Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  I tried to convince him, but one look at Karim’s talent release form, and Frank announced there was no way he could agree to the terms. He wanted 100 percent control of his likeness. Then Karim put down his foot: no way could he allow that, as it would prevent him from selling the project.

  I suggested we just start working with no filming, and once we got into a rhythm, we could reassess. Putting together the evidence packet was number one on the agenda. But that didn’t work, either.

  “Karim’s moping about,” said Frank. “I can feel it.”

  Now I put down my foot. The sun was going down, and we hadn’t gotten any work done yet. Frank was also frustrated. He suggested the camera crew go check into their hotel, and then he banished his two assistants.

  Now the house was empty—it was just Frank and me—and I had a blinding headache. Was he going to help me, or was I stuck with this uncompromising man in his Addams Family house with his colorful cast of characters, never to be heard from again?

  Frank suggested we move from the dining room into the living room, farther from the hope of work, where he offered to work on my back and neck to get rid of my building migraine. He started digging his thumbs into the pressure points in my neck.

  “Have you ever had your palms read?” he asked.

  He transitioned instantly from shiatsu practitioner to palm reader, grabbing one of my hands and inspecting my palm.

  “You have a very well developed Mount of Venus. Did you know that?”

  Where was he going with this?

  He took my hands into his and started pressing into my Mounts of Venus, the fleshy areas at the base of the thumbs.

  “You are a very evolved person,” he said, looking at the lines in my hand. “And you are strong energetically . . . Your health is good.”

  Good health, that was nice to hear. Because I felt like I was falling apart. Then Frank started to wax lyrically about how he could help me with India on an energetic level by “mixing prana”—Sanskrit for “life force.” He moved his hands together as if they were blending. Apparently Frank was a Renaissance man who wore many hats.

  Before I had a chance to ask what “prana mixing” entailed, Frank jumped up and announced it was time for the crew to return so we could all go sightseeing.

  To Niagara Falls. At ten o’clock on a cold, drizzling night. The crew returned, and we all climbed into Frank’s silver Lexus to trudge to the Falls. It was only a thirty-minute drive, and as we got closer, we could hear the water’s roar. We parked and got out to walk a short distance to the Falls—just as the drizzle turned into a monsoon. By the time we got to the lookout point, we were drenched. Sensing that a moment was to come, Karim turned on his camera.

  “You know, I used to catch rattlesnakes when I was a kid,” Frank yelled over the rumbling water. “At first, the bite was excruciating. But eventually I got used to it.”

  Karim and the others looked both stunned and enthralled.

  “Um, Frank!” I shouted. “How many times did you have to get bitten before you developed a tolerance for it?”

  He shrugged. “A lot.”

  And standing there by the thundering waterfalls, soaking wet, I started to laugh.

  Was it any wonder why Frank wasn’t afraid of Keith and his minions? He had inoculated himself against rattlesnake venom; he was like a snake medicine man! He’d harnessed nature’s poison, and it had given him a superpower to fight the Beast! Right there in that moment, I decided I liked Frank—very much. A snake master like him was exactly what I needed to help me fight this unusual battle between good and evil.

  “Hey, Frank!” I yelled again. “Why were you catching the snakes in the first place, especially after they kept biting you? What kid in his right mind would do such a thing?”

  Frank looked at me as if what he’d done was the most normal thing in the world for a kid to do.

  “Why, to eat them, of course.”

  Yes, sir. Frank was the man for this job.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, Frank’s living room turned into a war room like mine back home.

  Whatever had happened to Frank in Niagara Falls the night before—some sort of alchemic baptizing from the water from the sky mixed with the water from the Falls—had turned him into a powerhouse.

  I stayed in his guest room that night, and when I walked into the war room the next morning, he was working at his computer—right where we’d left him the night before, in his damp, dark, rumpled clothes—typing up the comprehensive memo that was to go with the evidence packet. It would outline and explain every possible state or federal crime committed and law broken by Raniere and his group, and would include instructions on navigating the packet section by section, complete with ID codes and numbers.

