Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  “I definitely felt like a veil of fog had been lifted: I had more clarity, I was making better decisions, I understood people better—I thought this was the key to success and happiness,” Edmondson told me. “By the end of the five days I thought, ‘This was amazing. All my friends need this. I want to bring this to Canada.’ ”

  Edmondson learned that she could get the cost of her first intensive back if she brought in three new students within three months of taking the course. She referred her boyfriend Tony, her mother, and her actor friend Nicki Clyne, who was part of Edmondson’s Artist’s Way circle and working on the set of Battlestar Galactica with Grace Park. Edmondson used the money to invest in more classes, knowing that this would help her advance up the ranks and eventually make a commission. Because NXIVM didn’t yet have a center in Canada, she commuted south of the border to Seattle to earn her first sashes and stripes. Edmondson and Mark Vicente couldn’t help noticing how middle-aged and “schlubby” the NXIVM vibe had been when they first joined, so they set out to invite young people they’d actually want to hang out with. With sales help from Barbara Bouchey, Edmondson would take on new recruiting responsibilities, including renting hotel spaces, photocopying course materials at Staples, and burning DVDs for every workshop or retreat that happened in Vancouver.

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  ACTOR CHAD KROWCHUK still remembers the curious way talk of NXIVM buzzed through his social network. He first heard good reviews from Edmondson over dinner one night, and then from his acting friends Kristin Kreuk and Mark Hildreth a few weeks later. Krowchuk didn’t know what to make of all his friends’ hyperbolic gushing; he assumed there must be a catch. But his longtime girlfriend, Smallville actor Allison Mack, would eventually convince him to make the trip from Vancouver to attend a five-day intensive with her in Albany.

  Krowchuk is blond, with a worried intensity about him. He’s often cast as the wide-eyed dork who’s underestimated by an alpha male protagonist. Mack, on the other hand, was known for swooning eagerness and golly-gee smiles. Her “sparkle,” both on screen and off, put her miles out of Krowchuk’s league, many thought. That he was from Alberta and she from California only added to his unspoken underdog status.

  Both Krowchuk and Mack were former child actors who’d found each other in their early twenties and built a steady live-in relationship around their busy schedules. Krowchuk was working at Starbucks and bussing tables at a local restaurant in between acting gigs. He wanted to find more time to develop his career as a visual artist. Meanwhile, Mack was a household name among a certain demographic of teens, playing Superman’s best friend on CW’s Smallville, a teen superhero show watched by millions.

  The couple had been living together for about three years when NXIVM “became a thing” in their group of friends, Krowchuk says, thanks in large part to Sarah Edmondson’s hustle. Clyne also got to work enrolling her own network of Vancouver actors, and they made a point of regularly getting together without the usual social crutch of drugs and alcohol. “We really prided ourselves on that—how we could have fun without being under the influence of anything,” Edmondson says.

  Edmondson was celebrated within NXIVM for bringing coveted TV stars into the fold. “It wasn’t so much a pressure to recruit celebrities; it was just kind of a whim within the company. Like, ‘Oh, how great, we’ve got a VIP,’ ” she told me for a Vice story in 2018. “We wouldn’t get bonus points per se, but it was something that was acknowledged as a good thing, because it would grow the mission and grow the company if we had whoever endorsing…. They were bragged about very openly.”

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  ALLISON MACK ATTENDED a weekend retreat in late 2006. The NXIVM inner circle had come to the West Coast for the women-only event, where they rolled out the VIP treatment for her. It was like an intensive, but Raniere’s new “Jness” curriculum was specifically tailored to women’s experiences, and named to evoke the sound of female essence. Nancy Salzman facilitated with help from her daughter Lauren, and Sara Bronfman attended. Jness taught women to examine why they entered relationships, and suggested that dependency and inner deficiency often play a role. “By the end of the weekend, Lauren and Allison were like best friends,” Susan Dones, who ran NXIVM’s Seattle center, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018. The next day, Mack accepted an invitation to fly in the Bronfman jet to meet Raniere and the inner circle in Albany, where she stayed for a few weeks. And in April 2007 she attended her first five-day seminar on a yacht docked in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour.

