Finally, there was the risk of incurring the wrath of Vanguard and all the damage his network of intimidation and flying monkeys could inflict: physical harm, financial ruin, emotional trauma, imprisonment, and more.
But it was either take those risks or leave my daughter shackled for the rest of her nonlife as a brainwashed member of a madman’s harem.
So, really, there was no other choice for this mother to make. India’s safety came first, even if it was at the cost of our relationship.
—
THROUGH A FRIEND, I got in touch with a top editor at People, and Mark Vicente put me in touch with Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Karim Amer, who connected me to Barry Meier, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the New York Times.
Over the phone, I broke down in tears and told Barry everything about my ordeal with India and the cult. I told him about the brainwashing, the diet, the collateral, the branding, the slave pods, the coercion, and the horror of it all. I unburdened myself.
Barry got to work investigating and they slotted the story to run at the end of August.
I asked him if there was any way to expose the cult without naming India outright. At the same time, I understood he had to write the story in a way that would elicit maximum impact. Even if India were to get angry that I gave the interview, I truly believed she would read the article and have her come-to-Jesus moment, as would others in ESP. From what the defectors had told me, many on-the-fence Espians were simply waiting for another mainstream, “credible” news outlet to report on the cult’s wrongdoings, and then they’d believe it and leave. They were instructed to disregard the FrankReport as the workings of an irate, disgruntled maniac, hell-bent on discrediting their precious Vanguard.
But surely they, and India, would not dispute the credibility of a Pulitzer-winning reporter and the New York Times?
With my new connection to filmmaker Karim, another project was born to help expose the cult.
Mark had opened up to his longtime friend Karim about his harrowing experience with the cult and, in the process, began sobbing. Karim instinctively picked up his camera and began filming. Mark talked, and talked, and fell apart on camera the same way I fell apart on the phone with Barry. Mark told him to keep recording, so he could have his side of the story on tape for his own protection.
Karim was so troubled and moved by Mark’s testimony, he asked if he could interview me as well. And what began as one interview became an ongoing documentation of my fight for India’s freedom.
Greg’s directive was disrupt, disrupt, disrupt and expose, expose, expose. And do it in a way that will reach as many people as possible as loudly as possible—and that’s what I was doing.
Karim had now joined my army—along with Greg, Callum, Barry, Mark, Bonnie, Frank, my mother, Sarah, Nippy, and the other defectors—to help us use the media in every which way that we could to take this nightmare out of the shadows and into the light.
—
BY MID-AUGUST, AN estimated four hundred people had left ESP, and a third center, in San Francisco, had closed. More than half of the cult had defected, from what I could gather. The FrankReport kept pumping out damning blog posts about the cult that revealed more sordid details, including a comprehensive list of fifty branded slaves. India was on the list. I felt nauseated and grief-stricken.
I received another call from Sasha, who’d gotten a call from someone linked to DOS.
I heard that “ESP has hired a team of lawyers and they’re going to sue you for slander and put you in jail. Apparently everyone is packed for Fiji, ready to go.”
It was now the third time I’d heard about Fiji, and I was freaking out.
I shifted into overdrive—a near-perpetual state for me now—and began investigating what link ESP had with Fiji and what the remote island nation’s extradition laws were. Even worse than India being at command central in Albany was India being under Keith’s spell on a private island in Fiji, where I’d probably lose her for good.
It took one Google search to find out that a year earlier, Clare Bronfman had bought 80 percent of Wakaya, a five-square-mile private island in Fiji (population, three hundred to six hundred). With a little more digging, I discovered that she’d bought her house from someone I knew: John, a British American business exec who’d courted me before I met Casper and once owned the movie equipment company Panavision (and offered to name a camera lens after me at the time). Also, the man from whom Clare purchased her stake in the island had been one of my father’s best friends.
Bonnie was shocked at how well connected I was.
“Well, when you’ve been around for as long as I have, you tend to know everyone,” I said, and I put out calls to both. I relished the moment when Keith’s army would find out that I already had eyes and ears on his damn island.
My biggest fear now—and every week I had a new, more troubling one—was that India was also packed and ready to go off to the South Pacific. I lay in bed at night trying to figure out if it was possible to get Special Ops to take a boat from the main island, Viti Levu, and rescue India off Wakaya in the middle of the night—if she were to go.
John returned my call, and I explained the situation and peppered him with questions:
“How close is Wakaya to the main island? What’s the access? Would I be able to locate India if she was there and pluck her off the island?”
I relaxed after he checked with sources to find there were no impending arrivals due on the island.
A week before the New York Times article was slated to run, I met up with Sarah and Nippy in LA at Karim’s house, and for the first time ever, I saw the brand up close and in the flesh, as it were.
Sarah stood up, unzipped her pants, and pulled down the fabric covering her left hip. And there it was. My stomach lurched.
K-R A-M.
It was ugly. I tried not to imagine it on India’s body, but that was impossible. All three of us cried, and I hugged Sarah for being so brave to expose this ugliness to me and to the world.
—
VANGUARD WEEK WAS fast approaching, so we set out to cause a commotion.
