Ep. 125 | The DISTURBING NXIVM Cult

Head to https://www.tryfum.com/CCCM and use promo code CCCM to get your free FÜM Topper with purchase, and start The Good Habit today! Head to https://Factormeals.com/cccm50off and use code cccm50off to get 50 percent off and free daily greens per box, with new subscription only, while supplies last until 09/27/2026. (See website for more details). Taking care of your health just got easier – start here with Zocdoc: https://zocdoc.com/CCCM #sponsored NXIVM claimed it could help people become the best versions of themselves - but behind closed doors, members were being controlled, blackmailed, and even branded. Next episode, we sit down with a survivor who takes us inside the cult in her own words. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Self-improvement is supposed to be a gift you give yourself. Some join groups dedicated to their personal growth. A room full of people all trying to be their best. And for years, that's exactly what it looked like from the outside. The classes, the language of science, the man they called the vanguard. But something underneath had nothing to do with growth. And by the time it surfaced, it had already gone too far. This is the story of Nxivm. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder. All things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. Today, we are talking about quite an infamous cult,

• 2:09Speaker 02

  but one that I feel like a lot of people don't go fully into. And not only am I going to be deep diving into this cult today, this Saturday, I got to sit down with somebody that was inside of this cult, that experienced it firsthand. And it was an incredible conversation. And that's a big part of the reason I wanted to do this video. I wanted to be able to dissect this cult and its disgusting leader from the inside out, while preserving her story that you can hear in a few days. So definitely tune into that this Saturday. And for right now, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go wildfire down the highway, slam on the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this infamous cult together.

• 3:03Speaker 02

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• 4:30Speaker 02

  Addiction is really good at saying "later," so don't let it. Thank you so much to Fume for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. Keith Raniere was born on August 26, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. Now that I think of it, actually, right now, pausing, um... I believe I'm posting this on August 26. That was not remotely intentional, but that means that it's Keith's birthday. So I guess, happy birthday, you ugly, stupid, waste-of-oxygen piece of shit. And for your birthday, I will be absolutely dragging your name through the mud

• 5:11Speaker 02

  and letting everyone know what a perverted, disgusting freak you are. That's great, but anyway, from the top, Keith Raniere was born on August 26, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. And his father, James, worked in advertising, and his mother, Vera, taught ballroom dancing. Now, when Keith was five, the family relocated to Suffolk, a small village about 30 miles northwest of the city. Now, Keith was an only child, and his parents fought constantly, wasn't a really great relationship. So he grew up wondering if he was the reason. And by the time he was seven or eight, they'd separated and divorced. And his father would move out, and Keith would stay with his mother. Now, she had heart disease at this point.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  And at 13, Keith watched her go through open-heart surgery. And the recovery nearly broke her. And every day carried that same fear, that she would die and he'd have no one left. So as she declined, the roles between mother and son kind of reversed. And he became the one scheduling her doctor's appointments and telling her not to give up on herself. But Vera was drowning her pain in alcohol, and Keith poured everything he had into keeping her alive. So allegedly, friends and classmates would never really see him. But please take everything I'm saying with a big, big, big, giant grain of salt, because as you will come to learn, Keith Raniere is a piece-of-shit pathological liar,

• 6:39Speaker 02

  and he loves to make himself look like the hero. So anytime you hear that he's being like, "uh, an okay person," you could probably assume he's sprinkling some extra cherries on top, okay? Because he's not a good person at all. Now, Barbara Boucher, a longtime girlfriend, told CBC that Raniere traced his lifelong habit of staying up all night to those years watching over his mother. Again, grain of salt. So on August 26, 1978, he turned 18. And he and his mother spent the day together at home. And then he went back to school. And four months later, she would be gone. But something had changed in Keith long before his mother's death.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  His father shared a story with Boucher from when the boy was seven or eight years old. And apparently, Keith had taken an intelligence test, and the results said he was gifted. And according to Boucher, James Raniere describes, quote, "He said it was almost like a switch went off. And suddenly, overnight, he turned into, like, Jesus Christ, and that he was superior and better than everybody, like a deity," unquote. Now we're getting into the real Keith right now, okay? So like, seven or eight years old, he already thinks he's better than everyone, because his IQ is allegedly kind of high. And Raniere filled his self-authored biography with extraordinary claims that reflected this view.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  He claimed he could speak in full sentences by age one and was reading by two. I don't buy it. And by 12, he'd supposedly taught himself all of high school mathematics in 19 hours. And according to him, by 13, he had mastered college-level math and was already a professional computer programmer. Nearly all of these childhood claims were difficult to verify independently, obviously. But there were even more. He said he'd taught himself concert-level piano by 12, with a talent that eventually extended to many other instruments. And there is no record of him performing for literally anyone, and no concert ever took place.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  The grain of salt is becoming a boulder, okay? And he also claimed to have been the East Coast judo champion around the same age. But it was a children's tournament, one that hundreds of other boys entered while their parents watched from the sidelines. And regardless of their authenticity, though, they molded the man and the image he portrayed publicly. Because, yeah, it's pretty easy to lie. If you just tell somebody that, they're like, "Let me see the tests, let me see the awards." They're gonna believe what you say if you're good at talking, which unfortunately, Keith was pretty good at talking. And Toni Natalie, a girlfriend of Raniere's, remembered how the legend was pitched to her by her then-husband.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Quote, "He has a 240 IQ, triple-major graduate from RPI, pianist, cyclist, East Coast judo champion, and he wants to save the world," unquote. And Natalie would joke, quote, "East Coast judo champion, he rode a unicycle. He'd spit jelly beans in whichever color you'd prefer. I mean, his dossier went on forever," unquote. He's like one of those actors that just like, says they ride a horse and can speak Russian just to get the role, but they can't do any of that, you know? That's what it kind of reminds me of, like a shitty, lying actor. Basically. Now, Renier attended Rockland Country Day School, a private school in Congers, New York.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  And his biography said he'd enrolled at RPI, a prestigious school in Troy, New York, at 16. But a later document contradicted the claim. And it said he'd entered just after my 17th birthday. School records and local newspapers confirmed he graduated high school in 1978, making him two months shy of 18, a perfectly average age, by the way. And he did pursue three majors at RPI: mathematics, biology, and physics. And even claimed to be the school's first-ever triple major, though RPI hasn't confirmed that either. And according to that same biography, he dove into PhD-level math from day one at RPI and worked his way through a large portion of the graduate physics and math the school offered.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  And his GPA was 2.26, and he graduated in 1982. So in 1988, Renier took the Mega Test, created by Ronald Hofland for an organization called the Mega Society. Not MAGA, but mega. M-E-G-A, just to clarify. And it was a take-home test with no time limit, no supervision, and no way to verify how the answers were reached. Why does this test exist? I don't know. So the whole thing just ran on a BS honor system. And by his account, the first 43 problems took him about two hours. And the final five stretched across four more days and another eight hours of work. And the completed test sat with him for weeks before he finally sent it in.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  But once it was submitted, Renier called Hofland and told him that one of the easier questions contained a copying mistake. And Hofland accepted the argument and credited him with the correct response. And without that extra point, Renier would have scored below both Marilyn Vos Savant and Eric Hart, and the claim of being the smartest person in the world would have been off the table. So his final score was 46 out of 48. And then he would join the Mega Society and essentially took charge of it. And the society had 26 members before Renier showed up. And by the time he was done, three were left. And from there, he conducted his own study on the statistical rarity of his test score.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Of course, because he needed to show everyone how awesome he was, even though it was just all BS because it was an honor system test. What the hell is this? You know, most of his data had no written documentation behind it. And Renier said the underlying data had been given to him orally by educational testing service officials. And his conclusion was that he has problem-solving rarity of 1 in 425 million. My gosh, he's so special, and he's so rare, and he's so smart. Just kidding. He's just really good at manipulating and just lying, basically. Now, the whole foundation underneath his status as one of the planet's top three problem solvers was a study he built and ran on his own.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  And the 1989 Guinness Book of World Records listed him in the highest IQ category. And it showed up only in the Australian edition for a single year. And he was left out of both the UK and US versions entirely. And the next year, Guinness polled the highest IQ category altogether, deciding there was no reliable way to measure it, because it's bullshit. Basically, you can lie. And Heidi Hutchinson, who knew Renier from the mid-1980s, told CBC she was surprised that the test behind all of it was something you could take at your kitchen table for as long as you wanted with nobody watching over your shoulder, right?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And she was blunt when she said, quote-unquote, "If he is a genius, it's in sales and manipulation." I'm with her. So after college, Renier's resume was thin. His only real professional experience was a stint as a distributor for Amway, the health and beauty MLM. But the job gave him something more valuable than income. Three influences from the late 1980s helped shape everything that was to come: Scientology, neurolinguistic programming, which is an approach to personal development that treats communication patterns as tools for rewiring thought and behavior, and the multi-level marketing model he'd seen up close at Amway.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  You know, those BS pyramid schemes you saw everywhere around this time, in like 90s, early 2000s, they were everywhere. It was like a disease. And according to Eric Rood, a close friend at the time, Renier believed he could improve on Amway's models. He wasn't interested in selling beauty products for the rest of his life. He was studying the mechanisms underneath the sales pitch. So by 1990, he put that study to work. And he founded Consumers Byline, a MLM company based near Albany that offered discounts on groceries, dishwashers, and hotel stays. But of course, the real money wasn't in the product.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Old members earned commissions by recruiting new ones, and the pitch spread fast. So he went city to city, running recruitment events, filling rooms with as many as 1,000 people ready to buy into the dream. And every brochure and sales pitch circled back to the same claim: The man behind the company had one of the world's three highest IQs, which just was not true and was in one Guinness World Record book in Australia that got retracted after one year because it was BS. But we already know that they didn't, though. And in 1992, the company reported $30 million in sales and projected revenues of $100 million.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  And he claimed that by the end of 1993. And Consumers Byline had moved $1 billion in goods and services. And the operation, he said, ran on 80 employees. At one point, allegedly 160 employees even. And roughly 250,000 members, all paying $19 a month. And he put his personal net worth at that point at $50 million. But then, it all collapsed. And in April of 1993, New York Attorney General Robert Abrams filed suit, claiming that Consumers Byline was an illegal multimillion-dollar pyramid scheme. Pyramid scheme, pyramid scheme. Classic pyramid scheme.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  At the time, the company had 5,000 members in New York and 200,000 nationwide. And Arkansas filed its own suit, Maine launched an investigation, and before long, regulators in 23 states and two federal agencies were looking into the operation. And cases were settled in Arkansas, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. And Renier settled the New York case for $40,000 without admitting any wrongdoing. And only 9,000 of it ever actually left his pocket, which is insane. And he said the balance was more than he could manage to pay, which was hard to believe given he claimed to be living comfortably off of savings, because remember, he has a $50 million net worth.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  But the company had just been a recruitment-driven pyramid, sold on the legend of a genius founder, staffed largely by young women in a service of his vision. And even before Consumers Byline, Renier had been building a circle. His home base was a Clifton Park townhouse he shared with his girlfriend, Karen Utteraina. And by the late 1980s, the place had taken on the feel of a commune. Now, it featured a rotating cast of visitors, most of them being women, that drifted through at all hours, staying up late to talk philosophy, spirituality, and money. And he never had money on him and slept while everyone else worked. And he didn't show up to his own office until 10 at night, and meetings could start at

