Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  New York private investigator Juval Aviv, who’d first been hired by NXIVM in 2003 to gather intel on Rick Ross, said of Keeffe in a July 2009 deposition, “She almost really lived in our office. She wanted to be one of our investigators. She loved it.”

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  ACTING FOR NXIVM, Juval Aviv reached out to Rick Ross in 2004 and told him a fake story about a mother who had a twenty-seven-year-old daughter in NXIVM. Aviv said the mother, Susan Zuckerman, was a family friend who’d discovered that her daughter had sold family heirlooms to pay for her classes. Aviv’s company, Interfor, was apparently looking into the daughter’s involvement in the cult and wanted to bring Ross onto the case to do an intervention.

  “He said repeatedly this mother is a wealthy woman,” Ross told me.

  Aviv secretly recorded a conversation that later became evidence. He asked Ross for dirt on NXIVM to “impress” Zuckerman.

  “How’s this for impressive,” Ross replied. “I have two hundred photographs of Raniere at one of his functions. I have him in compromising poses with his girlfriends.”

  “Oh my god!” Aviv said.

  “I have him in the nude,” Ross continued. “I have one picture of him standing in front of his girlfriend with a red ribbon tied around his penis…which is erect.”

  In April 2005 Ross went to the Interfor office on Madison Avenue in New York City to meet with the mother. As Ross recalls, there seemed to be a plan in place in which the mother and daughter would meet on a cruise ship, where it would be difficult for NXIVM to interfere by phone. Ross would also board the ship and help the daughter begin to question her participation in NXIVM. Interfor was excited about the plan and had already paid Ross a retainer for his services.

  “At one point I make it clear to [the mother]: at no time will I be alone with the daughter,” Ross told me. He also requested that Aviv be present at the cruise ship intervention, since Aviv was personally invested in the case. “Once I made that clear, it was like it was abruptly dropped.”

  Aviv claimed that NXIVM couldn’t come up with a woman to play the daughter. Aspiring double agent Kristin Keeffe wanted to play the role, according to Aviv, but Raniere and Salzman wouldn’t allow it.

  The cruise ship fiasco was far from NXIVM’s only spy mission against Ross, and Interfor wasn’t the only collaborator on the case. According to testimony at Raniere’s trial, Keeffe brought on a second investigation firm, called Canaprobe, to dig into several enemies’ bank records. Keeffe bragged about finding someone who was able to get Ross’s phone records, according to Barbara Bouchey’s 2009 deposition. Bouchey also admitted to having seen a Canaprobe invoice for $10,000 on which “Ross bank sweeps” was the only line item. “They wanted to know who he was speaking to, what he was doing, what he was spending his money on,” Bouchey said.

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  IN THE END, Interfor didn’t need to orchestrate an elaborate cruise ship sting to score plenty of info on Rick Ross. Interfor provided NXIVM with pages and pages of material on his medical background, tax returns, daily bank transactions, criminal record, business associates, and past civil lawsuits. One report alleged that Ross had been an informant during an attempted raid on the Branch Davidians’ ranch in Waco, Texas, and might have even been somehow responsible for the fifty-one-day siege there in 1993 that ended with seventy-six deaths.

  “I had no idea to what extent I was being surveilled,” Ross told me for a Vice story in March 2019. It was the same week Nancy Salzman admitted that NXIVM had conspired to alter court records in the fourteen-year civil case against Ross.

  Ross says it was a phone call from Metroland reporter Chet Hardin that first tipped him off about Keeffe’s spy games.

  “Did you know they have all your banking info and phone records?” Hardin asked, according to Ross. (Hardin confirmed that he made the phone call but declined an interview.)

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ross replied.

  Hardin said it was true, and that he had the dollar amounts to prove it. “He started reciting portions of a bank statement,” Ross told me.

