Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  —

  MEANWHILE, CASPER AND I went back to Albany soon after India left for Europe to attend our third set of Level Two classes, “Characterization,” and, essentially, to break up with Keith. At this point, we were both nearly at our end points with ESP. The more confident I grew about being a woman in my own body and helping other women do the same, the less effect ESP had over me.

  As for Casper, he’d gotten into a scuffle with the Albany group a few months earlier and was hesitant to go back at all. He’d gone on his own for a “Society of Protectors (SOP)” weekend seminar—that women-hating class that was making all the men assholes, Mark told me later. During the first day’s talk about being “honorable, noble protectors of humanity,” the lead coach said something to the effect of: “And you know, our job is to protect Keith!”

  That was the wrong thing to say to Casper, who had no respect for a guy who didn’t put up his dukes and fight his own battles. He looked at the coach like he was nuts.

  “I’m not going to fucking protect Keith,” he fumed. “Are you serious? He can protect himself!”

  After that, as Casper described it later, the room got a little unhinged.

  The men swarmed him, and he thought for sure someone was going to throw a punch. He was ready if they did: although Casper wasn’t a martial artist, he’d played one in the TV series Mortal Kombat: Legacy—just as good. But as quickly as the room heated up, the aggression evaporated.

  For all their talk of protecting, they didn’t have any real fight in them in the end, it seemed. They were still beta males, just flustered ones. Not only did we notice that the men seemed more feminized the longer they spent in ESP, but also we observed that, conversely, the women became more masculine.

  Nancy, Clare, Esther, Wendy, and even Nancy’s daughter, Lauren, all gave off a bit of a butch vibe to Casper and me—especially to my husband, who fancied himself a female sex appeal whisperer.

  “None of those women,” he declared to me one day (after careful examination, I’m sure), “has an iota of sensuality.”

  When we arrived back in Albany that May, I was still in the middle of a silent cold war with Nancy, so she sent Mark to do Keith’s bidding with me. They’d all heard through the ESP grapevine that I was working on what could be a groundbreaking project about female sexuality.

  I saw Allison Mack there again, though not in any classes. She seemed to be a permanent fixture, but I wasn’t sure what she did. During a break from class, we chatted a bit in the lobby. She asked me about Sexology with mock interest, and when I told her a little about it, she gave me the same vacuous smile as before, then cocked her head à la Gold Sash and said, “You should talk to Keith about this!”

  Just then, Mark approached. He’d been primed by Nancy and sent to ambush me in the lobby to get Keith in on the Sexology action.

  “You know, Keith is a master of tantra,” he informed me, looking uncomfortable with his mission. Oh, Lordy, was there anything this guy wasn’t a master of? “He’d love to talk with you about sexuality on camera. Are you open to doing a roundtable with him?”

  In an effort to improve the organization’s image, Keith had been conducting roundtable chats with high-profile ESP members to post on the website. Mark had been running around doing damage control all year after the Albany Times Union had published a scathing exposé about ESP and Nxivm. I’d heard about the article only recently but hadn’t read it yet. But I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was talk to the Oompa Loompa boy wonder about sex. The thought of it made me throw up a little in my mouth.

  I felt cornered. I told Mark I had to make a call and would get back to him. I raced out into the parking lot to find a private spot to call my partner Gabrielle Anwar. She’d know a way out of this. Just as I was about to dial, I was cornered again—this time by Esther. She’d followed me.

  “Catherine,” she said, slightly out of breath. “I’m glad I caught up to you. I hear you’re doing a project about sex.”

  “Yes, Esther. It’s a docu—”

  “Catherine,” she cut me off. “Listen to me. You have got to help the Espian women.”

  “Help them? Help them how?”

  “None of them are having orgasms.”

  Oh, God. Bad enough I had the image of Keith performing tantric sex in my head, thanks to Mark. Now I had to be tormented by visuals of the manly Espian women not getting off? This was cruel. And it was the second time that year Esther had rendered me speechless. Now came a third:

  “You know, Catherine,” she said, still very serious, “the only way to true enlightenment is by having sex with Keith.”

