Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

All proctors have resigned except for one. There is dissention within the ranks. I’ve heard 100 defectors so far and more daily. The Vancouver center collapsed, LA too. ESP is shrinking. They want to pin it on a single troublemaker at a time, blaming Sarah, Mark, Bonnie, and me because they can’t see that it is their behavior that is causing this to happen. In a way, it is a good thing that KR crossed the line & became reckless, as otherwise people might have been enslaved for life.

  This branding may be what brings the whole organization down.

  I ask for peace and faith today.

  I am afraid for my child.

  I have been able to successfully save other women from joining and getting mutilated, but I could not save my own child. That is the crux of my pain—my complete powerlessness over her and my inability to help her see the light.

  And the fact that I was unable to protect her from harm.

  And my naiveté at how easy it is to be brainwashed, the power of undue influence and mind control and coercion.

  Never again will I be part of a large-group awareness training or anything that remotely resembles a cult. Nor will I expose my children to these organizations.

  No more gurus, or anyone who poses as a godlike figure.

  Forgive me, God, forgive me for being so blind. Forgive me for misplacing my devotion, forgive me for exposing my children to potential harm.

  I am innocent, I am good, and I pray that any damage I have incurred can be reversed.

  11

  * * *

  GANGSTA MOMS

  I prayed and prayed, but still I spiraled into an abyss of despair.

  Hundreds were leaving the cult, but not my India—and now she was refusing to talk to me, too. Once again I felt completely powerless to penetrate the cult’s ironclad indoctrination of my daughter. All I could do was double my frenzied efforts to find help.

  In addition to reaching out to Frank Parlato, I called the FBI again. They didn’t return my calls.

  I got in touch with a friend who owned a private plane and asked if we could whisk India away to a deserted island with no cell phone reception and have her forcibly deprogrammed. “Isn’t that illegal?” my friend asked.

  I checked with two top security firms to ask if they could kidnap India and bring her home. The days of forced cult extractions and interventions were over, I was told. A cult member had recently sued his parents for $4 million for kidnapping him from a cult—and won.

  The only people I didn’t try were the US Special Forces and the Mafia, but, believe me, I asked everyone I knew if they had a Guido in their back pocket just in case.

  My powerlessness was made all the worse by the guilt and unanswered questions that began haunting me at night when I desperately needed sleep to keep sane and remain a functioning mom to Grace, Maya, and Celeste through this nightmare.

  Why had this happened to India? I wanted to know.

  Had she inherited a gene that predisposed her to brainwashing? Did this happen because I took her to Deepak Chopra’s ashram when she was a baby? Should I not have told her about the self-help adventures of my past? Was her entrapment my fault because of what I did to Keith or because I took her to ESP in the first place? Why, why, why?

  I spent days and nights pondering and agonizing over those questions and blaming myself.

  Then I remembered someone who might have the answers.

  Ranking right up there with Frank was one other man just as vilified by Keith Raniere and considered an archenemy by all Espians: Rick Alan Ross.

  Rick has been called a “cult deprogrammer” or cult intervention specialist—some say he is a “cult buster.” He is the founder of the nonprofit Cult Education Institute and online educational database. In the 1980s, he deprogrammed two former members of the Branch Davidians religious cult, long before the 1993 siege in Waco, Texas. More recently, he’d had success deprogramming Espians. As with Frank, the Espians had all been ordered not to pay attention to anything Rick said—which was one big reason why I knew I had to call him. If Keith said someone was lying, you could be sure he or she was a truth teller.

  Keith, backed by the Nxivm clan, tried for fourteen years in federal court to sue Rick into oblivion. He claimed Rick had defamed the cult by posting online the reports by a psychologist and a psychiatrist who were critical of Nxivm’s programs and practices. The lawsuit also claimed that the doctors’ reports somehow violated copyright and trade secret laws because they were largely based on the study notes of an ESP defector (whom the cult also sued).

