Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Over time Salzman’s coaching visits grew less and less frequent. Daniela described not wanting Salzman to ever leave, and then “hating” her when she did. “Sometimes she would take three days to come…. [Then it was] a whole week of seeing no one. Not a human being, not a face, not a nothing…. And then time passed and there was a point where I didn’t see her for up to three months.”

  In a notebook she kept at the time, Daniela drew the view from her foam mattress on the floor. The yellow walls are bare, the door is closed in front of her, and there are no windows in sight; she testified that the only window was papered over for much of her time in confinement. Daniela also spent time translating the labels on salad containers and shampoo bottles. “I would take all of these materials and I would write all the words in English and all the translations into French, and I would make a dictionary,” she testified. “I was just trying to keep myself busy and I was trying to have a schedule.” To keep her mind occupied, Daniela fantasized about the simple task of walking to Walmart. She imagined opening the door, stepping out of the house, counting her steps down the street. “ ‘Remember, the first aisle has this,’ and I would try to think of the music,” she said. “I would try to construct something inside my head so I wouldn’t go crazy, because sometimes I would go crazy.”

  She experienced wild mood swings, sometimes feeling panicked and destructive, and after that numb for days. “I would just lose control of myself,” she said. “There were times where I just remember, like, laying on the carpet and scratching my arms and wanting to scream, but I knew I wasn’t allowed to…. There were entire days where I would just sit against the wall.”

  In emails presented as evidence, Salzman described a note Daniela wrote on November 8, 2010, that signaled her deteriorating mental state. “Let me out. I’m coming undone,” it read. Daniela’s sister Camila found it, and she texted Lauren asking permission to speak with Daniela. Camila didn’t want to show it to her parents, because they would be alarmed and might take “reactionary” action.

  Salzman relayed the message to Raniere and pledged to visit Daniela early the next morning to explain that resisting the project this way was a major setback. “This focus of ‘letting me out of the room’ is totally in the opposite direction of healing the breach,” Salzman wrote in an email to Raniere. If the family spoke to Daniela, or let her out of the room, she would learn she could throw a tantrum and get what she wanted.

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  DANIELA STARTED a newsletter she called the Wilton Times, named after the keyhole-shaped street outside the family townhouse. In a cheery, tongue-in-cheek tabloid voice, Daniela logged daily activities of “the resident” (and sometimes Lauren, “the visitor”) in neatly printed Spanish. “Our editors? Unqualified and just barely passable, but eager! Our reporters? The most daring and reliable! Our sources? There are none more exclusive!” she wrote in a signed editor’s note on November 11, 2010.

  In one entry, more than eight months into her confinement, Daniela announced an “exclusive!”: the resident had impulsively cut her hair. Included with the report was a “before” drawing of waist-long hair and an “after” sketch of a bob reaching just below her ears. “The breaking news on a totally unexpected makeover,” reads a subheading styled with precise serif touches. Daniela “transitioned from looking like a Disney princess to a hybrid of Prince Valiant and Mafalda,” she wrote, referring to a popular Argentine comic strip about a six-year-old girl with an oversized peanut-shaped head. “The sources also report that her head looks about twice as big!!”

  “I remember it was something I could control, something I could do—cut my hair because it’s mine,” Daniela recalled at Raniere’s trial. She knew Raniere liked long hair and that he wouldn’t have allowed her to cut it if she’d asked. “I remember I made a braid. I was wearing a blue shirt,” she said. “I remember looking in the mirror and looking at my short hair and being satisfied.”

  In the same two-page issue of the Wilton Times, Daniela listed her weight at 120 pounds and her daily calorie intake at 940. She reported that after some back pain, she’d returned to doing fifteen hundred jumping jacks per day: five hundred before breakfast, five hundred before lunch, and five hundred before dinner. She expressed excitement at reaching sixty days of writing a daily letter, and pledged to swear off naps. “Today I have squeezed the most I possibly could out of the day, the maximum of what I have been able to imagine,” she wrote. “No more naps or long moments staring into space. I have a purpose in mind and it is to heal my broken pieces.”

  Daniela’s excitement dissipated after Raniere found out about her hair. He told Salzman that Daniela’s haircut violated an important agreement between them. He asked Salzman to take a photo of Daniela so that she’d know he’d seen the result of her reckless behavior. Salzman said, “He told me that she should come up with a way to fix that, and that a way to fix that was staying in the room until the hair grew back. He thought that she would feel bad if he saw it and that would somehow inspire her to change something.”

  In a November 15 entry of the Wilton Times, Daniela wrote about the “harmful act” of cutting her hair and the consequences she’d been asked to impose on herself. She acknowledged that it was a “blunder” and agreed to let it grow back, but resisted the idea of staying in the room for the duration. “This seems really unreasonable to me and I’m still in shock about it,” she wrote.

  “The hair thing was so ridiculous, to me it seemed like a game,” Daniela testified. “Like, tomorrow I’ll do something else and they’re gonna extend it eight years.”

