Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  “Maybe so he could continue to use her credit cards? I don’t know,” she answered. “I couldn’t stay any longer, Catherine. Mark begged me to, but I couldn’t. A veil had been lifted, and I saw everything for what it really was: all lies.”

  Bonnie’s whole body was shaking. She was fighting a decade of programming and indoctrination to talk this way about ESP and would now be considered a heretic because of it. I reached across the table and squeezed her hands, as if to still them.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for being brave enough to share this with me.”

  “I’m telling you these terrible things about your daughter,” she stuttered, “but why is it you’re the calm one and I’m shaking like a leaf!”

  I smiled, somehow. “I’m a mother; I can handle a lot.”

  My mind was already working overtime thinking up ways to handle all the news she’d told me over the last twenty-four hours, and how to help India.

  “You know, Bonnie, I always assumed India would wake up at some point and leave the group of her own accord.”

  “No, Catherine, listen to me. She won’t. She went in too young, she was too impressionable. The only way to get her out now is to do an intervention.”

  I drove home along the Pacific Coast Highway, trying to absorb the evil I’d just heard.

  In front of Bonnie, I had remained calm. And a big part of me was in shock. But inside, my heart and soul ripped apart at every word she uttered. Of all the many, many worries I harbored about India and ESP over the years, I never, ever, would have guessed anything like this was in the realm of possibility.

  My India, starved, punished—a slave? How did this happen? Please, let my precious girl be safe!

  She’d be arriving in six weeks, on May 25, and I was already planning to surprise her with her favorite things to do: massages, hikes, watsu, hot springs, road trips, and lots of great restaurants, I thought to myself, to feed you. At the same time, I was consumed with guilt. I’d never outright lied to India before, and here I was, setting her up to come for her birthday and then ambushing her. I fully intended to do what Bonnie urged: a full-out intervention, though I had no idea what it entailed yet.

  As I drove by Zuma Beach, I slowed to catch a glimpse of a pod of dolphins breaching near the shore break. It reminded me of the time India was eleven, and we were driving along the coast not far from where I was now. She’d said a prayer then, and asked for dolphins to appear in the water to confirm that her prayer had been heard—and they did. She had a magical intuitive connection to nature, and I took the dolphins as a sign of hope.

  When I got home, I sat on the couch and stared out the window for hours, not wanting to move or to believe anything I’d heard that day. I watched the sun slip into the Pacific. After the shock came rage, then indignation, then grief.

  And finally, determination. As soon as the sun set, I sprang into action—there wasn’t a minute to spare. Bonnie had already emailed me a list of books, films, articles, and cult experts: “Educate yourself,” she said to me as we left the bar. “To help India, you’ve got to learn everything you can.”

  I put on Holy Hell, a recent documentary about another bizarre sex cult based in West LA, called Buddhafield, and attacked the list Bonnie sent me, ordering books, reading articles, and making appointments, until it was morning.

  —

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, I was sitting in the office of Rachel Bernstein, a therapist, cult deprogrammer, and recovery specialist, strategizing on how to do an intervention for India.

  Rachel came from a family of activists, like mine, and grew interested in this line of work after a family friend had been brainwashed by Scientology. She’d since helped hundreds of people recover from destructive cults and held support groups for former cult members. Some of her past patients had included “Expians,” she told me—a moniker referring to defectors, or ex-Espians.

  “They are a very dangerous, extreme cult,” she said. “And they’re known to be viciously litigious against defectors. But I’ve had success with several of them.”

  I asked her why India had been sucked into the group when we’d all taken the class and none of us had been?

  “Anyone can be susceptible to cults and prone at different times in their lives,” she said. “Cults often have a front organization that looks completely normal and legitimate offering practical tools—skills that one can use in the outside world.

  “Keith is so ordinary as a cult leader, nothing original. He demands total belief in him and sacrifices such as proof of loyalty and devotion. You’re asked to see the world in black and white and not question him. The mechanism of control is identical to most cult leaders. Fear induction is a potent behavior modification tool. Public shaming dissuades other members from challenging hierarchy.”

  My plan was to stage an intervention at the tail end of her visit; that way India could spend as much fun time with the family as possible first, before the axe dropped.

  “That’s not enough time,” Rachel said. “It often takes months to put together a proper intervention.”

  “Rachel, there is no other time. It’s nearly impossible to get her home. This is the only chance I have. Why does it take so long?”

  “I usually educate the entire family. The way everyone communicates with the cult member is very different than usual; there are skills you all have to learn . . .”

  I’d already checked with the girls, and they didn’t feel comfortable getting involved. And Bill did not appear interested in meeting with any specialists.

  “It’s just me, Rachel. I’m it. I’m the entire family.”

  We talked about the possibility of my bringing India to Rachel’s office when she came home for her birthday party. I had no idea if I’d be able to convince India to see her, so I wanted to be educated on what to say to her myself.

  For the next few hours, Rachel coached me on how to talk to India during the intervention—what words to say and not say, how to pose questions to her, how to respond to her.

