Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Kobelt grew more disoriented by Edmondson’s line of questioning: Had Kobelt ever wondered why ESP was so expensive? Or why asking questions was so strongly discouraged? At one point, when Edmondson burst into tears and yelled “Motherfucker!” Kobelt thought she might be listening to her friend unravel in real time.

  “She was helping lead me down my own rabbit hole,” Kobelt told me. “I decided I needed to resign and figure this out.”

  Edmondson had spent the better part of a ten-hour train ride making many similar calls, trying to figure out who was in DOS and to warn the women she knew without giving away too many details. If Lauren Salzman found out that Edmondson had broken her vow of secrecy, there was a chance her collateral could be released. So Edmondson had everyone swear not to tell. She told Kobelt that even her live-in boyfriend couldn’t know about their conversation.

  While Edmondson headed to Toronto to visit family, her husband took a noisier approach. He confronted NXIVM’s leadership, including Lauren Salzman, at a gathering of more than a hundred coaches. Portions of a secret audio recording of the meeting were first published by the CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM.

  “Sarah tells me she got fucking branded,” Ames told the gathering. His voice was icy, as if he was holding back stronger words. “This is criminal shit…. Don’t even try to wrap your head around how this is okay. I’m out.”

  On his way out the door, he added, “You’re branding my fucking wife!”

  Causing a scene was part of Edmondson and Ames’s plan to leave without setting off alarm bells. Ames was known for his “anger” issues, and Edmondson had spent plenty of exploration-of-meaning (EM) sessions working through her “dependency” issues. Ames’s “tantrum” was intended to frame their exit as a spontaneous attempt to save their marriage, not a move to get the authorities involved. They were afraid of intimidation, lawsuits, and worse.

  Lauren Salzman immediately jumped into damage-control mode. She texted Raniere “911.” When she finally spoke with him, he acted as though he were learning about the branding for the first time. “How do you think I feel learning that this wife branded my initials next to her vagina?” he said. Salzman took this as an instruction that she needed to lie to protect Raniere. If anyone asked, she stuck to the story that he didn’t know anything; he wasn’t involved; he was as shocked as anyone that women went around branding themselves.

  In the weeks after she’d been branded, Edmondson had showed the scar to a close friend, who pointed out that she could see a downward-facing K. But there also looked to be a small zigzagged M tucked under a letter A—possibly a reference to Allison Mack.

  Edmondson called Salzman to say she had to leave in order to stop Ames from divorcing her. She asked about her naked photos and confessions, and if it was really Raniere’s initials on her body. She wanted answers, but she was also testing how much Salzman knew and what she was willing to reveal.

  Salzman admitted that Raniere knew about DOS and had given permission to use concepts of collateral and penance. She defended the initiation ceremony, saying, “It wasn’t supposed to be a horrible experience…. I don’t believe it’s bad for women to build honor and character.” This was a message Salzman would repeat many times over the next year as she spearheaded a wider damage-control plan within the NXIVM community.

  * * *

  —

  THOUGH EDMONDSON’S EXIT was quiet at first, one week later an all-out war erupted in Vancouver. The branding allegations appeared on Frank Report, former NXIVM publicist Frank Parlato’s tabloid-style blog. Kobelt remembers that she and her boyfriend were driving over a bridge when she first read the details. “I read the article out loud,” she told me. “I was flabbergasted.”

  The only names mentioned in the June 5 post were Keith Raniere and Allison Mack, but the post described the nude photos collected as “collateral,” the hours-long branding process that was recorded on cell phone video, and the vow of slavery taken by each recruit.

  Not long after the post went live, Edmondson got a phone call from one of her coaches. “I heard about the Frank Report and I’m supposed to move to Albany,” the Vancouver coach told Edmondson. Though she can’t recall her exact words, Edmondson replied with some variation of “Please don’t move to Albany.”

  “Why, it can’t be true, can it?” the coach asked.

  “Do you need to see my brand?” Edmondson fired back.

  The woman on the other end of the call sounded concerned and confused, so Edmondson kept going. “I said, ‘I got branded, please don’t move to Albany,’ and I hung up.”

  Later that day, Edmondson found out the call had been a trap. The coach was already in DOS and already branded. “She was taping me, to prove that I was breaking my vow of secrecy.”

  NXIVM leadership had discovered that Edmondson was warning Vancouver students about the branding ceremony and helping people cancel their memberships, and Salzman had quickly mounted a campaign to stop supporters from leaving. “That’s when shit really started to hit the fan,” Kobelt said.

  * * *

  —

  KOBELT CONFRONTED ONE of her closest Vancouver allies, Lucas Roberts. Roberts ran a local computer support and repair business, and as one of the city’s few NXIVM proctors, he often played the role of personal assistant to Lauren Salzman when she visited town. Kobelt said, “What would it take for you to leave NXIVM? What would you need to know?”

  Roberts paused to think about it. He said he needed to know that they were really hurting people, and that they weren’t doing anything to try to make it better. It seemed to him that Sarah Edmondson was lashing out because of her own marital problems, not because of any real injustice.

