Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  She couldn’t stand violence or to see anyone get hurt, and acted as warrior and protector for those who were. In those instances, her touch could be bolder. When she was nine and at summer camp with her younger stepbrother, Cappy, she saw him being picked on and pushed around by a group of bigger, older bullies. She marched straight up to the bullies, unafraid, and demanded, “Leave my brother alone!” The boys scampered away.

  Around that same time, she also showed a wisdom and empathy beyond her years. I took her with me to Italy when I was shooting The Omega Code in 1999, and, as usual, little India had an impact on everyone she met, in the most beautiful way.

  We were filming in the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi, a fifteenth-century castle just north of Rome (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes would marry there a few years later in what would become Scientology’s most extravagant and highly publicized wedding of all time), and the director invited India to be an extra in one of my scenes. They made a big to-do: the costume person took her out to get a new dress, and they did her hair and makeup in the trailer, sitting right next to me. She loved it!

  India always had a luminous, ethereal quality about her, but as soon as they put her under the lights, she looked . . . magical.

  “Remember, angel face, don’t look into the camera,” I reminded her in a whisper before the director called “Action!”

  She looked at me like I’d just said the most asinine thing in the world to her.

  “I know that, Mom!”

  As the camera rolled, I watched her out of the corner of my eye; she knew exactly where to go and what to do. I was so proud! She was a natural. Later, as Linda the makeup artist powdered her nose in between takes, India looked at her seriously.

  “Linda, even though you’re smiling,” she said, “and I heard you tell someone with my rabbit ears that you’re happy, you don’t have to lie about your feelings. Kids always know the truth.”

  Linda looked at her, stunned. She had indeed been going through a difficult time all week but was trying not to show it.

  “But it’s okay,” India continued. “Don’t worry. You may not be happy now, but you will be—soon.”

  Linda nearly fell over backward. Everyone was amazed at how precocious and compassionate India was.

  So back to the ESP introductory meeting: I imagine their promise of creating a better, more ethical workplace and happier world appealed to India. Whatever it was, I put aside my skepticism, took out my credit card, and checked and signed some paperwork they’d handed me without much scrutiny.

  What appealed to me was spending time and sharing a new experience with my daughter—that, I was always interested in.

  —

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at the beach house three months later on that May morning, we still had no idea what to expect. As well as being excited, we were both also slightly disheartened. A week before, India’s bakery business and TV pilot had fallen through. And a screenplay that my husband, Casper, and I had written about my grandfather, Royal Exile, hadn’t interested producers as I hoped it would. The time for both of us to learn new business skills was perhaps more apropos now than ever.

  The scene that unfolded inside was just as bizarre as the madcap mystics and circus performers on the boardwalk. The loftlike living room was set up like a minimalistic lecture room, with a few couches and rows of folding chairs and not much else. It was as if the ESP troupe had slipped into town the night before and transformed someone’s home into a pop-up self-help venue.

  Standing at the front of the room, an army of barefoot ESP coaches greeted us. They wore green, orange, and yellow sashes around their necks, and they grinned from ear to ear. And when I say they grinned, I mean grinned. I’m talking face-splitting, vaguely unnerving, over-the-top smiles—as if they were trying desperately to convince us: we’re the happiest, most successful people on earth. I felt like I was standing before a choir of Tom Cruises.

  The attendees included a few celebrities and some high-profile people already attached to the organization. Emiliano Salinas, the son of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was there—he held a high-ranking position in the group and wore an elite green sash around his neck. Each color signified a level in the group’s hierarchy. “Like a martial arts dojo,” explained one coach.

  Beginners started off with white, and then you got stripes added to the bottom of your sash as you moved up in the color group. The next color was yellow, which you received once you became a coach. Then came orange and, finally, green, which meant you were a senior proctor. I have a vague memory of a blue and purple sash, too, but at some point, their system got very fuzzy to me, so I can’t be sure. Gold was the highest sash color you could wear, but later I would find out that only Nancy Salzman, the organization’s second in command, was deemed worthy of one.

  With Salinas was his new girlfriend, Polish-Mexican actress Ludwika (“Mika”) Paleta, who was taking the course for the first time. She sat with her arms crossed and projected that cynical I’m-not-going-to-buy-into-any-of-this-BS attitude.

  We spotted actress Rosario Dawson, and India went over and struck up a lively conversation with her. India had always been a carefree spirit who could chat with anyone; she was never overly impressed or intimidated by people she didn’t know. I was more reserved and envied her confidence in that way, and was glad when I saw a good friend of mine in the small group: British actor Callum Blue.

  We glommed on to each other like allies and took up permanent residence in the back row while India took a seat near the front. That’s when I noticed for the first time that Callum had a big, beautiful blue tattoo of the Archangel Michael’s sword running up and down his left arm.

  “He used to stand at the end of my bed when I was a child—ten feet tall, with a sword of light,” Callum explained.

  “Throughout my life, I always felt protected by Michael,” he said.

