My facialist handed me my purse so I could dig out my phone. I had to adjust my eyes to the light and blink a few times before I could take in what I saw: dozens of frantic texts, emails, and voice mails marked “Urgent” from Bonnie and Mark, Toni Natalie, Frank, Karim, my various Albany spies, my various lawyers, everybody.
ART: Catherine, we received documents from the EDNY that Raniere was arrested and will appear in court tomorrow in TX. I emailed you the complaint.
Congratulations for your perseverance and dedication to this cause.
I quickly called Art. “Tell me everything! What happened?!”
“Catherine! There was a raid yesterday and Keith was arrested in Mexico, near Puerto Vallarta! He did not go willingly. The Feds worked in conjunction with the federales . . . they were concerned about his connections to the Salinas family so they wanted to get him out of there as quickly as possible. We have issued a press release for you.”
“Thank you so much!” I cried into the phone. “I’m so grateful for you! Arrested!!!” I screamed, bursting into tears. I hopped off the table and jumped up and down, then hugged the facialist, explaining what had just happened—and she started crying, too. The creams on my face dripped all over us. After we finished jumping and dancing around the room together, I started making calls from the spa table. The first was to Mark and Bonnie: “Ohmigod, ohmigod!!!” I laughed and cried into the phone, hyperventilating, “I can’t believe . . . it actually happened . . . ohmigod . . . Keith . . . arrested . . .”
Bonnie and Mark were crying and laughing on the other end, too.
“Catherine, this is unprecedented,” Bonnie said. “Remember what the cult recovery therapist, Rosanne Henry, said? Over twenty-five years in her work and she’d never seen a cult leader arrested before the Kool-Aid scenario—never! But now . . . we did it!”
From the spa table, to the street, to my car, I dialed and texted everybody: Mom, Greg, the Expians . . . I was like the town crier banging the drum and yelling out the good news. I had to pull over to the side of the road because I was crying so much, the leftover facial cream was getting into my eyes and I couldn’t see.
“You’re a hero,” Greg said to me. “You just saved hundreds—thousands—of people. I’m so proud of you!”
The pièce de résistance was a text I got from Bill:
It seems like you are right about Keith. Call me. Thx
From what my resident Sherlock Holmes group could gather from our inside sources, someone from the US government had called in a favor with the Mexican government, asking them to swing by and pay a friendly Sunday call on Keith at his resplendent manse in Mexico.
And not just on any Sunday, mind you, but Palm Sunday. These Catholic federales were giving up church with the family on a holy day to smoke Keith out with machine guns.
But it was so fitting, because Keith was about to be crucified. He was even surrounded by a flock of slaves, his branded apostles—Allison, Nicki Clyne, Lauren, and a Mexican DOS slave who I wasn’t familiar with—who all protested as he was handcuffed and hauled away. Where are Baby Avatar and his mama? I wondered. There seemed to be no sign of them.
Keith was deported instead of extradited, which would have been the proper protocol. There was a worry that the Salinas family would step in and use their government ties to block extradition if they caught wind of it. The beauty of deportation was: no warning, no paper trail, no due process. All it took was one phone call: “Pick him up and toss him out!”
As it turns out, Mexico was not so keen to have a branding pedophile in its backyard.
They handcuffed Keith behind his back—a sure sign they didn’t like him, I’d heard—and drove him to the US border. There they unceremoniously dumped him, squirming, into the waiting arms of the FBI on the other side, like a reluctant mail-order bride.
He didn’t go willingly, Art said.
I imagined Keith begging for mercy and hanging on to the legs of furniture or curtains as they dragged him out of his beautiful hacienda. I imagined them ripping the virgin margarita, hot tamale, and churro out of his hand as he caught his last glimpse of the stunning Pacific. I envisioned him crawling under his bed to hide like a baby, scratching and biting as they yanked him out by his ankles. I visualized them chasing him through the giant house like it was a maze until he was cornered, tangled up in reams of mosquito netting.
