Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  Later that April, Nicole spotted Raniere in the flesh one night while she was waiting for Mack to come home. It was the first time she remembered seeing him. “I saw Keith walk by and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the person I’ve been emailing back and forth with, I should go say hi,’ ” she testified. “So I went outside and I said hi.”

  Raniere finished up a conversation, made his way over to Nicole, and asked her if she’d like to go for a walk with him. She was well aware of the significance of being asked to take a walk with Raniere. “People waited around awhile to go on these walks,” Nicole testified. “He said that I had earned—because we had been going back and forth on email—that I had earned a walk.”

  Raniere asked Nicole what she knew about him and his lifestyle—“which was not a lot,” Nicole testified. He explained that he wasn’t married and had more than one partner.

  It began to rain, and Raniere asked Nicole if she knew how to get back to Mack’s place. Nicole replied that she did, even though most days she found the neighborhood confusing.

  Then Raniere threw her a curveball: “He said, ‘Isn’t this funny that this is our first date?’ ” Nicole recalled. “I just remember not quite being able to wrap my head around it. Because I thought, ‘What? Like, what?’ ”

  Raniere asked if she was okay. She had zoned out for a beat, but she jumped back in. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m just feeling overwhelmed.’ ”

  Nicole ran back to Mack’s house feeling oddly uneasy. “I wasn’t really thinking. I didn’t know what to think, but I remember that my body really did not feel okay.”

  Mack was home. Nicole told her about the walk and that she sensed something was off, that there seemed to be a plot to bring her and Raniere together in Albany. “That’s what it felt like,” she testified. “I wasn’t accusing her, because I was so out of my element, but I was like, ‘This feels like a plot to get me up here for Keith.’ ”

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m so glad you told me that,” Mack replied. “That’s not true, that’s not what’s happening, but that’s such a good sign that you can trust me enough to tell me that.”

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE LONG NICOLE was going on regular walks with Raniere, all arranged through Mack. Except now they were happening between two and five a.m. While sleeping in Mack’s bed, Nicole would hear the special ringtone Mack had assigned to Raniere’s phone number and immediately feel her body go into fight-or-flight mode.

  She thought it was suspicious that Raniere seemed to know exactly what she was struggling with, things she hadn’t confided in him. “It drove me nuts,” she testified. “It just seemed too weird for him not to know [about DOS], yet I had no reason to believe that he was part of this women’s organization.” Even when Nicole brought up these coincidences, Mack would flatly deny that Raniere knew about their secret group.

  On their walks, Raniere would ask Nicole the kinds of personal questions that often appeared on NXIVM worksheets: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? What are you afraid of? What would be the hardest thing for you to tell me right now?

  Nicole’s next assignment truly frightened her. Mack told her that on her next walk with Raniere, she had to tell him she would do anything he wanted. Before the walk, Nicole recalled, Mack said, “Now go be a good slave.”

  “I went outside and he was waiting outside, out the back door of Allison’s house, and we started walking. And I was too nervous to say it,” Nicole testified. “We walked a little ways and then I just kind of blurted it out, like, ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’

  “I was just saying it because I had to,” Nicole added. “I didn’t want to say it.”

  Raniere may have sensed this. “I don’t think you mean that,” he replied.

  “I don’t,” Nicole admitted.

  Later in the walk, Raniere asked what would be the worst thing he could ask Nicole to do. Her mind raced with dark possibilities. “I remember looking up at the roof of a house that we were walking past and thinking, ‘Oh my god, he could ask me to jump off that roof.’ ” Sexual humiliation was one of the first horrible scenarios she imagined, but she told Raniere that wasn’t the worst.

  “The worst thing that you could ask me to do would be to ask me to hurt someone in my family,” she told him. “I was like, ‘What if he asked me to never speak to my family again?’ ”

  “Do you really think that I would ask you to do those things?” Raniere responded.

  Nicole didn’t know at this point what anyone around her was capable of. Mack had repeatedly surprised her with the intensity of her orders and the consequences she claimed would follow failure. But Raniere’s question still cut through some of the tension between them. She felt calmer as they continued walking back toward Mack’s house.

  Before they parted, Raniere told Nicole to come back out only when she really meant it when she said she’d do anything he wanted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “This Is Not the Army”

  When Nicole returned to Allison Mack’s house, Nicole told her she’d said exactly what she was supposed to say but that Raniere hadn’t believed it and told her to try again.

  “Okay, so you’ll go back tomorrow,” Mack replied.

  Just as she had many times before, Nicole sensed she didn’t have a choice. She would have to say it and mean it.

  The following night, “I was sleeping in Allison’s bed,” Nicole recalled on the witness stand. “He called Allison and Allison told me to go outside.”

  Nicole walked out the back door and locked eyes with Raniere. “I was like, Okay, you can do this, you can do this,” she testified. “And I said, ‘I will do anything you ask me to do.’ ”

  “Do you mean it?” Raniere asked.

  Nicole said she did.

  “He took my hand and took me across the street, directly across from Allison’s house into another house,” Nicole testified.