  Chad Krowchuk says that at first he resisted Mack’s invitations to join her as a member of NXIVM, which led to a few arguments. He was surprised by how quickly she’d dropped all skepticism. “That was the part that scared me the most,” he says of Mack’s sudden shift in perspective. “Before, we had conversations about it, and we both thought it seemed kind of weird and creepy. I don’t necessarily know if she thought it was creepy, but we agreed it seemed a little messed up.”

  Krowchuk put aside his discomfort and attended a five-day intensive in Albany. “I met some very powerful human beings,” he said of his first impressions of the NXIVM community. “As in, controlling a lot of money, intellect, and influence.”

  Mack started a personal blog where she recorded all the new questions she was grappling with about meaning and purpose and personal connection. She was twenty-four years old, coming to terms with her own fame and attempting to foster a deeper sense of self-awareness. “I allow my insecurities to dictate the things I do in my life,” she wrote in an April 2007 post. “I suppress the things within me that I think are ‘bad’ and then spend my time and energy punishing myself for even having these flaws in the first place. I feel like these habits are incredibly destructive and violent toward my own growth and potential.”

  Mack was eternally optimistic, constantly ending correspondence with multiple exclamation points. She loved Miranda July, Harry Potter, John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and inspirational Gandhi quotes, and she wanted to be around people who shared this romantic, starry-eyed worldview.

  Both Allison Mack and Sarah Edmondson saw this kind of idealism in the NXIVM coursework—Be your best self and help others do the same!—but Krowchuk was on the fence about it. He thought the hand-clapping and sashes were weird, and the workshops had an intense vibe that reminded him of bad acting classes. But the people he met in Albany were impressive and kind, and they gave a name to things he didn’t yet have a vocabulary for.

  The courses taught that everyone was responsible for their own reactions to the outside world. That meant a NXIVM coach could turn around just about any bad situation and blame the student for their flawed interpretation. “If a course like this is in the hands of somebody who means well, it’s harmless,” Krowchuk says. “But I always felt like it would be really shitty if it was used in a negative way.”

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  NXIVM SHIFTED KROWCHUK and Mack’s social landscape. The classes discouraged students from revealing details of the patent-pending “technology” to anyone who hadn’t paid for it. That meant not being able to share their exciting journey with the uninitiated. Krowchuk preferred to keep a blend of industry and non-industry friends—those who knew about NXIVM and those who didn’t, or didn’t care for it. Others started to break away from their old lives in favor of surrounding themselves with like-minded people. Edmondson’s Artist’s Way group was split down the middle. Half of the women were on board, and the other half thought it was kind of culty.

  Having a dinner party with NXIVM friends meant constantly dissecting your fears and insecurities. If somebody said they didn’t like sharing the food on their plate, for example, other group members would chime in with probing questions in an effort to overcome the block. What would you lose if you stopped the behavior? Is refusing to share holding you back? Needless to say, it wasn’t a welcome conversational style for e
veryone.

  Krowchuk could see some of his friends overcoming their insecurities, like Allison’s Smallville costar Kristin Kreuk, who battled career-stifling shyness. “I felt like I related more to Kristin than anyone there. I could see what the appeal was,” says Krowchuk. But other acting friends pivoted away from the entertainment industry, like Battlestar Galactica’s Nicki Clyne. “Nicki—I know she was the first example of somebody who had a decent acting career, she was doing quite well, and then she took the courses and went, ‘Fuck it, I want to do this thing instead,’ ” Krowchuk recalls. Friends saw a new self-righteous streak in Clyne, who would sometimes point out her peers’ ethical shortcomings. At the time, Krowchuk thought there must have been a greater good he couldn’t see, and reserved judgment.

