Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

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  ALLISON MACK’S WAS the next plea to drop, on April 8, 2019. Mack began to cry as she started reading a list of her crimes.

  She’d had a year, she said, to look back and re-examine her life and relationships. “Looking closely at the decisions I made, the people I trusted, and, more importantly, those who placed their trust in me…I am prepared to take responsibility for acts in which I was involved, some of which I now recognize were wrong.

  “I became close with many individuals,” she continued, “many of whom are wonderful people, and some of whom I now realize are not…. I joined NXIVM first to find purpose. I was lost and I wanted to find a place, a community in which I would feel comfortable. Over time, I truly believed that I had found a group of individuals who believed as I did and who were interested in trying to become better people and in doing so make those around them better.”

  Mack said it had been her motivation to help others, “misguided though it was,” that brought her closer to Keith Raniere. “Through it all, I believed that Keith Raniere’s intentions were to help people, and that my adherence to his system of beliefs would help empower others and help them.”

  As Lauren Salzman had done a few weeks earlier, Mack admitted that Raniere had founded, developed, and led DOS. “At Raniere’s direction, I and other women sought to recruit other women to join DOS,” she said.

  Even though Salzman’s plea had gone over many of the same facts of the case, it sounded different coming from Mack. She described the fear the scheme had intended to create, and the ruinous, embarrassing outcomes she’d threatened to set in motion if Nicole and others didn’t comply.

  Like Salzman, Mack admitted to forced labor, extortion, and obscuring the real purpose and leadership of DOS. “Specifically, I concealed Keith Raniere’s role as the head of DOS and characterized DOS as a women’s only organization, knowing that Keith Raniere was the head of the organization….

  “I am very sorry for the victims of this case. I am also very sorry for the harm that I caused to my family. They are good people who I have hurt through my misguided adherence to Keith Raniere’s teachings.”

  Allison Mack thanked the judge, the lawyers, and her family. “I know that I am and will be a better person as a result of this,” she said.

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  CLARE BRONFMAN PLEADED guilty on Good Friday, two weeks before the trial was scheduled to take place. She admitted to identity fraud and to harboring an undocumented migrant for financial gain. The charges stemmed from bogus job and work visa offers she’d extended to non-citizen students. One Mexican woman said she was offered a $3,600-per-month salary to work on a NXIVM venture, but was paid little more than $4,000 over two years, and was discouraged from taking other jobs. “Your Honor, I was afforded a great gift by my grandfather and father,” she told Judge Garaufis. “With the gift comes immense privilege and more importantly, tremendous responsibility. It does not come with an ability to break the law.” Sara Bronfman, whose husband, Basit Igtet, had helped secure Clare’s $100 million bond, was not in attendance.

  When Bronfman was finally sentenced in 2020, Judge Garaufis said she made promises she didn’t keep, exacted labor she did not pay for, and “took advantage of these individuals’ financial straights and immigration statuses.” He stressed that her blindness to Raniere’s crimes was willful, and her continued loyalty to him was concerning. He sentenced her to six years and nine months in federal prison—three times the recommended guideline. Bookkeeper Kathy Russell pleaded to a separate fraud charge that same afternoon as Bronfman. Four out of five defendants had moved from the “not guilty” column to “guilty.”

  There was only one left.

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  WHEN KEITH RANIERE’S day in court finally arrived, on May 7, 2019, he was a lone defendant with the knowledge that his closest allies had all pleaded guilty.

  Still, there was absolutely no certainty about what outcome Raniere might face. On the one hand, there was the moral outrage that comes with branding women with your initials, but on the other hand, there were extraordinary levels of compliance that raised questions about personal responsibility. There was surely a difference between consent and the coerced appearance of consent, but there was no guarantee a jury would agree on what that was.

  Prosecutor Tanya Hajjar was straightforward in her assessment of Raniere. In her opening arguments she called him a con man and a crime boss. “He targeted people who were looking to improve their lives,” she said. “He drew them in slowly with promises of success, of money, of better relationships, and once he gained their trust, he exploited it.”

  The speech did not dwell on any of NXIVM’s redeeming qualities, instead alleging that it was all a facade. “The defendant pretended to be a guru but he was a criminal, and along with an inner circle of followers he committed crimes, crimes of extortion, forced labor, sex trafficking, fraud, and the production and possession of child pornography, and that’s why we are here.”

  Hajjar told the story of Daniela coming to the United States only to be groomed, sexually exploited, and later confined to a room for nearly two years of her young life. She told the story of Daniela’s younger sister, Camila, who was photographed naked at the age of fifteen and went on to become an accessory in DOS and other crimes.

  She also made a distinction between the more mundane genre of naked photos sent by iPhone-owning men and women of the twenty-first century and the specific use of nudes in DOS. “In the defendant’s hands, these photographs didn’t just serve his sexual needs. These photographs became instruments of coercion and of control. He used them to blackmail and extort,” Hajjar said. “He used them to increase his power.”

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  IN THE HALLS of the courthouse, Barbara Bouchey later told me she thought the prosecutors had left a yawning gap in their opening arguments. She said they’d be better off if they had at least acknowledged that Raniere did improve lives.