His fake judo expertise and his phony hundred-yard-dash record were of no help to him now. He was such a coward, he probably threw his slaves in front of himself, yelling, “They did it! It wasn’t me! Take them!”
It was doing my heart wonders just to imagine all this.
After he was taken away, Keith’s devoted apostles hopped in a car and launched a high-speed chase following the machine-gun-toting federales as they ferried Keith from Puerto Vallarta to the border, until they ran out of gas. God forbid they should lose sight of their Vanguard. I’d heard they were last sighted in Guadalajara, a five-hour drive from Keith’s manse.
—
THE GOVERNMENT’S CASE was being handled by the office’s Organized Crime and Gang Section—another clue they were going for RICO. Assistant US Attorneys Moira Kim Penza and Tanya Hajjar were in charge of the prosecution, and a new third name—another woman!—was added to the team. Assistant US Attorney Karin Orenstein was in charge of the forfeiture portion of the case—the first indication that they were going to seize assets! My lawyers sent me the official twenty-two-page criminal Complaint and Affidavit in Support of Arrest Warrant, written by FBI special agent Michael Lever, who specialized in investigations involving sex trafficking and civil rights violations. They also sent me the eight-page letter to the judge written that day by Moira and Tanya.
The first two bits of information I saw on the complaint made me laugh out loud. First, it was filed on February 14—Valentine’s Day! Keith loathed Valentine’s Day. In general, he had a vendetta against anyone having a day named after themselves—even a saint. He didn’t like the competition. Keith particularly hated Valentine’s Day because he didn’t believe in (or understand) romance, devotion, and love. He used to throw anti–Valentine’s Day parties during which he ordered couples to pair up with someone who was not their spouse or significant other.
The second bit that I saw at the top was this:
United States of America against KEITH RANIERE, also known as “The Vanguard.”
Vanguard!
The whole country was fighting a comic-book character, a video-game super-antihero!
It was a taunt if ever I saw one.
The rest of the complaint couldn’t have been more serious. As I began going through it, I could now see what the FBI had been working on so diligently over the past four months. They knew and understood everything about Keith, ESP, and DOS—all the details the slaves had told me were in there: the sashes, secrecy, money debts, and the rotating fifteen to twenty women Keith had sex with. It mentioned the slaves, collateral, branding, punishments, and diets. It confirmed that Keith created DOS and it mentioned “the Heiress” who owned a private island in Fiji (Holy shit, I thought, they’re targeting Clare Bronfman!). It mentioned ESP’s teaching that women had “inherent weaknesses including ‘overemotional’ natures.” It talked about slaves feeling forced to have sex with Keith, and described his “Library” lair that had a hot tub and a loft bed (all Keith was missing was the lava lamp).
The complaint asserted that Keith, along “with others, did knowingly and intentionally conspire to recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide, obtain, maintain, patronize and solicit persons . . . affecting interstate and foreign commerce, knowing that means of force, threats of force, fraud and coercion . . . used to cause such persons to engage in one or more commercial sex acts . . .”
Right away, I recognized Jane Doe 1 and 2—the slaves who gave the major testimony—in the complaint, but I learned new details I hadn’t known before. Like that Keith had emailed a DOS slave and said, “I think it would be good for you to own
a fuck toy slave for me, that you could groom, and use as a tool, to pleasure me . . .” Or that he demanded a return of expense money from another after she refused to have sex with him anymore.
And I also learned that the intimidating letters sent out by Nxivm Mexico to me and others had indeed been orchestrated by Keith and Clare, who’d also, the complaint confirmed, tried to have Sarah Edmondson charged with crimes after she defected:
“Since defecting, several DOS victims have received ‘cease and desist’ letters from a Mexican attorney. Emails exchanged between RANIERE and the Heiress, received pursuant to a search warrant executed on RANIERE’s email account, discussed below, reveal that the Heiress and RANIERE orchestrated the sending of those letters. Additionally, the Heiress has made multiple attempts to have criminal charges brought against a former DOS slave, who has discussed her experience in the media.” I immediately recognized this former DOS slave as Sarah Edmondson.