  “A cult intervention bears no resemblance to an addiction intervention,” she explained. “There is no confrontation, simply an invitation to have a conversation. The purpose is to ask questions to awaken her critical thinking. Cult members are handicapped when it comes to trusting their inner voice. She’s been systematically taught to override that first impulse, so she’s going to have to relearn how to listen to her inner guidance.”

  The most crucial instruction, she stressed, was to keep from being critical or judgmental of India during any of our communications with her.

  “She’s getting judged and controlled and criticized by the cult already, so you need to do the opposite: show her what unconditional love looks like, show her the difference. It’s very important that people see her in a positive light and recognize her strengths. Saying anything negative about Keith or the cult will only make her defenses go up.”

  She described how cult members have two separate personalities. “The precult persona is the India you’ve always known. And the cult persona is the one that is distant, distracted, stressed, serious, dissociated, burdened, acting superior.”

  “Yep,” I said, nodding. “I’ve seen that persona.”

  “Catherine, every opportunity you can find, engage her precult persona as much as possible. Remind her of her memories. The more you can get her to laugh, smile, and enjoy herself, the better. You want her to miss her time at home.”

  “The most important thing to remember in any interaction with her,” she emphasized, “is to keep it light. This is not an ambush.”

  For the next hour, Rachel continued to drill me on questions, answers, phrasings, responses, good and bad words, and the do’s and don’ts of an intervention. She also warned me how difficult it can be to get into and change a cult member’s mind.

  “Many defectors feel anxiety around freedom,” she explained. “They miss the appeal of the community, the ‘high,’ and the magic. They miss feeling specially chosen and f
ollowing someone who seems to have all the answers. The ones who do not get deprogrammed often go cult shopping, leaving one cult for another. The loss of community is very real for them; it’s very painful. So surround India with people who love her.”

  With what I’d learned in just one session, I was confident I’d be successful. Armed with my anti-cultspeak, I was sure I’d get through to India, and she wouldn’t want to go back.

  “Catherine, if India does go back to Albany this time, don’t be disappointed and think the intervention failed,” she said. “The goal is not to stop her from leaving. She may feel she has to go back because she is afraid of the repercussions, not because she wants to. Fear-induction techniques and planted phobias about betraying Keith and the doctrine are controlling her. Many times, people need to go back and figure it out for themselves and have their own awakening so that it can be their decision, not someone pushing them. But you will have planted the seeds of doubt.

  “When cult members finally see the leader as a sociopath or narcissist, it’s so freeing. But it may take time. We are dealing with an invisible art. There are no locks on the door, there is only a lock on your mind.”

  I thanked her, and left the office filled with hope—and in denial.

  India, go back to that insanity? To me, that wasn’t an option.

  A few weeks later, I got another unexpected call: this time it was Mark, Bonnie’s husband. He was with Bonnie in LA, and he’d just finished facilitating an intensive ESP class. It would be his last, he told me.

  “Catherine, please keep this to yourself, but I’m defecting from the group, too,” he told me. “No one knows yet except for Bonnie.”

  “Oh, Mark. Thank God.”

  This was big, big news. Not only would Mark’s defection save his marriage, but also, as the first high-ranking man to leave the group, he would surely influence others to wake up and leave, too—maybe even India.

  Like Rachel Bernstein had said, every cult member has to have his or her own awakening; his or her own way of connecting the dots. For Mark, it happened when he realized for the first time that Keith had told him a lie about something—just one small, little lie. When Mark confronted him about it, Keith lied a second time. And that’s when something occurred to Mark for the first time like a bulb switching on in his brain:

  Oh my God, what if he’s lying about other things, too? What if he’s been lying to me all along, about everything? What if all of this is a lie?

  Hearing about DOS from Bonnie horrified him and hastened the departure he was already planning. His defection had been in the works for a while, but Bonnie couldn’t tell me about it at our meeting because they feared for their lives. As soon as Mark announced his departure with an official resignation letter, and Keith and other cult members found out about it, he was certain he’d receive death threats, he said.

  “I have so much shame, Catherine,” he lamented. “I dedicated over twelve years of my life to this man and his mission, and then one day I realized the whole thing was an evil charade. To think I was a part of it, that I helped recruit thousands of people, the amount of destruction I unknowingly participated in—my guilt and shame are unbearable.”

  I could hear his muffled sobs before Bonnie took the phone.

  “Catherine, Mark spoke to Sarah Edmondson this morning, and you need to hear what she had to say. She admitted to him that she’s part of DOS and that she was branded on her body. Can we meet you somewhere to talk in person? We can’t say any more over the phone.”

  Branded? I told her to meet me at my friend Greg’s house that afternoon. He was someone we could trust who could give good advice and help them navigate their next steps, I told her.

  We hung up, and for the second time in two weeks, the idea of hearing more from Bonnie filled me with dread.

