Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  “They’re like an extended family,” she said to me around that time.

  It was also around that time that I began to notice something ever-so-slightly odd about India’s behavior. When we spent time together, she was with me, but . . . she wasn’t. We’d go for walks on the beach, and the whole time, she’d be on her phone, three feet ahead of me. I couldn’t keep up with her, and it felt like she was leaving me behind.

  As she grew closer to this false family, she began distancing herself from us.

  —

  AROUND MARCH OF 2013, India nonchalantly let it slip in conversation that she’d become a “shadow coach”: a coach in training. This time it was me who was quiet.

  I started noticing subtle changes in her then. She was showing signs of becoming secretive, distracted, and unreliable—showing up late for appointments or not helping out at home when she’d promised she would.

  Not coincidentally, this was all occurring around the time I’d filled out paperwork to pass her custodial bank account to her. My father had left her an inheritance—a hefty six-figure sum—to be given when she turned twenty-one. The Espians must have gone into overdrive to pull her deeper into the fold, knowing she’d soon have access to and control of all that money. India was sweet, generous, and now wealthy—a perfect target to become one of their cash cows.

  She wasn’t quite acting herself, and I was worried.

  Pulling her aside one day, I asked, “India, what’s going on with you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Are you upset about something? Do you not feel well?”

  “No, nothing like that. It’s just . . . I don’t want to show that I’m happy here because I’m afraid then that I’ll never leave.”

  I looked at her, confused. In hindsight, this was the first time I didn’t recognize the words and thoughts coming out of her mouth as being her own. They didn’t ring true to me; this did not sound like her.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You’re free to leave anytime you want. Are you pushing me to kick you out and make the decision for you? India, I love you too much, and I am not going to participate in ruining our relationship to help make the decision for you. We have always had a wonderful relationship, and it means too much to me to compromise it in any way, and there is no reason to ruin it because you don’t want to make the decision to move out. You don’t need to create a problem where there is none.”

  Still confused, I called up Nancy to see if she could offer any insight.

  “She’s just individuating,” Prefect explained knowingly, referring to the natural phase young adults go through when they are trying to find themselves and leave the nest.

  The explanation was reassuring. Problem was, Nancy was wrong—and she knew it.

  Instead of trying to find her individuality, India was in the process of losing it. Everything that was strikingly unique about her was about to be erased as she transferred her loyalty from one family to another. That first thin wedge, slyly slipped between us on day one of ESP, had now formed a chasm.

  —

  MY DIVISION WITH the group increased that same month.

  Inspired by my experience writing Royal Exile, I’d begun a blog on my website two years earlier and loved the creative outlet that writing gave me. In March I posted on the vulnerability in relationships and quoted something Nancy said to me once in passing:

  “Men traditionally initiate with women, asking them out, and women generally are the ones who get to reject or accept men’s advances. It is a very vulnerable place to be in—to be in the position of being rejected—over and over again.”

  I posted the blog and then proudly emailed a copy to Nancy, thinking she’d be pleased. Within minutes my phone rang. It was Nancy’s daughter, Lauren—also a high-ranking, green-sashed member of ESP.

  “Anything that comes out of my mother’s mouth is proprietary!” she shrieked. “You are infringing on our material! Take it down!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to explain. “I thought she would appreciate the tribute.”

  With all the bowing and thanking she expected, I’d never known Gold Sash to turn down a little tribute.

  When I hung up the phone, I was shaken. It took me one minute to move to pissed off.

  Had Lauren just threatened me? I owned my own experiences! Why should I censor my one area of free expression because of them? What if they started to claim everything I wrote belonged to them? It was absurdly Big Brother of them.

  Fuck that.

  Not only was I not going to take down the post, I wasn’t going to remove the quote or her name. It would stay up there for at least a year, until I subbed in a well-known psychotherapist instead, who gave me an identical quote (by then, I’d found out that Nancy’s previous experience was as a registered nurse—more like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I imagine—not a therapist). So much for ESP’s unique, patented material.

  —

  IN MAY I flew to Mexico City to take the next class, Family Values—which ended up having no value whatsoever.

  Attempts to establish a stronghold in Europe had fallen flat, but ESP garnered a big following in Mexico. Go figure. I was always looking for ways to improve my parenting skills and had heard about this class, but it had been discontinued in the States and exiled to Mexico, like the defunct dolls banished to the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

  I stayed in a luxurious mansion belonging to a wealthy patron of ESP. Its security rivaled Fort Knox, as did the security for the ESP center: a modern white triplex with a back patio situated in a busy part of the city. Bulletproof vehicles were parked on the street in front, and armed guards milled about. Because of the crime and violence that roiled Mexico, anybody who owned anything worth stealing lived behind fortress-sized walls and employed bodyguards. In fact, just minutes before I arrived, one of the students had been held up at gunpoint en route back to the center from lunch.

  Inside the clinical and sparse office, the mood at times grew just as threatening.

