She explained the concept as best she could.
“India,” I told her, “that sounds just like TaskRabbit.” She didn’t hear me.
“And I’m going to develop an app for it, and I have to raise eighty thousand dollars for it and . . .”
Oh, God. Raise money? This is where the rest of her inheritance was going: as seed money for one of Keith’s inane, self-serving creations.
“And there’s more!” she said.
I didn’t think I could take any more.
“I’m moving to Albany in September,” she said, “to be a part of this new university program Keith created! I’m going to be one of the first guinea pigs—it’s going to be so much fun!”
I was at a loss for words at this point and could answer her only monosyllabically. I couldn’t say “Great,” and I couldn’t say “I’m excited for you.” I couldn’t say any of the things that a mother would want to say when her child was about to embrace a new stage of her life.
The best I could manage was: “Wow.”
She’d dumped so much upsetting news on me, one item after another, I didn’t even get a breather in there to enjoy the fact that she’d dumped Michel. She’d already traded up to Keith, which was so much worse.
Later, I would learn about two events that had happened a few weeks before our conversation and had swiftly hoovered her deeper into the ESP underworld.
First, she and Keith had taken a little walk together around the town of Halfmoon, where he lived, and when they returned, India was flushed and giddy. Whatever her previous feelings about him were, they’d been erased, and from that moment onward, she’d wear the same adoring expression on her face around him as those volleyball cheerleaders from five years earlier.
Second, Allison Mack had recruited her into some new, top-secret, badass female empowerment sisterhood sorority—“like the Masons, but for girls!” was the pitch. “We’ll be like ninja warrior women!” Allison told her.
Allison was to be India’s group “master.”
But I didn’t know any of that yet.
All I knew so far was that the devil himself had taken India personally by the hand, and now she was leaving us to move to Cult Central.
—
THAT SEPTEMBER, SHE gave away and liquidated her possessions as if she were leaving the planet. All my daughter left behind were dozens of packets of colorless, zero-calorie noodles in the fridge in my garage—they looked like baby eels floating around in a murky fluid, like something that ends up invading the world in a horror sci-fi flick if you let it loose.
After our conversation, I saw her fleetingly over the next year. Our next extended visit with each other was in the spring of 2017.
Again I rented the enchanting white house by the turquoise waters of Tulum.
This time I gathered three generations of Oxenberg women there: Celeste, Grace, and Maya came in with me from LA, my mother flew in from Belgrade, and India flew in from Albany. This was our own badass sisterhood sorority.
It was our first vacation together as a family without Casper, so it was an important one. We’d all survived the wreckage of divorce, and now I wanted us to share an inspiring, magical, celebratory time together. I wanted us to feel our solidarity and unity as a family again. I wanted us to bond and heal from the last two years.
Tulum had healing powers before; I was counting on it having them again.
We went for long walks on the beach and visited the Mayan ruins nearby. My mom hired a chef to whip up fantastic, fresh meals, and the kids spent all day in the water.
And while I was there, I worked on the mission statement for my next creative project to help women: a nonprofit human rights organization I was going to establish as soon as I returned to LA.
“The Catherine Oxenberg Foundation is a human rights organization dedicated to empowering women to lead more embodied lives,” I wrote.
“This can only become a reality in an environment where women are free from subjugation, exploitation, and abuse. We champion issues essential for the enhancement of female health and well-being—emotional, physical, and sexual—through the areas of research, rehabilitation, and restoration.”
We all had an amazing, rejuvenating time together in Tulum, but . . . there was something off about India—more than before, I mean.
She had a weary lifelessness in her eyes that I’d never seen before, and her usual radiant luster was replaced with dark circles under her eyes. She looked gaunt. While the rest of us basked contentedly like beached whales soaking up the sun on the sand, India couldn’t sit still. She was constantly jumping up, restless, in perpetual motion—going on endless runs up and down the beach. At one point, oddly, I overheard her telling my other kids, “I don’t want to have children.”
Why would she say this? That didn’t sound like her at all.
“Mom, I’m down to a hundred three pounds!” she said, proudly, drinking some liquid concoction while the rest of us wolfed down mountains of food from the huge spread on the terrace.
I smiled, and nodded. She hadn’t been that weight since she was thirteen.
“Darling, you look beautiful. I hope you don’t think you need to lose any more weight.”
India tried to hide the fact that she carried two phones now, but it was pretty hard to conceal when both of them beeped constantly and she was always leaping up to answer a text or a call. The fact that she couldn’t get decent cell reception in Mexico made her frenzy even more frenetic.
But she felt happy and purposeful, she told me, even though she didn’t look it. My daughter seemed more burdened and serious than ever before.
Even my mother noticed something wasn’t right. After chatting with India out on the terrace one afternoon, she came in to talk to me in the kitchen.
“I asked India what she was doing in Albany and what her plans were, and I didn’t understand her answer at all,” said my mother. “It sounded like she was talking in circles. Maybe I’m just going senile.”
