So all year, she’d flown under my radar. Because I was in my own personal hell, I didn’t notice that India had descended deeper into her own abyss. Not that she thought she was in hell, because she certainly didn’t; according to her, she was thriving and moving forward and upward in her world.
Maybe because our family had been torn apart, seemingly beyond repair this time, India felt a need to fall further into the waiting clutches of her other family.
She’d always been our family peacekeeper; perhaps we’d failed her with our breakup. In contrast, the ESP family seemed invulnerable. Theirs was a family you couldn’t, didn’t, leave; a contract and a vow you didn’t break—even if you wanted to. It was forever.
Our family breakup didn’t happen because of ESP, but, looking back, I could see how our involvement pushed the envelope. I had encouraged the classes as a family-togetherness experience, but a friend told me later that “the more classes you all took, the more distant from each other you seemed to get instead of getting closer.”
A cult expert told me later that’s one thing cults do on purpose: polarize and destroy families if the family members are not willing to toe the party line.
By the fall of 2014, India was dating Michel, one of her orange-sashed superiors at ESP, and they soon moved in together. At nearly forty, Michel was sixteen years her senior. We’d met him three years earlier at our first class in Venice. What he lacked in physical stature, Michel made up for as an aggressive recruiter. And after hooking up with him, India went from a gentle, mild-mannered, not remotely pushy person at all to an Energizer Bunny missionary.
She systematically went through every single Facebook friend of each member of the family and sent messages to more than a thousand of our contacts, urging them to improve their lives using ESP. I found out about it when my friends started to call me up.
“Do you know your daughter is trying to recruit me for some weird cult thing?”
I sighed, apologized, and explained. “I’m hoping this is just a phase she’s going through that won’t last much longer . . .”
I wanted to scoop her up in my arms and tell her, “You don’t have to do this,” but I worried that any attempt to thwart her might have the opposite effect.
At home, India’s sisters were noticing a change in her. When she visited, she went into coach mode with them. One day one of her sisters came home from school upset about a friend, and as she was telling us what happened, India went into autopilot EM questioning.
“Let’s break down why you’re upset,” she said briskly.
She meant well, but her tone was patronizing, and her sisters did not like it one bit. All of a sudden, she’d gone from being their sister to being an all-knowing, pontificating superior doing therapy on them.
“Can’t we just have a normal conversation without you doing that thing to me?” Maya, thirteen at the time, once snapped at her in frustration. Then to me she said, “Mom? India’s in a cult.”
The irony was, there was a time when India would have said the exact same thing—and did say it, when she was even younger than Maya. Casper and I used to go to seminars to learn parenting skills and techniques to use on her and her siblings, but she always knew when I was trying out some new therapeutic jargon.
“Mom,” she’d say, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, “I know what you’re doing. You’re doing that thing on me.”
The kid busted me every single time; her instincts were so good then.
But now—now—she was acting like an evangelizing religious fanatic. After I got more phone calls and emails from bewildered Facebook friends, I tried to use humor to get her to ease off without making her think I was judging her.
“India, you might want to back down on your Jehovah’s Witness enrollment tactics,” I joked.
Her response was silence—as if she had a wall up and couldn’t hear me.
My buddy Callum, who’d pegged ESP as a cult way back, was also one of India’s targets. He, of all people, knew better. They’d hang out together, and whenever she inevitably tried to recruit him, he’d say, “I’m getting a Mormon vibe from you here.” After numerous email requests to join the group, he finally texted her to say “Come on, enough already. You’ve just got to stop this. It’s not okay.”
But she couldn’t stop. And she couldn’t see that it wasn’t okay.
—
BY THE END of 2014, India had been actively coaching for almost a year, which meant three things.
First, she’d entered the “devaluation” stage that came after love bombing. Once she’d joined the “stripe path,” her superiors had permission to give her brutal, incessant criticism designed to break her down. They would tell India it was to help her become a better version of herself, but what they were really doing was making her submissive and suggestible, and then locking in a new persona: her cult persona—rebuilding her in their image.
Second, as a full-fledged coach, now she was required to attend and pay for Ethos twice a week and also teach it—for free. So those gobbledygook Level One modules I’d found so boring, she had now repeated hundreds of times until they were embedded in her subconscious.
And third, she was required to take (and pay for) every new class they introduced.
That year, ESP rolled out an endless stream of curriculum on a nonstop conveyer belt, one after another: new classes, new levels, new for-pay activities, from Consciousness Groups to Goals Labs—each with shiny, new Keithspeak names: Exo-Eso, the Source, Ethicist, Anima, Ultima. It was as if he’d figured out a way to target slightly different demographics using the same regurgitated bullshit, repackaged and prettied up with a different bow.
By that point, my daughter must have spent tens of thousands of dollars on class fees.