  Mack believed NXIVM was furthering her education, which had been cut short by her acting career. “I noticed recently that I have a tendency to say I am stupid,” she wrote in a 2007 blog post. “I became very comfortable chalking things up to the fact that I don’t have a ‘proper education.’ ” To show her progress, Mack shared her goals with her online fans by writing about them in her blog. “I will be directing episode 20 of Smallville this year, and I am so intimidated!” she wrote. “Ignoring the voice inside my head that is screaming ‘You have no clue how to do this!’ has definitely been a challenge.”

  Allison was invited into NXIVM’s inner circle very quickly, and in the beginning Krowchuk was able to tag along. But he knew he couldn’t go much further with the coursework. “Allison paid for a lot of my courses,” he says. “I would slowly pick away at paying her back, but I couldn’t afford to do it. Most normal people couldn’t afford to do this.”

  All told, Krowchuk says he probably spent between $20,000 and $30,000 on NXIVM courses, and by then, he and Allison were already on the verge of breaking up. Their friends could see it coming; one heard Mack speculate that she might be asexual. Mack and Krowchuk had different ideas about where their lives were headed, and around 2009 they ended things for good.

  Sarah Edmondson was nearing a similar crossroads in her relationship and career. She was pushing harder than ever to advance in the company, and in July 2009 she was finally rewarded with a license to open a permanent space in Vancouver with Mark Vicente. Under the guidance of her NXIVM coach, Edmondson split from her boyfriend and fully immersed herself in work. This was a common story among women in NXIVM’s upper ranks, as boyfriends and husbands were often interpreted to be standing in the way of success. Like Mack, Edmondson was feeling the gravitational pull of Albany and began making trips there several times a year. Clyne and Mack went on to live in Albany full time, but continued inviting their Vancouver networks into the fold.

  That meant the stage was set for Vancouver to outpace all the American centers—even Albany—in attracting younger creative types to NXIVM.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  An Ethical Breach

  In many ways, Daniela was the perfect candidate to act as accomplice in Keith Raniere’s secret mission. She was a fast learner and a capable computer programmer. But more importantly, she didn’t “cause problems.”

  Initially she seemed at ease with the one-sided sexual arrangement Raniere had introduced during the week of her eighteenth birthday. Whereas the other women in his life would “go off” (Raniere’s words) on emotional tirades supposedly propelled by their issues of jealousy and pride, Daniela obliged him with sexual favors and seemed content to watch other women constantly seek his attention and approval.

  “I felt I was Keith’s friend,” she said on the witness stand at Raniere’s trial in 2019. “I felt like he could be with women in front of me; I wasn’t jealous. I really wasn’t.” When asked to name the women who were regularly part of Raniere’s sex life, Daniela testified that she knew of at least eleven, including her own sister Marianna.

  Daniela had accepted that some kind of inverse relationship existed between intelligence and adherence to social norms. What Raniere lacked in social skills or conventional attractiveness he made up for in brain power. Daniela herself didn’t seem to fit into her own theory: she had nerd credentials and was also a striking young woman with a collection of miniskirts. But the momentum of her own ambition and idealism pulled her away from a typical young person’s social life and thrust her deeper into Raniere’s.

  This combination of forces made Daniela a regular fixture at the Flintlock house in 2005. “I was spending almost every waking moment I had there,” she said.

  Marianna was also a regular presence, making a home at the Flintlock house in Pamela Cafritz’s room. The rest of their family’s living situation was more complicated. The youngest siblings, Camila and Adrian, had come to Albany for the 2003–2004 school year but lived separately in shared NXIVM homestays. Camila was placed with Monica Duran, another transplant from Mexico, and her roommates, while Adrian lived with Mark Vicente and other men. Eventually their parents bought a family home in Clifton Park—but not before most of the kids ran into visa troubles. NXIVM had always offered help with visas and advised against leaving the United States even to renew their tourist status, but the help never seemed to materialize.

