Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  NXIVM later shared an unsigned testimonial letter from Edgar Bronfman that claimed Salzman to be one of the most influential people in his life. “It is my experience that when you are living life you should be learning, and when you are learning, life has much more meaning,” reads the unverified April 2003 testimonial, which has circulated on news sites as recently as 2019. The letter describes Bronfman’s “new way of looking at the world, not based on any hokey philosophy, but based on truth.”

  Barbara Bouchey claims that in 2003 Edgar Bronfman brought Nancy Salzman to his Manhattan home via private helicopter for several more private sessions. She says the arrangement was that Salzman would provide free coaching in exchange for referrals. But Edgar didn’t like the way NXIVM pressured him to pitch the courses to wealthy and powerful people in his life, and cut ties when he discovered that Clare had lent $2 million for a NXIVM-related venture. The Bronfman sisters’ strained relationship with their father then became a focal point of their participation in the NXIVM curriculum.

  “I am not sure where things are with my father and I,” Clare wrote to Raniere in June 2003, following Edgar Bronfman’s break with the group. “Yes, he walked out. I acted impulsively, and extremely mindlessly. This is where my recognition of just how mindless I can be came from.”

  Clare wanted badly to repair her father’s impression of the company and earn Raniere’s approval. “I will never know the extent of the damage I have caused, to my father, myself, you, Nancy, the organization, or the world. I would really appreciate your help in starting to try to heal the damage,” she wrote.

  In the same email Clare described her ideal self to Raniere: “Very clear. Very focused. A leader, but not in the public eye. Very efficient. Very strong. Very active, not hanging around.”

  NXIVM classes taught that the problems of the world stemmed from “parasite strategies,” or individual behavior that isn’t self-sustaining. The most effective way to make the world a better place was to replace parasitic strategies with “effort strategies,” according to Raniere, and this included replacing all charity with investment, which he said increased value and self-esteem. With Raniere’s theories on work, value, effort, and parasite strategies, Sara and Clare were able to think differently about their family’s enormous wealth. Instead of being a source of guilt, each dollar they spent began to represent their effort toward building a better world. Instead of living as “parasites” off their father’s fortune, they were taking responsibility for their vast resources and doing something “ethical” with them.

  * * *

  —

  IN 2003, SARA Bronfman told Forbes magazine that the yellow sash NXIVM had awarded her “was the first thing I had earned on just my own merits.” With the sash she was promoted to an unpaid coach.

  A NXIVM student needed to enroll two new students to advance to a yellow sash. But if Clare and Sara wanted to advance from coach to proctor, the next step up NXIVM’s “stripe path,” they needed to develop six coaches each. Clare pushed through her discomfort with handling money and in the process kicked off the sisters’ fifteen-year NXIVM spending spree. “What they did was they bought people’s courses for them,” Dones says. “So then they would get mad when someone didn’t complete the course, and they would ask them to pay it back.”

  The sisters were expecting Forbes to print a glowing cover story profiling the teachers they admired, but instead, when the issue hit newsstands in October 2003, they found a critical investigation that made them look like they’d been duped. “I think it’s a cult,” Edgar Bronfman told the magazine.

  Edgar’s “cult” accusation became a massive wedge between the Bronfman sisters and their father, who instantly became an enemy of NXIVM. Raniere blamed Clare for bringing on the bad press. Clare never forgot the so-called ethical breach she’d made by telling her father about that $2 million loan, and she vowed to make it up to her mentor. “I think she felt responsible for some of the bad media surrounding our organization,” Lauren Salzman testified at Raniere’s trial, “and felt that part of rectifying that was to try to make that right financially, legally.”

  * * *

  —

  AT RANIERE’S TRIAL in 2019, prosecutors would show the jury whole file folders of financial records and dirt collected by NXIVM on Edgar Bronfman and his charities. Raniere spread the idea that Edgar was behind several supposed anti-NXIVM conspiracies. The Bronfman sisters were told that their father was funding NXIVM’s enemies and even manipulating world markets to ruin Raniere’s investments.

