Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Raniere suggested “a certain ritualization” for each of the seven lines of the brand. “Maybe each of the strokes has something that’s said with them, and maybe repeated after the stroke is done,” he said. He asked what rituals would be most meaningful and encouraging of surrender, and suggested that recording the branding on video from different angles would provide another layer of “collateral.” This became an important detail at his trial two years later.

  “Probably should be a more vulnerable position,” Raniere continued. “Legs spread straight, feet being held to the side of the table, hands probably above the head, almost like tied down like a sacrificial whatever.”

  After a pause, he added, “And the person should ask to be branded.”

  “Okay,” Mack replied.

  “Should say, ‘Please brand me, it would be my honor,’ or something like that. ‘An honor I want to wear for the rest of my life,’ ” Raniere said. “And they should probably say that before they’re held down, so it doesn’t seem like they’re being coerced.”

  This became the script for Lauren Salzman’s branding ceremony the next day.

  * * *

  —

  ON JANUARY 10, 2017, Salzman arrived at Allison Mack’s house and was asked to take a naked photo. She lay on a massage table and helped place a stencil on her bikini line. NXIVM senior proctor Loreta Garza recorded the procedure as Salzman’s other new “sisters” surrounded her, holding her limbs in place as if she were a human sacrifice.

  “Master, please brand me, it would be an honor,” Salzman said. She braced for the most painful moments of her life.

  The ceremony fell on the same day as a memorial for Pam Cafritz. Salzman thought it was strange to see Raniere talking with giddy excitement about this new sorority in the wake of Cafritz’s recent death. According to Salzman, DOS seemed crafted to fill the gap left in the absence of Cafritz, who’d functioned as a kind of procurer for Raniere. “Pam facilitated all Keith’s objectives, whatever Keith wanted in many of his personal relationships,” she testified. “Especially my relationship with Keith was facilitated by Pam.” Salzman hadn’t realized it yet, but she and the other slaves were already filling Cafritz’s shoes.

  * * *

  —

  FIVE DAYS AFTER submitting her collateral, Salzman flew to Vancouver to tell Sarah Edmondson about the sorority. She wanted more than anything to prove to Raniere that she was loyal and capable. She also wanted to prove to herself that she believed in DOS and could make it transformative.

  Salzman would put her powers of persuasion to work and bring in more slaves faster than all seven of the other “founding” masters. “I think I have good capacity to enroll other people in my ideas,” Salzman explained in her testimony. “I had the least experience and the least objections at the time.”

  Ten days after Salzman submitted her collateral, Raniere told her that Marianna was pregnant. He’d known for three months but had waited until after Salzman had put her whole life on the line in a vow to never disobey him. It was a personal betrayal, but it was also a betrayal of the ethics Raniere taught, according to Salzman.

  “He got me to stay because he thought I would leave if Marianna was pregnant,” Salzman testified. “He stole from me and himself the ability to know if I would have stayed no matter what, without being in a 100 percent collateralized vow.”

  Salzman learned that Mack and Daniella Padilla, another first-line DOS recruiter, both believed they would raise Keith’s babies, too. Mack was particularly excited about having new sister wives, which left Salzman feeling alienated and confused. “I was like, number one, I’ve had sister wives for twenty years; number two…it’s been something that’s been incredibly difficult for me,” Salzman testified. “This was just a lot to learn.”

  Out of self-preservation, Salzman had to turn off the part of her brain that was hurting and questioning. Bound by collateral that made every moment an emergency situation, she didn’t have time to second-guess herself. Not with her job, home, and family on the line. “I stuffed it, I compartmentalized it, and 100 percent went full force forward with my conviction that DOS was not bad, that it was a growth program, that it was amazing, that this was for women and for me to get through my issues,” Salzman told the court. Later, she would discover that Allison Mack and Nicki Clyne were giving “seduction” assignments to their slaves—ordering them to seduce Raniere, take a photo, and enjoy it.

  When initiating the group of women she’d recruited into DOS, including Sarah Edmondson, Salzman did a lot of work to soften the strangeness of it all. She wasn’t allowed to reveal Raniere’s involvement anyway, so she presented the best version of what she thought a women’s group building discipline and character could be. She lit candles, made dinner arrangements, and broke the evening up into small, escalating reveals. She led each of the five women to different rooms in her house, timing their arrivals so that they wouldn’t see each other until the ceremony was underway. She asked them to take their clothes off and put on a blindfold before they were led into the living room together. Sitting cross-legged in a circle on the floor, they all took off their blindfolds at once.

  “Guys, get over it—get over your body issues,” Salzman told them. “We’re a sisterhood, relax.”

  Then they all got dressed.

  * * *

  —

  IT WASN’T UNTIL later, at Allison Mack’s house, that the brand stencil came out and the clothes came off again. Salzman said the brand represented the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. Each woman was held down on a massage table and video recorded. Nudity was easier the second time around, but there was no avoiding the blinding pain of the cauterizing pen. Some of the women thrashed and squealed and asked for a cloth to bite down on.