  Like Frank, Rick never gave up and wouldn’t be silenced. The lawsuit against Ross was finally dismissed in January 2017.

  I tracked Rick down—he was based in New Jersey—and called him. He gave me the assurances, information, and wake-up call I needed.

  “Catherine, it’s meaningless to investigate why certain people are suggestible; in fact, it is a form of victim shaming,” he explained. “Anyone and everyone can potentially be susceptible. It is a fallacy to believe that you can’t fall prey to this. There are successful, extremely well-educated, sophisticated people in this cult. We need to stop talking about who does and doesn’t get brainwashed, and focus on what the groups did to ensnare them.

  “Cult leaders and the people that run the cult use deception and misrepresent their motivation and goals. Through confession, they extract secrets about you, they expose your vulnerabilities, and everyone has them. Their ulterior goal is to exploit you.”

  “But . . . do you think I created a susceptibility in India,” I asked him, “because I exposed her to ashrams and gurus since she was little? We have alcoholics in my family. I was bulimic. Could there be a genetic link—”

  Rick cut me off. “Stop right there,” he said sharply. “Stop blaming yourself. Destructive cults are well-oiled machines. Your daughter never stood a chance. It doesn’t mean she’s weak, defective, malleable, or stupid. The only common denominator so far seems to be people who are ‘in transition’ in their lives.”

  I thought about India’s bakery and TV job that fell through a week before our first class began, and her having left school a few months before that.

  “Everything that cults do is calculated,” he said. “It’s all a trap.”

  When I described my intervention attempt, Rick wasn’t surprised it nose-dived. “You did everything wrong,” he told me frankly. “You never say ‘brainwashed’ or ‘cult’ to them—never! Members of Nxivm are some of the hardest cult members to deprogram because of all the implanted phobias.”

  “Rick, India doesn’t believe she’s brainwashed.”

  “No one who’s brainwashed thinks they are,” he said. “The term ‘brainwashing’ is really describing a synthesis of coercive persuasion and influence techniques used to gain undue influence over people. The way you recognize undue influence is you will see people acting against their own best interest but consistently acting in the best interest of a person who has undue influence over them.”

  “That’s exactly what I see happening with my daughter. Nothing she’s made to do is in her best interest, only Keith’s.” I hung up, feeling mortified that I had blundered the intervention so badly, but also relieved because this expert was confident that India was indeed a victim of brainwashing, and that her susceptibility wasn’t my fault. I would turn to Rick countless times over the next months whenever I needed an expert’s advice and opinion, or to try to understand my daughter’s thoughts, feelings, and challenges.

  I was still at a loss, though, over what to try next to help her.

  In late June, I went to Greg’s to tell him about the hundreds of defections from the cult and that India was still digging in her heels.

  “I pray she won’t be the last woman standing,” I told him.

  I also updated him that Mark and Sarah had filed a report with the senior investigator at the NY State Police and that Sarah and several victims had filed complaints with the Department of Health.

  Greg, in turn, gave me some updates of
his own.

  He described more details about his sex-trafficking work and the neglected young women he’d seen on the street. He wanted to dedicate his life to helping these victims because no one else did.

  One woman Greg had recently rescued was Stella, a former straight-A student and cheerleader who’d been kidnapped by a sex-trafficking ring, chained to a bed, shot up with speedballs and heroin for weeks, and then sent out on the streets to hook.

  The ringleader was nicknamed “the Murderer.”

  “How could this be happening in our own backyard?” I asked, but we both knew the answer to that. It happened the same way a sex-slave cult happened in our own backyard: we had a broken system that protected the perpetrators and neglected the victims.

  “How did you even find these girls, Greg?”

  “Their mothers reached out to me.”

  Never underestimate the power of a mother’s love, I thought. Perhaps it was the pain of being powerless to help my own daughter. Or maybe it was because these girls actually wanted to be rescued, unlike India.

  Whatever it was, I knew I needed to help someone, somewhere, and that helping these girls might be the very balm my broken heart needed.