  Raniere asked Nicole to trust him, no matter what was about to happen. “I said yes. I mean, I already said I would do anything he asked, so I said yes,” Nicole recalled. “Then he asked me to take off my clothes.”

  Nicole undressed as Raniere sat and watched. He made comments about whatever he noticed, from her belly button piercing that had grown in to the fact that she hadn’t recently shaved or waxed her pubic hair. “He was surprised because it didn’t seem like my nature,” Nicole testified.

  “I responded, ‘Yeah, I’ve been celibate for three months. Sorry, it’s not the first thing on my mind.’ Or something like that.”

  Raniere replied that that was okay, he liked a woman with a bush, which set off a series of realizations in Nicole’s head. While staying in such close quarters with Mack, Nicole had seen her master’s pubic hair situation and guessed that she’d grown it out for Raniere. “I was like, ‘Oh, he has a sexual relationship with Allison. I was right about that.’ ”

  Nicole thought it was safe to assume that sex was about to happen next, but Raniere steered left of that expectation. “He told me to put my clothes back on and he said that there are two blindfolds to put on.”

  The first blindfold pressed so tight into Nicole’s eye sockets that it left marks under her eyes. Raniere tied the second blindfold over top and told Nicole they were leaving the house. “He took my hand and took me to the car, put me in the car, and then we drove somewhere.”

  After ten minutes of driving, Nicole said she was led out of the car and through some bushes. “I just remember feeling things crash under my feet, like branches breaking,” she said.

  She couldn’t see anything, but she could feel a doorstep with her foot. She stepped up, trying not to trip, and was led through a front door. “In my imagination it was a little cabin,” she said. “But I don’t really know.”

  Raniere told Nicole to get undressed again and to lie down on a table. He then tied do
wn her wrists and feet.

  When asked in court how she felt being tied, Nicole replied, “Super vulnerable and exposed. And I was hoping that maybe that was it,” she said, her voice starting to crack, “maybe that was the whole thing, you know, just that I had to be super vulnerable and exposed.”

  She testified that she suddenly felt a tongue nudging its way between her legs. She assumed it was Raniere’s, but then she heard his voice coming from somewhere near her head.

  “I was like, ‘Holy shit, there’s somebody else in the room.’

  ” She tried to stay calm. Raniere was moving around the room while an unknown person performed oral sex on her. Raniere was asking Nicole questions about her sex life: Had she ever been in a threesome? How many people had she been with at once?

  “I’m trying to process what’s going on,” Nicole recalled. “There is somebody else in the room. Okay, so now there’s two people in the room. Are there three people in the room? Like, how many people are in this room right now?”

  * * *

  —

  NICOLE DIDN’T KNOW how long this went on for. At some point Raniere asked her if she was okay. “I didn’t think that there was an option, so I just said, ‘Yes, I’m okay.’ ”

  Raniere untied Nicole but left her blindfolds on. He helped her get dressed and took her back to the house across from Allison Mack’s place.

  “He said he wanted me to know that nothing bad had just happened, and that I was a young woman who was allowed to be sexual,” Nicole recalled. “I was not in a relationship, so what happened was not bad.”

  Nicole thought about how she wasn’t in a relationship because Mack had specifically ordered it. Raniere went on about trust and bravery. “He was just kind of talking, and eventually I just felt like, Can I go?” she testified. “And finally I said that out loud. I said, ‘Can I go?’ And he told me not to tell anyone what happened.”

  Nicole asked if she could tell Mack, and he agreed. By the time Nicole made her way outside, the sun had already risen. “I just remember it being really bright when I walked out,” she said.

  Outside, Nicole saw Clare Bronfman and Emiliano Salinas out for an early morning run. “I ran to Emi and I just hugged him, because, you know, I always felt safe with Emi.”

  She went back to Mack’s house and took a shower. Then she sat Mack down to tell her what had happened. “She seemed a bit freaked out,” Nicole said. “I don’t think she knew exactly what was going to happen, but she also said I was really brave.”

  Nicole didn’t have time to consider whether what had been done to her was a crime, and anyway she placed nearly all the blame squarely on her own shoulders. She left Albany with only a short time to rest before another all-night shift at the club. Raniere texted her later that day, repeating that he thought she was “very courageous.”

  * * *

  —

  LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR hours after it happened, Nicole had already pushed the incident to the back of her mind. She didn’t want to talk about it or even think about it—and even if she had wanted to talk about it, she wasn’t allowed. Allison Mack was the only person she had permission to tell, and for security reasons she wasn’t allowed to discuss it by email.

  Though she kept her vow of secrecy, Nicole seemed to redirect some unfocused anger into a journal entry about her messy apartment the following day. “Coming back every week to an unorganized home and hectic life here feels awful. Words can’t even express how stressful and bad it feels,” she wrote on June 1, 2016. “It fills my whole body with this raged up anger and pain.”

  At Raniere’s trial, Nicole explained that she hadn’t absorbed what had been done to her. “I don’t think I processed what had actually happened for a really long time, but I was emotionally upset,” she said.

