India Oxenberg on Not Doing The Vow and Her Message to Keith Raniere and Allison Mack (Exclusive)

i feel like people have been waiting to hear your side of this story for a long time finally it's coming why now and why in seduce for a long time i would i just wasn't ready to speak out i needed to take care of myself and prioritize my own healing and recovery and i was kind of turned off by the media to be honest i was thinking okay cult girl sex slave all these sort of terrible tag lines are being attached to me like why would i want to talk to you i really just took the time away and when all of that was happening i actually got introduced to the producers and the directors on seduced and they explained to me that they had a vision for a very different type of documentary that was female focused created by a female team of filmmakers and that it was going to go deep into coercion and high control groups and i thought oh that is something that i can get behind i grew up looking for a more purposeful life nexium was a program to make people's lives better i found real deep sense of community i felt like i was in the right place so how did we all end up in the clutches of a monster well i think you delivered on the vision there because i feel like so many times any sort of occult documentary comes out people are like i would never be in a cult how could somebody get into this seduced lays out exactly how you were manipulated into falling down this rabbit hole that was my goal i just wanted it to be real it really reinvigorated my belief in myself and what i could do in my future where for a long time i didn't really see anything besides albany from my life what was the hardest part of making this series definitely going back into those memories and then having to go revisit those places and be there that was really hard my body was freaking out i started having panic attacks my throat felt like it was closing i had acid reflux just on the freaking train from penn station and i thought okay clearly there's some unfinished business here i had to ask permission to eat there's control of sleep demeaning sexual acts it kept getting more extreme all over the globe we don't know how many victims there could be the cruelty it's beyond the pale i didn't want to be saved was anything off limits was there anything that you said i will not go to this place no actually no i'd already had this story sort of told for me if you will and i wanted to change that this is coming out after the vowel which is also telling your story without you there's no good way to leave ever as much as she doesn't know how to let go of this cult i've not let i go to expose what's going on this has to be stopped how do you feel about the vow have you watched any of it i haven't watched any of it it's really hard for me to watch a lot of that footage i wanted to stay focused on this project and i also have a book that's coming out at the same time about all the red flags that i didn't see that i wish i had and for me i didn't participate it in it for a number of reasons mostly because i wasn't ready at the time but i think anything that can bring awareness to these topics is good so to me it's not a competition it's just information i think yours so beautifully informs missing pieces of the vow you fill in so many gaps so many questions that are left from the vowel that i think people are going to walk away from seduced with the full 360 degree picture of what it was like to be in this organization minutes ago a federal jury here in the eastern district of new york returned verdicts convicting keith renery on all counts in his federal indictment keith renery's crime spree has ended and his victims will finally see justice keith ranieri was found guilty on every charge brought against him he maintains his innocence his sentencing is coming up though what will be a satisfying sentence for him yeah i'm actually going to go and i'm going to speak there um i have a statement written i just needed that closure and i think for me life in prison is really the only thing that i would feel satisfied and safe with because i don't think that he's somebody who is capable of changing i mean he's operating as a wannabe mob boss from prison now trying to control people to go on cbs on his behalf like being used and if he was released he would do the same thing and he would hurt more people i'm just not okay with that and that's also why i wanted to speak and i trust the judge i mean the judge is wonderful and fair and he is going to give him the sentence he deserves but life in prison is what i would want to see the cbs this morning interview the dancing outside of the prison when you see that what goes through your mind a lot of feelings when i first saw the dancing i thought it was a joke i couldn't believe it i just thought how do they not see that he gives two shots about him and this is basically for his own self gratification to know that he can get people to dance outside of a prison at 9 00 pm like it was so absurd to me and i mean i get really riled up about it because it just shows you the power of indoctrination and how dangerous it is it's a real thing seduced really explains how fixated keith was on you specifically did you ever get any explanation or insight into why he was so narrowed in on you i don't like giving keith that much credit but if i will it will be that he was a genius at knowing how to manipulate and exploit people for their specific skills and i think one of the things that i brought to keith and to nexium was this positive view of them i was told to be good and look happy and i did that was much more valuable than i could have imagined for them and on top of it he specifically placed me with allison in her apartment to make it look more normal to make people feel more comfortable because allison had a very different personality than me she's very intense very aggressive more of a extrovert and i'm kind of softer and more gentle and i think people just generally felt more comfortable with me than her and that gave me the ability to have people break down their walls and come closer and closer to keith and allison without me knowing what was really happening so i think there was a couple things at play that i was unaware of actress alison mack pleaded guilty to racketeering charges today prosecutors say she helped alleged nexium leader keith renery get women into a secret society in the group she actually pleaded guilty to the charge that was brought against her what punishment would you feel right for her alison is a broken person and i consider her a victim of keith renery and not to say that she didn't hurt me or other people because she did and that's why she's facing those types of charges but broken people don't heal in prison and i don't see her as somebody who's going to get better