Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

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  THOUGH SHE HAD a good time, Nicole wasn’t smitten with the program the way some of her acting peers were. The secrecy and ritualistic aspects left her feeling a bit confused and uncomfortable. “When I learn something cool, I like to call my little brother and I’m like, ‘Guess what I learned today?’ ” she testified. “They were basically saying you can’t do that, which seemed really weird to me.” All things considered, she thought the classes were just “okay.”

  But Nicole’s lukewarm feelings about NXIVM didn’t stop Hildreth from suggesting more courses. Even after they broke up, he suggested that Nicole would benefit from taking classes on ethics or emotions or communication.

  “He used to drive me nuts,” she told jurors with audible exasperation. “We weren’t even dating anymore, but we were still in acting class together, and I’d be struggling with something and he’d been like, ‘You know, the ongoing ESP [Executive Success Programs] would really fix this problem.’ ”

  Hildreth was ahead of Nicole in his acting career, but Nicole still wasn’t convinced he knew what was best for her. She didn’t want to take more NXIVM classes, no matter how good Hildreth was at selling it. She was getting more comfortable with auditions and commercials, and she had a better idea of what she needed in order to level up: she wanted to move to New York City to try her hand at stage acting. “There’s something about being on stage that I just really loved and I found it easier,” she told the jury. “You can take a character through the whole story. Every night you’re taking this character through the whole story and you’re kind of like living it, and it’s a little bit different each night because you don’t know how the audience will react to things.”

  Hildreth and Nicole were still taking acting classes with each other. On a day when the two were paired together, Hildreth told her about another acting program she could try in upstate New York. “I think he actually said, ‘It doesn’t have to do with ESP, so like don’t get mad at me,’ ” Nicole testified. “There’s another course that they were working on that was about psychology and acting…. And they had been working on this program for a while, and it was supposed to be really cool and tailored to artists.”

  If she signed up right away, Nicole could do the five-week acting program for a discounted $6,000 instead of $8,000. “The timing was perfect,” Nicole said. “It was supposed to be a five-week course. And I was moving out of my apartment in L.A. and I hadn’t gotten a job yet in New York and I hadn’t found an apartment yet in New York. So, like, when in your life do you have five weeks where you don’t have to also pay rent, you know?”

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  IT WAS THROUGH the Source, the NXIVM acting program developed in 2014, that Nicole finally spent time with Allison Mack. It quickly became obvious that the program was heavily influenced by NXIVM concepts. But unlike the fourteen-hour-plus days Nicole had experienced in a NXIVM intensive, the Source teaching schedule was spare. Classes happened only in the afternoon, which left her to fill her time with exercise and self-reflection.

  “I didn’t realize quite how isolated it would be,” Nicole said of her first impressions of Albany. “Like, there wasn’t a grocery store you could walk to.” Though their time together was limited, Nicole developed a reverence for Mack, who was clearly committed to improving herself. “I think I looked up to her because, you know, she had a lot of discipline and she had gotten to a certain level in her career and had a certain amount of success, but was also very serious about becoming a great actress. And that was what I cared so much about,” Nicole testified.

  For her part, Mack showed obvious devotion to her own mentor, Keith Raniere. Students recall that he was constantly cited as the source of Mack’s inspiration and discipline. Raniere appeared in many of the videos Nicole watched as part of her Source training, and Mack elaborated on what they’d worked on together.

  Nicole began to place a lot of hope in the Source program as a way to both improve her acting chops and make money. The idea was to take the skills and exercises from the program and go on to mentor others.

  But she found that she was mostly removed from other actors in the program and rarely spoke with Mack. “Allison and Mark were really big on that when I first moved. Like, ‘You’re so lucky because now you have a built-in community when you get to New York…we’re going to introduce you to people in the New York center,’ ” she explained. “I met, like, a few other people in Albany, but I didn’t really hang out with Allison outside of class.”

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  AFTER THE FIVE weeks were up, Nicole tried to keep connected to the Source program by attending weekly classes via video conference. But a thriving acting community and starting her own teaching practice still seemed out of reach. She later learned that she’d need to retake the whole five-week course plus a “teachers in training” program to advance toward becoming a certified acting coach.

  Mack invited Nicole to attend V-Week that August, and they slept in the same bed to save money on an extra room. “One day she brought up that she was part of this really cool women’s mentorship,” Nicole said on the witness stand. “It was this really cool thing for women who wanted to be serious about being strong women, and she thought that I might be interested in it.”

  “ ‘I’m just going to plant this seed in your mind, but that’s all I’m going to say for now,’ ” Nicole said Mack told her.

  She eventually did retake The Source program that October. The second run was supposed to be half price, as well as the cost of the teacher training, but she ended up paying the same amount she had the first time. “I thought it was going to be $3,000, then maybe plus the extra thousand. But they had raised the prices [to $10,000], so now it ended up that it was going to be $6,000.”

