Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Daniela had been fired from the admin office, and so she picked up more odd jobs to compensate for the loss. “I was running errands for people. I worked as an assistant to a real estate agent. I was dog sitting, house sitting, taking dry cleaning. I was looking to make a buck so I could, you know, continue surviving.”

  All the while, Daniela was confiding in Raniere, who was beginning to flirt with her in tutoring emails. He asked her if she’d ever been in love and commented on her purity when she revealed that at age seventeen she’d never been kissed. “I think he set me up,” she said. “I think that he made himself the hero of the story. He created a horrible situation by which I became closer and a little more dependent on him.”

  Raniere first kissed Daniela during a conversation about her parents’ separation. She was seeking his worldly guidance on how to navigate the split, which her father was finding extremely difficult.

  “I didn’t feel bad, didn’t feel good, didn’t feel anything, it was just like, What’s going on?” she said of the kiss. They were sitting on a purple couch in Nancy Salzman’s office, and the door was uncharacteristically closed behind them. But after some time passed, Daniela started to feel excited that she was special and had been chosen.

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  BARBARA BOUCHEY REMEMBERS the moment when she began suspecting that Raniere was grooming Daniela for a sexual relationship. She’d gone over to the Flintlock house, where he lived with his “spiritual wives” Unterreiner, Cafritz, and Keeffe. At the time, Bouchey and Raniere had a not-quite-secret romantic relationship. Bouchey was dressed for relaxing around the house, in sweatpants with no underwear. She found Daniela sitting in a chair in the living room filming Raniere while he lounged on a couch.

  Daniela later testified that Raniere had a mild obsession with women’s underwear, or rather, lack of it. He was a man who acted on impulse, and he apparently correctly guessed that Bouchey was going commando under her sweatpants. Bouchey recalls that, with the camera rolling, Raniere started “roughhousing” with her as if they were alone in her bedroom. It wasn’t uncharacteristic of Raniere to tickle or manhandle Bouchey, but this was the first time it happened in front of a teenage girl. Bouchey was disturbed and asked Daniela to turn the camera off, but Daniela kept filming and giggled.

  “It struck me as odd that he wouldn’t stop,” Bouchey recalled. She couldn’t prove it, but Bouchey suspected he may have been exposing Daniela’s two sisters, Marianna and Camila, to similar situations when they were in Albany. “I believe he had started grooming the three girls, making them more susceptible to a sexual kind of freedom or life.”

  Leading up to her eighteenth birthday, Daniela’s conversations with Raniere turned to sex. She was too young for them to have sex yet, Raniere told her. He opened up about his own sex life, revealing that he had several long-term girlfriends. Raniere said his privacy was very important, and that he needed all of this to be kept secret.

  As her birthday approached, Daniela was repeatedly asked by Raniere what she wanted, implying that she should want him. “It took a lot of him asking in a flirty way, ‘What do you want for your birthday? Do you want something special?’ ” she testified. “I couldn’t say it and I did not say it. And he noticed I was extremely shy, and he said, ‘Well, if you’re too shy to say it, why don’t you write it on the palm of my hand?’ And it was easier than to say it, so I, with my hand, spelled out S-E-X.”

  Daniela was immediately mortified when Raniere acted surprised, saying, “Ooohh, you want sex?” as if he hadn’t considered the idea. Seeing her become so plainly self-conscious, Raniere took the opportunity to ask Daniela what body insecurities were standing in the way, suggesting she should lose weight and reassuring her that he liked natural body hair.

  “I remember being really confused because I was like, How would I be insecure [about pubic hair]?” Daniela recalled. “Is the hair too curly? Is it the wrong color? And he explained, ‘Some women are insecure and don’t like their hair. But you know, I like natural.’ ”

  Daniela’s birthday came and went, and she didn’t see Raniere. He told her he was disappointed that she hadn’t reached her weight goal of 155 pounds. Raniere had shared his theory about energy exchange during sex, claiming body fat got in the way. Daniela felt rejected and disappointed that, after all this anticipation, nothing had happened.

  But a few days later, Raniere followed through. He took her to an office building once used by Consumers’ Buyline and led her down a second-floor hallway to a suite of offices, where he brought her into a small room.

  Daniela described the room as dimly lit, with stacks of boxes everywhere. In the center of the floor, on an old, dirty carpet, was a mattress. “It had raggy, used sheets on it,” she recalled. “It wasn’t like—that bed wasn’t made up.”

  Raniere asked her to undress, and she did. At first he kept his clothes on as he performed oral sex on her, and then he undressed and got on top of her. “He gave me a hug, like a long hug is what it was,” she said. “And then he just kissed me, got up, helped me up and got dressed, and I drove him back to Flintlock.”

  Almost as soon as they’d parted, Raniere called Daniela to talk about the experience. Seemingly out of nowhere, he asked her why she hadn’t asked him to use protection. “Confusion ensued because I couldn’t understand why he was asking me to use protection if I didn’t feel he penetrated me,” Daniela testified. “He was telling me that he did penetrate me and I did lose my virginity, but I did not feel that.”