  It takes a twisted imagination to come up with such a scenario, but its basic premise has been studied by scientist Stanley Milgram. His obedience experiments of the 1960s found that most study participants were willing to cause harm to another person despite their own conscience if doing so was presented as mandatory by an authority figure. Instead of branding, the Milgram experiments instructed participants to read out memory tests to an unseen student and administer what they thought were electric shocks of increasing voltage when the student answered incorrectly. (In reality, no student was electrocuted.) The study’s findings suggest that more than half of us are capable of inflicting traumatizing, potentially lethal pain if we believe we don’t have a choice.

  Sarah Edmondson told me that the trauma actually bonded the women together. There were fart jokes, yogic breathing lessons, and words of gentle encouragement. Edmondson disassociated, which oddly earned her praise. “She did her yoga breathing,” Salzman testified. “She handled it, comparatively, much better than the other girls did and I was very proud of her at the time.”

  After Edmondson spotted the text on Salzman’s phone from “KAR,” her first guess was Karen Unterreiner, but she did consider that it could have come from Raniere. She thought Raniere might even be proud of how well she’d done. Days after the painful ceremony, Edmondson wanted the brand to be a good thing—it was hers and she’d survived it. According to the research kept in Raniere’s library, severe initiation rituals actually increase the commitment of new members. It took time and soul-searching for her to realize that she’d never freely given consent.

  Lauren Salzman testified, “At the time I thought it was consensual and they wanted to do it, but even if they didn’t, I was their master and I told them to.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Reckoning

  In March 2017, Mark Vicente was reaching a point where he had to choose between Keith Raniere and his wife, actor and former NXIVM member Bonnie Piesse.

  Piesse had decided in January to resign from all things NXIVM over conflicts she was having with the upper ranks. She thought NXIVM had turned against her. She was constantly getti
ng critical “feedback” from Lauren Salzman and Clare Bronfman on what she was told were her defiance issues.

  NXIVM had been encouraging her to move up the ranks, but to get there, Piesse had to show a concerning amount of obedience. “Bonnie’s this little firecracker who doesn’t really care what you say,” actor Maja Miljkovic told me. “They were trying to make her just into another woman who will do whatever.”

  That wasn’t the only reason Piesse had backed away. She’d watched some of the other women in NXIVM become unhealthily skinny, tired, and stressed. Allison Mack was wearing a belly chain and India Oxenberg was wearing a similar chain around her neck. Both of them were wasting away, becoming increasingly frail-looking.

  Vicente wanted to follow Piesse back to Los Angeles and escape whatever it was that was happening under his watch, but he still felt committed to his friend Raniere and his responsibilities as a senior proctor and NXIVM board member. The organization was also a steady source of income at a time when his filmmaking projects had stalled.

  * * *

  —

  AT TRIAL, VICENTE recalled a conversation he had with Raniere during a springtime walk around Albany. The exchange planted seeds of doubt that would soon upend his life completely.

  “We were walking and I was beginning to have very distant, at that point, doubts about him,” Vicente testified in May 2019. “And he said something to me that sounded, you know, one of the usual things that sounded very ‘principle.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, you could be a psychopath and say those exact same words.’

  “He seemed to me to get very excited. And he said, ‘Well, I could be. Let’s say I am.’ And the whole discussion continued. To me it was a strange response, his what I perceived as excitement about it.”

  Vicente told the court that his apprehension grew as his conversations with Raniere continued. “ ‘I don’t know what is going on with you and all these women, but I have deep concerns about this all blowing up in some way that is bad,’ ” Vicente told Raniere. “He said to me, ‘Well, I don’t think this will blow up; maybe other things will, but not this.’ I thought, ‘I don’t know where to go from here. He’s not engaging me on what I’m concerned about.’ ”

  Vicente received a worrying phone call from an L.A. student who’d been propositioned about submitting collateral for entrance into a secret society. Around the same time, he was called to participate in a Jness intensive that solidified his suspicion that something sinister was happening. The program riffed on familiar NXIVM themes geared for women around not choosing victimhood, but it also went a few steps further.

  “My general understanding of that intensive was, in essence, if somebody complains about abuse, they are, in fact, the abuser,” Vicente testified. “So if somebody says, ‘There’s abuse going on and so-and-so person is doing it,’ the whole idea is, ‘Well, actually you’re the abuser.’ ”

  Vicente took Lauren Salzman aside and told her about his concerns. On top of the bizarre lessons, he was worried for Lauren’s health, as she was looking fatigued and experiencing bouts of vertigo. “ ‘You know,’ ” he told her, “ ‘all these skinny women and all these things that are happening, why don’t we start talking about that?’ ”

  According to Vicente’s testimony, Salzman went pale and replied, “ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”

  “ ‘You absolutely do know what I’m talking about,’ ” he said. “ ‘This stuff doesn’t happen without you knowing.’ ”

  Vicente began to suspect that Raniere had wanted the amped-up Jness course to influence him and drive an ideological wedge between himself and Piesse. Raniere had reason to suspect that Piesse was exhibiting “suppressive behavior” behind the scenes and likely wanted her removed. “I began to piece together that this intensive was designed for me,” Vicente testified. “It was designed for me to turn against my wife.”