  Nicole had only $2,000, but Allison Mack lent her the rest. Nicole learned that as soon as she had her teacher certification, she could be making a 50 percent commission on new acting students she brought in, which at $10,000 per course sounded like a very lucrative way to teach acting. So she took on the $4,000 debt and went up to Albany for more acting mentorship with Mack.

  “She asked me how much my family meant to me, which is obviously a lot,” Nicole said, recalling a walk she had with Mack while taking the course for the second time. “She asked me if I was willing to—I don’t remember how she phrased it exactly—but willing to let go of my attachment to my family or push hard enough to let go of my attachment to having a family.”

  Nicole was confused. She replied, “Why? Like, why would I need to do that?”

  By February the next year, Nicole’s insecurities about her move to New York City had grown into aching existential anxieties. “I was just feeling really lonely and unsure of how to move forward with my career in New York,” she said. “I was really depressed.”

  She reached out to Mack, who replied almost immediately. “I’m sorry I have not been there for you,” Mack wrote. She said she was coming to New York City for an audition the next day and would make time to check in with Nicole. “I will prioritize you.”

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  THE TWO ACTORS met in the lobby of Manhattan’s Ace Hotel, where hulking white columns support an impossibly high ceiling and bare light bulbs hang from spare, industrial-style chandeliers.

  “She said that she had something that she thought would fix how I was feeling,” Nicole testified.

  Mack told Nicole about a women’s mentorship organization she’d mentioned at V-Week the previous year. She said it was exactly what Nicole needed to get out of the rough patch she’d described. The details of the organization were top secret, but once Nicole had proven her commitment to secrecy, Mack would mentor her and Nicole would be able to mentor others.

  In that moment, Nicole felt hopeful. “I really enjoy working with people, and if someone helps me get somewhere, I
absolutely would want to repay that and help somebody else,” she said. But with the benefit of hindsight, Nicole would realize that she’d been desperate for support and wasn’t thinking rationally. Mack was one of the few people she trusted enough to show her most vulnerable self to, and she was ready to lean into that in whatever way was necessary.

  Mack explained that she’d provided “collateral” to back her own vow of secrecy, and that Nicole would need to do the same. In fact, Nicole would need to “collateralize” several dimensions of her life, including her family, her career, and all her important personal relationships.

  Nicole hadn’t kept up with the higher-level NXIVM classes, so the concept of collateral—at least the way Mack was using the word—sounded foreign to her. In Mack’s universe, giving collateral was a powerful way to show your commitment. It added weight to your word, assurance that you’d never renege on your personal decisions. It felt good to be locked in this way, Mack said, because it built trust and took ambivalence out of the equation.

  Mack told Nicole she’d need to write a letter that would hurt her family if it was ever made public. Nicole told her she couldn’t think of anything that her family would want to keep hidden—none of them had broken the law to her knowledge. Mack herself had written a letter claiming her father had molested her as a child, and she suggested Nicole do the same.

  “She said, ‘You could lie,’ and she said she had written that—her father had sexually abused her,” Nicole said, her voice steeped in remorse.

  On the witness stand, Nicole held her head in her hands and sobbed when she recalled what she’d written about her family. She accused her father of sexual misconduct and put the statement in an envelope addressed to the local newspaper in her California hometown. She wrote similarly horrific things about her mother and an actor ex-boyfriend, addressing one envelope to her mom’s workplace and the other to the Los Angeles Times. Mack assured Nicole that no one would ever see what she’d written.

  By comparison, Nicole thought providing career collateral was an easier task. She made a solo sex tape that Mack promised to keep in an underground vault where no one could look at it. “The letters were so much, so much harder for me,” Nicole testified. “Making the video was kind of freeing, again, under the circumstances that I thought no one was ever going to see it, ever.”

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  NICOLE MET MACK again at the Ace Hotel to deliver her collateral, then the two actors headed to a vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village, where Mack told Nicole about the secret women’s empowerment group, which Mack called the “Vow.”

  Mack told her about the incredible women who were already part of this growing network. She said that women who joined were pushing each other to be stronger in all facets of their lives. The program would make Nicole physically, emotionally, and intellectually stronger so that she could build the life she wanted for herself. The Vow was a lifetime commitment, Mack said, and all the women who joined would get “a small brand, like a tattoo.” Nicole would have to decide if she was ready within twenty-four hours.

  Nicole wasn’t sure about the lifetime commitment, but the opportunity itself sounded exciting. “As an actor, you always want to be physically, mentally, and intellectually stronger. You want to play those kind of characters, you want to be that kind of woman,” she said. “I wanted to be like Wonder Woman, I wanted to play that role. So it sounded—compared to where I was at mentally—yeah, it sounded pretty good.”

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  IT WASN’T UNTIL after Nicole confirmed her life commitment to the Vow that she began learning what practices she’d apparently signed up for. Mack explained that the “mentorship” was actually a master–slave relationship, and that every day Nicole would have to text her “Good morning, Master” when she woke up and “Good night, Master” when she went to bed. “There were so many things that were added on later once you were sealed into this situation,” Nicole said.

