Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  India: Is my ticket canceled, too, or just yours?

  Ava: Just mine.

  Ava was afraid to tell her the whole truth. India didn’t express any anger at Ava that we could see, even though she knew she’d just lost a slave and was probably now stranded. She was more likely focused on the fact that she was about to fail in two assignments: get back to Albany and bring her new recruit back with her. Showing anger toward others was rare for India. (The yelling match with Mark on her birthday was unprecedented.) Even her telling me to “please stop” was high voltage for my daughter, angerwise. Plus, she was probably in shock from what had transpired over the last twenty-four hours. She’d been living in a bubble, a weird, alternate reality, and both her doctor and I had just punctured it.

  It would be a waiting game until the next morning before we knew. But even if she did return to Albany at least we’d stopped one woman from a horrible fate on the branding table.

  Our next attempt was with Yasmine’s best friend, Emma. Yasmine had tried to bring her to our clandestine meeting but she’d refused.

  “I don’t know what else to do to stop her from going,” the young woman said sadly. “I told her about my assignment with Keith, and she knows Catherine’s been warning everyone, but she made up her mind to go. She said she’s trusting in her angels to lead her in the right direction.”

  At that, we were all silent for a moment.

  “Maybe we can be her angels,” I said.

  Yasmine smiled and nodded, and then picked up her phone:

  Yasmine: My intuition is going off, worried about u going to Albany. Are you sure you can trust your angels on this one?

  Emma: Nothing can happen to me.

  Yasmine: Okay, but let me know that you’re OK, babe. Please call me or text me if you need anything. If you don’t feel safe, let me know, and we can figure out how to get you somewhere safe. I love you very much, and I’m here for you. Please don’t do anything you’ll regret.

  For the next few hours, we huddled on the terrace strategizing about how to stop the upcoming ceremonies and save more unsuspecting women. We discovered there were at least two ceremonies scheduled for the first week of June: the one that Sarah Edmondson was supposed to attend and the one for Ava’s cell of slaves, of which India was master.

  “The more information we can get,” I told the team, “the more likely we can convince state police and the FBI to make a raid. Please, girls, if you have any more information . . .”

  But the slaves were never given dates and locations in advance for secrecy purposes. “We were just given a deadline to be back in Albany by May 31,” said Ava. “Tomorrow.”

  —

  LITTLE DID WE know that as we plotted in our LA café, Sarah Edmondson was walking into an FBI office in Albany that day, about to pull down her trousers and show the agents the initials of Keith Raniere and Allison Mack burned on her body.

  Sarah had recently been promoted to green sash and was one of the biggest recruiters in the company. When she first heard about DOS, she thought it sounded interesting, she told me a few days later on the phone. There was no mention of masters or slaves when she took her lifetime vow of obedience at the beginning. “The pitch was ‘join a badass bitch boot camp!’ ” said Sarah. But the minute she gave Lauren her first collateral, she regretted it. And the deeper into it she got, the darker and more punitive it became—with girls beating subordinates when they failed to recruit new girls or when they gained five pounds or when they didn’t answer their phone in sixty seconds.

  Before she was branded that March, Sarah was told she’d be given a tiny tattoo: “a symbol of our sisterhood,” she said.

  She arrived at Lauren’s house, was blindfolded and told to take her clothes off, and then was left to wait in the bedroom.

  She was brought downstairs and told to sit down and take off her blindfold, whereupon she realized she was sitting in a semicircle in Lauren’s living room with a group of women—all naked—who she knew from Nxivm. They were all part of Lauren’s slave cell and were women Sarah had done business with, so the situation was more than a little awkward. Sarah noticed a camera mounted on the mantle piece: Someone’s filming this for kicks, she thought.

  They were all instructed to put their clothes back on, and, with their eyes covered, were driven to an unknown destination. But even with the blindfold on, Sarah could peek out the bottom and recognized Allison’s rug from her townhouse once they got to the location.