  “I submit that you haven’t heard much about the truth so far,” defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo countered in his opening argument. “What you’ve heard is a lot of conclusions. You’ve heard a lot of slogans. You’ve heard a lot about the names of certain crimes.”

  As might be expected, Agnifilo played to men’s insecurities about after-the-fact sexual accusations. “People are going to come here and say, Look, Raniere is abusing me. That’s what they’re saying now. That’s not what they said at the time,” he told the jury.

  He also talked about control—specifically, how it could be a good thing. “Every downhill skier who won a gold medal was controlled by some ski coach,” he said. “Every eighteen-year-old kid who comes from Biloxi, Mississippi, or Hauppauge, Long Island, who becomes a marine is controlled by a drill instructor.” Agnifilo talked about self-denial and vulnerability as noble concepts, not levers of extortion and blackmail.

  I walked away that day thinking that Agnifilo had scored points. He got in front of some majorly distasteful aspects of NXIVM and took advantage of our current climate of fear around sexual assault and its impact on men. He reiterated that this was something these women had signed up for. They’d made choices, and at some point, there had to be a level of personal responsibility.

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  THE FIRST DOS witness testified without mention of the word trafficking. Afterwards I spoke with former prosecutor Krishna Patel, who specialized in sex trafficking cases in the state of Connecticut. When I described the day’s testimony to her, she saw the basic elements of a sex trafficking conviction: proof of commercial sex, compelled by force, fraud, or coercion. The “collateral” handed over remained a threat throughout one’s membership in the group, even if it was never released. “That’s the gun to her head,” Patel said. Money didn’t need to be exchanged if nude photos served as a kind of currency
.

  As days turned into weeks, Agnifilo’s assessment rang less true. Every day more testimony was given about Raniere’s brazen bait-and-switch designs. The witnesses were remarkably consistent in their use of the phrase “not what I signed up for.”

  Agnifilo had a particularly tough time cross-examining Lauren Salzman, who would not budge on the fact that she’d lied and misrepresented Raniere’s involvement in DOS, and that she’d known it was wrong. She wouldn’t go along with Agnifilo’s “good intentions” frame.

  Salzman had just revealed yet another disturbing side of DOS: the group had been acquiring equipment for a BDSM dungeon and increasingly women were being paddled for their shortcomings. Salzman said she had no interest in BDSM but knew she had to go along with the humiliating punishment, which was usually filmed. “These things started to become scary for me,” she testified. Among the dungeon orders was a $645 “steel puppy cage” that Raniere had said “was for the people who were the most committed to growth,” according to Salzman. This possibility weighed on her heavily. She wanted to challenge herself, and she believed in choosing hard things, but Raniere seemed to be choosing assignments for maximum cruelty and degradation.

  I was amazed at how perceptive Salzman was about all the layers of compliance and coercion. She could capably jump in and out of NXIVM’s circular and extreme logic. “Once you have collateral over somebody’s head, then the way they interact with the situation is entirely different,” she testified.

  Sitting on the witness stand, Salzman had unofficially joined the new mission that Mark Vicente and Sarah Edmondson had started two years earlier. When Agnifilo asked what her goal had been in NXIVM, Salzman said it was to raise the ethics of the world. “Ultimately that’s why I’m sitting here, because I believed that in order to decide what’s ethical and what’s not, the truth has to come out,” she said. “Lying and covering up everything we did is not ethical and it is not the mission that I was enrolled in.”

  Agnifilo asked Salzman if she’d changed her mind when she pleaded guilty. “As you sit here today, many of the things you thought were positive and good for the world, you no longer view them that way; correct? You view them as negative?”

  Salzman was fiery in her response. “I still hold the same principles that I held before and I’ve had enough time away by myself, after I was indicted, to think about my own experiences and to be able to process them without other people talking me out of them or reframing them or leveraging my own fears or attachments,” she said. “I decided to go forward the way I’ve always gone forward to uphold what I think is right and good in the best way that I can.”

  Agnifilo tried a half-dozen ways to get her to say that there’d been a time when she thought she was doing good things for the women she recruited. Instead of getting the answer he wanted—that she’d had no idea she was doing anything criminal—Salzman said, through sobs, that her sole intent had been to prove herself to Raniere, that she put his approval above everything else in her life. He was the one on trial, not her.

  “Okay, that’s it. We are done,” Judge Garaufis told Agnifilo after the wrenching emotional outburst. After a few awkward exchanges with Agnifilo, he clarified his point: “So you can sit down.”

  Agnifilo questioned why the judge had cut off his cross-examination. “I am not going to have someone have a nervous breakdown on the witness stand,” Garaufis said. “This is a broken person, as far as I can tell.”

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  THE COURTROOM WAS stunned. Agnifilo later told me that in his twenty-nine years as a lawyer, he’d never seen anything like it.

  Agnifilo had tried to frame Salzman as a scorned woman who was upset that she’d found out about Raniere’s other relationships through the evidence prosecutors shared with her. He’d asked whether Salzman still loved Raniere, and implied that she’d taken a plea deal simply to avoid a drawn-out trial. This had angered Judge Garaufis.