  Like magic, all sorts of other evidence began pouring in that morning from the people I’d reached out to the week before, and from Frank, who’d opened his coffers.

  I was printing, Frank was printing, Chitra and Debbie were printing. The whirring of the printers and crunching of the hole punchers and staplers were nonstop.

  Chitra and Debbie stacked hundreds of pages of evidence and sorted them into five giant folders lined up on a long table like an assembly line.

  In the middle of our busy activity I got a tip that the so-called branding doctor, Danielle Roberts, was going to be speaking about “wellness” at the Naval Expo in New York City and Long Island over the next two days and that a bunch of women from the cult, including India, would be accompanying her. They were probably going to use the expo as a recruiting venue!

  I immediately alerted the producers at 20/20, who were working on a story about the cult to air in December, so they could send a reporter with a camera to confront the doctor.

  Then, I got one of the expo organizers on the phone and tried to get her to cancel Danielle’s talk, explaining that her idea of wellness was branding other women.

  “It’s all over the news!” I told her.

  “Well, you can’t believe everything you read,” the organizer said.

  “Well, she branded my daughter!” I said, exasperated.

  The organizer hung up on me.

  Right around then, Frank’s biker friend—whom I’d nicknamed “Chops”—arrived. He wanted to help, too, and became our newest towering crusader.

  “I’ll call them, too, Catherine,” said Chops. “I’ll lodge a complaint. You need backup!” (20/20 did show up and caused quite a stir, scaring off DOS attendees and potential recruits.)

  In the afternoon, Toni Natalie, Keith’s former girlfriend, arrived from Rochester to meet me. She was a beautiful, elegant woman, and even though she’d been through hell at the hands of this madman and suffered debilitating PTSD, she looked radiant and was warm and loving.

  “The last thing Keith ever said to me,” Toni told me, “was: ‘I’ll see you dead or in jail.’ ”

  She was the first one brave enough to come out against Keith publicly, and he used her as an example to keep others from doing the same.

  “But Keith underestimated three things,” she said: “the internet, the FrankReport, and the power of a mother’s love.

  “Catherine,” she said to me, “all this time I was waiting for a Prince Charming to rescue me from this nightmare. And it turned out to be you, a princess, who would do it.”

  I did want to rescue Toni, and all of them, along with my daughter. Toni helped with the last of the paperwork, and by the time we finished, it was ten thirty at night. Each evidence packet was more than three hundred pages thick.

  Before we left Frank’s, he gave me a final coaching session in the kitchen, the same way that a trainer preps a boxer before he heads toward the ring.

  “When you get in the meeting room, place the evidence packet right in the middle of the table,” he instructed. “Watch if they lean in and pull it toward them. If they do, that’s a good sign. Sit like this and put your hands like this,” he said, placing his fingers together like a steeple. “It looks aut
horitative. And drink some pineapple juice before you go.”

  With that, he handed me a bottle of juice, I hugged Chops, and Toni gave me a tight hug.

  “We are bookends, you and I,” she said. “I started this. Now you go and finish it.”

  —

  WE DROVE AT breakneck speed through the inky blackness and arrived in Albany at three in the morning. While still at Frank’s, I’d texted India again, asking if we could meet up. I also told her I’d like to get together with Keith, with Nancy, with all of them. I didn’t hear back.

  In Albany, I was back in enemy territory, but this time I was there to declare war, and I had my comrades with me.

  Frank was still furiously working on the memo when I went to sleep and I prayed he’d email it to me in the morning and that I’d be of sane mind—compos mentis—for the meeting a few hours later.

  After four hours of fitful sleep, I got up to meditate, pray, fling myself in the shower, and obediently drink my mandated pineapple juice.

  When I met Art in the hotel lobby, I was still texting Frank: “Where’s the memo?! We’re leaving!”

