Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  The Mega test “violates many good psychometric principles by overinterpreting the weak data of a self-selected sample,” Carlson wrote. And Hoeflin went far beyond standard “number crunching” in his calculations: “What Hoeflin has done in the norming of his test results,” Carlson declared, “can be said to be nothing short of number pulverization.”

  IQ testing itself has since come under more scientific scrutiny, and after the proliferation of high-IQ societies in the late 1970s and 80s, new research in the 1990s moved toward theories of multiple kinds of intelligence. Intelligence testing as a whole has been criticized for its narrow, culturally exclusive definition of cognitive ability. Racists and eugenicists are obsessed with it, which is never a good sign. But in 1988, skepticism about high-end intelligence testing and Hoeflin’s formula had not yet taken hold. With eye-popping results in hand, Raniere’s team of supporters seemed to have no trouble finding a local Albany reporter willing to write a googly-eyed profile.

  “The woman who did the write-up was completely infatuated with Keith,” Hutchinson recalls of the now-infamous Times Union story. Raniere didn’t have to brag about himself to make it happen; Hutchinson’s sister Gina reached out to the paper first, talking Raniere up as a rising star in a mostly boring town. “I think the reporter was excited about it…being able to feature a real live true genius, right here in Albany,” says Hutchinson.

  Raniere told the reporter that he’d learned to spell the word “homogenized” by reading it off the side of a milk carton at age two, and that he “had an understanding of subjects such as quantum physics and computers by age four.”

  “By the time he was 16, the Brooklyn-born genius says he had exhausted the curriculum at his high school,” read the Times Union story. “He dropped out of school and entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he simultaneously earned undergraduate degrees in math, physics and biology.”

  The piece went on to say that he played seven instruments, tied the state record for the hundred-yard dash, rode a unicycle, and juggled—“not necessarily at the same time,” the writer joked. “But one gets the impression that this amazing young man, who requires only two to four hours of sleep, could do both—if he put his mind to it.”

  Raniere’s take-home test score translated into recognition for “highest IQ” in the Australian edition of The Guinness Book of Records in 1989. Sandwiched between the largest-ever human chest measurements and the lowest-recorded voice, a tiny write-up mentions Raniere and two other Americans who took Hoeflin’s test. Marilyn vos Savant, of Missouri, and Eric Hart, of New York, both tied Raniere’s high score of forty-six. “This represents a performance at the level of one in 10,000,000,” read the entry. According to the record book, Hoeflin had admitted only seventeen members to his exclusive Mega Society.

  The next year, Guinness retired the “highest IQ” contest following questions about the Mega test’s design and execution. In the early 1990s other high-IQ societies began rejecting the Mega test, claiming that some of its brainteasers had already been published elsewhere and that several of its problems could be solved using basic computer programming skills. Some solutions were leaked in the early days of the internet, and if you looked at M.C. Escher’s lithograph Waterfall long enough, you could figure out Hoeflin’s three-cube problem.

  Despite all the inconsistency surrounding his IQ world record, Raniere committed to the one-in-ten-million super-genius narrative. Right up until his arrest in 2018, he repeated and riffed on the story of his extraordinary intelligence at an improbably young age. In one recorded interview with Hawaii Five-O actor Grace Park, Raniere even described having memories of infancy and early childhood. “I spoke very early,” he told Park. “By the time I was, you know, a year old, I was asking questions…. I had some really deep, profound thoughts at an early age.”

  Old versions of the NXIVM website, which have since been taken down, contained more unverified claims: Raniere was an East Coast judo champion by age eleven; he learned high school math in a day at age twelve; he taught himself three years of college mathematics by age thirteen. There was the assertion that he’d been “noted as one of the top three problem-solvers in the world,” another nod to his questionable Mega test score.

