the admins were giving to pet parents. And the admins often felt like they were drowning under the weight of caseloads. But through this group, they were saving the lives of cats that would otherwise have been euthanized. And that was something they all felt really proud to be a part of. But every once in a while, Nicole would hear whispers about things that made her think some shady stuff was starting to happen again. And then sometime around 2022, those whispers started to get so loud that Nicole couldn't continue to ignore them. Commissions seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. People seemed to be quitting their jobs to do FIP warriors work full time. Cats seemed to be relapsing more than they should have been statistically. They were now having to continue treatment past the recommended 12 week period.

Sari Safer Sukinek (26:05)

And there were people that had started raising questions about some of that and in particular with actual issues with the medication itself. And they were very summarily booted from the group. And that was sort of a big wake up call of like, okay, something's not right here.

Alex Goldman (26:21)

When Nicole ultimately sent samples of medication from the warriors list of approved brands to be tested at a university lab later that year, the scientists discovered that their concentration of GS was actually very different than what was on the label. In fact, of the 87 injectable samples tested, only two contained a GS concentration that would have been acceptable by FDA standards. And when it came to oral medications, which were widely being used at this point, tests revealed that some of the pills were just wildly under concentrated. And the reason that matters is because while it's nearly impossible to overdose on GS, treating cats with consistently under concentrated medication can cause both relapses and worse, a total resistance to the treatment, which is one of the things that the FIP warriors were seeing in 2022. But in that moment, nobody knew what was going on. And the question for Nicole was, why doesn't leadership want to talk about this? And then, in July of that year, Nicole Randall got raided. And as the details of the case began trickling back to the group, Nicole Jacques began to feel like she was getting her answer. Here's Sari again with the story of what happened to the other Nicole.

Robin Kintz (27:41)

Okay, so we learned from the case filings that it all started in February 2021, when a special agent at the FDA received a tip from Customs and Border Patrol. They had just intercepted a package from Hong Kong sent to someone named Nancy Ross with boxes inside labeled facial mask. But what was actually in there were dozens of unmarked vials and pink foil packets with mystery pills. Lab tests ended up revealing that the liquid wasn't skincare. It was GS 441524. So the agent learned that the package recipient was a moderator of a Facebook group called FIP warriors, and she went undercover. She reached out to the group with a picture of a cat. And despite that cat having just been to the vet and getting a clean bill of health, the FIP warriors diagnosed it with fip. The agent was then sent to Nicole Randall to get GS. And that's when she started digging deeper into Randall. She found that Randall had been coordinating with GS manufacturers in China using fake names and fake labels to try and get them past customs. The FDA ultimately discovered that between 2020 and 2022, Randall received more than 220 packages from Hong Kong or China. She and those linked to her sent nearly 60,000 vials and more than 200,000 thousand pills of GS to pet parents around the globe.

Nicole Randall (29:01)

Wow.

Robin Kintz (29:02)

Yeah. And because their agent in her undercover capacity was one of those parents, they learned Randall was charging customers between 65 and $385 per vial, even though they've seen Chinese manufacturers were charging as little as $25 online.

Alex Goldman (29:17)

Wow. So she was cleaning up.

Robin Kintz (29:19)

Yeah. I mean, in total, Nicole Randall had sold more than $9.5 million of GS and made 4 million off the proceeds. And with that money, she purchased a Tesla and four additional homes. One of those homes, which she bought a few months before the raid, was valued at $2.8 million. And Randall eventually pleaded guilty to felony drug charges.

Alex Goldman (29:48)

After the break, the warriors grapple with the Nicole Randall raid. And suddenly cracks in the group turn into a full blown rupture.

Celeste (29:58)

It became a large split in the group between one side and the other.

Alex Goldman (30:03)

That's after the break. Over and over again in our reporting, we heard people say that the FIP warriors is not a monolith. At some points, they told us it barely even felt like a group. But there was this one idea that united them. And that idea was that no cat should have to die from a treatable disease. Everyone in the group knew what they were doing was illegal, but they were compelled to do it anyway. Some told us that the thought of euthanizing cats that didn't have to die was so intolerable, it didn't even feel like a decision for them.

Nicole Randall (30:42)

Them.

Alex Goldman (30:43)

And I think this is why the Nicole Randall situation cut so deeply for this group. It wasn't just the scandal of it all. It was the betrayal of that one idea that held them together. Here's Celeste again.

Celeste (30:59)

If I went to court, if I was actually sent to court, I can guarantee you that I would have the court filled with people who were there saying that I saved their animals, that I was there doing it for the right reasons, that I was there doing it for a moral reason and an ethical reason. Was I doing the legal right thing? No. But I was put in this situation because I had no other option. And that's me. When we find out exactly what Nicole Randall had done. I don't know that I could say the same thing about her.