• 17:58Speaker 02

  1:00 in the morning even. Hutchinson described that people would hang out for hours while Renier sat among them, playing with a Rubik's Cube in his hand or writing in a notebook. And everyone around him was focused on the same project: turning Keith into a literal guru. So they treated him like a visionary about to make history. So in 1991, Toni Natalie first learned about Renier when her husband told her that, quote-unquote, "One of the most intelligent men in the world was headed to Rochester to pitch Consumers Byline." And she was struck by how unassuming he seemed in person and by how easily he held a room. And less than a year after meeting him, Natalie left her husband and relocated to Clifton Park.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  And in one early meeting, Renier implied to Natalie that he could cure her smoking habit. And he pressured specific spots on her knuckles and told her to do the same if the urge to smoke came back. And she thought that she was in his office for this meeting for just 15 minutes. But her husband told her it had been two and a half hours. Now, the cravings never came back, apparently. But for Natalie, those missing hours marked a turning point she couldn't fully explain. And she told Forbes that Renier had convinced her she was put on Earth to carry his child. Just textbook cult leader coming in real quick right now. A baby destined to transform history.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  And Renier used a polyamory framework to hold his relationships together. Get the checklist. Get the cult leader checklist out right now. This guy... He's the fucking worst. You got the manipulation, you got the narcissistic personality, you got him thinking he's a deity guru, you got the commune that's going on right now, and now he's saying that up. Also, it's gotta be polyamorous, everybody's gotta sleep with me and have my babies. It's just disgusting. But he would sell his girlfriends this theory, that nature designed men to sleep with multiple women, but not the other way around. How convenient. And if that arrangement bothered anyone, it only proved how deeply society's broken

• 20:09Speaker 02

  values had taken hold. It's their problem. They're the evil ones, everybody out there. A tale as old as time, I swear to God, they all have, I say this in every single video where I talk about cults. I feel like there's a meeting that is held where they all have a how to be a cult leader playbook, and it's the same thing every single time, and they all deserve to burn in hell. But that framework gave him both cover and access to the women around him. And Hutchinson, first time seeing Renier was around Christmas of 1984. At the time, he was 24, and he was climbing through the bedroom window to get to her teenage sister, Gina. And Gina had been involved with Renier since she was 14 or 15, and he was eight

• 20:54Speaker 02

  years older. So from the get-go, he's literally a predator. And what Heidi described was essentially a takeover. Quote, "He had sex with her, became her mentor, had her quit school to be tutored by him, and claimed she was born to be his consort and achieve enlightenment as a Buddhist goddess through him." End quote. And Renier was persuasive enough to convince Gina's mother that his intentions with her daughter were serious and committed. But he had other girlfriends the entire time, as we know, and Gina would eventually find out. And at one point, another woman in Renier's circle approached Gina and tried to bring

• 21:35Speaker 02

  her into the group relationship. And this pattern was already in place before any of his companies had names or curriculum to follow. So this was extremely early on, where he's already building a cult. And whether he knows it or not, he's a cult leader at this point. Because he drew young women into his orbit, isolated them from their existing lives, which, again, cult leader 101, told them they were special and molded them into a system that served only one person, and that was himself. So when consumers' byline folded in 1994, like we talked about, Renier moved straight into his next multi-level

• 22:14Speaker 02

  marketing operation, National Health Network, selling vitamins. And he and Toni Natalie opened a health food store in Clifton Park, New York. And while they worked there, a woman named Nancy Solzmann showed up to get help with a chronic health issue. And she pitched them on private NLP, neuro-linguistic programming sessions, telling them she could help fix whatever was going wrong between them. And before reinventing herself as an NLP practitioner, Solzmann had worked as a registered nurse. So NLP blended hypnotherapy with methods like mirroring body language, all aimed at breaking through the mental

