Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Having sex with Raniere meant accommodating his pubic hair preferences. “If I loved and cared for him, I would care for his preferences,” Lauren testified. “His preference was that it be natural. So not groomed.”

  Lauren testified that she participated in threesomes with some of Raniere’s inner circle, including Pam Cafritz and Barbara Jeske. “Initially I participated in them because I was curious,” she said. “I had questions regarding my sexuality and I wanted to explore that.” Other times, Lauren said, she went along with it because it was what Raniere wanted.

  Lauren was often brought in to intervene when Raniere’s other girlfriends were threatening to leave. Along with Cafritz and Keeffe, she would help Bouchey and others “work through whatever their upset was so that they would be happy with him instead.” She excelled at this. Using the NXIVM curriculum, she would identify what Bouchey or another girlfriend was having an “emotional reaction” to and pitch them on an opportunity to work on that issue.

  “We all believed that we are responsible for our own emotional reactions,” Lauren said. “Sometimes you would talk about that, like, ‘This is for your growth. This is an opportunity. How are you ever going to get through the issue if you leave?’ ”

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  RANIERE HAD MORE than a dozen other relationships over the course of nine years with Barbara Bouchey. She didn’t find out about most of them until after she left NXIVM. When she suspected an affair, first with Barbara Jeske, Raniere said it was a guru–student relationship, and that they had sex only once or twice a year to exchange kundalini energy. Still, Bouchey saw herself as the one with the closest, most meaningful connection to Raniere during that time. “I was told I was the Dagny, I was the soulmate, and I was treated like his only girlfriend,” she says.

  Whenever Bouchey raised suspicion or protest, she says she was confronted and coached by Raniere’s other girlfriends. She was getting her first taste of the “wolf pack” approach Toni Natalie described, with each inner-circle girlfriend making visits, playing good cop or bad cop.

  Scientific studies of conformity have found that our minds are more prone to caving when we’re outnumbered. In 1951 the social psychologist Solomon Asch set up an experiment where a single study participant believed that a group of actors were fellow test subjects. The group was asked to perform obvious “perceptual tasks,” like identifying the length of a line on a flashcard. The actors were instructed to choose right answers most of the time but to uniformly get one answer wrong. Although most test subjects still chose the right answer, 38 percent of them would go along with the wrong answer.

  Bouchey describes her own conformity experiment as a “mind fuck.” The inner circle told her it was her own fault if she had a problem with Raniere’s secretive lifestyle. They told her she was still his soulmate; she’d still been put on earth to join his mission. This was messier than Bouchey had bargained for, but she was willing to go along with it. Because when it came down to it, she was still in love with Raniere.

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  EVEN IF BOUCHEY had wanted to complain about the arrangement, there was no one outside the inner circle she could tell. By the mid-2000s most NXIVM students were being told that Raniere had sworn off both sex and material possessions, a claim that obscured his numerous sexual relationships from most of the community of coaches and proctors growing around Bouchey.

  She began to learn more about Raniere’s approach to personal and professional life—namely, that he saw absolutely no divide between them. Raniere did business almost exclusively with the people he had intimate sexual relationships with, she says. Later she would learn that this included, at different times, NXIVM cofounder Nancy Salzman and funder Clare Bronfman.

  It was Raniere’s way of guaranteeing forgiveness and loyalty, according to Bouchey. It gave him freedom, leverage, influence, and a window into each woman’s psychology.

  Each of the “spiritual wives,” as they sometimes called themselves, had a different role in the company and in Raniere’s domestic life. Pam Cafritz fulfilled a personal assistant role, tending to Raniere’s whims with a reverence usually reserved for a religious figure. Friends described her as a soft, reassuring presence who always aimed to ease the tension in a room. Behind the scenes she spent much of her time arranging sexual conquests for Raniere and convincing his girlfriends to stay. She routinely introduced young women with big athletic dreams to her “coach,” who doubled as a math and Latin tutor. When a woman told the Albany Times Union that Raniere had sex with her in the 1990s when she was twelve, she said Cafritz had hired her to walk her dog and suggested that Raniere tutor her in algebra.

  After a stint as chief financial officer of Consumers’ Buyline through most of the 1990s, Karen Unterreiner oversaw NXIVM’s finances along with two other bookkeepers. Former members described her as a wallflower librarian type but with a sharp, sometimes cruel, wit. “Karen was an actual fiduciary,” one long-serving senior proctor told me. “Of all the people, I think she actually has the highest IQ.”

  In the early 2000s, Kristin Keeffe had not yet grown into her role as “legal liaison” overseeing NXIVM’s many lawsuits. According to Bouchey, Keeffe was working as a bartender and was rarely seen at NXIVM community events. She became less active as a coach and seemed to have one foot out the door. But a deluge of legal cases beginning in 2003 seemed to restore her commitment and sense of purpose, Bouchey says. As a behind-the-scenes player fighting NXIVM’s perceived enemies in court, Keeffe later wound up with a victim’s advocate placement in the local district attorney’s office.