  “We were taken into a room with only a massage table and told to take off our clothes again and remove our blindfolds.”

  Of all the women who’d been held down and branded, Sarah might have been the only one who didn’t scream.

  “I disassociated,” she recalled. “It was more painful than childbirth, but I didn’t utter a single sound. I just wept quietly and thought of my baby boy the entire time.”

  Sarah’s branding took over thirty-five minutes. Shortly after they were done with her, the putative branding doctor—Dr. Danielle Roberts, a doctor of osteopathy—moved her aside, and they hauled the next victim onto the table. Some of the women wore surgical masks to absorb the scent of burning flesh. For each branding, it took four women to hold down the burn victim. Because this was no tattoo—it was an angry, gaping two-inch-by-two-inch monstrosity.

  As Sarah stood to the side, bleeding, Lauren shoved her iPhone into Sarah’s hands.

  “Film it,” she ordered. Sarah held the phone with her shaking hands and did as her master said. That’s when she saw a text come through on Lauren’s phone from “KAR”, asking, “How are the girls doing?” Later, she found out that Keith’s initials were KAR: Keith Allen Raniere.

  Like Yasmine and Ava, Sarah was a second-tier slave and had no idea up until that moment that Keith was behind DOS. Sometime after the ceremony, she confronted her best friend/maid of honor/master Lauren, who admitted that Keith was involved with DOS.

  So much for a female empowerment group, Sarah thought. Then, when she discovered it was Keith’s and Allison’s initials on her crotch, she went ballistic. What the hell was she supposed to tell her husband? That she was now the property of another man? And woman?

  But it wasn’t until just a few days before speaking to me that Sarah’s husband, Nippy, saw the brand.

  She’d been avoiding him since the March ceremony, finding ways to create distance between them both physically and emotionally so that she wouldn’t be naked in front of him—something I’m sure Keith relished. He liked to introduce obstacles between intimate partners so that their primary loyalty would always be to him. It gave him supreme power.

  After Sarah finally showed Nippy the brand, she told him all about DOS—including that she’d made a false confession on film at Lauren’s insistence, accusing him of being an abusive father.

  Sarah already felt compromised and trapped because they had so much collateral on her, so she did it. She felt as if she were on a runaway train that kept picking up speed, and she didn’t know how to get off.

  “How could I have done that, Catherine?” she asked me. “And how could Lauren, someone I trusted and loved, direct me to do that?”

  They’d flown into Albany separately. Unbeknownst to Nippy, Sarah’s original mission in Albany was to attend a branding ceremony. But after she came clean with him, she and Nippy hatched a plan of defection. Sarah hopped on a train to Toronto, telling Lauren she had to visit an ailing relative in the hospital. Her husband, meanwhile, confronted Lauren in person at the office.

  “You branded my wife’s pussy? What the fuck is wrong with you?!!!”

  Lauren tried to justify it and convince Nippy of the brand’s importance, but Nippy wasn’t having it.

  “Don’t you fucking try to EM your way out of this one!” he yelled at her. “You’re fucking crazy!”

  Before she left Albany, Sarah went to Victim Services and made that trip to the FBI office at Mark’s prompting. He’d already called several branches of the FBI and state po
lice investigators but was getting the runaround. He was told that Keith and his sordid cult had been under investigation over the years, but authorities hadn’t been able to pin anything on them.

  “Be careful who you tell you went to the authorities,” one law enforcement official told Mark. “These are very dangerous people.”

  Sarah was convinced that once the agents saw her brand, they’d be outraged and galvanized into action. But the same door was slammed in her face, too.

  “We’ll look into it. But, lady, from what you’re telling me, all the women involved are consenting adults,” she was told, “So unless there are any underage girls involved, we can’t do anything.”

  There had been valid accusations from several underage girls, but as I would find out later when I dove into a deep investigation of Keith and Nxivm, he was never held accountable.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Bill called to say that India had gotten on the plane the night before and was probably landing in Albany at that very moment. My heart did more than sink—it plummeted. Somehow, she’d managed to finagle her way onto the plane.

