“But . . . I thought the man we visited in prison was my dad?” he asked her.
“No, dear, that was your imaginary friend.”
Callum had the entire class laughing and crying, and for a moment, I had to remind myself this was real life, not acting class. If I was the Bruce Springsteen of the class, Callum was our Daniel Day-Lewis.
When his EM was over, he was drained. “Go take a walk outside on the beach,” Nancy told him. “Give yourself time to integrate.”
After Callum left the room, we all wiped our tears, and Nancy announced proudly to the class that she’d just cured his alcoholism.
Little did she know that as soon as he walked out the door, Callum went straight to the nearby pub to celebrate his “integration” with a few beers. He’d faked his entire EM, he told me later! After a few ales, he returned just in time for the official ceremony.
The coaches lined up in front of the room, with Prefect center stage. Then, one by one, we went up and bowed our heads (even though I’d vowed not to), and Nancy ceremoniously placed our newfangled sashes around our necks. Our old ones had been taken away temporarily and transformed to reflect our progress. Callum and India now had one stripe added to the bottom of their sashes, to symbolize that they’d finished the first five classes. Mine had three red stripes across the bottom—the most you could be awarded.
Me? The highest honors? Callum and I were dumbfounded, and then one of the coaches explained:
“You’ve been awarded the honor of Best Recruiter in the class because you signed up more recruits than anyone else!”
Callum and I looked at each other again and went into hysterics. After my dramatic protest on the first day refusing to ever, ever recruit for them, I’d gone ahead and beat everybody at it. Earlier that day, I’d signed up my husband and his two kids from his first marriage, Grace, thirteen, and Cappy, sixteen, to take the five classes we’d just completed—that’s how I’d become a three-striped family recruiter!
Before we left that day, the coaches went into overdrive pressuring the class to sign up for the next five classes of Level One. As it turned out, the entire level consisted of three sets of five classes, fifteen in all. So while we were all whipped up in a frenzied, vulnerable state of bonding and emotions on graduation day, they tried to trap us into more.
Callum was for sure bailing and urged me to do the same.
“It’s a cult, dummy!” he said.
I laughed, and imagined myself dressed up in those shapeless, pastel prairie dresses worn by the many young wives of polygamist Mormon sect leader Warren Jeffs, who was about to be convicted for sexually assaulting two of the girls—one fifteen years old; the other, twelve—and sentenced to life in prison plus twenty years. Now that’s a cult, I thought. This group was just . . . way, way too happy and dogged.
“You’re just a sore loser, because you only got one stripe!” I teased.
A trio of coaches came over and zeroed in on India and me like heat-seeking missiles.
“You’ve seen such remarkable gains so far,” they said. “It only gets better from here on out. You two showed so much promise in class—we’ve never seen so much potential!”
They were like a cheerleading squad on steroids. Something felt off to me about their effusive flattery, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Later, I’d learn from cult experts the term “love bombing”: the overly affectionate and ego-boosting attention that cult members lavish upon you when they are trying to build you up and lure you in. It’s an aggressive, predatory, and manipulative seduction meant to make you feel special and irreplaceable. In the world of romance, it would be like dating a sociopath-narcissist.
Little did we know that, in a sense, we were.
After the love-bombing stage comes the “devaluation” stage. But I’ll get to that later. For now, India and I were still in the honeymoon stage of being seduced.
India was intrigued to go further, and I was curious to know why. We hadn’t shared our experiences in class together during lunch breaks or at home—she didn’t want to hear about mine and didn’t volunteer about her own process.
And because we were never in the same group, I had no idea if she was having epic breakthroughs like me or not. I glanced over at her group from time to time, but hadn’t overheard or seen any emotional outbursts from her.
Which was getting more and more frustrating for me.
I’d had this fantasy of watching her bloom in front of my eyes with new revelations about herself—or, at least, of hearing about it from her! But it was not to be. I wanted to respect her privacy, so I didn’t pry.
