—
AS ALWAYS, I was both elated and afraid—ecstatic about getting the bad guys, but worried for India.
I got a call from Bill.
“Catherine!” he said in a panic. “We need to help our daughter!”
I was stunned, and felt a flush of anger rush over me. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to lash out at him.
“Bill. What do you think I’ve been trying to do for the past year?!”
“As far as helping our daughter,” he said, “you have failed.”
I tried to remain civil. At least Bill was finally understanding the severity of the situation, and maybe he’d finally help me help her, rather than work against me. He agreed she needed to be proactive with law enforcement rather than wait to see if she got arrested.
Mark was having less success trying to convince Casper of the situation, and they had a text argument that ended with Mark reproaching Casper: “Time to be a real hero, not just a movie one.”
We were all angry, but the most damaging and misdirected anger was India’s, because it was preventing her from focusing on the task at hand, which was to save herself. She was busy blaming me for everything, Bill told me, instead of facing the facts and taking action.
“She feels like you got her into this mess and now she’s going to jail. She thinks it’s all your fault.”
I sighed.
“India thinks you want her to do a mea culpa,” said Bill.
“I don’t give a shit about a mea culpa,” I yelled into the phone. “I just want her to be safe!”
“Can’t you get immunity for her?” Bill asked. “You got Keith for them, practically handed him over on a silver platter. Now you want a mother’s quid pro quo, tell them.”
“Bill. I don’t think it works that way. They are already offering India an open door to come in and talk to them, all she needs to do is go do it. As amazing as they are, I don’t have the power to negotiate immunity for her.”
And they were amazing. They were offering India the support, kindness, and caring I’d hoped they would. One of my lawyers told me they’d never worked with FBI and prosecutors who cared so deeply about the well-being of their clients.
“Every week they call to see how each and every woman is doing,” he said.
Bill decided he was going to fly from LA to New York, get India lawyered up, and give her a hard reality check by describing the brutal facts of prison life to her. In his former life, Bill had been a “pot tradesman” ahead of his time and had his own brushes with the law and prison: “I know what the inside of a jail looks like,” he said. The fantasy of being Nelson Mandela doing time was not all it was cracked up to be, he’d tell her, especially if the cause you were fighting for was a screwball like Keith.
Bill was now finally going to do what I’d hoped and prayed he’d do all year—step up and show up for his child.
—
AND SO, HE went. But within hours after arriving in New York, he was pulled back into India’s web of delusion. She’d convinced him everything was just fine.
Successful day, I’m really glad I came to see her in her environment. Jury still out on which lawyers she’s going to pick. This is containable. Leaving tomorrow. She’s not scared right now. Looks healthy. Carving out a good life for herself. More than willing to go on and tell her story. Basically, she’s moved on. The group is a thing of the past. I think she’s going to be loyal to herself. Is she going to be indicted? I don’t know . . . Not imminent at all.
For a moment I wondered: Could this really be true? Could Bill have pulled this off? Was India really ready to move on? Then I gave myself a pinch, and asked Bill the million-dollar question.
Me: did you see where she lives? are you aware that she lives with Alli M.?
Bill: No. It didn’t come up.
There was no moving on with her life, I knew, while she was still living with Allison—aka “Co-Conspirator 1”—and living in a bubble of delusion.
—
KEITH’S APPEARANCE IN Brooklyn federal court was imminent, but I had no way to find out ahead of time what day it would be. The transferring of criminals is kept top secret so that no one tries to get to them en route and harm them or free them.
The team started making daily calls to the Oklahoma FTC see if he was still there, and I checked in with my lawyers constantly.
Finally, I had a gut feeling I had to just get on a plane and get to New York. I couldn’t miss it; I needed to see him in a court of law. I hoped the experience would give me a small amount of closure and help me let go of the Keith Nightmare a little bit.
On my way to the airport on Monday, April 9, I texted India.