  There are holes in Raniere’s boy genius narrative. Transcripts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute show that he graduated with a 2.26 grade point average, the equivalent of a C+. At his trial in June 2019, Raniere’s grades were projected on screens in front of a jury, showing F grades in general physiology and quantum mechanics and a D in experimental physics. The jury learned that in 1988 he was placed on academic probation and faced academic dismissal.

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  RANIERE WAS BORN in Brooklyn in 1960, but he was raised in the suburban sprawl of Suffern, New York, a couple of hours south of Albany.

  When Mark Jackson was in school with Raniere, he didn’t see anything exceptional about him. Raniere wasn’t popular or extraordinarily athletic, though he clearly liked math and judo more than the average student.

  Jackson and Raniere were bused together from Suffern along the New Jersey border to Green Meadow Waldorf School, an alternative school that appealed to hippie parents of the early 70s. Myths, legends, and Bible stories factored heavily into their educational diet, and the school boasted lively orchestra, choir, woodworking, and theater programs. In Raniere’s telling there were gardens and crochet lessons, and none of the students were allowed to wear clothes with logos.

  It would take Raniere another twenty years to fully develop his prodigy image, supposedly capable of stringing full sentences together by age one and becoming a self-taught concert-level pianist by age twelve. If Raniere really did develop above-average musical talents, Jackson didn’t see it at school. “He played clarinet, but he was a bad musician,” he says.

  Jackson, who is a writer and actor, has the gruff outward appearance of a biker, but with kind eyes and a well-shaped graying beard. He and Raniere grew to know each other well over three years of middle school. Jackson says he sat beside Raniere on the school bus for all of fifth grade. They weren’t best friends, but they spent time together outside of school at each other’s houses, playing basketball, or swimming. Jackson remembers going over to Raniere’s split-level house in October 1971, when they were both in sixth grade. They and three other boys went trick-or-treating together, stuffed themselves full of candy, and slept on the floor in the Raniere family’s living room. Jackson says he remembers the night vividly because the light of a clock kept him up most of the night.

  Raniere was an only child, but to Jackson he seemed to have a typical, healthy relationship with his parents. And even though they’d separated four years earlier, that didn’t stop Raniere from boasting about his dad’s skiing prowess or minding his manners when asking his mom about dinner. In interviews he has described his mother as “soulful” and said he took care of her through some serious health issues, including a heart condition. She died in 1978, when Raniere was eighteen years old.

  Jackson doesn’t remember ever meeting Raniere’s dad in person, but he heard all about the expensive gifts he bought his son. There was a pool in the Ranieres’ yard and an upscale sports car in the driveway. Raniere has said he grew up in the comfortable suburban neighborhood “surrounded by kids whose parents were all lawyers and doctors and surgeons.”

  Raniere didn’t distinguish himself in class. “There were at least four kids who were smarter than him,” Jackson says. “He was definitely smart, but not outstanding.” Though math was his favorite, Raniere was beat out by higher achievers in other subjects. One of the girls in his cohort, for example, would, after being voted class valedictorian, go on to complete a PhD in biochemistry at Harvard. “There weren’t exactly slouches in that class, but in terms of math and science he was bright,” Jackson says.

  The thing that stands out in Jackson’s memory was Raniere’s near-consta
nt need for validation. He was prone to one-upping his classmates in unexpected situations, no matter how petty or pointless. In childhood photos Raniere appears to be shorter than his classmates, with ears slightly too large for his head and his chest puffed out enough to suggest a competitive streak. He would wear his judo outfit to class and practice moves on the playground, so Jackson and his friends made a point of keeping their distance when it came to schoolyard fights.

  Jackson recalls one incident that became the subject of endless schoolyard gossip. One of the fifth-grade girls had apparently walked in on her older sister having sex, but being so young she had no idea what it meant. As Jackson recounts it, she was distressed and still trying to process the strange experience when Raniere apparently lunged at an opportunity to use information as a weapon.

