Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  “It never occurred to me that I would choose Keith and Keith would choose Keith,” she said.

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  NICKI CLYNE KEPT a cool head considering the dramatic scene unfolding in front of her outside the house. With phone in hand, she captured a short video of the police raid.

  “We’re going to follow them,” Clyne said to Allison Mack as Raniere was installed in the back of a navy cruiser with Policia Federal emblazoned across its doors. Mack turned to look at Clyne with a worried crease between her brows, her green eyes obscured by shadow. Clyne told her to get out of the way.

  In the following weeks, Mack would be apprehended in New York on trafficking charges and four more top NXIVM leaders would be indicted for racketeering. Their alleged crimes would amount to identity theft, forced labor, confining an undocumented migrant for twenty-three months, wire fraud, extortion, and obstruction of justice. A year later would come the charge that Raniere took sexually explicit pictures of a fifteen-year-old NXIVM student, adding possession of child porn and child exploitation to his rap sheet. These allegations laid the foundation for a massive racketeering trial beginning in May 2019.

  “Let’s go, you guys,” Clyne called out to Mack, Salzman, and others as the cops pulled away. Raniere was on his way to becoming federal inmate #57005-177, scrutinized under the unflattering fluorescent light of the American justice system.

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  ON THE FIRST day of his trial, May 7, 2019, Raniere appeared diminished but not broken. He was smaller than you would expect from his photos—all head and shoulders, with a squat torso and a lower body that seemed to taper off quickly. His hair was shorter and greyer, floating in uneven waves around his temples. From a certain angle, the glare of his glasses obscured his glances across the room at a jury of his peers.

  “Keith Raniere is the only defendant who will stand trial before this jury,” Judge Nicholas Garaufis told the jurors settling into their places in his Brooklyn courtroom. “Please do not speculate as to why this is the case.” (After many months of pretrial dealings, Judge Garaufis seemed at ease correctly pronouncing the name Ra-neer-ee and his organization Neks-ee-um.)

  Raniere’s codefendants had already pleaded guilty to serious crimes, ranging from extortion and forced labor to identity theft and harboring a migrant for financial gain. Three of the women—NXIVM president Nancy Salzman; her daughter, Lauren Salzman; and actor Allison Mack—had admitted that they’d participated in a racketeering conspiracy with Raniere. He was standing alone because his alleged partners in crime had agreed with the feds that Raniere was leading a dangerous mafia-like organization.

  This was a big change for Raniere, who was used to the company of rich and beautiful women. Since the 1980s he’d cultivated a subculture of adoration around him in which he was compared to Buddha and Albert Einstein. The way true believers talked about him, it was as if he had magical powers, perfect recall, the keys to world peace. They commended his contributions to science, his commitment to the harnessing of human potential.

  This was the myth built up over Raniere’s two-decade career leading NXIVM, an international self-help movement that appealed mostly to dreamers with deep pockets. (The NXIVM name has many layered meanings, from “next millennium” to “place of learning” to the more hidden meaning that allegedly references the Roman concept of debt bondage.) Though the company began as boutique executive coaching for aspiring millionaires, over time it grew into a massive-multi-level marketing enterprise spanning the globe, with active communities in Vancouver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, London, New York, Miami, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City.

  Followers started daycares, yoga schools, advocacy groups, science foundations, and humanitarian funds in tribute to Raniere. They incorporated his lessons into small businesses and startups, crediting Raniere as mentor and cofounder. Federal prosecutors estimated that NXIVM had launched close to one hundred offshoot companies, many of them drawing funds up a pyramid-like hierarchy. What held them together was a feverish belief that, with the right mindset and plan, anything was possible.