• 22:57Speaker 02

  blocks that held people back. And most of the scientific community had dismissed NLP as pseudoscience, cuz it is. But Solzmann believed in it, and she was good at making other people believe in it, too. She's also a master manipulator in this whole thing, and is also a ginormous POS, okay? She's evil, and we'll come to see that. Now, Renier started meeting with her privately in the back of the store. Now, he already had the mythology, from the genius IQ to the self-authored legend to the loyal following. And Solzmann brought what he lacked, a structured therapeutic framework that could be packaged and sold

• 23:39Speaker 02

  to anyone. And Natalie watched the two of them come together, describing it as, quote, "like putting two volatile chemicals together in a mad scientist's lab. The resulting compound was both explosive and dangerous." End quote. So in 2000, Renier patented what he called the Rational Inquiry. And the idea was if you could train someone to think more consistently, you could get them to change how they acted. And that patent became the backbone of a new venture. And together, Renier and Solzmann founded Nxivm. Now, he took the title Vanguard, meaning a trailblazer of new ideas. And she became Prefect, the

• 24:21Speaker 02

  organization's chief officer. And the pairing looked credible on paper. The self-proclaimed smartest man in the world and a trained nurse with a background in therapeutic technique. Pseudoscience, let's be real. And that combination drew high-profile supporters to Nxivm before it had any real track record. And over the next two decades, more than 16,000 people would pass through Nxivm's courses. And the roster included Sheila Johnson, a co-founder of black entertainment television, and Tonia Novello, a former US surgeon general, and Stephen Cooper, now CEO of Warner Music Group. And the entry point was a 12-hour session

• 25:00Speaker 02

  called an intensive, and it cost more than $7,500 per person. And the whole thing ran on Nxivm's patented executive success programs. God, these names are just ridiculous. But I mean, these are incredibly smart, successful people joining this program. It's easy to see, you know, hindsight's 2020. It's easy to see, looking from the outside in, that this is like absolutely baloney. But when you're in it, it's like, you would never know. You would never know. And that's why my conversation that I will have on Saturday and post is so incredibly, incredibly interesting and heartbreaking, just that it could literally happen to anyone. So I don't want to downplay that at all. I don't think any of the people

• 25:45Speaker 02

  that joined are dumb in any way. I'm mostly just coming from a place of anger that Keith exists, pretty much. And Solzmann, Solzmann as well. So that's where that's coming from. But I digress. Let's continue. So where was I? We were at, the whole thing ran Nxivm's patented executive success programs, buzzwords, buzzwords, buzzwords. So it was called ESP, and it polled from all over. Self-help theory, religious philosophy, and hypnosis, which all showed up in the material. And people who studied it often compared the results to a collision between EST, a 1970s self-improvement program, and Ayn Rand's objectivism. And

• 26:24Speaker 02

  at the center of the coursework were exercises called EMs, short for Explorations of Meaning. And the exercise worked by forcing a student to sit inside a difficult memory and reexamine what about it still hurt. Often in front of a bunch of people, also. So you're just going through like, the worst thing that's ever happened to you in your entire life in a room full of people. Nxivm taught that going through this process would drain the power out of those memories, along with the behavioral pattern they had left behind. And in Renier's framework, nearly everyone was held back by what he called disintegrations,

• 27:07Speaker 02

  a term used for the mental and behavioral dysfunctions he claimed were blocking a person's path to enlightenment. And the pitch was that Rational Inquiry and EMs would fix those disintegrations. And once a student was deemed healed, healed quotation marks, the door opened to move higher inside the organization. Pyramid scheme, right? You just want to keep moving higher and higher and higher. That's the whole point of Nxivm was that you're like, never quite good enough. There's always somewhere to step up. So you just, you never felt like you were in the right spot, or like you were doing good enough. There was always something to keep you moving forward with this, which we'll get into more, and

• 27:52Speaker 02

  which we go into in extent in the interview that I did. And cult expert Diane Ben Scott who worked closely with former members saw nothing original in any of it, which, I mean, we could see, again, from the outside looking in, this looks exactly like every single cult we've ever covered. And she called Nxivm, quote, "an old bag of tricks repackaged, recycling universal truths about how to improve yourself and how to look closer at things that are getting in your way of success and your fears." End quote. Because Keith Renier is not a smart man. He's just really good at repackaging bullshit and shitting out recycled material that other stupid men before him came up with. But again, when

• 28:33Speaker 02

  you're in it, you don't see it like that. Now, Tia Banks, a former member from Nxivm's early days, reached the same conclusion. And she picked up a copy of Stress Management for Dummies and found much of the same material inside. And the techniques may not have been original, but they worked. And that's the thing, like, some of these techniques did work on some people. That's why so many people joined and so many people continue to stay in it. It's like, it wasn't completely useless. It's just, you know, it's almost like a placebo effect, or like, when somebody's convincing you of something, then you convince yourself of something, and then you think that they're like this magical deity that was able to cure you. It's just, it makes sense, looking from the inside. Gabriel Gendron, a former

• 29:18Speaker 02

  member from the Vancouver chapter, said the courses sent her backward through her own life, pulling up the buried events she believed had locked her into patterns she could never break. Quote, "It's like years of therapy in five days. You are mentally drained afterwards, and you're..." But you've challenged everything in your entire life, unquote. And Candy Clark, another former member, called it, quote, unquote, "a gym for personal improvement." They really talked about it like it was a scientific thing. Like, we've studied and researched and we figured out how to grow the person, how to be happy, which makes sense. And I mean, like, NXIVM, just like a lot of other cults, isolated people and, and put them through these intensive sessions for hours and hours and hours so you couldn't

• 30:03Speaker 02

  experience anything else or get any outside perspective. They were extremely good at just taking you away from everything you knew and making sure that, like, this was the one thing that could change you. And it's extremely, extremely messed up. And Josh Block, the journalist behind CBC's investigation into NXIVM, pointed out that slapping a patent on the method gave Rhaenyra cover to wrap everything in the language of science and logic. So for anyone who would have walked away from something that sounded spiritual or new age, that framing was the hook. And cult expert Dr. Steve Eichel said the targets aren't people who are more broken than the average person.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  The recruits, who were more susceptible, are people who are in the middle of a life change, a job loss, a divorce, the birth of a child. And in Eichel's view, joining a cult comes down to bad luck more than anything else, because those windows of vulnerability open for everyone sooner or later. And that is something, like, that is so clear in every single cult we've covered. They just prey on people who are in vulnerable parts of their lives, or young, naive parts of their lives, and take complete advantage of that, and it's disgusting. Now, Clark noted that NXIVM addressed the skepticism head-on during the very first intensive, walking students through why the organization wasn't a cult, discussing the

• 31:31Speaker 02

  negative media coverage and dismissing the existing allegations about Rhaenyra as too outlandish to even be real. And she also said the approach only worked because of who it attracted. Quote, "It wouldn't work on people that are already horrible, selfish, cruel people. It worked because everyone there wanted to be better and help people and change the world," unquote. So they were preying on empathetic, sympathetic, caring, you know, selfless people, and they knew it. So inside NXIVM, a ranking system called the Stripe Path organized the membership, and each rank came with a colored silk sash, white for students, yellow for coaches, orange

