Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Harvard researcher Susan Clancy has studied the psychological phenomena behind many fringe human experiences, from a belief in having been the subject of alien abduction to recovered childhood memories of satanic ritual abuse. The element she often sees in common in these experiences is well-meaning therapists using trance states, in some cases leading subjects toward paranormal (or repressed memory) conclusions.

  Clancy’s research has found that our memories are changed every time we access them, and that memories played back and recontextualized in hypnosis are at higher risk of becoming distorted, or “false.” People who are higher in creativity or more prone to fantasy are more likely to have these kinds of vivid trance experiences—such as a belief that they’ve been probed by aliens or that they’re the reincarnation of Simone de Beauvoir—committed to memory.

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  FOR MUCH OF the 1980s Gina didn’t know that Raniere had at least one other girlfriend. He was living with a college friend named Karen Unterreiner, who would go on to play a central role in NXIVM. Though they never talked about their relationship publicly, Raniere and Unterreiner began a sexual relationship as students at Rensselaer.

  Heidi long suspected that Unterreiner secretly pined for Raniere, but she hadn’t imagined they’d been involved the whole time. “She was always around, and they were roommates, and they were just friends—always just friends,” Heidi says. “She acted like his mom, actually.”

  Raniere and Unterreiner both worked in computer programming after finishing school. Raniere found a programming job at New York’s Department of Labor and later transferred to the state’s parole division.

  Unterreiner and Raniere first lived in an apartment in Troy, New York, and then in 1987 moved into a townhouse together in Heidi and Gina’s neighborhood of Clifton Park, a suburban town of winding streets. That second house would become a central space for Raniere’s many so-called spiritual wives over the next several decades. It was the first in a cluster of NXIVM-associated properties that would later be dubbed “the mothership.”

  The homes of Clifton Park are strikingly uniform, and the mazelike arrangement of the streets protects them from outsider traffic. The buildings, grouped in triplets and quadruplets around small cul-de-sacs or crescents, resemble pieces of a Monopoly board game. The first NXIVM-owned townhouse is tall and boxy with pastel-colored siding and, like its many neighbors, a single-car garage. It became known to Raniere’s followers by its street name, the Flintlock house.

  Unterreiner was by many accounts the first long-term member of Raniere’s harem, which would grow by a dozen members in just over a decade. Around 1989 she was joined by Pamela Cafritz, daughter to well-known Washington political donors Buffy and Bill Cafritz. According to Sarah Edmondson, Pam and Raniere met on a chairlift at a ski resort. When Raniere said “Follow me” at the top of a hill, Cafritz did just that.

  “She was another brokenhearted stray who came into the misfits club to be healed by Keith,” Heidi says. Cafritz became a starry-eyed servant for Raniere: she cooked his food, washed his clothes, and drove him to wherever he needed to be. She became known as a “defuser of bombs”—able to soften any conflict and salvage the most damaged relationships. She went on to facilitate many of Raniere’s relationships with young women and girls, as Ghislaine Maxwell is alleged to have done for Jeffrey Epstein.

  While Gina and Raniere liked to riff on religious and philosophical ideas, Unterreiner got an actuary certification and was seen as the business mind of the group. As long as Heidi knew them, Unterreiner and Raniere planned to launch a business around Raniere’s genius.

  Friends who knew Raniere at the time say he was always looking for a way to make a lot of money with minimal effort. A friend told the Uncover podcast host that Raniere’s life goal was to set up an infinite money-generating machine, in part so he could focus on non-business interests.

  Raniere studied the sales techniques of Amway and other companies that saved on overhead by turning salespeople into recruiters. He tried selling health supplements for Matol International and legal services for Pre-Paid Legal, two lesser-known players in the mostly unregulated multi-level marketing ecosystem. Raniere often said that other multi-level marketing companies were unethical and that he was working on building something better for humanity. In court filings he claimed to have invented a “new concept in marketing” that happened to resemble Amway’s direct-selling structure.

