Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Parlato stands by his work for the Bronfman sisters in California. “Within a very short time I discovered a fraud and put the assets, such as they were, in the Bronfmans’ name.”

  The Bronfmans, however, didn’t see things this way. On advice from Raniere they went after both Plyam and Parlato in court. Construction on the properties was never completed.

  Parlato was fired in February 2008 and was soon caught in the crosshairs of NXIVM’s so-called legal department. Since that time Parlato and Raniere have been locked in an apparent battle to destroy each other. Raniere maintained a list of enemies, his trial revealed, and this latest entry would not go quietly into the night.

  PART TWO

  Some Very Powerful Human Beings

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mission in Mexico

  Daniela didn’t seem to be plagued with the unfortunate combination of horniness and parent loathing that usually comes with being a teenager. From a young age she’d developed a laser focus on her studies and was too shy to even think about boys.

  “When I was a little younger and I used to run around with my microscope and my encyclopedia, I wanted to be a biologist,” she recalled on the witness stand at Raniere’s trial in 2019. “I wanted to study animals and be a marine biologist, and I wanted to join Greenpeace.”

  Daniela’s family name is protected by court order. She comes from an unusually photogenic household, with parents Hector and Adriana, two sisters, and one brother. In beach vacation shots shown in court, they look like the surf-kissed model family displayed in a picture frame before you buy it. They lived in a small desert town with no malls or movie theaters in the geographical middle of Mexico.

  Daniela was the middle sister, the “dorky, nerdy” one, as she described herself. The eldest sister, Marianna, was the popular party girl of the family, while Camila was the baby. “My family was like my center of gravity,” Daniela testified. “They used to joke about our family, saying that we were like the Flanders in The Simpsons because we got along so well.”

  In 2002, when Daniela was sixteen, NXIVM was a relatively new presence in Mexico. Edgar Boone was the first NXIVM recruiter to break into the Mexican market in the early 2000s. Boone was from a prominent Mexican family and already had experience teaching meditation and studying personal growth. He and his brother Omar had an impressive degree of influence all over the country in the personal development sphere, and so they were able to bring many affluent students through the country’s first NXIVM chapter in Monterrey.

  Among those ultra-wealthy Mexican students was a man named Alex Betancourt, who in turn reeled in Emiliano Salinas, son of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Betancourt and Salinas went on to open their own NXIVM center in Mexico City and become influential spokespeople and executive board members within the organization.

  * * *

  —

  SITTING ON THE witness stand in May 2019, Daniela gave measured, understated answers to lead prosecutor Moira Kim Penza. Now in her thirties, Daniela sat tall, her posture so dignified that she seemed to levitate, occasionally leaning her angular features closer to the microphone to speak before rising up again. Her hair was long and dark, reaching for her waist, which appeared preposterously small in a fitted gray blazer.

  Daniela looked relaxed and even seemed to savor memories of her childhood as she recounted her parents’ preoccupation with self-help trends. They had enrolled Daniela and her siblings as kids in a couple of different personal development courses before the family got involved with NXIVM. “I had taken something called Empowerment, which was a program that connected you to your inner child, which I was a child, so it was easy to connect,” Daniela joked.

  Daniela scored highest in her class on a high school entrance test, which put her on course to attend a special international high school that fed students into Mexico’s most competitive college programs. She attended her first year of high school in Monterrey while her parents lived in a small town a couple hours’ drive away. As the weather was starting to heat up in 2002, her parents, Hector and Adriana, came into the city to attend their first NXIVM class at Edgar Boone’s center. Daniela remembers that she and her sister Marianna made use of the air conditioning in their parents’ hotel room while Hector and Adriana spent long hours learning about projection and goal setting from some of NXIVM’s top trainers.

  Daniela testified that she’d wanted to reach even higher than Mexico’s best schools and had earned a scholarship to attend an elite Swiss international school the following September for her second year of high school. She finished her first year at the top of her class once again, with new dreams of a long academic career. “I wanted to study at Harvard. That was my dream, that was my plan,” she testified. “I wanted to do preventive medicine research to help people.”

  Hector was so moved by the NXIVM program that he bought Daniela a sixteen-day intensive as a send-off gift, to help her succeed in Switzerland. Daniela liked that the program was scientific, and apparently based on the teachings of a record holder for the world’s highest IQ. This was different from the wishy-washy empowerment stuff that had come before, she thought.

  Among the trainers flown in to teach Daniela was Lauren Salzman, who had risen up the NXIVM ranks to the position of senior proctor. “She was sharp. She was bubbly. She was smart and she was likable,” Daniela said of her first meeting with Salzman in Monterrey. “I remember being intimidated.”

  In addition to learning that Raniere was the smartest person in the world, Daniela was told he was completely “unified,” a word used in the same way that Scientology uses “clear,” meaning that a person has resolved all psychological imbalances. “It is, in essence, like the endpoint, like the whole reason everybody is trying to go through all of these courses and removal of disintegrations, and so they can reach this nirvana, this point where there’s nothing else to be fixed,” Daniela testified. “And essentially, as I understood it, you no longer react to the external world…. You act, you think and you act.”