  Edgar made attempts to reach his daughters on his own terms but suspected that NXIVM was mediating their every interaction. “Yesterday afternoon with the two of you was very important to me. I have a few issues with ‘Albany’ which we should discuss,” he wrote to his daughters in June 2004, a message that was forwarded from Clare to Nancy Salzman to Raniere long before it became evidence in court in 2019.

  “I have no idea how much money you’ve put into ‘Albany’ nor will I ask, but that, too, is a minor issue. Having the sessions go from 8 AM until 10 PM is extreme, and it’s what cults do to gain dominance over their victims,” he wrote. “I am not sure whether or not Nancy was aware of our meeting, and whether or not she’s guiding you in your relationship with me.”

  On Raniere’s recommendation in early 2004, the sisters decided to switch up their money management strategy by appointing Barbara Bouchey as their primary financial planner. Bouchey’s firm recommended investments in line with the principles the Bronfmans learned in NXIVM classes.

  Meanwhile, Raniere and Nancy Salzman took an interest in Clare’s show-jumping career and coached her through episodes of anxiety and frustration. According to Bouchey, Raniere hoped Clare would make it all the way to the top of her field so that his coaching model would become famous.

  Clare had won a prestigious Grand Prix in Rome and nearly qualified for the Olympic Games, but was not selected to compete for Team USA. In late 2005 she decided to quit her equestrian career, a choice she later described on her blog. Clare had advanced to the rank of NXIVM coach and was learning “exploration of meaning” therapy, which involved guiding a student back into their childhood memories in search of misperceptions that could be holding the adult self back. She wanted, she said, to move on to her new calling. “I felt more fulfilled than I had after the most successful victory of my riding career—I realized I had earned the privilege of connecting deeply with other humans, and was able to help change their lives profoundly,” Clare wrote of the experience. “In that moment I decided it was time to join a new community.”

  Clare became one of Raniere’s most devoted disciples, a mostly one-sided relationship, one source told Maclean’s magazine, resembling what a “prepubescent daughter” might feel toward a father she adored. “She used to run up and kiss him and sit at his feet,” the source said. “For Clare and Sara, this became their real family.”

  * * *

  —

  AT A V-WEEK event in 2004, Clare and Sara Bronfman presented a giant novelty check pledging $20 million toward a new “ethical” foundation. The Ethical Humanitarian Foundation was one of several similar-sounding NXIVM organizations the Bronfmans would go on to support, including the Ethical Science Foundation and the World Ethical Foundations Consortium. Bouchey, who was responsible for advising the Bronfmans on their investments, later told me that the check was just for show, and that the money wasn’t set to be released for a long time.

  “I had discovered that they had charitable remainder trusts, each of them did, and that they were allowed to change the beneficiary,” Bouchey explained in a 2009 deposition. “I shared with them that I thought it might be a great idea that they could name the Ethical Humanitarian Foundation as the beneficiary, which would then ultimately be used to support Keith’s projects or explorations or pursuits, and they liked the idea.”

  The giant check signaled a new e
ra for both the Bronfmans and Raniere: the sisters had “leveled up” to a new phase of trust and cooperation, and NXIVM was no longer receiving just small-time cash contributions; it now appeared to have tens of millions of dollars at its disposal. Depending on whom you ask, the Bronfmans either added legitimacy to an otherwise kooky group or, at the very least, dumped money on the many problems Raniere was running from when he folded his other multi-level marketing ventures.

  The Bronfmans made other investments that benefited NXIVM. They bought an $11 million private jet, which was used by Nancy Salzman and later for a rendezvous between Raniere and the Dalai Lama in India. Clare bought a $2.3 million horse farm outside Albany and several properties in the suburbs, which she began renting to NXIVM students. Salzman also made use of a Trump Tower condo overlooking Central Park that Sara bought in 2006 for $6.45 million. As well, the sisters started making contributions to political campaigns, both Democrat and Republican.