  Raniere later offered her theories as to why she’d “blocked out” the penetrative part of their encounter, but she was confident that she’d never felt an erection. “I feel very sure of what I felt. I was there. It’s my body so it’s very confusing to have contradictory information,” she said. On a long walk together, when Raniere continued returning to the subject, Daniela suggested that maybe she’d blocked it out because deep down she hadn’t wanted it.

  “He corrected me and he gave me the right answer,” she recalled. “He said, ‘No, the reason why you didn’t feel it was because you were too in your head. That’s what you need to work on. That’s why.’ ”

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  ON THE WITNESS stand at Raniere’s trial, psychologist Dawn Hughes described gaslighting as “a behavior that functions to make you think you’re crazy by telling you up is down and left is right.” Gaslighting has become something of a buzzword in recent years, best known as the thing Teen Vogue accused President Donald Trump of doing to America. “It functions to make the victim not trust her own perceptions, not trust her own judgment, and not really have a sense of what really is going on, because she’s continually told that she is to blame,” Hughes testified.

  The prosecutors would return to “up is down” moments with many of the witnesses, often spending excruciating amounts of time unpacking what the women understood as reality and what Raniere and his fixers insisted instead. This was consistent across decades, whether the witnesses were high-ranking power brokers like Lauren Salzman or the lower-ranking “slaves” who were later initiated into the secret women’s group DOS with no knowledge of Raniere’s role in orchestrating it. In June 2019, after watching four DOS women, including Lauren Salzman, testify, I wrote a story for Vice about the thread prosecutors seemed to want the jury to follow: that Raniere’s slave group was in part powered by gaslighting, that he repeatedly invented new circumstances that changed and discredited women’s own experiences. Raniere even told one of his partners: “Things are most maneuverable when they are most unstable.”

  Daniela was not part of DOS. She left Albany long before branding and blackmail became formalized rites of passage for the young women closest to Raniere. But Daniela did see her relationship with Raniere as “an ownership of sorts.” And she had the most crystallized “up is down” story of all the witnesses. She didn’t use the word “gaslighting,” but she
articulated what it felt like to have her sense of the world undermined by Raniere.

  She got an uneasy feeling again when she asked him about the status of their relationship and stated her preference for monogamy. “He said we had already discussed that,” she testified, adding that by Raniere’s account they had agreed to a three-year relationship contract. “I felt really confused about the fact that we didn’t have that conversation…. I thought maybe he had it with a different woman.”

  Though the disagreement was far from settled, their relationship moved into a new phase where Raniere initiated sexual encounters and told Daniela his beliefs about sex and monogamy. “Among the reasons presented why he could have sex with other women, but I, for example, could not have sex with other men, is because that would hurt him,” Daniela said in court. “That meant we had some kind of a connection through sex; that if I had sex with someone else, he would feel it.”

  Raniere asked Daniela if she saw a blue light after they had sex—something that other women apparently saw. Daniela did not see any blue light and told him as much. He suggested she wasn’t sensitive to the same subtle energy shifts as other women were.

  Raniere also told Daniela that sex was a tool he used to fix “disintegrations” in women. He claimed to be able to see disintegrations and other weaknesses in people’s bodies, and that he could heal them through sex or through NXIVM therapies.

  “I found it very confusing, because the reason why I admired Keith and respected Keith was because I thought he was the smartest man in the world,” Daniela said. “To me, all that mysticism, if not in contrary, at least it’s not in line with what I believe science is.” Daniela was bold enough to discourage Raniere from speaking publicly about his parapsychological claims, saying it went against NXIVM’s mission.

  In a short amount of time, Daniela was initiated into Raniere’s inner circle of subjugated girlfriends. Though she didn’t realize it then, she would look back at her sexual relationship with Raniere as one-sided and steeped in manipulation. “I had no other thing to compare it to,” she testified. “All of the oral sex he had me give him, that was normalized. I didn’t know what it was to be a woman in a relationship.”

  Daniela said that her concept of being a woman in a relationship was all about giving pleasure, and it didn’t include receiving. “I didn’t know that it was an inordinate amount of pleasure, and it was not reciprocal, and that is not normal,” she said. “I mean, I’m not a sex-crazed person who wants to give oral sex all the time. That’s not who I am. That’s not what I wanted. All of that is a slow manipulation.”

  Her ensnarement would get progressively worse over the next decade. When her tourist visa was withdrawn, Daniela said, Raniere hatched a plan to sneak her back into the country using a fake ID. Whenever she would question his motives and methods, he would leverage her fear of deportation. Eventually, Daniela would be confined to a room for twenty-three months as punishment for daring to fall in love with someone who wasn’t Raniere.

  Daniela was, she said, “like a little deer.” Raniere had set up a trap for her, “and when I fell, he’s like, ‘Oh, you fell in a trap.’ ”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Heist

  Did Daniela really fall into a trap? If so, when was it set, and how did it work?

  Though Raniere billed himself as a scientist and philosopher, his skill set was closer to that of a stage hypnotist or illusionist. Former NXIVM insiders have compared him to Derren Brown, a U.K. performer who cranks out TV specials featuring what seem like superhuman powers of persuasion.