  Sarah Edmondson was having her own doubts. An episode of Black Mirror sent her into a worried spiral of questions. In the TV show, a kid is blackmailed by text into escalating crimes—all because a hacker discovers his porn-watching history.

  “I actually wrote to Lauren and I was like, ‘Who has my photo?’ I didn’t freak out, but all of a sudden I was just like, ‘What am I involved in?’ ” Edmondson asked Salzman who her master was and where all the photos were stored. The answer she kept getting in return was “You don’t need to know.”

  In April 2017, Vicente learned about a “vow” found on Allison Mack’s computer. “The vow was to Raniere, vowing in essence that she would never leave. And that if she ever did, she would give up any children she had to him and all her possessions,” he testified. Vows were already a part of NXIVM’s curriculum, but this was more extreme and disturbing than anything Vicente had encountered before.

  “I had finally asked myself the question, the most terrifying question, which is, What if he is not who he represents himself to be, but what if he’s the exact opposite? What if he is in fact evil? What if all of this is a mask to do heinous things to other people?”

  Vicente told Sarah Edmondson what he knew: that there was a secret society involving “collateral” and lifelong vows. “Her response I recall was something along the lines of, ‘Well, if something like this existed, then a person that was involved probably couldn’t talk about it.’ ”

  Edmondson was trying to signal to her friend that she was already branded and had given collateral. But it would take another few weeks for Vicente to catch on.

  * * *

  —

  AT ANOTHER INTENSIVE in L.A., Vicente warned two coaches about the secret society he had discovered. “I believed that their girlfriends had been approached for the secret society. And I said to both of them, individually, I said, ‘You need to get your girlfriends away from Albany. You need to get them away from these women that are trying to enroll them in something. You need to protect them, they are in danger.’ ”

  Finally, on May 20, Vicente told Sarah Edmondson that he was going to resign. “ ‘I think that something is going on that could be illegal,’ ” he recounted telling her. “ ‘I think it’s a huge problem.’ ”

  Edmondson had been playing along with assignments simply to avoid punishment. She felt thankful she wasn’t in Albany with the other women, who were punished with a studded leather paddle if they went against orders texted to them or failed to respond in under a minute.

  Still, she gave Vicente the same answer she’d given the previous month: if somebody was involved in something like what Vicente was describing, she probably couldn’t say anything about it. “That’s when the light bulb went off,” Vicente said. He asked Edmondson if she’d been invited to the secret society and her demeanor changed.

  “They have too much on me,” Edmondson said after a stressful silence. “They have confessions, recorded confessions, they have naked material, and I’m trapped.”

  “And I said, ‘Well, if the consequence of you leaving is that all these things end up on the internet, then you better leave, because what you’re involved in is illegal and you’re complicit in this if you continue.’

  “ ‘You have to make peace with it,’ ” Vicente recalled telling Edmondson. “ ‘So maybe your naked body is going on the internet, fine. Make peace with it.’ ”

  Finally, Edmondson revealed that she’d been branded. She told Vicente about everything: the video recording, the punishment, the readiness drills keeping them up at all hours of the night.

  That conversation spurred the first of many phone calls to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agency would eventually open a file on NXIVM that led to Raniere’s trial and conviction in 2019.

  “I was horrified,” Vicente testified, his voice breaking. “I just—in essence, the walls just came tumbling down. Oh, my god, this is what is really going on.”

  * * *

 
—

  JENN KOBELT USED to celebrate each May 31. It was the day she’d joined NXIVM, and it became an anniversary that represented a turning point in her life.

  But May 31, 2017, was a different kind of turning point. After a roller-coaster four years in which she’d left a yoga studio job, launched an acting career, and become Sarah Edmondson’s assistant as a way to fund her NXIVM education, she had begun to think the company had some terrible secrets.

  “That was the day it all fell apart,” she told me.

  Kobelt had just finished a training session with the women’s group Jness when she noticed that Edmondson’s husband, Anthony Ames, had left all the NXIVM group chats almost simultaneously. Then her phone rang.

  It was Edmondson. She had only cryptic things to say. “I’m sorry, we’ve been horribly misled,” she told Kobelt. Edmondson said they could still be friends, but not in the context of NXIVM. She and her husband were quitting, effective immediately.

  Kobelt knew from Edmondson’s tone that something bad was happening, but Edmondson couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say what it was. “That freaked me out a lot,” Kobelt says. If there was a good reason Edmondson was fleeing, she wanted to know about it, and likely flee with her.

  After pacing around her apartment for two days, Kobelt decided to reach out to Edmondson using the secret chat function on the messaging app Telegram. She hoped Edmondson would feel safer answering her nagging questions there, not realizing that DOS slaves used Telegram to communicate with their masters. Edmondson instantly called her with a barrage of her own questions, apparently thinking Kobelt was in DOS.

  “She was grilling me on whether I’d ever been in a secret group, and I’m just like so confused,” Kobelt recalls. “I remember saying to her, ‘You mean like ESP? That’s kind of secret.’ And she was like, ‘Yes, but different.’ ”