Independent, self-made Alexandra, who runs shelters for victims of domestic abuse, receives a phone call that plunges her into the world of abuse in a deeply personal way.

Learning that her estranged mother, Margaret, has died after writing a dark memoir called Owned, Alex flies cross-country to bury the woman she has not seen in 30 years. While cleaning out her mother’s apartment, she reads Owned, where Margaret shares the secrets of her life as a sex slave to controversial artist Bernard Barenbaum, who paints women’s ecstasy and suffering.

Alone in her mother’s apartment, talking to her urn, Alex struggles to make sense of her estrangement, hurt, and outrage over her mother’s unorthodox life. Owned revisits her teenage years when she watched the artist carve a B on her mother’s ass and do unspeakable things to her, compromising Margaret’s ability to tend to her daughter’s failing health and forcing her to choose between her master and her child.

In middle age now, Alex must reconcile everything she knows about her own world, where domestic abuse must be remedied, and the world where her mother freely consented to be the sex slave of a master who ignored the safe practices of their unconventional bond and turned into a monster. To understand Margaret and her need for pain and punishment, Alex goes in search of the family her mother has kept hidden.