Escaping NXIVM: Behind the investigation of the alleged sex cult

when we started this investigation nexium was thriving they have their main Center in Albany but they had centers in Mexico and LA and Vancouver they had tons of students enrollment was full they had all kinds of workshops happening and over the course of the investigation we have watched this organization unravel you Keith Moon area does not immediately look like the kind of person who you would associate as sort of bigger than life you see a photo of him and it's sort of hard to imagine how he could hold a room and be this big charismatic figure but the story we heard again and again is that he has an ability to make you feel like you're the only person in the room he has an ability to listen really intently and that was one of the strong draws for people who wanted who had come to him for their personal development for their personal growth you felt like this guy got you you felt like he was able to help you you felt like he saw you in a way that most people couldn't see you so I think that was really at the center of his charisma and his charm what's really interesting that when we started digging into who he was and sort of where he came from there's a number of signs and characteristics that go right back to his teenage years and into his early 20s that are very much central to what nexium is I spoke to one of his ex-girlfriend's who said you know he had this idea that when he was 13 years old he was enlightened he had he had reached some higher state of being and that is really you know the the image of himself that he continued to espouse as the head of Nexium so it's not only this idea of being enlightened but also of being a genius and he has kind of created this mythology around himself that he was talking in full sentences at age 1 and could read at age 2 and was a piano prodigy in a judo champion in 1989 he takes this high IQ test and he does really well and the Guinness Book of World Records lists him as one of the smartest men in the world so so there actually is some institutional acknowledgement and legitimacy to his claims that he is exceptional that mythology he's built around himself for the story he's built around himself of being a genius of being enlightened was central a lot of people told us that's what attracted them to join this organization to follow this guy the other element that that goes right back to his 20s is he had this particular infatuation with multi-level marketing structure a kind of pyramid structure to how organizations run and that's where members in the organization earn money by recruiting other members he had worked for a while for M way and seems to have been inspired by what he saw there and then early on before he created an axiom he actually created a multi-level marketing company of their of his own where he sold you know household appliances and vacation packages and it did really well and it was based on the same same model so when he created nexium we see it again that that's how the organization was structured that that members of Nexium went out and recruited other people and they earned commissions it was one of the ways the organization could really grow and then in fact when doss was created and the FBI alleges that that keith created dos it has the same structure women were recruited into the group and they were were required to recruit other women and you very quickly are able to sort of exponentially expand the size of that organization and then the last element that that I was totally surprised to see also um you know stretches back almost to his teenage years is his view of women and his view of sexual relationships with women and there's a really strong misogynistic undertone to nexium that people are taught about these inherent differences between men and women and one of those elements is that men are naturally polyamorous they need to have multiple partners and women are naturally monogamous and going back to his 20 he already had a relationships polyamorous relationship with relationships with a number of women who were solely devoted to him and were okay with him having multiple partners and the FBI alleges that in in nexium he had 15 to 20 women in a so-called harem who had committed to him for life committed to be in only to have sex with him and to keep that relationship secret and to be okay with him having relationships with multiple women in so in 1998 Keith Ranieri and Nancy salesmen created nexium the story we've heard as they had this epic four-day meeting Nancy Saltzman was this expert therapist in neural linguistic programming they have this meeting as the meeting of these two minds and they create what is now called nexium within it keith Ranieri is gonna be the spiritual leader of it the kind of resident philosopher and he is called Vanguard Nancy Salzmann is called prefect and he really takes on this role as as the spiritual leader as the resident philosopher within the organization he becomes a renunciate which means he renounces all his connections to the to material goods he doesn't own a car he doesn't he claimed in one interview that he doesn't even know the shirt he's gonna wear every morning that's sort of just given to him as a donation from the community he is driven around by other members of his inner circle he sleeps most of the day apparently and is up late into the night and that's when he writes a lot of the curriculum he has this vision that he wants to become someone who's seen as an ethical leader an adviser to world leaders but he actually exists in this very small kind of triangle within Albany New York or just outside of Albany New York just a few kilometers between his house where he lives in this in this small community there's a volleyball court a couple kilometres away where he plays every Tuesdays and Thursdays and and members of Nexium are encouraged to come there and it's a time that they can interact with him and between points or between games that can come up to him and whisper in his ear and ask him questions so there's this interesting tension between someone who wanted to be seen as this kind of worldly figure but then just existed in this small little circle and he actually we've heard from people we talked to that once you climb up the ladder of the organization once you get more involved in the organization there is a lot of pressure for you to move to Albany to be closer to the center of it and to come sort of be in his orbit more directly Sookie spoke image is really based on this this narrative this mythology he built around himself as being a genius as being enlightened and being a highly ethical person and that's the public image that he wanted to portray I would say that the one of the biggest successes he had in giving this kind of image legit legitimacy was the Dalai Lama came in 2009 on an invitation from the group to come speak in Albany and this was a huge success for the organization and he really played this up as one of the reasons that you should come try out his workshops try out his programs follow this guy because he had developed he had turned his attention his brilliant mind to creating a personal growth system and a humanitarian system that was going to change the world as you got closer to the center of this organization you kind of peeled back the layers of the onion you started to people started to become privy to another side of Keith first of all he had this harem of 15 to 20 women many of them were high ranking people within the company some of them sat on the executive board of the company this was not something that was shared people didn't know that you know some people I talked to said oh I thought he was celibate he also had a public image that was really about rational and critical thought and he was one to be seen as a scientist but within a smaller private realm of these higher ranks he had pretty unscientific ideas one of those ideas in fact was that the people in the organization were reincarnated from Nazi officers they now you know come back to atone for their sins and to redeem their souls and was one of the ways to better the world so this was something that what he definitely knew he had to keep private it did not square with this sort of rational scientific side of himself that he was trying to promote to most of the community Keith preneur his lawyer specifically say dass was created by a group of women in the organization as a self-empowerment a kind of separate secret self-empowerment group by women for women that everyone was part of it was so you know consensually they knew they were getting into they were consenting adults the FBI has a different story about what happened their claim is that dass was created by keith Ranieri and that he set up a kind of pyramid scheme that he was at the top of and so he recruited in this system he recruited six slaves and he instructed them to go out and recruit six slaves each of their own and and it would branch out that way the FBI alleges that that he used that system to instruct women within within dos to sleep with him he also the allegation is that he used this system to get people women within the within dos to do work for free for the organization and so it if Keith Ranieri is at the top of this there it's it's a very interesting question to ask you know why