  The Flintlock house in its natural state was a “pigsty,” Daniela testified. When Cafritz hired a cleaning service, workers left a note saying they refused to deal with the mess that had greeted them. Daniela took it upon herself to make the space more livable. In the process she became a fly on the wall for more of Raniere’s high-stakes conversations, whether it was about his commodities trading, the legal cases NXIVM was initiating, or illicit spying activities.

  Daniela testified about the inner circle’s many attempts to hack into enemies’ email and bank accounts. On a typical morning, Kristin Keeffe would come downstairs in her bathrobe to make coffee and start the day, knowing that Raniere would be waiting for her to report on various information-gathering missions. In the beginning these kitchen strategy sessions would mostly focus on cult educator Rick Alan Ross or Raniere’s ex Toni Natalie, but they expanded to include others over the years. According to Daniela, Keeffe would propose some next steps and Raniere would choose among the options.

  “He would ask, ‘How much is this, how much is that?’ ” Daniela recalled on the witness stand. By the mid-2000s, Raniere’s attention had turned to the Kristin Snyder incident. He was interested in accessing Snyder’s email account, years after the NXIVM student had gone missing in February 2003. Daniela recalled that Raniere had a theory about her disappearance he wanted to test by reading her inbox. He believed the disappearance had been a plot to create negative publicity for the company, and that Snyder was alive and in hiding.

  On the stand, Daniela explained that Keeffe was Raniere’s legal liaison, and that part of her role entailed digging up dirt on enemies NXIVM could potentially face in court. It was a proactive job, which meant that Keeffe sought the services of private investigators who might be willing to go around U.S. privacy laws to get passwords for email accounts. With access to Snyder’s email, Raniere wanted to prove that she hadn’t committed suicide.

  From what she’d already seen at NXIVM, Daniela was familiar with this kind of plotting bordering on criminal conspiracy. What stood out most for her wasn’t the hacking plot but the price tag Keeffe attached to it: a steep $24,000 for access to one email account. “I remember it was a very large amount of money they were willing to pay for a password,” she said. “That was the shocking part for me.” And no wonder: in all the odd jobs Daniela had performed around the NXIVM community since she was sixteen—cleaning, cooking, and babysitting for handfuls of cash—the most she’d ever earned was $3,000, also paid in cash, for building a website for Pam Cafritz.

  Daniela was soon enlisted to find a new, less costly source of assistance for NXIVM’s investigative needs. In her search to save Raniere money on hacking, she first reached out to friends who had computer programming skills. One friend passed her on to a software
wizard who called himself the Dark Lord. “I sent one of the addresses to the Dark Lord and he wrote back and asked me if the email address belonged to me,” Daniela recalled. “I told him very honestly: I said no. And he said, ‘Then I can’t help you.’ ”

  Hacking would soon become a major theme in Daniela’s conversations with Raniere. She began reading forums on the subject and downloading software from the internet. “I played with them and I started testing, and pretty quickly I zoned in on a strategy that I thought would be successful,” she said. “I thought I could, in all likelihood, get a password—hack a computer and get a password.”

  At first Daniela saw hacking as being at odds with NXIVM’s stated mission of raising the ethics of the world, and she said as much to Raniere. “How do we get to do this?” she asked him. “Why are we breaking the rules? I didn’t understand.”

  Raniere addressed her concerns with a thought experiment—something he said was derived from game theory. As “good guys” with world-changing ideals, NXIVM would be limited by their own ethics. “We’re going to be good people, and there are certain things that we’re not willing to do because they’re wrong and they’re unethical,” Raniere said. “So we have a certain number of options of choices we can take. And then you have these bad people, the suppressives, the people who are out to get us and destroy the good things in this world,” he continued. “These people are going to do everything we’re going to do and then more. They’re going to break the rules and do illegal things and destroy. These bad people have all the options in the world and we have only these options.”