  Mack came down to the city again to have lunch and go to a museum with Nicole. “She set up my first off-Broadway audition for a really great play, and also set me up with a meeting with her agency,” Nicole recalled.

  Nicole began a new job serving tables at a rooftop nightclub. Her shifts would last from nine-thirty p.m. until after the bar closed at five a.m. “I could pay all my bills myself at this new job,” she said on the witness stand. “I wasn’t as stressed about money, and I started to meet other girls in New York City.” With a new job, new friends, and free time during the day for auditions, Nicole was already feeling as if she’d moved past her seasonal mental health struggles. And when her mom came to visit New York, she decided it would be better for her to renegotiate her “lifetime commitment.”

  But when she told Mack she wanted to leave the secret mentorship group, Mack said that wasn’t an option. She repeated that it was a lifetime commitment, like an arranged marriage, Nicole testified. “I started crying, and she seemed upset, too. But she said she couldn’t let me out no matter how hard I cried because it would show me that…if I cried hard enough I could get out of anything,” she said.

  Nicole had been in the secret group for only about a month, and yet she was growing more and more uncomfortable with it the more she discovered. She got the sense that Mack was in a similarly frightening double bind when Mack talked about the possibility of her own collateral being released. “We were driving in her car to find a parking spot in the city, and she said she had been really struggling with something, and her master had said they were going to release her collateral—or her sex tape, that particular piece of collateral—if she didn’t get her act together,” Nicole recalled. “She said she got her act together real quick.”

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  DURING THE FIRST week of April 2016, Nicole got a new assignment. Her job was now to reach out to Keith Raniere. “I think she said it was my first secret spy assignment, to reach out to him,” Nicole said.

  Nicole had never had a face-to-face conversation with Raniere. What she knew about him she’d mostly learned secondhand, either through Mack and others praising him or by watching videos where he talked about concepts.

  Part of the challenge was figuring out a way to get in touch, since Mack refused to give Nicole Raniere’s email address—and except for Mack and her ex-boyfriend Mark Hildreth, Nicole didn’t have much contact with NXIVM’s insiders. It was Hildreth who eventually supplied Raniere’s contact information, after consulting Vanguard for permission. Nicole then wrote to Raniere to thank him for creating the Source. She said she felt awkward about it and didn’t know exactly what to say.

  Afterward, Mack grew impatient waiting to hear from Nicole about whether Raniere had responded, at one point saying she was “slow as molasses.” Then, on April 16, Mack texted Nicole about stage two of her assignment. “If you haven’t heard back from Keith before the end of the night you may wanna reach out again—continue to pursue until he responds,” she wrote, adding, “How do you get the attention of the smartest man in the world??”

  Mack told her that if Raniere didn’t respond by three a.m. that night, Mack would have to take a cold shower. Feeling pressured, Nicole laid out all her feelings and insecurities about the bizarre situation in an email to Raniere. Without mentioning the Vow, she pointed out a contradiction she was struggling with: the goal of constantly challenging fears seemed at odds with leading a “joyful” life.

  “In all the videos I’ve seen and things I’ve heard about you, you’re very joyful and playful,” she told Raniere, “but for me, thinking about pushing on my fears for the rest of my life doesn’t make me feel playful. It makes me feel scared and heavy hearted. It makes me want to run away. Allison told me to be honest with you and the truth is that Allison is trying to push me, or I assume push against my fears, and is going to stand in a cold shower if I don’t figure out how to hear back from you by th
ree a.m. Yeah, that’s happening.”

  Finally, Raniere responded. “The thing with Allison and the shower is not a good lever for me, but more on ethics later,” he wrote. “It is a scary difficult journey to experience existence with the lightness of true freedom with the depth of love.”

  When asked in court how she’d interpreted this impenetrable phrase about experiencing existence, Nicole admitted she’d had no idea what it meant. But she thanked Raniere for the feedback anyway and elaborated on her struggle in solving the joy versus fear equation. She’d noticed that many NXIVM students seemed caught up in pain as a means of growing. “I just didn’t want to live my life constantly needing to struggle and feel bad or find something to struggle against,” she testified. “Life gives you enough struggles.”

  Raniere had yet more lessons for Nicole in his next email, dated April 19, 2016. “True freedom in the physical world comes from absolute commitment to a principle with no tolerance for excuses,” he wrote. “Only then do we find freedom does not depend on being able to do what we want; it depends on not being able to do what we want yet still experiencing self. Love is only measured through pain. Our ability to feel human pain determines the depth and strength of our love.”

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  WHILE NICOLE WAS continuing to have these exchanges with Raniere, Mack requested that she come up to spend time in Albany on her days off. Nicole got into a habit of working Tuesdays to Sundays—arriving home each morning at six a.m.—and then on Sunday nights taking a bus or train up to Albany until Tuesday morning. She slept in Mack’s bed during these visits, as she had during V-Week in 2015.