  Raniere picked on the girl for the rest of the school year, reminding her of the shameful secret he could expose to anyone at any time, Jackson says. Raniere threatened to tell the girl’s parents and sister that he knew what she’d seen. It was only when the girl told her parents what had happened, and her mother intervened, that Raniere left her alone.

  In middle school Raniere read the Isaac Asimov novel Second Foundation, which is set in a future where all human behavior is reduced to mathematical equations. Raniere later claimed he was “inspired by the concepts on optimal human communication” and as a tween began developing a “theory and practice” he later called Rational Inquiry. It was a scientific approach, he claimed, that would become the basis of his self-help methods at NXIVM. “This practice involves analyzing and optimizing how the mind handles data,” he wrote in 2003. “It involves mathematical set theory applied in a computer programmatic fashion to processes such as memory and emotion.”

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  AROUND AGE FOURTEEN, Raniere experienced “a very great perceptual shift,” as he described it to actor Grace Park many decades later. He discovered that if you let go of fear and value judgments, “You can feel as much joy as you want at any time.”

  He’d wanted to “surrender to joy,” Raniere said, but he was held back by “bungee cords” of fear. His teenage thoughts approached an epiphany: “If I were to let go of everything at this point in time—I’m a little fourteen-year-old kid, right—I may not go to school anymore, I may not have ambitions to go to college, I may just decide to try to take, you know, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and go walking off into the sunset.”

  Raniere said he faced each fear in turn—fear of starving, fear of disappointing his mother—and over time the “bungee cords” holding him back started to dissolve. This was how he discovered the key to success and happiness, Raniere said. “When you remove [each fear] one by one, you know, you can feel as much joy as you want,” he told Park.

  Sometimes Raniere described this shift as a spiritual awakening, the moment he became “unified,” or “enlightened.” Decades later he would tell certain girlfriends that he recalled all of his previous lives, and that he knew he’d come into this lifetime in order to help others find enlightenment.

  Barbara Bouchey, Raniere’s girlfriend from 2000 to 2008, claims this transformation caused an immediate shift in the way he interacted with girls. As Bouchey first recounted on the CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM, Raniere established a formula for acquiring loyalty and devotion from the opposite sex. He embraced commitment and grand romantic gestures, Bouchey learned from Raniere’s father, James. And with the serial nature of his propositions concealed, Raniere benefited from always appearing ready for a lifetime together.

  “Dozens of young girls were calling the house,” Bouchey continued. “He was telling every single woman, every single girl the same thing: ‘I love you. You’re the special one.’ ”

  More than a quarter century later, he would use a version of this formula to ensnare Bouchey herself.

  Raniere transferred to Rockland Country Day School for high school, but he returned to visit Jackson and his Green Meadow friends in 1977, when they were all seniors. Jackson remembers that Raniere’s “wild, wild bragging” had gotten worse. “He was bragging mostly about girls. I think he had singled me out because I was sort of popular in class with that.”

  Their mutual friend Matthew, who once seemed an equal to Raniere in middle school, had somehow fallen into a “lackey” role, Jackson says. Matthew was acting the part of Raniere’s hype man, teeing up Raniere’s biggest brag of the afternoon. Jackson says Matthew cleared his throat and said, “Hey, Keith, what’s your record like for getting a chick in the sack?”

  “Twelve seconds,” Raniere replied, according to Jackson.

  “I was sitting there with my girlfriend at the time, and we kind of looked at each other like, ‘Um, that’s a little weird.’ ”

  Raniere’s habitual weirdness with women and girls was just getting started.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mothership, New York

  Heidi Hutchinson caught her fifteen-year-old sister Gina with a twenty-four-year-old Keith Raniere in her bedroom during the Christmas holidays.

  It was 1984. Heidi and Gina lived in Clifton Park, a quiet, mostly white suburb less than a half-hour drive outside of downtown Albany, New York, where Raniere’s NXIVM empire would later take root. Between the time Heidi and Gina’s grandparents settled there and Gina started high school, the town’s population had grown from two thousand to about twenty thousand.