Sometime in early 2015, I got a call from our financial advisor and family friend, Hillary. She’d worked with my mother for decades, then added me, and now was India’s financial advisor as well. Hillary was the one who’d coordinated the transfer of India’s inheritance money when she’d turned twenty-one. She was calling now about my daughter’s account, not mine, which wasn’t the usual protocol. But after leaving several messages for India and not hearing back, she reached out to me, concerned. India and I had always had an open-door policy with Hillary when it came to discussing India’s financials, and her statements still came to my house.
Hillary had noticed a lot of money going out to companies with suspicious-sounding names, she said, and was worried that someone had hacked into India’s account. I sighed again, like I’d done with my Facebook friends, and explained the situation to Hillary.
“Is there any way to restrict how she spends her money?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” she said, “because she’s over twenty-one.”
All I could do, it seemed, was stand by and watch helplessly.
A lot of money was going out, and no money was coming in.
That was something India promised she was about to remedy with a brand-new job, she told me a few weeks later, at which she’d be pulling in the big bucks. She’d taken a full-time position at Rainbow Cultural Garden (RCG): an unaccredited, unlicensed, untested day care school program designed by Keith and run by Michel.
The concept of Rainbow, she explained, was to teach children from infancy to age ten up to nine languages at once, including Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Russian, German, Hindi, and Spanish. Only languages approved by Keith were allowed.
According to the official website, they wanted to “create the leaders of tomorrow” with an “early child-development program which, through careful, progressive exposure to multiple languages, cultures, representational systems, and aesthetics, seeks to inspire and capture the miraculous, creative, learning lives of children.”
Ideologically, it sounded great: teaching children up to nine languages by the time they’re four. I’d grown up in Europe, where people are exposed to a lot of languages simply because the countries are all pressed against and into one
another, and you were obligated to speak more than one. My grandfather spoke thirteen, my mom speaks nine—making her the embodiment of the ultimate Rainbow child—and I trail in last place at three.
But when India began telling me what her duties were, I started to get that sick feeling in my gut that was now all too familiar.
Her job was to find teachers and then train them how to interact with the infants and children according to Keith’s specific guidelines. The teachers, she explained, were often foreign nannies they found on Craigslist and then paid minimum wage to talk to the children in their native tongue. Their correct title, India informed me, was multicultural diversity specialist (MDS): Keithspeak for unaccredited teacher. Or maybe his acronym for maids.
I was in no position to judge, being a college dropout myself, but I wondered, why was she training the nonteachers, when she had no training herself in education, or even a college degree?
And if the cost per child was up to $120,000 a year, and the nannies were making only minimum wage, where was all the money going? India herself was to be paid on commission only, so she had to target and woo billionaires (Who else could afford those fees?) to get a paycheck, and that wouldn’t be an easy sell.
I wanted to ask these questions, but I didn’t. She continued explaining, but the more she talked about it, the less sense it made to me, and the more alarmed I got.
“We encourage the parents to stay away from their babies and children all day while they are being taught a language the parent doesn’t know,” she said cheerfully.
That was the part that concerned me the most.
My immediate thought was that Keith—who’d never had a healthy connection with another human in his life, I suspected—didn’t want these children to bond with their parents. But I didn’t realize until later why he’d want to prevent this bonding and what his deeper ulterior motive might have been.
They wanted to “create the leaders of tomorrow,” their website said. But in reality, I think he wanted to create the followers of tomorrow. He wanted to sculpt and control these children’s minds to create his own army of the future that would follow his orders and agenda. And because the families of these children were wealthy and powerful, their wealth and unlimited resources would be in his clutches as well.
The thought gave me chills.
“Mom, I love working with the children,” India said, “much more so than with the parents.”
I didn’t doubt it. If I was one of those parents, and she told me I had to stay away from my kids for however long, I’d raise hell.
“Darling, why do they teach Arabic but not Hebrew?” I asked. I’d always sensed that Keith was anti-Semitic. I’d heard he sometimes called Nancy “Hitler”—but didn’t mean it as a negative. Bonnie later confirmed to me that Keith was an avid Holocaust denier.
“Keith says Hebrew isn’t relevant.”
I tried to hide my disgust, but I have a lousy poker face. The whole conversation and India’s belief in Keith made me ill. ESP prided itself that its teachings made students more reality based in their lives. But this was the first time I looked at my daughter and thought: Oh my God, my child’s thinking is not based in reality!
But what could I say to her?
Maybe she really was spearheading a totally forward-thinking program that was going to change the world, and I was just a backward dinosaur. My entire life had imploded that year, so who was I to make any judgments?
But if she was delusional, I also didn’t want to burst her bubble too callously. Our family was going through enough bubble bursting as it was.
—
WITHOUT WARNING, CASPER filed for divorce on my birthday in September 2015, while I was in the air flying to Tulum, Mexico, with my mother.
