Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Daniela was intrigued, even excited by this response. The math made sense in her head—sticking to the rules only limited the total number of options available in a given situation. That meant bad people were always going to win.

  “Ultimately this is to do good,” Raniere told Daniela. “So we’re going to have to break some rules in order to make that happen.”

  She would be applying her coding skills to further the NXIVM mission, even if it wasn’t anything like what she expected when she’d first taken a course at age sixteen. She was nearing her twentieth birthday now, and her days mostly consisted of listening to war room debates, overhearing heated commodities trading calls, and giving Raniere blow jobs anytime he thought to drop his pants. Manipulating software to achieve a special secret mission felt like a level up in her life.

  Daniela took extra care to ensure her hacking efforts wouldn’t be detected. Cafritz gave her $500 to buy a new refurbished computer that wouldn’t be linked to her name in any way. She would use public wifi and a set of brand-new anonymous Gmail accounts to send test emails with spyware embedded in attachments. If the targeted person clicked on the attachment Daniela had sent, the code she’d created would log every keystroke they made and upload those records to a server.

  Daniela hid the spyware in Excel spreadsheets and image files. To bypass spam filters, she learned to mask her email address with a less conspicuous one. Her first attempts weren’t successful, but she refined her process over time. “I would code it in a way that it would self-destroy if it wasn’t opened in a certain amount of time, so that there would be no evidence sitting there in someone’s inbox,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  BY 2005, RANIERE and Clare Bronfman had a new enemy they wanted Daniela to target: Clare’s father. Daniela knew that Edgar Bronfman was a powerful man and that she’d need to be extra careful to avoid getting caught. So instead of sending an infected email from one of her anonymous Gmail accounts, she worked directly with Clare to attach the code to a message from his daughter—an email he’d be more likely to open.

  “Clare hacked her father’s email account,” Kristin Keeffe said in a 2015 phone call that would later become evidence in court. Together, Clare and Daniela sent Edgar an email with a photo attachment that contained a key-logging virus. She chose a photo of a bear, playing to her father’s pet name for her: Clare Bear.

  “Clare went so far as to send the email to her father—’Oh, look at this thing’…but he never opened the picture,” Keeffe alleged. “So she went down to his office and met with him, and specifically said, ‘I want to show you this picture.’ ” She then “went on his email with him and downloaded the virus onto his computer herself.”

  After Clare had opened the infected file, Daniela started receiving all the keystrokes Edgar Bronfman was making. “Very rapidly, as I remember, I get the username and password that I’m looking for, which was, as I remember, his AOL account,” Daniela testified. “And, I mean, this was a high-profile person as I understood, so immediately after I had that access I killed the back door…. I didn’t need any more key logs being uploaded.” She recalled that Bronfman’s password was “miles75”—his middle name and the year he married Clare’s mother (also, more darkly, the year his eldest son, Samuel, was kidnapped and held for ransom).

  Daniela testified that she logged on to his AOL account and read his emails. From then on, anytime Raniere requested an update on the Bronfman email account, Daniela would log on late at night, copy and paste a selection from his inbox and his “sent” folder into a document, and pass it on to Raniere.

  “There were communications between him and his family, there were a lot of emails about scheduling—whether he was going to travel to this place or that place. There was a great deal of, like, political emails. I noticed he was a man with very good manners. It seemed he always sent thank-you emails after meeting someone, or having an event and running into someone,” Daniela recalled. “He followed up on things like that at a very personal level. I remember that.”

  * * *

  —

  AS PART OF Daniela’s work for Raniere, she had access to his executive library and his hard drives. At trial, prosecutors showed video clips of Raniere in his library, which was really a dimly lit condo that housed his Steinway piano, his books and whiteboard, a sauna, a hot tub, and a loft space containing a bed with a TV mounted on the ceiling. Raniere frequently ordered books on Amazon, and when they arrived it was Daniela’s job to catalog them. She would also digitize music files or back up computer folders at Raniere’s request.

