Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, when you need a lawyer, your mother has one for you. This branding . . . it’s not like a tattoo,” my mother said. “It is a sexual area, and it’s his initials.”

  “They are not his initials, and it is not sexual. I love my mom, and I miss her. This is not going to go on forever between me and my mom . . . but she has not put my interest first by doing all this publicity.”

  “She didn’t have a choice. It was the only way to get this thing moving if it is indeed a sinister cult.”

  “Yes, she did. She could have come up to Albany and talked to me. She didn’t have to use me. I want to leave and get away from all the press and go as far away as possible. Maybe I can go to Tasmania.”

  “In the end, all press is good press. You can bloody well use all this attention to build a fantastic career.”

  “You are right. But I don’t like living in LA. I don’t like the movie world.”

  “That’s BS, India. You were about to do that TV show, but it didn’t work out. I hear you’ve been given a company, Delegates, by Keith?”

  “No. That’s not true. Keith is a very nice man, Grandma.” Mom tried not to show her distaste at this comment. “My life is ESP,” India continued. I knew what that meant: She was completely aligned with her cult persona; she was mainlining the Kool-Aid. “I know Mom thinks I’m crazy, but I’m seeing a doctor and doing tests to prove I’m not crazy. I’m on my way to Long Beach after this to do a written test to show I’m not crazy or brainwashed . . .”

  I’d never in my life called her crazy; I had never used that word in conversation with her. And I was bewildered that she couldn’t recall—or didn’t think I would—the chat we had a year before when she excitedly told me that Keith was creating Delegates—the TaskRabbit copycat company—just for her. Either what she told my mother was a bald-faced lie, or she’d been conditioned to believe a new reality—an “alternate fact,” as they say today.

  I didn’t understand what she meant about doctors and tests until I saw Keith’s second official statement on the ESP website a week or two later. Not only did he distance himself from DOS and any criminal activity yet again, but he also announced that a team of experts had tested the women in DOS and said they were “thriving, healthy, better off, and haven’t been coerced.”

  I heard from Barry at the New York Times right away, asking me if India was part of these so-called “investigations” that Raniere had announced.

  I didn’t know yet. It would be a few more days before I’d hear from this mysterious doctor that India had mentioned to my mother and that Keith had mentioned in the statement.

  —

  UNTIL THEN, I focused on another task in mid-November: getting the celebrities who’d been linked to the cult to denounce it publicly.

  Disruption, disruption—I was always thinking of new ways to cause it.

  My first letter was to British business magnate and billionaire Sir Richard Branson, who’d been photographed with Sara Bronfman on his private island in the British Virgin Islands, Necker Island, for a Nxivm retreat. He’d also been quoted giving an endorsement for the World Ethical Foundations Consortium, founded by Keith and the Bronfman sisters.

  Sir Richard Branson

  Founder, Virgin Group

  The tools you have for compassionately dealing with complex ethical and global issues are not only unique, but also extremely valuable. This, along with a program of coordinated, organized resources, makes for an innovative approach to transforming our society. I think your founding event will be extraordinary and potentially world changing!

  A friend of mine who knew Branson forwarded a letter from me. He responded to her the next day.

  Dear ———,

  I don’t believe I know anything about this organisation. If I’ve been linked to it in the press, can somebody let me know in what context?

  So sorry to hear what your friend is going through.

  X Richard

  My head was reeling: Did everyone linked to Nxivm catch automatic amnesia?

  My next letter was to the Dalai Lama. Mom had gotten the email address of his personal assistant through her royal connections. In 2009, His Holiness the Dalai Lama had been invited to speak at one of the foundation’s functions but then publicly canceled after negative media attention about the cult hit the papers.

  According to multiple high-level defectors, the Bronfman brats, Nancy, and Keith apparently flew to India to beg him in person to reconsider, which he did. According to a high-ranking defector, they doubled their initial offer of a $1 million “donation.” A few days later, the Dalai Lama Trust magically became active in New York State with over $2 million in its account.