  Women, who outnumbered men in NXIVM’s ranks, were particularly captivated by Raniere’s lessons on taking responsibility for your own feelings. Students explored how they created their own suffering, and how they could use any perceived harm done to them as a teaching moment instead. People with access to vast resources appreciated Raniere’s theories about value and money: as long as you were clear about your own ethical principles, each dollar spent represented an effort to change the world for good. As the “philosophical founder” of these concepts, Raniere earned immense regard and praise, and every August he was lauded at an annual retreat held on the week of his birthday.

  Raniere still had access to his share of a $14 million irrevocable legal trust made available by heir Clare Bronfman in the wake of his arrest. Bronfman had been released on $100 million bail in 2018 and was one of the last defendants to plead before the 2019 trial began.

  Lead defense attorney Marc Agnifilo had chatted with press gallery reporters before the jury arrived, his sky blue tie briefly escaping from his unbuttoned suit jacket. He came across as the most comfortable guy in the courtroom, exuding a kind of confidence that money can’t buy.

  With Raniere on his feet facing the jury, Judge Garaufis began listing off the charges, which sounded intense and technical and strangely removed from the story that all those in attendance had read in the papers. The words “branding” and “slaves” were never mentioned. Instead there was talk of an “enterprise,” a “pattern,” “interstate foreign commerce,” and “predicate acts.” There were seven charges in total, one of them a multipart racketeering charge. The United States first passed racketeering legislation in 1970 as a means of taking down mafia bosses who ordered violence but didn’t physically carry out the crimes. It’s since been used to prosecute bikers, bankers, cops, and politicians for coordinating complex schemes that might seem legit but obscure all kinds of illegitimate conduct, from embezzlement and bribery to murder and kidnapping.

  To prove any kind of racketeering, there needs to be an “enterprise” of multiple people. Over a period of up to ten years, each member has to have agreed to commit at least two crimes in service of a common goal. Law books call this “a pattern of racketeering.” The goal itself doesn’t have to be criminal, as many gangs and Ponzi schemes have purely money-making ends. Raniere’s goal, according to prosecutors, was allegedly to enrich and promote himself, which facilitated his access to women.

  Raniere was accused of eleven racketeering acts, among them identity theft, altering court records, forced labor, sex trafficking, extortion, sexual exploitation of a child, and possession of child pornography. On top of that were separate non-racketeering counts covering similar territory: forced labor conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking, and attempted sex trafficking.

  Over the coming weeks, lead prosecutor Moira Kim Penza and her colleagues would walk the jury through a gut-wrenching version of the Keith Raniere story. Raniere secretly groomed three young Mexican sisters into sexual relationships, photographing one of them naked when she was fifteen years old. He confined one of them to a bedroom for nearly two years because she dared to kiss another man. The youngest sister later became part of a secret pyramid scheme that threatened the release of life-destroying allegations and photos if women did not comply with Raniere’s escalating sex games. These women, at one time numbering more than one hundred, were treated as modern-day slaves, and many of them were branded with Raniere’s initials.

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  THE TRIAL WOULD reveal secrets that had been hidden even from Raniere’s closest allies. Private messages showed how he’d threatened and manipulated women, using insults, shaming, and misinformation to break down their will to resist. Medical records and testimony w
ould show that his many concurrent girlfriends were compelled to get abortions under the close supervision of his loyal fixers. NXIVM’s inner circle arranged marriages and threesomes and secret border crossings and tax evasion, but jurors didn’t learn any of this from listening to the charges. The only hint of what was to come appeared in a lengthy juror questionnaire that asked about the #MeToo movement, abortion law, tax evasion, immigration and border crossing, policing, and polyamory.

  I sat in awe of the jury, who would decide what was right and wrong in a complex, potentially groundbreaking case. It had taken me more than a year to get my bearings as a reporter on the NXIVM file, and yet this newly assembled group of New Yorkers were expected to render a verdict in a matter of weeks. Though their faces would grow increasingly familiar to me as the trial progressed, they would remain anonymous by court order. How and why they reached their decision would likely remain unknowable. Whatever the verdict, it would have wide-ranging implications about power, consent, and women’s agency.