  Salzman led a NXIVM intensive module called “The Mission,” which left a huge impression on Daniela’s young mind. “They used a whiteboard with a marker and drew the world. Like a big circle,” Daniela said. “They proceeded to, one by one, describe how every effort that humans are making to better the world is futile.” She learned that it was pointless to try to save the whales or cure cancer or end world hunger, “because we’re just going to keep recreating all of these problems as long as we are disintegrated.”

  “Disintegration” was NXIVM-speak for an emotional or psychological imbalance that could be healed, or “integrated,” through their therapies. Daniela recalled that an “elegant progression” of arguments led her to a conclusion that NXIVM was the only way to resolve disintegrations and make the world a better place. Part of the proof came from a calculation by Raniere that found if current trends continued and humanity didn’t change course by spreading NXIVM’s special technology, the world was going to end in the next ten to fifteen years.

  Sixteen-year-old Daniela absolutely believed it. “It was a bit of a childish idea, perhaps, but I wanted to become a scientist and do all these things to help save the world,” she testified. After her epiphany during “The Mission” module, trainers began paying close attention to Daniela, who was praised as a smart and speedy learner. Everyone was impressed by how quickly she was picking up the concepts, and this flattered her immensely. In a conversation near the end of the three weeks, Salzman suggested that Daniela come to Albany to join the real-life mission.

  Daniela was shocked by the offer. “I was incredibly flattered but also very surprised,” she said. “Like, Oh, thank you, but what do you think I can do to help? I mean, I don’t know anything.”

  After some discussion, Daniela revealed to Salzman that she’d taught herself computer programming, and Salzman put her in touch with Karen Unterreiner, who oversaw administration and IT
for NXIVM in Albany.

  “I didn’t jump on it right away,” Daniela told the Brooklyn courtroom almost two decades later. Discussion continued for weeks, until finally she resolved to take a year off school and do her part to help with the NXIVM mission.

  “I decided, Okay, all right. So I’m going to take a sabbatical,” she said. “A year from now, school is still going to be there.”

  * * *

  —

  DANIELA ARRIVED IN New York in time for V-Week in August 2002. Her parents, who were now NXIVM coaches, came along as well. Though there were plenty of summer-camp-like activities to get lost in, from painting classes to competitive sports, the main focus of everyone’s week was two lectures, called Forums, given by Raniere.

  Daniela’s first impression of Raniere was exactly what she’d expected. He was geeky and a little weird. “He certainly wasn’t normal,” she said. “He was also attentive and very soft spoken, and had like a sweet presence about him.”

  She was surprised to find that Raniere already knew her name. “He said, ‘I hear you’re very smart,’ ” she testified. Her parents, who were by her side for that first interaction, beamed.

  Raniere’s words instantly became unforgettable to Daniela, who valued intelligence above everything. “I’m not one to crush on celebrities, but I mean, given my temperament and what was important to me in life, he was the smartest man in the world. So he was like a rock star. Like that moment was, like, Oh, my god.”

  Daniela was introduced to Unterreiner, who would become her boss. “I thought she was very sweet,” Daniela recalled on the witness stand. “A little mousey, but very sweet.”

  After her parents went back to Mexico, Daniela moved to an apartment close to the NXIVM center that was owned by Edgar Boone, who traveled a lot between Mexico and Albany. The apartment was small and had to be shared with a constant stream of visiting students; Daniela and a NXIVM coach named Loreta Garza were the only long-term occupants.

  Unterreiner showed Daniela the lay of the land. She also handed her a manual on programming languages and installed a demo application on Daniela’s laptop that she could use to test out code. After a few weeks of settling in, Daniela was put to work doing data entry. For several hours every day she entered payment details and enrollment information for new students.

  Daniela felt ashamed that she wasn’t doing more meaningful work, or even using her programming skills. She worried that she’d let her hosts down in some way. Unterreiner never gave her lessons beyond handing over the manual and demo app.

  “I started finding ways to make myself useful, you know, because there was no structure. I was used to the structure of school,” she said. “I would clean refrigerators, I would clean the floors, clean the bathrooms, organize the storage room. I found ways to be useful, like a full workday.”

  Daniela’s older sister, Marianna, had already graduated from high school but was going through a reckless, depressive phase. She was drinking and partying, and was even involved in a break-in at a supermarket owned by the parents of one of her friends. Daniela suggested that Marianna come to Albany to take ethics classes. She could also watch out for Marianna there. “I thought I could take care of her, maybe straighten her out,” she said. “And she could take some classes.”

  Marianna and Daniela’s parents paid for a Howard Johnson hotel room so the two girls could have their own space. Marianna was barely able to get out of bed in the morning, Daniela recalled. “She would get up and go to the center for the classes, but she would come right back.”

  On one of those trips to the NXIVM center, Marianna met Pam Cafritz. “A friendship was born. I saw it, like, overnight,” Daniela said. “They became really close, really fast. At the time, it was explained to me [that] Pam was an athlete and Pam had taken an interest in Marianna as an athlete too.”