  Kobelt says she nearly convinced Roberts to leave. He told her he was 80 percent of the way there but that first he wanted to talk to Salzman. Kobelt didn’t yet know that Salzman was one of the first-line DOS masters, responsible for having recruited Sarah Edmondson and several others into a vow of lifelong obedience.

  Apparently Salzman “ninja minded” Roberts into staying and taking on a bigger role within NXIVM. He immediately dropped all contact with NXIVM’s critics and would later pick up the responsibilities that Edmondson had left behind.

  This kicked off a period of elevated paranoia, where former members couldn’t be sure who to trust. Innocuous messages of concern and wanting to help would often escalate to strong-arming manipulation.

  Edmondson discovered that most of the women working as coaches in Vancouver had either joined DOS or had submitted first-round collateral to hear the DOS pitch. She guessed that fourteen of the eighteen women coaches had been propositioned, and that many had accepted. “There were women at different stages of their commitment to DOS. Many of them weren’t branded yet,” she said. “When I left, a ton of women left.”

  Jenn Kobelt was still coming to terms with the fact that DOS was very, very real. She discovered that some of her close friends were part of the secret slave group and had been subjected to disturbing punishments and threats. There was much more beyond what was said on Frank Parlato’s blog. She didn’t yet know about the dungeon the sorority had been building in the weeks leading up to Edmondson’s departure. At Raniere’s trial, prosecutors would show an itemized list of purchases from the website ExtremeRestraints.com, including ankle shackles, a hanging rubber strap cage, a studded paddle, a suspension kit, an electrified dog collar, and two human-sized cages. Punishments that DOS slaves may have received from these instruments of torture were apparently filmed, and probably on a hard drive somewhere.

  There was another solid two weeks of constant phone calls. It wasn’t easy for Kobelt and Edmondson to determine everyone’s allegiances. Some members went totally silent, which was usually an indication that they were sticking with Salzman’s version of events. But it became clear that some of the people calling in were essentially spying on enemies, trying to get what
ever information they could to use against defectors in court.

  NXIVM later accused Kobelt and Edmondson of accessing their servers and canceling over $100,000 in credit payments.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Me Too”

  On Monday, October 16, 2017, Sarah Edmondson looked at her phone, scrolled through a stream of #MeToo posts on social media, and cried.

  Overnight those two words had echoed to the far corners of the internet. The slogan was first coined by civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006 as a way to break through the silence that hid pervasive sexual abuse. It persisted on the cutting edge of feminist thought for a decade. Then, on the heels of a New York Times exposé that recounted the unrelenting abuses of film producer Harvey Weinstein, the hashtag suddenly became a near-universal cry for women seeking solidarity.

  It made sense that Hollywood actresses were the catalyst that sent the movement into unstoppable, viral territory. Not only were they Weinstein’s alleged victims; they were finally acknowledging an unspoken industry-wide delusion that unwanted advances were just part of the job description and somehow unavoidable. Women like Edmondson were expected to grit their teeth or preferably smile through harassment at any personal cost. But all at once, women realized the absurdity and misogyny of this unfair tax on women’s bodies and psyches.

  Actor Alyssa Milano tweeted, “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” She invited anyone with firsthand experience of sexual abuse of any kind to simply reply “me too.” Tens of thousands of people responded, and many more posted their own harrowing stories.

  * * *

  —

  EDMONDSON WAS STILL trying to process what she’d been a part of. She knew she’d been coerced. She knew she would not have consented to any part of DOS if she’d known its design and purpose. But it didn’t easily slot into one category. Harassment? Assault? Her experience didn’t quite fit with the accounts of unreported rape or workplace groping she was reading. NXIVM was way out in left field in many ways, and yet the silence, the shame, and the systemic enabling were all there.

  “I can’t be quiet anymore,” she wrote in her own #MeToo Facebook status.

  Edmondson wrote that she used to think sexual assault and harassment had never really happened to her; it was something other women experienced. She never saw herself as a victim. NXIVM had trained her to take responsibility for everything that happened in her life, and that pretty much included unwanted touching.

  She had been violated before, her post explained: once at a rave in England, and again in a bathroom in Israel. But most recently she’d been sexually abused at Allison Mack’s house near Albany. “Naked, pinned down, mutilated and videotaped,” she wrote. “After the humiliation, disassociation, dehumanization and pain, the worst part was my closest male friend not believing me.”

  The next day, October 17, 2017, The New York Times published an investigation into Keith Raniere, another man who, like Harvey Weinstein, stood accused of feeling entitled to the bodies of women he encountered. Edmondson was featured on the front page of the next morning’s print edition, carefully exposing her scar for photographer Ruth Fremson.

  Actor Maja Miljkovic was overjoyed to see Raniere’s story aligned with Weinstein’s. “It was one of the best things to have happen—to have the Harvey thing come out first, then the thing about Keith right after. It primed everyone to go, ‘I see, there’s a pattern of abusing piles of women using their position of authority,’ ” she said. “I thought that was just brilliant.”