  In some ways Raniere was a Rorschach test for what we see wrong with the world: the right of the political spectrum sees liberalism run amok, the worst example of moral breakdown among the monied elite; the left sees textbook toxic masculinity blown up to epic criminal proportions. But like the jurors, I would try not to make up my mind until all the facts had been heard. I’d learned so much about Raniere already, yet I was prepared for the trial to turn everything upside down.

  PART ONE

  Theory of Everything

  CHAPTER ONE

  Secret Sisterhood

  In late October 2017 I sat in an East Vancouver studio, writing down some of the most surreal questions I’ve scratched into a notebook in all my years reporting for Vice.

  I was prepping for an on-camera interview with actor Sarah Edmondson, the first woman in Keith Raniere’s inner circle to go public about NXIVM’s darkest secrets. She was going to talk about being branded with his initials as part of an initiation ceremony for a “secret sorority” in which she was cast as a literal slave. It was uncomfortable imagining the words What was it like being branded? coming out of my mouth, but I knew I had to get there somehow.

  She arrived with her own camera crew and handlers already in tow—a surprise for me and my videographer. It was the first time we’d met in person, and I immediately got the sense that she’d been preparing for the interview longer than I had.

  Edmondson made direct eye contact as we shook hands. I would later learn that handshakes were practiced extensively in NXIVM workshops, broken down into subtle techniques and dissected for meaning. In retrospect I’d say that my hand as well as hers gave off signs of cautious uncertainty. She was a polished mom and green-smoothie enthusiast with a smile fit for Hallmark movies; I wrote about crime and drugs on the internet, and for a second I wasn’t sure we lived in the same universe.

  But I was relieved to find that Edmondson spoke my language—or at least she kept having to apologize to her handlers for cussing like a sailor. She told me that in one of the last NXIVM courses she took, on gender and identity, Raniere had taught that women, by nature, are “always looking for the back door.”

  “I can see all this now is just fucking bullshit, excuse my language,” she said.

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  SARAH EDMONDSON FOLDED her legs and clasped her hands uneasily in front of me. Her glossy dark hair was gathered at her shoulders and she wore a key on a chain around her neck. Edmondson had spent twelve years taking almost every class designed by Keith Raniere. In all that time she couldn’t recall ever speaking ill of NXIVM lessons or teachers, she said. Edmondson had thought of herself as a “good girl” archetype—eager to take on responsibility and speak “honorably” of her colleagues. She’d met her husband as well as her best friend, Lauren Salzman, through NXIVM—details she often included when retelling her own story of self-empowerment and success. NXIVM was the center of her world, and up until 2017 she’d been proud of that.

  Salzman, who lived in Albany, New York, had been Edmondson’s maid of honor at her wedding, and then became a godmother to her first son. As director of education, Salzman held one of the highest job titles within NXIVM. Edmondson had followed her friend’s upward trajectory, advancing from an unpaid coach to opening a new self-help school in downtown Vancouver, which grew into one of the most successful satellite offices outside of NXIVM’s Albany headquarters. Though they lived in different time zones, Edmondson and Salzman were in constant communication, often sharing their fears, dreams, and day-to-day plans.

  Salzman was staying with Edmondson on a surprise visit to Vancouver in January 2017 when she asked Sarah to be part of something that she said had changed her life more than anything else she’d done in NXIVM.

  “But before I can even tell you about it,” Edmondson said, in what I now know was an uncanny Lauren Salzman impersonation, “I need to get something from you, to prove you’ll never talk about it.”

  Salzman wanted “collateral.” Maybe a family secret, or a compromising photo. She said she’d hold whatever it was for the rest of their lives—a way to make sure Edmondson would never tell anyone about this top secret life-changing opportunity.

  Edmondson had good reason to be curious about Salzman’s secret. Her friend was like a real-life Wonder Woman, traveling the world teaching empowerment classes, always making time for predawn exercise or late-night conference calls. She thrived on next-level optimization: constantly multitasking, displaying ever more virtuous lifestyle choices while doing it, and never complaining.

