by Sarah Berman
NXIVM reacted swiftly. “After the first time I quoted Rick Ross, days—I mean days—later they filed a $10 million lawsuit against him,” Yusko said. “It was like a cannon shot across the bow.”
NXIVM alleged that Stephanie Franco, the doctors who examined the course material, and Rick Ross had all violated trade secret laws and a nondisclosure agreement signed by all students. Yusko and the Times Union weren’t named in the lawsuit. The suit alleged that the company was losing $10,000 per day and had suffered irreparable harm because of the breach. If Ross wasn’t willing to take the offending material down, the strategy seemed to be to break the enemy financially. The case was refiled and appealed several times, even as judge after judge rejected NXIVM’s requests to have the material removed. In court filings Raniere claimed that the expert analysis was riddled with “more than twenty factual falsehoods and even more logical falsehoods and errors.”
“This false story with our copyrighted material released to the public through international media can never be completely reversed,” Raniere wrote in August 2003. “If this is not in the least stopped it is possible it will destroy us.”
Yusko immediately began preparing a story about the lawsuit, but he wasn’t able to get through to anyone who would comment on behalf of NXIVM. He left voicemail messages at the company’s headquarters and even dropped by the office, but for weeks he came up empty-handed. After some consideration, he decided to crash Vanguard Week, Raniere’s weeklong birthday party at Lake George.
As Yusko told me this, he paused for a beat, taking a moment to look out the window overlooking the generic strip mall parking lot beside us. His expression was guarded but amused. All these years later, he still seemed excited by the idea of showing up unannounced. “I’m like, I’ve got to get that side of the story. At least I’ve got to try, got to make a stronger attempt. Phone calls and stopping by the office isn’t working. So we’ve got to find out what this is all about, and what better place than Vanguard’s birthday celebration?”
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YUSKO AND A Times Union staff photographer headed up to V-Week, held at a YMCA conference and training center on the mouth of Silver Bay, in late August 2003. It was billed as a “celebration of the human potential to live a noble existence and to participate in a joyous interdependent civilization,” whatever that means.
The V-Week visit was Yusko’s first exposure to the culture of self-help, with all the power-of-positive-thinking baggage that comes with it. He didn’t yet know what an extreme strain of it he was dealing with, so he fell back on comparisons to more familiar subcultures.
“Lake George reminded me of a Grateful Dead show,” Yusko recalled. NXIVM followers didn’t do drugs, but shared a “free spirit” type of disposition, he said. It was easy to feel lost in a sea of sports bras, sneakers, and ponytails. “People were kind of floating around, but there wasn’t the love that’s usually in the air. It was more confusion—just a sense of people really convinced if they take enough courses…they would improve themselves or their minds.”
Yusko also noticed a “Latin vibe” among about a third of the crowd. High-powered families from Mexico were in attendance. “That’s when I first realized that this was international.”
Though many of the attendees seemed wealthy and well-mannered, Yusko saw that others were barely scraping by: “I even overheard some people talking—some guy saying he was ready to spend his last $2,400 to follow the next group of meetings. Some of them were naively following around, but the ones at the top, you know, Nancy, had their hands firmly on the steering wheel. And they were reaping the benefits.”
Yusko eventually met with Nancy Salzman, first at a picnic table by the lake. Around her sat a half dozen members of Raniere’s inner circle, including Pam Cafritz, Karen Unterreiner, and Kristin Keeffe.
Keeffe was younger than most of the other women Yusko met that day, but she was growing into one of Raniere’s savviest fixers and would take on the role of legal liaison overseeing the Ross lawsuit. “Kristin was extremely committed at that point,” he recalled. “In her eyes I saw full commitment.”
“I had a complete radical shift in career capacity almost overnight,” Keeffe told Yusko of the NXIVM “tech.” “It improved my memory and logic dramatically.” The fawning quote appeared in the Times Union on August 28, two days after Raniere’s birthday.
