Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

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  IT’S UNCLEAR WHETHER Kristin Keeffe was ever promised, as Salzman was, that she could bear Raniere’s first-born child, but she was definitely not supposed to be pregnant. Daniela was one of the few people to notice, in 2006. It was a short time before her blowout argument with Raniere. “I was spending a lot of time in Flintlock,” she testified. “At one time, I noticed her belly was very swollen—like, very, very, swollen—and I thought it was strange.”

  When Daniela noticed Keeffe’s belly a second time, she decided to mention it to Raniere. “I asked him if Kristin was pregnant and he said no, he had talked about that with her, but no.”

  Keeffe had good reasons to hide a pregnancy if she intended to keep it. During the jury selection process preceding Raniere’s trial, defense attorney Marc Agnifilo conceded that his client used abortion “cavalierly.” According to testimony in the trial, these abortions were sometimes carried out despite the wishes of the woman whose pregnancy was terminated.

  “There are a lot of abortions in this case,” Agnifilo remarked, out of earshot of a potential juror who’d said he was against abortion. Raniere had compelled “dozens” of abortions, Agnifilo revealed. The would-be juror was later dismissed.

  Why so many abortions? As Daniela learned firsthand, Raniere advised against hormonal birth control because weight gain was a common side effect. Abortion became a de facto birth control for Daniela and her sisters, and Cafritz, herself promised a child, was enlisted to ensure the procedures were carried out.

  Each time, Cafritz coached the sisters on what to say to doctors at the women’s clinic. They were instructed not to mention Raniere’s name or their undocumented status. On medical records presented at Raniere’s trial, Cafritz was listed as Camila’s only emergency contact when she was seeking a pregnancy termination in 2008.

  When clinic staff noted that the three sisters had all been accompanied by Cafritz and asked a few standard domestic abuse questions, Cafritz complained that the clinic was violating its patients’ privacy, which seemed to take care of the issue. By the time Marianna had her second pregnancy terminated, Cafritz and Raniere were well-practiced in making a pregnancy problem go away.

  So if Keeffe had told Raniere about her pregnancy, this apparently well-oiled abortion machine would likely have whirred into action. Instead, Daniela testified, the pregnancy announced itself with a pool of blood. “Kristin was upstairs in her room, and she hadn’t come out of her room,” she recalled. “I think Keith found her.”

  Keeffe was immediately taken to the hospital, likely by Cafritz. “It was a very serious situation,” Daniela said. “And Keith hadn’t gone. Keith had stayed back.”

  Daniela told the jury that Raniere received a phone call from the hospital that confirmed not just a pregnancy but a newborn baby boy. “I think Keith was talking to Kristin, but I remember the conversation being, like, ‘Well, how pregnant?’ Like, ‘How late in the term, how many months pregnant?’ ”

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  GAELYN WAS BORN several weeks premature in October 2006. As if that weren’t enough shocking news for one day, Keeffe also learned that she had cancer, according to testimony.

  Daniela and her younger sister, Camila, spent time with Keeffe in the intensive care unit, and assisted with childcare while Keeffe was undergoing cancer treatment.

  Camila grew especially close with the tiny, bright-eyed infant. “I even came to see her as Gaelyn’s second mother,” Daniela said of her sister. “She really was the one who took care of him since he was very, very little. She would go to the NICU, too, and she was doing a lot more of the babysitting.”

  When Gaelyn could finally come home, Raniere didn’t want the community to know the baby was his. And so, before Keeffe returned from the hospital, the inner circle hatched a plan to protect his reputation.

  “To the community, Keith was celibate,” Daniela noted. “Keith’s relationships with everyone were secret. Nobody knew. This was part of Keith’s image in the NXIVM community, so it would completely counter all they knew about him. If he had a baby, it means he had a relationship, and all of that would have to be explained.

  “It was plotted and planned that this baby was going to be in Barbara Jeske’s home,” Daniela continued. “That was a cover story, that she had adopted him, and that Kristin would be living there.”

  “I was there when it was told to the community,” the Seattle center’s Susan Dones recalled of the strange baby announcement. “It was during a training, and Nancy tells this story from the front of the room about this child. She said a friend of Barbara Jeske’s had a daughter who had been killed, she had a baby, and the parents couldn’t take care of the grandchild.”

  The NXIVM community apparently welcomed the child with open arms, many of them wholeheartedly believing the baby was being fostered. By the time Keeffe was out of the hospital, the story had already circulated widely. Keeffe said she accepted the cover story because she was convinced Raniere’s enemies would harm the baby if they knew he was the father.

  Jeske was declared the adoptive mother. Some questioned why a child was being handed over in this way—Dones worried Barbara Jeske could barely take care of her own dog—but most embraced the lie as a heartening rescue story following a terrible tragedy. Later, Keeffe quietly moved to her own townhouse next door with the baby.

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  WHEN NXIVM CRITIC Joe O’Hara heard about the mysterious adoption, he immediately knew something was amiss. O’Hara was a Washington lawyer who’d learned about Raniere’s unconventional business practices while working for him as a consultant.