  Minutes before our departure, Frank’s email finally arrived. The front desk hurriedly printed all twenty-six pages before I dashed into the car with them. Then it was an ordeal leaving the hotel. The front driveway was filled with chanting picketers and union reps handing out flyers and urging guests to boycott the hotel.

  Somehow we got out of the driveway. But then we couldn’t locate Antoine’s office. Karim and the crew were with us, and he drove around in circles until we had to make a few phone calls for help in order to find our destination: a building in a sea of identical, unmarked black towering monoliths. It looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Inside, Antoine ushered Art and me into a large conference room, and before we started, I quickly signed retainer papers with Art to be protected by client-attorney privilege. As I wrote my name, I had a sudden moment of paranoia.

  What if this is a trap? What if I am going to be dragged away in handcuffs, framed for something dastardly? It wouldn’t be the first time an enemy of the cult had become the target.

  As I was thinking this, six burly men in suits filed into the conference room from various departments of law enforcement. They all handed me their cards: NY State Police, Special Crimes Investigations, Financial Crimes Unit. It was too late to make a run for it. I prayed none of them had been bought off by Bronfman money.

  Antoine, a clean-cut, nice-looking man who looked to be in his early forties, sat at the head of the table. I handed the memo to one of the men, who made multiple copies for everyone. Then I did as Frank instructed: I plunked the book of evidence in the center of the table with a loud thud. That thing was heavy.

  They all leaned in.

  I had dressed conservatively for the meeting: navy-blue skirt, gray Armani sweater, a dignified scarf around my neck. But my boots! They were gray suede and thigh high. To paraphrase Nancy Sinatra, those boots were made for ass-kickin’! They meant business.

  I opened the cover of the packet to reveal the first page to them all: a giant color photograph of the jagged red brand of Keith’s and Allison’s initials on a slave’s pubic region.

  Then, with my kick-ass boots, I pushed myself back from the table on my castor-wheeled chair so they could all see my body, and I pointed to my crotch:

  “It’s here, right here,” I said to them, making eye contact with each man in that room. “And it’s happening in your own backyard.”

  Silence.

  I may have overdone the dramatics.

  Art took over then and gave them an outline of what was in the packet. Then he handed the floor back to me.

  “This is clear evidence of RICO, gentlemen,” I said with conviction. Never mind that two months earlier, I had no idea what RICO was.

  I opened the packet and began to flip through pages and point to my layperson conclusions that I hoped would finally prompt an investigation, including money laundering, human trafficking, unlicensed school, unpaid taxes, branding, bribery, forgery, and fraud.

  I went on and on, offering a smorgasbord of crimes for them to pick from. When I was done, I asked one of the men which crime they might be interested in.

  “Everything,” he said, very seriously. “All of them.”

  That’s when I gave Art the nod, and I stood up. I was a trained actress, I knew when and how to exit a scene.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “I think we all know we are dealing with criminals here. Let’s find the most expedient way to bring them to justice, shall we?”

  They all nodded in agreement, and I strode out of the room with those boots that meant business.

  —

  AFTER THE MEETING, Karim, the crew, and I drove to meet my number-one Clifton Park spy, Lori Christina, who’d been my greatest source of information about the minute-to-minute movements of every cult member. We were also going to meet Chris Burbs, who had briefly dated a DOS slave (until she tried to recruit him into ESP).

  Lori lived in Keith’s neighborhood and saw all the comings and goings of the cult peeps—she was my very own neighborhood watchdog. She wasn’t an Espian, but she had lived long enough in the neighborhood to know all their names, where they lived, and the Nxivm weekly schedules. I found her through Frank, and then after the media blitz, I gathered a few more volunteers who lived in Clifton Park and Halfmoon, where the slaves and high-ranking cult members resided. Keith’s neighbors hated him, so they were happy to feed me information. Even before all the press hit, no one liked the creepy guy who walked around at all hours of the night with a different skinny girl each time.

  “He devalues the neighborhood!” one spy complained to me.

