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

by Sarah Berman

The classes taught that suffering is optional, that the power of positive thinking creates reality, and that there’s no such thing as a “victim.”

Students would write down every instance of pain or suffering, for example, and then ask, “How did I create this situation?”

One of those therapies, later called an “exploration of meaning,” led students to redefine traumatic moments in childhood by identifying flawed “attachments” and “limiting beliefs.”

“We all believed that we are responsible for our own emotional reactions,” Lauren said. “Sometimes you would talk about that, like, ‘This is for your growth. This is an opportunity. How are you ever going to get through the issue if you leave?’ ”

Scientific studies of conformity have found that our minds are more prone to caving when we’re outnumbered.

By the mid-2000s most NXIVM students were being told that Raniere had sworn off both sex and material possessions, a claim that obscured his numerous sexual relationships from most of the community of coaches and proctors growing around Bouchey.

NXIVM classes taught that the problems of the world stemmed from “parasite strategies,” or individual behavior that isn’t self-sustaining. The most effective way to make the world a better place was to replace parasitic strategies with “effort strategies,” according to Raniere, and this included replacing all charity with investment, which he said increased value and self-esteem.

“The truth just didn’t matter; it was all about control,” he told me. “They were Trumpian before Trump.”

By that time Yusko was familiar with the psychologically exhausting techniques used to reframe NXIVM students’ worldviews. The classes went from eight a.m. to ten p.m.; students’ most private insecurities were probed and leveraged; and none of the teachers, including Nancy Salzman, were actually licensed to provide mental health care.

While it didn’t happen in every session, some coaches were known to introduce controversial interpretations of events that pinned crushing responsibility on new students. Students told me they’d heard rape victims questioned about how they may have been responsible for their rape, or a breast cancer survivor might be asked about how low self-esteem could have contributed to their illness.

He said he’d strongly encouraged her to see a doctor but that Esther Carlson, the lead trainer for NXIVM, discouraged this. Snyder’s suicide threats were described as cries for attention.

Raniere, who claimed his closest followers’ moods and thoughts could injure him, blamed Bouchey’s “negative reaction” for tanking the markets.

Meanwhile, Bouchey received ongoing coaching on her “attachment” to her savings.

He borrowed from Ayn Rand’s philosophy, focusing on creating “value” in the world and contributing to “civilization” via success in the free market. He sometimes claimed that he avoided paying taxes and getting a driver’s license because he didn’t buy into the social contract proposed by the U.S. government—though he seemed content living off others’ wealth when his own projects were unsuccessful in the marketplace.

Raniere said his courses should be taught at the highest rungs of power, which in turn would inspire other, less powerful people to educate themselves in how to respect “earned authority.” “You educate one common person and you have one out of seven billion educated,” he said. “You educate a person of influence, who wields strong power, you have one person educated, and that inspires many others to be educated, and also the power that they wield is now used in a legitimate fashion, in an earned authority fashion.”

When the trading scheme went down in flames and the money disappeared, Raniere once again blamed the sisters’ father, Edgar, for manipulating the market to make sure they lost the money. Bouchey remembers Raniere talking about a plot that would somehow “shift the money from these accounts Keith was trading” to Edgar.

Raniere also told Daniela that sex was a tool he used to fix “disintegrations” in women.

In another module called “Building Desire and Motivation,” NXIVM students identified triggers that could cause a motivated state to occur. Likewise, students tried to conjure a fight-or-flight state, testing their breathing rate and posture before and after. All of this qualified as “emotional anchoring” in NLP, and would theoretically give a practitioner easy shortcuts for making a student feel scared, excited, or motivated.

Much like Scientology, the organization was collecting what Russians would call “kompromat” on students. This was used as leverage to encourage deeper participation, and in Daniela’s case, her undocumented status, her use of a fake ID provided by NXIVM to cross the border in 2004, and her admitted stealing were all brought up to encourage compliance.

In one module called “Abuse, Rights, and Injury” participants discussed child sexual abuse. “What is abuse? What does it mean to abuse someone?” the questions begin. “If someone comes from a country where adults orally stimulate children and they find out according to American culture they have been abused, have they? Who did the abusing?” (Coach notes say the answer is yes, they have been abused, and the abuser is “our society.”)

Ames said emotions come from the difference between where we are and where we’d like to be. This didn’t compute for me until much later, but I think he was basically saying that positive emotions come from reality exceeding expectations, and negative emotions come from reality not meeting expectations.

This was how you became what NXIVM called an “integrated” person—to be in complete control of your emotions and not be unduly swayed by past traumas and misperceptions.

“The moral is significant: when system two is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything,” Kahneman writes. “Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”

NXIVM students often started by identifying a “stimulus” that caused trouble in their life, like a dairy allergy or fear of flying. The EM questioning process frequently led to a person’s most sensitive, embarrassing, or terrifying experiences.

Jness taught women to examine why they entered relationships, and suggested that dependency and inner deficiency often play a role.

The courses taught that everyone was responsible for their own reactions to the outside world. That meant a NXIVM coach could turn around just about any bad situation and blame the student for their flawed interpretation.