  Nicole emailed the journal entry to Mack, and Mack wrote back that Nicole was choosing to be angry rather than choosing the calm that was in the eye of any storm. “I feel sad, I thought you were through this but OK,” she wrote. “You are very attached to your physical comforts. It’s weak, spoiled and entitled.” Mack signed off with “I miss you. I love you. XO.”

  Nicole knew she was expected to continue “working” with Raniere. Mack said she’d “earned” his time, which NXIVM students and coaches generally thought was a rare privilege. Nicole reasoned that the worst was likely behind her. She even held out some hope that she could learn something from their weekly scheduled walks in the middle of the night.

  The following week, Raniere took Nicole to a location she’d never visited before. It was Raniere’s “executive library,” which included a sleeping loft accessed through a trapdoor that prevented others from coming up behind. Nicole looked at Raniere’s collection of books and his scribbles on a massive whiteboard. The windows were blacked out, and Raniere warned that Nicole wasn’t permitted to touch or move anything. “Everything had to be left exactly how I found it,” she said.

  Nicole learned this when she peeked out one of the windows to see if the townhouse had a yard. “I moved the curtain over a little bit and Keith got really freaked out,” she said. “I don’t know if he thought that someone was spying on him or something, but he said, ‘You moved the curtain, right?’ ”

  It was on this day that Nicole learned Raniere had actually created the secret women’s group Allison Mack had asked her to join. Raniere told her that he was Mack’s master, which made him Nicole’s grandmaster. Nicole felt a small amount of relief hearing this news, because it explained so many of her confounding experiences over the last several weeks. “I thought, ‘Oh, thank god, people can stop lying and talking around things to me,’ ” she testified. “Someone can finally explain to me what’s going on.”

  The revelation explained why Raniere had been able to describe internal struggles that Nicole had shared only with Mack. Until that moment, Nicole had guessed that Mack’s master was one of the older women in the community.

  * * *

  —

  WHATEVER RELIEF NICOLE felt in knowing this, it was short-lived. “The next walk we went on he said that because of the nature of the master–grandmaster situation, that he could have commanded me to have sex with him that morning, but he didn’t because he wanted it to be…he didn’t want me to think that that was all it was about,” she recalled.

  In WhatsApp messages, Raniere repeated this to other women he considered his slaves: he could command sex from any one of them at any time, but that wasn’t the “purpose” of DOS.

  Nicole didn’t know how to take Raniere’s offhand claim that he now had unhindered access to her on request. On the one hand it was outrageous, but on the other hand she didn’t feel she had room to object. What could she say? Mack was constantly monitoring her mental state, coaching her not to be angry. After every walk, Mack would ask Nicole about her mood and remind her that emotions were a choice. “How I acted reflected on her, so I needed to be well behaved,” Nicole said.

  Perhaps Raniere sensed he was in dangerous territory, or perhaps he really did want Nicole to think she was more than just a sex slave. Either way, Nicole testified, he waited a month before he tried to touch her again, when, on one of her weekly visits in July 2016, he asked to kiss her. The kiss marked the beginning of a new phase in which Nicole was regularly expected to submit to oral sex, and sometimes intercourse, as a way to face her fears and grow.

  * * *

  —

  AS THE WEEKS passed, Nicole said, she grew less resistant to her weekly Albany visits. She tried to get comfortable with the idea that she was bound to Mack and Raniere for the rest of her life.

  “Sometimes I would get into just being, ‘Okay, if this is my future, then I’m going to try to make the best of it.’ So I tried to get to know him,” Nicole testified. “I tried to figure out what his life had been about and who he was.”

  Nicole could text Raniere and ask to stay at his librar
y instead of Mack’s place, and if he agreed, she would have more space to herself. She grew less resistant to Raniere’s sexual advances, too, though she still told him when she felt uncomfortable. Raniere usually replied that discomfort was good for her and that in time she would “learn to like it.”

  “Like I would learn to love him, just like I would learn to love Allison,” she testified. He seemed to prefer blow jobs, she said, and so she would oblige. She preferred not having to worry about being disciplined or told she had to work on her “issue.”

  On the last day of V-Week 2016, held at the same Silver Bay retreat center, Nicole met Raniere at his cabin for a walk. He led her to a kids’ cabin with bunk beds and began kissing her. “He saw that I was very uncomfortable,” she testified. “He said, ‘Well, you can choose. Do you want to be intimate and have sex here, or do you want to go on a walk?’ I said I wanted to go on a walk.”

  Later, according to Nicole, Raniere lectured her about choosing an interesting life over one with a white picket fence. He said he was disappointed that she’d chosen a walk.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER V-WEEK, NICOLE flew back to California to spend time with her family and best friend. Raniere told her to stay in touch during the trip. While out for a hike, Nicole tried to tell her friend about some of her struggles and asked for advice.

  Nicole couldn’t say anything about the collateral and how she was being sexually coerced. “I kind of talked around things,” she recalled. Her friend told her, “I don’t care how special this guy thinks you are or how much potential he thinks you have…. If you’re not comfortable, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  Her friend couldn’t understand the secret pressures that were preventing Nicole from saying no. But Nicole took her friend’s advice to heart and felt more comfortable expressing her feelings to Raniere.