Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  May the sun in 2018 shine some light and help you to wake up.

  with deepest love g xoxox

  In early December, I got word that while it might look like the FBI had dropped the ball on the case when Keith fled, and nothing was happening, quite the contrary was true: the investigation had gained momentum.

  From what I could glean, they were now focusing on the sex crimes instead of going the Al Capone financial route, which Anne had said would be easier.

  I was blown away. This was incredibly ballsy of them! The sex crimes would mean a much more complex argument than the cut-and-dried he-didn’t-pay-his-taxes one. What this meant to me was that they must have undeniable proof. But my fear now was that they might see India as a perpetrator, not a victim.

  And now, a moral dilemma haunted me. All these DOS women were ultimately victims at the hands of the mastermind, Keith Raniere. But as far as the law was concerned, where would they draw the line between victim and perpetrator, especially when many of the victims had been turned into perpetrators via coercion?

  I was anxious for the FBI to get India in for questioning. Many of the other women had already been interviewed. Until then, she was at risk to be further exploited by the cult, which would actively use her to her detriment to exonerate itself.

  —

  BY MID-DECEMBER, INDIA’S second mission surfaced.

  She wanted to sign up for a vegan culinary school in New York or LA called Plantlab and asked both my mother and me if we could foot the bill for the $7,000 tuition. This put us in a conundrum. There was nothing we wanted more than for her to get away from Albany and move on with her life separate from the cult, but, as with the Dietz invitation, I didn’t trust it.

  I was hearing rumors from insiders that the cult planned to rebrand itself in Brooklyn and funnel recruitment through “the Source” (a very expensive program Allison Mack had already begun, targeted toward the acting community). I’d also heard it planned to open a restaurant in Brooklyn as a front for recruiting.

  Who better to run it than India, a born entrepreneur who, as a kid, was obsessed with the Food Network? And in her other life, once upon a time, she’d dreamed of success in the food industry! Those guys were clever. Now the missionary work Bonnie had mentioned made sense: India was being sent out into the world like an apostle to spread the good news and gather new followers.

  She began her petitioning to get the tuition money from us, and I was yearning to say to her, “Keith already took all your inheritance. Why don’t you get him to pay for it?”

  I again discussed the situation with Rick, who said, “Don’t you dare pay for this! They want to use your money to increase India’s value in the cult!”

  Mom and I told India we’d gladly help with tuition—if she ended her relationship with ESP. A week or two of tense emails between India and me, and India and my mother, ensued, until India finally gave up on us, saying she would not leave the cult.

  Bill, meanwhile, didn’t understand why I wouldn’t give her the money without conditions, but my mother, thank God, stood by me and saw it was the right thing. She wrote to India, “My heart wants to support you unconditionally, but my logic dictates that I should help you once you are free from ESP and have decided to move on with your life and in a new direction.”

  India spent Christmas with her fathers and refused to see me, though I sent lovely presents for her with her sisters as go-betweens, including a backpack that her sisters told me that she loved and began using right away.

  A few days later, India announced to Bill that she was going back to Albany in early January to attend an ESP coach summit. She had bought a one-way ticket. She cited me as the main reason she was going back.

  She wrote to Bill, and he forwarded me her text, where she blamed me for making it impossible for her to get a job and move forward in life.

  I freaked out. Reading between the lines, I saw something more than just a daughter angry at her mother because she didn’t get what she asked for. She’d failed at her assignments that month: getting me to see Dr. Dietz and getting the tuition for school. She was batting zero, and now she had to go back to cult command central and face the consequences.

  But what would they be? What would they make her do as penance? Why did she have only a one-way ticket?

  I lay in bed on the last day of 2017 and asked God to take over, asked my body to let go, coaxed myself to breathe. I’d done everything I could do, everything that the experts and the lawyers and the FBI and my own heart had dictated.

  The year was ending, the FBI was moving in, but how would India’s story end?

  Her life and her future weren’t in any of our hands, and maybe not even her own.

  16

  * * *

  A PASSAGE TO INDIA

  India was set to return to Albany on January 9, 2018, and the more I thought about it, the more I slipped into paranoia. I was convinced she was being lured back for her next, and final, assignment: a suicide mission.

  After she’d made plans to move back to LA and take a vacation that first week of January with her grandmother, India suddenly canceled both. It was obvious to me she’d been abruptly summoned back to the mother ship.

  “It’s a shame, we almost had her here,” Bill said. “But without enrolling in the cooking school, she doesn’t have anything keeping her here.”

  I wanted to shake him.

  “Bill, I didn’t want to enable her! But don’t you see what else is going on here?!”

  He still didn’t get it or see the danger she was in—especially now, with this sudden trip back. But Rick Alan Ross surely did. It was a big, big red flag, he said.

  “I’ve watched and studied this man for fifteen years, but I’ve never seen him escalate like this, like the way he is now,” he told me, and he’d said the same thing when interviewed on The Dr. Oz Show six weeks earlier for a segment about the cult, comparing Keith to Charles Manson.