• 32:14Speaker 02

  for proctors, and green for senior proctors. And the ESP courses were taught by proctors, and the way to climb from proctor to senior proctor, pyramid scheme, was to bring in enough new recruits. Then every August, members gathered for V Week, an annual celebration of Rhaenyra's birthday, held at the Silver Bay YMCA on Lake George in upstate New York. Of course, it had to be around his birthday, because he's a narcissistic fucking piece of shit. And according to Mark Vicente, a former senior member, what began as a one-day event eventually grew into a celebration that ran as long as 11 days.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  And attendees paid between $1,400 and $3,500 and traveled from across the country, Canada and even Europe. And Vicente called it, quote, unquote, "sort of like summer camp for adults." Now, members spent the week drumming, dancing, singing, writing poetry, and rehearsing plays they would perform before the group. And each of NXIVM's centers prepared its own tribute ceremony for the event, with singers and performances honoring Rhaenyra and his work. And Vicente said all of it pointed in one direction. Quote, "The entire thing was a celebration of him and this civilization that he had built," unquote. And attendance wasn't exactly optional for anyone who held rank, as skipping was very frowned upon.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  And in November 2002, an environmental consultant in her mid-30s named Kristin Snyder enrolled in her first ESP course. And her first classes were in human potential, and she made the trip to NXIVM's upstate New York headquarters to sit down with senior members of the organization. And by February 2003, she was attending a 16-day intensive in Anchorage, Alaska, and something had gone wrong. Snyder's spouse, Heidi Clifford, saw her falling apart. She stopped sleeping, became delusional, and turned suicidal. And on February 6, she walked out of the Anchorage Hotel mid-intensive, and those who

• 34:18Speaker 02

  saw her said she was distraught, and it was the last time Clifford saw her. And investigators with Alaska State Police determined that Snyder drove the couple's truck to a campground along Resurrection Bay in Seward, Alaska, and deliberately capsized a kayak. And inside the truck was a spiral notebook holding an apparent suicide note. Quote, "I attended a course called Executive Success Programs, aka NXIVM, based out of Anchorage, Alaska, and Albany, New York. I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. No need to search for my body," unquote. And her body was never recovered, and her death was ruled a suicide.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  So when the Albany Times Union reached the investigating state trooper, he confirmed that nothing in Snyder's background pointed to psychiatric or emotional problems before her involvement with NXIVM. And cult expert Rick Allen Ross described Snyder's transformation in the star's docu-series "Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult," which I highly, highly, highly recommend you watch. Quote, "Before she was in NXIVM, Kristin Snyder was happy. She had a master's degree. She had her whole life ahead of her. But when she got caught up in the endless maze of courses, she had a meltdown," unquote. And Ross said Rhaenyra dismissed the entire story to his inner circle, calling it a hoax

• 35:46Speaker 02

  and insisting Snyder had never died but was living somewhere in Mexico. But Snyder was not the only person close to Rhaenyra to die this way. Gina Hutchinson, the teenager he had pursued back in the 1980s, was found dead in 2002, a year before Snyder, and her death was also ruled a suicide, though some have continued to question the circumstances. Let's take a quick pause to talk about a problem I have. Now, for me, eating healthy has never really been a willpower problem, except for that one week of the month, if you know what I mean. It's more of a setup problem, really, because by the time I'm hungry and wiped out at the end of the day, the last thing I have in me is to cook something from scratch.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  And that's where Factor saves me. Factor is fully-prepared meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs, delivered right to my door. And with Factor, I'm actually hitting my nutrition goals this season, without the planning and the grocery runs, or the cooking. And my go-to lately has been the honey butter chicken breast. It is so delectable and you'd never know it was microwaved. But it is, and it's ready in two minutes, and it's never frozen, and it's always fresh, with over 100 rotating weekly meals, so I never get bored of what I'm eating. I use Factor, and you should too. Let's eat real. Head to factormeals.com/CCCM50off and use code CCCM50OFF to get 50% off and one free

• 37:16Speaker 02

  breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last until October 31, 2026. That's code CCCM50OFF at factormeals.com. CCCM50OFF at factormeals.com. See website for more details. Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring this video, keeping me fed and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. Now, Sarah Bronfman first walked into NXIVM's Albany-area headquarters as a student in 2002, and her father was Edgar Bronfman Sr., a billionaire who had retired as president and CEO of the Seagram Company in 1994. Now, Sarah and Claire were his two youngest children. And once Sarah brought Claire in, the two of them started playing Nancy Solzmann for one-on-one coaching.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  And Claire was 23 and competing as a show jumper. And to stay close to both the organization and her riding career, Claire bought a home near the Clifton Park headquarters and picked up a horse farm nearby. And her riding sponsor, a German clothing company, was dropped before long, and Claire chose to replace the gear with a purple and black jacket that had NXIVM printed on it. Now, Rhaenyra had never worked with horses, but he appointed himself Claire's coach and set the US Olympic team as the goal. Now, the logic was if Claire made the Olympics, Rhaenyra would be recognized as a world-class coach and gain access to an entire new circle of influence. And she earned a spot on the US team, but the 2004 Olympics remained out of reach,

• 38:46Speaker 02

  and she walked away from competitive riding not long afterwards. And Steve Pidgeon, who served as a political consultant for NXIVM along with Roger Stone, said Rhaenyra had persuaded Claire that her family's money carried a moral stain, and that the Bronfman fortune traced back to her grandfather Samuel and the prohibition era. And Rhaenyra used that history against Claire, telling her the money would stay dirty unless she funneled it into something good, and NXIVM was that something. So in early 2003, Edgar Bronfman Sr. enrolled in a five-day NXIVM intensive himself, and the experience left him enthusiastic. And he described Solzmann as, quote, "one of the most influential females in my life,"

• 39:31Speaker 02

  unquote, and said the course offered, quote, "a new way..." of looking at the world, unquote, but it did not last. And he found out Claire had handed Rainier and Salzman a $2 million loan and his opinion of the group shifted entirely. And later that year, Forbes released the first critical article examining Rainier and NXIVM, and Edgar Senior went on the record saying, quote, unquote, "I think it's a cult." And Rainier turned the fallout on Claire, and he said the Forbes piece was her fault, and he labeled what happened as "an ethical breach," the most serious offense in NXIVM's internal code. And people who later left the group said Rainier never let her forget it, wielding that

• 40:13Speaker 02

  breach for years to keep Claire compliant in his debt. So from 2002 onward, Claire put roughly $150 million into NXIVM, and that included bankrolling Rainier's personal life with private flights running as high as $65,000 per trip. Between 2005 and 2007, Rainier gambled nearly $70 million on corn commodities and lost. And when the bet collapsed, Rainier pointed the finger at the Illuminati and told his followers that Edgar Bronfman Senior was running it. And Claire and Sarah covered approximately $65 million of his losses. And another $26 million went toward a Los Angeles real estate venture that Rainier dreamed

