Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  In 2013, Times Union reporter James Odato—who wrote the scathing four-part series on the cult, “Secrets of Nxivm”—was sued by the organization, which claimed that he had used unauthorized passwords to get on its website and gain information. Odato was put on leave of absence and saw his career at the newspaper end. (He later landed on his feet, becoming a reporter for the Reuters news service, which helped bolster his reputation for being ethical and respected.)

  Citing the same reason, Nxivm also filed lawsuits against blogger John J. Tighe and Vanity Fair contributing editor Suzanna Andrews (who’d written the feature story, “The Heiresses and the Cult,” that I asked Esther, the green-sashed enforcer, about).

  Keith’s ex-girlfriend Toni Natalie has been in court for twenty years because of him. He was still suing her today in two bogus lawsuits—just because she had the audacity to leave him.

  He had her followed and hounded, ordered her dog poisoned, had his lawyers urge law enforcement to bring false criminal charges against her, got the Bureau of Criminal Investigation to ransack her home, sued her until she and her mother went bankrupt, and Toni believes to this day that Keith had a hand in her brother’s suicide.

  In 2003, one judge wrote: “This matter smacks of a jilted fellow’s attempt at revenge or retaliation against his former girlfriend, with many attempts at tripping her up along the way.”

  Another unwitting victim, Barbara Bouchey (who became the Bronfmans’ financial planner), lent Keith her life savings, and he lost it all on the commodities market. After she left him, she demanded her money back.

  Keith, backed by Bronfman money, went after her and eight other defectors, falsely accusing them of extortion and racketeering. The cases were dismissed, but not before most of the falsely accused suffered financial ruin. They were henceforth known as the “Infamous Nxivm Nine.”

  Like Toni, Barbara did nothing wrong except leave Keith Raniere. But a man who makes women sign a lifetime vow to him and brands his initials on their bodies has serious abandonment issues. When one follower in her early twenties developed romantic feelings for a man other than Keith and refused to join his harem, he confined her to her bedroom for eighteen months. She abided by his orders because she was in the country illegally and worried he’d report her if she didn’t. When the woman finally did leave the room, Keith, as he had threatened, had her driven to the Mexican border and ordered to walk across, without money or identification papers.

  Keith and his cronies didn’t care so much if they won their cases—in fact, they often lost. Their goal wasn’t to win but to harass, intimidate, bankrupt, and keep their enemies chained in the legal system until they were ruined every which way. And it worked.

  “They used and abused the legal system as an ongoing stalking device,” Toni Natalie said to me when I finally met her. “It’s called ‘vexatious litigation.’ ”

  The more I researched, the more complicated and corrupt the stories became. I read and heard rumors about bribery, blackmail, financial contributions, and kickbacks involving DAs, special prosecutors, state police, Nxivm lawyers, PI firms, and politicians. Court records from 2015 show that the Bronfmans hired a Canadian investigative firm, Canaprobe, to access bank records of judges involved in Nxivm cases—and of other officials, including one of the state’s two US senators, Chuck Schumer—so they would have “leverage” over them.

  What was going on here? It sounded like a fictionalized thriller written by a novelist like John Grisham, not real life. My delving into the web of corruption was only beginning, and there was no end in sight. It was like taking on a ten-headed Gorgon beast, and everywhere I looked, there was a new head.

  —

  BY JULY, I had put out an SOS through all channels imploring defectors to please call me in my war room. It had now been more than a month since I’d spoken to India, and I was desperate for any kind of info about her that would help me get her out.

  Lisa, a new defector, heard my distress signal through the grapevine and came out of hiding in mid-July to call me.

  Like the others, Lisa was lured into DOS by the “secret sisterhood for independent women” pitch, and the deal was sealed after several flattery-filled walks with Keith. Lisa gave some insight into the hypnotizing mind games Keith conducted during these strolls:

  “If I pulled away from him, he would ask me why I was choosing to be violent toward him in my mind. ‘Why are you making me bad in your head?’ he’d ask me. ‘You’re being destructive.’ He didn’t force himself on me, he baited me.”