  —

  GREG HANNLEY WAS a longtime neighbor and a successful entrepreneur, most notably the founder and CEO of the Soba Recovery Center rehabilitation facilities across the country. When Callum needed help with the alcohol problem that Nancy hadn’t cured, and his insurance wouldn’t cover another stint in rehab, Greg took care of him. (Callum had already done a gig at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, and “escaped” three times, as he liked to tell it. The third time, he ran off into the desert until a Betty Ford worker pulled up in a mandatory white rehab van. “You know, you don’t have to keep running away . . . and by the way, we have your wallet, your passport, and your phone,” the employee said nicely. “We’re not a prison. You can just leave.” Callum always likes to remind everyone about the ungodly amount of Valium that the rehab center had administered to him, and blames this farcical escape story on the pill addiction he left Betty Ford with, which he didn’t have going in.)

  Greg was a no-bullshit, silver-haired, handsome guy, in that gangster-mensch sort of way. And he was connected. His latest rescue mission was saving young women from the sex-trafficking industry. As it turned out, Greg endured a year of hell in an abusive cult when he was a teenager.

  He and a bunch of teens were prisoners of a man who controlled their every move and threatened their lives daily by putting a loaded gun to their heads. If you tried to escape, he ordered another cult member to drive you out to the desert and leave you there.

  “How did you get out?” I asked him.

  Bonnie’s earlier words still echoed in my mind: that India wouldn’t get out on her own because she went in too young and impressionable. But here was Greg, proof it was possible.

  “The guy died,” Greg said. He had advanced diabetes and one day just keeled over. “Had he not died, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten out.” It was not the answer I was hoping for.

  A few hours after our phone call, Mark, Bonnie, and Mark’s mother, Juliana—who’d been an accountant for ESP for more than a decade—met me and Greg at his house on Zuma Beach, a two-minute drive from mine.

  After introductions, we sat down, and just as Bonnie had done weeks earlier, Mark began unloading information like a bursting dam.

  “I don’t know where to start. I talked to Sarah this morning,” he said.

  “I just found out from her that Keith is having women branded,” he said. “She broke down crying on the phone and admitted that she was a member of this secret DOS group, and that she’d been branded. ‘There are potentially dozens of other women who have been subjected to this as well,’ she said.

  “She says that when she was branded, a bunch of other women in her slave cell held her down on a table, naked, and they burned her in the pubic area with a searing hot cauterizing pen and no anesthetic. She witnessed the horror of seeing the others getting branded that day, too, and heard their screams.”

  Mark continued, “She was terrified to tell me about it, worried they’d release the collateral she’d given them if they found out she was speaking about it. ‘Keith is involved with the group,’ she said.”

  The first collateral the women in DOS usually gave were explicit, naked photos of themselves. After they joined and found out they had to give new, different collateral every month, they had to get creative. Future collateral could be about you or about members of your family, as long as each time it was something—a photo, information—that would be ruinous if revealed.

  “Her most recent collateral, she told me, was something she’d made up. She’d run out of things to give, so Lauren told her to just make shit up.”

  Lauren, Nancy Salzman’s daughter, was Sarah’s best friend and had been maid of honor at her wedding to the actor Anthony (“Nippy”) Ames, also a member of Nxivm (the coach who’d called me “Springsteen” in an early ESP class). She was also Sarah’s master.

  “Lauren videotaped her giving a false confession about her husband being an abusive father,” Mark continued. “But she’d made it all up. She was crying, disgusted with herself that she’d done this and that Lauren would encourage her to do it. ‘Women need to be humiliated in order to build character,’ Lauren told her.
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br />   “She didn’t even know what she’d been branded with. Lauren had told her it would be just a tiny tattoo, a symbol of female empowerment—not a two-inch-by-two-inch brand.”

  Mark and Sarah both figured out what the symbol was: a combination of Allison’s and Keith’s initials.

  We were all silent for a moment, and I wished I could have stretched that moment into eternity. I didn’t want to ask the next, inevitable question, but I had to.

  “Does anyone know if India has been branded?”

  Bonnie, sitting next to me, put her hand on my shoulder in support.

  “From all indications,” Mark said sadly, “the answer is yes.”

  If I’d thought my earlier conversation with Bonnie was a nightmare, now I felt like someone was pushing me through the gates of hell. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining India’s beautiful, ivory skin being burned and branded like an animal and feeling the searing pain on my own body. I felt helpless and hopeless, and worried now that I was too late to help her.

  I looked over at Greg, who was so furious and repulsed by what he’d just heard, he was popping Nicorette gum like candy. Greg had a teenage daughter who’d been friends with Maya since kindergarten.

  “If I was India’s father,” Greg said, “I would get on a plane and get over there, grab her, and tell her, ‘That’s enough, you’re done and we’re going home.’ That’s it. Case closed. Lucky for Keith she isn’t my daughter, because he would be a dead man.”

  Lucky for Keith and unlucky for India, I thought. I wished one of India’s fathers would do just as Greg described.

  “Those ESP people, they’re a nasty bunch,” Juliana said in her thick South African brogue, shaking her head, “the whole lot of them.”

  “Bonnie, did they try to recruit you for DOS?” Greg asked.

  “I think Keith tried to test me once for ‘suggestibility’ and ‘subservience,’ ” she said. “He took me on a walk with him at three in the morning and told me to lick a puddle and then run into a tree. I did lick the puddle,” she admits, “but refused the tree. So I guess I failed the test.”