Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

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  NXIVM’S BRAND OF progressivism often seemed to emerge from highlighting the reality of gendered experiences. Raniere taught that in order to understand the roles of men and women, students needed to live them—to feel all the societal pressures and confines firsthand. This was especially prevalent in the Jness and Society of Protectors organizations, which were aimed at uncovering and harnessing innate “female” and “male” ways of being.

  Unsurprisingly, the search for innate qualities meant riffing on some very tired gender stereotypes. Women had “princessy,” “oblivious,” and “caretaker” tendencies, while men deep down were “big beasties” ready to either fight or have sex. Mark Vicente testified that it was the men’s program that first introduced “readiness” drills—a practice where members would receive a text message and have to respond to it within a minute. Later this became a source of relentless sleep deprivation and punishment for women in DOS.

  In an eight-day Jness intensive, Miljkovic didn’t see herself reflected at all. Women were protected from the real world and were allowed more space to be emotional, coaches suggested. They withheld sex because there wasn’t much else in women’s control. Breakout groups made distinctions between how women and men handled sex or child-rearing, which left Miljkovic with a lingering impression that women were supposed to be quiet and thankful “as long as you weren’t being raped every day.”

  In Vancouver, monthly Jness meetups aimed to tackle big questions about what “womanhood” really was, but at the end a group facilitator would read out a “disquisition” that served as the final word. These debriefs claimed to be culled from psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies, but of course it was Raniere behind the rulings. This was how Raniere’s “primitive hypothesis” was disseminated to the NXIVM community. “The primitive hypothesis is the thing in Jness that says men are designed to spread their seed and women are designed to be monogamous,” Sarah Edmondson told me. This thinking became a shorthand used throughout the NXIVM curriculum, and a quiet point of contention for women who identified as polyamorous. Men needed sex with many partners—it was in their genes, Raniere claimed—while women were best suited to stay with one person for life.

  Any woman who challenged this was viewed as a troublemaker. “If you have a problem with it, it’s because you think you’re special. It’s the woman’s problem,” a former member told me.

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  SINCE THE JNESS intensive left Miljkovic with more questions than answers, she joined other women in signing up for the Society of Protectors sessions as well. This was encouraged as a way to build empathy for the societal roles the opposite gender had to live up to. She hoped that seeing the other side would help her put it all together.

  The intensive was framed as a way for men to show women the dark and difficult parts of their own experience—to expose what it really took to excel in a male-dominated world. In this session, a NXIVM-associated doctor asked Miljkovic to wear a “brain cap”—a net of EEG electrodes that supposedly measured activity in the brain while “integrations” were happening. She agreed, which meant reluctantly becoming the focus of everyone else’s attention. Participants did extended wall sits and plank exercises at the mercy of coaches instructed not to hold back any judgment, no matter how demeaning or cruel. This culminated in an aggressive reenactment of schoolyard bullying, complete with name-calling, body shaming, and other abuse Miljkovic did not see coming.

  “They were being really misogynistic” toward the women in the session, she says. One woman accused of cutting in line had to wear a tiara and tutu. Any woman who acted at all assertively was told to wear a jockstrap for the rest of the day. The name Esther became “Breaster,” and Bibiana became “Boobiana.” In a later session, the men revealed they had surreptitiously taken photos of women’s bodies and then presented a “best in show” slideshow for maximum embarrassment.

  With gel in her hair and a net of electrodes on her head, Miljkovic was an easy target for childish taunts. At one point she asked the doctor if she could stop wearing the EEG monitors for the remainder of the class. She was told to keep the cap on; otherwise, the experiment would be ruined. “That’s when I was like, This is not cool,” she says. The same doctor lost his medical license in 2019 for conducting unsanctioned human experiments.

