Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  She texted Raniere that she was overwhelmed and would like to put aside the sexual aspect of their relationship. She wanted a teacher, and maybe a friend, not a master.

  Raniere replied with a long message explaining that Nicole didn’t have enough life experience to understand what she was asking. He was offering her a shortcut to experience and wisdom. Because of her lack of experience, she had to relate to him on a sexual level. They couldn’t just be friends.

  Lectures like these popped up anytime Nicole pushed back against Raniere’s control. When she protested, he would talk about the levels of obedience required in the military. “He said in the army sometimes they will have you scrub an entire tank with a toothbrush and then when you finish, put the tank in the mud, bring it back out, and make you do it again,” she recalled.

  “I remember being like, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound like very much fun, and also I’m not in the army. This is not the army.’ ”

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  RANIERE DIDN’T SEE Nicole as just his personal sex slave it seemed; he also saw her as his personal spy. After Kristin Keeffe’s surprise exit from NXIVM in 2014, there was a gap to fill in the company’s euphemistically titled “legal” department, one that specialized in uncovering dirt on perceived enemies. Raniere was apparently still boiling with jealousy over Camila’s fling with Robbie Chiappone, and so Nicole’s latest spying assignment was to seduce him.

  Nicole heard about it initially from Allison Mack, who said Raniere had a “really cool” task for her. It was like an acting job, but better. Then, on one of their late-night walks through Clifton Park, Raniere told Nicole that she needed to seduce Chiappone as part of a bigger plan to track him.

  “We talked about it,” Nicole testified. “He told me where Robbie worked out and that they were going to arrange for me to kind of run into him and, like, start up a conversation.” The spying assignment went smoothly at first. She initiated an innocent conversation, stuck to a well-practiced backstory, and continued texting from a fake identity. She even met Robbie and a friend for a drink. But as the months went by, the sting grew unwieldy and absurd, with Raniere demanding that Nicole use her sway to pressure Robbie into visiting a dominatrix. He went away to a U.S. Navy boot camp instead.

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  BY OCTOBER 2016, Nicole had learned that Mack had other slaves. Among them were Michele, a nanny with Rainbow Cultural Garden; Danielle, a doctor leading a fitness program; and India Oxenberg, who wanted to start her own catering company but was overseeing odd jobs in the NXIVM community.

  Nicole grew to be close friends with India, daughter of the Dynasty actor Catherine Oxenberg. “She was really good at talking me off the ledge,” Nicole testified. “So if I was going into one of my moods or getting very upset and worked up…she was very good at calming me down.”

  Once Mack’s other slaves had been introduced to each other, discipline started to take on a group function with the DOS sorority. “When India and I became close, they used her to help me behave,” Nicole testified. “If I didn’t do something, then it would make things harder on India.” Oxenberg seemed to take more punishment than the rest, especially when it came to calorie restriction. Her goal weight was 107 pounds, and she had to stay on five hundred calories per day until she reached it. “It was just really hard to watch sometimes,” Nicole said. “She would get really tired. You could just tell, like, she was just all over the place and hungry.”

  Mack told Nicole that her own goal weight was around 102 or 103 pounds. Nicole testified that “[Mack] said sometimes she felt like Keith wouldn’t care about her if she gained weight, and she knew that wasn’t true, but that’s how it felt.”

  Mack and her slaves began meeting Monday evenings for a session that Mack started calling “church.” “The four of us would sit on the floor and Allison would sit on a chair or on the couch, and we would talk about the week and where we failed and what we were trying to work on for the next week,” Nicole said.

  Next, Mack introduced something called a “family photo.” “Whenever we all got together, we all had to take off our clothes and take a picture,” Nicole testified. “I absolutely hated it.”

  Nicole had become accustomed to having her personal boundaries constantly challenged. She knew that resisting would only cause her more trouble, but she tried to fight it anyway. Mack would push back, either by telling Nicole she didn’t have a choice or by pointing out how her “tantrum” would only hold up everyone else.

  In the “family photos,” slaves were required to appear happy and uniform. “Sometimes it was fun and I could have fun doing it,” Lauren Salzman testified about the photos. “But a lot of times, it was just very painful and hard to put on a happy face for that.”

  “It made you feel really unsafe…because anytime you were together with all the girls, that could happen,” Nicole told the court, her voice becoming pained and breathless. “It feels really horrible to not be able to say no to that. Sometimes it felt like the very worst—like one of the worst parts of everything happening because you have no control when you were just told you have to take your clothes off.”

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  THAT OCTOBER, THE five women—Nicole, Allison, Michele, Danielle, and India—drove to Massachusetts for a weekend getaway. “It was supposed to be a bonding trip, and some of it was nice,” Nicole testified. “We went on a hike…and we kind of explored one of the small towns.”

  After dinner, Mack made another announcement. “As much as I would like this to be just a bonding trip, it’s not,” she said, according to Nicole. “I have another assignment for you guys.” It was like a family photo, but different. “I am going to take a close-up photo of all of your pussies.”

  Nicole testified that she said no, absolutely not, but it didn’t matter. Her anger was her own problem; it wasn’t going to get her off the hook.