• 40:56Speaker 02

  up, building high-end homes in neighborhoods like Sherman Oaks and Hollywood Hills. And in 2009, the sisters reportedly dropped $2 million just to get the Dalai Lama to come to Albany and sit down with Rainier. And in a January 2011 email, Edgar Senior tried one more time to reach his daughter, quote, "Whether or not you want to believe me, I do not lie, and I love you two very much. Someone is not telling you the truth. Why don't you try and figure out who that might be? Who has something to gain? Certainly not me. What would be my motive? Tons of love, even if not requited. Pops." And Claire and her father never repaired what was broken between them. And Edgar Senior died in 2013.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Now NXIVM's reach extended well beyond upstate New York. And out of Rainier's inner circle of 25 men and women, close to half of them were Mexican. And Emiliano Salinas, whose father, Carlos Salinas, had served as Mexico's president, was on that list. And so was Rosa Laura Junco, from a family that controls one of the country's most powerful newspaper groups. And for more than 15 years, Salinas and his business partner, Alejandro Batancourt, had been building and operating ESP's presence in Mexico. And Marc Vicente directed a documentary called "Escadar el Corazon," or "Turn On The Heart." And Rainier turned it into a tool for bringing new people in.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  And it centered on Julian LeBaron, a man from a Mormon community in northern Mexico. And his brother Benjamin was kidnapped and killed in 2009 because the family refused to pay ransom for another brother. And Rainier cast himself as a guide to nonviolent resistance throughout the documentary, but the closing message had nothing to do with LeBaron or Mexico's violence. And it told viewers to just join Rainier's movement. And LeBaron said afterward that nobody asked his permission to use the documentary for recruitment. And the Bronfman fortune also bankrolled a legal war against anyone who criticized NXIVM, because Edgar Senior was now deceased. And by attorneys Peter Skolnick's estimate, the legal campaign cost was around $50 million

• 43:07Speaker 02

  across 15 years. And Claire cycled through 50 to 60 lawyers from roughly 30 firms, targeting close to a dozen critics of the organization. And concerned parents recruited cult expert Rick Allen Ross to look into ESP's course materials. And he brought in mental health professionals for the review and put the conclusions on his website, where he called NXIVM's classes "expensive brainwashing." And NXIVM responded with a lawsuit, and the fight lasted 14 years. And Ross estimated the organization burned through at least $5 million fighting him in court. And he told Oxygen that number was conservative. Now, the playbook, according to Ross, was to slow everything down, rotate attorneys,

• 43:49Speaker 02

  jump between jurisdictions, and bury the other side in costs until they couldn't fight anymore. And Ross said the campaign against him did not stop at the courthouse. And he claimed the organization paid private investigators hundreds of thousands of dollars to surveil him, including digging through his trash. And he also alleged they invented a fake client whose sole purpose was to get him onto a cruise ship stranded in the middle of the ocean. And NXIVM also filed patent infringement claims against AT&T and Microsoft, both of which collapsed, leaving Rainier ordered to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in companies' legal costs. And journalists who covered Rainier were targeted as well. James O'Dotto, at the Albany Times Union, and Susanna Andrews.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  At Vanity Fair, both faced lawsuits over their reporting. And the legal cost crushed people. And Bouchy, Natalie, and former consultant Joseph O'Hara all ended up filing personal bankruptcy after years of fighting NXIVM in court. And for Boucher, this came in part from her decision to walk away from NXIVM in 2009, because she had been one of the highest-ranking members in the organization and one of Rainier's girlfriends. But she wasn't the only one to leave. And that year, Boucher and eight others, known as the NXIVM Nine, confronted Rainier about his conduct before they left. And in response, Rainier filed lawsuits to prevent them from harming the company. And Boucher described, quote, "It's been almost nine years that they have been legally

• 45:15Speaker 02

  stalking me and abusing and harassing me, and I have not felt safe." And Sarah Edmondson, a member who would be one of the first to open up about the darker aspects of the organization, compared life inside NXIVM to being a frog in a pot where the water heats up so gradually you don't realize you're being boiled. In my talk with one of the former members on Saturday, we go into that specific aspect of this in great detail. And that comparison is true for so many. So Daniela ranked among Mexico's top students when NXIVM found her. An elite high school in Switzerland had already accepted her, but NXIVM members convinced her to drop out and relocate to Albany.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  And she arrived in 2002, still a teenager. And shortly after she turned 18, she became sexually involved with Rainier. And her parents and all three of her siblings eventually joined her in Clifton Park, and by 2005, the whole family was inside the NXIVM community. And her two sisters, Camila and Mariana, also became involved with Rainier. And all three became pregnant by him at different points, and each time he ordered them to end the pregnancy. And in 2007, Daniela kissed another NXIVM member named Ben Myers. And she told Rainier about it, and he completely erupted. The relationship was minor, a kiss and some underclothes contact, but with NXIVM's framework,

• 46:43Speaker 02

  it qualified as "an ethical breach," and the same concept that had kept Claire Bronfman in line for years. However, for Daniela, the consequences were far worse. And they started stripping things from her life. First her iPod, then her phone, then her computer. And after that came her immigration papers and ID, which were the only thing standing between her and a way out of the country. And then on March 9, 2010, Daniela was isolated into a room at 12 Wilton Court, her family's home in Clifton Park. And the room had a mattress and nothing else. And someone had blacked out one of the windows, leaving her with barely any natural light.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And Rainier and other NXIVM members set up cameras to monitor her, but the door was left unlocked the entire time. But she would stay in there for close to two years. And every so often, someone would hand her a piece of paper and a pen, and she would use them to write Rainier, apologizing for what she'd done and pleading for her freedom. But he never read them. And she described how time felt, quote, "There would be entire days when I would just sit against the wall." And she frequently spiraled, losing control and thinking about ending her life. But something small changed her mind, a bird outside the window, sitting on a nest with its babies. So she held on.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  And eventually, one of her notes made it to Lauren Salzman and Rainier, and it said, quote, "Let me out. I've come undone." And she cut her own hair because it felt like the last thing in her life she still had power over. And NXIVM labeled the haircut "yet another ethical breach," and informed her she would stay confined until it grew back, a process that could stretch on for years. So in February of 2012, Daniela walked out of the room. And her father and another NXIVM member took her to the US-Mexico border and sent her across with less than $80 in her pocket. And according to Lauren Salzman, Rainier's original instruction was that Daniela's stay would last only a few days.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  And of everything Salzman had done inside the organization, she considered Daniela's confinement the worst. And Camila's story started even younger. Now, she was 13 when her parents joined NXIVM and she first met Rainier. And at this point, he was 45 when they had sex for the first time, and she was 15. And in the months before the sexual abuse started, Rainier would walk with her late at night, steering their conversations toward sexual subjects and pushing further each time. And once the abuse was underway, he demanded total secrecy and isolation, quote, "He told me to keep it all secret," immediately severing me from my family

• 49:34Speaker 02

  And friends and effectively making himself my only resource unquote. And at seventeen, Renier talked Camilla out of going back to Mexico to renew her visa. And letting her immigration status lapse gave Renier total control over whether she could leave. She ended up in a hidden apartment near Albany that one of Renier's fixers rented under the table, paying cash for the lease and hanging heavy velvet drapes to block out every window. And Renier tracked her body obsessively, demanding her weight every single day, starting from the moment their sexual relationship began. He wanted her at a hundred pounds or under, and the constant pressure overweight pushed Camilla to attempt to end her life.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  And when she tried to get psychiatric care afterward, Renier refused to let her see anyone. And Camilla got out in 2017 with her sister's help, and she was 27 years old, but 12 years under his control had frozen her in place. Quote, "When I walked away, I had the mind of a 15-year-old and the body of a 27-year-old. I missed out on incredibly basic things people learn in their youth." And as mentioned, Renier had a sexual relationship with Mariana as well, and he ordered her to end her pregnancy, just as he had with her siblings. And far less is known about her time in the organization, but the pattern was the same. And the tools Renier used on the three sisters appeared to cross his inner circle.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  He could sleep with anyone he wanted, but the women around him could not develop feelings for anyone else. And violating that rule triggered an ethical breach, a label that carried real punishment. And Lauren Salzman once asked Renier for permission to pursue a relationship with another man, and he convinced her to stay by promising they would have children together. And that promise evaporated years later when Salzman leaped onto a man during a volleyball celebration, and Renier declared it an ethical breach. And Salzman wrote him a seven-page confession cataloging every way she believed she had acted out of line. Quote, "I committed to stay with nothing, no relationship, no baby, nothing."