Me: DARLING I am on my way to ny and I would love to see you. Let me know if you have time ♥
India: thank you for reaching out. Fly safe.
Me: Thank you, love.
In the kindest way possible, she blew me off—which made me sad. But I was buoyed soon after by a Facebook post from a stranger, who wrote: “Thank you for being brave enough to let her hate you by exposing the evil.”
The stranger’s words reminded me of my strength and resolve, and that I’d started this journey coming from a place of bravery and would conclude it that way, too.
Before I boarded my flight, I received another encouraging message: Keith was in transit! Even the lawyers and the AUSA and Eastern District of New York press office in Brooklyn didn’t know this yet!
Being the supersleuth that he was, Frank called the detention center to find out what Keith was eating while in prison for a blog he was writing. He wanted to compare Keith’s prison menu against the diet he’d given his slaves. Lucky for me, he got a chatty warden on the phone.
“Oh, he won’t be eating anything here anymore,” said the warden. “He just left.”
Bingo!
Frank tried to find out Keith’s mode of travel, but the warden was mum on that.
Keith would either be traveling by plane—“Con Air”—or getting his very first dose of “diesel therapy.” Diesel therapy, I learned from a friend, was the nickname for transporting an inmate by bus—and it was not a pretty sight. You traveled for days, sometimes weeks, handcuffed and wearing leg irons and shackles. There was an open toilet on the bus, but most guys ended up pissing and shitting themselves because it took too long to stop the bus and get them unshackled. The driver zigzagged all over the country, like a Magical Mystery Tour from hell, stopping at various prisons along the way to pick up more passengers.
We had to know how Keith was traveling so we’d know when he’d be arriving and could try to figure out what day he’d be in court. The next day, Toni Natalie used her charm. She called up the detention center and got another chatty warden.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, we can’t give you status on any prisoners,” he told her.
“I understand, I understand,” she said, sweetly. “But you know . . . he’s a very bad man. And there are a lot of people who need to see him get the justice he deserves.”
“Well . . . let me put it to you this way,” the warden said. “Sometimes, there are people who need a little diesel therapy.”
“I love you!” Toni yelled into the phone, then called me immediately: “He’s on the move—by bus!”
We found out soon after that Keith’s arraignment would be that Friday—Friday, April 13. It made perfect sense to me that he’d be arraigned on the day featured in a horror movie franchise.
—
I STAYED WITH Stanley all week; his apartment was only two blocks from the courthouse.
The day before the arraignment, I got word from the powers that be that they didn’t want me in court unless I had a security detail—they couldn’t be specific, but there had been threats. I already had my dear Stanley, who planned to stay by my side and hold my arm the entire day. For extra backup, I hired two beefy bodyguards.
The next morning, Rick joined us at Stanley’s apartment for more filming and to give us a celebratory send
-off.
“I remember in the summer, when Catherine said, ‘That’s it! I’m done being nice and it didn’t work. Now I’m going to war,’ ” Rick said, smiling. “I was skeptical. I wondered: Can she really pull this off?”
“I wasn’t skeptical at all,” said Stanley, putting his arm around me. “I’ve know this girl since she was eighteen and when she wants something, she goes for it.”
Rick didn’t come with us to the courthouse; he’d spent well over a decade in and out of courtrooms with Keith, more than enough for one lifetime.
The first bodyguard arrived at 12:45 p.m. to drive Toni, Stanley, and me the two blocks to the courthouse. Once we got there, the second bodyguard met us across the street and they both escorted us in—past a wall of photographers, through security—while they scanned the crowds for vicious, murderous flying monkeys.
Inside, the courtroom was packed with media. I quickly scanned the room and spotted Barry from the New York Times and said hello, meeting him for the first time. Toni introduced me to Suzanna Andrews (the Vanity Fair writer who’d been sued by Nxivm). Barbara Bouchey, one of Keith’s former significant others, whom he’d tortured for years in court, was there—she came up to me and we hugged.
