I burst into tears in the back of the taxi. I had never anticipated the Eastern District.
“I didn’t think they had jurisdiction!” I said. The Eastern District’s jurisdiction covered Brooklyn, Staten Island, and all of Long Island—all of them about 160 miles from Albany.
“They’re looking at ports of entry,” Anthony explained.
I immediately understood the implication: the airports the women flew in and out of. They were going for trafficking! This was huge!
“Assistant US Attorney Moira Kim Penza was particularly moved by your story,” Art added.
I held the phone still but couldn’t speak.
It had taken a woman and a mother to understand.
It had taken a woman to respond to my call for help. And it was going to take a group of women to take down Keith Raniere.
And when it was all over, I knew that’s what would infuriate him the most.
15
* * *
D-DAY OR DOOMSDAY
The FBI was on the case, and I was right there with them.
After I left the attorney general’s office in Albany, I’d sent dozens of witnesses and defectors to their point people to provide testimony and evidence, overwhelming them and jamming their phone lines. But within twenty-four hours of the FBI’s involvement, I’d rerouted and funneled everyone to the bureau. In the meantime, a top law firm had stepped in to represent all the DOS victims pro bono.
For a moment, I allowed myself some hope. How could I not? I envisioned the FBI slapping handcuffs on Keith Raniere, ransacking cult headquarters, and India free at last.
But even though the investigation was now in good, official hands, my anxiety continued to grow over the next few months as I waited for the Feds to complete their probe and take action. When would they storm the ESP offices in Albany and handcuff Keith and his cronies? My biggest worry now was not just that they wouldn’t capture Keith but that they wouldn’t capture him in time.
Would they get to him before India was pulled in so deep she wouldn’t be able to get out? For the first time since Bonnie’s urgent phone call six months earlier, I was realizing that not only was I being called to save her from the cult, but also I was in a race against time to save her life.
And not only hers.
Under the new pressure stirred up by the media exposure and the FBI hunt, what if Keith went berserk and, in a bold, deranged statement, ordered his flock to take part in a glorified doomsday pact together? It was possible. Rick Alan Ross had been worried about the same scenario.
“I feared we’d end up dealing with a mass suicide situation,” he told me later, “but I didn’t tell you at the time because I didn’t want to scare you.”
Well, I was scared with or without him telling me. And there was more to be scared about: like Keith’s grandiose scheme to take over the world and achieve global domination.
Keith had been playing and positioning his devoted follower Emiliano Salinas as his pawn for years while Emi’s family groomed him to follow in his father’s political footsteps. From what I heard from high-ranking defectors, the supposed plan was to get Emi into office in Mexico’s next presidential election in the summer of 2018 so that a top-ranking Espian and Nxivm devotee would have power on the world’s political stage. His father, Carlos, would use his Machiavellian methods to ensure his son’s election win, and then Keith would use Emi as his puppet and rule Mexico.
And that wasn’t all. According to Bonnie, Sara Bronfman’s husband, Libyan businessman Basit Igtet, had taken Nxivm classes for several months. Igtet was a Libyan national and supporter of the Libyan revolution. Could Keith have been mentoring Igtet, as he had with Salinas, in the hope of expanding Nxivm’s tentacles to positions of power around the world?
It hadn’t worked—yet. Once it did, Nxivm would be planted in Libya as well.
But Libya and Mexico were just warm-ups for Keith’s ultimate target: the superpower of America.
Keith told Lisa the year before that he was planning to give his slaves orders that he didn’t have the strength to give yet. After my talks with Frank, Rick, and many defectors, we decided that Keith’s warning meant that he was going to ask his DOS slaves to sacrifice their lives for the cause somehow; we just weren’t sure how.
Either way, their sacrifices would be so that Keith could attain more power to influence and take over the world.
I know, I know: it sounds like a fictional plot for a political or sci-fi thriller. But this was no Hollywood movie. Keith was a real-life Dr. Evil.
Think about it: he was training young children in his school to be his mindless drones, a little army of Rainbow Culture Children, and ten to fifteen years down the road they’d be of fighting age and under his power—his own Aryan Nation.
He’d already trained his slaves to have sex on command and take postcoital proof photos. According to one of his harem members, when he was confronted with legal troubles in Albany, he’d ordered his harem to strategically seduce and photograph certain law enforcement officials in flagrante, including cops and district attorneys, to blackmail them for his legal advantage.
Taking it one step further, his ninja concubines had then been desensitized and trained using violent films and branding to give them the ability to tolerate, endure, and inflict unbearable pain. So now he had a small army of loyal, brainwashed, fearless, desensitized women ready to go undercover at his beck and call and do whatever it took to please their master.
After all that, my final worry—and I don’t even know how to rank which one of these was “worst”—was that Keith and his flying monkeys would set up the DOS slaves, or maybe just India, to take the fall.
A few days after that phone call from my lawyer, I got another big call—from Assistant US Attorney Moira Kim Penza, FBI special agent Mike W., and one of my lawyers. They called to apologize for the Albany office’s lack of a quicker, better response over the summer.