  His Holiness had given a talk in Albany on May 6, sponsored by the WEFC, and Keith and cronies heralded that as a victory—especially the symbolic moment when Keith went onstage, and His Holiness placed a traditional white ceremonial Tibetan scarf, a khata, around his neck. In one fell swoop, the Dalai Lama had demoted Keith to novice, white-sash level.

  They never mention that their victory backfired when the Dalai Lama was asked during a Q&A session why he’d previously canceled his visit.

  He cited the negative press and then said to Keith, “If you have done something wrong, you must accept, you must admit, change, make correction. If you have not done [anything wrong], make clear all these allegations [are untrue], truthfully, honestly, openly, transparently.” Then he asked the media to investigate Raniere and report truthfully what they found. (Which, as we’ve seen, didn’t work out so well for the journalists who did follow up on his request.)

  Despite the Dalai Lama’s directive, his visit was spun by Keith and Nxivm cronies as an endorsement, and Keith milked it for years—riding on the Dalai Lama’s coattails as if he himself were a philosophical leader in his own right on the global stage. I emailed the Dalai Lama in mid-November:

  “I urge you to make a public statement distancing yourself from this dangerous cult,” I wrote, “by stressing that your appearance was in no way an endorsement of this group.”

  That very day, scandal erupted on the Dalai Lama front when it hit the news that his emissary to the United States, Lama Tenzin Dhonden—also known as “the Dalai Lama’s gatekeeper”—had been involved in an affair with Sara Bronfman and had accepted millions in exchange for access to the Dalai Lama. Witnesses shared that they were spotted canoodling in a hot tub. Dhonden, who was a Buddhist monk and had taken a vow of chastity, was suspended from his post immediately, right around the time their office was reading my note.

  There was an ensuing investigation into allegations by a prominent Washington businessman that Dhonden had abused his role and extorted money in return for ensuring the spiritual leader’s appearance at a major Washington state event.

  I never heard back from the Dalai Lama, but his office did issue an official statement saying that it never received money from Nxivm.

  I did hear from Elizabeth Smart, the young woman who’d gained national attention at age fourteen after being abducted in Salt Lake City in 2002 and held captive for nine months by husband-and-wife cult members.

  Today she’s a mother and works as a child safety activist and contributor for ABC News. After reading the Times and People magazine stories, she kindly reached out, asking if she could be of help.

  We made a plan for her to send an email to India asking if she needed support, explaining that she, too, had been a victim of media exposure and had experienced many emotions that India might be going through. Elizabeth wrote a wonderful, heartfelt letter. But India never responded.

  During this same week in November, the New York Post linked New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand to the cult via her father, Doug Rutnik, who worked as a lobbyist for Nxivm in 2004. (Why does a cult need a lobbyist?) After he sniffed that something smelled rotten in the state of Denmark—er, the city of Albany—he left the job after four months, and the litigious flying monkeys got to work in retaliation
. Nancy Salzman went after him with her Nxivm posse. The settlement was sealed. Nancy got back all the consulting fees they’d paid Rutnik and got him to sign a confidentiality agreement not to talk about it.

  Like Branson, Gillibrand refused to talk when asked about her father’s link to the cult.

  “Senator Gillibrand had never heard of this group until she recently read about them in the newspaper,” said her spokesman.

  It was frightening how far-reaching this group’s tentacles were and how many varied people it had reached. Even more frightening was how or why so many remained silent about it.

  —

  ON THANKSGIVING I got the news that Vanguard, the coward, had fled town.

  Except for his jaunt to Dharamsala to grovel at the Dalai Lama’s feet and a foray to Fiji, this guy never left Albany. But somewhere in those two and a half weeks since I saw him prowling the streets of Clifton Park, he likely boarded a private plane and flew to Mexico with Clare Bronfman, Mariana Fernandez, and the Baby Avatar.