  For the first time since she’d entered the room, Daniela had seen a possible endpoint to her confinement, and it was a terrifyingly long time away. She suggested alternative consequences, including spending a week living outside in the cold, water fasting for ten days, and sleeping only four hours a night for a month. All of these were preferred to staying in the room for the years it would take her hair to grow back.

  “The action of cutting my hair is much more serious than I wanted to see or think,” Daniela wrote, seemingly coming to grips with her lack of control over the situation. “Decisions like this one are a great part of the way I have lived until now, which has been so indulgent and harmful, and it is precisely this life and this decision process that I came to this room to heal.”

  Only weeks after it began, Daniela’s newsletter was deemed an indulgence and an ethical breach. The Wilton Times was discontinued.

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  LAUREN SALZMAN WANTED to let Daniela guide her own healing program, but Raniere was against it. “I would spend time with her and I thought that we had made progress, and he told me that she had just been manipulating me for hours and I couldn’t see it,” Salzman said. Raniere told her that Daniela was having temper tantrums, or playing games, and that she was creating more work for him by not being able to negotiate the situation properly on her own. “I felt that somehow I was screwing it up in my ineptitude and my failure to be able to see what was going on, which he seemed to think was so obvious.”

  Raniere always had an explanation for why Daniela wasn’t progressing or was possibly getting worse. “I was really mad at her for not figuring out whatever she was supposed to be doing to end this for herself and for all of us,” Salzman testified, her voice wavering with emotion. “I thought she was playing games and being manipulative with me and I couldn’t figure that out.”

  Adriana felt deep responsibility and guilt about her daughter’s situation. She’d been caught leaving notes for her in the bathroom, which Raniere said was interfering with the project. He told Salzman that Adriana had agreed to go into a second room and experience the same discomfort until Daniela healed her breach. The arrangement was aimed at motivating Daniela to make progress quickly. She needed to know that her actions were hurting somebody else, too.

  In theory Adriana was suppose
d to experience exactly the same conditions as Daniela, but in practice this wasn’t the case. “Adriana within a short period of time had many things in the room, like exercise equipment or art supplies,” Salzman testified. “At one point she had a pet fish, and she was making kombucha and sprouting vegetables.” Family members ate meals in Adriana’s room and kept her company while Daniela was still cut off from all communication. After a few months, Adriana left the room to attend a funeral in Mexico and never returned.

  On the witness stand Lauren Salzman expressed deep guilt and shame over her role in confining Daniela and splitting apart her family. “Of all the things that I did in this case and the crimes that I committed,” she said, breaking into sobs, “I think that this is the worst.”

  Daniela wasn’t supposed to suffer in the room; she was supposed to focus on what she was learning through the experience. But she did suffer, sometimes physically. For months she wrote to Salzman about tooth pain, and eventually part of her tooth broke off before she was taken to a dentist.

  Around V-Week in 2011, Daniela heard her brother and another NXIVM member talking about installing security cameras outside her room. “I thought I was helping her,” Adrian, her brother, told a judge.

  It’s hard to imagine how so many people in Daniela’s life went along with such cruelty, why they didn’t stand up for her. This question weighed on Daniela, too. She often fell into a disorienting despair when she wondered why her own family wasn’t putting an end to her confinement.

  There’s no satisfying answer for why Daniela’s family didn’t stand up for her. Lauren Salzman suggested they thought that above all else they needed to maintain their relationship with Raniere. “All of our perspectives were highly influenced by Keith’s perspectives,” she said. “We wanted him to think that we would do the hard thing, the ethical thing, and wanted him to see us as people who were willing to do that.”

  Salzman and both of Daniela’s sisters were in sexual relationships with Raniere and wanted to prove to him their own commitment to and worthiness of motherhood. He knew their most unflattering secrets. Precarious immigration status weighed on the whole family. They were caught up in the same fear-based tunnel vision that later propelled women inside the secret NXIVM sorority known as DOS to do unspeakable things.

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  MORE THAN a year and a half into Daniela’s confinement, she made some attempts to reach the outside world. “I was desperate to just be able to read something,” she said. One day, when nobody was in the house, she snuck down the stairs and used her mother’s PlayStation to scan the internet. She also managed to look at photos of her family by guessing her father’s Facebook password. She said that seeing the fullness of their lives overwhelmed her with emotion.

  “It was the saddest thing, because I remember I was able to check my email, from that PSP, and I remember nobody had written me.

  “There was one email from Ben on my birthday the year prior, with like, ‘Happy birthday!’ But I was gone from the world and nobody noticed,” she said. “I remember I cried for days and days.

  “Nobody came and got me. My own family didn’t come,” she testified. “They didn’t say, ‘Enough, it’s our daughter.’ My mom didn’t say, ‘Hey, I made her, maybe she deserves to live her life.’ They didn’t come. They didn’t get me.”

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  DANIELA HIT HER lowest moment in winter 2012. “I started accumulating cleaning supplies and I thought, ‘As soon as I have enough, I’ll just drink everything and it will be over soon,’ ” she testified. “It was gonna be over, you know. I wasn’t afraid. I was just gonna do it.