Yusko hoped to interview Salzman on the record, but NXIVM’s top ranks wanted to control the circumstances and context of any meeting. “They wouldn’t conduct the interview unless they videotaped it,” he said. “It took me like an hour to negotiate the terms of the interview.”
Yusko agreed to be filmed, and the group relocated to a nearby cabin. Yusko’s cameraman started snapping photos as Salzman began to speak. “One of the first things she says is, ‘You never tried to call me,’ and in very deliberate, slow wording. [It was] noticeably, extremely…What’s the word…?”
“Hypnotic?” I suggested.
“Yeah, that’s it. That’s what it was. So I’m feeling that, and then she accuses me.”
Yusko was certain he’d chased Salzman and Raniere for interviews. “Trust me, I knew that I made these phone calls,” he told me. Faced with a surreal situation in which what he knew to be reality was being flatly contradicted, Yusko stood up for himself. “I knew I had to establish my space, and I said, ‘That’s not true. You’re lying.’ And the only reason I remember that is because she later called my editor and complained that I said that to her. I accused her of lying.”
Times Union editor Rex Smith would hear many complaints from NXIVM as their influence grew and Yusko continued reporting on the controversy that followed. And Yusko now knew from firsthand experience that Salzman was playing by different rules than the rest of the world. “The truth just didn’t matter; it was all about control,” he told me. “They were Trumpian before Trump.”
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YUSKO LEFT LAKE GEORGE with a sense that he’d witnessed injustice in some form, even if he couldn’t articulate exactly what it was. “I didn’t know about the sexual abuse at that point. I thought it was more about people getting ripped off. People were getting just wrung out on a bullshit trip,” he said. “I just had a real deep suspicion and sensitivity to that for some reason.”
Days after Yusko’s V-Week visit, he was finally offered a phone interview with Raniere. “It was awkward. He was trying to ingratiate himself,” Yusko recalled. “He’d obviously done a little homework on me. I remember that.”
Yusko wanted to be fair to Raniere, but he was having some trouble understanding what “Vanguard” was trying to say. “He was so esoteric with his comments,” Yusko said.
Raniere talked about the noble ideals NXIVM stood for. He said he was trying to create a future society where cash registers and service workers wouldn’t be necessary, because people would be so ethical that they could be trusted to leave money for the products they wanted. “He wasn’t saying anything, and I clearly became impatient, and the interview kind of ended,” said Yusko.
Looking back, Yusko is still unsure what Raniere expected would happen after their conversation was finished. “I felt that he thought I was a pushover…that a couple minutes of just talking with me and everything would be rosy again, and I would just drop off the planet and the reporting would stop. That’s what it really felt like. He just needed a few minutes to convince me of his greatness and the good things they were doing. In retrospect, it was never about a better society, it was just more about him: power, control.”
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RANIERE DIDN’T SEEK power just from the people who came to him hoping to find new lives. His followers made connections early on with official centers of authority.
Dennis Yusko is cautious when talking about the political and social alliances that NXIVM cultivated. He reminded me that he h
adn’t reported on those allegations firsthand, that other reporters should be credited for digging up connections to Senate Republicans. “Their influence began to spread to official circles,” Yusko told me. “They reached up to some of the top levels of government.”
The community influence grew to a point where Yusko, a declared enemy of NXIVM, had a hard time planning his own wedding. “It was tough, you know. I got married in Saratoga, and we got our tuxes from this guy in Latham. Me and my father went, and little did I know that the owner of the friggin’ tux place was part of NXIVM. I guess my father’s number was on the tux application or the receipt, and he ended up calling my father and [making] kind of a veiled threat. And they ended up calling my wife’s workplace. That rattled her.”