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  IT REQUIRED EXTENDED exposure to NXIVM logic to appreciate how these strange sexist and traumatizing rituals lined up with the organization’s core principle of making the world a better place. NXIVM wasn’t concerned with “equality” per se; it was about harnessing an individual’s “potential” and showing them that growth was a hard-earned, painful process. The world was a tough place, the logic went, but NXIVM could teach you how to punish yourself for your laziness, weight gain, self-indulgence, and whatever else you deemed a personal moral failing, so that succeeding felt less tough by comparison.

  Creating a mental association between physical discomfort and failure to meet a goal was simply building character and discipline—two traits that Jness coincidentally concluded were often lacking in women. But somewhere along this line, more themes of male dominance and female submission were introduced into the equation. Maja Miljkovic says that an ex-boyfriend of hers was all but convinced Raniere was trying to groom her as a “sub.”

  “I just want to ask you, Did anything happen between you guys?” she recalls her boyfriend saying. She was firm that Raniere favored her, and even hit on her at times, but she never saw him as a viable romantic interest. Even the suggestion that they could have hooked up made her gag.

  “Are you sure?” her boyfriend said. “Because the way he’s speaking to you…he’s talking to you like a dom.”

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  MILJKOVIC HADN’T CONSIDERED that Raniere’s strange demands on her time might be part of some sexual power move. In fact, she thought the idea was pretty far-fetched. When Raniere made her wait hours in the middle of the night just to go for a walk, to her that only meant he was busy, not that he was testing how much boundary pushing she would accommodate. It was only after she learned of other women’s experiences with Raniere that she started to see how she might have been groomed after all.

  Raniere would occasionally summon her to his side at social gatherings. Miljkovic remembers one evening when, at an Apropos community night, where many tables of people were chatting and eating dinner, Clare Bronfman came to get her and bring her to Raniere.

  “Keith would like to talk to you,” Bronfman told her.

  After some resistance, Miljkovic says, she agreed to leave her gluten-free pizza and go join Raniere’s table. Marianna stood up from her place beside Raniere to work the crowd, leaving the two of them to chat privately. Miljkovic remembers it all feeling very Godfather-esque in the way Raniere commanded a room, always giving special attention to the pretty ones. Whenever he entered Apropos at the end of a day, the kitchen knew to bring pizza to his table as soon as he sat down.

  Raniere seemed to test his rapport with the women he favored by applying mirroring techniques. “If he talked to you, he’d stare deeply into your eyes,” Miljkovic said. “He’d physically try to get you to go where he was going. I remember he would reach out his arm—not quite touch you yet—then maybe on the third time, you’d respond in kind. Eventually you’d just be touching hands. And then he would smile, so you would smile back. He openly talked about that as something he did.”

  Miljkovic says she was usually quite aware of the games Raniere was playing, and that she wouldn’t play along if she didn’t feel like it. “I’m a great flirt, and I know how to close myself out,” she told me.

  But when she didn’t mirror Raniere’s movements the way he liked, he’d sometimes call her out on it. “Why are you so closed off?” he’d ask. Raniere told her she was sexually repressed and that it showed in t
he way she hugged. He said that for her sex was in “the box,” the NXIVM term for something that hit too close to home, often causing a repressed or overly sensitive reaction. (“I don’t tend to hug people with my crotch,” Miljkovic told me wryly.) Raniere also suggested that she didn’t like people thinking she was slutty. He went “on and on about it.”

  This constant physical boundary testing became more intense once you were part of Raniere’s circle of girlfriends. Lauren Salzman testified that he would touch vaginas or breasts openly with lots of women around and then comment on how women reacted. “The reactions that we were having…were things we needed to get through,” she said. “So we stayed and participated in things that in any other circumstance we wouldn’t have.”

  Only a select few saw this side of Raniere, where boundaries and privacy were stripped to nothing. Many women existed on Miljkovic’s side of the spectrum, where nothing Raniere did escalated beyond an unexpectedly touchy greeting. (Yes, he habitually said hello with a kiss on the lips.)