Barbara joined the three of us as we positioned ourselves in the front row. We didn’t want to miss a thing, and we didn’t want Keith to miss seeing us.
I looked over at the prosecution table. It was surrounded by people whose names I knew and voices I’d heard over the months. But this was the first time I was actually seeing the army of angels that took Keith down.
From where I sat, I figured out who was who. There were Moira and Tanya, the badass prosecutors who skewered Keith and his low GPA in the letter to the judge. And there was the Mike whose name was on the criminal complaint . . . and there was the other Mike, the first FBI agent I’d spoken to—his wife had just had a baby and he was showing photos. The team consisted of Moira, Tanya, two Mikes, and a Charlie. And even though I’d never met them and was not to approach them now, I couldn’t help but gaze at them from afar with boundless gratitude and love.
On the other side of the room was the defense table, and behind it sat three stooges huddled together—I assumed they were Keith’s overpaid lawyers, his version of the OJ Simpson “dream team,” courtesy of heiress Clare Bronfman’s billions. The media commandeered the left side of the gallery, and they were essential soldiers in this army, too. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have been in the courtroom that day. The darkness of Nxivm demanded that good people stand up and fight, and the media heeded the call by exposing the injustice and danger, and sounding the clarion for law enforcement to take action.
In my palm, I clutched my lucky bronze Archangel Michael coin like an amulet. Not only was Michael the slayer and vanquisher of evil, he was also the patron saint of law enforcement. (I usually kept the coin in my car, where he’d kept me from getting dozens of speeding tickets.) Looking out into the courtroom, it occurred to me for the first time that the two FBI agents who led the charge against Keith were also named Michael.
A coincidence? I’d like to think not. I took it as a sign that India’s special angel, who had announced twenty-seven years earlier that it was my destiny to protect India, was also watching over her himself.
“I’ve got this covered,” he was saying to me, from the heavenly realm.
—
THE JUDGE ENTERED the room, and we all rose.
Minutes later, we heard the sound of heavy, jangling chains from behind a door at the front of the courtroom. The three stooges rushed to circle an incoming Keith and escort him to their table along with a dozen big men who looked like plainclothes prison guards.
I flashed back to one of my first ESP classes, when everyone huddled together like a football team to say a mantra in unison: “WE ARE COMMITTED TO OUR SUCCESS!!”
The stooges and prison guards parted on the floor, and there he was: the Great Vanguard.
I hadn’t seen him up close since the volleyball game five years earlier, when he French-kissed Allison, and Casper guessed he was having sex with everyone.
He looked shorter and wider than I remembered (no slave diet for him!) and colorless; the Mexico tan he’d sported in his backseat mug shot had faded. He wore a dishwater-brown prison-issued onesie that emphasized his stockiness and loping gait.
Keith walked to the defense table and sat down, facing forward. I had a good view of his right profile, and could see right away that three weeks in prison and several days of diesel therapy hadn’t made a dent in the Vanguard. On his face was the same smug, arrogant expression he always wore—no remorse, no conscience. He wasn’t going to indulge us with any of that.
As the judge spoke, Keith leaned in toward him in mock deference.
“Do you understand the severity of these charges?” the judge asked.
Keith leaned. “Yes, Your Honor,” he answered in his thin, high voice.
We were inconveniencing him. He was impatient for his highly paid stooges to finagle him out of this in the same way he’d wriggled out of his previous transgressions. It was only a matter of time, he conveyed, until he’d be out again, surrounded by his fawning slaves.
Keith glanced in our direction—twice.
For a fraction of a second, he and I made eye contact. I stared him down with daggers. He looked at Toni, and there was a fleeting moment of surprise on his face. The last thing he’d said to her was “I’ll see you dead or in jail.”
But when he said it, he’d meant her, not him. Surprise, surprise.
One of his lawyers—the strutting, portly one whose other unsavory client was Harvey Weinstein—tried to save face for Keith—and for them, too. There was no way Keith was getting bail; he’d done a stellar job proving he was a flight risk when he fled to Mexico. But just for show:
“Your Honor,” he said, “we’re not going to request bail because our client has only been here for a couple of days . . .”