In the coming years the Bronfman sisters would make significant campaign contributions to both the Mike Huckabee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns. An Albany Times Union report would reveal that they contributed more than $30,000 in private jet travel to upstate Republican Joseph Bruno. “It really was difficult to report on some of these things back then, when they had so many allies,” Yusko said. “And you were reporting on things that were fresh and really unbelievable for up here…. Who would ever think the Bronfman sisters would sink millions and millions of dollars into local coffers to, you know, keep people off [Raniere’s] back? Again, a lot of it wasn’t known for a long time.”
Yusko was up against well-resourced dreamers who were willing to use whatever means necessary to stop his research. His friends and family started to worry that he was pouring gasoline on a blaze that was never going to end. “I lost sleep. And then, I’m not going to lie, I became mildly obsessed with the whole thing. That’s just what happens when you get deep into a big story like this,” he said. “There were some people who thought that maybe I had ventured too far. I was investing too much of my sanity in this.
“I consider myself lucky that, you know, I feel like I survived,” Yusko added. “Some people didn’t.”
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DENNIS YUSKO CREDITS his own survival to the reporting for a national audience by Forbes magazine that backed up the stories he was working on.
High-ranking members of NXIVM and their politically connected attorney were putting pressure on Yusko’s editor. “I was feeling extremely vulnerable at one point, and they were coming in to talk to Rex Smith, who was the executive editor of the Times Union,” Yusko told me. “It had been coming, I had been feeling it. They were going on the radio and saying certain things. They were trying to battle back…. Meanwhile they’re suing Rick, and they’re using all these power moves, and they come in trying this innocent routine: ‘We’re getting pushed around by this local reporter, you gotta get rid of this guy.’ ”
Nancy Salzman came into the Times Union newsroom with a well-connected right-wing lawyer who’d claimed that NXIVM courses had improved his law practice. Yusko knew that Smith took meetings like this in a glass-walled office in view of the city reporters. “I was sitting at my desk. I still remember to this day being really nervous, wondering if I was going to have a job after this,” Yusko said.
“It was the day the Forbes article came out. This was ten minutes before these guys came walking in. So I read it first, and my mind was completely blown. So I printed it out and dropped it on my editor’s desk and said, ‘Before these guys come in, you should read this article.’ ”
The piece was headlined “Cult of Personality.” Its author, Michael Freedman, had an impressively holistic understanding of the group’s less obvious dynamics, from its preoccupation with secrecy to its theories borrowed from Werner Erhard and Ayn Rand. Freedman reported on Raniere’s claims that he didn’t take a salary, didn’t own a driver’s license, and didn’t have his own bed. “I live a somewhat church-mouse-type existence,” Raniere told the magazine. The article even hinted at how much money the Bronfman sisters were sinking into the group.
“I felt really vindicated,” Yusko told me. “Everything and more was in this article. To the point of like, Holy crap, there’s more stuff than we ever knew.”
Rex Smith says that, inside the “glass box” where he met with Salzman and the lawyer, he listened to Salzman and the lawyer carefully but never had any doubt that he’d stand behind his reporter. “It was pretty clear to me, honestly, from meeting Nancy and then later Keith, and from reading Dennis’s stories, that this was a situation that was beyond a business advisory group,” he says. “It felt to me like a cult.”
Whether or not his job was actually in danger, Yusko saw that meeting and the Forbes cover story as a turning point. “That really rescued the whole situation. That was really huge for me. And for the paper,” he said. “We were on the right trail; we weren’t sensationalizing; we weren’t tabloiding. This was all real. And it was in our backyard! It’s here whether you want to deal with it or not.”
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OUT OF ALL the stories Dennis Yusko wrote about NXIVM, there’s one that still sticks out in his mind and evokes a sense of mystery and dread.