  Bouchey was best known for enrolling hundreds of new students. She says she recruited high-profile people from all over the United States and helped build up the local community with holiday parties and music nights catering to students across a handful of Albany suburbs. Her role was expanding as both field trainer and sales closer; at one point she made $100,000 a year in commissions. She says that in the summer of 2000 she started a weekend conference that became Vanguard Week, or V-Week, an annual gathering on Raniere’s birthday.

  Over the years, V-Week grew into a near-mandatory engagement that spanned ten days in August. Held at a YMCA retreat center on Lake George, New York, it was an occasion for NXIVM students and coaches to test out new curriculum, participate in talent shows, run triathlons, and, most importantly, listen to Raniere speak. V-Week also became a central sign-up ground for NXIVM’s new programs and fundraising efforts. Bouchey recalls raising $50,000 one year to go toward an executive library fund for Raniere. Another year she raised $350,000 to launch a new humanitarian foundation. In a show of paying “tribute,” students often simply gave Raniere cash gifts.

  With this crescendo of funding and activity, more people than ever were moving to Albany’s suburbs to “move up the stripe path,” NXIVM-speak for advancing through the ranks and earning new sashes. The so-called stripe path resembled Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom in that it offered a graded series of rituals and teachings. All students started with a white sash, like a white belt in martial arts. If the higher-ups judged that students had advanced in their personal growth and recruitment, they earned a yellow sash, and then an orange sash, and then a green sash. Bouchey’s performance had earned her a green sash, one of the highest ranks that only a few dozen people reached. The sashes represented job titles, like coach or proctor or counselor, though only the highest levels were actually paid.

  NXIVM even had an affiliated real estate agent who helped facilitate more than a dozen home purchases clustered in Knox Woods, a Clifton Park residential development. Some of these new followers had shut down their own self-help and wellness businesses and moved across state lines to join the NXIVM mission. They populated the organization’s social gatherings, became proctors and coaches, and often brought with them big networks of family and friends from all over the world.

  In s
hort, the company was about to break into a whole new sphere of money, influence, and power.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Girls

  Sara Bronfman, daughter of billionaire Edgar Bronfman, had something that money couldn’t buy for her younger sister, Clare. Namely, people liked her.

  By most accounts Sara, older by three years, was the prettier, more popular sister. In her early twenties she developed an easy charm that seemed singularly calibrated to quietly capture men’s attention. She had bouncy curls and smiling blue eyes that could have an immediate impact. And if a flirty glance didn’t work, Sara was perfectly comfortable walking over and getting a man’s attention in a more hands-on way.

  Seeing her sister work a room this way left Clare with some unresolved insecurities about her own popularity and self-worth, according to a family friend. She was warm around the people she trusted but subdued and aloof in the presence of strangers. “Loyalty is one of her strong points,” the friend says.

  As heirs to the Seagram liquor dynasty, the sisters had a massive family legacy to live up to. Their grandfather Samuel Bronfman came to Canada as a poor Jewish refugee from Russia and went on to make a fortune distilling and distributing liquor in the Prohibition era. The next generation of Bronfmans took the empire global, becoming one of the wealthiest families on the planet.

  By 1998, when their father published his self-congratulatory memoir Good Spirits, the sisters, who have five older half siblings, had barely amounted to more than a footnote in the century-long Bronfman family narrative. Their mother, born Rita Webb and nicknamed “George” by Edgar, was the Bronfman patriarch’s third wife. Rita had changed her name to Georgiana and married Bronfman in the wake of his eldest son’s kidnapping in 1975. The couple divorced soon after Clare was born, in 1979.

  Sara and Clare’s half siblings from Edgar’s first marriage had a twenty-year head start establishing themselves as the high-society heirs who would take the reins of the family business in New York City. Edgar Bronfman wrote extensively in his memoir about his oldest sons, Samuel and Edgar Jr., who became leaders in the Seagram company and recurring characters in the society pages of The New York Times. In contrast, and not surprisingly given their young age, Sara and Clare (aged twenty-two and nineteen at the time) appear only in a brief entry about a tumultuous period in Edgar’s personal life, though he calls them “wonderful” and “loving” daughters. The two shared access to extreme wealth with their half siblings, yet were separated not only by a generation but also a few unspoken social boundaries. “They really weren’t always under the umbrella of the Bronfman family,” a family friend told Vanity Fair in 2010.

  The sisters were both born in New York City, but they spent much of their childhood on a farm in the English countryside with their mother. “The one rule I remember in our house was to be outside whilst the sun was up,” Clare wrote in a nostalgic 2009 blog post about her mother’s farm, where Webb bred horses. “I have fond memories of jumping on my pony bareback in the field, making mud pies, adventuring through the swamp and talking to the fairies in the flower garden.” Between school and holidays, the girls visited their father’s sprawling estates in the farmlands of Virginia, in the ski hills of Sun Valley, Idaho, and in Westchester County, New York. “We dipped, in and out of our father’s world,” Sara recalled in a letter describing the arrangement. “He sometimes picked us up in the corporate plane, or we were flown as unaccompanied minors or with a nanny to wherever he was so we could visit him.”