  Cafritz bought Marianna tennis gear and court time, and they began training regularly. “I felt happy that she was doing better, because she was doing better. She wasn’t sleeping at the hotel all day anymore,” Daniela recalled. “She had some light back in her.”

  * * *

  —

  DURING HER FIRST year in Albany, Daniela mostly saw Raniere from afar—either at speaking engagements at the center, where he sometimes answered students’ questions, or from the bleachers at late-night volleyball games held multiple times a week at a local gym. After many months had gone by, she finally mustered the courage to approach him and express her disappointment in the work she was doing. “I was very disillusioned,” she said. “I felt like there was no point to me being there and I wanted to go back to school.”

  Raniere asked her some “guiding” questions about her purpose and preferences, and whether she’d taken any time to write out a mission statement. Daniela recalled that he picked up on her academic interests very quickly and began testing her math skills on a whiteboard, scribbling out equations for her to identify. “The first was a quadratic equation, and there was some calculus,” Daniela testified. “I didn’t take calculus in high school. I think he was gauging my level of education.”

  Raniere then gave Daniela a brainteaser, she said. “I don’t remember what the brainteaser was, but it was simple. And I gave him the answer right away, and I thought he was very pleased.” He gave her a second, much harder, problem to solve. Daniela threw her whole heart into solving it quickly.

  “I wanted to impress him, I wanted to show off. I wanted him to know how smart I was,” she said. “I went into one of the rooms in the back. When I want to think, I always need silence and isolation. And I thought really hard and I solved it—I think in a matter of minutes. It was fast, because I caught him before he left.”

  Daniela had proven herself to Raniere, who suggested she see him for more tutoring. Later, Unterreiner told Daniela that she’d been reprimanded by Raniere for not recognizing she had a genius in the admin office.

  * * *

  —

  RANIERE AND DANIELA began exchanging emails regularly, with Daniela still keen to prove her problem-solving skills. “One of the problems was, How many distinct spaces can be created by three cubes that are intersected?” she said. This was one of the questions that had appeared on Raniere’s record-setting IQ test decades before. Though it took longer for Daniela to reach the answer, she got it right once again.

  As the end of Daniela’s one-year “sabbatical” approached, Raniere encouraged her to continue with NXIVM training, suggesting she could achieve more with it than with a traditional education.

  Barbara Bouchey, Raniere’s girlfriend and top recruiter at the time, recalled that Daniela did odd jobs around the community and at some point also took up filming Raniere as he went about his daily activities. She continued working in the admin office with Unterreiner but was increasingly excused to work directly with Raniere.

  This trend away from the admin office reached a decisive moment after Daniela admitted that she’d stolen several thousand dollars from a drawer in Unterreiner’s office. Daniela felt guilty immediately about the impulsive theft and testified that she returned the cash within a day. “I felt everybody could see right through me. My heart was racing. I couldn’t sleep. I felt really bad,” she said. She decided to put it back and confess to Raniere. “He was a person I had started to trust. We were building a friendship.”

  When Daniela told Raniere about the theft, he said he already knew. “I have to say I didn’t believe him,” Daniela testified. “He said that, but I didn’t believe that was true.”

  Raniere and Daniela then had a lengthy conversation about morality and ethics. “Now you know that stealing is a possibility,” Raniere told Daniela. “Now you can leave it that way, or correct it.”

  Daniela said she left the conversation feeling she’d corrected her mistake by returning the money. And she reflected on advice from Raniere that made her feel a little better. “He said this, which I
thought was interesting: ‘You could actually be a better leader of people because now that you know what it’s like to steal and choose not to steal…you can speak to it because you now know more than someone who has never done it.’ ”

  But she soon learned that the incident wouldn’t be resolved so easily. Raniere called Daniela and instructed her to speak with Nancy Salzman and Karen Unterreiner about the situation. He told her that what they had to say might be tough, but he would be there for her in the end.

  What followed was a confusing several weeks of humiliation and mind games Daniela repeatedly described as “hell.” Salzman grilled her on how she would “fix” the transgression but didn’t accept anything she proposed—even paying back interest—as a solution. Salzman told Daniela’s parents about the theft, and a number of other NXIVM members too.

  “I was part of this module and breakout group that was helping me at the time,” Daniela testified. “In the middle of the breakout group, I remember it was Barbara Jeske who was leading the discussion, and at some point she turns to me and said, ‘So, what do you think, Daniela? How does that relate to your stealing the money?’ And I was like, How does she know? Did they tell everyone? And, they did.”

  Daniela estimated that about a dozen people suddenly knew about the stolen money, which filled her with shame. Then, during another heated negotiation with Nancy Salzman, she heard for the first time NXIVM’s name for her actions: suppressive. “That was drilled into me,” Daniela said. “I was wondering to myself maybe—maybe that’s why I stole the money. Because maybe I am a suppressive.”

  As in Scientology, NXIVM used the word “suppressive” to describe people and forces that went against the organization’s interests. In NXIVM, a suppressive person was described as someone who had their wires completely crossed, so that good things made them feel bad and bad things made them feel good.