  Gina had met Raniere at a local theater club the year before. One of her classmates had a part in The Barber of Seville. Heidi was an aspiring actor herself, playing in the same club’s production of Little Murders, by Jules Feiffer. Heidi remembers seeing her sister and her friend, also named Gina, together at rehearsals and performances, where Raniere would chat them up. The two Ginas, nearly a decade younger than Raniere, seemed to appreciate the grown-up treatment. Raniere had a way of interrogating every belief, fear, and insecurity they might have, and making it sound like the most important task in the world.

  The two friends had more than a name and high school in common. In 1984 both were allegedly molested by Raniere. And when Heidi discovered the abuse that Christmas break, Raniere was already deeply entwined in Gina’s life.

  “I feel guilty about it to this day,” Heidi says.

  Gina was interested in Eastern religion, shamanism, philosophy, and martial arts, and Raniere positioned himself as a brilliant mentor in all of those fields. Heidi says she now recognizes this as a tactic predators commonly use to groom families into allowing unsupervised contact.

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  IN PHOTOS, GINA Hutchinson has a wide, sly smile with dark, bushy hair and blue eyes. From a certain angle she looks like a less witchy Fairuza Balk. Her journal entries have the scratchy, back-tilted print of a left-hander.

  In her journal, Gina wrote about spirituality and her experience receiving energy healing from Raniere. He studied the traditions of Swami Muktananda, the founder of Siddha Yoga. (The guru, who set up an ashram in upstate New York in the late 1970s, was believed to encourage enlightenment simply by his presence.) Raniere told Gina that he recalled his past lives and had made “a commitment” to certain people to be their spiritual teacher in this life. In return, she brought him all the spiritual knowledge she could find.

  Gina looked up to Raniere for his theories on Buddhism and the unexplained, but it wasn’t all they talked about. At a young age Gina was excited about Jack Kerouac and E.E. Cummings, and Raniere accordingly showed off his deep knowledge of and appreciation for beat and free-form poetry. Whatever Gina thought she knew about the world, Raniere knew a thousand times better, according to Heidi.

  Heidi suspects that part of what made Raniere captivating for her teenage sister was that Gina was seeking an older brother figure. Their mother had moved into their grandmother’s house during a complicated marriage separation, and both of Gina’s older brothers moved out soon after.


  “He became what she was missing,” Heidi says. “He was a friend, but then he started to position himself as a mentor, as somebody who was like our older brother, who was a genius himself.” Raniere convinced Gina to drop out of high school and get a GED under his supervision. She was upgrading to a private tutor. “He went to Rensselaer, and that was a mecca of genius. It’s the college on the hill, you know, a place of privilege.”

  Raniere took Gina and her friends on trips to Manhattan, where his dad had an apartment, or out for pizza in the suburbs. By the time Heidi realized what was happening, Gina already had her heart set on pursuing enlightenment with Raniere, in this life and the next.

  When confronted, Raniere said he intended to spend his whole life with his “fiancée” Gina, and this seemed to convince the Hutchinson parents, who were somewhat preoccupied with their divorce. Heidi says she wasn’t convinced; from the beginning she thought Raniere was a “megalomaniac.” But Gina wouldn’t hear it.

  Raniere and Gina experimented with altered states of consciousness, according to Heidi, and in twilight states, Raniere guided Gina in piecing together that in another lifetime, she may have been an important Tibetan Buddhist figure. This reinforced Gina’s belief that they had a strong spiritual connection, that their thoughts and actions were cosmically linked.

  Heidi says she believes Gina suffered from some kind of mental health event—something close to a break—and Raniere suggested to Gina that this could be a natural result of her special spiritual sensitivity. He had a name for her experience, “disintegration,” and he claimed to know how to help her become more whole again. “She needed something to cling on to, to understand what she’d been through,” Heidi suggests.