When sisters Alison and Ann Dadow wrote their bio for a potential yoga-focused reality TV show in 2013, no one could have guessed how prescient their words would be.
“No human being has a stronger bond than the Dadow Twins,” they wrote in a treatment draft obtained by The Post. “We fight on a daily basis, but can make up in a snap of a finger. One of us will WIN this contest because we are both SURVIVORS.”
On May 29, the identical 37-year-old sisters plummeted off a 200-foot oceanside cliff in Maui, Hawaii, in a Ford Explorer driven by Alison.
Ann died. Alison survived.
Is this winning?
Onlookers say that prior to the fall, the siblings were screaming and fighting in the car. According to a court document, the driver “appeared to be in rage” and Ann was pulling her sister’s hair and grabbing the steering wheel when, suddenly, the vehicle accelerated and disappeared from sight.
Ann was found dead in the back seat with severe head trauma. Somehow, Alison, whose legs were pinned against the steering column, was extricated with minor visible injuries. Documents state that once released from the hospital, she tried to flee the state. She had a flight booked to the mainland for June 1, then changed it to June 3. Her attorney, Todd Eddins, says Alison was planning to fly to upstate New York for her sister’s funeral.
Instead, that morning, she was arrested and charged with second-degree murder of her twin. The prosecutors told the judge that Alison never even attempted to brake.
On Thursday, the judge dismissed the charges, arguing that there was not enough evidence to proceed. But Eddins tells The Post: “We’re not out of the woods yet.
“It doesn’t mean that [prosecutors] can’t try to circumvent the judge and seek a grand jury indictment.”
How the glitz-loving sisters went from Palm Beach, Fla., yogis to lawbreaking, booze-guzzling outlaws is a tale of a slow decline that included multiple arrests, bankruptcies and hair-pulling fights that led to 911 calls.
Like “Thelma and Louise,” the Dadows left behind a string of tragedies and crime when they went over the side of the cliff.
In Florida, the sisters were well-known for their matching Porsches and “Sweet Valley High” looks, but those close to the Dadows cite a sad childhood and unnerving codependence on each other as early warning signs.
In 2014, they drew ire after they ditched Twin Power Yoga — their popular West Palm Beach, Fla., yoga studio — with zero notice, leaving teachers without two weeks’ pay and burning clients who had shelled out hundreds of dollars for classes upfront.
“A lot of people really trusted them,” says Dalia Soles, a Twin Power Yoga manager-turned-friend, of the residual anger around their abrupt departure.
Despite the swirl of trouble circling the siblings, friends and family tell The Post that they “are shocked” by what happened.
“They did everything together. They finished each other’s sentences,” says a former employee who took over the twins’ studio space when they left Florida. “When I heard that [Ann] passed away, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, one can’t live without the other.’ ”
Alison and Ann Dadow were raised upstate in New Hartford, NY, the daughters of a prison doctor and his wife (the girls’ sister, Amy, is two years older). When they were 5 years old, the twins found their mother on the kitchen floor, dead from a heart aneurysm, according to Liz Nole of Utica, NY, whose daughter was friends with the Dadows. It was a moment that traumatized them for life.
‘We fight on a daily basis, but can make up in a snap of a finger. One of us will WIN this contest because we are both SURVIVORS.’
- Dadow twins' reality-show pitch
The twins still maintained outward appearances. As teenagers, they were lifeguards and cheerleaders and worked as counselors at the chichi sleep-away camp Point O’Pines in upstate New York, making sure to get staffed on the same bunk.
The two moved to Florida — where their father and Amy live — to attend college. They opened their first Twin Power Yoga in Palm Beach Gardens in 2008. The classes were so popular they opened a second studio in West Palm Beach three years later.
“It was the best yoga studio,” says former Palm Beach resident Lisa Singer, who frequented the twins’ classes and became friends with the women. “It’s where all the rich Palm Beach ladies went.”
Singer and others who knew the sisters say the two were inseparable. Alison was regarded as “the more vocal one,” according to Singer; yoga-studio manager Soles says that Alison was “a little bit more outgoing.”
To many, the Dadows were living embodiments of the healthy lifestyle they preached.
“They would wake up every morning when the sun rose to practice yoga. They pretty much abstained from drinking and did meditation,” says Soles, who invited both sisters to her 2012 nuptials, at which she says neither imbibed alcohol.
But despite picture-perfect appearances, the sisters’ lives were darker than they let on.
Soles recalls how one of the Dadows admitted that she and her twin hadn’t spoken for a four-year period prior to moving to West Palm Beach.
“They were private and I got the impression that it wasn’t something they wanted to talk about,” says Soles.
As for their sobriety, it was on and off, according to sources. And when it was off, it was bad.
Both sisters racked up a number of DUIs and alcohol-related arrests throughout the country and an arrest each in Florida: Alison for defrauding an innkeeper and Ann for disorderly intoxication, battery and resisting arrest.
“When they drink, their personalities change,” Federico Bailey, who calls Ann his girlfriend, told the Maui News after the accident.
Shelly Slatkin, who spent 200 hours training with the Dadows to become a yoga instructor, recalls a 2013 incident when they barged into a class she was conducting.