Yusko learned that a thirty-five-year-old woman named Kristin Marie Snyder had gone missing in the middle of a sixteen-day NXIVM intensive in Alaska. One friend who’d interacted with Snyder before her disappearance said that her mental health had deteriorated dramatically. Kenny Powers, who knew Snyder and her wife through the Anchorage Nordic Ski Patrol, says that days before her February 6, 2003, disappearance, Snyder had lain down outside without a jacket in the middle of the night but had eventually given up on an apparent attempt to die of exposure. Powers was part of a search party sent out to locate Snyder after she’d left a NXIVM class and didn’t return home. Following an extended search, police determined that she’d kayaked into icy waters near Seward, Alaska. Neither her body nor the kayak was ever recovered.
“I don’t know what happened to Kristin Snyder, but the story still haunts me to this day,” Yusko told me.
Snyder’s story came across his desk nearly a year after her disappearance, in winter 2004. By that time Yusko was familiar with the psychologically exhausting techniques used to reframe NXIVM students’ worldviews. The classes went from eight a.m. to ten p.m.; students’ most private insecurities were probed and leveraged; and none of the teachers, including Nancy Salzman, were actually licensed to provide mental health care.
While it didn’t happen in every session, some coaches were known to introduce controversial interpretations of events that pinned crushing responsibility on new students. Students told me they’d heard rape victims questioned about how they may have been responsible for their rape, or a breast cancer survivor might be asked about how low self-esteem could have contributed to their illness. (When questioned in 2009, Raniere said that coaches caught making such representations would likely be subject to an ethical review.) It wasn’t unheard of for NXIVM followers to be convinced that they were partly responsible for major world events. Nancy Salzman was known to tell students that the World Trade Center attack might not have happened if she’d joined Raniere sooner. In Kristin Snyder’s case, Kenny Powers had heard her talking about being responsible for the Challenger space shuttle explosion and suggesting that the world might be better off without her.
Forbes had already interviewed one Mexican woman who’d begun hallucinating and suffered a nervous breakdown during an intensive and was later hospitalized. An Albany-based psychiatrist also claimed to have given psychiatric treatment to two other students. Powers told me he has a medical background and had assessed Snyder’s suicide risk before her disappearance. He said he’d strongly encouraged her to see a doctor but that Esther Carlson, the lead trainer for NXIVM, discouraged this. Snyder’s suicide threats were described as cries for attention.
A volunteer search-and-rescue team searched through the night for Snyder on Friday, February 7, and Powers personally put in forty-eight hours straight before taking time to get s
ome sleep. An official search, involving Alaska State Troopers, fire and emergency service workers, the U.S. Coast Guard, Seward police, and Civil Air Patrol, began the morning of Saturday, February 8.
One of the search parties found Snyder’s abandoned car. In it was a chilling note in a ringed notebook. Police gave Yusko a copy of the note in 2004 when he came across the story, and the Times Union published a photo of it.
“I attended a course called Executive Success Programs (a.k.a. Nexivm) [sic] based out of Anchorage, AK, and Albany, NY,” Snyder’s note reads. “I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. I still have feeling in my external skin, but my internal organs are rotting. Please contact my parents…if you find me or this note. I am sorry life, I didn’t know I was already dead. May we persist into the future.”
A second page reads, “No need to search for my body.”
Powers learned that in the months after the search, Snyder’s wife, Heidi Clifford, began receiving harassing phone calls in the middle of the night. NXIVM insiders floated a theory that Snyder had simply skipped town, and later hired a private investigator to help back up the claim that she was alive and “resort hopping” in another state.
Powers tried to convince Clifford to pursue a wrongful death suit. “She decided not to do it, because she was really getting harassed,” he recalls. Powers calls it “gangster intimidation-type stuff.” Yusko was facing his own barrage of intimidation just for reporting on the disappearance.
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ONCE THE BRONFMAN sisters’ relationship with NXIVM was made public in the Forbes story, Sara and Clare took more active roles in managing the group’s public image, which meant more meetings with the local paper, the Times Union. Clare Bronfman and Raniere requested a meeting with publisher George Randolph Hearst III, whose cousin Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and indoctrinated by an ideological group in the 1970s.