  But all of these expenditures would pale in comparison to the legal spending and commodity trading losses they would incur in the next several years.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Us vs. Them

  Keith Raniere had reason to be wary of reporters. When newspapers reached out for comment during his Consumers’ Buyline days, it was usually about unflattering accusations, not the breakthroughs and achievements of his company.

  Until the summer of 2003, NXIVM had successfully stayed out of the critical media spotlight. Raniere’s company, still officially called Executive Success Programs, was in its fifth year of expansion without a single accusation that it was a pyramid scheme getting in the way. Barbara Bouchey was reaching new students on both coasts in record numbers, mostly through old-fashioned word of mouth, and two healthy Mexican chapters were reaching international elites. The company was in the process of rebranding as NXIVM, Forbes had yet to publish its skeptical cover story, and the time seemed ripe for a more public launch.

  In 2003, Times Union journalist Dennis Yusko was a general assignment reporter covering all of Saratoga County, New York, a collection of commuter suburbs directly north of Albany. Though the state capital was a steady source of political news, its surrounding neighborhoods were sleepier and unaccustomed to grabbing front-page headlines. To fill newspaper inches, Yusko attended business association meetings and visited Saratoga’s horse-racing track in search of stories.

  Yusko learned that NXIVM was planning a massive 66,000-square-foot personal training center for a small Albany suburb called Halfmoon. He’d been tipped off by a planning board chairman, who simply said, “You gotta see this.” What Yusko saw was an architectural rendering of clustered honeycomb-shaped structures sprawling in all directions. With what appeared to be hexagonal reflective glass sheathing tightly connected geometric domes, the property looked more like an alien village than a human potential school. And although NXIVM officials continued speaking about their plan for a futuristic new headquarters, the development was never built.

  I met Yusko at a Starbucks on the outskirts of Albany in June 2019. His handshake was firm and he spared almost no time for small talk. He shifted in his seat as the gears of his memory went to work. The hand gestures he used to sculpt the greenhouse-like structures in the air reminded me of the Italians in my family.

  “Halfmoon is one of the fastest growing towns in upstate,” Yusko said, setting the local political scene for me. “It was kind of known for its freewheeling planning board.”

  NXIVM’s proposal was out of character for the neighborhood, even by the Halfmoon planning board’s laissez-faire standards. Yusko decided to dig up whatever he could on the proposal, completely unaware of the reporting rabbit hole he was about to venture down.

  “I didn’t know anything about Keith Raniere. I didn’t really know anything about this group,” he said, recalling the quiet before the storm. Yusko heard from neighbors that before the proposal was approved, NXIVM had hosted a ceremony on the undeveloped plot. The unofficial groundbreaking had set off alarms among some who felt the development didn’t belong in the area’s suburban environment.

  “Halfmoon is a place where people go home and they go to sleep, and they wake up and they go to work,” Yusko explained. (A resident of Knox Woods, the subdivision where NXIVM lifers had settled, told me the same thing.) “It’s not where people congregate, there’s no cultural places, there’s no musical places. At most people will go to the local park on Saturdays, or little league games. That’s why this was unusual—because these people had bought this land and talk had begun among the neighbors that they were holding these get-togethers that were unsettling to them.”

  “Unsettling how?” I asked, trying to imagine the scene.

  “I think one neighbor had said their appearance was unusual. Again, in Halfmoon just about anything is unusual unless you’re very suburban looking. So these people were wearing different kinds of clothes, and they were expressing themselves in a way that was different.”

  Members of NXIVM were proud of the ways they expressed themselves, and saw this suspicion as a kind of unfounded NIMBYism. A tight-knit “us” was formed, and everything outside it, Yusko included, would soon become “them.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A FEW days of research, Yusko stumbled upon the website of a cult specialist named Rick Alan Ross, who has helped hundreds of people leave fringe groups. He learned that Ross had been hired in 2002 by Morris and Rochelle Sutton, the wealthy owners of a New Jersey children’s clothing company, to help extract their son from NXIVM.