The judge’s letter, written by Moira and Tanya, requested no bail for Keith (“if released, he would pose a danger to the community,” they wrote) and was filled with more personal digs and a staggering emphasis on Keith’s history of sexual abuse.
They wrote that “the defendant had repeated sexual encounters with multiple teenage girls in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s,” and detailed many of the encounters I’d read and heard about. They also wrote that Keith “posed disturbing hypotheticals as part of the Nxivm curriculum, challenging whether incest and rape are actually wrong. He told one DOS slave that incest is not wrong if the ‘victim’ is sexually aroused by the experience, and he questioned whether gang rape is bad if the person being raped has an orgasm.”
Reading that jogged my memory of watching Nancy coach someone through their childhood sexual abuse during one class and normalizing it. She told the Espian that in indigenous cultures it was an accepted practice for fathers, or some respected elder in the tribe, to initiate their daughters sexually at puberty. Callum and I looked at each other in horror and mouthed “WTF” to each other.
“That’s barbaric!” I said. “We’ve learned, progressed, and evolved since then!”
But this was not only the philosophy of Nxivm’s weird, perverted leader, but of the cult itself. And it confirmed what I suspected about the curriculum—that the seeds were being planted to normalize Keith’s rape of young girls.
As French philosopher Voltaire once wrote: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
As a zinger, Moira and Tanya once and for all put a nail in the coffin of Keith’s bragging about his educational accomplishments:
“Nxivm students are also taught that the defendant is the smartest and most ethical man in the world. He frequently cited having earned three degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but a review of his transcript shows that he graduated with a 2.26 GPA, having failed or barely passed many of the upper-level math and science classes he bragged about taking.”
Moira and Tanya intended to expose Keith and hold him accountable for every single woman, man, and child he’d ever abused, exploited, or raped—each one was represented in their narrative, not one voice was left behind. I was stunned at the power of their words, and cried tears of joy and relief. The women who were silenced for months or years had their voices given back to them.
In the press release put out by the US Department of Justice, the United States Attorney’s Office wrote that “as alleged, Keith Raniere displayed a disgusting abuse of power in his efforts to denigrate and manipulate women he considered his sex slaves . . . these serious crimes against humanity are not only shocking, but disconcerting to say the least, and we are putting an end to this torture today.”
That the FBI and prosecutors had connected the dots on all these issues was incredibly emotional and vindicating for me.
—
BUT SOON, MY joy turned to devastation (something I should have expected by now).
As I went back and forth, reading both the complaint and the judge’s letter, I recognized Allison Mack as “Co-Conspirator 1” in the complaint . . . and then I recognized “Co-Conspirator 2”—it was India.
My heart broke into a thousand little pieces. There she was, reduced to a criminal code—“CC-2”—even though she was a victim, which was how I and so many others saw her. I hoped law enforcement would perceive her that way, too.
Never in a million years, when I pushed to get this investigation opened, did I imagine India would be implicated with the others. Never. I’d stirred up a hornet’s nest and, in doing so, seriously implicated my precious girl—she could be prosecuted for her involvement! Keith was in custody, so one nightmare was over. But now an entirely new one began.
I was advised that the best thing for India to do now was to go in voluntarily and talk with them. But would she?
A few weeks earlier, one witness told me that the FBI was dividing people in the investigation into three categories: subject, witness, and target. India, she said, did not seem to be a target.
“Okay, who are the bad guys?” they’d asked this witness.
“Keith, Clare, Allison . . .”
“Not India?”
“No, I truly believe she’s a caring, loving person. She never punished anybody. She’s innocent, like a bunny rabbit.”
The Feds agreed, she told me.