But I wondered later if this was part of the group’s divide-and-conquer strategy. We’d embarked on this journey to share an experience, and, against my best efforts, my daughter and I were in our solitary orbits.
When it came time to decide whether to sign up for more or not, I finally asked India: “What are you getting out of this?”
She was quiet for a moment, because she knew she wasn’t supposed to speak about other people’s experiences outside of class—what went on in that room was sacrosanct. Then she told me about a moment in class that had moved her profoundly. An older man had broken down crying as he opened up about his childhood abuse for the first time in his life.
“He pulled up his shirtsleeves, Mom,” India said with tears in her eyes, “and showed us long lines of scars up and down both his arms. They were from his mother. She used to abuse him when he was little.”
I saw how she’d bonded with her groups, and I could understand that. I was making friends myself. I met Sasha and Katie those first few days, and Katie would become not only my seminar buddy but also one of my dearest friends outside of ESP.
Perhaps India didn’t need bursting fireworks or cathartic breakthroughs the way I did. Maybe she was such an empathetic spirit and felt so deeply for others, she shared in their healings as if they were her own, and that made the process meaningful and intimate for her.
We signed up for the rest of Level One, and now, with Casper and the two other kids signed up too, I’d be able to talk to someone about what happened behind ESP’s closed doors. Screw their confidentiality agreement!
—
THE FOLLOWING MONTH, in August, I flew to Albany on my own to take the continuation of Level One after Nancy offered to give me some emergency, one-on-one EM-ing. I was freaking out after a botched eye surgery and having panic attacks that I’d ruined my eyesight forever.
“Come to Albany, and I’ll do some work with you,” Nancy suggested, “to get you less panic-stricken about the fact that you’ve blinded yourself.”
The ESP headquarters was a plain brown-brick office building on the outskirts of the city, off a large highway. Inside, it was sparsely furnished like the house in Venice, but even more drab and generic: a few couches, a few tables, some office chairs, and a handful of private coaching rooms off to the side. Everything was in a dishwater-brown color.
The only décor I remember was the framed headshots of Vanguard and Prefect on the wall, displayed prominently like religious icons—side by side, as if they were Jesus and Mary: Keith with his long hippie hair and Nancy with her neck wrapped in her beloved gold sash. Both of them smiled for the camera as though they were posing for cheesy prom shots. I was mesmerized by how awful these portraits were.
—
MY FIRST DAY there, Nancy helped me with my panic attacks. And then she asked me to choose a fear I’d like to work on.
“Public speaking,” I told her. “When I have to talk in front of a live audience, I feel disoriented, like I will lose my balance. I can’t stand being in the spotlight.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Feeling exposed.”
A memory popped into my head that I hadn’t thought of in forty years.
I had to deliver a monologue at school, and, feeling the first stirrings of my feminist self, I had chosen to deliver an excerpt from the classic sociopolitical comedy Lysistrata,
by the Greek playwright Aristophanes.
First performed in Athens in 411 BC, it’s a story about how the women of Greece decide to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers in order to force them to negotiate peace and end the Peloponnesian War—a natural choice for an eleven-year-old girl to pick, of course. What was I thinking? Where did I even find it?
I got up in front of the class and began:
“Then submit, but disagreeably: men get no pleasure in sex when they have to force you. And make them suffer in other ways as well. Don’t worry, they’ll soon give in. No husband can have a happy life if his wife doesn’t want him to.”
I was passionate! I was bold!
And as I walked back to my seat after my rousing performance, I discovered that the fly on my trousers had been open the entire time. There I was, my first triumphant feminist manifesto, and the whole time I was flashing a bunch of sixth-grade boys like a cheap porn star. The shame and humiliation were almost too much to bear.
“So what if your underwear was showing,” Nancy asked, back in the present. “What was so bad about that?”
“I felt exposed,” I said. “Men will think I’m inviting attention.”
