Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  Soon India was off again, this time for ESP’s annual Vanguard Week (aka V-week)—a ten-day camp the Espians held at a YMCA in upstate New York every August in honor of Keith’s birthday. Yes, it was a ten-day week. That’s because Keith had to tinker with everything, even the Gregorian calendar, and in his kingdom, a week had ten days instead of seven. I would find out later he actually hated the number seven, which is fitting because it’s considered a holy number!

  I assume that India had met Keith briefly before, but this was her first V-week, where she’d be more exposed to him. Like me, she thought he was creepy, and she tried to avoid him, but it wasn’t so easy to do confined to a small campus.

  According to Bonnie, throughout the week, Keith would see her from across the room and call out, “Oh, Innnnnnddddeeeeeaaaahhhhhh!” and she’d roll her eyes (like grandmother, like mother, like daughter), hide shyly behind her mane of golden hair, and then slip out the back door.

  In the beginning, she wasn’t attracted to him. And why would she be? She was young, innocent, and radiant. He was an unattractive, paunchy, middle-aged gnome with BO and a bad retro 1980s haircut.

  But he had his eye on her; he had his eye on the prize.

  By the end of that year, India would graduate from shadow coach to official coach, but she didn’t tell me about it this time—not even nonchalantly. I caught a peek of her yellow sash—the color for a new coach—draped across the back of a chair in her bedroom.

  My heart sank.

  I imagined she felt good and strong at that time, finding a mission for herself and thinking her work there would better humanity. I felt strong and good, too, filled with the stirrings of a purpose to help women find a certain kind of liberation they were seeking.

  She and I were so very alike in our motives and goals, both passionate about helping people and making the world a better, more just place—much like our ancestors before us. The difference between our two noble pursuits was that mine was to free women; hers would, unbeknownst to her, imprison them.

  Mine was guided by my inner truth; hers was unknowingly misguided, based on the lies of a madman.

  6

  * * *

  SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE

  I was tired of the madman’s lies—or any man’s, for that matter.

  For the first time in my life, I was feeling bold enough and ready enough to seek out a career—and a life—that would help women free themselves from restrictions or harm and find the answers they needed within themselves, on their own.

  As life imitates art, I started with myself.

  By January 2013, I was deep into the research for my new passion project: a documentary called Sexology.

  After my ugly, infuriating encounter with the men in Mexico, followed by my proactive, profemale reading list, a surge of creative energy unleashed inside of me, and the documentary idea downloaded one day like a high-voltage current. I’d been yearning for more of a creative outlet, and here it was.

  My project would be about women, sex, and female energy, and my idea was to travel the world with my friend, actress Gabrielle Anwar, and explore the meaning, force, and relationship of all three. After a year dismantling myself piece by piece with ESP, it felt invigorating to put myself back together and begin work on a project to help women, including me, find self-power and wholeness.

  As part of my research, I finally read the book I’d bought the summer before: Naomi Wolf’s Vagina. The old me wouldn’t have even said that word out loud, let alone walk around toting a book with Vagina emblazoned in giant red letters on the cover. But that was the point of my project: to boldly go where many women, including me, had not gone before. Much to my kids’ dismay and groaning, I bought dozens of copies of Wolf’s book and stacked them by the front door to hand out like party favors, thrusting them into the hands of every unsuspecting female who crossed our threshold.

  In February, India and I flew to Albany together for a class called “Human Pain”—for sure the least enticing name for a workshop in the history of self-help. But I was promised that it was a “beautiful” program. If “Mobius” was about self-love, this one was about deepening one’s connection to self and increasing empathy by awakening one’s conscience.

  The trek there was always a pain in itself because it took an entire day—two flights with a stopover wherever. But for once, I was happy for the lengthy haul, as it gave me some time with India to myself, which I hadn’t had in months.

  By now, I was swept up planning the film’s production and putting together a shooting schedule for the fall. I wanted to include India in the project as much as possible, if she was willing.

  “Darling, maybe you could be a part of the production team?” I asked as we flew east.

  “Sure, Mom, sounds great,” she said, busy typing on her laptop. “I’m not quite sure what’s on my schedule then with my other commitments, but . . . if I can juggle it . . . sure.”

  My friend Katie was with us again, so she and I chatted away excitedly for the rest of the flights. Katie owned LA’s most prominent casting workshop but became so enthused about Sexology she planned on taking a sabbatical to roam the world with me as one of my producers. We had a lot to discuss!

  After arriving in Albany, we unloaded at Bonnie and Mark’s and set up camp for the week.

  Also sharing the house was that actress Allison Mack, who gave India her bed to use for the first couple of days. Allison spent a lot of time in the kitchen cooking up vats of low-calorie vegetarian food, which she stored in Tupperware for the week. “Wow, that’s a lot of vegetables,” I said one day, wandering into the kitchen to find Allison at the stove and the countertops overloaded with mountains of produce.

  “I’m chunking,” she said. (Keithspeak for time management, I assumed.) “I’m preparing my meals for the entire week.”

  I tried to make more conversation with her, but . . . she was one of those people who rubbed me the wrong way, right away. I was allergic to her. She had one of those giant Nancy-like smiles, but it was all shine, with no sincerity behind her eyes.

