Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  It isn’t hard to see why NXIVM might set its sights on recruiting Vicente and bringing his mashup of science and spirituality into the self-help universe they were building. Like What the Bleep, Raniere traded on the urban legend that we use only 10 percent of our brains, selling students on a promise to access more of that other 90 percent.

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  AT THE HEIGHT of What the Bleep’s popularity, in October 2004, Vicente received a letter from Barbara Bouchey inviting him to a symposium involving many of the people who appeared in his documentary. Bouchey was planning a November event that aimed to bring together fifteen to twenty scientists in the fields of “science, physics and systems thinking,” according to her letter, to discuss the “connection between what you think inside your mind and what’s happening outside,” among other topics. The invite called Vicente and his codirectors “visionaries” who would have “profound effects in the world for generations to come.”

  Teah Banks, Vicente’s girlfriend at the time, recalls that, for much of 2004 and well into 2005, the What the Bleep filmmakers were flooded with similar letters and invites. Because of the film’s ambitious themes tying religion and science together, many spiritual splinter groups attempted to get in touch.

  When Banks had attended Ramtha’s spiritual retreats with Vicente, she’d found the intense New Agey talk of “vibrations” and “frequencies” a little too off the beaten path and wanted to try something more serious. Bouchey’s letter stuck out from all the hippies and kooks. She sounded professional, academic, and full of praise. Vicente testified that he replied right away.

  Banks says that she and Vicente were in Los Angeles for a What the Bleep screening when they first exchanged phone numbers with Bouchey and Nancy Salzman, who said they were attending an event in San Francisco in the coming days. Over the phone Vicente and Banks learned that their new admirers had access to a private jet and were keen to fly down to L.A. to meet the couple for lunch the next day.

  Banks and Vicente agreed, and made their way to a Beverly Hills hotel the following afternoon. As Vicente remembers it, Bouchey and Salzman complimented his film and made a case for him to come visit Albany. They told him about an “incredible mentor” named Keith Raniere—a scientist, mathematician, and all-round great person—who apparently knew how to “hack the human behavior equation.” They were prepared to fly Banks and Vicente to upstate New York in the jet the following morning.

  Banks says she was intrigued by the pitch but that, more importantly, she wanted to get to know Bouchey and Salzman as people. “It was strange. I don’t have a lot of female role models, and I remember I just instantly wanted to be like them,” she recalls of the meeting. “They just seemed so polished.”

  Vicente and Banks returned to their home in Ashland, Oregon, but made plans to rejoin their new friends a few weeks later. The couple agreed to travel with Sara Bronfman and Salzman to meet with the scientists who had appeared in What the Bleep. Vicente testified that the Bronfmans’ twelve-seat jet picked them up in Oregon and flew them around the country over several days.

  Banks says that most of the scientists and researchers they met on that trip weren’t all that interested in NXIVM’s self-help methods, but that she and Vicente grew more captivated by Salzman’s talk therapy skills. Nancy Salzman was using Vicente and Banks as live guinea pigs “to demonstrate to the scientists what the methodology was,” Vicente said.

  When they returned to Ashland, Banks says, they went out for dinner as a group. Banks informed a server that she had a dairy allergy, which caught Salzman’s attention.

  “ ‘What do you mean you’re allergic to milk?’ ” she remembers Salzman saying.

  Banks replied that she’d had the allergy since she was a little girl.

  “Well, let me ask you,” Salzman said. “Do you remember the first time that you were allergic to milk?”

  Banks told her she did remember her first allergic reaction. “It was when I was six or seven years old, and I poured myself a glass of milk,” Banks says. “And my mom came down and said, ‘That’s too much milk. You better drink all of it; don’t waste any of that.’ ” The next morning, Banks woke up with a rash all over her face. “So my mom told me I was allergic to milk.”