  Ross says he later learned that NXIVM had paid to have his garbage searched. He lived on the twenty-second floor of a New Jersey high rise, where at one point he was told about a problem with the garbage chute. “One of the building attendants said to me, ‘Would you please put your garbage bags outside your door? I’ll take care of it.’ I didn’t think anything of it, I just thought, ‘That’s nice, I don’t have to go to the garbage chute.’ ” Ross says he later believed the attendant was actually someone hired to go through his trash in search of personal information. Court records eventually confirmed this was true.

  These so-called garbage runs, which are legal in New Jersey, still couldn’t explain how NXIVM got detailed bank records over a long period of time. In a counterclaim Ross alleged that the company used illegal tactics to access his bank information, social security number, and other private data.

  Even Aviv, a seasoned investigator, was apparently stunned when presented with the questionably sourced bank and phone records Keeffe had scored. “I said to her, ‘Where did you get this? I need to know before I even work with it.’ She said, ‘Don’t worry, it comes from a friend who is authorized to do certain things,’ ” Aviv said in a deposition.

  According to court records, Keeffe told Aviv she had a relationship with a U.S. marshal or a deputy sheriff who allowed her to run plate numbers and telephone records. She’d developed these kinds of law enforcement contacts over years of spy work for NXIVM, which somehow led to her placement as a victim’s advocate with the Albany County district attorney’s office between October 2006 and February 2007. She then leveraged this cozy relationship with law enforcement to encourage criminal charges against Raniere’s ex-girlfriends, NXIVM critics, and journalists.

  Clare Bronfman made her own separate efforts to get Ross and his allies indicted. “The ‘Ross camp’ needs to be fearful, back down and look to fix the damage they have done; the thought of criminal charges may help inspire this,” she wrote in a 2008 email to one of her father’s closest personal and professional associates weeks before a mediation date on their civil claim against Ross. “I know you are incredibly resourceful and have the intelligence to figure this out. I don’t need to know who is funding them, how you stop that from continuing, in fact I don’t want to know—it just needs to be done quickly.”

  Stephen Herbits, a confidant of Edgar Bronfman since the 1970s, told Clare that her requests were inappropriate and lacked evidence.

  Ross says he likely would have spent something in the range of $5 million defending himself in court had his defense team not waived the legal fees. His lawyer has estimated the full legal bill was more like $50 million. Ross adds that NXIVM’s lawyers weren’t helping by constantly delaying the process. “That’s a very unusual scenario,” he says of the interminable case. “The way that was done was changing legal teams repeatedly; NXIVM changed legal representation a half dozen or more times. They pleaded with the court that they needed to extend everything, to bring the next team up to speed.”

  NXIVM’s inner circle didn’t seem to understand why Ross wasn’t crumbling under pressure and settling. Clare suspected that her own father might be funding their enemies’ court fees.

  “It seems obvious to me that you still think I am supporting RR [Rick Ross] in some way or another. That is simply not true,” Edgar wrote in an email to his daughters in 2011. “In no shape or form would I do that and tell you that I am not. Whether or not you want to believe me, I do not lie, and I love you two very much. Someone is not telling you the truth. Why don’t you try and figure out who that might be. Who has something to gain? Certainly not me.”

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  NXIVM HAD BEEN carrying out intense surveillance schemes for years, something that wasn’t widely known until the Ross lawsuit pu
t much of it on the record between 2007 and 2009. The evidence compiled by Ross’s lawyers gave credence to accusations from other longtime NXIVM enemies who said they’d been subjected to intimidation and harassment, often while being made to feel alone in their struggle.

  Raniere’s ex-girlfriend Toni Natalie claims the title of “patient zero” when it comes to spying and intimidation. In a Vice interview in 2017 she described break-ins, stalking, and threats made by Raniere’s inner circle of women after she cut ties with him in 1999. As well as showing up at her work and surveilling her mail, they invaded her home upward of fifty times. “[Raniere] showed up one night with ten people and took everything that belonged to him,” Natalie said. “They would unmake my bed, turn over my photographs. He just wanted me to know he could get in there.”