  I was starting to feel left out; these visitations from Michael were a dime a dozen with my family and friends, but he was playing hard to get with me.

  —

  MOMENTS LATER, WE were asked to remove our shoes and put away our cell phones—they were officially banned from the house for the duration of the course.

  Then a hush fell over the room: Nancy had arrived.

  She was short, bespectacled, and overcaffeinated, and went by the ancient Roman title “Prefect.” Of all the smiling going on, Nancy had mastered it the best—or rather, the worst. Her wide, pasted-on grin was so inauthentic to me that it looked like a Halloween mask set off eerily by her gold sash and bobbed hair.

  She stepped to the front of the room, and all the coaches put their hands together and bowed to her.

  Creepy, I thought.

  Even creepier was our instruction that we, too, were to bow to the Prefect every time she entered or exited the room—and every time we left the room ourselves. At the beginning of each day, coaches instructed everyone to huddle together and repeat in unison their mantra: “We are committed to our success!” This was accompanied by a synchronized hand clap.

  And, we were also told that we’d have to bow for the founder and creator of ESP, the genius problem solver Keith Raniere. Only his name wasn’t Keith anymore. We were now instructed to call him “Vanguard.” Apparently, he didn’t need no stinking colored sashes, because he never wore one.

  We wouldn’t have to worry too much about bowing to him, though, because we wouldn’t be meeting him. Vanguard, it seemed, was as elusive as the Wizard of Oz. He did all his brilliant thinking back at ESP headquarters in Albany, and no student got to meet him until they had graduated from the first level of classes.

  But although he wouldn’t be with us physically over the next five days, he would most certainly be there in spirit. He would be talked about, thanked, and glorified in almost everything we did—God forbid we should forget Vanguard for one second.

  “We must always remember to pay tribute to Vanguard,” Nancy said with reverence. “Without him, these great tea
chings wouldn’t exist.”

  Just like a god, I thought.

  I couldn’t help myself; I had to see what kind of power trip this guy was on. I whipped out my iPhone, hid my hands behind Callum, Googled “Vanguard,” and snuck a peek.

  Up popped a site for a comic book character of the same name: a gigantic, muscle-bound alien superhero with tiny antennae on his head. His job was to guard Planet Earth.

  Oh, man, I thought. This guy is living out his childhood fantasy.

  I showed Callum, and we both laughed. Back then, it was just funny and nothing to take seriously.

  —

  AFTER ALL THE bowing was done, our next step was to recite in unison the mission statement written out in big block letters on a giant poster board at the front of the room. It was to be regurgitated daily until we knew it by heart.

  I silently read the twelve points on the board as the others said them out loud. It was a word salad of platitudes and obsequious beyond belief:

  Success is an interior state of clear and honest awareness of who I am, my value in the world and my responsibility for the reactions I have to all things.

  What did that even mean? And then there was this gem:

  The methods and information I learn in ESP are for my personal use only. I will not speak of them; nor will I give to others knowledge of them outside ESP. Part of being accepted into ESP is to keep all the information confidential. If I violate this commitment, I am breaking a promise and breaching my contract, but more, I am deteriorating my internal and integrated honesty.

  And the statement ended with us making a vow to bring in more students:

  I promise to share and enroll people in ESP and their mission for my own benefit and to make the world a better place to live.

  My hand shot up in the air.

  “I have a problem with that,” I said to Nancy and her foot soldiers. “I didn’t sign up to recruit people.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence in the room.

  “And furthermore,” I continued, “the idea that I can’t share this experience with my family is simply unrealistic.”

  Apparently, the reserved Catherine had left the building. Nancy cocked her head like a parrot, and the coaches looked both surprised and mildly annoyed at me but kept their smiles intact. I guess no one had ever challenged the mission statement before.

  “You already agreed to all of it,” said one of the smiling, yellow-sashed ones. “When you signed the nondisclosure agreement.”

  The wha—? And then I remembered: the paperwork I had quickly filled out and signed months earlier at the intro meeting. Wow, that was sneaky. And it didn’t sit well with me at all. I’d been tricked into signing a legal contract, and now they wanted to bind and gag me to secrecy? That was preposterous and fundamentally wrong to me.

  Much later, I’d understand exactly why. This kind of extreme exclusiveness was the first wedge a group like this placed between you and your life outside the group. It was the first stage of imprinting upon you that loyalty to ESP overrode anything else in your life.

  And that, I would learn, was the beginning of being inducted into a cult.

  —

  EACH DAY WE began at eight in the morning, broke for lunch, and finished around ten at night. We didn’t get a break for dinner, and by the end of the day, I was famished.

  What India and I expected to be a course about business was more of an intensive facilitated group therapy. We learned a technique called “mirroring”—a type of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) in which you built rapport and influenced business associates by copying their body language. Nancy’s background was as an NLP practitioner, and it was something I’d already learned from numerous seminars by Tony Robbins, the self-help guru. The technique was performed without the other person’s knowledge, and that always struck me as highly manipulative—was it even ethical? I wondered. I could see India’s profile from where I was; she was listening intently in the front row.