From the moment Greg gave me the marching orders to “create a disturbance,” this shit-disturber looked for every opportunity to do so.
“How can we mess up V-week?” I asked. “How can we stop it from happening at all?”
V-week was Clare’s baby; she organized it every year. We wrote letters to the Silver Bay YMCA Conference and Family Retreat Center—on the shore of pristine Lake George, an hour-plus drive north of Albany—alerting management that they would be housing a branding sex cult in its rambling 115-year-old facility, in hopes that enough complaints might get them to cancel the event. A few days later, while Callum and I were in Vegas doing research for Gangsta Moms, I got him to rewrite my letter on hotel stationery in his handwriting and mail it himself (in case anyone dusted for fingerprints) from the hotel, so it couldn’t be traced to me. Which was a fine plan, until we posted a photo of ourselves in front of our hotel on the Vegas strip on Instagram and completely foiled my attempt at subterfuge.
Ironically, while we were planning how to disrupt V-week, the green sashes were holed up in a war room of their own, planning the demise of the whistle-blowers.
Although we weren’t successful in getting V-week canceled, spies at the YMCA helped us cause a major shit storm.
Frank got some YMCA employees to surreptitiously take candid photos and notes of the goings-on, and Frank posted them on the FrankReport all week like a kid gleefully sending his parents snapshots and letters from summer camp. The Espians went wild, trying to figure out who in their group was the disloyal mole feeding the FR. The green-sashed ones had even disabled the resort’s internet and activated their own server to try to control information leaks.
Contrary to the ESP propaganda machine, we heard that attendance was low and that it had cost Nxivm more than $500,000 to pull off the celebration. And the higher ranks barely made appearances—Ke
ith attended only one forum, with Baby Avatar and Mariana in tow. Whether or not Baby Avatar’s presence was a deterrent from his usual naked romps in the woods, we weren’t sure.
I searched India’s Instagram page for photos of her at V-week, grateful she hadn’t blocked me, as the majority of Espians had been directed to do. I may have been shunned, but I hadn’t been blocked—and that was a victory in my eyes. I was surprised to see that instead of V-week, she’d gone to a friend’s wedding here in California, in Napa Valley, and had posted a photo. She looked beautiful! The photo made me miss her so. I clicked the heart emoticon underneath it.
In the three months since I’d last seen her, India hadn’t returned any of my texts, calls, or emails, so I’d been relying on updates about her from her sisters and my mother, with whom she kept in touch. And I “loved” her from afar by clicking the heart under every photo of herself that she posted.
“The last thing you want her to feel is isolated in the cult,” Rick Alan Ross had advised me. “She has to know there is an avenue of communication with the family and know she has a place to go, because they try to convince her that she doesn’t.”
Despite the network of intimidation, this Gangsta Mom refused to be silenced. Seeing Sarah’s brand in person that August only made me want to create a bigger disturbance. I was buoyed further by a birthday text from India on September 22—my very first birthday wish that day, and the first communication she’d sent me in four months.
It was a little tradition of ours that she had stubbornly held on to ever since she was a little girl: she had to be the first one to wish me happy birthday and happy Mother’s Day. I was wondering if she’d keep tradition this year, and then at seven in the morning, I heard the ping!:
Happy Birthday, Mom.
That was it, but it was enough to tell me that her noncult persona was safe somewhere in the recesses of her heart and mind, alive and well, and reaching out to tell me she loved me.
The New York Times article was supposed to be published already, causing a major uproar, but it had been delayed.
“One more month,” Barry said, “be patient.”
But I wasn’t patient. My child was getting mind fucked every day she stayed under the influence of those lunatics.
I had to think of something else to do to disrupt and expose while I was waiting, and came up with an idea.
Everyone knew there was strength in numbers, right? Maybe it was time to organize as many defectors as possible and get them on board for a civil case against Nxivm to demand retribution. We needed to mobilize! There were hundreds of Expians—plenty to form another small, strong army to vanquish Vanguard.
Through a friend, I found an attorney, Anne Champion—a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Manhattan office—who specialized in class action lawsuits. I sent her the highlights of the research I’d done over the summer to prep her for our first phone call.
My first question to Anne wasn’t about the civil case I envisioned per se, it was about law enforcement in Albany and the bleak stories of collusion, negligence, and injustice I’d read about in the FrankReport.
“I came across so much of what looked like cover-ups of Nxivm’s criminal activities,” I began. “If these stories are accurate, this organization has been blatantly breaking the law for years, decades, and no one in law enforcement has done anything about it and gone after them. I read about officials and politicians being paid off or compromised in some way. Is it possible, Anne, that what I read was really true, or is it too far-fetched?”
Anne chuckled.
“Oh, Albany is famously corrupt!” she said matter-of-factly—almost surprised that I wouldn’t know that.
“We didn’t get anywhere with law enforcement there when I told them about the branding and the sex slaves,” I told her. “All I heard was that everyone was a consenting adult. That can’t be right!”
“It’s not. It’s a violation of anti-slavery laws. Catherine, listen. I understand you’re interested in a civil case. But after doing some research of my own, I see clear evidence of RICO here.”