• 51:46Speaker 02

  And by the mid 2000s, Alison Mack had been pulled into the fold. Now, Mack had spent 10 seasons and 204 episodes playing Chloe Sullivan in Smallville, making her a very recognizable face from television. And Kristen Crook, her Smallville co-star, signed up with NXIVM in 2006 and recruited Mack soon after. And Mack was 23, and according to the New York Times, unhappy with her television career. And she reportedly wanted Renier to transform her into a top-tier actress. So Mack went on to represent NXIVM publicly, starring in promotional videos for its women's empowerment arm, J-ness. And she called the work "the most gratifying thing she's ever done."

• 52:31Speaker 02

  And Mack became one of Renier's most trusted enforcers, personally recruiting women into a secretive inner circle. And she tried to bring in other actresses, including Emma Watson. And another woman Mack approached was Samia Showop, who felt the friendship was genuine at the time. Quote, "We got close very quickly, and looking back, it was a very contrived effort, but at the time, she seemed so sincere." Let's take a quick pause to talk about something a little uncomfortable, okay? Be honest with me. How long has that one appointment been sitting on your to-do list? Mine sat there for months, maybe even years, honestly. I'd just think about calling, picture the hold music and the phone tag and the questions I didn't have answers to, and decide I'll just deal with it tomorrow.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  But tomorrow never came, newsflash. And then I would finally call, and then it would say that the appointment's gonna be like 12 weeks out. It's just silly. And I don't want you to have to deal with that, so I highly recommend Zocdoc. Because Zocdoc lets you search and compare local in-network doctors, and you can see actual appointment openings and click to instantly book and visit. So no phone call at all, which I personally love as an introvert. And appointments happen fast, usually within 24 to 72 hours, and you can even score same-day doctor's appointments. I literally made a doctor's appointment last week, and the doctor saw me like three hours later, and I was able to get a prescription because my tummy was not feeling too good, okay?

• 53:58Speaker 02

  And it was super easy, super fast, and super reliable. And I was able to choose the doctor based off my preferences as well, which is also really nice. Your health matters, and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. So find and book the right doctor with Zocdoc. And head to zocdoc.com/cccm to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's z-o-c-d-o-c dot com slash cccm. Thank you so much to Zocdoc for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. Now, buried inside NXIVM was a second organization that most members never knew existed, and it was called DOS, or D-O-S, sometimes referred to as "The Vow."

• 54:39Speaker 02

  And it operated as a secret sisterhood built on a single principle: total submission. And the whole organization was structured as, believe it or not, a pyramid. And at the top sat Renier, the only man in the entire group and the so-called Grand Master. Now beneath him were eight women known as first-line masters, and each were responsible for recruiting and managing her own network of slaves. Now Lauren Salzman, one of the first-line masters, had 22 slaves reporting to her alone. And every woman who joined was told she was entering a group designed to make women stronger. And Renier controlled every aspect of the women's lives, but the framing was always

• 55:24Speaker 02

  about sisterhood and strength. And there were rules about who got in, and Renier set every single one. And recruits needed to be attractive, young, and thin. If they weren't thin already, they were expected to drop weight quickly. And the group also required women to be single, with rare exceptions, because a husband asking questions, of course, would make the whole system harder to run. And before a woman could enter, she was required to turn over something the group called collateral. And that meant, in a lot of cases, naked photographs of themselves, always with their faces visible so they could be identified. So it was blackmail. They were blackmailing these poor girls.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  And it also meant giving letters containing their darkest secrets and fabricated confessions about the worst things you could imagine. And once a woman was inside, the control over her life was constant. The women were put on restricted eating plans, and sex with anyone, in a lot of cases, other than Renier, was off limits. And in the middle of the night, readiness drills would arrive by text, and a slave who failed to respond fast enough could be paddled, or there could be some sort of penalty for that. And the group's own written rules spelt out the expectation clearly. Quote, "You should be a hungry dog for your master."

• 56:49Speaker 02

  And punishments included being locked inside a cage for days, standing barefoot in snow, and enduring cold showers. And Salzman said that the cage was positioned as a growth tool, something only the most devoted members would be asked to endure. And one woman, referred to only as Nicole, was an actress in her late twenties trying to build a career. And Mack recruited her with a pitch about, quote, "an intense growing empowerment group where women pushed each other to be stronger physically and mentally." And for collateral, Nicole would be made to make a video of herself doing inappropriate things and wrote a false letter alleging that her father had S-A'd her, then turned both over to Mack.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  And before long, Mack told Nicole to seduce Renier. And soon after that, she was branded. And Nicole described, quote, "I thought I was getting into a women's empowerment group. Somehow, I'd become a man's sex slave." And Renier personally scripted the branding ceremony the women would go through, down to the smallest detail, even explaining exactly how the ritual should look. And that was that the woman should be naked, he said in a private recording, with, quote, "legs spread straight, like feet being held to the side of the table, hands probably above the head, being held almost like tied down, sacrificial, whatever." Heartbreakingly awful what these women had to go through.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  And he also said that the woman should verbally request to the brand before anyone held her down, quote, "so it doesn't seem like they're being coerced." And they would get that on video. Because filming the ritual was part of the plan, too. And Renier pointed out that recording it, quote, "from different angles gives collateral," meaning yet another piece of leverage to hold over the women. More blackmail. And in a separate recording from January 2016, Renier told Mack what the women should be thinking as the pen touched their skin. Quote, "Pain is how we know how much we love. We know the depth of our love through pain. When they feel the pain, they think of that love." And he selected the design for the brand, himself, of course.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  And according to Lauren, once her mother found out about the brandings, she was enraged that her daughter and other women, quote, "went out and got Keith's initials branded next to their vaginas." Now, one night in March 2017, Sarah Edmondson was summoned to a house outside Albany along with four other women. And she'd spent 20 years working as an actress out of Vancouver, and with credits that included a lead on the TV show Continuum and voice work on My Little Pony. And her introduction to NXIVM came in 2005, when she enrolled in a five-day seminar and never looked back, staying for more than 10 years. And they were told to strip and wear blindfolds, then sit on a sheepskin rug.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  And the five of them formed a semicircle, and she thought she was getting a tattoo. But instead, a cauterizing device was pressed into the skin below her hip, with no anesthesia, searing a two-inch square symbol into her flesh over roughly 30 minutes.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  And Dr. Daniel Roberts performed the branding. And Edmondson called the pain, quote, unquote, "worse than childbirth." It was a horror movie. It was the most inhumane, horrific way to treat anybody. But the most horrific thing is that it's women doing it to women, unquote. And afterward, she examined the mark and realized the design wasn't a special symbol at all. The letters K and R were seared into the design. And as we said before, they were Keith Raniere's initials. Quote, "I lost it when I figured that out. I'm not cattle. I'm not owned by Keith." Unquote. And she filed a complaint with the New York State Department of Health. And then she picked up the phone and called Frank Parlato.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Now Parlato had his own history with NXIVM. And in 2007, the organization hired him to clean up their reputation and facilitate a $5 million real estate loan. And he spotted fraud in the finances. And Raniere just cut him loose. And by 2012, Claire Bronfman had filed a criminal complaint against him with the FBI. And Parlato brought what he'd learned about NXIVM to the federal prosecutors running his own fraud case, but the team didn't seem to care. And his former counsel, Brian Feldman, said the team in the Western District of New York was wholly uninterested. And law enforcement wouldn't listen. So Parlato built his own platform. And he launched a blog called FrankReport.com.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  And his first post on DOS carried the headline, quote, "Part One: Branded Slaves and Master Raniere." Unquote. And it exposed the hidden group inside NXIVM that was burning Raniere's initials into women's skin and holding compromising material over their heads to keep them from leaving. And Edmondson had reached out to him to make sure what happened to her wouldn't happen again. And in her book, Scarred, she wrote, quote, "I told Frank about my branding experience so that he could expose DOS in time to stop the next session. I told Frank everything. Releasing that secret was the biggest relief so far." Unquote. So the word spread, and the next ceremony was actually called OFF.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  And from that first post, memberships began to hemorrhage. And as NBC's Dateline put it, Parlato had cratered the cult. And Nicole, the DOS slave who'd been recruited by Allison Mack, described what reading the Frank Report felt like from the inside. Quote, "There was this blog called The Frank Report that started blogging about DOS. An article came up online that said that I was like sex slave of Keith Raniere's. It was just that, like, a tiny bit of, like, courage or whatever I needed. It was like that flash of reality. Like, now is this little window when I can get out, and I'm taking it." Unquote. And India Oxenberg, the incredibly brave woman I got to sit down with and that I will