  Vacuous, I thought. She’s a Gold Sash in training.

  At headquarters, I caught quick glimpses of Nancy in passing—we still hadn’t spoken since before the blog incident, and she was still avoiding me. There was no sign of Keith, either; so far, we’d never seen him there. Not once. This time another wizened battle-axe by the name of Karen Unterreiner acted as head coach for the seminar.

  At first, as with many of their classes, I liked “Human Pain.” I could relate to one of the concepts Karen began with, which was that we needed to feel loss in order to feel more love. My father had passed away nearly three years earlier, and I had found that grieving his loss had, in fact, opened my heart to him. I felt more love for him now than I’d ever felt when he was alive.

  But in true Espian fashion, things suddenly turned weird.

  “The gateway to growth is through pain,” Karen said, adding that the pursuit of comfort and satiation (Keithspeak for self-care perceived as self-indulgence) were weaknesses of character and should be frowned upon.

  “We need to proactively choose pain to develop our capacity to deeply love.”

  It was a messed-up concept, if you asked me, and I could already foresee problems with it. Couldn’t this set the foundation for someone to confuse pain with pleasure, and vice versa?

  Although I’d gotten a sneak peek of the concept of penance back in Mexico, this class was specifically intended to teach that theory. Karen told us that if we broke a commitment, our punishment or penance should be harsh enough—even unbearable—that we’d be forced to keep our word.

  “Learning to honor your inner word is your ultimate value,” she said.

  Inner word? What was that? More Keithspeak.

  Karen was very excited to assign the class some hands-on homework. She divided us into small “conscience groups” and for the first time ever, India and I were put in a group together! I couldn’t believe it. I was excited
we’d finally be able to share in an ESP experience—until the nature of the assignment was explained.

  The goal was to practice keeping a commitment of our choosing. If we failed, the entire group had to do penance. For example, if you promised to stick to your diet and then cheated, everyone in the group had to take a three-minute freezing-cold shower or run a mile or some other punishment previously decided upon. Sure, the penance sounded doable. But if you kept cheating on your diet, it got worse—the icy shower became ten minutes, and the jog became three miles. Keep in mind that everyone in the group had to do penance for all its members, so if you had a group that couldn’t keep their hands off the chocolate éclairs, everyone could end up running a marathon and taking cold showers all day.

  To keep from getting to that point, you upped the ante a different way: by adding what they termed “collateral.”

  Their version of collateral was almost like a “deposit.” You handed over, say, $100 to your “accountability buddy,” and if you failed to follow through on whatever your task was, you lost the money.

  Each time, the amount of money in your collateral was raised, until you couldn’t afford to break your word one more time.

  In a conscience group, everyone lost their collateral if you didn’t complete your task.

  “You must learn to collateralize your word,” Karen told us (Keithspeak for adding leverage to your conscience).

  Damn, these people were hard on themselves. The whole thing sounded dreadful to me. I didn’t want to be responsible for other people running in a blizzard at three in the morning!

  I refused to participate, and, thankfully, India wasn’t so into the assignment, either. Because when I really thought about it, pairing us together for something like this was downright devious. I was already feeling that new distance between us because of ESP, but to throw manufactured punishment and resentment into the mix for a class assignment? That could have destroyed us.

  Years later, when I found out about the inhumane penance the “slaves” like my daughter were forced to endure if they or someone in their “slave cells” failed at an assignment, this class made sense. It was indeed laying the groundwork for worse pain to come. Being branded by a flesh-searing implement, India would tell me four years later, was a “good” and “character-building” experience for her.

  I wondered what she thought about the love-pain-inner-word-penance philosophy, and I asked her, not really expecting an answer.

  “I think it’s very moving,” she said, “and quite beautiful.”

  I could see why she would. My daughter was so generous and altruistic, she would find the idea of taking on pain or sacrificing her own comfort to help someone else learn or evolve an honorable undertaking—especially if it meant the end result was for the good of all civilization.

  But India was such an empath already and sensitive to other people’s hurts, she didn’t need anyone to teach her about that. She was so caring and obliging, I worried people would take advantage of her.

  Indeed, experts would tell me later that cults often targeted idealistic personalities, like India, who wanted to make the world a better place. By promoting their groups as humanitarian, they are able to recruit them. Which is the ultimate irony, because often, they end up convincing good, kind people to do harmful deeds in the name of humanity.

  —

  CLARE BRONFMAN INVITED us to stay at her place for a few nights, but I ended up bowing out after just one. She’d put India in a bedroom downstairs next to hers and relegated me to an upstairs bedroom in Siberia that had no heat. The billionaire heiress couldn’t afford heat for the second floor? I wrapped myself in long johns, hat, gloves, earmuffs, and even put on my boots to keep from freezing to death.

  It was all part of the Spartan ESP lifestyle that Clare had adopted, and I guess I wasn’t cut out for it. My pursuit to be warm and comfortable was a “weakness of character.”

  “I am so-oooo indulgent,” I mumbled to myself that night, over and over, through gritted, chattering teeth.