“I want to offer my most sincere apology,” Mike W. said. “I can imagine how hard this is for you.”
Moira asked if I’d be willing to fly to New York to testify in front of a grand jury.
“Of course,” I said. “Whatever it takes. Whenever you need me.”
“One more thing,” Mike said on the phone. “You did the right thing, Ms. Oxenberg. You shone the light where it needed to be. So now, uh, you can stop investigating and let us do our job, okay?”
I laughed, relieved to hand over the baton to them. But as I’ve said, my relief was always short-lived. On the tail end of my Albany trip, I found out that India had flown to Los Angeles to escape the media attention and, possibly, to avoid seeing me—which was heartbreaking. But, I reasoned, at least it got her away from the cult epicenter, and that was good. And then I’d heard she planned to stay in LA for good and that she’d been staying with Casper, but neither Casper nor Bill had let me know.
“I thought I could count on solidarity from you!” I said to Bill on the phone.
“Don’t expect it,” he said. “Look, India’s fine. In fact, she’s better than ever.”
I wanted to say to him: “Bill, you are in denial along with her. At some point you will have to deal with reality!” Instead, I hung up, stunned and exasperated. India didn’t want to see me, and that was to be expected. But I couldn’t understand how the entire world was outraged after hearing defectors describe publicly how they were coerced, extorted, blackmailed, abused, and tortured—and yet her father thought India was “fine” and in no danger.
Assuming he’d read the New York Times article, why was he not disturbed by it when the FBI was so disturbed, they were charging in?
Unfortunately, Bill was buying into India’s narrative hook, line, and sinker, and it seemed like Casper was, too. She was trying to convince everyone that I was exaggerating and what they’d read in the news was made up. When I needed her fathers the most to stand by me in order to help her, all I felt was their resistance.
Once again I went to Rick Alan
Ross for help to understand it all.
“You know, it’s not such a bad setup,” he observed. “Let the dads be the ‘good cops,’ and you can be the ‘bad cop’ and play that game even if it hurts your feelings. The dynamic can work for you behind the scenes to your advantage.”
He stressed again how important it was for India to keep a link, a lifeline, to the family and to have some members she felt she could trust. This way the cult wouldn’t take over her life entirely.
“She needs a safe harbor, so let her feel she has it with her dads,” said Rick. “Swallow your pride. They can’t really think she’s okay.”
When I picked up the girls from Casper’s after my return from Albany, they piled into the car upset and angry. They’d just spent a week with India and she’d gotten them all riled up.
“What you’ve done to India is terrible!” Celeste and Maya said in unison.
“She can’t walk outside without the press chasing her. You ruined her life, Mom! She says she’s stigmatized.”
I stayed calm and talked them through it as we drove home.
“Girls, you know if I could have done anything else, I would have . . . and that I tried everything, right?”
They nodded.
“This was my last resort. If you needed saving, wouldn’t you want me to do everything I could to save you?”
They nodded again.
When we got home, I was drained. I had plenty of support from friends and now, finally, law enforcement, but very little from my own family. I’d reached an emotional threshold I didn’t think I could bear on my own. Feeling utterly alone, I called my mother in Belgrade.
“Shall I come to LA, darling?”
“Yes, please,” I said, bursting into tears. Mom immediately booked a flight to arrive a few days later. She didn’t quite understand the depth of danger India was in, and she came from a generation that didn’t put credence in the concept of brainwashing. (“This sounds like nonsense,” she said when I tried to explain what was going on.) But my mother understood enough to know that her family needed her, and she got on that plane as fast as she could to help and show solidarity.
—
EVEN THOUSANDS OF miles away, the Albany contingency had its hooks into India deeper than ever. She was on her cell phones even more than before, her sisters reported. And a call from Bonnie confirmed my suspicions that she wasn’t in LA only to skip seeing me in Albany.
She was also here on orders.
“I think the DOS girls have been sent out on missions,” Bonnie said. “It’s what they’ve been trained for.”
Lisa agreed, telling me: “All DOS girls are trained to fight for Keith and fight for the cause.”
But what had they been sent out to do?
When I began speaking to defectors in the summer, some speculated that if Keith got in trouble and needed a diversion, he’d push a loyal DOS slave to commit an “honor” suicide.
And then I remembered something. I called Bonnie and asked her about the early modules India and I had done during our first classes at ESP—the ones India later repeated hundreds of times in Ethos. Sure enough, my memory was correct. On day five, one of the modules under the “Good and Bad” theme posed the question: “When is suicide honorable?”
The coaches built up to the question like a logical, mathematical equation: Survival and values were “good” while the destruction of values and counter-survival was “bad.” But could these concepts ever overlap or intermingle? The groups in class were asked:
Can you think of anything that is counter-survival and/or destroys value that is good?
Can you think of anything that is pro-survival and builds value that is bad?
When is suicide good?