“No, Mom, you’re not,” I assured her. “What she says doesn’t make sense to me, either.”
Something was definitely wrong—more wrong than before—but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
A few days after we got home, and India rushed back to Albany, I got a worrisome phone call from India’s father, Bill.
“India told me she was a hundred thirty thousand dollars in debt,” he said.
Neither of us knew that the unaccredited university program she had signed up for was costing her five thousand a month.
How was she going to dig herself out of this? I hoped the money she owed was to ESP and not credit card companies.
I was trying to figure out a way for her to get out of her financial mess when another phone call interrupted me.
It was Bonnie, whom I hadn’t spoken to in four years—ever since I’d left ESP for good and distanced myself from everybody involved. I’d heard she’d recently defected from the group.
“Bonnie, how are you doing?” I asked.
“Catherine, you know I’m no longer with ESP, right? I left, I’m back in LA.”
She was talking fast and sounded afraid.
“Yeah, I just heard that. Hey, are you okay? What about Mark?”
“It’s complicated,” she said, haltingly. “He’s still in. But I’m not calling about us, Catherine, I’m calling about India.”
My heart skipped a beat, and I held my breath.
“Wh—what about India?”
“Catherine, I don’t know if you know what’s going on, but . . . you have to save her,” Bonnie said. Her voice was trembling.
“You have to save India!”
PART 2
* * *
Saving India
8
* * *
AWAKENINGS
Save her?
“Bonnie, what do you mean?” I asked, still holding my breath. “Save India from what? From whom?!”
Bonnie took a deep breath.
“Cathe
rine . . . India is a member of a secret slave-master group,” she said, now speaking even more quickly—as if to get it all out before she was caught.
“She signed a lifetime vow of obedience and gave damaging collateral about herself and most likely you, too. Keith puts them on starvation diets and makes them sign away their possessions, their properties, their bank accounts, and even their future children. They get punished if they don’t do as they’re told. Each master has to recruit five or six slaves, and then the slaves become masters, too, and recruit slaves of their own. And . . .”
What the hell was she talking about? Slaves? Collateral? This was insane. India couldn’t be part of anything as twisted as this.
“And Catherine,” Bonnie whispered, “India isn’t just a slave, she’s a master, too.”
I was too stunned to speak.
“There’s so much more,” Bonnie said, “but I need to tell you the rest in person. I’m scared to do this over the phone.”
More? The idea of more filled me with dread. We made arrangements to meet the next day, and after we hung up, I called India’s father, Bill.
“India’s in jeopardy; she needs our help,” I told him, repeating the bizarre details Bonnie had told me. “We need to take action. We need to get her home!”
Neither of us knew what to make of what Bonnie had said, but we knew we had to get her home as fast as possible to find out what was happening—and do so without tipping our hand. India’s twenty-sixth birthday was seven weeks away, on June 7, so we came up with a plan to throw her a party and send her a plane ticket. If there was one thing I knew about my daughter, it was that she loved a good party. When she was four years old, she announced one day that her secret name was “Bunny Party Girl.”
I texted her:
Your dad and I would love to fly you home for your birthday, darling, and we can throw a party and invite all your friends.
She replied, over-the-moon excited, saying she’d cried when she received my text. She could only get away for five days at the end of May, she said, because she had important classes during the week of her birthday. I was thankful for even that. I hated that they kept her on such a short leash, but at least she’d be home soon—and I planned to keep her here.
—
BY THE TIME I met Bonnie the next afternoon, I’d already booked India a one-way flight to LA. I was emotionally and physically incapable of booking the return for her—I told her that her father would do it.
Bonnie and I reunited at a dimly lit bar in Beverly Hills. It had been four years since I’d seen her, and she looked exactly the same except for one big difference: her ever-present cult smile had been replaced by a haunted look in her eyes.
We hugged, but she was so jittery, she could barely stand still for it. Before we sat down, she scanned the room to see if she’d been followed or if anyone was watching her.
For the next two hours, Bonnie unloaded a torrent of information nonstop, sometimes sounding discombobulated, as she zigzagged through the last two years. I took notes, barely saying a word, and tried to keep both of us calm.
Bonnie and India had become the best of friends around India’s first V-week in 2012, she began explaining, but everything came crashing down once Allison Mack began mentoring India around the end of 2015 or early 2016.
“Allison derailed our friendship, as if she wanted to steal India away and wanted her for herself,” she said. “She felt threatened by me. I was worried and tried to warn India about her; I’d seen some very, very bad results from Alli’s mentoring.”
When Allison lived with Bonnie and Mark, including during the time India and I were their houseguests, “she would flip out in the middle of the night, and I’d hear murderous screaming coming from her room. She would get up and walk around Clifton Park all night long.”
Bonnie stopped to take a sip of water. Her hands were shaking.
Soon after Allison began mentoring India, she continued, India began to lose weight and act coldly toward Bonnie.
“Alli is obsessed with penance and weight,” Bonnie said. “I found out that Keith kept all the women on diets of five hundred to eight hundred calories, and if they gained weight, he punished them. It was to build character, he told them, because women don’t have any.”
