Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  “What Keith Raniere is masterful at is using secrets and lack of transparency to not allow people to know the whole story, or to discredit someone who might,” Bouchey says. “NXIVM was all about teaching people how to be more honest, honorable, forthcoming, and genuine. So nobody ever expected that the leadership were all liars.”

  In NXIVM-speak, Bouchey had become “suppressive” and was in danger of taking a fall, like the angel Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Raniere had created an entire module about what happens when brain wires cross to create a suppressive. Bouchey was also a danger to NXIVM’s bottom line, which meant she was probably evil, the kind of sociopath who thought good things were bad and bad things were good.

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  AROUND 2008, SUSAN Dones noticed the way Barbara Bouchey was becoming an outcast in the company. She heard that Raniere wasn’t speaking to Bouchey and wondered why. “People were going around and saying, ‘What do you think Barbara did that was so bad that even Keith won’t talk to her?’ ” Dones recalled in a 2010 deposition. “I didn’t know. And so finally I went to Barbara, and she said, ‘All I can tell you is I’m renegotiating my contract with him.’ ”

  This was an interesting choice of words on Bouchey’s part, given that her renegotiation wasn’t just about the business; she’d also taken her sexual relationship with Raniere off the table. Like Daniela, Bouchey was snubbed and silenced for breaking up with Raniere, and she began to be more openly accused of trying to destroy him and the company.

  Bouchey’s criticisms about the executive board were partly answered in 2009 when new members were appointed, including Mark Vicente, Clare Bronfman, and Mexico City center owners Emiliano Salinas and Alex Betancourt. Though Lauren Salzman had been removed from the board following Bouchey’s claims of inappropriate relationships, she was allowed to return a few weeks after the shakeup.

  Bouchey wasn’t the only troublemaker on NXIVM’s watch list. In April 2009 Nancy Salzman and Karen Unterreiner paid a visit to the West Coast, where Dones and her wife, Kim Woolhouse, operated the Tacoma and Seattle chapters of the company. “Nancy came out to the Pacific Northwest and met with all the proctors,” Dones told me. “What she wanted to do was take the center away from me and give it to the proctors in the Pacific Northwest.”

  Dones thought the proposed deal went against everything NXIVM taught about business. Not only would it take income away from her and her partner, but it would turn several proctor colleagues into what NXIVM termed “parasites.” They hadn’t earned their position, the teaching went, and knowing this would damage their self-esteem.

  Dones looked to Bouchey as an ally within the company, and after some protest Bouchey was allowed to be her coach. Dones told Bouchey about Nancy Salzman’s plan to push her out and promote her proctor colleagues. Dones decided that if Salzman went ahead with it, she would leave the company and take her recruiting contacts with her. “Nancy knew the proctors aren’t enrollers,” Dones says. “I just called her bluff.”

  Salzman did not take this news well. “She said, ‘You’ve ruined everything,’ ” Dones told me. “I said, ‘I haven’t ruined everything. I’ve made a decision about how I want to participate, or not participate, if you do what you said you’re going to do.’ ” Salzman relented and allowed Dones to keep ownership of the center.

  Dones called Bouchey after the exchange and told her coach that, even though Salzman had given up on her West Coast coup d’état, she wanted to quit anyway. Salzman had let it slip that untaxed cash was coming across the border from Mexico. “I told her what had happened. I said, ‘There’s a lot of weird shit going on, I think illegal shit, and I can no longer be a part of this organization.’ ”

  Bouchey and Dones would take unprecedented action together within a matter of days. In court filings, NXIVM would later allege that Dones took 120 clients and coaches with her, leaving only eight members in the Seattle area.

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  THOUGH THE COMPANY’S foundations were shaking in that early spring of 2009, NXIVM was in the international spotlight more than ever before—for better and for worse. Clare and Sara Bronfman had spent over a year planning the details of the Dalai Lama’s first-ever visit to Albany at the invitation of the World Ethical Foundations Consortium, the organization financially supported by the Bronfmans and whose “conceptual founder” was Raniere.