  Bouchey recalled Raniere’s inner circle having open discussions of these break-ins around the time they were going on. “I believe it was Kristin that said that she had broken into [Natalie’s] house to get back things that they believed were Keith’s, or things that they believed would be good to take,” she said. Stolen items included letters, photos, Consumers’ Buyline records, and other personal items.

  Joe O’Hara, the lawyer who’d done consulting work for Raniere and had introduced NXIVM to Interfor, told me that after he ended his contract, his cable and phone lines were cut and the words “You will die in seven days” were spray-painted on his property. Before he left, O’Hara had warned Raniere in writing that surveillance material gathered by NXIVM, which O’Hara had discovered by accident, was likely illegal.

  Like Rick Ross, O’Hara and Natalie were both simultaneously fighting off “legal attacks” initiated by NXIVM. In a counter-lawsuit filed in 2012, O’Hara listed more of the bizarre and vengeful ways he believed NXIVM had retaliated against him over the years. They called up his consulting clients to accuse O’Hara of illegally practicing law in New York. They reported him to the District of Columbia bar association, where his practice was located. They filed “fictitious change-of-address cards” with the U.S. Post Office, apparently hoping to intercept important correspondence. According to O’Hara, they succeeded in turning his consulting enterprise upside down.

  Joe O’Hara says he now regrets introducing NXIVM to powerful contacts that enabled them to abuse the legal system. “They used the tools that I gave them, and by that point they had Bronfman money,” O’Hara told me. “They were hiring the best attorneys money could buy. They would have multiple firms working on each case.” By one lawyer’s estimate, Clare Bronfman employed as many as sixty attorneys at thirty firms.

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  AFTER BARBARA BOUCHEY staged her revolt in 2009, Kristin Keeffe and Raniere seemed to double down on their spying efforts. With nine more insiders now on the outside, all hanging on to potentially damaging information, full-blown paranoia set in and Keeffe began using bizarre coded language in her communications with Raniere.

  According to emails presented as evidence at Raniere’s trial, Keeffe became wary of passing cars and of house painters in the neighborhood, and stopped referring to Ross by name in emails about surveillance. She and Emiliano Salinas both created new Gmail accounts that they believed weren’t linked to their real names.

  In an August 2009 correspondence with Raniere, Keeffe vaguely refers to bank sweeps as “dishes” of food she intends to have made according to Raniere’s “recipe.” “I’m checking on the toppings,” she wrote, apparently alluding to different methods of bank snooping. “I reminded Richard [from Canaprobe] yesterday to make us only one layer dishes if the topping is different than the layer; to do two layers only when the first topping is the same. He’s erred so far and cooked two layers each time no matter what. It’s turning out pretty tasty.”

  In response, Raniere requested more info on what went into the “dishes” and referred to Emiliano Salinas as “our Mexican chef,” perhaps a reference to Salinas’s role translating and delivering investigation reports through third parties in Mexico.

  Keeffe’s confusing new style of communication seemed to be part of a larger effort to remove any links between Raniere and NXIVM’s spy missions. In one August 2009 email chain about private investigation reports, Keeffe wrote to Salinas, “NEVER SEND TO KEITH. EVER. PLEASE DON’T FORGET THIS AGAIN. XO.”

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  DESPITE THE NEW layer of secrecy and the increasingly high price tag for surveillance, the information Keeffe and Salinas were getting seemed to be less and less credible. One set of search results claimed that Rick Ross had bank accounts in tax havens all over the Caribbean and Europe, but attempts to test activity in those accounts came back negative.

  “I feel the information they sent us now is not high impact and not very credible,” Salinas wrote.

