Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Immediately following their blowout confrontation, Daniela was coached on how to overcome the prideful and destructive tendencies that Raniere said had gotten her into that mess. Nancy Salzman and her coach Karen Unterreiner made regular stops to help Daniela understand the extent of the damage she’d caused and the exhaustive “program” she’d need to undertake to fix it.

  At first Daniela resisted this coaching and continued her romantic relationship with Myers in secret, which only seemed to embolden her handlers, who were directed by Raniere.

  “I knew that it was from Keith because I had been around for three years in his life, and I knew how he worked on women,” Daniela told the jury. “I knew that people were coming to me not because they were concerned and they wanted to know what was going on. They were being sent to me to work on specific things and to get me to do specific things. Namely, go back to Keith, apologize.”

  Though Daniela was certain that her reason for confronting Raniere was innocent and well-meaning, her grasp of what had happened and why became foggy over time. “It was no longer as clean as ‘I no longer want to be with you, I want to be with him,’ ” she said. Her coaches told her that committing to weight loss and writing book reports were also part of her program, and that she owed the whole community a massive debt for her many, still-accumulating transgressions.

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  AT TIMES DANIELA threw herself headfirst into her self-improvement program, fasting for forty days at one point and recording her weight as it dropped from 154.8 to 134.8 pounds. “I became ridiculously attuned to when I drank water, how much I would gain weight, when I went to the bathroom how much I would lose,” she testified.

  Daniela was eventually encouraged to reach out to Raniere by email, though her coach said he might not respond. At trial she estimated that she went on to exchange thousands of emails with Raniere about Ben Myers, her pride, and the “ethical breach” she was now wholeheartedly trying to fix.

  The emails show a young woman writing around and around in circles, trying to anticipate subtle interpersonal dynamics three to twelve steps ahead. In one, she laid out plans to address Myers’s perception of Raniere, Myers’s perception of Daniela, and Myers’s perception of Raniere and Daniela as an “us.”

  “It is my perception he thinks extremely highly of you,” she wrote to Raniere on June 10, 2008. “I have been making a very conscious effort to make sure he has the right idea about you for a long time now. If he is weird around you, the only reason I can think of, and I doubt it is a real reason, is if he thought you were competition.” (At trial, Daniela explained that the “competition” concept was one drilled into her by Unterreiner.)

  In her email, Daniela proposed that she pull back on all “indulgent” interaction with Myers. She wrote that he already knew about her character flaws, listing anger, lying, pride, entitlement, and “sneaking behavior.” She suggested that stopping all interaction might be necessary at some point, but that it could be interpreted as “an order coming from elsewhere (possibly you) not me.”

  In later emails, Raniere riffed on this theme some more: “Part of the problem is a perception that consequences had to be imposed or suggested to you. It should never be a consequence has to be suggested or imposed,” he wrote. “Because you allowed this, any changes are likely to be seen as imposed.”

  On the witness stand Daniela called this “absurd dissection” typical of Raniere’s paranoid, impossible demands. “Part of my breach is that people saw me as a victim,” Daniela explained. “There was a very intense focus on precisely making it look like it wasn’t that way.”

  Raniere responded to Daniela’s self-flagellation with more crude judgment. “I think you have missed a lot. I think you are still trying to balance things,” he wrote. “Do you understand what you have destroyed? What sort of hurt is this? Was/is this in the name of not hurting Ben? Although this might seem disjoint [sic], when was the last time you were with Ben kissing? More? Have you ever had an orgasm with him?”

  Daniela testified that extreme disclosure was a theme throughout her exchanges with Raniere and could be requested of her at any moment, often seeming to come out of nowhere. The interrogation style resembles that of a “security check” in Scientology. In response she would give highly detailed play-by-play accounts of her makeout sessions. She felt shame in having to recount her most intimate moments, but at the time, she thought Raniere was trying to help her untangle her own neuroses in a “clinical,” if unconventional, way. “These are a little hard to read,” Daniela said in court, looking back with a decade of perspective. “In that mindset and just going back there—it’s a little upsetting. This is just a perverted curiosity, or I don’t know what other type of manipulation and control.”

  Raniere reminded Daniela that she wasn’t “pure” anymore—a concept that would come up again with at least one of his other young victims. “I had been a virgin and I had never been with anybody before, so he always acted very proud of that, and when my relationship with Ben started, took place, that was one of the main things that he brought up—that I was no longer pure,” she testified.

  Shaming worked. Raniere succeeded in making Daniela believe she’d caused a lot of damage, and that fixing it would be an enormous, difficult task. She also believed that her complete cooperation was necessary because her being in the country was a liability for NXIVM. But the more Daniela conceded that she’d acted unethically, the more outlandish and punishing Raniere’s vision of justice became. If she was really committed to healing her ethical breach, he told her, she’d want to live in “speechless, monk-like seclusion” until the task was done.