  Michael Sutton had quit his job with the family business to spend more time with the NXIVM community. His parents thought the classes were encouraging him to cut off communication, and they retained Ross as a consultant. They agreed to arrange an intervention at a beach resort in Florida over the December 2002 holiday.

  “The point of an intervention is to stimulate critical thinking, to get an individual to reflect and think about what they’re involved in,” Ross said at Raniere’s trial in June 2019. Ross thought Michael would be able to look at the demands the group was making on his time and bank account and think about whether it was truly worth it.

  At the time, Ross put NXIVM in the same mostly benign category as Landmark Education’s leadership seminars, but he was not yet familiar with the company’s rules and rituals. His conversations with Michael changed that. “Michael would speak at length, and he would talk about his experience,” Ross recalled of the beachside intervention, which stretched out over several days. “It was then that I learned that Keith Raniere had a special title of Vanguard. And that they celebrated his birthday during Vanguard Week.”

  Ross revised his assessment of NXIVM, telling Michael Sutton that he believed this was a personality-driven group “eerily reminiscent” of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. Michael listened politely but wasn’t swayed. “He was very courteous, very reasonable, but he kept talking on his cell phone with Nancy Salzman,” Ross recalled on the witness stand. “Even in the presence of his parents and myself, he would talk to her and she would coach him. And it became obvious to me how much power and control the group had over Michael. Eventually Nancy Salzman persuaded him to discontinue the discussion.”

  The intervention was a failure, but the Suttons did not give up. Michael’s half sister Stephanie Franco, who had attended two NXIVM intensives in the summer of 2001, agreed to turn over her class notes to the family. In January 2003, Ross recommended a forensic psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist who could assess the material critically.

  Dr. John Hochman, who was teaching psychiatry at the University of California at the time, reviewed material for the sixteen-day course Stephanie had attended, identifying elements he thought were manipulative and cult-like. As points of concern, he pointed to the long hours, secrecy, inability to seek feedback from friends and family, paramilitary rituals and regalia, frequent contact with superiors, and unsubst
antiated extravagant claims.

  Dr. Paul Martin also audited Stephanie’s class notes from a psychologist’s perspective. “This appears nothing short of a religion, a system that has answers to the problems of life,” he wrote in a highly critical report. Martin went on to compare the NXIVM material to Robert Jay Lifton’s seminal work on what he termed “thought reform.” Lifton’s 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, defines eight elements of ideological control, and Martin pulled out glaring examples of each from NXIVM’s curriculum.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN DENNIS YUSKO discovered these reports, written in February 2003 and published on Rick Ross’s website in July, they solidified the journalist’s suspicion that there was more to the NXIVM story than a simple building application.

  Ross shared more of his critical view of NXIVM with Yusko, but when Yusko tried to get NXIVM to respond to the claims, he hit a wall of silence and misdirection. “When you’re a reporter, you have instincts,” he told me. “And then when you try to reach out and get the other side and it’s murky and difficult, you begin to become a little suspicious, so you do more research.”

  Yusko knew he couldn’t use the word “cult” lightly, and Ross warned him of the inevitable backlash. “He’s a warrior, so he prepared me,” Yusko said of Ross. “He said, ‘This is going to cause a splash.’ But I don’t think I was fully prepared. I don’t think I fully knew what I was getting into when I filed that first story.”

  On first glance, Yusko’s initial NXIVM story wasn’t the scandalous exposé you’d expect, given the years of litigation and conflict it ignited. It appeared in the Times Union’s Capital Region section on July 29, 2003, under the headline “ ‘Success School’ Plans Raise Concern.”

  “It wasn’t even an A-1 story,” Yusko quipped.