“Right from the start,” Bonnie said, “we talked about cases when suicide would be considered good.” I remembered during the Characterization class Casper and I took—our final class before we left ESP for good—the coach talked about the Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thích Qua’ng Ðúc, who set himself on fire in 1963 in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon. He was an example of tremendous character, said the coach, because he felt joy as his body burned and he died for his beliefs, becoming a martyr for the good of the cause.
Keith talked about that monk all the time, and other examples like Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, who sacrificed for their beliefs. The thing about Keith, though, was that he enjoyed watching others do the sacrificing. Being the malignant, narcissistic, punitive, and vindictive psychopath that he was, I could see Keith ordering his slaves to drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid while he ended up sipping piña coladas in a thatched hut in Fiji.
Was this the fate of the DOS women? The murky details of their mission would become clearer over the next few weeks as I continued to try convincing my daughter via text to get out.
Me: Sweetheart—I know u think u are part of something good, but please research the law to understand the seriousness. I don’t want u to get into trouble.
India: I have, mom. Plenty, actually tons. The people that you’re working with are actually accused criminals. Frank your expert has only ever written slander and has been paid money to do so. It’s devastating for me to see you being this convinced to the point of destroying my image and publicly painting me as a victim and a violator of woman. The accusations you’ve made against me are outstandingly false and traumatic. I’m now dealing with them constantly, and the effects have put a huge weight and disturbance to my life that I don’t even think you can image. I have had zero issues spending time with family and friends here in LA or elsewhere. I’ve actively decided to not speak with you out of principle because I think what you’re doing is so damaging to me and my friends and family. So for you to say I’m trapped or blocking you is not true. I’ve actually only said kind things about you in your defense and tried to understand your perspective. At this point, my conversations with you seem futile since your absolutely convinced that I’m brainwashed or crazy, and I don’t see the point in trying to convince or prove otherwise to you. If that’s what you believe, I can’t change your mind about me. your just the only one who seems to see me unwell. That’s all I have to say at this point. I’m interested in seeing Elizabeth tomorrow if she would like.
I could see that this text was definitely not written by India; I wondered which cult handler helped her with this one. You would think by now I would have learned not to use the “B” word, but no . . .
Me: You are brainwashed. Many people have left ESP and there are some very disturbing stories. As a mother, it is normal that I would be concerned. Frank is not my expert—I’m not sure where u got that from—I am working with Rachel Bernstein.
India: As a mother, I would hope that you would see your daughter and not just believe hearsay or other people’s opinions.
Me: I have asked to see u—and am available any time.
India: I have also offered to see you but not under your current perspective, it’s somewhat futile if your just convinced that I’m brainwashed but with a neutral mediator. I’ll see Elizabeth separately.
Me: Then see me with a neutral arbitrator. When u are ready.
India: I would like to see my grandma if she wants to tomorrow.
Me: She would love to—and she will be there.
My heart broke again (how many times can a heart actually break and still stay intact?) when I read India’s last bit about seeing her grandma. I could hear the little girl in her wanting nurturing and love, and I wished I could be the one she was running to. I was grateful that my mother could be a safe harbor for her until I would be a possibility again.
But for now, I was the enemy.
“She looks through a specific lens that redefines good and evil,” Diane Benscoter, one of my cult-expert friends, told me, “and she has redefined you as evil.”
Diane is a former Moonie and wrote the book Shoes of a Servant: My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie.
Even though India was redefining me as the enemy, “s
he has to know you wouldn’t risk losing her just for publicity or fame or money. You’ve already had all those things.”
Mom arrived in LA, and before her meeting with India the next day, I briefed her on what to ask and how to respond. The following day, I dropped her off in Santa Monica, at the same corner where I’d dropped off India six months earlier. As I pulled to the curb, I looked up—and there was beautiful India, walking toward us a short distance away. I stuck my arm out of my car and waved, and then blew her a kiss. She smiled and waved back.
It was the first time in six months I’d seen her lovely face. And even though it was brief and from afar, my heart leapt.
When I picked up Mom two hours later, India had already left, and Mom began telling me details as soon as she got in the car.
“She was sweet and so loving, Catherine,” my mother told me, “and very happy to see me.”
She relayed the conversation as we drove:
“What do you want me to tell you, Grandma?”
“I’d like you to tell me all about what goes on in Albany. There are about thirty defectors who I hear were good friends of yours. Would you like to talk to them?”
“I would,” she said to my mother. But I knew it was only lip service—she’d shunned every defector.
“Do you have to ask for permission before you do anything?”
“No.”
I knew that DOS slaves did have to ask permission for pretty much everything from their masters.
“They’ve lost a lot of business because of all the press,” said India, quickly changing the subject.
“But India . . . all these girls have been harassed and abused.”
“It’s not true, Grandma. I haven’t heard any of that or seen any abuse!”
“If that was true, would you leave? It’s very possible that some things have happened that you don’t know about. I’m concerned—there is a legal aspect here. These young girls are coming over the border from Mexico . . . to . . . it looks like slavery and prostitution. I guess they all ended up in bed with Keith.”
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