  My new nemesis, Nancy, had flown in to be head trainer for the week and brought Wendy (one of the battle-axes from Vancouver) and a gaggle of other high-ranking staff in tow. Other than them, I was the only female American in the room—the rest of the coaches and students were locals. The group was composed of Mexico City’s elite, wealthiest, high-society types. The children of four former presidents of Mexico have been involved with ESP, and, sure enough, there was Emiliano Salinas with his actress girlfriend Mika Paleta, canoodling in the corner on the first day.

  I was shocked to see how different Mika’s attitude was this time. Gone was the resistant rebel I saw at my first class. Now she sat on Emi’s lap the entire week and embraced him—and ESP—lock, stock, and barrel. The flames of romance had obviously quieted her skepticism, and I’d lost a potential ally in dissension!

  The main arc of the week’s discussions was how to apply the ESP principles to parenting, and topics included the concepts of shame, punishment, conscience, and consequences. Which on the surface sounded intriguing until we explored underneath—then everything started to remind me of an Opus Dei–like storyline in a Dan Brown novel, in which supplicants self-flagellate with cat-o’-nine-tails. All that was missing were the hair shirts.

  But the archaic, self-flagellating program wasn’t my main discomfort—though I could see why this course had been discontinued in the States. The threatening mood I felt in the room had more to do with some of the men.

  “There is a healthy, good kind of shame,” the coach in my breakaway group told us on the first day, as we attacked that topic. “We call it ‘at-cause’ shame.” This was another one of Keith’s wonky terms for “blame-free.”

  “I don’t agree,” I piped up, to get the discussion going. “I don’t believe there’s such a thing as healthy shame. My definition of what you’re referring to would be ‘remorse,’ and—”

  The coach cut me off instantly, berating me for
not immediately accepting the doctrine he’d just provided.

  “You’re wrong!” he yelled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  I was taken aback. He might as well have tacked on “you ignorant woman!” The coach’s name was Raton, which translates into English as a kind of rodent, appropriately enough. He was a total jerk. I confronted him later and told him to back off, and he did, with apologies. But still, I was shocked he would talk that way to a student, and I gave him a wide berth, avoiding him for the rest of the week.

  We moved on to the topic of penance, not normally covered in this program. Thanks to an overenthusiastic Mexican coach, we got some bonus material! She talked about how taking on penance for your children’s transgressions would help them build a conscience. I struggled with their Lord of the Flies premise that children were little savages who needed to be civilized, versus my experience with my own children: they each seemed born with a strong innate sense of conscience.

  The coach in class told the story of how she used this technique to teach her young sons to be intolerant of violence. After she’d caught them fighting and hitting each other one day, she picked up and held a heavy rock for thirty minutes in front of them. Instead of punishing them, she punished herself. The boys were devastated to see their mother suffering because of their own actions, taking on the penance that was really their own.

  I fantasized about what penance I could take on the next time my children fought. Maybe cleaning the cat box indefinitely? Or using public transportation? When I got home the following week, I settled on the latter. The kids went into convulsions—of laughter. The joy they derived from the image of their posh mom on a bus made the whole trip worthwhile.

  Nancy avoided me the entire week like the plague. I had intended to confront her about the blog bullshit, but she was protectively escorted out of the classroom during breaks and immediately after each class was over by two devoted subordinates. She was having trouble breathing because of Mexico City’s high altitude and the toxic smoke in the air released by the active, erupting volcano nearby.

  When she wasn’t gasping her way through a module, Prefect was hooked up to an oxygen tank in the room next door. Her usually colorless face looked a paler, extraterrestrial blue. I was having constant nosebleeds from the pollution and the altitude myself.

  Inside the classroom, a whole other level of toxicity continued.

  On the second or third day, we got on the topic of abortion. The coach in my group (not the rodent) asked if we ever thought it was ethical to have one: “What if a woman was raped, for example, and got pregnant?”

  My group that day was dominated by overly macho Latin men—not the ideal scenario for debating a woman’s right to choose. These men had probably never changed a diaper, never mind squeezed a baby out of their bodies. I, on the other hand, was a woman who’d squeezed out three beautiful babies and also had two abortions. Even though terminating the pregnancies was extremely traumatic for me, and I’ve lived with the emotional consequences of my choices every day, it’s not a decision I’d ever want taken away from me or from any woman.

  One of the macho guys in my group inflated his chest:

  “There is never a reason to terminate a life—the end!” he said, eyeing the women in our group with contempt, in case one of us had even considered it. One of the women, who we found out later had been raped, burst into tears. Now it was my turn to lose it. I wanted to both vomit on the guy and punch him.

  “That’s bullshit!” I yelled.

  Our ensuing argument escalated into a melee when the coach threw another stick of dynamite into the already heated discussion: according to ESP teachings, there are no ultimate victims in this world.

  “Are you telling me that women are responsible for their own rape?!” I cried again, exasperated.

  Oh, no. It was much worse than that.