  O’Hara had worked in child welfare and suspected the adoption was illegal. “You can’t trade kids like playing cards, there’s a process you have to go through,” he told me. O’Hara reached out to the Saratoga County Department of Social Services and the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.

  “I got zero response, and I mean zero, nothing, nada,” he said. Undeterred, he wrote a letter to the New York attorney general, Andrew Cuomo. “I probably wrote three letters, which got increasingly aggressive and increasingly detailed.” Finally, the government got sick of hearing from him and called state police to have a look.

  State trooper Rodger Kirsopp was brought in to investigate what he called the “golden child.” O’Hara gave Kirsopp all the information he had about NXIVM and the adoption story that Nancy Salzman and Barbara Jeske were spreading. After more than six months of investigation, Kirsopp finally confirmed that Kristin Keeffe and Keith Raniere were the parents.

  “Whatever story had been put out there by NXIVM was a fallacy,” Kirsopp said in a Vice interview in 2017.

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  GAELYN BECAME THE center of a new language program Raniere developed called “Rainbow Cultural Garden.” This “system of education” proposed to hire half a dozen nannies to speak different languages to a child at the early stages of development.

  “Even before Rainbow, we had heard that Gaelyn was being experimented on,” Joe O’Hara says about the language program Raniere was testing on his son. NXIVM critics heard that Gaelyn was on a bizarre diet and was limited in his interactions with other children.

  The Rainbow program was offered to other pre-kindergarten kids in the NXIVM community at a steep price. It was marketed to wealthy families who believed that kids with language skills would probably have more empathy and would maybe score higher on intelligence tests. No research was produced to support these claims.

  “My sister Cami was the first teacher in the program,” Daniela testified at Raniere’s trial in 2019. Nannies like Camila were called “multicultural development specialists,” and the program cost parents upward of $120,000 per year.

  Loreta Garza oversaw the hiring of several nannies with various cultural and linguistic b
ackgrounds. Other “specialists” spoke German, Hindi, Mandarin, and Arabic. The “full rainbow” included a different language every day of the week, and parents who paid for this service were sometimes asked not to interfere with the nannies during full-day teaching sessions.

  NXIVM’s critics were disturbed by the development. Again, O’Hara’s experience with child protection suggested that there were urgent reasons to investigate. The program would have to be registered, either as a school or a daycare, and O’Hara couldn’t find any evidence that NXIVM had taken these basic steps. He contacted the appropriate offices to complain, but it went nowhere. O’Hara began to suspect NXIVM had government backing.

  “I knew at some level they had some protection,” O’Hara told me. “Child welfare workers are among the most aggressive in government. People in that business really do care about kids. They put their own lives at risk going into abuse and neglect situations.” O’Hara thought the only way to explain the government’s failure to shut Rainbow down was that someone with insider influence had put a stop to any investigation. “Somewhere in the hierarchy the dogs weren’t being let loose,” he said.

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  FOR MORE THAN a decade, Rainbow continued to expand. Daycares opened in Monterrey, Miami, London, and Guatemala City. Sara Bronfman headed up Rainbow’s U.K. operations, and in 2017 she gave a rare interview to a British education consulting group called Quintessentially Education. Bronfman claimed that Rainbow’s “bespoke, in-home service” allowed children to speak four to seven languages fluently.

  “This service replaces a nanny or other childcare options from as early as three months to school age and beyond,” Bronfman explained. “As an example, a child might have a Spanish development specialist from eight to eleven a.m., Chinese Mandarin from eleven to two p.m., and Russian from two to five p.m. each day of the week, to introduce age-appropriate exercises in each language.”

  For many NXIVM followers, Rainbow was the calling card for the company’s world-changing credentials. Here was proof that they were literally breeding a new, more evolved generation that would speak more languages, live according to higher principles, and score higher on intelligence tests. Gaelyn was the “epitome of a Rainbow child,” former students told me. People told fantastical stories about him reading books as a toddler and speaking a dozen languages fluently. At V-Week and other community events he was held up as a prodigy—until he and his mother fled the community in 2014.

  “Keith was experimenting on him. I had to get Gaelyn away,” Keeffe wrote in a panicked April 2014 email to a lawyer she trusted. “The state police arranged a series of safe houses for me to stay in with Gaelyn and they moved us out of the Northeast.”

  Keeffe went into hiding, and Rodger Kirsopp, the state trooper who’d first investigated Gaelyn’s birth, helped her exit quietly. “We did help Kristin Keeffe,” he confirmed. “She came to us and asked us to help her get out of the situation that she was in. She was placed in a shelter.”

  When Keeffe left NXIVM, she took Rainbow’s shining case study with her. The wider community was told that Keeffe had taken over as Gaelyn’s foster parent but had “gone crazy” and kidnapped him. The company never completed a documentary that was supposed to showcase Gaelyn’s genius and the Rainbow program’s effectiveness.

  It wasn’t until after Raniere was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2018 that some Rainbow schools finally began to close. The state of Florida’s Department of Children and Families issued a statement saying that the agency “has no tolerance for any activities that put children at risk, including operating an unlicensed child-care facility.” A spokesperson for the department told the Miami New Times that operations at a midtown Miami Rainbow school had been halted until a thorough investigation could be completed.