  We learned something called a “takeaway,” which was standard salesman-pitch stuff, and we learned how to avoid libeling or slandering someone—which would end up being the most valuable tool I learned that week. The information was couched within a lesson about how to speak honorably about people and make judgments without committing “verbal violence” against them. You could pretty much say anything about anyone, they taught us, as long as you prefaced it with the phrase “in my opinion.” It was a tool to build better communication skills, said Nancy. (And one I was grateful for years later, when I would use it against them while at war with ESP.)

  For a program supposedly based on ethical business practices we spent an inordinate amount of time learning about how a con man runs a scam and how to pinpoint and identify the telltale signs and markings of a con artist at work.

  Other than that, most of what we learned had nothing to do with business.

  In the mornings, we cycled through a number of “modules”: weirdly constructed question sets full of hokey terminology that put me to sleep. If you nodded off in this class, you received a very unique kind of scolding:

  “Catherine! You’re falling asleep because you’re disintegrated! Which is why you need to pay even closer attention!”

  Translation: I wasn’t evolved enough yet to absorb the highly evolved principles they were talking about. It was the worst insult they could give you, and they gave it out frequently that week. Telling someone she was “disintegrated” was cultspeak for calling her stupid in front of the entire class. Pretty soon I noticed that a lot of students stopped asking questions or making comments for fear they’d elicit the D word.

  Even though Nancy was there in the flesh, she introduced the modules to us using cheaply produced videos in which she was the only star on a TV screen. In the videos, she asked us a series of tedious questions, which she compensated for with overanimation. Then we broke into small groups to come up with the answers.

  My daughter and I weren’t allowed to be in a small group together, they told us that first day. The group talks could get emotional, the coaches explained, and they insisted it was best for us to be separated. India seemed to agree, giving me a “like I really want to watch my mom bawl her eyes out over some childhood memory” look.

  But I was frustrated by this rule. We were doing this together to share an experience; that was the whole point of it! I didn’t like being disconnected from her like this. I’d noticed earlier the wedge they tried to create between students and their outside lives; obviously, this applied to family as well. Looking back, it was easy to see what they were doing: separating you from your real family so that you’d think of the group as your new family.

  One module was called “Honesty and Disclosure,” and I remember it well because it posed one of the more interesting questions: if you were in Nazi Germany and hiding Jews in your basement, and the Nazis came to the door searching for them, what would you do? Would you give them up, or would you lie to save their lives? The real question was: When is it ethical to lie for a higher purpose?

  When discussion time within the groups was over, Nancy would return to the front of the classroom with much fanfare to give the “debrief.”

  Each group would report the answers its members came up with, and Nancy, or Prefect, would smugly “correct” them, providing them with the right answer. No group ever got it right on its own, I noticed.

  After the modules, we moved on to what they called “exploration of meanings,” or “EMs,” an umbrella term for a Socratic line of questioning that’s more experiential than the modules. It’s a one-on-one process done with a coach that is meant to unhook the emotional charge around painful memories in one’s life and dismantle phobias. The same one-on-one process done in a classroom setting where other members witness it is called a “sourcing.”

  (For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to both “sourcing” and “exploration of meanings” as “EMs.”)

  But before we even got to that, I was already having an e
motional charge of my own—and not a good one. Somewhere between the sashes, the bowing, the groveling mission statement, and the hokey handshake they showed us to use, I snapped. Like an allergy, I had a violent reaction to the structural rules and rituals these people were presenting, and, from the back row, I became the rebellious, obstreperous teenager I had never been.

  I refused to call Nancy Prefect. (Callum and I came up with our own nickname for her early on: Gold Sash.) I refused to bow to anybody, I refused to learn or do the silly handshake and clap, I refused to say the mission statement (I mouthed the words and, under my breath, said “Blah, blah, blah, blahhhhh”), and I refused to wear the white Level-One sash I’d been given. Just the thought of putting it around my neck made me choke. I kept leaning back and letting it casually slip off my neck and slither down the back of my chair until it reached the floor in a heap. (I found out later that Keith had requested patents on many of their weird rituals, accessories, the methodology, and terminology—including the sashes, and even the handshakes and hand claps.)

  Emiliano Salinas always seemed to be conveniently lurking nearby when that happened, and he would pick it up for me and put it back on my neck. After the third or fourth time my sash fell, I’m sure he was onto me. But at least he wasn’t a dick about it.

  In fact, speaking of . . .

  Another of the peculiarities I noticed that first day was how the male sash wearers in the room all had a vaguely “beta male” quality about them—a description Casper used when he attended later. They gave off a subservient energy that was disturbingly deferential to Nancy, who reveled in her power.

  I was the opposite of deferential.

  As Nancy debriefed, I raised my hand every ten minutes like a disruptive heckler with Tourette’s, yelling out “I have a problem with that!”