  “Do you need help?” I asked.

  I hadn’t even been clear on the definition of “sex trafficking” when Greg mentioned it at our meeting weeks earlier with Mark and Bonnie. But soon after, I’d looked it up on the website of the US Department of Homeland Security to clarify the official description: “Human trafficking,” it read, “is modern-day slavery and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.”

  Greg was certain that Keith’s master-slave operation amounted to sex trafficking—which was all the more reason why I wanted to help with his work.

  My nonprofit foundation had just become an active 501(c)(3), I told Greg, and I would now expand my mission from research to actively protecting women from various forms of subjugation, exploitation, and abuse—including victims of sex trafficking.

  Within days, inspired by Greg’s mission, I’d conceived of another project that would expose this alarming crisis—a docuseries about domestic sex trafficking—Gangsta Moms—that followed mothers who rescued their daughters off the street.

  “Gangsta Moms?!” Celeste asked quizzically over breakfast one morning.

  “Mom, you seriously can’t call it that,” Maya said. “That title is super lame!”

  “I promise, it’s just a working title,” I said.

  “Good. Because this is the first thing you’ve done that I’m really proud of,” she said. “That Sexology stuff was embarrassing!”

  Callum came on board as director and cowriter after Greg got a call about another young woman who needed to be rescued, and we got to work.

  Twenty-three-year-old Nina had become entangled in a dark, seedy, drug-infested, sex-trafficking underworld in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Nina was a witness in a lawsuit against a bunch of corrupt policemen who’d been feeding her heroin in exchange for sexual favors. Her boyfriend, a criminal wanted by the law, had been holding her hostage in a hotel room and her mother feared he might be pimping her out. Meanwhile, the corrupt cops were searching for her—they’d have liked nothing more than for Nina to “accidentally” overdose before the day she was supposed to testify.

  As I waited anxiously in LA, our undercover team in Myrtle Beach—which included an ex-marine-turned-private eye—rescued Nina and put her on a plane to San Antonio, Texas. Over the phone, I coordinated for her to be picked up and taken to Greg’s Soba rehab facility to receive treatment for her drug addiction.

  When Nina was pulled from her abusers and landed safely in Texas, I felt like we’d just freed India from the clutches of Nxivm.

  Every daughter we helped was like helping my own.

  —

  WORKING ON THE series threw me into the world of drug dealers, vice squads, drug cartels, bail bondsmen, Russian and Albanian mobsters, and sex workers. I spent the summer of 2017 alternating between two dark worlds: the gangster-street-sex-trafficking world and Keith’s deviant cult. The scary thing was, they weren’t so different.

  At home, my living room became like a war room.

  I’d vowed to investigate everything I could about Nxivm, and that’s what I began to do. I researched early in the morning before the kids woke up and late into the night after they’d gone to bed: reading, writing, and organizing the information into hundreds of color-coded, cross-referenced folders.

  During the day, I was the go-to place for new cult defectors, foundation donors, and Gangsta Mom meetings, with a phone that didn’t stop ringing.

  The FrankReport and Rick Alan Ross’s Cult Education Institute were treasure troves of information, as I dug up past news articles and testimonies about Keith from five, ten, twenty years earlier.

  I started with the basics: What the heck was “Nxivm”? Just a bit of research brought up the word “nexum”—an ancient Roman contract that meant “debt bondage” or “debt control”—in which a debtor pledged themselves as collateral if they defaulted on a loan. If they defaulted, the person would effectively act as a “slave” to the person they owed until they paid off their debt. Keith had picked the name Nxivm back in 2003. I wondered, did this mean that this had been his plan all along?

  I moved on to Keith Raniere’s bio. It didn’t take long to pretty much debunk everything he’d ever said about himself regarding his IQ; his education; his childhood talents in piano, reading, math, and judo, and that he was speaking in full sentences by the age of one; his listing in The Guinness Book of World Records; his “original” business ideas—the list went on. Most of his claims, I found, were either baseless, greatly exaggerated, or bald-faced lies.