  On May 1, 1990, Raniere launched a new company called Consumers’ Buyline, which seemed to bundle existing multi-level marketing vendors under his “open marketing” concept. Unterreiner took on the bookkeeping, and Cafritz supplied investment. Like Amway, the company sold discounted household products and services to people who paid annual membership fees.

  Gina Hutchinson wasn’t so interested in selling products or recruiting sellers, but she worked for an hourly wage in the company’s computer programming department. Her parents allowed it because they were convinced that Raniere was preparing to marry their daughter. Meanwhile, he continued pursuing other women and girls inside and outside the growing company.

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  THERE ARE A couple of theories as to how so many bright, ambitious women wound up turning their lives upside down to become part of Raniere’s stable of girlfriends. Cult expert Steven Hassan’s theory is that Raniere used neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, to leave suggestions in women’s subconscious minds.

  “I’ve talked to more than a few ex-members [of NXIVM] now who talked about their first meetings with Keith. They have no memory of what happened. These are two- or four-hour meetings,” Hassan told me after Raniere’s arrest in 2018. “As an expert who studied NLP, I think that’s indicative of them being put into a hypnotic trance state, and specifically given a suggestion that they’ll have no recollection of what was said or done.”

  Toni Natalie remembers seeing Raniere speak for the first time at a Consumers’ Buyline event at a Rochester hotel in April 1991. She had decided to check out whether this up-and-coming company lived up to its marketing, which boasted about the founder’s record-setting IQ. Natalie hadn’t completed high school, so she was curious to learn what the smartest man in the world spent his time thinking about.

  Raniere pulled Natalie aside during her tour of the Consumers’ Buyline office in August 1991, and they discussed her smoking habit. “I had a small child,” she said in a 2017 Vice interview. “I was trying to cut it out.”

  As she first confessed in 2006 to reporter Chet Hardin of the Albany-based Metroland newspaper, Natalie remembered going into a small room with Raniere, where he asked her questions about her anxieties and fears, occasionally touching her knuckles—setting an “anchor,” as it’s called in hypnotherapy. NLP’s creators claim these anchors can be used to call up similar emotional states. “The last thing I recall was him saying, ‘What relaxes you and what stresses you out?’ ” Natalie said. “He told me after, ‘Every time you feel like you want a cigarette, press this spot on your knuckles.’ ” Though she remembered being in the room with Raniere for only fifteen minutes, she later learned it had been nearly three hours.

  As Steven Hassan puts it, NLP is an “amoral system” that can be dangerous in the wrong hands. “If you’re a psychiatrist who has sworn an oath to do no harm, and people are coming to you for help, you’re being granted a license to do what’s going to work and help them. But when you’re talking about business and money and sex, and power differentials…it’s so exploitative and so destructive.”

  Some people are more susceptible to hypnotic induction than others, and Natalie believes she was a prime candidate. “I guess something good is I never smoked again,” she said.

  Natalie and her husband at the time became what Consumers’ Buyline called “affiliates”: they sold memberships and products on commission. The couple made $10,000 in their first few months, winning
a $16,000 top seller award, which in 1991 was a significant windfall on top of Natalie’s regular income making gift baskets. And at night she was getting a window into the mind of the smartest man she’d ever met, chatting with Raniere for hours on the phone about philosophy and the future.

  For Toni Natalie and many more women to come, the romantic advances came around the same time as a rare financial opportunity. Natalie was offered a position rolling out a new skincare line. “He told me about the job and offered me a tremendous amount of money to move me and my son and hire a nanny and do all these things,” she said. Natalie tried commuting from Rochester for a few months, but eventually she went along with the relocation. She was swayed by the steady salary Raniere could offer, and was made to feel like family among his roommates and business partners. She left her marriage and moved to the Albany area to take a bigger role within the company. Like Gina, she didn’t know there was already a handful of secret girlfriends in Raniere’s life.