It was the lamest excuse for not requesting bail I’d ever heard. It wasn’t even worth $10 of his $1,000-an-hour fee. My client has only been in this hellhole for a few days, no biggie. He can take it. I smiled: if this was how his lawyers worked, this trial was in the bag.
I looked at Keith again.
I felt a lot of emotions raging inside of me when I looked at his smug, unrepentant face, but most of all I felt validation.
In a way, this whole ordeal had put my own sanity on trial. For months I was told by law enforcement, by India, by other family members that no crime had been committed, that everything Keith and Nxivm did was consensual. But every cell in my body screamed the opposite to me—so much so that I couldn’t rest until I was sitting in the front row of this courtroom on this day.
And now I was surrounded by people who knew the wrongness this man had done and they wanted to hold him accountable.
Vindication, I thought. And justice. I had a rare, front-row seat to watch the wheels of justice turn, and it was a privilege—a miracle, even.
—
THE HEARING WAS over in just three minutes.
The Great Vanguard loped toward the same door from which he’d emerged and exited with his new posse around him. After the door shut, we heard the chains jingle-jangling again.
Toni, Stanley, Barbara, and I were in a daze. As we left the courthouse and stepped into a sea of reporters outside, I could hear one of Keith’s attorneys saying something to the media like “There are two sides to this story!” and “I’m impressed by our client’s stamina!”
It’s doubtful, I thought—with a chuckle—they’re referring to their client’s sexual stamina.
The media swarmed around Toni and me.
“Catherine, do you have a message for Keith?”
“Yes I do,” I said: “You are where you belong, behind bars, for the rest of your life.”
“And what would you like to say to India?” yelled another reporter.
“I love you. Come home.”
/> 18
* * *
PERSEPHONE’S DILEMMA
Yes, I desperately wanted India safe and back home again.
But from the start—and time and time again after that—I had underestimated the all-embracing and absolute hold that Keith and the others had over her. That I had been certain my own little intervention in the bedroom a year earlier would loosen their grip was tragically laughable to me now.
I thought of the Demeter myth again.
After Zeus orders Hades to release the abducted Persephone from the Underworld and send her back up to the light and home, Demeter and her daughter finally have a joyous reunion. The mother and daughter rush to each other and have a long-awaited, emotional embrace. But during that embrace, Demeter notices that something is still amiss. She discovers that Hades had forced Persephone to swallow pomegranate seeds while in the House of the Dead, which would now tie her to him forever.
Even though she’d been “saved,” Persephone was doomed to periodically return to Hades’s dark world for the rest of her life.
I always hated that part of the ending.
—
THE DAY AFTER Keith’s arraignment, my mother arrived in New York to help me, hopefully once and for all, rescue our girl from the underworld and bring her back to the light.
India was sharing an apartment with Allison in Brooklyn Heights, the same area where Stanley lived. The plan to infiltrate and invade Brooklyn with the newfangled Nxivm program called the Source, headed by Allison, was obviously in full swing even though their grandmaster had been temporarily detained.
As soon as Mom arrived, we set up camp at my usual Lower East Side hotel and she texted India, saying she was in town and hoping to see her. I hadn’t heard back from India myself after my text a few days earlier, but I couldn’t see her saying no to her grandmother. Yet when her replies appeared, they were vague, nonsensical excuses about being busy: “I’m making snacks,” she wrote. “I’m packing my things.”
I’d never seen her avoid her grandmother before, and then I realized: Alli must be back from her high-speed federales adventure in Mexico. And as her slave, India would be busy tending to her needs. My suspicions were confirmed when Mark spotted Alli with her mother in Brooklyn Heights as he left a coffee shop. The two women entered an apartment building two blocks from Stanley’s—which means the entire time I was there, India and I had been in the same bloody neighborhood!
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