Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  In the “Self-esteem” module, students wrote down areas in life where they had high and low self-esteem. Then they watched a series of videos showing that self esteem was the result of having a range of viable life choices. Between clips, coaches facilitated discussions of hard-to-answer questions like, What is reality? How do we know that it is reality? How do we know that this isn’t a dream? What is honesty? What is integrity? Can you have honesty without integrity? Can you have integrity without honesty? What is a lie? These discussions often led students to find disagreement and acknowledge the limits of their own understanding of the world. At the end, coaches summed up working definitions while stressing that they weren’t teaching “what to think” but rather “how to think.” Honesty was the intent to “represent one’s internal reality” accurately, coaches told students, while integrity was about consistency and being whole. A lie was “when one trades reality for fantasy. It is a distortion of reality that the person knows about.”

  When Raniere led the classes, which he often did in the early years, he would answer questions with more questions and never explicitly reveal his own position. Some lower-ranking coaches took a more prescriptive approach, following a script set out in coaching notes. By the second half of the lesson, the concept of self-esteem as a range of possibilities would start clicking into place for students: high self-esteem came from more choice, coaches said, while “people with low self-esteem feel like they have no choice and are victims.” One of the last exercises in the module asked students to return to an area of life where they believed they had fewer choices and then list all the possibilities they could think of, “whether or not you would choose them.” Sarah Edmondson and other NXIVM students practiced this regularly and believed it helped build confidence.

  Students were assigned a coach separate from the lead trainer, someone to check in with on the commitments or goals they set during the intensive. Raniere’s innermost circle, including Karen Unterreiner, Pam Cafritz, Barbara Jeske, and Nancy Salzman, fulfilled this role for many. Depending on the course, students were encouraged to call coaches twice a week, or daily. “Outside practice” often included journaling on decisions and emotions throughout the day, with the intent to explore how feelings were chosen. Students would write down every instance of pain or suffering, for example, and then ask, “How did I create this situation?”

  These group exercises created powerful experiences for the people seeking help from Raniere and Salzman. They forged intense personal relationships and accountability structures that were unusual in the world of psychotherapy. Years later, NXIVM would implement a rule that no psychologists or psychiatrists were allowed to attend its courses, a rule shared with Scientology. When a former trainer asked Nancy about this, she said it was because psychologists “ruin the training for everybody else; all they want to do is argue.”

  Raniere’s special status in NXIVM would be written right into the curriculum. Basic classes taught students to give tribute to their teachers, and that the creation of NXIVM qualified as a great human invention—a ten out of ten on a scale of human achievement, according to one exercise.

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  NANCY SALZMAN TOOK on the title of “Prefect” and was later honored with a gold sash and a large portrait on the wall next to Raniere’s at their headquarters. Toni Natalie attended regular hypnotherapy sessions with Nancy and found that she’d become an early test subject for the one-on-one therapies Raniere and Salzman were developing. One of those therapies, later called an “exploration of meaning,” led students to redefine traumatic moments in childhood by identifying flawed “attachments” and “limiting beliefs.”

  Natalie and Salzman weren’t far apart in age, but they looked as if they were from different generations. Whereas Natalie’s eyes had a bright, animated quality, Salzman’s gaze was sustained and penetrating. Salzman kept her hair short, wore suit jackets, and had a disarmingly wide smile. “If a corporation were to take the form of a female human, it would look very much like Nancy Salzman,” Natalie later wrote.

  As Natalie and Raniere’s relationship grew more strained, Natalie put more faith in Salzman’s guidance. She participated in hundreds of sessions, often working through her relationship troubles with Raniere as well as her trauma from having been molested at a very young age.

  Both Salzman and Raniere knew all about her deepest fears and insecurities and repeatedly used this to influence her. They offered a unifying theory of her “issues” and how to fix them. Natalie had an addiction to “taking,” according to Raniere, and needed to overcome her anger, pride, defiance, and spite.

  Natalie said it was an inconsequential dispute over laundry that sent their relationship into a tailspin. “I had asked him if he could throw some clothes in the dryer but not to put a particular shirt in,” she recalled. Raniere put the shirt in the dryer with the rest of the laundry, and Natalie says she responded with a “Hey, I asked you not to do this.” Then something snapped. “He started to scream at me: ‘Don’t you know who I am? I have perfect retention. You can’t talk to me that way.’ I remember him screaming at me and backing me into a corner.”

  Raniere demanded she apologize; Natalie said she refused. She left him in April 1999, but a clean break was all but impossible.

  The following month Raniere sent his “sweetheart” Natalie a letter that included a tape of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. He instructed her to play it while reading. The letter, printed on marbled paper in a distracting font evoking Hallmark card calligraphy, laid out why they should get back together despite all the terrible things Natalie had done. “Although you have wronged me more than you will ever wrong anyone else, I still offer my hand to you,” he wrote.

  Raniere enclosed pictures of Natalie from the previous August and February, making a case that her “downward spiral” was visible in her diminishing happiness and energy. He said he’d always refused to do what was easy and had instead done what was right for Natalie’s well-being and personal growth. “I gave up hope in my ability to change the situation and I surrendered ‘us’ to the universe to see what would happen,” he wrote. “I later discovered this path leads to not very nice things for you and it appears my Sweetheart may well go to jail.”