  Clare was passionate about animal welfare from a young age. She stopped eating meat around age nine after learning it was “dead animals,” her sister wrote. By age sixteen she had sworn off all animal products, which was an uncommon choice in the mid-1990s. She put her high school education on hold and began competing in international show-jumping events the following year. According to a fellow rider Clare was always the last one to leave the barn at night, and she often referred to her horses as her “children.”

  Their mother moved to Kenya when Sara and Clare were still kids. On her blog, Clare described a two-week period where her mother left the sisters in the care of a remote Kenyan tribe. “I remember the children running to see us when we arrived—they were so curious; touching us and giggling,” she wrote. “During those two weeks we lived very simply; in mud huts with no electricity, a hole for a toilet, and extremely simple food—however the way of life encompassed incredible richness.” The memory reveals the beginning of a romanticization of poverty and struggle that would develop further in young adulthood.

  “For much of my life I was ashamed of my wealth,” Clare wrote to the judge that would sentence her in 2020. “I felt it made me different, when all I wanted was to be accepted.” At horse shows she avoided luxury hotels and sought company with riders who came from modest backgrounds. “We joked that her horses had better accommodations than she did and laughed about her being the cheapest rich girl I’d ever met,” a friend and fellow equestrian recalled.

  Sara and Clare both craved a new kind of family story, ideally one that was more about helping people than getting rich. Instead of holidays in the Hamptons the sisters said they found volunteer work serving the poor. For Clare that included building huts in Nepal and spending time at a drug rehab center in Italy. In a testimonial video shown at a birthday celebration for Nancy Salzman, Sara Bronfman admitted to having felt lost in the years before she found NXIVM. By 2002, at age twenty-five, she had dropped out of university after a brief stint, grown bored of running a skydiving business in Turks and Caicos, and filed divorce paperwork soon after marrying an Irish horse jumper in Las Vegas.

  Sara’s friends and family knew she needed help figuring out what to do with her life. It was Susan White, a close friend of Sara’s mother, who suggested she attend her first NXIVM session. White had attended an intensive in October 2002, not realizing that the company was specifically seeking out generational wealth. “I took the course purely because I wanted to see if it would be good for my kids,” she says. Her stepson also signed up. “I thought it was very well put together, and I thought the kids could really benefit from it.”

  Barbara Bouchey says White was like a surrogate mother to Clare and Sara—someone they loved and admired. “Susan was worried about Sara’s depressed state at the time and strongly encouraged her, believing it would help,” Bouchey says. “Which it did.”

  Though White now deeply regrets signing the sisters up for something that turned out to be “predatory,” she thought NXIVM’s world-healing, humanitarian messaging was exactly in line with the Bronfmans’ goals. On the surface, at least, she was right. Sara attended a NXIVM session in Mexico City in late 2002. “I took a training and I thought it was undoubtedly the coolest thing I’d ever done,” she later recounted on Albany radio.

  The following year, Clare attended her first session in Monterrey, Mexico, where coaches had a tougher time penetrating her defensive shell. “She had a defiant air about her. She was more angry than Sara—angry at the world,” one source told Vanity Fair, adding that the heiress struggled to even look people in the eye. “My goal was to like myself—to develop a relationship with myself, and feel proud of myself,” Clare wrote of the experience on her blog. The sisters became known to many in the community simply as “the girls.”

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  SUSAN DONES, NXIVM’S Seattle center owner, first met Sara at a level two training session in 2003. “She still had a white sash on, which meant she was considered a student,” Dones recalls.

  Dones wasn’t familiar with the Bronfman family pedigree, though she did notice that a different set of rules seemed to apply to Sara. This young woman with the bright smile was bouncing off the walls from one room to the next, and was obviously flirting with one of the high-ranking trainers, Edgar Boone.

  “I was in a few groups with Edgar Boone, and she would come into the room I was in, and she would sit on Edgar’s
lap,” Dones says, with an amused rise in her voice. “She was all over him, stroking his hair, almost like lap dancing with him…and I thought, ‘Who is this woman?’ ”

  Boone, who had opened the first NXIVM chapter in Mexico, was already revered by the community as a success in business and personal growth. His and Sara’s flirtation developed into a relationship that fueled a brief traveling spree, where the couple tried building up new NXIVM organizations in Ireland and other regions of Mexico.

  Then a few months later, “Sara dropped Edgar like a hot potato,” Dones says. “I remember for Edgar it took him a long time to get over that. He didn’t understand why, and I didn’t understand why either. But in retrospect I think Keith didn’t want them to be together; he saw Edgar as an obstacle to get to Sara’s money.”

  In emails to Raniere, Clare asked for help in using her wealth and power to have a “positive effect on the world.” “I am very un-learned in business and would love some help in that area. I feel that my family is walking into some very large business deals with their eyes closed and I do not hold sufficient credability [sic], and certainly not the knowledge to help,” she wrote on May 30, 2003. “I would like you to teach and advise me in these areas. And in exchange?”

  “A slave for eternity,” Raniere replied.

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  BOTH BRONFMAN SISTERS opened up about their complicated relationship with their father, and on the advice of NXIVM coaches they persuaded him to attend a five-day VIP intensive with Nancy Salzman in Manhattan. Edgar was eager to learn more about the program that seemed to light a fire inside both of his daughters.