  Yet even at the time of Raniere’s trial in 2019, sources familiar with NXIVM’s operations in Mexico said that Rainbow schools were still alive and well. When she testified in May 2019, Daniela said she thought her sister Camila might still be working as a “multicultural development specialist” in Mexico while her first student remained in hiding with his mother.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  His Holiness

  By 2006, Daniela wasn’t the only girlfriend of Raniere’s who was asking questions and “creating problems.” Barbara Bouchey, one of NXIVM’s most prolific enrollers and sales trainers, had some growing doubts about the company’s leadership.

  For three years before she left NXIVM for good, Bouchey was in survival mode. Even from a distance she looked like she was suffering. The wit and energy she’d radiated at early V-Weeks had faded. “Something had happened, and her demeanor had deteriorated,” former member Susan White told me. Behind the scenes, Bouchey suspected the inner circle was plotting to shun her.

  Specifically, Bouchey guessed that Raniere wanted to turn key people against her because of her tendency to speak up when she didn’t like what she saw. As the Bronfmans’ financial planner, she’d witnessed millions of dollars pulled out of the sisters’ trust funds for failed commodities trades and real estate deals. That was after she’d lost $1.6 million of her own life savings to an earlier bogus trading scheme put in her name. She maintained that all this money had been lent, and that the company should make efforts to repay it.

  Former members say that NXIVM’s financial records were closely guarded by bookkeepers Karen Unterreiner and Kathy Russell. Daniela testified that, during her early days working for Unterreiner, in 2002 and 2003, she was instructed to record cash payments separately from the others. Cash went directly into the top right drawer of Unterreiner’s desk and was logged as “scholarship admin.” “The point was to not pay taxes on the cash,” Daniela said matter-of-factly. “So the cash would not be on the books.”

  For anyone who’d watched Raniere lecture about unjust taxes, this may not have come as a surprise. Consultants were brought in to help NXIVM achieve its goal of paying as little tax as possible. But Bouchey says she never actually saw evidence of illicit tax evasion. “I was never allowed in their financial office,” she told me. Bouchey claims she would have left the company if she knew the extent of NXIVM’s evasion, and that Raniere knew this and deliberately kept her in the dark.

  NXIVM enrollment was nonetheless a steady stream of income for Bouchey, on top of her financial planning income. She was a field trainer earning tens of thousands every month on top of asset management income that at times exceeded $1 million a year. For a long time she was willing to accept that NXIVM’s books were a black hole for reasons she didn’t need to know. Until, one day, she couldn’t do it anymore.

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  IN JANUARY 2008 Bouchey decided to step down from NXIVM’s executive board. One of her top concerns was that the business model wasn’t working: enrollment was sagging and people weren’t properly advancing through the “stripe path.”

  NXIVM coaches worked for no pay until they advanced far enough to become proctors. Coaches would arrange for participants’ food, facilitate the training exercises, and pay for their own travel, essentially just to maintain their standing within the company. It was only by hitting an exceedingly tough recruitment goal—developing six new coaches with at least two students under each—that NXIVM lifers could actually start making an income.

  “Nobody got to the proctor level,” Bouchey says. “Over nine years, only twenty or so people made it to proctor, and what that meant was we had a couple hundred people at the coach level who weren’t making any money. In my opinion, that was a fatal flaw in the business model.”

  There was more going on that Bouchey didn’t like. She thought Nancy Salzman was abusing her power at times, and that there was too much pressure for members to work on the “inner deficiencies” they identified in coaching sessions. For Lauren Salzman, her issue was that she indulged in sadness too often, earning the nickname “Forlorn.” For Nicki Cly
ne, it was always needing to be right. “I never saw a group of people work harder on their issues—to root out any issues of anger and fear and lack of forgiveness,” Bouchey says. “These people were amazing at this.”

  But Bouchey’s biggest concern was that Raniere seemed to be abusing his position as leader in order to sexually manipulate women in the company. At the time, Bouchey, Loreta Garza, Lauren Salzman, and Karen Unterreiner were all on the executive board and secretly maintaining sexual relationships with Raniere. Edgar Boone was the only board member who wasn’t also a sex partner. Bouchey thought Raniere was leveraging these relationships, and that it was affecting day-to-day decision-making.

  Bouchey stopped enrolling new students, hoping the financial pressure might encourage Raniere and Nancy Salzman to address what she called the “elephants in the room.” But her plan backfired. She noticed her ideas were being shot down in every facet of NXIVM activity. When she criticized how Raniere ran the business, others in his inner circle would jump to his defense, telling Bouchey, “How dare you speak to him that way.”

  For the next two years, Bouchey claims, Raniere’s most loyal followers, including filmmaker and Vancouver center cofounder Mark Vicente, waged a smear campaign against her. People whispered horrible things about her—that she was a troublemaker and blamer and might have an undiagnosed mental deficiency. NXIVM taught that it was an honorable thing to keep a secret, so the damaging rumors were spread quietly. Bouchey had no idea what was coming her way.