  After some argument, they each took turns sitting on the couch with legs spread while Mack took photos.

  “Beautiful cunt,” Mack said, looking at one of the images on her phone.

  Nicole said she refused to speak after the assignment. She knew the photos were sent to Raniere; she testified that she’d seen him text Mack a purple devil face emoji after receiving nudes. Mack chided Nicole for making such a big deal out of it. “Are you still throwing a fit over there?” she teased.

  Behind the scenes, Mack was working with Raniere and other “founding” masters on a plan to expand DOS and brand its members with a cauterizing pen. Raniere wanted more women, more pain. More regimentation. One DOS master testified that Raniere envisioned thousands or maybe even a million members one day. They talked about hosting high-powered meetings wearing masks and using pseudonyms. They even hatched plans to place a DOS candidate in high-level political office.

  Raniere and the founding DOS masters were working on a book, later submitted as trial evidence, which contained NXIVM-style modules on submission and surrender. The lessons aimed to program DOS slaves to endure greater encroachments on their freedom.

  “Practice bringing up a high state of joy when being given a command,” reads one lesson. “The more distasteful, the greater the joy. It is a gift, it is an opportunity to receive a command from your master.” Slaves were encouraged to imagine that a loved one was going to die if they didn’t complete their assigned tasks.

  By late November 2016, Mack was demanding more collateral from Nicole and the others. They all had to submit fresh collateral by the first of each month or face punishment and risk having their other collateral released. Nicole offered her credit card numbers in December and her grandmother’s wedding ring in the new year.

  “I just felt like I was getting more and more trapped,” she said.

  At different times Nicole considered suicide and the witness protection program as means of escape. Suicide wasn’t a good option, beca
use she thought it would hurt her family just as much as if her collateral were released. “I don’t know that I was thinking incredibly rationally,” Nicole said, “but I thought that maybe if I just disappeared, that they wouldn’t have any reason to release my collateral.”

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  IT WASN’T UNTIL late 2016 that Nicole and her sorority sisters were branded. The ceremony took place at Allison Mack’s house in Clifton Park. Nicole was instructed to think of her master through the initiation, and to show her love through the pain. “I didn’t want to say that. I wasn’t having that,” she said on the witness stand. “I thought about my little brother, I thought about my mom, and I just thought, ‘I can do this.’ ”

  By the new year, “readiness” had become a more central practice in DOS, which meant waking up at all hours of the night to respond to drills. “Allison would text me and I had to respond within sixty seconds and it would be any time, day or night,” Nicole said. If Nicole didn’t answer, Mack might call her coworkers, friends, or manager to track her. Failure to respond was punished.

  Nicole testified that she often felt she was on the edge of giving in completely but that a voice in her head always stopped her from total surrender. She put up the strongest fight when she felt herself falling in love with someone around March 2017.

  Just as Daniela had done a decade earlier, Nicole told Raniere about her romantic feelings. She wanted a normal relationship with someone she’d chosen and the freedom to act on her own feelings.

  “He said, ‘Okay, fine, just give me one year. Just trust me for one year and then I will help you find a partner,’ ” Nicole recalled. “For me that was really good news. One year felt like, ‘Okay, I can do that. I can get through one year.’ ” Nicole eased up on her protests after that. She’d still have to remain committed to DOS for the rest of her life, but she had a light to look forward to at the end of a one-year tunnel.

  Nicole wouldn’t have to wait that long to be free of Raniere’s trap, as it turned out. Within two months, most of DOS was disbanded. Within a year, Raniere was in jail.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Master, Please Brand Me”

  When I first met Sarah Edmondson, I had only a superficial understanding of her relationship with Lauren Salzman and why she might choose to formally bind that relationship with a “collateralized vow of obedience.”

  Before DOS, Edmondson and Salzman had talked about a lifetime of closeness ahead of them. They looked forward to wearing matching tracksuits and leading self-help seminars together well into retirement.

  So how was Salzman able to lie to her best friend? She lied about Raniere’s involvement in DOS and denied that his initials had been scarred into her flesh. And she used her deep knowledge of Edmondson’s inner life to manipulate her into compliance.

  It wasn’t until Salzman testified at Raniere’s trial in 2019 that a whole new side of her story emerged. Back in early 2017, over only a few short weeks, she’d become the most prolific recruiter in DOS in part because she, too, had been lied to.

  On New Year’s Eve, 2017, Salzman told Raniere that she was unhappy about his being surrounded by a new inner circle of women. After spending half her life near the center of his world, she’d found herself on the outside looking in. Raniere’s response was to tell her he wanted to re-establish their relationship and bring them closer again, Salzman testified. “He asked me what I was willing to do for my growth and for my commitment to him.”

  “Anything,” Salzman replied. “I’m fully committed to my growth and fully committed to you.” She believed she was being evaluated for her fitness as a parent. She knew she was under a microscope because years earlier, in 2011, Raniere had challenged her eligibility as a mother when he accused her of “roughhousing” with another man at a volleyball game. Salzman had dropped all her commitments and written a ten-page “ethical breach plan” to regain her position on Raniere’s waiting list of would-be mothers. She single-mindedly pursued this outcome with Raniere, even as he slowly became more public about his relationship with Marianna.