  After Bill’s call came a text from Yasmine: “I sent a message to India last night officially quitting the Vow. I was strong and firm and expressed my disgust and desire to no longer be associated.”

  What happened next came from various sources.

  Before Emma left town, she was confused and scared, but, “she was trying to prove something to herself for some reason,” her ex-boyfriend told Yasmine. “She wanted to see for herself.”

  And did she ever. When she arrived in Albany that morning, Emma was picked up at the airport and brought to a cult member’s home, where a bunch of high-ranking DOS and Espian women surrounded her for a cult pep talk. It was like a scene out of Rosemary’s Baby.

  “You must remain a woman of your word,” they chanted, closing in on her. “You made a commitment to go through with the ritual, and you must keep your word. Or do you choose to be weak willed and back out? How could you let your master be punished for your own weakness?”

  At some point, Emma was able to call her ex-boyfriend. She was crying and begging him to check up on her over the next few days—and if he didn’t hear from her, to call 911.

  Me: Yasmine, let Emma know we have Nippy standing by to help if she wants to escape.

  Bonnie: Emma getting into a car and going to safe house now. She is figuring out a flight home. Apparently, she wanted to collect more data and investigate what is going on. But she’s not safe until she is on a plane. Lauren could still do an EM on her and change her mind.

  Me: Yes, that’s because Lauren is a fricking sadist getting a lamb ready for slaughter.

  Yasmine: I want to stop that from happening. She’s not equipped to deal with the head fuck. Wow, people basically pay to get themselves brainwashed! I feel so silly thinking this was a women’s empowerment group.

  (Yasmine had since told us that before she left Albany, she’d found a way to copy all her slave cell’s collateral to protect herself in case anyone threatened to release hers in the future.)

  Next, I got a call from Sarah saying that she’d heard through the cult grapevine that because of all the shit-disturbance we’d caused, the branding session she was to attend had been canceled, as were the others.

  I sent out a text to the team: “Good News!!! Apparently, all the ESP cronies found out about my intervention, and they got scared and stopped the ritual! So no more girls have been branded!! Yeah!!!!!”

  It was good news, but I needed to make more happen, faster.

  From the moment India had landed back in Albany, I’d gone into a crazed outreach frenzy, and called anyone and everyone under the sun who might be of help.

  One man was Frank Parlato, Keith’s former publicist from many years ago. In 2007, he’d been hired by political consultant Roger Stone—yes, that Roger Stone—to clean up Nxivm’s image. (Stone had worked at Nxivm for a short stint. His advice to Keith? “If you don’t want to come across as a cult, then don’t act like one.”) Today Parlato is a businessman, journalist, and creator of the FrankReport, a blog dedicated to exposing Keith Raniere and the criminal activities of the cult.

  “If Clare Bronfman had never come after me with false, made-up charges, there wouldn’t be a FrankReport,” he would later tell me. “I will continue to do what Keith hired me to do as his publicist—tell the truth about Nxivm.”

  I pulled up his blog and began reading it voraciously, one post after the other.

  I remember hearing his name whispered when I was taking ESP classes. The cult vilified Parlato as a purveyor of vile misinformation with a vendetta against Keith, and members were instructed not to read his blog. I could see why.

  One post contained a video of Keith saying, “I’ve had people killed because of my beliefs, and for their beliefs, and because of things that I’ve said.”

  Another detailed allegation was that Keith had raped underage girls. Kristin Keeffe, one of Keith’s ex-girlfriends, also revealed a kidnapping plot hatched by Keith and a high-ranking Espian in which they were going to lure Keith’s ex-girlfriend Toni Natalie and three other defectors to Mexico for a phony anticult rally, and then have them kidnapped and thrown into a Mexican prison.

  “Keith intended these women serious, serious emotional and physical harm,” said Kristin, in an email sent to Nxivm’s executive board and lawyers.