  Keith always promised his flock that he’d never, ever abandon them, but now he told them he’d been forced to because his life had been threatened. By whom? I wondered. Maybe it was simply the sight of this angry mother on his doorstep with a camera crew a few weeks earlier that had scared him away.

  How could the FBI let him escape like that? Did this mean they’d dropped the ball? I was totally confused, and worried that out of the country he’d go off the grid and never be captured. I tried to have faith that the FBI knew what they were doing. Maybe they were even more methodical than Keith?

  By the time December rolled around the following week, India’s own missions were becoming clearer—and so were the cult’s devious and obvious attempts to use her.

  We found out that the “doctor” she’d mentioned to my mother was Dr. Park Dietz MD, MPH, PhD, a well-known forensic psychiatrist who’d made a name for himself profiling sociopaths such as Richard Kuklinski, the prolific Mafia hit man known as the Iceman; Unabomber Ted Kaczynski; Jeffrey Dahmer; and other notable serial killers and cannibals. He’d testified as an expert witness at the murder trials of Dahmer, John Hinckley Jr., Betty Broderick, and Joel Rifkin.

  Basically, he’s the guy you call when you want to prove competency in even the most heinous criminals. Prosecutors call him when they want to prevent an insanity plea.

  Dr. Dietz sent me a letter explaining he’d been retained on behalf of Nxivm “to conduct a psychiatric evaluation of your daughter India’s competence to participate in Nxivm and ESP programs and her current mental state,” he wrote. (Like the attorney in Mexico, Dr. Dietz would also spell the name Nxivm wrong. Maybe he got the spelling from Bufete?)

  “I’ve already examined and tested India, and as part of my evaluation of her would like to interview you.” His request struck me as odd, and Rachel Bernstein agreed—“it’s highly irregular” that he should need me to complete the evaluation.

  So, either India had been lying that she had found this doctor herself and that he’d been her choice, or she was now part of a hive mentality and could not separate herself from the cult—as if they were both one, which was alarming.

  India texted, asking me to take the meeting with Dietz and her. And while my heart leapt at the thought of seeing her, the whole thing felt like a monumental trap for both of us.

  Of course Keith would hire this guy. How transparent! He hired someone who he expected would prove competence—100 percent guaranteed, foolproof. He was willing to overpay this star forensic psychiatrist to show that India was not brainwashed; that way the cult could point out that anything she did—even if it was following orders—was done of her own free will.

  I sent Dietz’s letter to Frank, Barry, Rick, Rachel, and another cult expert, Rosanne Henry.

  My lawyers’ advice was not to respond to the letter until they’d spoken to the FBI about it.

  Rick Alan Ross told me, “Dietz has probably been paid a very substantial amount of money supplied by the Bronfmans. His professional history did not seem to qualify him as an expert on cults, the coercive persuasion methods used by cults or specifically evaluating cult members. He’s known for his examination and evaluations of psychopaths, murderers, and deeply disturbed individuals with narcissistic disorders. He profiled David Koresh. He would be highly qualified to evaluate and profile Keith Raniere, but not necessarily a cult victim.”

  Both Rick and Rachel thought the meeting was a setup to get me to say something that could be used against me or used to incriminate India in the future.

  “Keith is setting up India to take the fall!” Barry emailed.

  I didn’t know what move to make, and I could feel the eyes of Keith on me, barreling toward destruction.

  The FBI said to speak with Dietz, but not in person . . . and they suggested I tape record the conversation. And so, a few days later, I embarked on my first secret assignment for the FBI—without any preparation from them, I might add.

  I was dealing with the world’s foremost forensic psychiatrist at the behest of one of the world’s most devious psychopaths, and all I was instructed to do was “get information.” No list of questions, no other guidance, nothing. It’s not like I was a trained expert at waterboarding or information extraction.