  “I looked out the window and there was a bird that I’d been watching. I had seen this family of birds over a few years. And it was a red bird, and I later identified it as a cardinal. It had babies. It had nested in front of my window. I had seen it. And I think like for the winter he had disappeared for a while and this day he came back—it was a he, according to me.

  “I don’t know what it was about that bird, but in that moment I remember thinking, ‘I want to live.’ ”

  Daniela had reached a tipping point. She had accepted that she might never see her family again, and might soon find herself destitute in an unfamiliar Mexican city. It didn’t matter to her anymore; she was determined to leave the room. “I remember thinking ridiculous things. I remember thinking I can be a drug addict, I can be a prostitute, I can do anything because I’m gonna die anyway, and there was a sense of freedom.”

  Daniela opened the door and walked past the security camera, out of the house, and onto the street. Later she headed for the volleyball court where she knew Raniere would be. “I wanted to go tell Keith because he was the one who put me there,” she testified. “I wanted to know why.”

  A game was already underway when Daniela arrived. She was overwhelmed by the sight of so many familiar faces, all of them surprised to see her.

  “I remember Keith running to hide,” Daniela said. A crowd formed around her, and Raniere faded into the background. “I could not get through those people. Someone pulled me aside and Keith was out of reach.”

  Almost two years had passed since Daniela had first heard Raniere’s ultimatum, but she knew the stakes were just as high as the day she went into the room. By appearing at volleyball that day, she had publicly broken her commitment to resolve her ethical breach. She knew it meant she’d be sent back to Mexico under the harshest imaginable circumstances: no money, no documents, no family contact. She would still need to settle her conflict with Raniere if she ever wanted to see her siblings and parents.

  Daniela testified that she was able to pack a few days’ worth of clothes, a journal, and some gold earrings she planned to pawn once she crossed the border. She also took about fifty dollars’ worth of pesos from her father’s wallet before getting into the back seat of a car headed for Laredo, Texas, where she would cross the border by foot.

  Her father and NXIVM fixer Kristin Keeffe sat in the front seat. Keeffe supervised Daniela’s interactions with her dad. When they arrived for an overnight stay at a hotel, Daniela learned she was not allowed to stay in the same room as her father. She recalled finding some alone time in the hotel gym, watching television news for the first time in years from a treadmill. In 2012, violence breaking out at Mexico’s northern border was a global story.

  “Please do everything you need to do to get back to us,” Hector told his daughter when the time came to part ways. Both of them cried, Daniela testified. “It’s going to be hard,” he said, “but you can do it.”

  PART THREE

  A Place of Survival

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Act

  Maja Miljkovic’s introduction to NXIVM began with a flirtation in an acting class.

  “As happens with ridiculous scenes in acting class, you work together and then you go, ‘Oh hey, maybe I like you,’ ” she says.

  The flirtation with her scene partner led to a date, and about a week into their relationship, Miljkovic’s new man friend asked if she’d ever heard of NXIVM. She knew of a few actors in town who’d mentioned the name, but she didn’t know what the classes were about. He said it was a group of actors helping each other set goals and stick to them. Some of them were kind of famous. The classes would help her connect with her emotions, face fears, and deal with rejection.

  To Miljkovic, it sounded social, challenging, fun. The next week she went to an open house hosted by Sarah Edmondson and immediately saw the vision of success she wanted.

  “For an up-and-coming actor it was like getting invited to an Oscar party,” she told me. “I signed up on the spot. I didn’t think twice.”

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  I MET MILJKOVIC for the first time in July 2018. She picked me up from a bus stop on the outskirts of Vancouver and drove me to her suburban home perched on B
urnaby Mountain, where the grid of East Vancouver stretched out like a mostly green, slightly dirty crocheted blanket. She gestured with a bottle of pink wine she’d picked up, joking that we were going to need it.

  In 2013 Miljkovic became part of an in-crowd of Vancouver actors who attended NXIVM classes on evenings and weekends. She was captivated by the “aha!” moments the classes seemed to inspire in people and wanted to learn to recreate those feelings in a performance or script. Edmondson and Miljkovic’s boyfriend both urged her to take upper-level courses as a way to encourage that creative path.

  In level two classes like “Mobius,” students did a lot more feeling and exploring. Mobius was known as the “self-love intensive.” In a typical exercise, people would think of a time when they felt angry with someone and then ask themselves, Why were you angry with them? What were they doing? Why were they doing it? After some reflection on each of these questions, the exercise would flip. What about when someone was angry with you? Why were they angry? What did you do? Why did you do it? The process would then be repeated, but with a new emotion, like love, replacing anger.

  At the end of a Mobius intensive, all students would make a vow. One might declare they’d never eat red meat again, another might promise to never text a certain ex. The point was to say it out loud, confirm it, and get some peer accountability going. At the end of “Human Pain,” another intensive that often followed Mobius, students would form a “penance group,” where failures would be punished with cold showers or plank exercises—something hard or uncomfortable to serve as a deterrent. DOS wouldn’t be created for another two years, but some of the elements that would define it were already taking shape.

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