  In an interview with local Albany radio personality Paul Vandenburgh in 2009, Sara Bronfman said she’d always wanted to meet the spiritual leader. “I was literally in my bedroom one day listening to his tapes and thought to myself, ‘Wow, this guy is amazing!’ ” she gushed. “I always had this calling, or this vision, to find people who were humanitarian.”

  In interviews, Sara said she’d seen parallels between the teachings of the Dalai Lama and of Keith Raniere, and so had set out to bring the two thinkers together in the same room. In 2007, when she’d crossed paths with Tenzin Dhonden, a Tibetan monk who was “special emissary for peace” to the Dalai Lama, Sara had proposed inviting the spiritual leader to Albany; Lama Tenzin had since arranged for her and her sister Clare to meet him in India.

  After their initial meeting Sara hosted Lama Tenzin at one of her Albany-area properties, showing him all the tools for ethics and compassion NXIVM students were supposedly learning. Multiple former insiders say that the two developed a sexual relationship—despite the monk’s vow of celibacy. The affair was an open secret, as the two shared a bedroom at times and were once interrupted while making out in a hot tub.

  When the Dalai Lama event was finally announced in January 2009, it sparked a media frenzy that underlined Raniere’s past as an alleged pyramid schemer and his company’s aggressive stance against defectors and critics. Critics of NXIVM had started a letter-writing campaign warning the Dalai Lama that NXIVM was a cult. A March 29 op-ed in the Schenectady-based Daily Gazette claimed that Raniere’s past wasn’t in line with the World Ethical Foundations Consortium’s peaceful mission and named high-profile critics, including Edgar Bronfman and actor Goldie Hawn, who’d rejected a speaking invite. “If Goldie Hawn has the sense not to appear at an event sponsored by Keith Raniere,” the op-ed read, “then cancellation by the Dalai Lama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, should be a no-brainer.”

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  THE DALAI LAMA was expected to make several NXIVM-sponsored appearances between April 18 and 22, at two college campuses and the Times Union Center. The panels were supposed to cover wide-ranging topics. An opening discussion was titled “Compassionate Ethics, Education and Active Non-Violence.” Subsequent events were to tackle violence in Mexico, women as social icons, and the science of media.

  But on April 6, days before the spiritual leader’s first scheduled appearance, the Albany Times Union reported that the Dalai Lama had pulled out. “We had naively believed people would be excited about his visit and that our community would put their pettiness aside to unite for this momentous occasion. We were wrong,” Sara Bronfman wrote on her blog. “His visit was met with fear and cynicism and some of our local media sources worked ardently to destroy the honor faster than we could build it.”

  The sisters flew to India to negotiate with the Dalai Lama in person. Raniere and Nancy Salzman joined the mission on the Bronfmans’ private jet, bringing back fantastical stories of monks not needing clothes to stay warm and beautiful moments shared with the Tibetan leader.

  His Holiness eventually agreed to a lecture on May 6 at a smaller Albany venue. At the event, the Dalai Lama sat cross-legged on a brown armchair alongside the Bronfman sisters, each of them wearing a billowing white silk scarf. He used the platform to encourage investigation into any unethical allegations against NXIVM. “If you have done something wrong, you must accept, you must admit, change, make correction,” he told the crowd.

  Even though the talk brought another tidal wave of bad p
ress, Clare and Sara considered it a victory. In the eyes of many NXIVM followers who’d been growing skeptical, the Dalai Lama’s appearance secured newfound legitimacy for the company’s leadership.

  One former critic who remained notably silent throughout the drama was the Bronfmans’ father. Edgar had made peace with his daughters’ unwavering commitment to Raniere’s mission, softening his stance as he neared the end of his life. “His relationship with his daughters is excellent and it continues to be and that’s what’s important to him,” his spokesperson, Stephen Herbits, told Maclean’s magazine and many other media outlets.

  Almost a decade later, Tenzin Dhonden would be forced to step down from his emissary post when the press learned that the Bronfmans had allegedly made a $1 million donation to secure the Dalai Lama’s appearance.