  “We actually believe that the victims are the abusers.”

  Which, looking back, was pretty ingenious of them. They did indeed teach this belief in their classes, and in fact, it was even part of their twelve-point mission statement. And by doing so, they set up the cult members for abuse while at the same time convincing them they couldn’t possibly be victims. The women who ended up enthralled by and in thrall to Keith would not be capable of admitting they were victims after indoctrination like this.

  Hearing that, I had to remove myself from the room before I did some violence of my own. I stormed out onto the patio and shoved a wad of Kleenex up my nose. I was bleeding again. So much blood was coming out of me I was starting to think I had stigmata of the nose—in keeping with the self-flagellation theme of the day, of course.

  What was going on? I’d never seen such chauvinistic attitudes expressed so overtly from the men in ESP before. If anything, they were normally as docile as lambs. At the time, I wrote it off as a cultural thing, but I started to put together the pieces much later when I talked to Mark Vicente about it.

  Espian men in Mexico had been signing up for the newly rolled-out men’s course, SOP (Society of Protectors) in droves. It was promoted as the counterpart to that misogynistic course I’d unwittingly hosted less than a year earlier, Jness. While the men thought they were being trained to become honorable, noble protectors of humanity, they were actually being molded to serve as mindless soldiers in Keith’s perverse army—the sole goal of which was to protect Vanguard and his harem.

  There was an even darker, uglier agenda to it all.

  “It was turning us all into assholes,” Mark told me years later. He had been one of the three leaders of the course for many years. “It was turning us into misogynists.”

  At the end of Family Values Week, Emiliano and Mika hosted an elegant cocktail party on the terrace of his penthouse apartment. His place was sealed up like a fortress, and the heavy metal front door looked as impenetrable as a bank vault. Anyone considered high profile was a kidnapping risk there.

  I sipped champagne on the roof as my nose bled, and the volcano in the distance growled and began to smoke.

  I couldn’t wait to get home.

  —

  THAT SUMMER WAS the beginning of a turning point for both India and me, but on roads leading in opposite directions.

  Maybe it was in reaction to and in protest of the hostile guys in Mexico, the lingering effects of the misogynistic rhetoric of Jness, and even my fight with Nancy for creative freedom, but when I got back to LA, I picked up two ultra-female-positive and girl-friendly books for some scintillating and political summer reading: Vagina, by Naomi Wolf, and, I’m embarrassed to admit, Fifty Shades of Grey.

  That summer, the book was a global phenomenon, and all the women at my tennis clinic were reading it and getting titillated, calling it “mommy porn.” My curiosity finally got the best of me, and I bought a copy. Man, it was badly written—and yet I couldn’t put it down. Shakespeare it wasn’t. But a lot of women (including me) were so desperate to get turned on that we were subjecting ourselves to what seemed like hundreds of pages of . . . drivel.

  More than a hundred million women read that book in a compressed period of time that year and got fired up about it, which made me wonder about the “hundredth monkey” effect I’d heard about. It’s a hypothetical phenomenon that explains the dynamics of evolution, suggesting that when a critical number of members of a species understand a new idea or exhibit a new behavior, it spreads spontaneously to other groups.

  Perhaps I was feeling the zeitgeist of that. But all I can tell you is, the book had me buzzing and thinking. The plot was inconsequential to me; I was interested and moved by what the story was doing to women all over the world as a collective.

  There was something women needed, and they were reading this book out in the open, boldly and unashamed, to get it. It was a new kind of sexual liberation and strength, and an idea was percolating in my mind about a female-empowering project I could create to support it.

  I was excited and filled with energy and wanted to dis
cuss everything with India, but she’d whisked herself away to Albany to take another bunch of classes and then stayed on there to celebrate her twenty-first birthday with the Espians. That saddened me. My sweet daughter had come of age, and she’d chosen to observe this milestone with them. This sense of them versus us kept growing stronger and stronger.

  When she got home in July, the first thing she did was break up with her boyfriend, Hudson, whom I adored. They’d been dating since they were sixteen, and he’d always been a strong, devoted, solid presence in her life. Hudson was such a gentleman, he reminded me of a knight—he had an old-fashioned, chivalrous air about him.

  When India told me about the breakup, I burst into tears. She seemed strangely unemotional about it, which I found odd. He’d been the love of her life for five years, and her emotional response was detached—almost robotic. It reminded me of Relationship Day back in Vancouver, when the ESP coaches taught that emotional attachment was an expression of weakness.

  I’m sure that was especially true when the attachment competed with your loyalty to the group. I’ve learned since that members were often persuaded to sever relationships that “weren’t supportive of your personal growth and the mission.”

  Hudson had never been a fan of self-help courses, and he definitely did not like ESP. And in India’s case, it would have been a critically important time to pull her away from any attachments that would get in the way of her money, now that it was officially hers. A future with Hudson, marriage, children, a life outside of ESP—those things would not support the mission.