  But I prepared like hell, putting together a list of dozens of questions. And when I got Dr. Dietz on the phone, I barraged him unrelentingly, rattling off my questions like gunfire. So much so that he suspiciously asked me: “Who are you on a fishing expedition for?”

  In the process, I obtained some good intel and derailed the so-called “experiment” that could have proven disastrous for India.

  First, Dr. Dietz confirmed to me that India was the only cult member he was examining, suggesting only India was being targeted versus the whole bunch of them, as per Keith’s statement on the Nxivm website.

  Second, he had been misinformed by the cult and India as to why he’d been hired. He thought he’d been hired to evaluate and prove the competency of a student of ESP and Nxivm; he hadn’t been told anything about DOS. Keith’s statement had said their testing was to show that the DOS women were “flourishing.”

  Third, I confirmed that Nxivm had hired him and that it intended to publish the results of the evaluation online and give it to the media. Well, there was no way I could let his evaluation be made public.

  “Dr. Dietz, what if I told you that India was examined by a medical doctor a few months ago? And that there was physical evidence that this group was endangering her health. And that she was also told to seek psychological help, too.”

  He was silent.

  “Are you aware that in this group, my daughter is a ‘slave,’ and she has a ‘master’?”

  “Who is a slave?” he asked. He sounded nervous now. It turned out that Dr. Dietz was being used as well.

  A combination of our talk and Barry’s story in the Times put the final kibosh on Keith’s plan—Dr. Dietz’s evaluation never saw the light of day, and Nxivm’s plan to throw my daughter under the bus had failed. I was under strict instructions not to go to the media, but my mother’s instinct overruled that, and I told him everything. I got my hands slapped by my lawyers, but it was the right choice. Dietz spoke to Barry for the article, saying that India appeared “happy” and that he found no evidence of “brainwashing”; she just seemed troubled by the negative media reports about the group, he said. Barry ended the article on a more truthful, tragic note, quoting Antonio Zarattini in Mexico—the former coach who’d been targeted by the cult.

  His friends still in the cult, he told Barry, “are in some ways kidnapped; their minds, their emotions have been taken for ransom.”

  Dietz never ended up doing any finalized testing or giving any conclusive, official results to Nxivm after that.

  Once it dawned on me that the evaluation was counting on my participation, I held the trump card because there was no way I was going to comply. Keith’s dastardly plan to set me up fizzled like a wet petard. I got my h
ands slapped for a second time when I let it slip that Mark and Bonnie were in the room with me, filming my entire conversation with Dietz.

  “What?” Anthony asked over the phone. “You did what?”

  Art and Anthony gave me a good talking to after that. If I were to spy for the FBI, apparently I shouldn’t do it with other witnesses for the investigation in the room, watching.

  “Oopsy daisy,” I said with a smile. “Sorry, I didn’t know!”

  —

  INDIA WAS NOT happy, and she texted my mother about it. It was so hard being hated by her. If there was ever a definition of tough love from a mother, this was it. But she didn’t get the result she wanted from her grandmother, either:

  India: Mom is still actively working against me not with me, and her approach is pushing me farther away from her no one else, so it’s very sad for me to see her unwillingness to even speak under my terms. She’s not respecting what I want at all but insisting that I lie and I won’t lie. I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as loving, it’s not the truth, and I can’t pretend to agree with tactics like this. I’m sorry that you’re in a challenging position. The loving thing would be to believe her own daughter and not other people who have motives of their own. I’m just telling you the truth. Whether you want to accept it or not, I hope you can see how from my perspective it’s not loving. It’s loving her mission to destroy my friends and our relationship in my opinion that’s more important to her right now.

  Elizabeth: Darling, I know this man Dietz may seem like a dear old dicky bird, but he has been paid a huge sum of money by Nxivm to report to them what they want to hear, so how can he be a mediator??

  You were always exceptionally bright, so there is no excuse to suddenly lose all perspective and pretend not to understand . . . please get a grip on reality.

  I love you, darling, but this situation is too stupid and is taking too long . . .