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  SUSAN DONES ALREADY had a plane ticket booked to visit Albany when she heard that the first scheduled Dalai Lama event had been cancelled, but Barbara Bouchey convinced her to get on the plane anyway. Bouchey explained that she was getting a group of women together to talk about their leadership concerns. She offered Dones and Woolhouse a place to stay while they were in Albany. “I said, ‘Okay, as long as you’re not going to try to manipulate me into staying,’ ” Dones says.

  Bouchey wanted the women to “lay out all our cards on the table,” as Dones puts it. When the group met, Kathy Ethier, a massage therapist and coach who attended, was shocked to learn that Raniere was sleeping with everyone on the executive board. “She really thought he was celibate,” Dones recalls.

  The “NXIVM Nine,” as they became known, requested a meeting with Raniere, which lasted three days beginning on April 21. The confrontation did not go well. Over many tense hours, much of it recorded by Dones and Bouchey, cracks began to form in Raniere’s usually serene demeanor.

  “I saw him for the first time in such a flustered state,” Bouchey told me. “He was scattered, fearful, swearing, angry, his face red, veins pulsating…and the entire time he tried to convince the other women I was full of crap, denying things, lying, and blaming me.”

  “We had him on the hot seat ten and a half hours,” she adds, “something I never witnessed in my nine years there.”

  A leaked eight-minute video clip of the confrontation was posted to YouTube more than a year later. It shows Bouchey and Raniere facing off in mostly restrained tones. Bouchey said she knew of forty people in the company who wanted to see NXIVM address the issues it had been ignoring. “What I see are the effects,” she told Raniere. “The effects are that our company is falling apart.”

  “You don’t have the experience of leadership,” Raniere countered. “You don’t have the experience of preserving people’s lives with what you say. And the truth of the matter is—”

  “Neither do you,” Bouchey interjected. Consumers’ Buyline, she said, had crashed after only a few years.

  Raniere lowered his voice to a barbed whisper. “Here’s the thing. I’ve been shot at for my beliefs. I’ve had to make choices—should I have bodyguards? Should I have them armed or not? I’ve had people killed because of my beliefs, and because of their beliefs…” he said. “You might say…the brighter the light, the more the bugs.”

  For Bouchey and her allies, the meeting was the last straw. In that moment, they decided to resign from the company. The resignation letter, signed by all nine women, didn’t mention Raniere’s inappropriate sexual relationships explicitly, but it did allude to “inconsistencies in the leadership of the company” and “conflict of interest within the system.”

  The resignation letter included a list of unpaid invoices totalling over $2 million, most of it owed to Bouchey for her commodity trading loans. Susan Dones, her wife Kim Woolhouse, and six others cosigned Bouchey’s request for all outstanding commissions and loans to be paid by April 30, 2009. “If these requests are not met we will move forward by contacting the Press,” the letter concluded.

  The recording wouldn’t go public for more than a year, but when it did, it became infamous for Raniere’s apparent admission that he’d had people killed. On October 23, 2010, the New York Post covered the story under the headline “Creepy Cultist’s Killing Confession.”

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  NXIVM’S LAWYERS LEAPT into action in response to the women’s demands. “The contents of this email constitute extortion and coercion in violation of the New York Penal Law,” reads an email to Dones dated April 26, 2009. “As you know, NXIVM has notified the authorities regarding these threats…. We also demand that you refrain from any further contact with Mr. Raniere or Ms. Salzman until your personal differences have been resolved.”

  The company’s lawyers later argued that Raniere’s comment about having had people killed referred to a murder that occurred in Mexico during a months-long documentary project NXIVM produced about its anti-violence activism in the region. Raniere had advised a local Mormon family not to pay kidnappers a ransom for the return of their son. The family went along with Raniere’s directive and the son was returned safely, but the father was later killed. It was this suspected retaliatory death that Raniere was talking about, according to his lawyer. NXIVM’s critics disputed this claim, arguing that the murder didn’t happen until July 2009, after Raniere had been recorded making his comment.

  Within thirty-six hours of the NXIVM Nine confrontation, Raniere had to call a company-wide town hall to explain that he wasn’t the celibate he’d claimed to be, that he’d had a secret relationship with Bouchey and others.