Alex Goldman (31:32)

Why not?

Celeste (31:33)

Because you don't go out trying to save cats and end up with $4 million like people are. I mean, you wouldn't have people euthanizing over not being able to treat. You wouldn't have people struggling so much. You wouldn't have people picking up doordashing or selling their cars. And here she is buying a new Tesla.

Nicole Randall (31:56)

Over.

Alex Goldman (32:05)

For months, the tensions had been building over questions of drug efficacy, profiteering, and business entanglements. And now they knew at least one of those charges was true. Nicole Randall had turned other people's desperation into her own cottage industry. And Celeste just wanted to know if anyone else was doing that too. So she went looking for receipts in the one place she might be able to find them. At the time, many of the admins had been logging the vials they were shipping to pet parents in a program called Ship Station, which is just a program that helps businesses organize orders and shipments. And she zoomed in on this one six month period from March to September 2021, because that was the one time period where everyone overlapped. And what she discovered led her to believe that Nicole Randall may not have been the only one making millions. Celeste sent us a Google spreadsheet with all her calculations on there. We checked Celeste's math based on the numbers she provided, numbers that are hard to verify on their own because a lot of the prices fluctuated over time. And it wasn't public information what each company provided in commissions. But what she tells us is that, based on her math, she believes Robyn.

Celeste (33:22)

Made almost half a million dollars in that six months without her extra income. That's when we sat down and we're like, how is this happening? What is this doing? I mean, what in the world are we doing?

Sari Safer Sukinek (33:36)

That's when sort of like there was a very, you know, concerted effort to say, like, this is not okay. We need to come up with some ethical rules and we need to fix the group.

Nicole Randall (33:50)

It was kind of like all of a sudden, a bunch of people became born again virgins. Oh, no, we shouldn't be making money off of this.

Alex Goldman (33:59)

While everybody agreed that fundamental changes had to be made to the way the group had been operating, not everyone agreed on what those changes should be. And the closer they looked into it, the further apart they drifted.

Sari Safer Sukinek (34:11)

There were full scale, kind of like it was war, discussions of, basically there were two camps, right? There was the camp of, we are supposed to be volunteers. We are supposed to be neutral. We are not supposed to be like, salespeople for this. And the other camp, which was literally their literal whole argument was, people are entitled to make money however they want.

Celeste (34:37)

It became a large split in the group between one side and the other.

Nicole Randall (34:42)

If you want to talk about the split, it wasn't about how the money was or any of that stuff. The split was just basic power struggle between Robin and a couple of other people. That was it.

Sari Safer Sukinek (34:54)

We were. We were butting heads. I was asking questions like, what's with all this commission? How much money are people making? What are these arrangements that are being made with these companies? And then I was kind of just like, any day she's gonna come up with something to kick me out.

Alex Goldman (35:12)

Sure enough, that's what happened.

Celeste (35:15)

All of a sudden there was an argument with Nicole and Robin was just like, we're done. I'm kicking Nicole out.

Alex Goldman (35:24)

If you asked a dozen FIP warriors what exactly happened between Robin and Nicole, you may end up with a dozen different answers. But these answers mostly fall along party lines. Robin's camp will tell you that Nicole Jacques was testing a new brand of medication on cats, experimenting on them without group approval. Nicole's camp will tell you she wasn't testing a new brand. She just donated some sample vials from a supplier that the warriors already used to save a cat from being euthanized. She would also say that it was never really about that. It was because she was asking questions about money. But none of that really matters. The only reason we're telling you about any of this is that the moment Robin decided to kick Nicole out of the group, she unwittingly set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the landscape for the distribution of GS in the United States. But it wasn't just the fact that Nicole was getting kicked out of the group. The reason the decision was so consequential was because of what Celeste did the night she found out about it.

Celeste (36:27)

I went to bed and I was steaming mad.

Alex Goldman (36:30)

As Celeste lays down in bed with the news that Nicole has been kicked out of the group weighing heavily on her, her mind starts spiraling. She thinks of all the cats Nicole is treating at the moment, all the pet parents relying on her for guidance. What would become of them now that Nicole had abruptly gotten booted from the group? Celeste felt like she had no control in this situation. It was Robin's group and Robin's choice. But then she remembered one thing she did have some sort of control over. When Celeste first started in FIP warriors, she was one of the members that came up with the idea to create State Chats. Basically they were just message threads, but there was one for each of the 50 states. And it was through these message threads that pet parents were able to share their extra doses of GS with new cat owners that needed medication. The State Chats had made it so the FIP warriors were able to promise pet parents access to life saving drugs just a few hours after they were diagnosed. It was one of the group's most powerful tools. It had saved thousands of cats lives.