  India stayed at Clare’s another few nights on her own, and I was concerned. All week, Clare had been trying to convince India to move to Albany full-time, live with her, and work as her personal assistant and gofer—at minimum wage, no doubt. Clare was notoriously cheap, and I’m sure she assumed anyone would find it an honor to be her lackey. There was one instance where she commanded her assistant to fetch her a meal twenty minutes away in the middle of a terrible blizzard, even though the terrified assistant protested that her car had no snow tires. “But what will I eat for dinner?” Clare whined.

  The idea of India working as Clare’s assistant sickened me, as did seeing how aggressively Clare tried to sink her hooks into India. Call it a mother’s instinct, but it felt very predatory. I was beyond relieved when India said no.

  By that time, I’d heard about the Vanity Fair magazine feature story published in 2010 about Keith and the Bronfmans, titled “The Heiresses and the Cult.” The article reported that Clare and her sister Sara had taken $150 million from their trust funds to help finance Nxivm and that Keith had lost at least $66 million of it in failed commodity trades, spent $30 million to buy real estate in LA and around Albany, spent $11 million for a twenty-two-seat, two-engine Canadair CL-600 jet, and spent millions more for legal costs on behalf of himself and Nxivm.

  “If Keith’s so smart,” I asked Esther, who was taking part in the intensive, that week, “how come he lost sixty-six million of the Bronfmans’ money trading in commodities?”

  “Eh!” Esther answered. “That’s nothing for them! A drop in the bucket!” She went on to allege that Clare and Sara’s father, Edgar Bronfman Sr.—who would pass away later that year—had rigged the market to make sure Keith’s infallible algorithm would fail.

  I was stunned, and speechless. Seriously? She and the others actually believed this?

  On the flight back home, India kept busy typing as Katie and I tried to figure out the mysteries of “Human Pain.”

  “So . . . let me get this straight,” Katie said as we flew westward. “We destroy our conscience by conditioning ourselves to do the wrong thing, right?” she asked.

  “Right,” I said. “And then we make doing the wrong thing feel right by justifying it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  We both sighed and sat back, exhausted from trying to make sense of the word salad. This would be Katie’s last course with ESP, she told me. She couldn’t afford it anymore and refused to take out a new credit card, as the coaches strongly suggested, to max it out on more courses.

  Katie put on a movie, and I looked out the window for a while, daydreaming.

  I had no intention of using pain as a gateway to love, as they were teaching. That was not my way. I wanted to use love as a gateway to love, and, like most people, I hoped that love would be as pain free as possible.

  I was ecstatic to get home and back to my project. That April, India helped me put together a mission statement for Sexology. We bought a giant poster board, and she wrote out the project’s statement in giant pink letters using a thick Sharpie. Unlike the mission statement that ESP made us read aloud each day, which was about limitations, rules, and secrecy, mine was about expression, fun, and freedom:

  This is about our aliveness, our passion, our creativity, our ability to tap into an infinite source of well-being, of yumminess . . .

  Not only was I trying to involve India in my project, I was trying to get her interested in anything outside of ESP. I was watching her get sucked into the organization’s vortex, and I started to feel quietly desperate about it. I started pitching India for jobs left, right, and center, and frantically talking her up to my friends and coworkers who might have positions available that she’d be interested in.

  Without India knowing, I orchestrated a summer job offer for her through a friend as actor Pierce Brosnan’s personal assistant on the film The November Man. Not to take all the credit: India did do an interview with Pierce and secured t
he job on her own merit. It was to shoot for three months in Belgrade starting that May—an ocean and worlds away from Albany, New York. I called up the line producer in Serbia to say entre nous that I’d supplement whatever salary they had budgeted for the position so they could offer India more.

  When my daughter accepted the job, I was over the moon. She packed her bags to stay with my mother for the summer in her fifth-floor penthouse apartment in a bustling, happening part of the city. My mother knew something was up, and she knew to keep India as busy and having as much fun as possible when she wasn’t working. In true Slavic grandmother fashion, my mother welcomed her grandchild into the bosom of the motherland and devised her own loving agenda to keep India there forever: by introducing her to as many eligible Serbian beaus as she could. It was my mother’s own version of The Princess Diaries.

  “Maybe she’ll get engaged to someone here and stay!” she said.

  It seemed like everyone wanted India.

  Sure, sure, I thought—anything to keep her away from Albany.

  During the summer, my mother would send frequent reports about India’s activities. She was going out with the crew and partying at the nightclubs, having a great time. Next to the hardship of spending long days on a film set with one of the most handsome men in Hollywood, India’s biggest worry for those three months was probably how she’d remain a new vegetarian in a country that considered pig’s feet the najbolji deo—“the best part” of any meal—and had a national meat dish named after her very own ancestor, Black George, called Karageorge schnitzel: pork cutlets stuffed with cheese and ham, and then breaded and fried. Every restaurant had it on the menu. Karageorge schnitzel looked like a giant, textured salami; hence its naughty nickname, “the maiden’s dream.”

  But, you know, sometimes a schnitzel is just a schnitzel.

  With India far away in our homeland with my mother, I breathed a sigh of relief. She was safe there.