  Mark Vicente, who took on a more central leadership role after Bouchey’s exit, testified in Raniere’s trial that retribution was swift. Raniere called the women socialists and supressives and said they’d never really worked through the personal issues they had identified in NXIVM classes. “He explained to me that there were a number of issues with these women. They were basically engaged in criminal behavior,” Vicente said. “They were described as enemies. As being suppressive. As enemies of the company and enemies of Raniere as well.”

  Bouchey and the other women were immediately cut off from contact. “We were told not to engage with her, not to talk to her,” Vicente said.

  Lauren and Nancy Salzman characterized the request for $2 million in owed funds as an extortion attempt. They asked Vicente and others to tally up the financial losses that could be attributed to Bouchey’s exit. With the Salzmans’ help, Vicente went on to write a letter to the Saratoga County district attorney’s office alleging that Bouchey had committed criminal extortion. He accused Bouchey of contacting NXIVM associates and discouraging them from doing business with NXIVM. Vicente wrote that he’d personally lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and that the company had lost millions as a result of Bouchey’s extortion efforts. “Barbara Bouchey has flagrantly slandered Nancy Salzman and Keith Raniere,” reads part of the letter. The Bronfmans fired Bouchey as their financial manager on May 1, 2009. A year later, Bouchey filed for bankruptcy.

  Vicente was promoted to a green sash. “I was praised as being somebody who was very loyal and stood by the company and stood by Raniere,” he testified.

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  SINCE 2009, BOUCHEY says, she’s been dragged into fourteen legal cases by NXIVM and the Bronfman heirs, as either a defendant or a witness. She has stood before eight judges in four different states, accused of breaching fiduciary responsibility, breaching client confidentiality, and colluding with adversaries to wrongfully defame NXIVM.

  The Bronfmans personally sued her three times, at one point seeking $10 million in damages. Clare Bronfman also went to five government agencies to file a criminal complaint of extortion based on Bouchey’s resignation letter, in which she requested that Raniere return the $1.6 million of hers he lost on the commodities market.

  “It was a very effective strategy,” Bouchey says of the never-ending lawsuits. Her
financial planning business struggled, her credibility was seemingly ruined, and NXIVM supporters actively spread false rumors of her guilt. Looking back, Bouchey says she thinks she was tormented in part because Raniere wanted to make an example out of her—to show what would happen to anyone who tried to blow the whistle.

  “Anyone who left NXIVM was terrified to talk to me,” she says.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Spy Games

  NXIVM’s enemy list was getting longer.

  When Nancy Salzman first asked Kristin Keeffe to coordinate the company’s “legal” efforts in 2003, the organization was targeting only a handful of people. The case against cult deprogrammer Rick Ross was at the top of Raniere’s priority list, and there were constant motions and filings to manage. But as Keeffe settled into that role, overseeing more lawsuits against critics and ex-members, the range of duties expanded along with the list of targets.

  Keeffe has a pale, younger-than-her-age face and a slight voice to match. There’s a certain anonymity to her appearance, with her gray-blue eyes and an in-between hair color that isn’t quite dark but wouldn’t be called light without some help from hair dye. In photos she shows a lot of teeth when she smiles, signaling ease and agreeability. She wasn’t as tiny or striking as some of the women around her, and this was a point of shame Raniere leveraged. He set Keeffe’s weight goal at 128 pounds, and would ask her to report her weight in front of colleagues. Like many NXIVM women, she developed an eating disorder.

  As legal liaison Keeffe increasingly relied on private investigators to track NXIVM’s perceived enemies covertly, and over time she became a self-taught investigator herself. In the wake of the mysterious disappearance of NXIVM student Kristin Snyder, Keeffe began amassing evidence that Snyder was alive and “resort hopping” in another state. After Snyder was pronounced dead in 2005, Keeffe ramped up the investigation. In emails produced as evidence at Raniere’s 2019 trial, one private investigator told Keeffe he’d carried out searches at a guest house in Key West, Florida, and at a location in Palm Springs, California. Keeffe provided leads on possible aliases and post office locations that the missing woman might have used. By 2009 Keeffe had a drawer full of dirt, not just on ex-members but also on journalists, judges, and politicians.