  But why was only the FrankReport writing about all this?

  With just a little research, I found my answer online: Nxivm vigorously sued any and every publication that had written a negative word about it, so that by now, most investigative journalists were afraid to report on the group. They’d been silenced for fear of legal retribution.

  Thanks to the limitless Bronfman billions, Nxivm had sued mainstream media publications such as Vanity Fair and had even gotten a respected reporter from the Albany Times Union, James Odato, put on leave—all because they dared to write the truth.

  Almost everybody had been silenced. Except for Frank Parlato.

  Oh, they’d gone after Frank, too—with accusations that led to two indictments and nineteen felony counts against him.

  But Frank didn’t let that stop him. He kept on writing.

  The more I read about Nxivm on the FrankReport, the more shocked I was at what I read and how many famous names were linked to it—including Doug Rutnik, the father of New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as Sir Richard Branson and even the Dalai Lama.

  I decided I was going to investigate all of it—the criminal stories, the celebrity links, the lawsuits—everything.

  But first I wanted Frank’s help.

  I noticed he hadn’t posted in a while, and I didn’t see anything on his site about branding or DOS.

  I cold-called him and got him on the phone. After introducing myself, I explained my background with the cult and about India.

  “Mr. Parlato, are you aware that Nxivm has a secret master-slave sex society, and women are being tortured and branded?”

  The pause was so long, I thought we’d been disconnected.

  “No,” he said carefully. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  Later, he told me that he thought I was one of two things: a crazy mom or a plant by the cult trying to feed him false evidence to open him up to more lawsuits. Understandably, he was suspicious and cautious, and asked me if anyone could corroborate what I was telling him. I told him I had a list of names, and he began his own investigation.

  As soon as he realized that my claims were accurate, Frank went on a writing rampage about the cult that hasn’t stopped churning out over a thousand blog posts about the cult up to this day.

  His first of many articles about DOS hit the internet on June 5, 2017, and it caused an uproar in Albany and in the ESP community:

  PART 1: BRANDED SLAVES AND MASTER RANIERE; SOURCES: HUMAN BRANDING PART OF RANIERE-INSPIRED WOMEN’S GROUP

  I wasn’t sure if India saw it, but other cult members su
rely did. They began leaving Nxivm in droves that week, with hundreds of defections in the first few days after the article posted. So many fled, terrified, that the LA and Vancouver centers collapsed.

  I saw it as a freeing of the slaves. An exodus.

  Two days after the article posted was India’s twenty-sixth birthday, on June 7. If she had any idea that I was partly behind the defections, she didn’t let on yet:

  Me: Darling I am wishing you a very happy birthday. I love you and miss you. ♥

  India: Thank you. No call?

  Me: Yes call—when are u free?

  India: I’ll let you know.

  Me:

  But she never did. After that last text, I wouldn’t get another for months.

  That night, I wrote an entry in my journal to the higher powers that might be. Like Demeter, I was preoccupied with my grief, but still refused to give up. In fact, I was planning on going deeper into hell to get her.

  June 7

  God, guide my pen—today is my daughter’s birthday, and I am desolate.

  I feel dissociative, I feel incapable of taking care of other tasks, I have so much fear, I am panic stricken, I can’t take my mind off what is happening, I am consumed, I feel obsessive.

  I know I need to let go, and I don’t know how.

  I need help, I feel like a zombie. I don’t know what is proactive behavior, and what is codependent and intrusive, and meddling.

  I don’t want to be passive. Talking about the situation relieves my anxiety, but it is exhausting me. My head feels like it is spinning, I woke up in a full-blown anxiety attack, I am having a hard time breathing. I want guidance, but all the tension I feel might be preventing that guidance from filtering in. Please, help me take care of the other things in my life.

  I see India burdened and alternatively focused, and right now I am infected by the same behavior. I am no better off.

  There is a mass defection happening within the ranks at ESP.