Still, I was trembling with fear and tried to reach India to let her know she was in the complaint and in jeopardy, and I was ready to help. The previous November I’d lined up several pro-bono lawyers for her after the New York Times article came out, but she hadn’t wanted them. Now, unfortunately, their free legal advice was no longer available. But I was willing to pay for whatever attorney she needed as long as she was a witness for the prosecution.
Maybe the seriousness of Keith’s crimes and the arrest would finally wake her up? Or, at least, convince her to let me help her?
For the rest of the day I emailed, texted, and called her. Radio silence. I enlisted her sisters, my mother, Stanley, and my lawyers to try. Her response to everybody was essentially this: she didn’t believe anything serious was happening at all.
“It’s not real,” she texted my mother. “You’re buying into the fearmongering.”
To Stanley, she wondered why people were bothering her all day; to her sisters, she complained I was bullying her.
One of our insiders reported that higher-ups at Nxivm were telling the faithful that Keith had orchestrated his own arrest as a ruse to gauge how loyal his slaves were.
I sent her another text:
Darling—I am going to email you the complaint from FBI & US Attorney. You will see the charges. The US Attorney is offering u a chance to come in immediately and it is in your best interest to do so or they will come after you. You need lawyers immediately.
Please understand how serious this is.
But it was continued radio silence for me.
The next day, Keith wore shackles and chains during a hearing in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was held without bail. Next, he would be transferred to Brooklyn, where he’d be arraigned in an open courtroom. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had to be in that courtroom that day.
Online, I saw a sketch of him in court wearing chains. I thought of India just two years earlier, asking for the loose diamonds from one of my rings to make a belly chain—now I realized it was part of her induction and initiation into DOS. Now Keith was blinged out, courtesy of the US government.
Now you’re the slave, I thought, looking at the sketch. Now the master is wearing the chains.
—
YEAH, IT WAS a bad week for the Vanguard and his flying monkeys. Soon after his arrest, I heard that the cops found $8 million still in Pam Cafritz’s bank account (the dead, rich, harem member he’d kept on ice) that Keith had been using.
After his arrest, the FBI, NY State Police, and IRS raided Nancy Salzman’s house in Halfmoon and soon after, Keith’s sex lair—aka the Library. From Nancy’
s, they confiscated over half a million dollars in cash stuffed in shoe boxes and envelopes. In Keith’s lair, they found a book called The History of Torture, a DVD about sex trafficking called Bought and Sold, and a mysterious box of unidentified white pills. Was this what provided the promised “true enlightenment” Esther told me about once, that women found only by having sex with Keith? The pills might explain the blue light some women reported seeing during sex with him. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were roofies—or maybe quaaludes, with Keith being so frozen in the eighties.
Keith was tossed in the infamous Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, the hub where everyone awaiting trial goes until they’re assigned a prison. It’s huge, and it’s the worst of the worst, people say.
“I’m glad the creep is in jail,” Bill said to me. “I’ve heard of that FTC, it’s a total dump. Good. The highlight of his week will be a bologna sandwich.”
And if an MS-13 gang member demanded his sandwich, Keith would have two choices: give it to him, or get fucked—literally and figuratively.
He was surrounded by rapists and murderers there, said a friend, and as unappealing as Keith was, no one was going to be looking at his face. Now it would be Keith doing the bowing and bending over. Now he was the one being told when to wake up, when and how much to eat, when he could take a shower and for how long, and when he could sleep.
With that knowledge, a sense of balance slowly returned to the universe.
Karma’s a bitch.
But there was more—much more—to come, said one of my insider flies on the wall.
On March 29, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York announced that while “some dramatic steps have taken place over the past week or two . . . you should expect to see the aggressive pursuit of Mr. Raniere and some of his cronies.”
More arrests were to come! And this was confirmation that multiple agencies at different levels were working in tandem to create a monumental task force from both federal and state authorities.
“Consider this as act one,” said the insider. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Captive Page 26