  Daniela testified that it was during one of these digitizing assignments that she came across a folder of naked photos. It wasn’t hard to figure out they were Raniere’s, as she recognized some of the women. “There was one that I distinctly remember because I didn’t know Keith was having sex with her,” Daniela said. It was her younger sister’s first roommate, Monica Duran.

  Seeing the photos triggered a not-too-distant memory for Daniela. She’d been sitting on the Flintlock couch when Raniere had insisted she pull her pants down and let him take a close-up picture with his new camera. “I knew he had taken pictures of me, so I asked him to delete my pictures. I didn’t click through [the folder], so I don’t remember having seen myself.”

  That backup folder, or some later version of it, is likely what became key evidence in the sex trafficking and racketeering trial against Raniere, containing graphic photos of Daniela’s sister Camila, taken when she was fifteen. Daniela said she didn’t see her sister’s pictures, but she told Raniere to delete the folder. “I remember my approach when I went to him was like in a ‘I’m looking out for you’ kind of way, like, You really shouldn’t have that there. You really should be more careful. I found it. Anybody else could find it,” she said.

  Though she didn’t see Camila’s photos, Daniela soon learned that Raniere was having sex with her younger sister. Daniela had noticed that Camila was looking unwell and was leaving small self-inflicted cuts visible on her skin. On top of the cutting, she was wearing ragged clothes and writing dark poetry. “She didn’t look good,” Daniela testified. “It was very concerning to me, so I went through her stuff.”

  Daniela read Camila’s private writing, including a letter that revealed her sexual relationship with Raniere. “It said things like she was sexually unsatisfied. It said things like she really wanted to have a baby,” Daniela said. Camila was sixteen years old.

  Daniela confronted Raniere, but she didn’t put a stop to the relationship. Exposing it would have meant exposing her own secret. She testified that Raniere convinced her to put the letter back and let him handle it. “I deeply regret that I didn’t at that moment get my sister out of there,” she said. “But that’s how it happened.”

  * * *

  —

  IN 2006 DANIELA realized she was pregnant, which became another secret that ate her up inside. She testified that Raniere had joked about one day having really smart kids with really big heads, but she never wanted that for herself.

  “I thought he was a great man, but he was with a lot of other women and he was with my sisters and that was not something that I wanted the world to know,” Daniela said. “That was something that caused me a lot of shame.”

  Daniela needed time to process the news, though her instincts leaned toward choosing an abortion. When she told Raniere about the pregnancy, she learned the decision had already been made for her. “He very matter-of-factly stated that we already talked about that if I got pregnant, I would have an abortion,” she recalled. “We had never talked about that before. Never. I would have known.

  “That interaction was very shocking to me, and I was very emotional and I was very scared, but it was also what I wanted,” Daniela said. “I could not imagine having a baby. So I didn’t push back. Even though I knew we did not have that conversation.”

 
Daniela said she went through with the abortion, and that Pam Cafritz coached her on what to say to the staff at the clinic. Because she couldn’t talk about it with anyone except Pam and Raniere, she was alone for the two days the doctor told her she would bleed and feel intense pain. She would later learn that both of her sisters also had abortions, and that all three of them were coached through the process by Cafritz.

  Within days, Raniere was looking for an upside to Daniela’s abortion. “I remember just a few days after, we were on a walk and he told me this was a great opportunity for me to lose weight and get fit.”

  “What do you mean?” Daniela replied.

  “There are Olympic athletes that get pregnant on purpose just to have abortions as part of their training,” Raniere said, according to Daniela.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S NOT CLEAR whether Raniere’s response to Daniela’s abortion was the catalyst, but after that exchange Daniela said her heart wasn’t in the relationship. That fall she started to develop feelings for someone else. Ben Myers, a fellow NXIVM student and employee who attended all the same volleyball games and social gatherings, became the focus of her romantic attention. Myers was a few years older than Daniela, with an awkward computer geek disposition. He worked in the IT department and attended weekly Star Trek screenings at the Flintlock house.

