Don't Call it a Cult
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WHEN MAJA MILJKOVIC started climbing the course ladder, NXIVM was going through a period of rapid expansion and innovation. Vancouver’s community was especially vibrant, well on its way to two hundred regularly attending students. The inner circle in Albany could see there was a new cohort of young people primed and eager to help expand the curriculum into the realms of fitness, ethical media, and creative arts.
As Edmondson’s self-help classes filled up with more local actors, conversation turned to the possibility that NXIVM would one day offer formal acting classes. Miljkovic was particularly keen on the idea, pursuing it with Edmondson in the summer of 2013. If the company was developing an acting curriculum, she wanted to be part of it.
Miljkovic was twenty-six when she first visited Albany for V-Week in August 2013. There she met Raniere, who didn’t fit the vision of the wise, nurturing teacher she’d had in her head. Other students had gushed about his “magnetic” presence, but standing in front of her, he appeared unimpressive and a bit robotic. “I was like, You’re kind of weird. Why do people think you’re cute?” she says.
But Miljkovic quickly came around to thinking Raniere was at least “deep.” He invited her to share whatever she was struggling with and listened carefully while she tried to articulate whatever was on her mind. His advice sounded philosophical and tinged with an urgency that suggested NXIVM really needed her to succeed.
Raniere seemed to know already that Miljkovic was interested in a NXIVM program that catered to actors. One night, during a gathering at Allison Mack’s house in Clifton Park, he told her that he could use her help in testing out a new program called “Ultima.”
It was a big deal to be invited to Ultima. The “tech” was supposed to apply to all the creative and athletic fields Miljkovic and her peers were excited about. Miljkovic said she’d love to be a part of it but that she had to go back to Canada.
“Keith was like, ‘Why? Why don’t you want to stay?’ ” she recalls.
Raniere wouldn’t let her say no. He was pulling out the “specify, isolate, overcome” routine.
“What would you need to stay?” he asked. “Money, a visa, a house—what if we could get you all of that?”
Miljkovic looked around the room and for a second felt starstruck. Here she was at Allison Mack’s house, with Mark Hildreth and Kristanna Loken, two actors with exceedingly long IMDb pages, being asked to help start a new acting class. By the end of the night, Raniere had convinced her to stay in Albany to help make the NXIVM acting curriculum a reality.
The aim of Ultima was to “put your emotions, thoughts, and physical body on a slider scale,” Miljkovic explains. It was like being a sound engineer, turning your own feelings, thoughts, and physicality up and down on command. Richard Bandler, founder of neuro-linguistic programming, told audiences they could access a similar “control panel” in their brains. “That meant, if you were an athlete, you could turn down your emotions all the way—have zero feelings—and have your body be all the way up to 100 percent physicality,” she says. An actor, on the other hand, might want to dial physicality to 80 percent, thinking to 5 percent, and emotions to 90 percent.
Miljkovic learned that the Ultima curriculum testing would start up in December and run for six months. She called her boyfriend in Vancouver and told him she was going to remain in Albany. “He was not supportive of the fact that I had made the decision by myself to stay in Albany without him,” she says. They broke up, which gave her one less reason to return to Vancouver.
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MAJA MILJKOVIC MOVED in with Allison Mack and Mark Vicente and was enlisted to help shoot interviews for a few of Vicente’s film projects. Since 2007 Vicente had been working on a documentary that aimed to debunk so-called lies about Raniere; he’d already amassed thousands of hours of footage. Miljkovic drew up questions for on-camera sessions with Sara and Clare Bronfman, Pamela Cafritz, and other high-ranking execs. She was paid $15 an hour, usually in credit toward her next class.
Miljkovic grew close to Mack, Vicente, and his new partner, actor Bonnie Piesse, whom he married in 2011. On Miljkovic’s twenty-seventh birthday, Mack threw a party for her. “She was like, ‘I know you like to drink, so for this one time we’ll have booze in the house,’ ” Miljkovic recalls.
Though Miljkovic had arrived in the United States on a tourist visa, everyone around her seemed confident that Clare Bronfman would help sort out her work status. (NXIVM’s proposed visa strategy would later result in Miljkovic’s short-lived marriage to motivational speaker Marc Elliot. The marriage ended soon after a U.S. customs investigation in 2014.) The company seemed to have a number of new causes on the go, from peacekeeping in Mexico to research about Tourette’s syndrome. The important thing for the time being was to keep busy and focused—doing the kind of creative work she actually wanted to do full time.
But despite her early enthusiasm, she couldn’t help noticing signs that the NXIVM community wasn’t as forward-thinking as it seemed on paper. One of the first glimpses of this came during one of Raniere’s signature late-night volleyball games. Going to watch Keith play volleyball was a big deal for many, but not for Miljkovic. Allison Mack roped her into attending, and she immediately recoiled at the scene. “It was just women sitting on the sidelines in their little cliques, and only men playing volleyball,” she says. It was a cartoonish performance of masculinity and femininity, with young women seemingly losing their minds in excitement every time Raniere connected with the ball. “I was like, Eww. There’s nothing I hate more than all-male sport with all the women cheering for them.”