  Keith broke DOS protocol by telling Lisa directly that “I am the mastermind behind DOS,” information she would not normally be privy to because of her second-tier status in the DOS pyramid.

  Throughout Lisa’s involvement, Keith constantly asked about her weight, she said.

  “I went from a hundred thirty-two pounds to a hundred two pounds in quite a short time span,” she recounted, “and I had fainting spells. I’m five foot four. Keith would tell me to eat no more than two hundred calories a meal, followed by forty-five minutes of vigorous exercise.”

  Why did Keith groom all his girls to be so thin? The mystery might be solved by what he’d told one slave I spoke to: “An ounce of fat on a woman turns me off so much, I can’t get an erection because of it.” So, basically, Rubenesque women need not apply to DOS.

  Lisa had no idea she was about to be branded when her master, Joan, told her excitedly that she was going to take part in a special ceremony in early June—scheduled the same week as the branding ceremonies that Ava, Yasmine, and Sarah skipped out on.

  “All I was told was that I’d be on lockdown for a few days,” she said.

  (Joan, by the way, had been one of the multicultural diversity specialists at Keith’s Rainbow Cultural Garden school and had been assigned the children of A-list actors. I wonder if these parents had any idea the nanny-slash-unaccredited-teacher taking care of their children was a branded slave.)

  Lisa never made it to that special ceremony.

  “You created such a fiasco,” she told me, “sending texts that the FBI was going to raid us, that they got scared and postponed the ritual.”

  She found out days later, after reading the contraband FrankReport, that she’d had a near miss with the branding iron.

  “I don’t have a brand of KR on my body,” she said. “I’m so grateful. I have you to thank for that.”

  Lisa confronted Keith about the branding, and he admitted to knowing all about it, calling it “a form of tribute to me. If it was Abe Lincoln’s or Bill Gate’s initials, no one would care,” he said dismissively, stressing that his importance to the world was just as great, because “if DOS didn’t continue, it would be one of the biggest tragedies of the world.”

  A few weeks later, Lisa finally had her connect-the-dots epiphany that the entire Nxivm setup was a scam.

  “It was thanks to India that I woke up,” she said. “It was something she said to me—and didn’t say. I asked her if DOS was ‘honorable,’ and she paused. Her pause was so long, and what she said after made me think. I don’t even remember what she said, but I remember how she said it—like she was regurgitating someone else’s words by rote. I suddenly saw that she was being used, and, consequently, so were all of us. Everything started to make sense—or rather, make no sense. I woke up.”

  I smiled at the bittersweetness of that. Without even knowing it, India had helped this woman regain her wits and leave. But she couldn’t do the same thing for herself.

  Lisa also recalled something from the last time she was with India. My daughter, giggling, showed her a text she’d sent Keith:

  “If all goes south, there’s always Fiji.”

  Fiji? That was the second time I’d heard talk about the isolated South Pacific island; the first was when Mark mentioned it as Keith’s official escape destination.

  And there was something Keith told Lisa that I hadn’t heard before from any other defector:

  “He said, ‘There
are things I’m going to ask the women to do soon that I don’t have the strength to yet.’ ”

  She didn’t know what that meant, and it would take me a little time to find out—but I would.

  After her awakening, Lisa called her parents, and they planned an escape: Lisa’s mother arrived to help her pack her belongings, while her father, Jim—a highly trained US government secret agent, who’d been captured, imprisoned, and survived time in a desolate Eastern Bloc detention camp—had a federal marshal on standby in the neighborhood, ready to step in if anyone tried to get in their way.

  She was relieved to get out of the cult, but like so many defectors, Lisa was afraid.

  She was scared to share what she’d just told me, petrified of being persecuted by the cult for the rest of her life, and worried that her collateral would be released.