Celeste (37:34)

And so I got up and I started removing everybody who was not with us from those state chats. And this is like at 3:30 in the morning. I don't know why I thought that doing that, but I just done with Robin and that's what I did.

Alex Goldman (37:54)

Celeste deleted robin from all 50 state chats. Then she deleted anyone who she thought was on Robin's side. It was Celeste's way of saying, you don't own this group. We laid the bricks right alongside you. It's ours, too.

Celeste (38:11)

I didn't want the profits. I didn't want the control. Those state chats are ones that I had created. I mean, looking back on it, it was kind of petty to do, but it was a coup.

Alex Goldman (38:23)

It was nearly dawn when Celeste finally fell asleep on the west coast, just about the time another admin was waking up on the east coast. And according to Celeste, that admin turned around and did the same thing right back to her. She deleted everyone that Celeste had installed in the state chats and put back in her allies. And that same morning, Celeste discovered that it wasn't just Nicole gone from the group. Celeste had been booted, too. And over the next couple days, nearly half the warriors admins and almost all of the moderators left with them. From the inside of the warriors group, not that many people were surprised. Ever since the Nicole Randall raid, this sort of split had felt inevitable. Distrust was rampant, lines had been drawn, and everyone believed their vision for the future was the right one. But from outside the warriors, there was no warning. One day, a good amount of the admins were just gone, which meant some of the pet parents being treated by FIP warriors were without care leaders. And some people got really freaked out. There was speculation that the admins left because they'd found out the treatment wasn't safe. Others thought it was because they questioned the group's methods. The conversation moved on to Reddit, which, you know, it's Reddit. But it also allowed pet parents to start sharing all their experiences with the Warriors. Some talked about compassionate admins who'd ushered their kittens back to health. But others talked about feeling pressured to buy drugs they couldn't afford or being ghosted when they asked about cheaper options. The other thing is that a lot of them felt very taken advantage of when they heard about all the money that was being made.

Unknown (40:00)

You have to bear in mind that without gray area activities, there's no way that the hundreds of thousands of cats that have been saved by the work of this group could have ever happened.

Alex Goldman (40:16)

This is Robin Kintz, the founder of FIP Warriors. You heard her story on our last episode. We were only able to interview Robin once, and she has since stopped responding to our emails. But during our conversation, we were able to ask about a number of the charges that have been leveled against her and generally Speaking, she didn't seem terribly concerned by them, in part because she told us that FIP warriors no longer functions the way it once did.

Unknown (40:43)

The suppliers are now directly involved in all of the shipping and payments and whatnot that has moved back into the hands of the suppliers. So people in the middle making commission are down to barely any at all. And I don't even know what commissions people are making because I have taken myself out of that piece of the equation. Money was made in the past, varying degrees by various people, but I'm definitely not going to expose anyone or any details about that. There are inherent risks that people have taken in order to make this group function, in order to save cats, despite their risks. So to the people that are worried about commissions and being ripped off, I say look elsewhere for something to complain about. Is your cat alive?

Alex Goldman (41:48)

When we started this journey, we told you we were going to explain why Otto didn't receive his drugs from an FIP Warrior admin. And ultimately, the answer is this. As Robin just said, the risks of shipping medication were simply too great for most people. So they devised a new system. Now, when a pet parent comes to the Warrior's Facebook page, an admin will direct them to one of the supplier's websites where they can buy the drug themselves. But the thing we've been dying to tell you is that that system is now essentially obsolete. Remember we told you that Nicole Jacques was gonna flip the whole GS market on its head? Well, she did. GS441524 is now available in pharmacies across the U.S. your vet can prescribe it and insurance can cover it. And on our next episode, we're gonna tell you the story of how that came to be.

Celeste (42:44)

And looking back now, when we started FIP Global Cats, how easy it was for us talking to the FDA and getting pharmacies involved. I mean, that's what really, you know, hurts me is all these parents could have had these cheaper options so long ago.

Alex Goldman (43:03)

That's next time on Hyper Fixed. This episode of Hyper Fixed was produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amor Yates and Sari Sopher Sukanek. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. The show is engineered by Tony Williams. Fact checking by Naomi Barr. Legal review by Matthew Hallgren. In today's episode, one of the admins was voiced by an actor as they wish to remain anonymous. So special thanks to Artemis Pebdani. You have the voice of an angel. You can get bonus episodes. Join our discord and much more@hyperfixpod.com Join Next week on the Premium feed we will have an extended interview with Robin Kintz, the founder of FIP Warriors. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from prx, a network of independent, creator owned listener supported podcasts. Discover audio with Vision at Radiotopia fm Radiotopia.

Celeste (44:27)

From PRX.