Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult

How do I do something that makes the world better

beyond what I need today?

The three words I would use to describe NXIVM

are magnificence times infinity.

I went into NXIVM looking

for a more purposeful life,

and I thought that these people wanted that, too.

An EM is a stimulus-response disconnection.

But then I went through something

that I don't wish upon anybody.

Keith Raniere, NXIVM's founder,

created a secret sex slave ring.

Female members of NXIVM were branded

in their pelvic areas.

NXIVM is one of the worst,

most harmful cults I've ever heard of.

How did we all end up in the clutches of a monster?

I'm still trying to figure it out,

and I need to go back

so I can deconstruct the last seven years of my life.

Do you understand how you could rape a baby?

I can make it a baby that's very rapable.

It's taken me over 50 hours

of working with a therapist

to even be able to say something sexual did happen

between Keith and I.

Confronting all of these memories

is just bringing up a lot for me.

Mm-hmm.

Like, I feel robbed sometimes.

You were.

You were robbed of a lot of things

that if you had known ahead of time,

you would've run for the hills, right?

- My God. - Right?

Like, I can't even imagine

what my-what my life would've been like

if someone was like, "Hey, come to this course

"where eventually you're going to feel crazy

"and you're going to have to be somebody's slave

and you're not gonna have your own life."

- How did that happen? - Yeah.

You've been influenced in so many ways

because Keith created

a very deliberate methodology for indoctrination,

and so the more you understand about what happened to you,

sort of the system that you were put in,

then I think the more you get why it is that you did this

so that you're not beating yourself up.

I've really been struggling to figure out

how NXIVM really worked.

It's like, what the hell happened to me?

It's like the curriculum totally changed my brain.

How did I get indoctrinated without even knowing it?

NXIVM seemed so legitimate.

They had centers all over the world,

but their headquarters were in Albany.

Albany-Rensselear is the final stop for this train.

Make sure you have all of your personal belongings.

Albany is where Keith and a majority

of the higher-ranking members lived.

It's not easy to come back here.

455 New Karner Road, NXIVM headquarters.

The 55 is gone.

A lot of my life was spent in this place.

This is super weird.

How are you different than your indoctrination?

How are you actually different than you believe you are?

Oh, that's freaky.

Still says "Executive Success Programs."

A psychopath, doesn't have any empathy,

just sees something that feels good...

Raping a person, raping a cat.

You know, whatever it is.

I feel like the blood

is leaving my arms.

Not totally dizzy, but just, like, a li-little bit weird.

Oh, that's so weird. Even the lights are still on.

It's like they just left.

In this room,

we would have the higher-ranking members

promote people.

The only way to move up in NXIVM

was to recruit other people

and to continue taking more and more classes.

The Stripe Path was NXIVM's ranking system,

similar to a martial arts studio,

where you master one level and then the next and the next

until you're proficient enough to teach.

People worked really hard to earn their next stripe

or the next colored sash.

There were different goals

you had to meet, and enrolling was part of it.

I was enrolling clients

and friends and acquaintances

and family members

because I believed in this so much

and because I had a huge network of people.

When I was first promoted to coach,

it felt great because I thought that I was rising

through the ranks

of this innovative humanitarian organization.

So welcome to the rank of proctor,

with all the rights, privileges,

and responsibilities that come with the rank.

The only way that you could make money in NXIVM

is when you became a proctor, which was an orange sash.

That was the dream, to have an actual career

where you could help people.

Senior proctors,

wore the green sashes,

like Sarah Edmondson and Mark Vicente,

were making a good living

running the centers and enrolling people.

They were making commissions off of anyone

that they brought into the organization,

and they were making commissions off of anyone

who those people brought in.

This is the way indoctrination works.

In order to get so many people

to go even deeper and deeper into the course curriculum,

Keith Raniere would hold out a kind of carrot

and say, "Look, you know,

"this might be tough,

but there's a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow."

Welcome to the rank of proctor.

The first time I saw someone

be promoted to proctor,

I felt a little jealous.

I thought, "I want that.

How do I even get there?"

The illusion was,

to be able to rise up in the ranks.

It was a merit-based system, but, in fact,

Keith was really pulling the strings

from behind the scenes,

and so it really had

nothing to do with merit

but to Keith's preferences.

And as you might imagine, it was the more beautiful,

slender women who were chosen

to rise up more quickly in the ranks.

And that's how Keith eventually built up

the stable of sex slaves.

Those were well-earned promotions.

With respect to motivating mules,

I just set up the circumstances.

Most of the time, if they're motivated

for the first time in their life,

they go too far, which is fine.

Yeah.

So anything else? Are we done?

We're good.

By 2013, I had been in NXIVM

for about two years

and a coach in training for about a year.

I put in hundreds of hours in teaching and coaching,

and I wasn't making any money doing it,

but I believed that I was working my way up.

They said it was like an unpaid internship.

All coaches had to work without pay.

So, to make money, I'd pick up any odd jobs

and assistant work that I could fit around coaching.

Eventually my entire life became NXIVM-related,

including my friends.

And then I met a guy, and I thought it could be

the beginning of something really great.

His name was Michel Chernitzky,

and he was also in NXIVM.

Enrolling is like sex.

It feels good, and if it doesn't, you're not doing it correctly.

When we first started dating,

Nancy Salzman was super opposed,

because he was a higher-ranking coach

and I was not.

And so she kind of, like, inserted herself

in our relationship

and put all these parameters in place

in order for him to date me.

So we had to split everything 50/50, for example,

to make sure that I wasn't dependent on him.

Nancy told me that being dependent on people

was a problem that I needed to work on.

There was a great deal

of what we call the systems of control,

telling people who they could date

and who they couldn't date, how they should behave.

Every little part of daily life was controlled

in some way or another by the group.

Over time, you begin to lose

your critical-thinking abilities.

Through this indoctrination process,

you don't really know who yourself is,

and they're creating a new self for you.

I-I do feel unbelievable guilt

because I was the one who introduced India to NXIVM,

and it took me years to realize how dangerous it was.

After India became a coach,

she started to recruit everybody.

She started to recruit all my friends on Facebook.