  Pam Cafritz died of cancer in October 2016, after which Raniere turned more of his attention to Marianna, who had recently become pregnant with his child. Marianna was not sworn to a life of obedience, and with Cafritz no longer around to facilitate abortions, she had more leverage than ever to start a family. Raniere knew Marianna was pregnant in early January but he kept this from Salzman, knowing it could wake her up from her dream of starting a family with him, which was what had kept her so closely bound. As her mentor in all areas of her life, including her medical decisions, Raniere knew that Salzman valued him and family above everything else.

  Rosa Laura Junco, a wealthy proctor overseeing NXIVM’s “ethical media” projects, then approached Salzman about a very important secret. But first, Junco told her, she needed to submit collateral—something very damaging to her life and relationships—to hear what the secret was. Salzman testified that Junco’s invitation was significant, since she was the one who’d convinced her not to be discouraged by Raniere’s increasingly public relationship with Marianna a year earlier, reminding her that if she left NXIVM, she’d never get to be with him.

  Salzman’s aspiration to have Raniere’s baby didn’t come up during the conversation with Junco, but she still linked Junco’s offer with the possibility of working through her issues and fulfilling that dream. She walked away from the meeting with her mind racing. It was only after Raniere approached her again, this time revealing that he’d created a secret “sorority,” that the pieces started falling into place.

  Raniere asked her to become one of eight founding members of the women’s group, even though DOS had secretly been operating for well over a year already. He asked her to guess who the other founding members might be. “Once I knew Rosa Laura, I guessed the others,” Salzman testified. It was the same group of women, including Nicki Clyne and Allison Mack, that she’d admitted made her feel like an outsider on New Year’s Eve. After years of feeling neglected, Salzman was becoming an insider once again. She wrote a letter of support for Mack and Clyne’s marriage application—an arrangement that allowed Clyne, a Canadian, to stay in the country. Clyne posed for their wedding photos in the same black suit jacket she’d later wear to see Raniere in court.

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  RANIERE WAS SELECTIVE about what he told Salzman. He didn’t reveal the master–slave part, or that she’d need to submit more and more collateral until her life was “fully collateralized.” He made it sound like a women-led support group. “He told me that the sorority had started because of a personal struggle that Camila had surrounding a suicide attempt,” Salzman testified.

  As collateral, Salzman provided an account of an actual crime involving not only herself but her parents and Raniere as well. She wrote that, at a volleyball game in the fall of 2002, a NXIVM student from Mexico had had a psychotic break and become agitated. Instead of taking the woman to hospital, Salzman and others drove her around, physically restrained her, and put Valium in scrambled eggs to make her sleep. Salzman had borrowed the meds from her mother, who got the prescription from her father. Raniere was the one who suggested that, rather than taking the woman to the emergency room, a drive might calm her down.

  This was the most damaging thing Salzman could think of, but Junco wouldn’t accept it as collateral. “She told me that she rejected it because it would be a conflict of interest for Keith to release the collateral, because he would be implicated in the collateral,” Salzman testified. “I needed to submit something that wouldn’t hurt him so he would be sure to feel good releasing it, if I ever break my vow.”

  Junco suggested that Salzman submit naked photos, which she eventually agreed to do. Salzman testified that she was comforted by the fact that Junco had submitted similar photos as part of her own collateral. Salzman put the photos on a USB drive and gave them
to Junco. That’s when she found out she would be Raniere’s slave.

  “She explained the concept that he would be my master and I would be his slave, and the idea that having a master in your life is to help you learn to become a master in your own life,” Salzman testified. Raniere taught that everyone was a slave to impulses—to eat, to have sex. But this was an opportunity to serve something bigger, something rooted in Salzman’s highest values and principles, as defined by NXIVM.

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  JUNCO THEN TOLD Salzman about the branding. “The idea of the brand was to memorialize on our body our promise to ourselves that we made this lifetime commitment to our growth and our master,” Salzman recalled at Raniere’s trial. NXIVM defined greatness in the context of overcoming great adversity. Receiving the brand would test Salzman’s readiness to face pain in pursuit of her goals.

  “I was very familiar with the concept,” Salzman testified. “I was very enrolled in that idea of doing hard things to become somebody who would do hard things when it was most important.”

  Junco showed Salzman her own scar. It was a kind of monogram, with a K, A, and R representing Raniere’s initials. Salzman was more than ready to do the hard thing for Raniere. She “collateralized” everything she owned—her investments, her two homes, her two cars, all her art, and signed letters resigning from all her positions if she ever broke her vow.

  Like a few of the other “founding” slaves, Junco and Allison Mack had received their brands months earlier from a professional body modification artist. But now, after one of Mack’s slaves had been trained to use the cauterizing pen, Raniere wanted to change the atmosphere of the initiation. The day before Salzman was branded, Raniere and Mack went on a walk and discussed how future branding ceremonies would be carried out. A recording of their chat would later become evidence at Raniere’s trial.