by Sarah Berman
“We were crying, we were shaking, we were holding each other. It was horrific. It was like a bad horror movie,” she said. “We even had these surgical masks on because the smell of [burning] flesh was so strong.”
Edmondson asked me to imagine someone taking a lit match to my crotch and drawing a line with it over and over again. “I really believe that the only way I did it was I disassociated,” she said. “I wasn’t present. I went somewhere else. I thought about giving birth to my son. I thought about how much I loved him, and I just focused on that. I just brought up a loving state.”
The women had talked about a dime-sized tattoo, not the jagged two-inch scar Edmondson now had hidden under her jeans. Salzman said the composition of angled lines represented the four elements; if you unfocused your eyes, you could at least make out a mountain and a horizon.
Still in shock from the pain, Edmondson followed her master’s directions, despite a rising urge to run. She was using Salzman’s phone to film the fourth woman being branded when she saw a text pop up on its screen: “How are they all doing with each other?”
The message came from someone saved in Salzman’s contact list as “KAR.”
“I thought maybe there was another woman involved named Karen,” she said. She just needed time, she told me, to “unravel the lies.”
* * *
—
IT WOULD TAKE three more weeks to put it all together. The letters KAR and the symbol burned into her skin pointed back to the same person. For nearly thirty minutes of unbearable pain with no anesthetic, Keith Alan Raniere’s initials had been seared onto Edmondson’s body.
Was that when she realized she was part of something truly twisted? Did she think, “Maybe I’m in a cult”?
“Cult definitely came into my mind when [Salzman] told me that part of it was getting a tattoo,” Edmondson said. Seconds later, she strongly encouraged me and my videographer to edit that part out. One of her handlers firmly agreed: the word “cult” wasn’t going to work.
“Can we please? That’s a legal thing for me,” Edmondson said. “Be careful how you edit.” Her own safety could be at risk, she added.
I was confused. We’d already talked about some textbook Cult 101 red flags: she’d told me about the sashes they wore to denote each member’s rank, about secret handshakes, and about bowing to a photo of Keith Raniere, whom they called “Vanguard.” In my notebook I had bullet points on calorie restriction, sleep deprivation, arranged marriage, and BDSM-style punishment. Edmondson was blowing the whistle on this group for its extreme control of women’s diets and sex lives, and yet she wasn’t willing to utter the word “cult” on camera?
I would later learn that Raniere was a man who knew how to double down. He’d sued many former students and adversaries just for using the “cult” label or for daring to criticize his secret self-help “technology.” By the time Raniere was in prison six months later, Edmondson was more than happy to call NXIVM a cult and Raniere an abusive cult leader. But he wasn’t behind bars on that Friday afternoon in October.
Over two decades Raniere had successfully ruined the lives of several people who tried to expose him, usually through lawsuits, private investigators, and criminal complaints in several states. Some of these people, usually women, were bankrupted and even jailed. One woman went into hiding with the help of a state trooper and was rumored to have fled the country.
It was reasonable for Edmondson to fear that Raniere would try to ruin her next.
* * *
—
A STORY THIS incendiary leaves the mind racing with questions. How is it that our brains can allow for one person to see sex trafficking and another to see self-actualization? Can concentrated social influence really change what a person thinks, feels, and experiences? Why would Edmondson, who struck me as a strong-willed, determined person, want to be part of this secret sisterhood that hurt women in disturbing ways? Why would anyone sign up for a secret group that called women “slaves”?
Edmondson was patient with my questions. On many occasions she welcomed me into her home to explain her decisions. I could sense her effort to demonstrate to me why for twelve years she loved NXIVM and its community and had seen no reason to feel any different.
I realized that most of the seventeen thousand people who took NXIVM classes thought the worst it could be accused of was being corny. In their minds it was like a smiley, slightly kooky summer camp for adults. There was no room in their mental portrait for sex crimes or human trafficking because everything about this group seemed as wholesome as a Thanksgiving dinner. Women didn’t join because they wanted to be branded and extorted; they wanted to help people and do something important with their lives. If there was a common thread among them, it was that they dreamt bigger than their peers.
Over the years I’ve reviewed tens of thousands of pages of Raniere’s patents, legal filings, lectures, interviews, and writings, all in search of the hook that had captivated so many women. I ultimately found that it was other women who allowed would-be students to talk about their secret ambitions, try on a fantasy future, and get started down a path that seemed a fast track to getting there. Former insiders who took that path say it began with a honeymoon experience, finding a sense of mission and purpose and a community that seemed to drop everything to support you. At least at first.
On a brisk forty-minute walk along Vancouver’s waterfront, Edmondson explained for me how she reeled in new students. She demonstrated how her pitch would sound a lot like a gentle chat between friends, often on a walk similar to ours.
“Most of the time they’d be a friend of a friend,” she said. The mutual friend would have already spoken highly of her and the work she did coaching actors and entrepreneurs. Then Edmondson would usually jump in with her own compliments—in my case, for example, telling me she’s heard that I’m a great writer.