  Oh, would this day never end?

  “Ya know, Esther? I’ll have to get back to you on all this.”

  I weaved my way farther into the parking lot, leaving Esther behind, and hid behind a car. It had come to this. I dialed Gabrielle’s number—she was in Miami, shooting the TV series Burn Notice—and I hoped she could find an out for me regarding Keith. She didn’t disappoint.

  “Absolutely not!” she yelled into the phone from the set. “Under no circumstance should you get in front of a camera with that man! Look online. There are allegations of pedophilia against him there! Women have come out saying he’d raped them when they were under the age of fifteen! You cannot risk or taint our brand and be seen on camera discussing sexuality with him!”

  What she said startled me. I knew Keith was creepy, but I had no idea people had accused him of such heinous crimes. All ESP students were dissuaded from looking Keith up on the internet and warned in advance that people have a vendetta against him and have tried to discredit him. When India and I started more than two years earlier, the worst of the bad press hadn’t appeared yet. The salacious stories I did see on blogs at that time sounded so outlandish, my thinking was: If this is true, why isn’t he in jail?

  But since then, the in-depth exposé on Nxivm by the Albany Times Union had been published, among others. This is what Gabby was looking at as we spoke on the phone.

  Even if they were just rumors, I agreed it was too much of a risk. I went back inside and found Mark to tell him so. And, like a fool, I repeated everything Gabby had told me verbatim.

  “Mark, the terrible things online about Keith. Are they true?”

  Mark brusquely dismissed my question with the wave of his hand.

  “Don’t believe anything you read. Keith has a lot of enemies—very powerful, wealthy people, who are out to get him and have spent a lot of money in an effort to destroy his public image.”

  Of course, Mark then went straight to Nancy, who went straight to Keith and repeated everything I’d said—especially about my concern that he’d tarnish my brand.

  And here’s the problem with saying no to a malignant, narcissistic psychopath like Keith: his fortes are revenge, vindication, and retaliation. He is as methodical as Hannibal Lecter. And if he wants to get back at you, he doesn’t care how long it takes, he’ll spend the rest of his life doing it.

  Years later, I would have a sick, eerie feeling thinking about that moment when I stood in the lobby at Nxivm headquarters and said no to Keith Raniere via Mark. What if my refusal had become a defining moment for Keith, one in which he initiated a meticulous, devious, painstaking plan to capture and destroy my daughter to punish me?

  Your penance suffered by one of your loved ones, remember?

  What if he’d thought to himself, That bitch is going to pay for this. She’s worried I’ll taint her brand? I’ll steal her daughter away from her forever and burn my mark into her.

  Then we’ll see whose brand gets tainted.

  What if.

  —

  THINGS WENT DOWNHILL after that.

  It was as if high command had already put out an all-points bulletin for my methodical torture and began the assignment to tear my family apart. For good reason, I already struggled with trust issues with Casper regarding other women, and I’d talked about it and cried about it during various EMs in class, s
o the coaches were aware of it.

  The first part of our marriage had been a bumpy ride, navigating the challenges of Casper’s roving eye. We once came face-to-face in the grocery store with a woman he’d strayed with, and I screamed every insult known to mankind at her in the deli aisle. Then I turned and punched Casper in the face. Hard. He fell backward into a six-foot bakery stand piled high with cookies, cakes, tarts, meringues, pies—the works. He lay sprawled on the floor, buried in a batch of freshly baked goods.

  You might say I’d hit the sweet spot.

  Anyway. Casper and I had worked hard to overcome that big hurdle, and I’d forgiven him—but not forgotten.

  Now, suddenly Casper’s breakout groups all week consisted of young, attractive women who fawned over him and hung on his every word—which had never happened before in class (due to Keith’s aforementioned Svengali hold on them).

  Casper played to his enraptured audience all day, every day, very loudly. I tried to concentrate across the room, but all I could hear was my husband doing his sexy voice followed by girlish shrieks of delight that reverberated through the room.