  Throughout this time, Daniela’s family didn’t know the real reason why she was reluctantly swearing off all “entertainment” and worldly connection under Raniere and her coaches’ direction. They wanted her to be a part of the community, to share meals and spend time with them. “It’s like my world closed in on me,” Daniela testified. “I felt like my life was becoming extremely isolated.”

  Daniela was living with her parents and younger sister Camila in a boxy townhouse with pastel yellow siding at the end of a crowded Clifton Park court. It was just a five-minute walk from the Flintlock house and a five-minute drive from the gym where the NXIVM community played volleyball—but Daniela was expected to stay away from both.

  In January 2009, Daniela discovered she’d made a grave mistake by appearing briefly at a party. In unanswered emails to Raniere in which she’d asked permission to attend, she said that people were starting to worry about her and that a short visit would help them understand she was alive and well and busy working toward her goals. Afterward Raniere wrote that she’d caused irreparable damage by reinforcing a “captive” narrative about her breach-healing program.

  “During volleyball, Fluffy [Daniela’s brother] kept on implying I needed to give you permission to go,” Raniere wrote about the party. “I told him it was up to you in a puzzled fashion. This belief of your imprisonment is your direct doing. If you said or had said something like ‘I can’t stand anything until I fixed myself,’ no one would bother you. What you do promote is ‘I love the social life, I love parties, I love the limelight…but I can’t go, I just can’t.’ The translation: the evil ogre Keith is keeping me in the castle.”

  Though Raniere seemed able to will his own version of events into existence by repeating it over and over, his command over Daniela faltered at times. In March 2009 she wrote to him that the “illusion has been shattered” and that she didn’t have the “ethical strength” to do what Raniere insisted was right. “I have been thinking more and more about creating a life for myself, one that does not necessitate your presence,” she wrote. “I feel very trapped/cornered by the way things are right now. I would like to be able to at least sustain myself, pay my rent, pay for my food, pay for my health, etc, but with the restraints imposed on me, I can’t work on anyt
hing else.”

  Daniela anticipated that Raniere would attempt to break her “prideful” line of thinking with further punishment and coaching, just as he’d done hundreds of times before. She knew that expressing desire for anything other than Raniere was grounds for more discipline, and yet she repeated that she wanted to leave Albany and start an independent life.

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  RANIERE’S NEXT MOVE was to get Daniela’s family to sign on as disciplinarians. Raniere and his inner circle stressed that Daniela’s parents were part of her upbringing and therefore bore some responsibility for her ethical breach.

  Daniela’s family still didn’t know about her sexual relationship with Raniere, so they couldn’t understand what had actually caused the conflict in the first place. They still believed him to be one of the world’s most ethical thinkers, able to spot honor and injustice where others couldn’t. With the help of his inner circle, Raniere convinced them that it was Daniela who had lied, manipulated, stolen, destroyed, and played mind games with them by pretending to be a victim.

  “I remember getting really angry all the time,” Daniela testified, “and telling everybody, ‘You don’t understand.’ Telling my parents, ‘You don’t understand anything. You don’t understand anything about this.’…There were a few things that happened that made it very clear for me that anything I told my parents, they were not gonna believe me…. Now they were on Keith’s team.”

  With Daniela’s parents involving themselves, the situation escalated quickly. They took away her phone, computer, books, personal documents, and even her bed. “They told me I need a consequence because I spent my entire life being very indulgent and destructive without consequences, so it was winter and they locked me out of the house.”

  Daniela said she was in shock. She wrestled with the door handle, certain the door couldn’t actually be locked. “I couldn’t believe it, so I kept knocking on the door because it was cold outside. I didn’t have anything on me. I had no money, I had no food.”

  For days, as she went without basic necessities, Daniela was left with her own thoughts. She thought about how her own parents were acting out Raniere’s cruel instructions and not listening to her. But before she could think about how to repair her relationship with her family, she had to find food and shelter. “I went to a laundromat and a man thought that I was a homeless person and he gave me a five-dollar bill,” Daniela recalled. “With that I bought the cheapest snacks that I could find so they would last a long time. I just kept walking and checking back into the house to see if they would let me in.”

  Daniela checked back repeatedly over multiple days before her parents finally allowed her inside again. She was grateful just to be home once more and told her parents she was sorry. At trial she said she couldn’t recall her exact words, but that they were “all the right things.”

  Karen Unterreiner and Daniela’s mother began coaching her on how to apologize to Raniere. “I remember my mom saying, ‘If it’s an apology and it’s a sincere one, that’s healing your breach because that’s where it starts,’ ” she testified. She was instructed to visit Raniere at his executive library to apologize.

  Daniela was allowed to walk over unsupervised, which she recalls was unusual given how closely she was being monitored at the time. “I knocked on the door and Keith opened the door,” she said. He was expecting her. “I knew what I had to do.” She looked at Raniere, but she couldn’t find the words. “I just could not apologize. I just had nothing to apologize about,” she recalled. “So he closed the door and I left.”

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  FROM THEN ON, Daniela’s punishment seemed inescapable. It was hard to imagine how it could get any worse, but Daniela suspected she would soon find out. “I was begging to go back to Mexico. I had given up,” she said. “I told my parents I just want a simple life.”