“Catherine, you’ve assigned far too much significance to the power of your undergarments,” Nancy pronounced. “You can make a simple, human mistake like forgetting to zip up your fly and not have it mean Armageddon.”
—
EVERY DAY WAS an emotional whirlwind of crying and confessions, leading to yet another catharsis or two, or more. I was the rock star of EM-ing, they said. Later on, I would ask myself: How much of what I was doing was a purely hedonistic pursuit?
While in Albany, I stayed at the home of Sara Bronfman, the daughter of billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. She and her younger sister, Clare, were the heirs to the Seagram fortune. They, Keith, and Nancy all lived in the upscale Albany suburb of Halfmoon.
Sara was a proctor when I met her, and she and Clare had both been deeply involved in the ESP world since 2003—both had served on the executive board and had prominent roles in the company.
Sara stayed somewhere else while I was a guest in her home, but I met her at the office near the end of my stay and thanked her. She was cool and distant, and I was beginning to notice something about the ESP devotees: while the process itself was highly emotional, and there was a lot of smiling and persistence coming from the coaches, they were also strangely emotionless, as if they’d deleted feelings from their operating systems.
Sara’s coolness made me self-conscious. I started babbling about how I’d been a “disintegrated” houseguest ever since I was ten years old and stayed at the stately Sussex mansion of Antony Lambton, the 6th Earl of Durham. It was very Downton Abbey.
“I slept in a different bed each night to test them out, like Goldilocks,” I told her, “and then I got found out because I had lit a fire in the last bedroom and left embers as incriminating evidence. My mother was so mortified that she had me apologize to every member of the staff. I remember the lineup of twenty-odd servants, like a firing squad . . .”
Sara didn’t look amused at all or the least bit interested, and I felt ridiculous for having told her the story—it was completely irrelevant.
I left Albany with one epiphany unrealized: a sighting of the infamous Vanguard. Even half-blind, I assumed I’d catch a glimpse of the mysterious Oz in the office at some point during the week, but, no, he was a no-show.
I was beginning to wonder if Keith Raniere existed at all. The only concrete evidence of his reign was that framed portrait on the wall: a repackaged, generic Jesus with a photo of the middle-aged, gold-sashed Madonna on the wall beside him.
The scratched glass sparkled and the cheap frame shone, as if they were Windexed and buffed on the hour.
But no amount of spit and shine could ever make this false messiah worthy enough to be anyone’s idol of worship.
As I would find out very soon.
3
* * *
THE DEFIANT ONES
The hypnotic bubble I was living in began to burst two months later.
At a weekend seminar Nancy asked me to host that October, it struck me for the first time that what she and Keith were teaching was dangerous.
The seminar was called “Jness”—another made-up word by Keith, I imagined—and it was meant to be a “fantastic new women’s empowerment curriculum” that Keith and Nancy wanted to introduce to the LA community. Jness was a sister program to ESP under a parent company called Nxivm. I had no idea what any of these words meant at the time.
I agreed to host it in my home after Nancy offered some enticement: the group would pay all expenses for Casper to take Grace, fifteen, Maya, ten, and Celeste, eight, to Disneyland (now demoted to the Second Happiest Place on Earth after ESP headquarters and its wide-grinning, ecstatic coaches) for the weekend while fifty women took over our house. Casper was more than happy to do it. One of his nicknames was “Disneyland Dad,” and, given the choice, he’d pick a weekend of Mickey Mouse over another self-improvement seminar any day.
My mother, Elizabeth, was visiting from her home in Belgrade, Serbia, at the time. I was excited she’d be taking part with India and me, making it a three-generational Oxenberg female empowerment fest. I’d mentioned ESP to her over the last few months and was eager to introduce it to her and see what she thought.
We gathered in the living room with coffee and tea as Nancy introduced the program and began the modules, posing question sets about men, women, and relationships.
Men don’t experience intimacy. Imagine the difference between sticking your finger in someone’s mouth and them sticking their finger into your mouth. The first one is not an intimate experience, the second one is. That is what sex is like for a man.