  “It happened one night at Star Trek,” Daniela testified. “I had never felt attracted to him before. It was really just like a friendly relationship.” She recalled that over the course of the episode they were watching, they had naturally inched closer to each other, and after everyone else left, they almost kissed.

  “I felt something for him, and I think he felt something for me, and there was this brand-new feeling for me of attraction. Which was new. And it was an intense moment,” Daniela said. “We didn’t even kiss, but it was really close. So there was this tension that built up.”

  Daniela tried to articulate how she felt about Ben Myers to Raniere. Raniere was her best friend, her closest confidant, she testified. “I had nobody else to tell. It never crossed my mind to hide it.”

  But Raniere was not the supportive friend she thought he would be. He told her she was wrong about her own feelings. “His direction was, ‘No, no, no, no, no, that’s not what it is. You are making it up. You cause every single feeling you have and you should have that for me, not for him.’ ”

  Not only did this reaction not make sense to Daniela, it also didn’t work. She went to Star Trek night the next week full of anticipation and curiosity. Would she and Ben finally kiss? Did he feel the same way as she did? She distinctly remembered what clothes she put on for the occasion: a white crew-neck top and a long Ralph Lauren skirt with two buttons on the side.

  Daniela and Ben stayed on the couch together after the screening. They talked and moved toward each other, and then finally it happened. They kissed, or more accurately, they made out. “I liked the way I felt with him and I liked what happened,” she said.

  Daniela didn’t want to hide this blossoming crush from Raniere. Her sense of justice led her to think he’d come around to seeing her perspective. How could he stand in the way of something so innocent and lovely? With the right negotiation strategy, she thought she could persuade him that he didn’t need her as a romantic partner, that he had plenty of women in his life already.

  “The way I saw it, Keith didn’t really love me. Keith loved my sister Marianna. Keith loved Pam. He spent a lot of time with them,” Daniela said. “He spent time with me but it wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t sexual. I mean, he had me give him oral sex but that was very robotic and mechanical.”

  Daniela thought Raniere would be willing to compromise, to trade in their life commitment for a lifelong friendship. But it didn’t go that way. “He was angry. I had never seen him angry,” she said. “It was dramatic. It was irrational. It was illogical. I remember that night, and I remember there was no reasoning with him.”

  Raniere told Daniela that she was no longer pure. She had broken her word and in the process had destroyed so many things that she didn’t even realize it. To understand what Raniere was accusing Daniela of destroying, another lesson in NXIVM jargon is necessary. NXIVM taught that reality is separate from our perceptions, and that our perceptions can influence others. NXIVM students called the mental image of a person a “thought object.” Daniela had learned it was important to speak honorably of others; otherwise, you could harm the “thought object” of a person in other people’s heads.

  “I had destroyed the thought object of him,” Daniela explained at Raniere’s trial. “He is telling me that the way I think of him, I’ve changed forever and I’ve destroyed it, and that is my fault and that is an ethical breach for me.”

  Daniela did not accept this ruling without putting up a fight.

  “Why can’t we just be friends? You can still teach me. We can still do science together. We can still do great things together,” she pleaded. “There was just no reasoning with him. He would not let it go. It was, ‘No, you can’t, you’re destroying me. I’ve done everything for you and you are now damaging me. You’re hurting my heart.’ ”

  “You are going to kill me,” Raniere said.

  * * *

  —

  UNLIKE MANY IN Raniere’s harem, Daniela didn’t give much weight to the metaphysical link he claimed to have with women in his inner circle. He said their actions could give him chills, sap his energy, cause him physical pain, and make him feel sick. Daniela had seen and heard him manipulate others this way. Now he was turning his arsenal of manipulation and discipline tactics on her.