  Salzman had an almost wizard-like appearance, often wearing oversized tunics that engulfed her tiny frame. Like Edmondson, she was in her early forties, with dark hair and a bursting white smile. She was a walking embodiment of NXIVM’s unspoken success formula, which always seemed to involve heroic acts of self-denial and sacrifice. If anyone had access to the company’s most powerful secrets, it was Lauren Salzman.

  Salzman said that she herself had given a nude photo as collateral, and suggested that Edmondson could do the same. Or maybe Sarah could offer a confession about something that would blow up her life if it ever got out.

  Edmondson trusted Salzman more than anybody else on earth, but she was unsettled by what she was hearing—it sounded like the personal accountability techniques she’d learned and taught in NXIVM, but kicked up to a disturbing degree. Salzman sensed Edmondson’s discomfort and framed it as a good thing, saying that Sarah should feel nauseated by the thought of betraying the trust between them—that it was exactly the feeling the collateral was meant to reinforce.

  After a day of uneasy reflection, Edmondson wrote down a confession about her party-girl twenties. But Salzman said her indiscretions weren’t damaging enough. She encouraged her to make a bigger confession—to make it up if she had to. What mattered was its weight. When Edmondson finally arrived at something consequential enough, Salzman took a photo of the handwritten confession with her phone. This was the first price of admission to the international women’s group called DOS, or Dominus Obsequious Sororium—a fake Latin phrase roughly translating to “master over the slave women.”

  DOS, whose members were mostly drawn from the ranks of NXIVM, went by many different names. It was a vow, a sorority, a badass bitch boot camp. Some women even talked about it as if it were an elite talent agency. In Edmondson’s brain it was a secret society. Salzman told her it was like the Freemasons but for women wanting to build character and change the world. The two would be making a lifelong commitment to each other, though not on the equal footing they had as best friends. Edmondson would have to take a lifelong “vow of obedience” to Salzman—to become her slave.

  Obviously slavery sounded like a bad idea to Edmondson, but Salzman assured her that “master” and “slave” were just useful terms, like “guru” or “disciple.” It was just another way of saying that Salzman was her coach. “She even said, ‘I�
��m taking you under my wing. And I’m going to take good care of you.’ It felt very—the way she did it—felt very loving.”

  It takes a certain level of privilege to overlook such historically abhorrent terminology, Edmondson admits now. She knew that Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color came through NXIVM’s entry-level courses but in many cases left quickly and quietly. The women who stayed and became lifers were mostly white or white-passing, many raised in private schools and country clubs, where subjugation was an abstraction more than a lived reality. These were glaring blind spots, no doubt, but the implicit threat of collateral blacked out Edmondson’s option to walk away. She vowed to obey Salzman for as long as she lived.

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  SARAH EDMONDSON’S FAITH in her friend unraveled less than two months later, after a March 2017 initiation ceremony that brought together five women in the same collateral-bound situation. Edmondson and the four other women being inducted into DOS took turns holding each other down, naked, while a doctor they knew from NXIVM carved a cryptic symbol into their bikini line with a cauterizing pen. Worse, all of this was filmed.

  Before the branding began, Edmondson pulled Salzman aside and said she didn’t want to go through with it. She didn’t know what that would mean for their friendship, her vow of secrecy, or the collateral she’d put on the line, and Salzman wasn’t willing to say. Instead she turned her deep knowledge of Edmondson’s fears and insecurities back on her, reminding her that she’d “always looked for a back door.” This was a pattern Edmondson had identified in herself, one for which she’d learned to welcome coaching.

  Edmondson had the highest rank of any of the DOS recruits that day, and Salzman said she should show it by setting a good example for the other women. Meanwhile, Edmondson told me, she was struggling to control herself—trying to justify the extreme pressure as a good thing.