Really? Whoever came up with this bullshit had obviously never experienced intimacy before, I thought. We broke off into smaller groups to discuss and then came back for more from Nancy:
Men are designed to be polygamous, and women must learn to tolerate this behavior. Men are more loyal than women. When men cheat, they go back to their wives. When women cheat, they tend to transfer affection and leave their primary relationship.
That was her definition of loyalty? None of this rang true to me at all. But again I went with my small group to discuss and debate, after which we returned again to Nancy for more:
Men abide by an honor code, and women do not. This code gets passed down, like a legacy, from father to son. Women, on the other hand, are whimsical, entitled, spoiled, overemotional, childish, self-serving, weak-willed, indulgent, lack discipline, have trouble keeping their word, and are bereft of any such code.
My gut lurched in protest and anger.
What the hell was she saying? Had she really just described women as defective, useless second-class citizens? Was I in a remake of The Stepford Wives, and no one had bothered to tell me? I looked around the room to see everyone else’s reaction. Nada. India was in the kitchen, setting up food. When Nancy divulged proudly to the class that it was Vanguard himself who had benevolently and brilliantly devised the entire Jness program to guide women, bells went off inside me like a fire alarm.
This is ridiculous! A program about female empowerment devised by a man? I didn’t care how high this guy’s IQ was; no man was genius enough to understand the inner workings of a woman’s soul. The nonsense Nancy was spouting was offensive. Why not just drag us by the hair back into a prehistoric cave or something?
I was livid, and wanted desperately to raise my hand, raise hell, and call for anarchy in my own living room, like I’d done the first day back in Venice. But as hostess, propriety ruled. I’d invited all these people into my home, including two good friends, so my hands—and my aforementioned defiant spirit—were tied.
I needed a comrade in arms and searched around the room for my mother’s face. On it I saw the same expression of disgust that I was trying to hide on mine. Our eyes met, and she rolled hers heavenward and f
rowned. I would have a lot of apologizing to do later for getting her into this.
My mother is a wise and insightful woman with a great sense of humor. But she’d never been particularly patient and definitely didn’t suffer fools lightly or gladly.
—
TO EXPLAIN MORE fully: my mother, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, is the only daughter of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark.
She was born in Belgrade; grew up and was educated in Kenya, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Paris; and speaks nine languages.
Her great-great-grandfather was George Petrovic, nicknamed Karađorđe (Black George) by his Turkish enemies. He was a Serbian revolutionary leader who fought against the Ottoman Empire for his country’s independence during the First Serbian Uprising of 1804–1813, liberating his people from five hundred years of Turkish oppression and enslavement.
Black George was murdered by his best friend, Milos Obrenovic, who ordered Black George’s head chopped off and had it delivered on a platter to the Turkish sultan. My courageous ancestor was the founder of the Karageorgevic dynasty, from which our family descends.
My mother’s father, Prince Paul, is the one I wrote the screenplay about, Royal Exile—and the one who fed us grandchildren coffee-soaked sugar cubes in his beautiful Italian villa. But before that, he was thrust into the unenviable position of prince regent of Yugoslavia after the assassination of his cousin King Alexander on the eve of World War II. My grandfather became the first leader to establish democracy in Yugoslavia. Long before any other leader in the world, he recognized that Adolf Hitler was a threat. In 1939, he warned Joe Kennedy Sr., who was ambassador to Great Britain at the time, that after meeting Hitler, “I have looked into the face of evil.”
Winston Churchill instructed my grandfather to declare war on Nazi Germany unprovoked, which Paul knew would be suicide for his country, so he refused. Instead, he met in secret with Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at the führer’s Eagle’s Nest lair in the mountains of Berchtesgaden to negotiate a nonaggression pact. His brilliant negotiating skills secured his country’s autonomy while refusing to grant passage to German troops and refusing to fight alongside them—a status of neutrality no other enemy of Hitler had been able to attain.
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