Miljkovic liked volleyball well enough, if she was able to play it. But in Raniere’s universe, apparently women just weren’t good enough players to compete on his court. Miljkovic knew of just one woman, a former high school volleyball star, who was allowed to break the unspoken gender divide and play with Keith’s “pros.” If enough “amateurs” showed up, women would sometimes join a second game off to the side. But the real game people came to watch was between Keith and his regular dude competitors. This was accepted by nearly everyone who attended.
When Miljkovic asked why it was only men on the court one night, Raniere said it was men who always showed up. They brought the equipment, set up the nets, and took everything down at the end of the night. Women were less consistent in their attendance and skill, he told her. That’s why they didn’t get to play.
Miljkovic pushed back. She said she had the same level of skill as the rest of them and wasn’t interested in the “amateur” side of the gym. So, as the game continued, she was made to prove herself in a series of drills. A friend named Mike spiked the ball at her on the sidelines and she hustled to return it, not exactly eager to jump through more hoops or be the target of more doubts. The strange side spectacle lasted until Raniere deemed her capable enough to join the real game.
The gameplay itself was anticlimactic; Miljkovic remembers virtually nothing about the teams or the score. “He let me play for two games,” she says, “and then Keith was like, ‘You should work on this, and next time do this.’ ” Raniere wasn’t the best athlete—far from it, according to Miljkovic—but he was quick to enforce the rules. His coaching felt like being publicly berated, which made her fume in silence. “I was like, Fuck that. You missed half of your own shots, buddy.”
It seemed straight-up sexist to exclude women from a recreational game of volleyball, but it wasn’t enough to make her question NXIVM’s world-changing credentials.
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BY THE TIME Ultima got started, another fifty students had paid their own way to Albany just to be part of the teaching experiment that would spawn acting, journalism, and personal training spinoffs. Many of these students were from Vancouver with a specific interest in writing and acting. Some of the women would stay in Albany permanently, anchored by secret relationships with Raniere.
One of the exercises she remembers was called “Masks,” in which students would usually pair up and face each other, then one actor would mirror the other’s facial expressions as closely as they could. “From imitating their face,” Miljkovic explains, “you would try to feel what they may be feeling.” The theory behind this went against the grain of contemporary acting: if an actor has an emotional scene to get through, many acting coaches will advise them to call up a memory that evokes those strong emotions and let their inner feelings animate their face and body. And yet “Keith argued you could do the opposite,” she says. His students began with face and body language, then attempted to feel it on the inside. It was an “outside in” way of feeling emotion rather than “inside out.”
When Miljkovic wasn’t with the actors, she often joined a group of about twenty in Nancy Salzman’s basement for “Ultima Ethical Media” sessions, where they discussed journalism, media spin, and how to counter it. The downstairs space, outfitted with a cluster of chairs around a table, was sometimes called the “war room.” Many NXIVM students from the acting and fitness groups attended these sessions, which were also captured on video. Raniere lectured on writing techniques and the separation of “data” and “emotion.”
NXIVM’s flagship classes already taught the separation of different classes of data, categorizing most traditional reporting as “hearsay” or “once removed.” The strongest source of data, according to Raniere’s teaching, was firsthand experience that was consistent and verified by others. By this measure, the journalists who wrote about NXIVM were failing at their jobs because they lacked the firsthand experience of taking courses. They were just circulating secondhand information.
In 2014, Rosa Laura Junco, whose family owned a media empire in Mexico, became the CEO of a NXIVM-inspired media criticism website called The Knife of Aristotle, later shortened to The Knife. Raniere said a knife could be a life-saving instrument or a murder weapon, and that the media could be harnessed as a similar tool. He encouraged Miljkovic and others to cut through the noise and separate truth from fiction. Actor Nicki Clyne became one of the site’s main coordinators, teaching new writers to dissect articles appearing in the Albany Times Union and other news outlets.
Leading up to the site’s launch, Miljkovic practiced highlighting spin words, separating data, and rating the reliability of various news sources. She also helped prepare a script to enroll new contributors, who were asked to pay $2,000 for four weeks of training. “Who here would like access to news which reflects the truth of what is happening in your world? News that adheres to ethical standards?” read the presentation script. “Currently whatever is published by media is forever stored as human history. But media does not have strong standards. It’s subjective, skewed, and being spun a certain way…. When we consume this skewed media it distorts our perception of reality.”
The pitch went on to say that Keith Raniere had guided the development of a news analysis “product” that would raise media standards “forever.” “What we need is scientific media. Media with high standards and a code of ethics which goes through a rigorous, verifiable analysis to ensure it really is what it says it is.”
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WHEN THE ETHICAL media group wasn’t talking about news or data collection, the lectures turned to creative writing.