as a result of sitting in jail i think she's the type of person that could use tremendous amount of help and therapy and not my judgment to say how many years she deserves i just feel like she will get justice will be served you said in your book you'll lay out all the red flags you missed along the way that you've come to realize something in watching seduce that i kept going back to is why did no one see allison giving up her big life her successful career as a red flag they did i lived with her for almost two years and i remember her mom and her family questioning her and she had an explanation for everything and keith said i should do this he said i should do this was basically the answer always and i think that was a red flag to her mother but she couldn't dispute it i mean she's in her 30s she was living in new york and what are you gonna do there were also reasons why we stayed obviously one being the collateral but right or the blackmail oh it's hard i mean you can always kick yourself when you look and retrace back like oh why didn't i do this why didn't i see that when you why didn't you say anything but when you're in it when you're in it you don't see that it's hard do you have a message for keith or for alison today one of the things that i i said repeatedly to myself when when things were really hard was that this wouldn't break me and i feel the same about them i mean yes it was painful and it was cruel and it was hard not only for me but for other people but it didn't break me like i still have my life and my spirit and yes i have hard days but i'm not gonna let it take away the rest of my life that's a really positive place to come from so that's really great yeah i'm better now it's revealed in seduce that you were the person in nexium or esp who went through the most ems which is kind of the equivalent of auditing in that organization did you know that you were you had been the person who went through the most no i did not know that i even find that statistic shocking now no because ems were a constant thing i had a lot of ems especially during the time when my mother was trying to extract me from nexium and they were trying to keep me in mexium so there was quite a bit of conflict and stress and pressure going on for me then you think that you always have your mind and you think that you always have your own will but the fact was that mine was hijacked and it was taken from me without me really knowing so having to kind of be slingshotted back into your new life when you're still dealing with the feelings of the past is difficult and it's challenging and that i mean em's included i have to still kind of process what was that like what happened and sometimes it's not fun your mom really fought to save you this is my last resort going to the media i'm only doing this to bring awareness because without awareness there can be no outrage and unless there's outrage the authorities are not going to step in and do what they should do which is shut this down what would you say she did right that parents who might be in a similar situation could learn from she fought like hell and she didn't stop i mean you're gonna make me cry but the fact that she never gave up was ultimately the thing that gave me my life back i just can't express how grateful i am to be able to have the mom that i have this organization would still be going on if she hadn't exposed it in the media in my opinion and of course there was the work from the government and the work from people who left nexium before i did that also helped to dismantle this thing but for other parents she just fought and she kept fighting even when i couldn't feel it as love she kept going and even though there were moments where i thought we might never speak again because of all the chaos and the pressure that i was experiencing from nexium there was still that little part of me that knew this was my mom this was my mother who loved me and this is just some big misunderstanding that's kind of like what i had to keep telling myself in order to be mentally okay with what was going on i think seduce does a much better job too than the vow of explaining how involved your mother was in nexium at the start did making this documentary help heal some of the wounds that were left between you and your mom yeah it did it brought up a lot of stuff that we hadn't addressed a lot of things that maybe lay dormant that you think you can move on with but you can't that's one thing that i've realized just for our own healing and i'm looking after she's outside but you just gotta lay it all out there and know that the people that love you love you and they won't judge you and there's no name to be had i mean everyone has done stupid everyone's made mistakes and we learned from them and this just happened to be something that i never anticipated having to deal with and neither did my mom and we've grown a lot because of it and i have so much respect for her i love that you guys are together right now yeah i came over to her house to do all the interviews because i live in an apartment with two cats and a roommate and a fiance and it was just chaos and i tried to do one interview while my fiance was making tea and i was get out of here you're distracting me while i'm trying to have this serious conversation but think about how rich your life is right now that you have those kind of mundane problems i i am telling you i could never have expected having the life that i have now never i mean i just feel so much more me you say in the documentary do i even know who i am did you get that answer by the end of making seduced yeah and a lot more i feel more myself now than ever and i feel like i said reinvigorated by this whole experience like actually seeing a future for myself so yes so so who is india oxenburg what identifiers do you want to be known by that aren't yeah please take that off my resume but the truth is that that is a part of my story and those are experiences that i can't just get rid of and i talk about that in the documentary i mean in order to heal you have to accept it and go through it and that's a daily process i mean i'm still healing now and i guess i'd like to say that i'm a resilient and optimistic person who wants to take advantage of the time that was lost and i am not going to take that for granted you

Channel: Entertainment Tonight

Views: 190,255

Keywords: India Oxenberg, The Vow, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult, Allison Mack, india oxenberg interview, india oxenberg nxivm, nxvim documentary, Entertainment Tonight, etonline, et online, celebrity, Hollywood, news, trending, et, et tonight, Exclusives from #ETonline : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQwITQ__CeH2Y_7g2xeiNDa0vQsROQQgv

Id: Efbtah78PD4

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020