  * * *

  —

  I SAT DOWN with Edmondson just over a week later, as more allegations against powerful men circulated on social media, in private Google spreadsheets, and on the front pages of news sites. She told me that the #MeToo movement had given her a powerful collective consciousness to tap into. “All of a sudden my whole body was overcome with I have to talk about this,” she said. “I had been silent. I was trying to get people out without even telling them what had happened.”

  Edmondson didn’t want to let shame and the threat of retaliation stand in her way anymore. “I didn’t ever see myself doing this sort of thing, but I’m feeling a really strong pull to expose this kind of stuff,” she said.

  For decades the many abuses of Keith Raniere had existed in plain sight—somehow too absurd and sensational to ever be taken seriously. Part of the reason those abuses went unchallenged for so long had to do with our cultural understanding of his victims, the majority of whom were young women.

  It’s true that young, beautiful women are often perceived as sympathetic victims—though this applies only to unambiguous crimes. Their abusers must jump out of bushes, or at the very least the abused must rush straight to the authorities—no negotiation or continued contact with abusers permitted—to secure their status as a good, “credible” victim.

  Edmondson, too, had thought she was complicit and therefore not a good victim. To further complicate things, in NXIVM there were other women, branded as slaves just like Edmondson, who did not consider themselves victims at all.

  Most of the women who would later testify against Raniere were wrapped up in his projects, his social life, and in some cases his other crimes. And, like the actors who kept silent about abuse by disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, they didn’t want to invite the kind of scandal into their lives that comes with betraying a powerful man.

  It has taken the #MeToo movement, and with it a paradigm shift in our understanding of sexual abuse, to even begin to realize that this kind of “complicity” does not disqualify women like Edmondson from seeking justice.

  If Weinstein was an oversized jungle predator carelessly terrorizing whoever crossed his path, Raniere was a smaller but no less dangerous creature, a spider who meticulously lured women into his web. The power dynamic in the NXIVM case is arguably even more skewed than it was with Weinstein. These women weren’t just working for Raniere’s company; he held the keys to everything they owned and had the power to destroy all their important relationships. He was their therapist, their spiritual teacher, their second dad, their abusive lover. It was this power, fueled by the unlimited financial resources of heirs to the Seagram liquor fortune, that enabled Raniere to act above the law for so long.

  As I met with Edmondson, NXIVM’s inner circle was still working on a campaign to discredit her. The top ranks of DOS were planning for a public relations battle and had hired a firm to help them secure favorable media coverage.

  Raniere prepared a “position statement” claiming that the branding ceremony was a consensual symbol of mutual commitment, drawing parallels to fraternities where men brand themselves. Raniere grandiosely compared the DOS vow of secrecy to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He denied his involvement and called Edmondson a “vow breaker” and a liar.

  “Any story based on the few liars who seek to shame their sisters because of their own dishonor is regretful,” Raniere wrote. “Imagine if our forefathers had done the same the moment times got difficult.” The statement was never released.

  In meetings with Raniere and the other founding members of DOS, Lauren Salzman helped come up with new explanations for its most shocking practices. The seduction assignments were just a “dare,” not meant to be carried out, Raniere suggested. The brand represented the four elements, or seven chakras, or a Greek symbol/letter combination, bar alpha mu. Salzman sketched out new versions of the brand on graph paper, highlighting the different symbols for reporters; Raniere told her to make a sorority website for bar alpha mu.

  Meanwhile, more and more slaves were asking Salzman to return their collateral and come clean about Raniere’s involvement. At V-Week Raniere had claimed he had very little knowledge of DOS, that the group was “a little edgy” and “alternative,” but that he supported a woman’s right t
o express herself.

  Salzman repeated this version of the story to anyone who asked and collected positive testimonials from the slaves who remained faithful.

  * * *

  —

  THE VIDEO DEPICTING Sarah Edmondson’s branding was also prepared for release. Salzman and actor Nicki Clyne had begun preparing for a number of possible outcomes in September 2017. They edited the recording of the branding, blurred out nudity, transcribed the audio, and edited audio files to see how best to present the ceremony to the public.

  “We discussed among first-line DOS masters and Keith the idea of possibly releasing the branding video,” Salzman recalled at Raniere’s trial. “Keith said that he was considering whether we should show it to the media reporters or release it publicly.” (The clip, which Raniere had described as another layer of collateral, was leaked to Mexican media after Salzman testified.)

  “We edited out the dialogue portions of the branding ceremony from Sarah’s branding video,” Salzman said, “things like ‘I’m committing my labor, my material possessions, my body for unconditional use to my master and that’s my highest priority.’ ”

  The edited version still retained the statement read by every slave before she was branded: “Master, please brand me. It would be an honor, an honor I want to wear for the rest of my life.”

  Salzman pulled together as much proof of consent as she could find, including some collateral, and met with a forensic psychologist and a former law enforcement agent. She repeated the same story Raniere wanted them to hear: that Raniere had no knowledge of the sorority, that seduction assignments were just dares, that all the women were thriving and achieving their goals.