  Natalie says she was immediately harassed by Raniere’s inner circle. In August 1999 she reported to police that Barbara Jeske had gone through her mail. “Jeske has been harassing me for about four months, beginning after we parted company as coworkers,” reads her statement in the police report. “She has written letters to customers of mine, defaming me, and has been stalking me at my residence and business.” Natalie told police that she even had a video recording of Jeske’s snooping.

  That same month, according to Natalie, Kristin Keeffe showed up at her workplace for five hours. “She was telling people I was the chosen one, I had to come back to him,” Natalie said. Another time Keeffe showed up at Natalie’s house with flowers and candy. On the box was an image of a mother and child. “I had a vision that you changed your mind and you’re coming back to us,” Keeffe told her.

  In a letter to a judge more than a decade after the breakup, Natalie accused Raniere of rape. “Prior to leaving him in 1999,” she wrote, “I was raped repeatedly by Raniere, each time with him telling me it was harder on him than it was on me, that we needed to be together so that I could share his energy, and that I needed to remain silent so as to not wake up my child who was sleeping in a nearby room.”

  During my first phone conversation with Natalie, she surprised me by saying something that flew in the face of Raniere’s genius polymath narrative.

  “He’s got a very small playbook; he just changes up players all the time,” she said. Natalie claimed that Raniere had a pattern of constantly scouting and replacing the women in his life. He was always on the lookout for other women with better reputations, more credibility, or more money. “Once he uses them, he’s done an
d on to the next,” she said.

  Toni Natalie was arguably the first person to experience every phase of the NXIVM story. She’d been captivated by a man praised as a world-changing thinker and guru. A honeymoon phase pulled her deeper into his business ventures and personal orbit. She believed the hype, participated in stoking that hype, and offered her whole self for experimentation. And then years later, to her horror, that great big money-making machine she helped build began trying to destroy her life, dragging her into courtrooms on and off for decades.

  Not long after Natalie cut ties with NXIVM, Raniere and his inner circle set their sights on recruiting a new “chosen one” to be Raniere’s girlfriend and business partner.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Albany Shrugged

  Only five months after Toni Natalie walked out on Keith Raniere, Barbara Bouchey received a fateful phone call.

  Pam Cafritz had picked Bouchey’s asset management company out of the Yellow Pages because it listed two locations, suggesting some measure of success, according to Bouchey. It was a cold call, or so Bouchey thought, until Cafritz revealed who she was working for.

  Bouchey, then a forty-year-old financial planner, learned that her old friend and former therapist Nancy Salzman was now the president of a fast-growing human potential school called Executive Success Programs, or ESP. Salzman had treated Bouchey for teeth grinding and stress management in the late 1980s, and the two had sporadically stayed in touch. Bouchey agreed to learn more about the self-help company if Salzman agreed to catch up over dinner in October 1999.

  Bouchey is tall with a thick mane of blond curls and a welcoming, jolly expression. Her experience with sales calls shines through in conversation. She isn’t shy about her tough upbringing, often reminding people that her mother died when she was eight years old and her father was an alcoholic. In 1999 Bouchey was still reeling from a recent divorce and mourning the death of a close friend, but she agreed to attend three weeks of seminars, starting on March 27, 2000. Salzman told Bouchey that the intensive would help with the transition and grief.

  Raniere had a signature way of flirting with women like Bouchey. He handed her a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged and told her she was his Dagny Taggart, the heroine who wants to save unbridled capitalism. (Toni Natalie, who years earlier had also earned the “Dagny” nickname, was now being called a suppressive and a thief.)

  Pam Cafritz and Kristin Keeffe both claimed they had visions that Bouchey was coming to be a leader in Raniere’s project to build a new, more evolved society. “I was going to be somebody who was going to partner with Keith and be someone that he would have as a partner, companion, or somebody that would help them do this,” Bouchey said in a 2009 deposition.

  Near the end of the first day of Bouchey’s first intensive, Raniere opened up to her about his ambition to create his own country and currency. “I know that Nancy had not ever heard that before, because she had gotten a little bit upset that night, because here I was, my first day, I didn’t know Keith, and he was sharing these concepts and things with me,” she said. Their Ayn Rand–inspired philosophies seemed to align, and Bouchey saw that this granted her special status with Raniere.

  Unbeknownst to Bouchey, Raniere’s inner circle was watching her closely, and taking notes. “They were in every breakout group, reporting everything I was thinking and feeling back to Keith,” Bouchey told me. With this knowledge Raniere grew more assertive in his advances, telling Bouchey that he too believed she was destined to join him. “In the last three days of my intensive, Keith himself told me that he had dreams and visions that I actually would be in a relationship with him and have a child with him.”

  Bouchey says she wasn’t initially all that interested in a new life partner or a career in self-help. She had a financial planning business keeping her busy and was still in the process of untangling her life from her ex-husband’s. But she was drawn to the idea of becoming a central pillar of a new community, and when she returned for coach training in June 2000, she brought colleagues, former in-laws, and her own cousin.