  According to Natalie, the day-to-day work culture at Consumers’ Buyline was charged with sexual innuendo and manic, stay-up-all-night energy. “You go in,” she recalled, “and there’s this flurry of young energetic people flying all over the place till two a.m. like it’s noon.”

  The office was decked out with hulking computers and whiteboards filled with equations, pulling off a proto-tech-startup vibe. Underneath it all, there was also an excitement around wanting to change the world—which is exactly what Raniere had always said he was going to do.

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  RANIERE’S ROMANTIC LIFE wasn’t a polyamorous arrangement in the way young readers of the Ethical Slut might understand today. Several former girlfriends described it as more like a bait and switch: Raniere would shower each new addition with attention and praise, in many cases leading them to believe they had entered a monogamous relationship. And when Raniere’s other relationships were discovered, the women worked as a team to convince the new girlfriend that her own hang-ups were getting in the way of a good thing. Natalie called this the “wolf pack” approach. “Pam would come and talk to me and say, ‘He loves you. He’s special. He’s brilliant. He needs you to do this.’ ” Then the next girlfriend would make her case.

  Forty-year-old Barbara Jeske and eighteen-year-old Kristin Keeffe were initiated, and went on to initiate others, this way. In some cases Raniere denied or minimized his other affairs. Unterreiner was a college friend with no interest in sex whom he promised to always take care of; Keeffe and Cafritz were just business partners living with him to save money; Jeske was actually a lesbian who was sorting out some psychosexual hang-ups. According to Heidi Hutchinson, it was Keeffe who introduced a more confrontational tactic, wherein the women already in Raniere’s inner circle told new girlfriends, “You don’t own Keith’s penis.”

  Heidi overheard Keeffe confronting Gina this way on the back porch of the Flintlock house soon after Keeffe had moved in. They argued over “whether or not Gina should feel entitled to have Keith to herself.” Heidi later recalled how upset her sister became as she realized that her spiritual teacher wasn’t being honest about something so important. (Raniere hid inside the house as the women argued.) At the time, Heidi didn’t quite grasp the private world Raniere and Gina had already built together, one in which Gina found support for her beliefs. “She accepted this whole paradigm, this worldview [with] Keith as her mentor,” says Heidi. “It explained she wasn’t nuts; she was gifted.”

  Over many years Heidi was able to observe what she calls Raniere’s “ensnarement” tactics in action. Often this involved claiming unprecedented expertise in a woman or girl’s area of passion, whether it was running, spirituality, lucid dreaming, or past life regression. In Toni Natalie’s case, Raniere embodied the elite education she never had, while Gina was convinced she’d been a Buddhist goddess in a past life and that she and Raniere had known each other many centuries before. These were both fantasies and levers of manipulation.

  As Heidi describes it, Gina became trapped in Raniere’s orbit. She worked to make his business successful while he spent much of his time playing arcade games, having sex in the Consumers’ Buyline warehouse, and sleeping through the day. According to an Albany Times Union report in 2012, one of his favorite arcade games around this time was called Vanguard, “in which destroying enemies increases the fuel in the player’s tank.”

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  HEIDI SAYS THAT Gina continued to resist the harem-style arrangement. She wanted a simple life with Raniere, to continue what she believed they’d started in a past life. She pursued a degree in Eastern religion in the second half of the 1990s, and for a time switched to another spiritual teacher, which upset Raniere. Eventually Gina returned to the community she’d helped build.

  In 2002, following her mother’s death, Gina’s mental health started to slip. According to a police report, she had sent “personal articles and letters to family members that stated if something were to happen to her, not to worry, and that the Buddha would take care of her.” The family thought she was mentally distraught and feared she might harm herself.

  Police found Gina’s Toyota Tercel near a Buddhist monastery in Woodstock, New York. Officers spotted a small flashlight on the ground, which led them to Gina’s body at the edge of a pond. She had died of a gunshot wound. In her pockets police found a lighter, a hotel key, and a Buddhist medallion. Her death, on October 11, 2002, was ruled a suicide.

