Sarah Berman tries to see NXIVM leader through women's eyes in Don't Call It a Cult
Questions remain, as Vancouver author unravels the allure and mind control of Keith Raniere
Vancouver author Sarah Berman
AFTER TWO YEARS chronicling NXIVM for VICE, Vancouver author Sarah Berman was rewarded with a closeup look at founder Keith Raniere at his 2019 trial.
Here was a man, known to his followers as “Vanguard”, whose journey to the dock began with a multilevel marketing business in the ’90s and ended with lurid headlines about a secret sect of branded sex slaves. In between was the creation of a multimillion dollar self-improvement empire patronized by celebrities, corporate go-getters, and billionaire heiresses, along with cameos by figures including the Dalai Lama. At all times, Raniere’s ventures were premised on his vaunted status as “the smartest man in the world”. What was Berman’s impression?
“He’s smaller than you’d expect. Just this little squat guy,” she tells Stir on the eve of the release of Don’t Call It a Cult, the author’s book-long account of the NXIVM saga, published by Penguin. “There was nothing particularly spectacular about his presence. He spoke at the sentencing and it was just kinda garbled. He contradicted himself. He didn’t have this genius philosopher vibe whatsoever. It definitely contributed to my theory that his quote-unquote ‘charisma’ was completely engineered by the women around him.”
Raniere remains a somewhat opaque presence in Don’t Call It a Cult. Admitted as evidence during the trial, text conversations with his abused partners offer perhaps the clearest picture, exposing the world’s smartest man as the world’s cringiest gaslighter. Berman’s curiosity is largely directed at the women who fell for Raniere’s faux-cosmic patter; the likes of Clare and Sarah Bronfman—who sunk untold millions of their inheritance into NXIVM’s illegal activities (of all people, Edgar Bronfman emerges as one of the more sympathetic characters in the book)—and the Vancouver-based contingent of actors that included Battlestar Galactica’s Nicki Clyne and, most notoriously, Smallville’s Allison Mack. Less sensational, if more heartbreaking, are the stories of people like “Camila” and “Daniela”, sisters who encountered the very worst of Raniere’s predations.
"I think I was trying to see through their eyes because that was the bigger mystery to me,” says Berman. “How did this fit together in their heads? How did they think about and justify the things that they were doing? Each chapter tries to stay relatively within the perspective of one or two different women, because they were the ones who had the most on the line.”
In the course of answering these questions, Berman dove into the murky subculture of American-style New Thought, a ferment of religious-scientific technologies devoted to self-improvement, success, and prosperity. With the help of actress Sarah Edmondson, she even tried some of the NXIVM “modules”, submitting to pseudo-therapeutic courses steeped in soul-deadening corporate-speak. “Which is why,” Berman suggests, “I think CEOs and people with a lot of money gravitated to it. They got a sense of legitimacy. And when you’re just seeking out the language of money and status, that gets empty pretty quickly.
Convicted NXIVM leader Keith Raniere.
“All of these ideas were already bundled together and cross-pollinating in the ’60s,” she continues. “These guys all kinda knew each other, so you had AMWAY crossing paths with NLP [neurolinguistic programming], crossing paths wth leadership-training people, crossing paths with Scientology. So these elements were being remixed and repackaged decades before Keith Raniere comes along to repackage it yet again.”
Ultimately, it’s the same scam all the way down, this time with methods of coercion that included sexual blackmail. NXIVM’s innovation was to map a specific set of insecurities—“weight goals”, for instance, were assigned to Vanguard’s closest female acolytes—to build a vast and complex self-improvement superstructure devoted, finally, to satisfying the paraphilia of the malevolent doofus at its centre. Meanwhile, an inner circle of spies and mindfuckers adopted the Scientology model to intimidate critics with creepy harassment campaigns and preposterous courtroom maneuvers. (Cult expert Rick Ross estimates that his encounter cost upward of $50 million in legal fees.) NXIVM also worked hard to infiltrate government and cozy up to power. As with L Ron Hubbard, Raniere wanted nothing less than his own country.
As the title of Berman’s book implies, NXIVM’s public-relations strategy amounted to another kind of mind control, inducing an ambivalence about its goals and methods which Raniere’s defence team tried to exploit in the courtroom. The organization was receiving favourable coverage in the New York Times right up until 2018 (although this, as Berman points out, was before allegations of child sexual abuse surfaced.) The author also notes that, in the case of actress Kristin Kreuk. among others, even NXIVM skeptics had to concede that the tech seemed to yield some benefits.
It all ended with Raniere’s conviction a year later on all charges, including forced labour, sex trafficking, and sexual exploitation of a child. He was sentenced to 120 years. In lucid style and with exceptional clarity, not to mention sensitivity, Don’t Call It a Cult documents the entire story. As the first journalist out of the gate with an authoritative overview, Berman has produced the primary text on NXIVM. All other books will refer back to hers, whether or not she’s comfortable with that.
“Hopefully,” she says, with a sigh, “I’ll get to a place where I can move on and do different things, but it’s still like, ‘Fuck, when are they sentencing Allison Mack?’ I feel the need to be on top of it and I even feel a little bit of responsibility for it, being the person to present it to a particular audience.”
There’s also the possibility, if remote, that Raniere will reply from behind bars to the letter Berman sent to him. Added as an appendix to Don’t Call It a Cult, she asks a handful of politely probing questions, like: “Do you believe you have done psychological harm to any of the women you were involved with?”
“I don’t think he’d give satisfying responses,” Berman speculates. “He’s just got this deflection thing really dialled in. But I would still, even after this book is out, absolutely take a look at those responses. So Keith Raniere, if you’re reading Stir, get back to me."
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