  I’d read in Rick’s book, Cults Inside Out, that small groups like Nxivm are the most deadly, especially when they’re tightly wound around a leader who becomes progressively delusional. This puts them at a higher risk of becoming a formula for tragedy.

  Raniere was far away in another country, but he was still running the show. And as far as I could see, he used India like a puppet. I was worried that his next “distraction” would be for India to commit an honor suicide, like the ones he spoke of so glowingly in class.

  He’d been under a lot of pressure since all the press came out, and he’d fled to Mexico—he knew very well the FBI was after him. What Keith needed to do as soon as possible was to create a distraction as a diversionary tactic. This would feather the flock, it would create a drama that everyone would rally around, and it would take attention away from the chaos the press had caused.

  I scanned Allison Mack’s social media pages and saw an image she’d posted of Joan of Arc. Underneath, she’d quoted the play Joan of Lorraine—it was dialogue from the moments just before Joan is executed:

  Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it . . . and then it’s gone. But to surrender who you are and to live without belief is more terrible than dying—even more terrible than dying young.

  I quickly scanned other slave and master sites and saw Joan’s post of a woman standing by the ocean, ready to jump in, with the title “Standing By” and these words underneath:

  “We’ve been called to take up arms . . . Sisters, the light is dimming and we are the fire.”

  More red flags.

  I called my lawyers and explained my fears. Keith, Nancy, Sara Bronfman (whom I learned was still India’s ESP coach), Allison, and Lauren all had the rank to demand that India cancel everything and return so quickly. They implanted every idea and directive in her mind. And now, because she’d fai
led at her two missions at the end of 2017, I worried they were implanting a new belief in her mind: that she had no hope of a future and that she had more value to them dead than alive.

  How else do you begin preparing someone to do something drastic and dangerous for a cause?

  Toni Natalie had told me how Keith had had a hand in her brother’s suicide, and I knew about the other two suicides linked to Keith: those of Gina Hutchinson and Kristin Snyder.

  Sacrificing her life for Keith would prove India’s ultimate allegiance to him and save Keith’s worthy cause in one swoop. The DOS women were already convinced they were “at one” with Nxivm—that they were one collective entity. If the group died, so did they; if the group lived, so did they.

  I wouldn’t put it past Keith to find a way to pass around the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, kill them all, and make it look like a mass suicide. At the 2016 V-week, over a hundred Espians (including children) had gotten violently ill. Keith and the other high-ranking Espians there didn’t—and, strangely enough, neither did any woman Keith was having sex with. Everyone was bedridden for days, with foul stuff gushing out of both ends of their bodies. He quarantined everyone to their rooms and swore them to secrecy. A mother cannot help but wonder if this was a Jonestown-lite situation. It certainly would not have been the first time that a cult had poisoned the water supply.

  It wasn’t too far-fetched; it had happened in real life. The followers of the Osho cult in The Dalles, Oregon, gave food poisoning to 751 people by contaminating the salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella, sending 45 people to the hospital. Apparently that was a test run for a bigger plan to poison the county by contaminating the water supply using a blended mixture of . . . dead beavers. (It was a plan that was never carried out.)

  —

  BEFORE INDIA LEFT Los Angeles, I tried to convince her that she had so much to live for. The day before she flew to Albany, she came by to pick up her sisters and take them to Casper’s. I gave them a handwritten note to give to her.

  “I know you don’t believe me, but there is a beautiful, prosperous life waiting for you, full of opportunities when you are ready,” I wrote, “and I’m here to help you.”

  After the plane took off the next day, I had back-to-back nightmares that I’d never see her again.

  “Don’t worry, Catherine,” Sarah Edmondson called to say, “we won’t quit until you have her back.”

  But we were running out of time.

  If Keith or the group was in trouble, as they were now, would the DOS slaves be expected to perform the ultimate sacrifice to either save the group or die for it in one grand, apocalyptic finale?

  If so, they would plan ahead to ensure the blame wasn’t on the cult but on something or someone else. The current media persecution India kept talking about, for example, was an ideal target to blame as the trigger that had pushed a slave over the edge.

  Or in India’s case, the blame could be pinned on her celebrity mother for exposing her the way I had. Think of the publicity that would give them.

  I felt sick.

  After I talked to my lawyers, I wrote an email for them to forward to government officials, feeling that too many times people had sensed impending catastrophe and didn’t speak up. I wrote:

  I believe that the likelihood of the worst-case scenario playing out is slim, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t give voice to my fears, and if the consequence of my silence led to a tragedy.

  I’d seen Kristin Snyder’s suicide note, in which she wrote that because of ESP, “my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off.”

  I could imagine India’s: “My mother pushed me to my death.”

  —

  BACK IN ALBANY, the setup for Keith’s slaves to take the fall for him continued.

  If the FBI was going to come for Keith, he would first make sure that any wrongdoing he’d done pointed to someone else.

  An emergency meeting was called during the coach summit, and we had one of our moles—an ESP insider—there to report back to us. At least seventy Espians attended, including India.

  At the meeting, Lauren stood up and announced that she, Allison, and Nicki Clyne were going to publicly take full responsibility for DOS.