  It almost didn’t even matter that these women were officially and physically out of the cult’s grasp and perhaps thousands of miles away. Their minds were still enslaved—it was a psychological slavery.

  A lot of defectors went off the grid and into hiding once they got out. They’d been brutalized and beaten down—mentally, spiritually, and emotionally—and were paranoid they were being watched and that punishment was imminent.

  Which they were. And which it was.

  The paranoia was real, and everyone’s fears would skyrocket once the flying monkeys came swooping down.

  12

  * * *

  CUE THE FLYING MONKEYS

  Lisa was afraid, but there was a reason she was brave enough to escape when she did.

  Frank started posting on his blog that no collateral had been released to date, and this was a huge revelation to the young women still trapped in DOS. Many of them were desperate to escape but remained for fear that Keith and his goons would release their damaging photos and videos to the world. Hearing that none had been released so far gave more slave sisters the confidence to defect.

  There were other kinds of retaliation in store for defectors, though. And as the summer progressed, Keith’s flying monkeys were dispatched to deliver them.

  “Flying monkeys” is a phrase in pop psychology to describe the henchmen surrounding a narcissist or psychopath who dole out the leader’s abuse by proxy. The phrase was inspired by the film The Wizard of Oz, and the Wicked Witch of the West’s army of flying monkeys who scared the crap out of every kid who watched it. (“Take your army to the haunted forest and bring me that girl and her dog! Now, fly! Fly!”)

  As the defections continued, Vanguard’s flying monkeys—the Bronfman sisters, Emiliano Salinas, Alex Betancourt (co-owner of Nxivm Mexico with Emiliano), Nancy and Lauren Salzman, Allison Mack, and a host of others—were ordered to carry out frenzied attacks on the defectors in the form of spying, intimidating letters, legal accusations, computer hacking, and more.

  Keith loved to pit friends or family against each other—it was one of his favorite cruel strategies. So my intimidation began immediately by someone who called himself a friend. My intervention attempt and interference with the branding ceremony had solidly plopped me on the Nxivm archenemy list, alongside Frank and Rick, and I received the first of many emails in June by Manuel, one of the organization’s “Ethics Police,” and someone I’d met in Albany in 2012.

  He started off kindly: asking if I wanted to talk to him as a friend of the family “about the weird stuff going on.” I didn’t answer the first email, or the second, or even the third, but they kept coming every few weeks, each escalating in tone and desperation until I finally replied. By mid-July 2017, Manuel was hysterically accusing me of mudslinging and promoting lies.

  Me: Manuel—I am sure u have gotten this feedback before, but your behavior feels like bullying to me. I’m withdrawing from this conversation. Sending love

  Manuel’s emails were only the beginning for me.

  At the end of July, when I was out of town, India showed up at the house unannounced and ransacked the war room—rifling through all my notes and folders and taking photos of everything. She picked a folder labeled “Sex Trafficking Girls” and thought they were notes about Nxivm, when, in fact, she was looking at Callum’s notes for Gangsta Moms.

  “Mom is very confused,” she told her younger sisters as they watched silently from the sidelines. “Mom is acting in a really, really weird way.”

  Even family members, it seemed, could be flying monkeys.

  Soon after that, the threatening legal letters began arriving. Sarah, Lisa, Yasmine, me, and others received registered letters from lawyers working for Nxivm Mexico, charging us with various crimes, including extortion.

  Meanwhile, Clare Bronfman went to the Vancouver Police Department and accused Sarah Edmondson of “theft, fraud, and mischief,” urging them to open a criminal investigation against Sarah, which they did. The motion alleged that more than 125 students in Vancouver left ESP because of Sarah’s “mischievous and fraudulent” activities.