  After Gina’s death, Heidi learned that her sister had turned most of her modest inheritance over to the man whom she had helped turn into a self-help guru.

  “I’m sure Gina died thinking Keith was a genius,” she says.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Money Spilling into Your Wallet”

  When Toni Natalie became a Consumers’ Buyline affiliate in 1991, she believed she was joining one of America’s fastest-growing companies. And from the crowds she saw at recruitment sessions, she could sense the upward momentum.

  “What they presented was this amazing group of people who were running this company,” Natalie says of the pitching process. Karen Unterreiner was a brilliant actuary who’d just left a big corporate firm, they told would-be members. “And you had the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in D.C., and they were financing the company,” Natalie says. From one event to the next, rooms got fuller, interest keener. Long before the internet became a household necessity, Raniere encouraged attendees to look up his IQ record at the library. “It was smoke and mirrors, but it worked.”

  Raniere claimed that Consumers’ Buyline had grown an average of 40 percent every month for two years and that by May 1992 had “gross receipts in excess of 33 million dollars of products and services.” According to a biography posted on Raniere’s personal website more than a decade later, he was a millionaire by age thirty, with a net worth of $50 million by age thirty-two. He attributed this success to the “human motivation and behavior model” he was developing, which allowed him to recruit and train top sellers like Natalie.

  In photos from the 1990s, Raniere, then in his thirties, appears goofy and sleepy-eyed, like a sticky-fingered kid after eating too many popsicles. His hair is a mousy brown and quite a bit longer than you’d expect from a business wunderkind. He was not yet accustomed to wearing the expensive athleisure he was steered toward decades later by an “aesthetic team.” Without people telling him what to wear every day, Raniere joked that he looked like “quite the creature.”

  People who knew Raniere say he had a “type” and that Natalie fit all the specifications. In photos she appears striking and slender, with long, dark hair draping neatly over her shoulders and back. She looks tanned and vaguely muscular next to Raniere’s squishy frame. Though their relationship grew fraught, their career partnership kept it intact.

  You didn’t have to be smart to understand Consumers’ Buyline’s structure. Members paid a $39 annual
fee and a monthly fee of $15, costing a grand total of $219 per year. These fees granted members access to discounts on a long list of products and services, including home appliances, electronics, furniture, health aids, vehicles, travel, financial services, real estate, groceries, and optical services. It didn’t cost anything to become an “affiliate,” or sales rep, for the company, though it was strongly encouraged that sellers become members so as to be familiar with the company’s inventory. To buy discounted goods, members simply had to call a 1-800 number and verify their membership, and then they’d be forwarded to the appropriate vendor.

  In a promotional video explaining the company’s commission structure, Raniere pointed at a circle on a large sheet of chart paper. Two lines poked out from the bottom of the circle like cartoon legs, which attached to two more circles below. Raniere wore a gray suit and rounded metal-framed glasses that placed him firmly in Bill Gates’s 1990s. With a marker he drew more legs coming out of each circle, fanning them out left and right. For emphasis he traced a triangle around the structure, which, it must be said, looked an awful lot like a pyramid.

  Would-be affiliates sitting in a classroom-style arrangement learned that on average every person, represented by a circle, was able to recruit 2.6 new members. Years later, Raniere would tell NXIVM recruiters the same thing: on average, every student should be able to refer 2.6 people.

  “So what’s going to happen on the average with this structure?” he asked the room. “It’s going to perpetuate, right? It’s going to go and go. Because on the average this works.”

  Consumers’ Buyline affiliates were assured that they could earn decent income with a “one-time effort.” You didn’t even have to be an experienced salesperson; you could get by on following a script.

  “This is all found money—walkaway income—money that just keeps spilling into your wallet no matter what you’re doing,” reads company literature quoted in court documents. “In other words, think of it as a royalty reflecting your ongoing rights to something you’ve already created.”