  Allison and Nicki had gotten married in 2017 and I’d heard that India had been a witness at the ceremony.

  “It was our idea, not Keith’s,” one of them said. India was there, in apparent full support with the rest of the group.

  When our mole reported all this back to me, all I could think was, How naïve can they be?

  Their asshole leader had fled the country, leaving them all to hold the bag. Didn’t they realize their actions wouldn’t protect Keith from prosecution but would implicate them overtly as coconspirators?

  At least they’re alive, I also thought. Though taking the blame for Keith was a form of suicide, as far as I could see.

  One of the topics at the meeting was that they were going to rebrand DOS and call it the Squad. It was also announced that a writer for the New York Times Magazine, Vanessa Grigoriadis, was working on a “friendly” article about Nxivm, so arrangements would be made for slaves to give interviews and tell the reporter how happy, healthy, and unbrainwashed they were. Grigoriadis was photographed by one of our boots on the ground together with Sara Bronfman entering Apropos during the coach summit.

  When I heard about this, I panicked. Their policy was to never speak to the press, aka “fake news.” Now Keith was telling them to give interviews? It meant two things: he wanted all the DOS women to go on the record to say that everything they’d done, including the branding, was consensual. And, most important, that he had nothing to do with it. The more interviews that broadcast his innocence, the better. For him.

  How could an article like this be possible? After a bit of sleuthing, I found out that Clare Bronfman had hired a PR company who’d pitched the story of “inside the world of the DOS slaves” to various reporters—a rare glimpse, a scoop! And the scoop included an exclusive interview with the Vanguard himself.

  After all they’d been through, and then being brave enough to come forward, a flowery story presenting DOS as a female empowerment group would devastate the defectors, I knew.

  I went into hyperdrive trying to figure out how I could put a wrench in the story. But at least I had one piece of good news—law enforcement was not remotely fazed. No puff piece was going to affect the investigation.

  Then more good news arrived midmonth. I got tipped off that the investigation was going to widen way beyond the DOS crimes and expand vertically and horizontally, even beyond racketeering, to possibly include a public corruption investigation. This meant more potential crimes to pin on Keith and his cronies, and hopefully an investigation of violations committed by government officials and law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels.

  I was elated to hear this. The Bronfmans had spent untold millions to feed this beast, conspired, and enabled Keith’s criminal enterprise to continue—and even thrive. If Albany was as corrupt as my first attorney had said, then the only path to true justice was to include everyone who was complicit and had allowed the enterprise to continue for decades as lives and families were destroyed.

  The FBI was getting closer, and my attempts to get India out of the cult and out of Albany intensified. But she’d inherited her mother’s stubbornness, and the more I tried to warn her about the inevitable tragic outcome, the more defensive and resistant she became. This was the pattern all year when we spoke with or texted each other. Her wall of indoctrination was as thick and unrelenting as the concrete Berlin Wall—but even that had eventually toppled, I told myself. (I even had a piece of it. The year it went down, Bill was in Germany and had brought a piece of it to me as a souvenir.)

  “A cult leader’s narcissism trickles down and infects all the ranks,” Rachel Bernstein explained. “It becomes a mass trickle-down of hubris. They feel above the law.”

  In early February Frank als
o had words of warning for those still in Nxivm, to get the hell out while they could:

  The people left in Nxivm think, “Oh this will pass like in the past. Just bad publicity, we need to stay strong, blah blah blah.”

  This is nothing like the past.

  Nxivm has never been under a Department of Justice criminal investigation before, and if the Eastern District of New York (DOJ) is doing it, the evidence of crimes must be really, really bad.

  The prosecutor’s office that extradited El Chapo, and prosecutes some of the most dangerous and complicated terrorism cases in the United States, would hardly waste the time and resources to go after a small cult in another district unless the evidence is extremely damning.

  Keith Raniere knows this—he’s no fool—that’s why he’s gone.

  India’s next email, however, showed she was still oblivious to the danger and that the wall had gotten thicker; it read as perfunctorily as a laundry or grocery list you might give a stranger.

  Hello,

  I wanted to ask you to please gather a few of my things for me and give them to Bill or Casper this Monday. At this stage, I would like to have and use those items to support myself and pay for cooking school, apply for jobs, and organize my taxes.

  1. My Social Security card.

  2. My bonds that you have in your safe.

  3. My personal jewelry and the items my dad gave to me on your behalf, please.

  4. My tax information and any mail I might have that was sent to your home address.

  5. Any other material that you think would be helpful in order to go forward with school and my responsibilities.

  Thank you for understanding and respecting my right to have these things.

  The personal items, including three paintings and a wooden statue of a Burmese Buddha, had been given to me by Bill for safekeeping, to give to India one day in the future, “when the time was right.”

  The time was so not right, I told India. But the more I said no, the more hopping mad she got, whipping herself into a frenzied state I’d never seen her in before. My usually calm and docile daughter then resorted to a myriad of manipulative strategies—something else I’d never seen her do so overtly before—and roped everyone into the fight, shooting out texts and cc’ing her fathers and sisters to be on her side. She attacked me and wanted them all to see me in a negative light.