“RICO?”
“The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It’s when racketeering activity—like extortion, money laundering, loan-sharking, obstruction of justice, and bribery—is performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.”
This is what Greg predicted months ago! And something else dawned on me as Anne continued to explain it. By now, I’d reviewed so many lawsuits filed by Nxivm during my research, I realized that this was the crime they often accused and charged their enemies of! And now we were going to use their own ammo against them.
“You should go after them with a criminal case first,” she continued, “and once you have arrests, then you have the basis for a civil case.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Sex crimes are harder to prove. Go after them for the financial crimes and the racketeering. That’s how they got Al Capone, you know. On tax evasion.”
Al Capone! When we hung up, I was charged up.
I started making calls to round up the troops and put together the fight plan. We were going to go after Keith the same way that Eliot Ness, a famed US Prohibition agent during the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, went after the ruthless Chicago mobster Capone.
That was the new strategy: we were going to Al Capone Keith Raniere.
13
* * *
THE RING OF FIRE
What happened next was a divine concurrence.
My struggle to free my daughter and the other enslaved women in the cult intersected with another fight against oppression, abuse, and exploitive men: the momentous “Me Too” movement of 2017. The voices and energy of that crusade would give my battle wings, lifting it out of obscurity and onto the front pages of newspapers around the world.
By early October, the New York Times feature was two months behind its originally scheduled pub date, and I was in agony because of it. Everything hinged on the publication of this story—I couldn’t talk to any other media until it ran because I’d given the Times first rights, and People was holding their story until after the Times published theirs. And nothing would happen with law enforcement until the story appeared. That was the whole point of doing the story: to spur them into action. Law enforcement agents paid attention to only a few select journalists, I was told, and Barry was one of the few who carried that clout.
The story had already been vetted by the paper’s ultracautious legal department and met its exacting standards, which was our first difficult hurdle. This meant the editors had confidence in the veracity of our claims and had the guts to move forward with it. The Times was not intimidated by the litigious Bronfman-Raniere monster.
But apparently the story was considered what they call in the newsroom an “evergreen”: one without a specific news peg that could run anytime. So we kept getting bumped for others that had to run right away. And bumped again.
Then Barry said the editors were waiting for enough space to place such a large story as ours. Then the story wasn’t “relevant” enough. To whom, I wasn’t sure. When the Harvey Weinstein sex abuse scandal hit the news on October 10, I thought our moment had finally come.
“Are we relevant now?” I asked Barry.
Yeah, we were relevant. But now we were too similar to the Weinstein story: women being taken advantage of by an asshole guy. Plus, our asshole wasn’t as famous as the other asshole and didn’t bring the same kind of A-list talent with him. Weinstein’s story had Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah, Salma Hayek, Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Beckinsale, to name just a few. The most famous Hollywood celebrity DOS could boast was Allison Mack, whose stardom had gone from Smallville to Smalbany.
I was starting to get paranoid. I’d read that Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim—recently ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest man in the world three years in a row—owned a 17 percent share in the New York Times. Could he have killed the cult story as a favor t
o his buddy Carlos Salinas, the former Mexican president and father of Emiliano? Good God, I was becoming a full-blown conspiracy theorist.
I was in an anxious holding pattern. It was like being in labor experiencing excruciating contractions, but the stern nurse yells at you not to push because you’re not dilated enough. In that moment, you actually pray for “the ring of fire” to happen: the moment when the baby’s head crowns, and you’re finally allowed to push. Even though it’s the most painful moment during labor, it means the wait is over—and the wait is harder to bear than the pain.
I desperately wanted to push.
Meanwhile, Vanguard and his flying monkeys had gotten wind of the impending Times story because Barry had reached out to get a comment. They doubled their scare tactics to muzzle the whistle-blowers, sending out threatening letters to Barry and to everyone else who’d given interviews for his story.
That October, I received threatening letters from a Nxivm lawyer and a state attorney general in Mexico, accusing me of numerous felonies, including fraud and extortion. Somehow, they had resurrected one of their old, phony lawsuits originally filed against the legendary Nxivm Nine and roped me into it. It was a bizarre strategy, especially because the case had been dismissed six years earlier, and I hadn’t met a single one of the nine.
My failure to stop engaging in said criminal activities, the lawyer wrote, could lead “up to an arrest for 36 hours alongside criminal responsibilities that shall arise.” However, in noting that his “services have been engaged by Nxivn Mexico,” he couldn’t even spell the name of his client correctly!
The letter was signed with the word Bufete in front of the attorney’s name. What the hell was Bufete? “Buffoon” in Spanish? I looked it up; it meant from “law firm of.” Okay, fine.
I looked closely at the letter again: my listed accusers and witnesses were the same cast of characters on the numerous Nxivm lawsuits I’d researched from the last decade, including one filed against Kirsten Gillibrand’s father, Doug Rutnik. It was the same old Nxivm posse dispatched once again; they were a traveling roadkill show that went from town to town and person to person, ready to pitch their tent and perform litigation theater at a venue near you.
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