  Salzman proposed a different theory. She suggested that Banks’s reaction was likely a phobia caused by her mother’s overbearing response. She asked about Banks’s relationship with her mother and how it made her feel, which made Banks emotional. After only a few minutes of talking at the dinner table, Salzman told Banks that she believed her dairy allergy was likely now resolved.

  Vicente later testified that he watched this tearful interaction with a sense of wonder and surprise. “I was mystified by the nature of her questions,” he said. “I couldn’t understand at the time what was happening.” Salzman explained to the couple that she was using a patent-pending technique called an exploration of meaning, or EM, that helped re-examine the illogical associations our brains make in childhood. NXIVM’s “technology,” they learned, helped to refile everything in the brain in order to make you a more logical, ethical person.

  The next day, Banks says, she tried dairy for the first time in decades, and Salzman’s prediction proved true. “I was pretty impressed with that,” Vicente later testified, “because, you know, a day later my girlfriend did actually try some cheese and she didn’t have the reaction she had always had.”

  EM sessions could get to the root cause of any unhealthy behavior pattern, Banks and Vicente learned. NXIVM students often started by identifying a “stimulus” that caused trouble in their life, like a dairy allergy or fear of flying. The EM questioning process frequently led to a person’s most sensitive, embarrassing, or terrifying experiences.

  If an EM practitioner did it well, the student might just forget what was said. “You wouldn’t even remember what your EM was about, and that was considered a good thing,” one student told me. “If you’re integrated, you don’t need to know what your problem was—it’s gone.”

  Scientology has a similar way of dissecting emotionally charged memories, through a process called “auditing.” An auditor leads a “pre-clear” individual through a series of questions aimed to stir up emotions and insecurities. With the help of an “e-meter”—a pseudoscientific handheld device that is supposed to identify emotional spikes with a bouncing arrow—the auditor guides the person through those traumatizing places in their mind until the emotional charge is weakened or there’s some kind of resolution.

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  THE OVERNIGHT ALLERGY cure marked the beginning of Vicente’s journey into the center of an organization that would continue presenting him with modern-day miracles. It wasn’t all that different from the unbelievable things he’d seen at Ramtha’s School, which taught that reality was a flexible concept. Vicente decided to spend a year studying Raniere’s “tech” to see whether he could harness its magic in film form.

  Banks says that she and Vicente were “swept away” once they got to Albany. They’d committed to attending only a five-day seminar but ended up staying for three weeks in Salzman’s house, where they talked at length with Salzman’s daughter, Lauren, and other members of the inner circle.

  Vicente was especially interested in meeting the Vanguard, Keith Raniere, but it wasn’t until the tenth day of NXIVM classes that he was deemed ready for the experience. “I remember we spoke about dark matter, quantum mechanics,” Vicente said of his first conversations with Raniere. “He was talking to me about a certain kind of mathematics. I said I had never heard about it before. He said, ‘Well, actually I invented this mathematics,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that’s amazing.’ Not being a mathematician, what do I know?”

  When she first met Raniere, Banks saw a gentle, humble guy who cared about plants and animals. One day during their first visit he walked into Salzman’s house with a potted
plant he said he’d rescued from an alley.

  Another day, when Banks found out that Raniere was getting a massage from one of the community members in a bedroom in Salzman’s house, she was told that Raniere didn’t have a house of his own, that he’d renounced all material possessions. Salzman explained that he stayed with a rotating cast of community members, which sometimes included stays at her place. Banks was nervous about even speaking to him because of his prophet-like status among the people she’d met.

  At one point, Banks says, she questioned Salzman about the way women acted around Raniere. She noticed that they’d get flustered and become fawning, sometimes competing for Raniere’s attention. “I turned to Nancy and said, ‘Does Keith just get to pick who he has sex with? What’s going on here?’ ”

  Salzman’s swift and disapproving response took Banks by surprise. She said Raniere didn’t have sex at all, that he was like a monk. Salzman added that she personally hadn’t had sex in three years. Then Sara Bronfman chimed in, saying she hadn’t slept with anyone in a year.