It was all in the service of fostering a meaningful, pleasant connection. NXIVM called it “building rapport”—a straightforward concept, and not particularly unique, but one that NXIVM students practiced and studied at length. I’ve since learned that it helps to do it while walking, since your heart rates are likely to match and you’ll intuitively feel as if you’re on the same journey.
“This would be five, ten, maybe even fifteen or twenty minutes of just rapport,” Edmondson said. “I would do that until it feels like we’re in the same world.”
Next Edmondson steered our conversation toward my ambitions and dreams. She asked what I was working on, what I was excited about, and for the most part allowed me to guide the conversation. Because I had preconceived notions about how self-help works, I started listing my professional insecurities and fears around commitment, half hoping Edmondson would pounce on them. Instead she guided me back to talk of blue skies.
I got the sense that Edmondson was more focused on making me feel hope than on “finding the ruin,” a technique used by Scientology recruiters to push our most emotional buttons, as documented in Lawrence Wright’s book Going Clear. Those recruiters, having lured a subject into a private room with the promise of a free “personality test,” will often cut deep with assessments of the subject’s personal shortcomings.
Edmondson told me she would use her intuition and look for body-language cues to assess how to proceed. Many times she’d sense there wasn’t a strong enough personal connection, and so she’d find a way to let the person gently off the hook. “I would just skip to the end and say, ‘Honestly, I don’t think that this is for you,’ just based on energy,” she said. But for an eager listener like me, she’d offer a taste of the “tech” students got to learn.
At this point Edmondson noted that she’d already been using at least one coaching technique on me, one that came from a lesson NXIVM called “Hypothesis of Language.”
“I would try to mirror back the words that you used so that you felt listened to and heard. And you w
ouldn’t even clock that, if I did it well,” she said.
She would never fake it, she continued, but she’d often draw parallels to her own life to create a sense of common ground. “I would never put in things that weren’t true. I would never say I was a writer also…I’d just bring up things I’d also gone through, so the person felt like ‘Oh, there’s hope for me.’ ”
Immediately I considered all the words Edmondson might have specifically selected for my ears. But I also got the impression that she was exceptionally perceptive in the way she noticed my verbal tics and body language. Despite my self-conscious wondering—Is she swearing more than usual? Am I saying “like” too much?—I did get a sense that there was hope for me, as she put it. Even though I was more than ready to get vulnerable, Edmondson didn’t make me feel as though my weaknesses were being exploited. Technically, we were having a conversation about how I’d like to change my life “physically, emotionally, and spiritually,” but it mostly helped me imagine an ideal future self.
“Can you imagine a world where you’re more at peace with your decisions; where, if you do commit, you feel really good about that, and you’re not worried about if you hadn’t committed?” she asked.
I nodded and shrugged.
“So what would it be worth to you to make that go away?”
“Like, moneywise?” I asked. I hadn’t expected a budgeting session, so the question threw me off balance.
“Yeah. Like, if you try to quantify it in your head, how much does that pattern cost you?”
I thought out loud about the times I’d moved across continents out of restlessness—the price of my endless need to move on to the next thing. “I don’t know…$10,000? That’s a crazy amount,” I said, not for a second anticipating what was coming.
“Great! Good deal,” Edmondson replied, flashing a smile. “Our program is only $3,000.”
“Good sell!” I laughed, surprised by how easily I’d walked into a hard pitch. I couldn’t immediately think of a way to talk myself out of this so-called deal, either.
Edmondson said that she now thinks this approach is “gross” and “manipulative.” But at the time, she thought she was showing people how to invest in themselves. “When I thought it was a good end, I felt so good being able to do that for somebody,” she told me. “I didn’t think I was being tricky. I thought I got them a deal. I felt that way.”
Edmondson admits that when she first signed up, in 2005, she too was pitched this way, and that she’d said she would have paid $100,000 to get rid of the issues she was dealing with. She knows others who claimed that their anger issues had lost them as much as $50 million in film contracts. It crossed my mind that people with more access to money and privilege would likely have felt they were being offered an even juicier “deal.”
Edmondson and I weaved through a crowd of families with dogs and toddlers. A clear sky was reflecting off False Creek. I tried to imagine how I’d feel if the information she was feeding me was my only source of NXIVM info. Would it sound interesting? Sure. Would I be ready to invest three grand in my personal growth? Probably not.
“Let’s say I was unsure,” I said.
In that case, Edmondson said, she might tell me more about how the “tech” works, or move into a sales strategy that she called “specify, isolate, overcome.”
If, for example, I’d said the amount of money was the only thing holding me back, she would shift the conversation into brainstorming ways to secure it. Did I know that I could get my course for free if I brought in three new students? If she were to lend me the money, would I go for it?
She was testing how ready I was to break out of my “issue.” This would get me locked in while I was still excited and hadn’t had time for a second thought. I knew it was coercive, but I also figured my impulsive brain might well have jumped at this kind of rare opportunity.