  As one of Keeffe’s newest targets, Bouchey knew what was coming to some extent. She’d been present in the room when Keeffe and Raniere had discussed their investigations and legal cases. But it wasn’t until after Keeffe left NXIVM in 2014 that she told Bouchey about many of the more insidious tactics used against her. (I made many attempts to reach Kristin Keeffe and go over these spying and intimidation allegations with her but was not successful.)

  In Bouchey’s case, much of the campaign against her was more heavy-handed than it was with Ross. Private investigator Steve Rambam, who was first hired to investigate Kristin Snyder’s disappearance, began showing up at the homes and workplaces of Bouchey’s friends and coworkers, suggesting she was in trouble with the law. He led people to believe that Bouchey had stolen money from the Bronfmans, and that she was a jilted ex-girlfriend trying to extort Raniere.

  Rambam spooked Bouchey’s personal assistant in a parking garage in December 2009, according to court statements. “She was parking her car when a silver SUV pulled up very close to her car. A man got out with a woman. He identified himself as Mr. Rambam and demanded to speak to her,” reads an affidavit describing the incident. “When she refused to converse he made threats saying he would see her in court. He was very intimidating and she was frightened.”

  In another incident, a woman blocked the personal assistant’s car and proceeded to bang on her hood and car window in an effort to serve subpoena papers. And according to court documents, Rambam lurked outside of homes and took photos of residences and cars.

  When I called Rambam in July 2019, he denied ever working for NXIVM. “I have nothing useful to tell you,” he said. “I can say unequivocally, if I was aware of women being taken advantage of, or abused against their will, I would have stepped in pretty quickly.”

  In 2012, Times Union investigative reporter Jim Odato found that Rambam had been investigated for professional misconduct related to alleged witness intimidation leading up to one of NXIVM’s civil lawsuits. The complaint also revealed that his legal name was Steven Rombom, not Rambam. He got off with a $6,500 fine and was allowed to keep his private investigator license.

  Bouchey said she began wondering whether new clients coming to her were actually moles sent by NXIVM to gather information. She believes that NXIVM’s inner circle filed complaints with several government agencies, including the U.S. federal finance watchdog, claiming she stole money. Then her passport was suspended. She also got a voicemail message saying her pet bird was going to die. Later, she says, she learned from Keeffe that they’d been looking at all her credit card charges in real time.

  Emails between Keeffe and Salinas in July 2009 reveal their attempts to sue Bouchey for blackmail in Mexico as well as in the United States. To this day, Bouchey told me, she has trouble when she leaves the country due to some kind of flag on her file. Because of NXIVM, she says, she went for years without disclosing which state she lived in to most of her friends and colleagues. Her own employees didn’t know her home address.

  “Raniere’s manipulation of the courts and law enforcement…to scare and silence people—hoping to keep damag
ing information about him from coming out—has been an extremely effective strategy so far,” Bouchey wrote in a 2010 court statement.

  After a decade of working the legal system to wage NXIVM’s battles, Keeffe had become a near unstoppable force. But she was also kept on a shorter and shorter leash. Keeffe told a judge she accepted an enormous pay cut out of fear that she would otherwise be shunned from the community. She lived off $13,000 a year with no benefits, and at times had to ask Clare Bronfman for permission to buy food. Before she escaped NXIVM in 2014, Keeffe clocked one last achievement for Raniere: bringing indictments against Toni Natalie, Joe O’Hara, and Barbara Bouchey.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Room

  It’s now a matter of court record that beginning on March 9, 2010, Daniela was illegally confined to a room for close to two years. But the conditions of her captivity began to take shape much earlier—on the day in October 2006 when she confronted Keith Raniere about her romantic feelings for Ben Myers. From that moment on, Daniela felt her grasp on the world begin to slip.

  Raniere wasn’t speaking to her face to face, but email records show that Daniela was still the focus of much of his thinking, feeling, and strategizing. And although on some days Daniela accepted that this focus was a good thing—meant to help her learn and become a better person—she had a growing suspicion that Raniere’s obsessive attention was slowly chipping away at her freedom.