  “Mark and I were weirded out by that,” Banks says. But they were also sort of amazed by the apparent feats of self-restraint. Eventually this would become part of the mythology Vicente and Banks used to entice people into learning more about NXIVM. “This guy doesn’t own anything, he doesn’t have sex—how can you not be part of this group?”

  Though Salzman chastened Banks for bringing up Raniere’s sex life, Raniere and Salzman often talked about other people’s sexual hang-ups. On one occasion, when the discussion turned to sex, Banks says that Raniere put her on the spot, asking in front of a room of people why she was getting embarrassed.

  Another time, Banks says, Salzman directly questioned her about her intentions with Vicente. “She said, ‘Don’t you want to be more than Mark’s fuck toy?’ ” Again, Banks was thrown off balance by the question. “We were staying at her house, and we were a new couple, so I’m sure we had sex, but we tried to be quiet…. I just said that’s not how I view our relationship at all.”

  For a long time, Vicente’s only access to Raniere was at late-night volleyball games. “I wanted to have a meeting with him away from the gym,” Vicente recalled. “I was receiving EMs [explorations of meaning] on my overeagerness, my insistence that I should meet him.” Finally, on his birthday, at seven a.m., Vicente got a call from Raniere asking if he wanted to go for a walk.

  “Of course I was over the moon, because this is what I’ve been waiting for,” he said. “It was seen as a big deal that you got to have time with him.”

  Despite the philosophical similarities between NXIVM and Ramtha, Raniere convinced Vicente that Ramtha’s founder was a crackpot and that he should stop attending retreats in Washington. Salzman and Raniere assembled a “deprogramming team” to rid Vicente of his “mystical beliefs.”

  Raniere “spent an inordinate amount of time teasing me about it,” Vicente testified. Pam Cafritz told Vicente that it was a big deal that Raniere had taken a liking to him. She said Raniere didn’t have many male friends and suggested that Vicente could fulfill that role. Salzman echoed Cafritz. “If you’re very fortunate,” she told Vincente, “he may actually decide to mentor you personally, and that would be extraordinary.”

  “I believe I said something like ‘I really would love that, that would be very important to me,’ ” Vicente testified.

  This concentrated effort served to secure Vicente as a “true believer” in NXIVM for more than a decade to come. Banks was simultaneously pushed away.

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  IT WAS V-WEEK 2005 when Mark Vicente and Teah Banks finally split. Banks was out doing some errands when she had a “run-in” with Nancy Salzman that left her in tears. After Banks had left Salzman’s car running with the door open for a few moments, Salzman unleashed an unsettlingly angry tirade about safety and responsibility, and then acted as if it had never happened.

  When Vicente found Banks in a bedroom crying and questioning whether she even belonged at V-Week, he suggested it might be time for them to go their separate ways. “He’s just like, ‘Maybe it’s not going to work out,’ ” Banks says. “Because I was kind of fed up, I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is the right place for me.’ But he was locked in.”

  Couples breaking up after a short time in NXIVM became something of a running joke in the community. If couples among the new students displayed affection for each other, they were warned that they probably wouldn’t be doing that for much longer. Coaches often advised that relationships were crutches and came from a place of inner deficiency—though this reasoning never seemed to apply to Raniere, who continued to accumulate partners in secret.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Cracked Open”

  The story of Vancouver’s NXIVM chapter, which grew into one of the most active and star-studded centers of the global organization, began with a chance meeting on a cruise ship.

  Thirteen years before the FBI alleged that top NXIVM members had committed sex trafficking and a variety of other crimes, Sarah Edmondson attended, in spring 2005, a floating spirituality-themed film festival with her director boyfriend Tony Dean Smith. That’s where she met Mark Vicente and Teah Banks, who were both still buzzing from their first sixteen-day NXIVM intensive a few months earlier.