  For example, his genius IQ we were told about at the pitch for ESP was the result of an unmonitored, untimed, obscure take-home IQ test from 1988 called the Mega Test—administered by a society that he himself would later control. Members of his harem have since admitted to writing the test for him and called it “The Project.”

  No records or proof seems to exist for his claims that he was an East Coast judo champion at age eleven or had tied the record for New York’s fastest one-hundred-yard dash as a teen—insofar as Frank had thoroughly checked judo champ records for those years.

  Many of the patents Keith claimed were pending were actually rejected. One he did get patented was “how to rehabilitate a Luciferian.” I looked it up, and apparently a Luciferian was a kind of sociopath, a person who commits destructive acts and who looks to be sane on the outside but isn’t. Was this some desperate plea for help?

  In February 2015, Keith filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and AT&T for patent infringement, claiming the tech giants were using a teleconferencing invention he owned and patented. Two years later, the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Trial and Appeal Board determined that the patents were not his at all, and belonged to a company that had dissolved more than a dozen years earlier.

  Judge Barbara M. G. Lynn said that Keith’s “conduct throughout this litigation, culminating in his untruthful testimony . . . demonstrates a pattern of obfuscation and bad faith . . . (and) an abuse of the judicial process.”

  The deeper I dug, the sleazier it got.

  Keith’s past business history, I discovered, was, to put it charitably, checkered.

  His first company, Consumers Buyline, went bust when multiple states sued him for allegedly operating an illegal, multimillion-dollar pyramid scheme.

  Then came the women—or should I say, mostly girls.

  I read about a twelve-year-old girl, Rhiannon, who first met Keith when harem member Pam Cafritz hired the girl to walk her dog twice a day. Rhiannon’s mother worked with Keith at Consumers Buyline. Keith offered to tutor Rhiannon for free, which led to sexual encounters in which they had sex in elevators, offices, and broom closets, she had said. The relationship lasted several months, included at least sixty sexual encounters, and promp
ted Rhiannon to skip school and leave home. Two years after it ended, she went to the police but ended up not pressing charges.

  Another girl, Gina Melita, bravely went public in 2012, giving an interview to the Albany Times Union. Keith had been her Latin and algebra tutor when she was fifteen and he was twenty-four, and then he became her molester—taking her virginity and having sex with her even though she told him it was painful. Together, they spent time at video arcades playing Pac-Man and a game called: Vanguard, in which destroying enemies increased the fuel in a player’s tank. During their relationship, he pestered her to lose weight and warned her to keep their time together a secret from her mother.

  Before Gina Melita escaped Keith’s clutches, she introduced him to a fifteen-year-old friend, Gina Hutchinson, whom he also went on to rape repeatedly. Keith convinced Gina H. to drop out of high school so he could tutor her as well. When Gina’s older sister discovered they were having sex, Keith told her “your sister’s soul is much older than her biological age” and that she was a “Buddhist goddess meant to be with him.” Years later, Gina would go to a monastery and shoot herself.

  I read about the disappearance of Kristin Snyder, who became unhinged after taking two sixteen-day Nxivm seminars and allowing Keith to conduct experiments on her—trying to convert her from being gay. She told friends that Keith had made her pregnant, then she disappeared. Her death was ruled a suicide, even though many believed foul play was involved. Her body was never found.

  Why, I wondered, had Keith never been charged with anything—especially since at least one of the girls—twelve-year-old Rhiannon—made a report with the police?

  The answer was: They were all too afraid of him to press charges. One of them was asked by police to wear a wire in order to catch him in the act, but she was too scared to even be in the same room again with him.

  Then I discovered that Nxivm had spent more than $50 million against their critics and initiated more than fifty lawsuits many of which the Bronfmans had either participated in or backed, targeting anyone who wrote or spoke negatively about the cult: former members, journalists, ex-girlfriends—anybody.