  In Mexico, former ESP coach Antonio Zarattini sounded the alarm to the local Espian community about DOS and Keith’s sexcapades, prompting an uproar among the coaches, proctors, and students. The uproar was quickly silenced when Emiliano Salinas and Nxivm Mexico stepped in and attacked Zarattini for his whistle-blowing, filing trumped-up extortion charges against him and trying to get him arrested—adding him to the defunct and previously dismissed Nxivm Nine lawsuit, none of whom he’d ever met. The court finally threw out the case, a process which cost Zarattini upwards of half a million dollars. No one dared defect after that because they were terrified of being targeted and having their lives ruined or worse, being killed.

  As the flying monkeys did Keith’s bidding, the fear grew.

  Every week, Keith and his henchmen had a new enemy du jour to vanquish. In a conversation I had with Lisa’s father, he called Keith’s tactics “an act of terrorism.”

  I got a call from Sasha asking me not to post any photos of us together on social media.

  “My company is based in Mexico,” she said, “and I don’t want to be killed. You don’t know how dangerous Carlos Salinas is. I can’t be seen with you, Catherine. It’s too risky.”

  I’d had enough of Keith’s terrorism. He thought it would shut me up? He didn’t know me so well. Instead of keeping me quiet, it only made me want to fight louder and harder.

  Keith had his flying monkeys, but I had access to a powerful army, too, and an American institution at that: the free press.

  If they were against you, they could annihilate you, but if they were on your side, you could move mountains and make miracles happen.

  I’d failed at the intervention. My hope that the defections of friends India knew and trusted, starting with Bonnie and Mark, would trigger her own defection was dashed. We’d banged on the doors of law enforcement for months only to have them slammed in our faces. Mark had just gotten word from the senior investigator with the NY State Police that he’d closed his investigation on the cult: “There is no case,” he told Mark. Over the next many months, we’d learn more about this so-called investigation—and this is where things get more nefarious.

  This senior investigator on the case, we’d later discover, was the direct supervisor of another investigator who’d been working closely with Nxivm to condemn the defectors. Was it a coincidence that every defector who gave this supervisor confidential testimony—and later spoke to the press off the record—received threatening letters from Nxivm attorneys when their identities had been so carefully hidden? We don’t think so. Was there a corrupt reason why the supervisor closed the case on Nxivm amid so much damning evidence? We think so. Sarah and the other defectors got a response from the Health Department stating they’d found no wrongdoing regarding the medical conduct of the doctors in the cult.

  When I told Rick that law enforcement barely blinked an eye at Sarah’s brand, he suggested she was too fresh from the cult to be able to relate the details of her experience to them properly.

  “She needs time to organize he
r thinking and unpack what has happened to her first—she was too discombobulated to go to law enforcement so soon. Same with the others,” Rick said.

  Frank’s series of articles instigated an uproar and exodus of Espians in three countries, but still India didn’t budge. I didn’t have money to match the Bronfmans’ billions to try to fight Nxivm in the legal arena. I’d exhausted every other option. And yet, I knew in my gut and with every fiber of my being that even though law enforcement was shrugging it off, what was happening at Nxivm could not be legal.

  Aside from sex trafficking laws, there’s the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery. Adding to that, “there’s an important body of law that declares it illegal to consent to certain types of physical harm, whether it’s sexual or not,” says Wendy Murphy, a professor of sexual violence law at New England Law. “You can’t consent to torture.”

  My only recourse now was to find a way to generate public outrage that would put pressure on law enforcement to reconsider and take action. The power of the press was my last hope.

  It was also a horrendously painful option, going to the media and exposing my daughter’s private journey publicly for the world to see.

  It was a decision that came with many, many risks. First, I risked alienating my daughter for a long time—maybe even forever. How would India ever forgive me?

  “Your love for her is bigger than that,” a friend assured me. “And you love her more than needing her to like you right now.”

  Second, would going public stigmatize India for the rest of her life, and make it impossible for her to move forward if and when she left the cult? I didn’t know.

  If I could, I would try to expose Nxivm and leave her out of it or conceal her identity in some way. If there was a way for me to talk about the horrors and not mention I had a daughter involved, that’s what I’d do.