Having a dinner party with NXIVM friends meant constantly dissecting your fears and insecurities. If somebody said they didn’t like sharing the food on their plate, for example, other group members would chime in with probing questions in an effort to overcome the block. What would you lose if you stopped the behavior? Is refusing to share holding you back? Needless to say, it wasn’t a welcome conversational style for everyone.

This was a common story among women in NXIVM’s upper ranks, as boyfriends and husbands were often interpreted to be standing in the way of success.

NXIVM taught that reality is separate from our perceptions, and that our perceptions can influence others. NXIVM students called the mental image of a person a “thought object.” Daniela had learned it was important to speak honorably of others; otherwise, you could harm the “thought object” of a person in other people’s heads.

Just as Lauren Salzman would realize during Raniere’s arrest a decade later, Daniela saw that Raniere did not live up to his own ethical principles.

Why so many abortions? As Daniela learned firsthand, Raniere advised against hormonal birth control because weight gain was a common side effect.

Edgar Boone was the only board member who wasn’t also a sex partner. Bouchey thought Raniere was leveraging these relationships, and that it was affecting day-to-day decision-making.

Salzman had let it slip that untaxed cash was coming across the border from Mexico.

“If Goldie Hawn has the sense not to appear at an event sponsored by Keith Raniere,” the op-ed read, “then cancellation by the Dalai Lama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, should be a no-brainer.”

“All of our perspectives were highly influenced by Keith’s perspectives,” she said. “We wanted him to think that we would do the hard thing, the ethical thing, and wanted him to see us as people who were willing to do that.”

It was a concept that took some actors to very dark places. 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’s not that love doesn’t contain moments of happiness or moments of joy,” he says to Mack in the same 2017 video, as her eyes well up with emotion, “but the way we have a weight to our love, or understand love itself or the magnitude, is through pain. When we feel love, we feel pain. And the depth of pain we feel measures that love.”

Unsurprisingly, the search for innate qualities meant riffing on some very tired gender stereotypes. Women had “princessy,” “oblivious,” and “caretaker” tendencies, while men deep down were “big beasties” ready to either fight or have sex.

Women were protected from the real world and were allowed more space to be emotional, coaches suggested. They withheld sex because there wasn’t much else in women’s control. Breakout groups made distinctions between how women and men handled sex or child-rearing, which left Miljkovic with a lingering impression that women were supposed to be quiet and thankful “as long as you weren’t being raped every day.”

“The primitive hypothesis is the thing in Jness that says men are designed to spread their seed and women are designed to be monogamous,” Sarah Edmondson told me. This thinking became a shorthand used throughout the NXIVM curriculum, and a quiet point of contention for women who identified as polyamorous. Men needed sex with many partners—it was in their genes, Raniere claimed—while women were best suited to stay with one person for life. Any woman who challenged this was viewed as a troublemaker. “If you have a problem with it, it’s because you think you’re special. It’s the woman’s problem,” a former member told me.

IT REQUIRED EXTENDED exposure to NXIVM logic to appreciate how these strange sexist and traumatizing rituals lined up with the organization’s core principle of making the world a better place. NXIVM wasn’t concerned with “equality” per se; it was about harnessing an individual’s “potential” and showing them that growth was a hard-earned, painful process.

But when she didn’t mirror Raniere’s movements the way he liked, he’d sometimes call her out on it. “Why are you so closed off?” he’d ask. Raniere told her she was sexually repressed and that it showed in the way she hugged. He said that for her sex was in “the box,” the NXIVM term for something that hit too close to home, often causing a repressed or overly sensitive reaction.

“You then need to eat less,” Raniere wrote. “The extra weight hurts my heart physically when I am with you.”

“I get fearful because I project you will abuse that power,” Camila replied. “But I understand it is my own horrible projection.” “There will be times it will seem like I am,” Raniere wrote. “I won’t. But it is part of proving trust. If it never seemed questionable, then it wouldn’t be trust. I’ve earned trust. Do it now please…text it now.”

Raniere replied with a long message explaining that Nicole didn’t have enough life experience to understand what she was asking. He was offering her a shortcut to experience and wisdom. Because of her lack of experience, she had to relate to him on a sexual level. They couldn’t just be friends.

“I was very familiar with the concept,” Salzman testified. “I was very enrolled in that idea of doing hard things to become somebody who would do hard things when it was most important.”

“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.’ ”

His so-called “human behavior equation” amounted to a cruel premeditated subtraction—slashing women’s opportunities to question, resist, or walk away without enormous risk.

The first racketeering act was the fake ID made for Daniela to cross the Canadian border into the United States. The two acts of sexual exploitation of a child happened on November 2 and 24, 2005, when Raniere took photos of fifteen-year-old Camila. The photos themselves counted as child pornography possession. The identity theft occurred after Daniela was told to hack into Edgar Bronfman’s and others’ emails.

Daniela herself was trafficked when she spent twenty-three months in a room, Penza said. That was different from the sex trafficking and attempted sex trafficking of Nicole and others. Then there was the DOS scheme itself, which Penza said constituted wire fraud conspiracy and forced labor conspiracy. Penza did not once say the word cult, and she didn’t need to.