Edmondson said she’d been willing to go to great lengths to make that first sale. “Imagine you or someone you loved needed really expensive surgery and it’s going to cost $3,000. Where are you going to find the money?” she asked.
I silently reminded myself that this was only a “fun” simulation.
“And it really should be the same emergency,” she continued. “It’s an emergency to resolve these things within you now, so the rest of your life is different and better. Why wait?”
Part of the brainstorming exercise included listing some ideas you wouldn’t choose—like working at a strip club or sleeping with a casting director for a gig. This helped people feel as if they had more control over the situation. The exercise came from NXIVM’s curriculum on self-esteem.
“We talk about how the working definition of self-esteem is your perceived options in a given area,” Edmondson said. “So, for example, you may have self-esteem as a journalist. If Vice fired you, you could work here or there, or write your book, or do a blog, and maybe you feel good about that.” But by the same token, she said, I could feel a total lack of options in another area of my life—say in my family or romantic relationships.
I wasn’t quite following her unconventional definition of self-esteem, but she delivered it in a way that suggested it was a well-tested theory. “A lot of times it was actors being like, ‘I don’t know how to make my big break,’ you know? That was common, and I would have lots of stuff to say, because as an actor, I know what you can do to take more control of your career besides waiting for your agent to call.”
* * *
—
I WAS BEGINNING to see how Edmondson’s powers of persuasion had earned her a central role in building NXIVM’s Vancouver community. These pitches happened not only on long walks but also during car rides home, or in the sauna at a beachside yoga studio. Edmondson was the primary reason these classes had spread like wildfire through the local acting industry.
As we finished up our walk, she asked if I’d eaten lunch yet, and I told her I hadn’t. We stopped at a high-end market around the corner from her place to pick up kefir water on the way.
Spontaneous meal-sharing also seemed to be part of the NXIVM seduction process. In a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile, the journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis described how Seagram heir Sara Bronfman cooked up eggs for her at Bronfman’s preposterously proportioned home. We had the same thing: poached eggs, on gluten-free toast, with fermented beets, farmers’ market greens, carrots, a lemon-and-ghee dressing, and the kefir water to wash it down. The greens were so fresh that Edmondson found a live bug on her plate.
“It’s a worm or something,” she said, “from the farmers’ market. But I did wash it…. Oh my god, it has legs!”
“That is wild!” I said, laughing. I felt as though I’d experienced a caricature of a West Coast healthy lunch. Extra protein and all.
Edmondson followed the health and wellness trends that most give up a week after New Year’s Eve. When she committed to something, she stuck with it. As she moved around her kitchen, she seemed to be living someone’s ideal life, with her picture-perfect family and home. If this was a part of the seduction, I could absolutely see the appeal.
It was the kind of experience that had enticed so many young women to learn more about Keith Raniere and his so-called tech. This wasn’t something you could easily say no to. It was a lifestyle, a community, and most of all a chance to think about your best self.
CHAPTER TWO
One in Ten Million
Though mentors like Sarah Edmondson did much of the work convincing new students that they could win at life, most of the credit went to NXIVM founder Keith Raniere, the purported genius who started it all.
Raniere’s superintelligence was one of NXIVM’s most important and persuasive myths, and one that can be traced back to a 1988 article in the Times Union newspaper of Albany, New York. The story was about his membership in an obscure high-IQ society, based on a self-administered intelligence test that all
egedly ranked Raniere one in ten million.
Heidi Hutchinson remembers it well. At age twenty-seven, Raniere was still ten years away from launching his self-help empire, but he was already living in the Albany area and accumulating acolytes who would make that dream happen. Hutchinson’s sister Gina was on the team of (mostly women) supporters who helped Raniere complete a take-home IQ test developed by Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin. The Mega Society test was stacked with brainteasers that challenged spatial reasoning, analogical thinking, and math skills. One of the questions asked for the maximum number of individual three-dimensional shapes that could be made with three interpenetrating cubes. Hoeflin claimed the questions were so hard that even a person with the minimum IQ cutoff for Mensa would, on average, get less than half of the forty-eight questions right.
When Raniere received his results, Hutchinson recalled, he became furious that his team had gotten two of the questions wrong. According to Hutchinson, Raniere negotiated with Hoeflin to redevelop the scoring, which put Raniere at a cartoonishly high IQ score of 240.
Psychometric experts who later reviewed the Mega test found serious flaws in its scoring and weighting. For one, Hoeflin’s formula relied on self-submitted IQ scores from previous tests. And unlike supervised Mensa tests, the Mega test relied on the honor system to ensure that takers worked alone and didn’t use a computer to work through the massive calculations. Raniere broke at least one of those rules, if not both.
Psychologist Roger Carlson wrote in a 1991 critique that the test may have measured “resourcefulness” and “persistence” more than it measured intelligence. Any IQ score above 145, Carlson noted, is already starting to split statistically insignificant hairs. A calculation north of 170 falls more than four standard deviations away from the middle of an average IQ bell curve—theoretically possible, but not scientifically reliable.