I got the email from his lawyers as soon as I landed, and panicked. Casper’s timing sucked once again, to say the least. He was in Belgium, and I was now in Mexico, and our kids were at home in LA with a caretaker, with neither of us there to help them deal with this. I called them immediately, but as I suspected, they’d already read about it on the internet and were distraught.
I was stuck and couldn’t go back to them just yet.
I was in Tulum to teach a workshop I’d created and called Body of Bliss, but I was feeling anything but. In between my talks, I’d rush out to the hallway and hide in a nearby broom closet so I could burst into tears in private. I didn’t want my students to see I wasn’t walking the walk!
Thank God for my mother, who had been divorced three times and was a pro at it.
“Divorcing in Mexico must be a family tradition!” she said, laughing, and reminded me about my own parents’ unconventional divorce there nearly fifty years before. My father had insisted that, to save money, they had to fly to Mexico to get their divorce because it was cheaper to do it there. And with the money they saved, Dad wined and dined Mom and took her on what he called “our divorce honeymoon.”
They had a grand old time and went to the bullfights, and after their divorce was finalized, they took their judge to the bullfights, too! Now, that’s the way to end a marriage in style.
“The best part of my marriage with your mother,” my father used to say, “was our divorce!”
Mom’s retelling of that story made me laugh and took me out of my funk for the rest of our two-week stay.
Tulum is on the Caribbean coastline of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and it is known for its incredible beaches, warm turquoise waters, and well-preserved ruins of an ancient Mayan port city dedicated to the goddess Venus.
As it turned out, Tulum would be a magical place of healing for me, just as Mexico had lifted the spirits of my divorcing parents.
The beach house I’d rented—Casa Dos Besos (“House of Two Kisses”)—was beyond enchanting. It had adobe walls and a thatched roof, and everything inside was pristine, white, and made of carved wood. The back terrace looked out to the sea and miles of white, powdery sand that looked like confectioners’ sugar, and everything growing around the terrace resembled a Claude Monet painting of pastel blues, greens, and pinks.
As jagged and raw as I was feeling, Tulum smoothed out the sharp edges; I melted into its warm waters like I was being reborn.
At night, I opened my bedroom windows wide and stretched out fully on the four-poster bed like a starfish, to claim my space and my life.
Tulum had an awesome, freeing energy, and it was there that I knew I was ready to let go of my marriage. The very thing I had dreaded the most had, ultimately, liberated me.
—
AFTER I GOT home, I started writing and didn’t stop.
I scribbled diary entries for the end of 2015 and the first few months of 2016 as if my life and sanity depended on it, reviewing my past failures and what I’d learned. I started writing a book, Venus Rising, and went into depth about what I had wanted to say with my documentary but didn’t get the chance. I poured my heart into every sentence and got so immersed that it took a second call from Hillary to yank me back to the present.
This time she was calling me because her concern for India’s well-being had heightened, due to an extreme increase in activity on her account.
“Are you sure she’s okay?” she asked.
This prompted me to open up one of her statements, which I stared at in shock. The inheritance my father had left her was almost gone.
“Nxivm,” I said. “is going through her money so fast. She doesn’t spend any money on herself.”
I tried to look on the bright side. Maybe after India ran out of all her money, they’d have no more need for her and cut her loose? I couldn’t believe that was the best-case scenario, how sad . . .
After I hung up the phone, I went downstairs to check the pile of mail I’d been holding for India. They were all overdue bills. I’d been handing her stacks of mail each time I saw her, and now I realized they were all the same bills, over and over, that she wasn’t paying.
What kind of “executive success” business program take
s all your money and encourages you not to pay your bills? That ESP touted itself as a business program and then drained students’ bank accounts and steered them toward bankruptcy made the scam all the more ludicrous.
By the spring of 2016, India had grown more distant than ever—she just didn’t seem present. So much so that within a short span of a year, she’d totaled two cars in accidents, and now I was worried for her physical safety as well as her mental agility. What was going on with her that she was getting into these accidents? She’d asked me for a few tiny, loose diamonds I had from a ring so she could design a belly chain for herself, and I gladly gave them to her.
Around then, I received a third call from Hillary, reporting that my daughter had withdrawn the rest of her money and closed her account. When Hillary asked her what she was going to use the money for, India told her she was starting a new business. We crossed our fingers that this meant she was leaving the group and striking out on her own, and I waited patiently for India to tell me herself, which she did a few weeks later.
“Mom, I just wanted to let you know that I split from Michel, and I quit my job at the Rainbow school,” she said as we prepared dinner one night.
“Oh, really?” I tried hard to subdue my enthusiasm.
“Yeah. I’m going to start a new business.”
“That sounds great, India! Is this something . . . you’re doing on your own?”
I had a split second of hope before the word salad came tumbling out of her mouth again. Keith had designed a new business just for her called Delegates, she said, her eyes lighting up.
“It’s innovative and exciting! Keith is brilliant! And he’s going to mentor me personally, Mom. This is an opportunity I can’t pass up!”
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