  Another, responding to the New York Times story, emailed:

  This creep Keith lives in my condo development. He walks around our neighborhood 15 miles per day . . . usually with a different girl. I never knew who he was until recently but always felt he was totally whacked. My neighbor sprayed him with her hose the other day. He is so gross, and I don’t understand how he has manipulated all these women. 2 of those crazy doctors have been fired from a local Albany hospital.

  I hope they bring criminal charges against this freak and get him the fuck out of my neighborhood.

  As we sat in the restaurant, we got an urgent text from Chris Burb with a tip that a DOS master was at a café a few blocks away, aggressively trying to convince another DOS member not to defect. We zipped over, and Karim outfitted Chris with a hidden camera.

  The plan was for us to wait in the parking lot while Chris went inside and got close enough to record what was happening. Karim had failed to instruct Chris to act like a secret agent and be inconspicuous, figuring the phrase “hidden camera” was self-explanatory.

  Chris, who looked like a cross between the Marlboro Man and a bearded Tom Brady, walked right up to the female recruiter and the near defector, also a woman, and, in front of the entire restaurant, yelled:

  “Give my friend her collateral back!”

  The Espian freaked out and called for SOP backup. Chris pointed out the window at our car in the lot, and shouted again in a booming voice:

  “India Oxenberg’s mom, Catherine, is in the parking lot! What do you have to say to her?!”

  Some big guy showed up just then—from the SOP, I assumed—to usher the two women out of danger.

  My cover was officially blown, and now I was vaguely worried that some psycho Espian would be dispatched by the flying monkeys to find me and hunt me down.

  We piled into the car and fled, and my spy took us on a scenic tour of all things cult. She knew where they all lived and hung out. Everything and everybody was a ten-minute drive away from one another; they were all embedded in normal, middle-to-upper-class suburban communities.

  She drove us past their run-down clubhouse, formerly a restaurant, called Apropos; the gym where Keith played volleyball each week; and the condo Keith reserved fo
r various intimate encounters . . . he called it “the Library.” We drove by the houses of Nxivm top brass—one house owned by a reject from Keith’s harem whom I called “Rapunzel,” had windows blocked by white paper and tape. For years, Keith didn’t let her cut her hair because of a breach she’d committed; it grew so long that it dragged on the ground.

  It was like a Beverly Hills tour of movie stars’ homes, but not.

  I wondered if India was really out of town, or if we’d get a sighting of her. That’s what I was hoping for. I wanted to scoop her up and take her away. As it got dark, we turned a corner, and Lori Christina pointed out 21 Oregon Trail: the spacious five-bedroom house where Keith lived with his harem. Certainly not the lifestyle of a renunciant.

  As we drove by slowly, we saw three silhouettes walking on the road: a short male wearing droopy gray sweats flanked by two women, both brunettes.

  “Oh my God!” I shrieked. “It’s Keith!”

  By the time we caught up to the trio, Keith had scuttled away, disappearing into the house. Seconds later, we saw someone peer out from behind the curtains. Was that Keith hiding? Karim got out of the car as I hid under the dashboard. I wasn’t about to give them any excuse to accuse me of gnome-stalking as Clare had done to Frank. Karim rang the bell, but no one answered. And I didn’t have any time to wait around.

  We had to drive back to New York City that night because I had more meetings there in the morning.

  When I woke up the next day, I was a bit shell-shocked from my trip—the long-awaited meeting with Antoine and spotting Keith had both incited and drained me.

  The cult leader was a deranged criminal roaming the streets for all to see. And those burly men at the AG office with their business cards were only a thirty-minute drive away. They had the three-hundred-page evidence packet. Were they going to do anything about this?

  On the way to the airport the following day, I got my answer when Art and Anthony called.

  “We wanted to let you know that the AUSA of the Eastern District has moved in aggressively and has enlisted the FBI,” Art said. You don’t have to carry this burden on your shoulders alone anymore. You have help. They are taking this very seriously.”