  “I have to sentence this defendant and what you did was, basically, ask her to make legal judgments about whether what she did in pleading guilty was farcical,” Garaufis countered once the jury was out of the room. “I thought that really went pretty far beyond the pale, frankly.”

  Having spent the better part of two years studying Raniere’s teachings, I knew how this must have looked from his seat at the defense table. A woman had an emotional outburst, and was promptly coddled by a man with authority. Raniere would see this as an injustice, and later his lawyers confirmed this. (Agnifilo filed for a mistrial the next day.)

  Judge Garaufis was straightforward about why he’d cut off cross-examination. “I may not get everything right up here, but I will tell you, as a human being, it was the right decision. All right? And before I’m a judge, I’m a human being. And that goes for everybody in this room,” he said. “I am not going to allow someone to be placed in this circumstance and then let it continue. I am the one who is disappointed. I’m done.”

  As I left the courtroom I noticed two missed calls from Sarah Edmondson. I’d been updating her on Salzman’s testimony, and we were jointly piecing together all the secrets she’d missed living 3,000 miles from Albany. I told her what Salzman had said about telling the whole truth and letting a jury decide what’s ethical. Edmondson said it sounded more like the friend she knew.

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  THE NEXT WITNESS was Daniela, who walked into the courtroom with such force that she seemed to cut the air with her elbows and hips. She’d lived claustrophobically close to Raniere—first as his hacker protégée and secret girlfriend, then as his caged emotional punching bag. She recounted how Raniere’s pattern of psychological domination had torn her family apart. Her father and sister still shunned her after all the years of gaslighting, conditioning, and group influence.

  Daniela testified that, after leaving Albany and despite her fears of going out on her own, she’d built a whole new life for herself. She’d worked at a computer store, she’d coached tennis, and she’d met a human rights lawyer who helped her get a new birth certificate so that she could travel and work more freely. She beamed when asked about her current job overseeing a company of 250 employees. Despite everything that had happened to her, she’d refused to suffer.

  The testimony was a lot to take in. It spanned decades and international borders. There was striving and aspiration as well as starvation and deprivation. On the way out of the courtroom I heard more than one observer say they sensed an acute injustice, but didn’t know what to name it. Raniere’s actions sounded bad—like torture, even—but didn’t easily fit between lines drawn by a legal system that disproportionately polices street crime and marginalized groups.

  Raniere and his lawyers would later leverage this disconnect, writing that no one “was shot, stabbed, punched, kicked, slapped or even yelled at.” NXIVM victims said guilt and shame were Raniere’s weapons of choice, and he deployed them in systemic and calculated ways. His so-called “human behavior equation” amounted to a cruel premeditated subtraction—slashing women’s opportunities to question, resist, or walk away without enormous risk. As the justice system faces serious questions about overpolicing, particularly in Black and Indigenous communities, it’s also worth investigating what happens to powerful people who orchestrate harm on a mass scale. In the case of Raniere, I thought his whiteness and class privilege could have easily been part of the reason he was not adequately investigated for so long.

  About halfway through the six-week trial I noticed that prosecutors hadn’t asked any of the witnesses whether they thought NXIVM was a cult. It wasn’t something the government was trying to prove or disprove, so the word rarely came up. I’d spoken to a handful of experts who had their own theories and definitions. I knew that Raniere had endless rebuttals and deflections, and I felt relieved that this can of worms didn’t need to be opened.

  By the fifth week, the mood in the courtroom had shifted.
Nicole was on the stand, describing her impression of V-Week in 2015 and Nancy Salzman’s overwrought introduction of Vanguard. “She would always refer to Keith as the smartest man in the world, which, like—it just strikes me as weird because how would you know who the smartest man in the world is?” she asked, her voice more than a touch incredulous. “Anyone who says that—it just sounds like bullshit to me.” The entire room broke out laughing. Nicole apologized as the judge attempted to hold back his own laughter. “It just seems like a very arrogant thing to say,” she added, to another round of low chuckles.

  “Next question, please,” Judge Garaufis said.

  Of the twenty-three witnesses who testified, only four were in DOS, yet they left the impression that as many as 150 women had submitted nude photos of themselves as part of the scheme. Taken with Raniere’s own collection of photos, emails, and messages presented as evidence, there was a strong suggestion that Raniere had been developing a porno-blackmail scheme as early as 2005. A folder that contained up-close photos of an underage girl’s genitalia, as well as nudes of her two grown sisters, was entitled “Studies.” If Raniere considered himself a scientist, this was his life’s research.

  The prosecution’s last two pieces of evidence began with a video of Nancy Salzman that had been shown in the first days of the trial. In the clip she reads a disturbing sermon on child sexual abuse to a room of Jness members: “If you look at sexual abuse, there are different ways to determine if it’s abuse. One of them is the age of consent.” Salzman adds that in some parts of the world the age of consent was set at twelve. “But what is sexual abuse really? Is the person a child or is the person adult-like?…Often when you counsel people who are children of what you might call abuse, some little children are perfectly happy with it until they find out what happens later in life.” Salzman concludes that society is the abuser for telling such children that something bad happened to them.