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  be posting an interview of in a few days, said that those posts shattered the secrecy DOS depended on. Quote, "Even within NXIVM, no members outside of DOS were supposed to know that it existed. As soon as the Frank Report posts started coming up, there were a ton of questions and a lot of chatter." Unquote. And in October 2017, The New York Times published Barry Meyer's investigation. And the story went mainstream. And the report described the initiation process in detail. Women restrained, instructed to say, "Master, please brand me. It would be an honor." And branded one by one. And once NXIVM members found out about the branding, the organization went into damage control.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  And women were told to wipe encrypted messages and destroy documents. And as the first stories about DOS leaked out, Raniere publicly denied having anything to do with it. And he drafted a statement and distributed it to his top-line masters. Quote, "I feel it is important to clarify the sorority is not part of NXIVM and that I am not associated with the group." Unquote. And he added that, quote, "Our experts and forensic psychiatrists of international repute, psychologists, and ex-law enforcement say members of the sorority are thriving, healthy, happy, better off, and haven't been coerced." Unquote. AKA, bullshit. But his own recordings contradicted every word, capturing a man who choreographed every

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  detail of the ritual while claiming he had never heard of it. And in a recorded conversation, Raniere had called the branding a "monogram of his initials." And so faced with mounting scrutiny, he tried to rewrite the story, claiming the design was inspired by the Greek alphabet, the seven chakras, and the four elements, is what he would say. And Catherine Oxenberg, India Oxenberg's mother, who'd been watching her daughter, India, slip deeper into Raniere's world, later credited the timing. And she told The Daily Beast that The Times had originally treated the piece as an evergreen story with no urgency to publish. Quote, "I really think that if me two hadn't coincided, they may have never run the story." Unquote.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  And again, their story is so much more than what I am saying right now. And that conversation I had with India was absolutely incredible. So please tune into that on Saturday. And she would also point out to the Albany Times Union, which had published its own exposes in 2010 and 2012 with no results. Quote, "They ran this huge expose. They did run stories, and still nothing happened. And so the climate had changed drastically, thank God." Unquote. And the article landed on the desk of Moira Kim Penza, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York. And she saw crimes in the reporting and decided to move on it. And the FBI opened an investigation.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  And before The Times piece, Oxenberg had tried everything else first. She attempted a direct intervention with India, which she said failed horribly. And she went to law enforcement and hit walls. Letting the public know became the only remaining option. But Catherine would say, quote, "If law enforcement isn't going to listen, and I really believe with every fiber of my being that laws are being broken, there are abuses that are happening, then the media was the only option that I had." Because they had the power to get the attention of law enforcement. And I certainly didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars at my disposal, like the Bronfman's, to fight them with a legal arsenal. So I was kind of limited in what I could do. But I couldn't sit back and do nothing."

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Unquote. So that November, Oxenberg went on Meghan and Kelly Today and told a story on national television. And from that point on, she was the most visible figure in the campaign to bring down Raniere and NXIVM. And she teamed up with a group of defectors that led to working with Parlato. And they co-authored a memorandum of criminal allegations that she delivered to authorities that same month. So by late 2017, Raniere knew the walls were closing in. And he fled the country once The Times article dropped. And court papers allege he switched to encrypted emails and ditched his phone entirely. And Parlato tracked his movements from the blog. And in February of 2018, The Frank Report reported that Raniere had surfaced in the coastal resort city of Puerto Vallarta after leaving Monterey.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  And in an FBI affidavit supporting a search warrant, the Bureau noted that, quote, "The blog has previously had accurate information regarding Raniere's whereabouts." Unquote. So agents located him in Puerto Vallarta that month. And on March 26, 2018, Mexican federal police moved on a luxury gated community where Raniere, then 57, had been living with several women. And when officers entered, they found him hiding, just crumpled up like a little pathetic loser in a walk-in closet. And he was arrested and deported on a US warrant charged with sex trafficking. And once Raniere was in handcuffs, several of the women at the villa jumped into a car and sped off, triggering a high-speed chase.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  And then back in New York that same month, the FBI executed a search warrant at Nancy Solzmann's residence in Waterford. And the organization that Keith Raniere had spent two decades building was now finished. So one by one, the people closest to Raniere turned on him. And Nancy Solzmann pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy. And her daughter, Lauren, also pleaded guilty for racketeering conspiracy and racketeering. And she agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, which meant taking the witness stand against Raniere. And Allison Mack pleaded guilty to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy in April of 2019 as well. And Claire Bronfman, whose fortune had kept the operation alive for nearly two decades,

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  pleaded guilty to identity theft and immigration fraud. And the charges came down to two acts: keeping an undocumented immigrant, working without pay for Raniere, and using someone else's personal identification to do it. And Kathy Russell, the organization's bookkeeper, pleaded guilty to a single count of visa fraud. So out of Raniere and his five co-conspirators, only Raniere decided fully to go to trial. And the case was heard in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. And it lasted more than six weeks. And the testimony was brutal. Women would describe being pinned down while the brand was applied, punished with paddles, and pushed into sexual encounters with Raniere.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  And when Daniela took the stand, she told the jury about the room she had been confined in. And she described how the door was never locked. And prosecutor Moira Penza asked the obvious question: Could she have left? Daniela said, no. Leaving meant losing her family entirely, and without documents, she had no way to start over. And the jury heard a recorded phone call between Raniere and Daniela's mother. And in it, he pressured her to crack down harder, insisting again and again that the ethical breach her daughter did amounted to having Killed a child. And what Daniela had actually done, as she testified, was kiss another man. And Camilla did not testify at trial, but her presence filled the courtroom anyway.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  And prosecutors showed the jury photographs of her recovered from Reneer's computer, taken when she was only 15 years old. And they had been stored inside a folder named "Studies." And that same folder held hundreds of photographs, all depicting NXIVM women positioned so their genitalia were fully visible. And the women, known in court only as Nicole, described more of what DOS did to her. She was blindfolded, tied down to a table, and forced to endure oral sex from a stranger she could not see. And Lauren Salzman took the stand as a cooperating witness. And according to her testimony, Reneer told her to keep new recruits in the dark about what DOS actually was. And Reneer's defense team did not call a single witness.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  So on June 19, 2019, the jury returned after four hours of deliberation. And he was found guilty on all seven counts. Racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, forced labor conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy, and attempted sex trafficking. And the racketeering charge had its own threshold. Jurors needed to agree on at least two of 11 underlying acts. And among them, child pornography possession, extortion, sexual exploitation of a child, and forced labor. And they found him guilty on all 11, thankfully. And outside the courthouse, Catherine Oxenberg wept, saying, quote, "I'm so damn grateful."