would he create this what is he up to what is he doing here people have pointed to a history of controlling women a history of misogyny as well and that this was the ultimate manifestation of you know his control over people and of women specifically gonna be interesting to see what the prosecution says was behind the creation of das they've certainly already uncovered and exposed some of the communication that he was having with women and das around the time that it was created and that communication points to his interest in having women available to him as his sex slave so the FBI has named Allison Mac as a co-conspirator she has been charged with sex trafficking sex trafficking conspiracy and racketeering conspiracy amongst a number of other charges so she has been implicated in the potentially the creation and certainly the running of daus if this is true it does seem to follow a pattern of Keith working with women to create projects let me know there's a dozens of projects within nexium that are created as a kind of collaboration like he seems to be more of the ideas guy but then he has someone else he partners with to actually you know enact these things so the FBI allegation is that that Allison Mac is the co-conspirator on this project that she was one of Keith's Meniere's slaves and that she herself recruited other slaves to be part of das and there are allegations that some of these women within the system were instructed by their masters just to seduce click Keith or to have sex with Keith so I can say that aliceandmac is someone who is part of the smaller community the kind of inner circle of Nexium she lived in in knox woods in this little neighborhood in fact she seems to have left her acting career to be a part of Nexium to really focus on her work in nexium so if you look at the organization in terms of how they could use the tools to manipulate people one of the things they did was set was to say you need to ignore your gut instinct you need to ignore the part of your of your mind that's saying this is not good because that's what's holding you back in your life but what that does is it takes away your critical thought so when you're being asked to do something that is uncomfortable and that you don't want to do or if you're asked if you start to question what's going on here and you have questions about Keith's Burnie or you've questions about where the money is going there's another part of your brain that starts to kick in and say oh no this is my issue I always question everything that's what's holding me back in terms of my personal growth and that's one of the reasons why when we heard stories of women and specifically the story of Sarah Edmondson about being branded and going through this branding ceremony with a cauterizing pens that was a 45 minutes ceremony that was incredibly painful when I asked her you know why didn't you just leave she said well there's the four years I've been part of this organization that had taken away that gut instinct every time that little voice popped up that said this is not okay I should get out of here and she had been trained to ignore it she had been trained to push past that and so the things that that at one point we're seeing as this system is attractive system to kind of improve yourself in the world can be flipped around and turned on its head and can be used to manipulate people as well so we spent a long time trying to find someone inside nexium who would speak with us and eventually we landed an interview with Keith Rooney's lawyer mark egg Novello and he has a very different take on Keith through Nerys involvement in nexium and das everyone here is not only an adult they're well-to-do adults they're adults that for the most part are educated they're smart they have financial opportunity they're successful economically and they have choices you know these are not poor put-upon people you know who are desperate for a better life and will make choices against their self-interest I think the government's position has elements of sexism in it they're men in the United States who join fraternities and get branded a lot of their athletes we see these tremendous brands on their you know muscular arms when they're during football games and during other sporting activities and we don't think anything of the fact that big strong athletic men brand themselves also men joined secret groups the Masons or a secret group there are scores of secret groups from Harvard and Yale and all these you know elevated educational institutions but it's men so we don't think anything of it women want to be in a secret group and want to be branded and all of a sudden were very quick to say oh poor dears they must be victims because no no right-thinking free-willed woman would ever want that for herself and I think that's sexist and I think the government is playing into a sexist agenda you know men do these things we call them Marines you know women do these things we call them victims the FBI says that keith was using dass to compel women to have sex with him what does kee say about that absolutely for a hundred percent false I mean keith has a unique sex life he has had multiple partners his entire life they know about each other and they're okay with it you know I think most of the time not all the time most of the but he makes no bones about it you know this is who he is and women choose to be intimate with Keith or not with that knowledge the FBI alleges that there are in fact several women who were in dass who said they were forced or compelled because of collateral they had handed over collateral to have some kind of sexual encounter with Keith majestic that those women are lying yes I'm saying they're lying if there's if they're saying that they were coerced to have sex with Keith I'm saying they're lying I think one of the really interesting questions that to ask or one of the interesting pieces of his behavior to look at is what kind of person would need the constant validation that he has built for himself within nexium the way that manifests itself is that in every single nexium workshop you take there's a photo of Keith Ranieri on the wall and part of the part of the course is that you thank Keith Ranieri and then every year there's a 12 Day celebration for his birthday where people get up on stage and perform for him and wish him happy birthday and thank him in fact there's a huge element of Nexium that's all about paying tribute this idea of paying tribute and honoring people for the work they've done and a lot of that is oriented towards thanking Keith Ranieri so it's an interesting question what's going on with someone when they need that amount of constant validation and one expert I spoke to said that you know in his opinion he sees that as a cover-up first a huge brokenness or absence that that needs this kind of constant validation that that he's okay and he's worthwhile and if he doesn't have that that he would fall apart so that's that's one theory about what's going on imagine that nexium could exist without him there and active but who knows what will happen it seems like he has a remarkable hold and sway over the the inner circle and the core members of Nexium I guess it's a question as can he maintain that sway and persuasion and what will his follower stick him stick with him if he's in jail going way back to when media first started criticizing the organization Keith's Ranieri talked a lot and and built into baked into the curriculum a narrative about the organization being under attack and it was a way of inoculating the members against criticism against outside scrutiny and and and the story was that when people come around who are radical thinkers who have you know new ways of seeing the world who are revolutionary there's gonna be pushback there's gonna be people that want to destroy them there's gonna be people that that that that don't want to see those ideas flourish and he points to you know Martin Luther King and and and other you know Nelson Mandela and other revolutionaries so that was another way to say don't be surprised when the media comes out with stories don't be surprised if if you know the government comes after us so the you know the police were the FBI come after us that's what happens to to radical thinkers to revolutionaries to that extent that it wouldn't be surprising if the people who have remained committed to him are able to do so despite the evidence that that may come out in a trial they may still say devoted to him and they may still follow his orders or decide to run some kind of version of this it's hard to imagine imagine though that would have the broad appeal that nexium had prior to he through his arrest when nexium was operating when the executive success programs were operating at full speed they were going after and trying to attract the general public they needed new recruits now if you google it it's hard to imagine that that many people would you know it sign up for a personal growth workshop from an organization that has you know its first Google hit leader of life and sex calls has been imprisoned so it doesn't seem like it can exist in the way that it existed before where they're trying to recruit new students to take program that's supposed to make them a better more humanitarian more ethical person in the world [Music]