“We have to indoctrinate readers,” Raniere told a room of aspiring writers, including Clyne, Mack, and Miljkovic. He talked about using conditioning techniques to play with associations in readers’ heads, claiming that someone with the right indoctrination skills could invoke a specific voice or accent just by typing in italics or a different font color. At one point he launched into a monologue about hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming, adding that a skilled hypnotist could communicate messages “totally outside the person’s awareness.”
When we met in 2018, Miljkovic didn’t immediately recall Raniere’s lecturing about the power of hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming. She’d attended and filmed what seemed like hundreds of hours of sessions, but the closest thing she could remember was Raniere making a party trick out of putting senior counselor Barbara Jeske’s Maltese puppy to sleep using a sleepy expression in his eyes. He then turned his “magical sleep eyes” on his students. “He was trying to do that to a bunch of us, and I was behind the camera,” Miljkovic says. “Like when I yawn, you want to yawn—that’s what he’s trying to do.”
There was good reason to yawn. Students like Miljkovic were staying up late doing “ethical media” prep for what would become The Knife and then getting up at five a.m. to attend yoga sessions that would eventually become the basis of yet another new NXIVM curriculum. Many women were also going on late-night, one-on-one walks with Raniere to talk about their own business ideas. There was so much overlap between the acting, journalism, fitness, and creative projects that students would often sacrifice sleep to absorb as much of it as humanly possible.
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EACH NEW CURRICULUM and company was an opportunity to bring in more money and people. All the successful ones followed a similar recruitment and pay structure, with 10 percent of dues going back to their “philosophical founder.” This was the case for Jness, the women’s group Raniere founded, and a men’s group called the Society of Protectors. Both groups charged a $50 monthly membership in exchange for guided discussions about femininity and masculinity, plus extra for intensives. These organizations were seen as successful, long-lasting expansions of the NXIVM universe, following a familiar multi-level marketing blueprint. Like all recruitment-based businesses, they were not profitable for most members. Studies have found fewer than one percent of multi-level marketing participants make any money.
But Raniere had a more ambitious plan for Ultima and reserved the biggest potential price tag for special acting classes led by a real Hollywood actor. After six months of class development, Allison Mack became the de facto leader of Ultima Acting—eventually renamed the Source—but not without a power struggle. At the time, Mack, who’d advanced only to a yellow sash, had taken to regularly meeting in private with Raniere. Higher-ranking students who’d put in years of work recruiting and funding new projects didn’t necessarily have the same access to Vanguard.
Looking back on those classes, one participant remembers that there wasn’t actually a lot of acting going on. Raniere, who would lecture the group on the importance of theater throughout history, openly acknowledged his limited knowledge of acting in a half-hour conversation with Mack meant to advertise the program, posted to YouTube in 2017.
“I come from a non-acting background. You could say I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he tells Mack across a round table. “It comes from a behaviorist, humanist sort of practical philosophical background dealing with communication, dealing with all sorts of things relating to the psychodynamics of people.” In this video, shot in front of a stone fireplace, Raniere stresses that the key to “authentic” acting lies in unlocking the parts of oneself that are usually locked away in a “dungeon.”
In the classes, former students told me, this dungeon was also called “the box”—where we hide aspects of ourselves we don’t want to examine. It was a concept that took some actors to very dark places. Students were told they should be able to find it within themselves to embody the worst human traits they could imagine. One former student says this included trying to feel the lust of a child rapist. “Like you need to come to a place where you could play that character—the thing you hate most in the world—including pedophiles,” Amy (not
her real name) told me.
It took me a couple of tries to actually process what Amy was telling me. Somehow it was worse than I imagined. “We spent a whole day on how you should be able to rape a baby,” she said. “So put yourself in a place where you could identify with a pedophile who rapes babies. If you can’t, it means something is ‘in the box’ for you. It means it hits too close to home, so you won’t go there. If it’s in the box, it’s because you know that trait well, meaning you have that trait within you.”
Amy had a sibling who was abused by a grandparent, so she was immediately horrified by the exercise, but she didn’t want to say anything for fear that the group would accuse her of being a pedophile herself. She withdrew after class to try sorting out her feelings privately. Facing typical audition fears this was not.
The acting classes were another forum in which Raniere suggested that love was something that could be measured only by pain and sacrifice. “It’s not that love doesn’t contain moments of happiness or moments of joy,” he says to Mack in the same 2017 video, as her eyes well up with emotion, “but the way we have a weight to our love, or understand love itself or the magnitude, is through pain. When we feel love, we feel pain. And the depth of pain we feel measures that love.”
People who knew Mack saw that as her devotion to Raniere grew, she was suffering. She became consumed with calorie restriction and was quick to snap. Colleagues said she was becoming cruel and unhinged. It became increasingly clear that her devotion to Raniere wasn’t an act; it was urgent, seemingly impossible to hold back. This was on public display at a V-Week performance in 2016, when she sang on stage about turning her own flesh and blood into “anything you demand.” With her eyes closed, tears welling in the corners, she appeared to be in a state of smiling desperation.
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