“They both came in [wearing] street clothes and changed my music and started adjusting students’ poses, the kind of things they taught me not to do,” says Slatkin.
“Only afterward did I realize it may have been alcohol-induced.”
In their TV pitch, the Dadows wrote that they had “beat their demons,” but local residents weren’t so sure.
“They were party girls,” says one man who lives in Delray Beach, Fla., and saw the women boozing out on the town frequently.
The twins lived together in a swanky high-rise that’s just a quick drive over the bridge from uber-exclusive Palm Beach Island. They tooled around in matching white Porsche convertibles (one vanity plate read “TWN Yoga”) with matching white dogs and matching fake boobs, shopping up a storm on Worth Avenue and partying at hot spot Buccan. According to a yoga source, one of the sisters was rumored to have been dating Bikram Choudhury — the controversial founder of the eponymous hot-yoga style — but in secret. Choudhury, who resides in Beverly Hills, Calif., and has been accused of sexually harassing multiple women, did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
“They were wonderful souls,” says Slatkin. “Sometimes money can go to your head, and that Palm Beach area is very dramatic. You see the very affluent [on Palm Beach Island] next to the not-so affluent in West Palm [where the Dadows lived]. I guess it’s easy to get wrapped up wanting to live like the people on the island.”
The sisters wanted more than to just fit in — they wanted fame and fortune.
They approached Singer, a producer, to help them land a reality show.
The show’s premise centered around Ann and Alison selecting seven yoga students to live in a beach house and partake in a 28-day detox program. Palm Beach yoga teachers, including “The Mormon,” “The Womanizer” and “The Barbie,” would assist as the twins grew their “million-dollar yoga business” and searched for love. According to the pitch: “Their spiritual bank account is overflowing.”
Unfortunately, their actual bank account was not. Unable to afford the pricey rent, the twins shut down their Palm Beach Gardens studio in 2013 and the West Palm one, abruptly, in 2014, before fleeing Florida.
The Dadow sisters relocated to tony Park City, Utah, where they opened up a new Twin Power Yoga location.
Some time after moving, they legally changed their names to Alexandria (Alison) and Anastasia (Ann) Duval. They were still going by Dadow as of May 2014; their Hawaii licenses read Duval.
According to Alison’s attorney Eddins, “They wanted a fresh start.” But their past still followed them.
“Park City’s a really small town and once you Googled [the twins] . . . you could see what happened in Florida . . . We all kind of stayed away from them,” says Trudee Sanbonmatsu, who owns Yoga Kula Project in the ski town.
Photographer Christopher Reeves, who shot Ann for the local paper, recalls his strange run-in with the slain sister.
“She was telling me how much she would want to marry me if I wasn’t [already] married, and that I look like Brad Pitt. She would leave the room a few times . . . then remove another article of clothing and come back and run her fingers up my back,” Reeves tells The Post. “It was an odd experience, and I didn’t want to stay too long.”
In the two years they lived in Utah, the sisters soon racked up a lengthy criminal record, including multiple arrests for charges such as DUI, fleeing the scene of an accident, public intoxication, disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer.
In January 2014, when they were kicked out of a restaurant for being too drunk, officers arrived to find the twins’ car in a ditch, the two women yelling and pulling each other’s hair.
Four months later, Alison was arrested for DUI and her sister, Ann, for interfering with police and disorderly conduct. According to the report, when the officer tried to obtain the keys to the vehicle Ann “became belligerent” and “threatened to throw [bottled] water on me.” While being transported to jail, Ann threatened to kill the officer.
Apparently, run-ins with the law run in the family. Last year, older sister Amy was arrested last July for assaulting their 67-year-old wheelchair-bound father. She was convicted for battering a senior, making a false report of rape and resisting an officer. (Amy refused an interview request.)
In October 2015, police were dispatched to the twins’ Park City pad for a possible domestic violence incident. And in November, the sisters were accused of stealing $850 from Jennifer Cutler, a woman who the twins met at church.
The sisters’ business struggled. In November 2014, Alison filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Ann followed suit five weeks later. They reported around $150,000 in debts each.
When they ditched Park City for Hawaii in December 2015, things got worse.
Ann showed up at a homeless shelter on Maui, claiming she’d been robbed.
As the twins wrote in their TV pitch: ‘[Our] story is a story of struggle and triumph, unfolding in real time.’
“She gave us a false name at first. She claimed she had no ID, no money, no nothing,” shelter volunteer Kahili Moniz told Gossip Extra. “She wanted us to help her out with cash . . . but we’re a shelter, we don’t give out money . . . I had a feeling she wasn’t really telling the truth.”
Ann wasn’t homeless, but instead staying with her sister at the luxury Westin Maui Resort and Spa.
On Christmas Eve this past year, both siblings were cited for disorderly conduct and had warrants issued for their arrest after they failed to appear for their hearing. It’s that outstanding charge that is keeping Alison in jail, even after the charges of murdering her sister were dismissed.
“I’m so broken up,” says the twins’ 98-year-old grandmother, Genevieve Macner. “They were so close. I spoke with Alison. She says she’s coming along.”
What really happened that fatal day, and Alison’s true intentions, may never be known.
But as the twins wrote in their TV pitch: “[Our] story is a story of struggle and triumph, unfolding in real time.”