Channel: CBC News

Views: 1,453,310

Rating: 4.6901507 out of 5

Keywords: Escaping NXIVM, sex cult, NXIVM, Allison Mack, Smallville Keith Raniere, Josh Bloch

Id: qBQ2XJj8hr4

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/catnipbrownie]

Anytime a guy needs you to call him something like 'Vanguard' in order to get it up, run.

[u/iliketoeatfunyuns]

Somebody savvvvvvveeeee meee

[u/Treemich]

This makes me think of David Miscavige.

[u/Sushi_Whore_]

Another great resource to learn about this cult is the A and E show: Cults and Extreme Belief - very interesting

[u/pblack177]

This is going on The Wall of Weird

[u/Scarim]

I do not think this was particularly informative.

At no point did he go into any detail about the financials of NXIVM and the racketeering charges that people have plead guilty to.

All he discusses are the personal and sexual relationships of the people involved.

I get that sex sells and all that, but it seems to be tabloid level stuff. Not really the sort of content i think belongs here.

[u/HelenEk7]

It's hard to grasp how normal people can get entangled in things like this. Yet you see it again and again; people with normal jobs, and sound minds submits themselves under crazy people..

[u/dangitgrotto]

At first I thought this was about Nexium, the PPI med for heartburn

[u/[deleted]]

Every time I see Keith Raniere, I think... what? Why? He's the most bland looking dude out there. I wouldn't remember his face if I saw him in Walmart. And somehow these women are branding themselves for him?