Don't Call it a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM

by Sarah Berman

To prove any kind of racketeering, there needs to be an “enterprise” of multiple people. Over a period of up to ten years, each member has to have agreed to commit at least two crimes in service of a common goal. Law books call this “a pattern of racketeering.” The goal itself doesn’t have to be criminal, as many gangs and Ponzi schemes have purely money-making ends.

IQ testing itself has since come under more scientific scrutiny, and after the proliferation of high-IQ societies in the late 1970s and 80s, new research in the 1990s moved toward theories of multiple kinds of intelligence. Intelligence testing as a whole has been criticized for its narrow, culturally exclusive definition of cognitive ability. Racists and eugenicists are obsessed with it, which is never a good sign.

As in Scientology, NXIVM used the word “suppressive” to describe people and forces that went against the organization’s interests. In NXIVM, a suppressive person was described as someone who had their wires completely crossed, so that good things made them feel bad and bad things made them feel good.

Students were told they should be able to find it within themselves to embody the worst human traits they could imagine. One former student says this included trying to feel the lust of a child rapist. “Like you need to come to a place where you could play that character—the thing you hate most in the world—including pedophiles,” Amy (not her real name) told me. It took me a couple of tries to actually process what Amy was telling me. Somehow it was worse than I imagined. “We spent a whole day on how you should be able to rape a baby,” she said. “So put yourself in a place where you could identify with a pedophile who rapes babies. If you can’t, it means something is ‘in the box’ for you. It means it hits too close to home, so you won’t go there. If it’s in the box, it’s because you know that trait well, meaning you have that trait within you.”

“My general understanding of that intensive was, in essence, if somebody complains about abuse, they are, in fact, the abuser,” Vicente testified. “So if somebody says, ‘There’s abuse going on and so-and-so person is doing it,’ the whole idea is, ‘Well, actually you’re the abuser.’ ”

For decades the many abuses of Keith Raniere had existed in plain sight—somehow too absurd and sensational to ever be taken seriously. Part of the reason those abuses went unchallenged for so long had to do with our cultural understanding of his victims, the majority of whom were young women. It’s true that young, beautiful women are often perceived as sympathetic victims—though this applies only to unambiguous crimes. Their abusers must jump out of bushes, or at the very least the abused must rush straight to the authorities—no negotiation or continued contact with abusers permitted—to secure their status as a good, “credible” victim.

“It has taken me three years and a substantial amount of space from your manipulation to realize that the shame that has been weighing so heavily on my shoulders is not mine to carry,” Nicole said. “It’s yours.”