  In his 2006 special The Heist, Brown styled himself as a shady motivational guru and used conditioning, emotional anchoring, and other “insidious” techniques to encourage a mental state where a regular person would voluntarily participate in an armed robbery.

  Brown claimed that the show’s thirteen participants were drawn from the public, had steady middle-management jobs, and had no criminal record. They all met at a U.K. hotel and were subjected to a human experiment without knowing it. After dinner and several drinks, a server arrived with an unexpected food bill. “I want to see how they react: who complies, who gets angry, and who emerges as the alpha male, or female, and takes charge,” Brown explained. The outcome would inform who he’d select for further conditioning and manipulation.

  The next morning, Brown kicked off what the participants understood to be a five-hour seminar in “mind mastery,” full of tricks taken from the neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) playbook. Among them was the scientifically unproven idea that eye movements left, right, up, or down could reveal whether a person was genuinely remembering something or fabricating it on the spot. The participants tested it out and believed they were empowered with new body-language reading skills.

  NLP coaching is a growing facet of the multibillion-dollar self-help industry. It isn’t taught in academic settings—more often it’s experienced in hyped-up workshops like the one Brown staged for TV. Today these sessions are run by multi-level marketers, pickup artists, and business improvement YouTubers alike. They sell a chance to make more money, find more romantic partners, and unlock success in every imaginable aspect of life.

  For the record, Amir Raz, a hypnosis researcher at McGill University’s department of psychiatry, says the eye-movement technique, and NLP generally, is pseudoscience, talked up by the likes of self-help maven Tony Robbins and rejected by actual neuroscientists. “The whole claim on which this field is founded is completely tenuous,” he said. “In many ways I find it unethical.”

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  BROWN IS MORE transparent than you’d expect about his use of pseudoscience, misdirection, and straight-up bullshit. He admits that several techniques are effectively placebos, but claims that self-styled gurus like himself (and Raniere) are most powerful when audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and trust that something exciting and improbable is about to happen.

  The Heist participants then learned to create a “motivated state” through “anchoring”: “I tell them to remember when they felt highly motivated, and then to amplify that feeling,” Brown said. He told them to link that go-getter feeling to the “trigger” of rubbing their leg with their hand. “They can create the motivated state on their own just by rubbing,” he suggested. “And the more they do it, the stronger the association becomes.” Brown later had some of them practice this while playing a Jackson 5 song, aiming to trigger their “go-time” emotional state whenever they heard it in future.

  Brown’s self-help seminar featured in The Heist was full of outlaw language. Slogans like “Steel yourself” (playing on the word “steal”) and “Do it” littered his slideshow, and subjects received realistic toy guns to symbolize their new status as “thought criminals.” Brown then instructed participants to steal candy from a convenience store as a fun way to harness their inner child and take an exciting risk. This amounted to simple boundary testing. Some refused, and they were eliminated from the show. But the ones who tried it and framed it as a positive experience advanced to the next phase.

  After a few more experiments and conditioning exercises—including one where the participants rehearsed saying the words “Get down on the floor” in an unrelated context—Brown selected four people for the final experiment. Participants were each brought to a back alley. Unaware that they were being filmed, they had to walk alone, with a toy gun in hand, toward where an actor posing as a security guard was putting two giant cases, presumably full of cash, into the back of a security truck. The hope was that—with gun in hand, a few billboards in the vicinity that happened to display the slogan “Do it,” and a passing car playing the aforementioned Jackson 5 song—one or more participants would be triggered into spontaneously robbing the security guard.

  Three of the four selected participants went through with it. They pointed their guns, threatened the guard, and ran off before a crew intervened to stop t
hem. Brown claims that each of them truly believed they were committing a robbery.

  The Derren Brown special is entertainment and should be taken with enough grains of salt to garnish the rim of a margarita. Some of these participants may have caught on to the larceny theme early and knowingly played along or simply hammed it up for the camera. But Brown uses real motivation and conditioning techniques that are widely used in the field of self-help, and their employment on his show is an example of the kind of selection and manipulation “trap” ex-NXIVM members say they felt caught in.

  A close read of Raniere’s self-help methods shows he was guzzling from the same well of pop psychology and pseudoscience that Brown draws from. When an itemized list of books from Raniere’s executive library became evidence at trial in 2019, it wasn’t surprising to find Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, which is one of Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s founding texts on NLP, published in 1976; and the pop psychology juggernaut Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, first published in 1984 and updated in 2001. (Raniere also had five copies of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness, and several For Dummies computer programming books.)

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  TO UNCOVER HOW these persuasion, selection, and conditioning techniques might have played out in a NXIVM curriculum setting, I took a deep dive into Raniere’s patent application for Rational Inquiry, in which he sets out, for example, how lessons are conducted. Within the very first moments of a NXIVM class, ritualistic hand clapping, sash wearing, and group recitation offered an opportunity to observe students’ natural tendencies toward dominance or submission to authority. Students were led through a series of handshakes, stepping into them with a different foot forward, cocking their wrist slightly downward, and “gaining control” by grasping with their middle and ring finger. They learned a special NXIVM handshake that required students of lower rank to put their left hand on top of their already shaking right hand as a sign of respect.