  But given how many young women were receiving this escalating attention from Raniere, it seemed only a matter of time until things went too far.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Slave Number One

  Keith Raniere had a lot of secret girlfriends. But the level of secrecy varied widely, depending on the girlfriend, and this had an interesting effect. If anyone in NXIVM dared to speak in hushed tones about Raniere’s treatment of women, his least concealed relationships provided enough scandal to occupy the rumor mill. But underneath this chatter, obscured by dozens of more likely and age-appropriate affairs, was his most closely guarded secret: Camila. (As a victim of child sexual exploitation, Camila’s identity is protected by court order.)

  By 2014, most of the NXIVM community knew that Raniere had a relationship with Camila’s oldest sister, Marianna, who’d lived with Raniere and Pam Cafritz since her early twenties. The three of them would be spotted strolling through the neighborhood as an unbreakable unit, sometimes holding hands and laughing together. And a select few—the ones who were allowed to drop in on Raniere’s Flintlock home unannounced—also knew that Raniere had had a relationship with the middle sister, Daniela.

  Camila was the youngest sister, and almost nobody suspected she was involved with Raniere. At fifteen years old, she was well under New York’s age of consent when he first sexually exploited her in 2005. She’d lived separately from her parents and siblings when she first arrived in Albany. They didn’t know he’d secretly given her his private phone number and was meeting her in the middle of the night. By the time Daniela caught on to what was happening, in 2006, Camila was already sexually frustrated, self-harming, and intent on having Raniere’s baby. Raniere would justify his actions by telling Daniela that some girls were more emotionally mature than their age.

  In photos shown in court, Camila has an oval face and long dark hair like her sisters, but with apple cheeks and a sleepy, mischievous look in her eyes. Well into her twenties she had the petite, rectangular frame of a teenage track athlete. Raniere nicknamed her Virgin Camila. He became increasingly demanding and volatile as Camila reached her mid-twenties.

  In WhatsApp messages presented as evidence at his trial in 2019, Raniere appeared excited by the secrecy that this forbidden relationship required. At V-Week in 2014, he attempted to arrange a secret cabin meetup with Camila on the messaging app. He wanted to collect his birthday present (to “taste” her, is how he phrased it). Camila was only twenty-four, but Raniere had been her secret boyfriend for nearly nine years.

  “Go to our cabin!” Raniere messaged Camila around one a.m. on the night of his fifty-fourth birthday. “Be careful, sneak in, stay there.”

  Raniere had already warned Camila that she couldn’t be discovered on her way in or out of the cabin, which was some distance from the other accommodations where each of them was expected to sleep during the weeklong retreat at Silver Bay, New York. He advised against turning on the lights while inside.

  Camila was unsure about this plan. She was sharing a room, and she didn’t want her bunkmates asking questions about where she was going or telling her sister Marianna that she was running around in the middle of the night. “I’d have to pack. I’m afraid it would look too suspicious,” she replied. “Love, I don’t know when or if I can sneak out.”

  By two-fifty a.m. Raniere was rapid-fire texting through his disappointment. “Today and tonight was so important for me…. At times I wish you desired me so much you resourcefully found the way to make these things happen no matter what…and have our meeting be the most important thing…. Tonight I really needed you. I am very sad and alone.” Camila didn’t reply until morning.

  Camila was among a growing cohort of young women at V-Week who restricted calories as a way to build discipline. Raniere’s goal weight for Camila was one hundred pounds or less, and she reported her weight to him every day.

  “Thinking of you while reviewing my shopping cart,” Maja Miljkovic messaged Allison Mack during the same V-Week, attaching a photo of a sparse-looking grocery haul consisting of two heads of cauliflower, two squashes, a tub of greens, sweet corn, yogurt, and soy milk.

  “Aw!!” Mack wrote back.

  V-Week was in full swing, and Miljkovic wasn’t there for that year’s mix of poetry classes, nature walks, TED Talk–like lectures, and a cappella performances. The two women traded “I miss yous” charged with exclamations and terms of endearment: love, baby, muffin, amiga. “Wish wish wish you were here!!!”