  Edmondson had grown up in Vancouver as a theater kid with a director uncle. She got her first taste of a film shoot’s craft services table when she was sixteen. Sarah’s uncle Paul Shapiro, who went on to direct episodes of Roswell and Smallville, was working on a straight-to-TV movie called Avalanche with David Hasselhoff. “David needed a babysitter, so my uncle suggested I do it,” Edmondson told entertainment blogger Ruth Hill in 2017. “I was hooked.”

  Edmondson caught one of her first acting breaks on the CBC teen drama Edgemont, appearing in ten episodes as Stevie, a laid-back, cargo-jacket-wearing girlfriend of Shannon, played by Grace Park. When they were off set, the two women continued nurturing each other’s creativity by following the advice in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Part spiritual practice, part how-to prompt, the text inspired regular meetups and became an anchor for a circle of Edmondson’s close friends. “We worked, and had careers at a certain level, but we wanted to be more fulfilled as artists,” Edmondson told me. “So we got together, supported each other.”

  Grace Park and costar Kristin Kreuk stayed close with Edmondson, even as they went on to bigger roles on Battlestar Galactica and Smallville, respectively. Edgemont was cancelled in 2005, leaving a twenty-seven-year-old Edmondson looking for her next big thing.

  As she first recounted on the CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM, Edmondson thought the cruise ship film festival could be an opportunity to get her life on track. At the time, she was really into “setting intentions” and was growing tired of always waiting for her agent to call.

  Edmondson was trying to contain the symptoms of a nasty cold, but while she and Tony Smith were seated beside Vicente and his girlfriend at dinner, her “seal bark” coughs kept interrupting their conversation. Vicente took Sarah aside between hacking fits and asked her a bizarre question: “What would you lose if you stopped coughing?” As in, What would be the “downside” if Edmondson weren’t so sick?

  It was the kind of counterintuitive question NXIVM used to engineer epiphanies, and it prompted a burst of self-reflection in Edmondson. She realized that her coughs were an attempt to get her boyfriend’s attention. She had subconsciously believed that sickness would earn her the care and love she craved.

  “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, whatever Mark from What the Bleep is up to, I wanna do,’ ” Edmondson told the CBC.

  This new way of looking at health and relationships impressed her. She listened as Vicente told her about Keith Raniere, a guy with a really, really high IQ—a true polymath with concert pianist skills—bringing people together to change the world.

 
Vicente was still a relatively new NXIVM student, but his clear-eyed observation of subtle interpersonal dynamics gave Edmondson a feeling of hope that she could figure out her life, too. Vicente passed on Edmondson’s name to Barbara Bouchey, one of the highest-ranking NXIVM recruiters in Albany at the time. Bouchey, who oversaw enrollment, made follow-up calls to Edmondson to close the deal.

  Edmondson wasn’t an easy catch; she almost backed out. It was only after Bouchey told her she needed to work on her limiting beliefs about money in order to become “master of her own ship” and stop helplessly relying on her agent that Edmondson made a plan to attend her first five-day intensive in Burnaby, B.C., a few weeks later. It was the company’s first time hosting the weeklong workshop in Canada.

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  EDMONDSON DIDN’T THINK to Google NXIVM until after her first day of class. After thirteen hours of hand-clapping and sashes and tears and soul-searching, she finally looked up some of the critical media coverage online. What she found wasn’t good: the 2003 Forbes article suggested that she wasn’t just receiving thirteen-plus hours of life coaching, she was being initiated into a cult.

  Edmondson called Vicente to ask him what the hell he’d signed her up for. He said that anybody could write anything on the internet, and that smear campaigns were being waged by powerful people with a vested interest in destroying a good thing. Edmondson thought this was a red flag, but she wasn’t running away screaming. She showed up the next day bright and early, in part just to see what would happen next.

  By day three she felt “cracked open” and committed to addressing her “self-limiting beliefs.” As she began to feel the “lift” from examining her own patterns of behavior with a new set of psychological tools, she started to imagine what her life would be like without all the blocks she’d created for herself.