It was around that time she noticed the relationship between India and Keith ramping up.
“He’d had his eye on her for years,” she said. “Then India told me last spring about a secret project she was working on with Keith and Allison. She called it ‘the Project,’ though I’ve since learned members use other code names for it, like ‘the Vow’ or ‘the Agency’ or ‘DOS’—which is Latin for ‘dominus obsequious sororium’ and means ‘master over the slave women.’
“Someone else tipped me off about what the secret group was about. I can’t say who—it would put us both in danger,” she went on. “In this master-slave club, there’s a lot of pressure for the women to sleep with Keith. Alli must have influenced India to get close to him because that’s how Alli got his approval, by bringing him women.”
Then came India’s life-changing walk with Keith.
“One day, India announced that she’d been for a walk with Keith, and when she returned, her opinion of him had completely changed. The way she talked about him was so different; she was flushed and almost giddy. I’m pretty sure Alli is having sex with Keith, and I think India is, too. He’s having sex with at least twenty of them at the same time.”
“Bonnie,” I interrupted, for the first and only time during her monologue, “are you absolutely sure of this? Are you sure India is having sex with Keith?”
I couldn’t bear to imagine this was true. I couldn’t.
“No, I’m not sure. But it’s very likely.”
Bonnie explained that she’d been making plans to leave ESP well before she knew about DOS.
“I wasn’t happy for a while,” she said. “I was broke—we were all broke. The promise that once I reached proctor/orange sash I would finally be making money was a lie. Over time I started to notice major inconsistencies in the organization and blatant abuses.”
When Bonnie started asking questions about what was going on, Allison had her kicked out of a Nxivm program for actors, called “the Source,” and began ostracizing her and telling everyone else to shun her as well. Nancy accused Bonnie of being a narcissist and a “suppressive”—a term Keith had stolen from Scientology, no doubt.
“I began having panic attacks,” she said. One day she left one of Keith’s classes early because she wasn’t feeling well. Afterward, he confronted her.
“He was furious. He said, ‘You’ve committed an ethical breach you’ll never be able to repair or heal in this lifetime, but you have to do everything you can to try!’
“Then a friend of mine, another coach, confided in me that she’d been removed from her position as head trainer because she’d committed an ethical breach against Keith by refusing to have his baby. In this secret society, all babies go to Keith—it’s part of their vow of obedience. They have to sign a waiver that if they get pregnant with Keith’s child—or anyone’s, for that matter—they must give their babies to Keith.”
As I took notes, each new piece of information was like a punch in the gut, but I wasn’t about to allow myself to go down the emotional rabbit hole right there in public. This was a coping mechanism of mine in moments of emergencies and trauma: stay calm, carry on, take notes, digest everything. Later, I could scream and cry into my pillow.
During the last few months that Bonnie was still in Albany, Keith got even more psycho, she said.
Two longtime members of his harem—Pam and Mariana—lived with him, and Pam had taken ill with cancer. “She was basically dying in one room, while in the next room, he told everyone later, he was having sex with Mariana to conceive his baby—with Pam’s blessing, as she was literally taking her last breath.”
Keith had told a lot of his women that he’d father a child with them, that they were
the chosen one, and that the baby would be an avatar who would change the world. Nine months later, the “Baby Avatar” was born.
But he was not Keith’s first child. A decade earlier, one of Keith’s girlfriends, Kristin Keeffe, gave birth to their son, Gaelen—and for years, Keith and the harem created a web of lies and mystery surrounding the child’s origins. A story was concocted that Keith had adopted the boy, a foundling, after his mother had died in childbirth and no one knew who the father was. At the time, Keith was presenting himself as celibate—which was ironic, considering he had a full-time harem. Keith’s foundling story, I thought, was the ultimate “Immaculate Deception.”
“Pam died last November, and Keith kept the news from all of us for several weeks, until he suddenly announced there’d be a memorial. Soon after that, he started telling people that Pam had been poisoned. Another member of his harem, Barbara Jeske, had died from cancer just two years earlier, and he had also told the group she had been poisoned. (The following year, I would find out that Keith and Nancy had cornered Barb’s sister right after Barb’s death and asked to have her sister’s body so they could freeze it. When the family refused, they requested the head only. The family didn’t give them that, either.) He was convinced people were out to get him, and were poisoning those in his inner circle.”
Multiple sources, including Pam’s hairstylist, had heard Pam say that Keith was monitoring her cancer treatment and had administered a milky fluid for her to drink.
“But that’s not even the worst of it,” Bonnie said, stopping to catch her breath.
She leaned in closer.
“I was told by firsthand witnesses that Keith arranged to have Pam’s body snuck out of the hospital before a death certificate could be issued and kept her body submerged in ice in one of his bathtubs at home. No one knows what happened to her body.”
Bonnie paused for a moment, and we both let the horror of this sink in.
“Why would anyone do that?” I asked, appalled.
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