  I was getting so pissed off that I finally relocated my group to another room.

  Seeing him flirt in such an overt way brought the old hurt stinging to the surface. And somehow, everything around us was encouraging his behavior and egging him on. All week, the curriculum endorsed unleashing the beast within. And then at the flip of a switch, the nonsexual Espian women were suddenly seductresses. The women in Casper’s groups had gone from robots to sirens oozing sexuality. What was wrong with this picture?

  I couldn’t help but feel we had been set up, as if they’d all been given the command to move in and destroy.

  By the end of the week, I was fuming, and Casper was confused. He didn’t understand what he’d done wrong. When we left Albany, it was never to return. We skipped the final class in the series—“Ascension”—even though I’d prepaid for it. We were going to have to remain earthbound for a little while longer.

  —

  INDIA CELEBRATED HER twenty-second birthday in Belgrade, and that July, I sent her a plane ticket to fly straight to the Dominican Republic, where Casper and I were shooting a goofy Roger Corman film, Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf. My plan was to extend India’s hiatus from ESP as long as humanly possible.

  On set, I noticed Casper flirting again—this time with one of the actresses in the film. But as my passion for my own project continued to burn, it stopped bothering me.

  After our time in the Dominican Republic, I convinced India to come with me straight to the Bahamian island of Eleuthera to hang out as Gabby and I filmed the sizzle reel (a short promotional video) for Sexology. India came, lay out in the sun, and starred in some of our B-roll, swimming gracefully underwater like a mermaid.

  Unfortunately, we had no idea how to actually shoot a sizzle reel. After we FedExed the raw footage back to Gabby’s Oscar-nominated film editor father, Tariq Anwar (The King’s Speech, American Beauty), to put it together for us, we got a phone call.

  “If you girls want me to edit this, you’ll need more than one camera angle. What am I supposed to cut to?” he asked. “And I recommend having some sound, too. Being able to hear what people are saying is a key component of a documentary.”

  India had just come from a professional film set to witness Gabby’s and my dismal attempts at the sizzle reel, which fell flat. I’m sure our work didn’t exactly entice her to join the Sexology production team.

  But it was now early August, and time to revisit the conversation I’d had with my daughter on the plane earlier in the year. My fingers were crossed that she’d stay on working with us on the film, but before I could broach the subject, she dropped the bombshell two days before we were to leave Eleuthera.

  “So, Mom . . . I’m not coming home with you,” she said. “I’m going to fly to New York to attend V-week.”

  I could feel her slipping through my fingers. I tried begging.

  “India, we start production in mid-September, and I could really use your help and support.”

  Then, for the second time, I broke my number one parenting rule and tried to steer her to do what I thought was best. I’d bitten my tongue during the two weeks we’d just spent together, but now I couldn’t hold back.

  “Darling, aren’t you worried that ESP is taking over your life?” I asked. “Don’t you want to branch out and do other things?”

  India shook her head and smiled sweetly.

  “Mom, I really want to go. There’s a coach summit afterward, too. Just think of this as the university training I didn’t get. I’m investing in myself, like I would if I’d gone to college. But this is the education I want.”

  I was crushed. I’d put four months, a country, two islands, two movie sets, and an ocean between her and ESP, and still she wanted to rush back to them. How had they sucked her in again so easily?

  By now, I’d heard rumors about what went on during those ten-day V-weeks. It started off innocently one year, with everyone kissing everyone on the mouth regardless of gender, as a taboo-breaking exercise orchestrated by Keith. But that was merely the amuse-bouche.

  At some point, the antics escalated. They got dark and twisted, just like the classes. Vanguard was preparing them, just as the classes were.

  Not this year, but in the years to come, I would hear that the self-proclaimed tantric sex master started bed-hopping and humping naked all over the forest, and V-week apparently devolved into an orgiastic melee. A free-for-all.

  All those lucky women, having sex with Keith; they wouldn’t have orgasms but they’d get enlightenment!