  Her mother, Adriana, seemed to think Daniela had a point. Maybe it would be good for her to return to their home country and earn a living for herself. Daniela would need some help from the family to get there. Because she was undocumented, she couldn’t board a plane, and she’d need her Mexican documents to apply for jobs in her home country. A ride south, her birth certificate, and maybe some cash to get settled—that was all Daniela wanted, more than anything else in the world.

  But Raniere talked Adriana out of assisting her daughter with this plan. In a recorded conversation on March 3, 2010, he compared Daniela’s ethical breach to hitting a toddler with a car. Adriana’s English comprehension wasn’t as good as that of her bilingual daughters—“She doesn’t have an extensive vocabulary,” Daniela testified—and so Marianna, the only other person there when Raniere spoke with Adriana, translated for her mother. Raniere said that Daniela asking for help leaving the country was equivalent to a child killer asking to go on a vacation. He said she was acting without any conscience or care. It’s not clear whether Adriana understood that Raniere was repeatedly using the dead toddler as an analogy. She had no idea what Daniela’s ethical breach actually entailed, and it seems possible that she believed her daughter had hurt or killed someone. The conversation ended when Daniela’s father, Hector, arrived and reminded the family about a meeting they had to attend with Nancy Salzman and Karen Unterreiner.

  Nancy’s daughter, Lauren, was also brought in to help deal with the “Dani problem.” Raniere called Lauren and told her about Daniela’s misbehavior—that she was stealing food from her family, wasn’t doing work she’d committed to, and had gone off her weight-loss program and gained forty pounds. “What he proposed,” Lauren testified, “was that Dani be given an ultimatum that she go in her room with no distractions and come up with a plan for how to fix this or be sent back to Mexico.”

  Lauren asked Raniere why he wanted her to take on this project. Raniere framed it as an essential growth opportunity, a way to learn how to deal with a manipulative and sociopathic personality. The project, he said, would prepare her for future high-stakes parenting situations—for instance if a kidnapper called asking for a ransom. Lauren was still hanging on to her belief that Raniere would be the one to make her a mother. As she understood it, she had to take on the Dani project to prove herself as a worthy parent.

  “I thought that Keith understood everything about people’s psychodynamics,” Lauren Salzman said of her belief in Raniere at the time. “If Keith observed something and I couldn’t see it, it was because I didn’t understand and needed to learn something.” Raniere told Salzman that Daniela’s family felt responsible for her out-of-control behavior and that they saw seclusion in a room as the best option. “He said the family was concerned that she might extend the time in the room or view it as a type of vacation,” Lauren recalled. “And so in order to make it less comfortable and to inspire her to want to get out of the room quickly, they were going to remove anything comfortable from the room.”

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  ABOUT A WEEK later, Daniela’s family sat her down with Lauren Salzman and Karen Unterreiner. Lauren recalled that the family appeared sad and ashamed. Daniela testified that they presented her with a “horrifying” idea.

  “Listen, you can’t go back to Mexico. If you go back to Mexico it’s on our terms,” Daniela said she was told. She had only one other option: stay in her bedroom with only a pen and some paper until her ethical breach was healed. “If you are not willing to do that, then you go back to Mexico but not on your terms,” they said, according to Daniela. “You lose your family, you go with nothing.”

  Though her family would remain under the same roof if she chose to isolate, Daniela was terrified by the uncertain end date. Her room had already been stripped of furniture, photos, books, and everything else that reminded her she was home. “No way,” Daniela said. “There’s no way I was going into that room, because I had no idea what I had to do to heal my ethical breach. I had been trying to heal my ethical
breach for years.”

  She was given one day to think about it. She didn’t want to lose her family, because, she said, they were the only link she had to anything in the world. She tried desperately to think of a third option.

  “I remember I walked to Walmart with a few cents, and from a pay phone, I called Ben,” she testified. “They had taken my phone, they had taken my computer. I didn’t have anybody in the world except my family. I thought Ben, Ben will get me out of here.”

  She hadn’t talked to him for a long time, but Daniela knew Ben’s number by heart. When she dialed it, he didn’t pick up. “I waited and I waited and I tried again and he did not pick up,” she said. “I went back home and I slept on it and the next day, I realized I had no choice.”

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  THE RULES OF the room were not negotiable. The door wasn’t locked and the family brought her three meals a day, but Daniela wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone. She had no books or reading material, no music, and her parents and siblings made every effort not to show their faces. At mealtimes Daniela would hear a knock at the door, but by the time she opened it there was just a plate on the floor. She shared a bathroom with her family and was allowed to write them notes, but they agreed not to respond.

  Lauren Salzman was the only person permitted to speak with Daniela face to face. She showed up on the second day and reminded Daniela about the commitment she’d made and the consequences she’d encounter if she didn’t follow through. Daniela asked questions and listened for clues about how to fix her ethical breach. She thought that if she wrote down the right combination of words, either an apology or an ethical breach plan, that would be the key to her freedom.