  Like Camila and many others, Mack was becoming obsessed with setting and achieving food and exercise goals. Miljkovic’s shopping cart was an example of the extra-low-calorie vegetarian diet that all of Raniere’s harem adhered to. Squash was one of Mack’s favorite ways to feel full—a low-calorie vegetable dressed up as pasta. She ate so much of it that her palms once turned orange.

  Miljkovic had mostly given up on severe dietary restriction after falling into a destructive binge/purge pattern one too many times. Both Camila and her older sister Marianna had a history of similar eating disorders.

  “There are definitely cognitive impacts to someone who is being calorie restricted,” nutritionist Ali Eberhardt, who specializes in eating disorders, told me. “When my clients are able to improve their nutritional intake, they’ll say, ‘I felt like I was walking in a fog. I didn’t realize until now that I’m in this place of clarity where I can see, and I feel very detached from who that person was.’ Because you’re essentially in this place of survival.”

  By the summer of 2014, Camila had been living for the last four years in a secret Clifton Park apartment outfitted with dark velvet curtains blocking out any view inside. This allowed Raniere and Camila to stay out of sight of her parents and the NXIVM community. In messages Raniere called it “our home,” but it could also reasonably be described as a hiding place for an undocumented migrant. Even Camila’s close friends and family didn’t know where she lived.

  This secrecy came at a cost. NXIVM’s bookkeeper, Kathy Russell, paid a full year of Camila’s rent in cash each summer, according to testimony at Raniere’s trial. Russell used a pseudonym and handed the bills to the landlord in a paper bag at a Starbucks. All of this was arranged to keep Camila in the country without legal status and to hide her and Raniere’s relationship.

  Behind the thick velvet curtains, Camila was struggling. As her sister Daniela had done before her, Camila was, by 2014, starting to realize the drawbacks of the commitment she’d apparently made to Raniere when she was still a child. And, like her sister, she’d hooked up with someone else.

  Camila slept with Robbie Chiappone, a bushy-browed twenty-something with a light brown crew cut and wide jaw. He was one of four kids who’d moved to Albany with their mom from Alaska in NXIVM’s early days. He’d come of age surrounded by the same talk of self-help and personal growth familiar to Camila.

  Camila had hoped the affair wou
ld end their secret relationship, but it didn’t free her from Raniere. When he found out, he told her to forget breaking up—she should first seek to repair all the damage she’d caused.

  Raniere had a “program” for women he deemed guilty of betrayal, and the demands were near impossible. In addition to convincing Robbie that their encounter had been nonconsensual and traumatizing, Camila had to prove her repentance through more calorie restriction and a tougher ban on “indulgences.”

  Raniere demanded that she prove her desperation to please him in absurd, self-flagellating ways. “What have you done today that was difficult in the name of love for me?” he wrote on October 10, 2014.

  “I have not eaten and am dedicating all my free time to you…either reading or communicating to figure it out. I have not indulged in anger,” Camila replied.

  Sarah Edmondson told me about Raniere’s ideas around “penance” as it related to eating, especially if you were a woman. If you ever broke a commitment to yourself—say you slept through a workout or didn’t meet a writing goal—you were encouraged to cut calories as a penalty for bad behavior. “There was a woman I saw once on a three-hundred-calorie diet because of some ethical breach she did,” Edmondson says. “She was eating mashed frozen zucchini and tomato stew. Just nothing.”

  Raniere repeatedly asked Camila to report her weight but became upset when she admitted bingeing and purging.

  “How much do you weigh?” he asked on November 28.

  “I don’t know,” Camila replied. “I think 120.”

  “Why did you gain? You were 113?”

  “Lack of exercise during intensives.”

  “You then need to eat less,” Raniere wrote. “The extra weight hurts my heart physically when I am with you.”

  These WhatsApp messages are a rare record of a turbulent, coercive relationship hidden from public view. At times Camila alluded to the pain she felt in having been ignored by Raniere in front of the NXIVM community for years—something he claimed was a test of their true love.