  It was all part of Keith’s plan to bend the lines of morality and see how far he could push people. He wanted to confuse them about what was right and what was wrong.

  Once they didn’t know the difference, he would be the one to tell them.

  For he was Vanguard, creator and ruler of everything.

  7

  * * *

  HUMAN PAIN AND BLISS

  When Casper returned home from directing a film the following April and announced abruptly, “I’m done. It’s over between us,” and walked back out the door, I went into shock.

  No matter how tough the challenges were in our marriage, I always assumed it was death-do-us-part. Maybe because I’d come from a broken home myself, I’d made a vow not to do the same to our children.

  The initial shock quickly rolled into a combination of agony and desperation, slamming into me like a steel wrecking ball.

  That night, I enlisted one of my Sexology experts to act as a mediator for us. By day, he was a Unity Church minister; by night, he moonlighted as a sex therapist. I figured that covered all bases. In a three-way phone conversation, he tried to convince my husband to work on the marriage before suddenly abandoning our family after fourteen years, and Casper vacillated. He agreed. Then five minutes later, he changed his mind: the answer was no.

  As I hung up the phone, my heart raced to maximum throttle. I thought it would break through my ribs and explode out of my chest. I couldn’t breathe; I was in the middle of a full-blown anxiety attack.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was midnight, and I had a six o’clock call for our first expanded, full-scale shoot for Sexology in a rented house in Malibu, five minutes away from my home. How the hell was I supposed to calm down and get any sleep? I tossed and turned, then as a last resort, took half an expired tranquilizer I found in the medicine cabinet—something left over from my pre-audition-anxiety days—and waited. Nothing. An hour later, I took another half, finally passing out around three in the morning.

  Three hours later, Katie was banging on my door to rouse me from my stupor. I groggily got dressed, and she stuffed me into the passenger seat of her car. When I got to the set and started talking to the crew, they looked at me like I was a crazy person.

  The day before, I’d called a big powwow with the entire production team to make an impassioned plea that we
keep our set a drug-free environment. “We’re going to ask you to refrain from drinking alcohol or taking any recreational drugs for the period of the shoot,” I told them, “because we’re trying to create a sacred space.” Namaste, Namaste.

  But there I was, incoherent and slurring, drugged out of my mind. I was so nonfunctional that Katie had to usher me into the master bedroom of the house, where I flopped, face-first, onto the plush king-sized bed. From there, I attempted to direct the day’s shoot using Katie as a go-between.

  “Just get me an ambulance,” I slurred to Katie between takes. “Get me to an emergency room! I’m having a heartbreak. I think I’m dying.”

  If pain was the gateway to love, as Karen the wizened battle-axe from “Human Pain” claimed, then I was earning major brownie points for future bliss.

  But at that moment, and for the next year and a half, my life as I knew it would implode and collapse piece by piece. Casper did return a month later wanting to reconcile, and that instigated an eighteen-month roller-coaster ride in which we went back and forth and up and down, trying everything possible to save our family.

  Then, in the summer of 2014, another relationship shattered: my friendship and partnership with Gabrielle. I had to let go of Sexology because we had artistic differences, as they say in Hollywood, and because I hadn’t insisted from the outset on a legal contract between friends, I didn’t protect the documentary as my intellectual property. Not only did I lose control of my passion project but I also lost a friend.

  I was, however, able to salvage control of the instructional footage meant for the Sexology website. I transformed my dining room into an editing suite and, for the next five months, threw myself into work, feverishly splicing tape day and night. That creative work was the stabilizing force that kept me sane during the chaos my life had become.

  I was so wrapped up and consumed by my own drama that year, I didn’t see what was happening with India.

  After spending all of 2013 trying to find ways to get her away from ESP—jobs, expensive vacations, activities to distract her—I’d decided I couldn’t spend the rest of my life trying to manipulate her, albeit with love. It didn’t work, anyway; every time I did manage to distract her, they sucked her back in tenfold. She was going to have to make her own choices and figure it out for herself, I finally realized. I couldn’t run interference anymore—I had to let go.