  “I remember standing there telling him, ‘Hey, don’t use that on me. I’m your friend. I’ve seen you use this with everybody else,’ ” Daniela said.

  Raniere told her she was choosing pride over her life commitment. He called her destructive. He told her she was wrong about her own feelings. “You say that about Ben but you’re wrong. You don’t even know what you feel. You’re not honest with yourself,” she said he told her.

  Daniela resisted Raniere’s attempts to confuse her. She went with him when he tried to storm off. She followed him to the executive library, and then back to the Flintlock house, where Karen Unterreiner and Pam Cafritz heard them. “Honestly, maybe I was stubborn but I couldn’t let it go. I was very clear what I felt and what I thought about it,” Daniela recalled.

  Raniere suddenly lunged for the bathroom and locked himself inside. Unterreiner asked Daniela to leave, but she refused. “I was like, ‘No, I want to figure this out.’ ”

  Eventually Raniere opened the bathroom door and ran up the stairs. Daniela ran up after him. He ducked into Pam’s room with Daniela close behind him. Daniela recalled Raniere grabbing her by the arm as she approached and pushing her to the floor, where she fell on a mattress.

  Raniere ran out of the room and Daniela stayed on the floor. The confrontation was over. After that night, in November 2006, Daniela would never have another face-to-face conversation with Raniere, but she would stay involuntarily fixated on the exchange for many years to come. Nobody knew what her “ethical breach” had been, but the breach became the justification for escalating intervention and discipline at the hands of her family and community.

  The argument also marked a turning point in Daniela’s thinking about Raniere. Just as Lauren Salzman would realize during Raniere’s arrest a decade later, Daniela saw that Raniere did not live up to his own ethical principles. “I can say this now but I didn’t grasp it fully then…that Keith was a regular man, a fallible human, and all of those characteristics that I attributed to him, a better being in a way, wasn’t true.”

  Though the doubts were beginning to set in by 2006, another six years would pass before Daniela escaped Albany for good.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Golden Boy

  Daniela didn’t want to have
Keith Raniere’s baby, but there were many women in the NXIVM community who did. Publicly, Raniere maintained that he’d renounced all physical pleasure and material things. His fixers called him a “renunciate,” but at the same time he was sleeping with a dozen or more women, secretly promising many of them that he’d one day give them his first-born child.

  One of those women was Nancy Salzman’s daughter, Lauren. Since her late twenties, Lauren Salzman had been dedicated to proving herself a worthy mother to Raniere’s children. The two began a secret relationship in 2001, when Lauren was fresh out of college. By 2006 Raniere was showing less interest in her—and by 2009 they’d stopped sleeping together entirely—but her loyalty and wish for a family only grew stronger.

  “When I started getting closer to thirty, I started pushing that I thought I wanted to do it sooner,” she testified. Raniere often told would-be mothers like Lauren that they just weren’t ready. They needed to work on their issues first.

  Privately, Raniere often said he took on new sexual relationships for the benefit of his partners. He told Salzman it was sometimes difficult to take on new women, but that it was best for their growth. Salzman too thought she was overcoming her attachments and hang-ups through their complicated, mostly one-way relationship, but becoming a mother was not an attachment she was prepared to give up.

  At times she even suggested that Raniere allow her to break off their lifetime commitment so that she could fulfill her dream of being a mother with somebody else. She testified that he strung her along with a pledge to “reinvest” in their relationship but later found new reasons not to pursue having a child. “It was just this never-ending thing that got put off and put off and put off,” she said.

  Salzman testified that the conditioning instilled by NXIVM’s women-only “Jness” curriculum planted suggestions that women should want to have kids with Raniere. Talking points at some meetings raised eugenicist ideas about prioritizing the genetically fittest mate—Raniere naturally being the smartest, most evolved example on everyone’s mind. This kind of conditioning was part of the reason why Salzman and many other women in NXIVM’s inner circle held on to the hope that they would one day have Raniere’s child.