  With seven new recruits under her belt, she sailed up the ranks from coach to proctor, a paid position that oversaw coaches. Bouchey put her smooth cold-calling voice to work and helped bring in a wave of wealthy and high-profile students. She also took on the role of field trainer, teaching others new sales tactics and making a commission on new students referred by lower-ranking members. Proctors earned 10 percent on sign-ups they brought in, while field trainers earned 20 percent on every place in an intensive they sold. NXIVM’s ranks would expand to include Adam Glassman, the longtime creative director at O magazine; Antonia Novello, New York’s health commissioner and later the U.S. Surgeon General; Sheila Johnson, America’s first black billionaire and cofounder of Black Entertainment Television (BET); and Stephen Cooper, the interim CEO of Enron and since 2011 the CEO of Warner Music. In a deposition, Nancy Salzman claimed to have had a one-on-one coaching relationship with all of these heavy hitters in the early 2000s.

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  AFTER MONTHS OF suggestion, Bouchey’s role in Raniere’s universe took on a romantic dimension. For the first year of their relationship, Bouchey says, she didn’t know there were other girlfriends. She uprooted herself from Saratoga Springs and bought a house in Clifton Park, where Raniere slept over three or four nights a week. When friends gathered for dinner at Nancy Salzman’s house, everyone seemed to know that Bouchey and Raniere were together. “People would move so I could sit next to Keith,” Bouchey says.

  Karen Unterreiner, Kristin Keeffe, Barbara Jeske, and Pam Cafritz knew about Bouchey and each other but were sworn to secrecy. Inside Raniere’s inner circle of girlfriends, this was seen as a precaution in dealing with Bouchey’s “jealousy issues.” Her time spent at the Flintlock house was limited to scheduled social gatherings, like Thursday evenings spent watching Star Trek.

  Raniere tapped into Bouchey’s sense of destiny and psychological connection with him. He said he could feel her mood changes, even when they were apart. Raniere suggested this may have been because they’d both lived past lives and had been reincarnated in new roles in order to resolve what had happened in previous lifetimes. This sounded a lot like Gina Hutchinson’s reincarnation beliefs, but they went to a darker place. Bouchey admits she intuitively believed Raniere when he suggested that in her previous life she had been Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Her name means “butcher”; Heydrich was known as the “Butcher of Prague.” She accepted Raniere’s suggestion that her soul might have been given a chance to repair some of the damage she’d done as a Nazi in her past life, and that she could accomplish this by joining Raniere’s mission.

  Bouchey wasn’t alone in bearing a genocidal stain. Nancy Salzman, who is Jewish, was told she may have been Hitler reincarnated. Former associates have different ideas about how several members of Raniere’s inner circle came to believe they’d been literal Nazis in past lives. Some say women were guided to these conclusions in suggestive trance states, but others say it was more about repetitive suggestion. NXIVM students were taught that resisting feedback, especially from someone with a higher rank, was a sign of “disintegration.” When confronted with an uncomfortable, unprovable claim, an “integrated” person was expected to listen and consider without letting their emotions get in the way. With time and repetition these ideas seemed to grow more relevant or true to the person’s experience. Most of this was useful to Raniere, who could use guilt to manipulate his true believers.

  Raniere constructed a sexual component of these reincarnation ideas. More than one of his followers testified that he studied Eastern religious theories on energetic channels in the body and had mastered the path to enlightenment through sexuality. He told one of his partners that he required sex constantly, or else spiritual energy might consume him to the point of death. One way Raniere’s inner circle could atone for their Nazi
sins was through yogic enlightenment practices achieved through sex. “If you have sex, you can move what’s called the kundalini energy,” Bouchey told the CBC’s Uncover podcast.

  When I asked about the “Nazi stuff,” in September 2018, Bouchey said it had been a long time ago, and that it hadn’t continued past the first year of her relationship with Raniere. Today she denies that her past life theory had anything to do with hypnosis or trance.

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  LAUREN SALZMAN HAD her own unlikely experience with Raniere’s powers of suggestion. She moved in with her mom after college, and Raniere developed a habit of checking in with her at home. She thought he was interested in seeing her grow into a responsible, caring adult.

  Raniere encouraged Nancy to start charging her daughter for rent. “That inspired me to want to move out and be more self-reliant,” Lauren testified at his trial.

  Lauren increasingly looked to Raniere for guidance in all areas of her life. They went on long walks together, and she told him about her goals, her family struggles, even her medical issues. He suggested she join other women in juice-fasting to lose weight. “He thought a good weight for me would be around a hundred pounds,” she recalled. Raniere made the assessment simply by looking at her “body constitution,” she testified. From then on, Lauren appeared increasingly waifish, made more obvious by her loose-fitting outfits and pale, makeup-free complexion.

  In April 2001, Raniere initiated a secret sexual relationship with Lauren. He told her not to tell anyone, especially her mom. Lauren didn’t have the same “jealousy issues” as Barbara Bouchey, and so she became enmeshed in the daily goings-on at the Flintlock house.