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  And she would also say, "Justice has been served." And Reneer's lead attorney, Mark Agnifilo, offered a different version of how the day played out. "We knew it was a tough case going in. We do plan on appealing. Keith maintains his innocence. It's a very sad day for him." Where do these lawyers get off? Like, you lost the case? Just pack it in. Don't say you're sad for a man that exploited literal children. You freak. And sentencing would come on October 27, 2020, more than a year later. And at the Brooklyn courthouse, 15 victims gave statements to the court. Camilla, who had been silent through the trial, finally spoke. And her statement showed a catalog of abuse.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Reneer sexually assaulted her at 15, when she was still a virgin. And he gave her HPV, got her pregnant, along with both of her sisters, and forced all three to end their pregnancies. And the brand carrying his initials was seared into her skin. "He robbed me of my youth. He used my innocence to do whatever he wanted with me." And Daniela addressed the judge directly, saying, "He showed me and my little sister no mercy. He deserves no mercy." And Mark Vincent, the filmmaker who had once helped build NXIVM's promotional materials, delivered his own statement, saying, "You have done irreparable harm to people's psyches,

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  to their self-esteem, their belief in themselves, and their experience of sanity and well-being." And Reneer spoke last. And he told the court he believed he was innocent of the charges and that he was, quote, "Not remorseful of the crimes I do not believe I committed at all." Just fiery pits of hell for this guy. And the closest he came to an apology was saying he was truly sorry, that things had reached a point where there is so much anger and so much pain. And his defense attorneys had asked for 15 years, framing the case as something that never belonged in a federal courtroom. And their sentencing memo argued, "This complex situation of personal motives, individual regrets, and life choices has no place in a federal courtroom.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Yet, government seeks a life sentence for Keith Reneer in a case that has no guns, no knives, and no force. No one was shot, stabbed, punched, kicked, slapped, or even yelled at." How do these people sleep at night? And his attorneys also wrote that Reneer, quote, "Remains proud of his life's work and remains determined to fight this case, which he views as a terrible injustice." Judge Nicholas G. Garofis was not convinced, thankfully. And he pointed out that Reneer had dismissed some of what the victims said as lies. Then he turned to Daniela and said, "What happened to you is not your fault."

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  And he said the same applied to every victim in the courtroom. Prosecutors had sought a life sentence, and Garofis handed down 120 years, respectively. So over the months that followed Reneer's sentencing, the people who had helped him build NXIVM learned what their cooperation was worth. And in June 2021, Mack received a three-year sentence for racketeering and racketeering conspiracy. And she had faced a potential range of 14 to 17 and 1/2 years. And the prosecution credited her cooperation, which had begun just a week before she pleaded guilty, and recommended a reduced sentence. And in a letter submitted before sentencing, she addressed the people she had harmed directly,

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  saying, "I devoted my loyalty, my resources, and ultimately, my life to him. This was the biggest mistake and greatest regret of my life." And she told victims she was, quote, "Sorry I ever exposed you to the nefarious and emotionally abusive schemes of a twisted man." And that September, she entered the Federal Correction Institution Dublin in California. And she walked out on July 3, 2023, about two years into her three-year term. And Clara Bromfman received 81 months for identity theft and harboring an undocumented immigrant for financial gain, with a projected release in June 2025. And she is now under supervised release.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  And Nancy Salzman got 42 months on a racketeering conspiracy plea with a July 2024 release date. And she is also under supervised release. And Lauren Salzman, whose testimony had helped convict Reneer, received five years of probation and 300 hours of community service. And the prosecution asked for a lighter sentence due to her willingness to cooperate as they put their case against Reneer together. And Kathy Russell was the last defendant sentenced in October 2021. And she received two years of probation and 200 hours of community service for her visa fraud conviction. And at sentencing, she told the court, "I denounce NXIVM and I denounce Keith Reneer."

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  And she called him what he is: a monster. And in July 2021, a federal judge ordered Reneer to pay $3.46 million in restitution to 21 claimants. And part of that money was to cover surgical removal of the brands seared into their skin. And a separate order required him to give back every piece of collateral collected from DOS members, but the court paused enforcement while his appeal played out. And Reneer continued to insist he was innocent. And his appeal rested on the accusation that federal investigators had fabricated child pornography evidence. And he said agents had placed the material on a hard drive to connect him to charges built around photographs of Camilla.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  And in April 2024, Judge Garofis rejected his motion for a new trial, thankfully. And Reneer appealed again, and this time to the Second Circuit. And on October 27, 2025, a three-judge panel shut it down completely. And the panel pointed to a mountain of evidence behind the guilty verdict. And Reneer had failed to identify any newly discovered or suppressed evidence that would change the outcome. And even setting aside his claims about tampered evidence, the panel wrote, "There was no, 'real concern that an innocent person may have been convicted.'" And according to the Frank Report, USP Tucson was Reneer's home for five years, a federal

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  prison designated for sex offenders and inmates who cannot safely mix with general population, or GenPop. And by one account, he clashed with at least four other inmates after leaving the special housing unit. So for his own protection, he rarely left his cell. And people who recently broke away from his remaining circle say his body is failing him, his teeth are in bad shape, and his mind is starting to go. Womp, fucking womp. And by December 2025, he had been moved out of Tucson and was sitting at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, waiting to be assigned a new prison. And his projected release date is June 27, 2120. So he'll be dead.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  After decades of followers who catered to his every need, he now lives in a world where no one does. But not everyone walked away. Because while he sat in a Brooklyn jail awaiting his sentence in the summer of 2020, some of his remaining followers showed up outside to dance. And visitation was shut down due to the pandemic at the time. So they performed nightly on the sidewalk beneath his window. Nikki Klein, an actress and DOS member, was among the most visible of them. And as of late 2025, Reneer still maintained a circle of followers, some of whom tracked his condition and relayed updates to the Frank Report, and others had only recently defected. And one question kind of lingers over all of it.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  And that is, was Keith Reneer actually a mastermind, or just a mediocre man who found the right people at the right time? And I'm going to safely choose the latter. Because his IQ was self-tested at a kitchen table with no supervision. His GPA was 2.26. And his first company was shut down as a pyramid scheme after investigations by 23 states. And every system he built depended on someone else's talent, someone else's money, or someone else's trust. Nancy Salzman supplied the framework, Clara Bromfman the fortune, and Allison Mack the famous face. So a long line of recruits provided the one thing he could not manufacture on his own. And that was simply belief.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  And what NXIVM reveals is how many people have to look away or lean in for one person's exploitation to last 20 years. And I mentioned briefly before that I had the chance to hear the full story from someone who lived inside the cult firsthand. And the conversation was with India Oxenberg, and will be coming out on Saturday. So I highly recommend you tune in because there's so much other stuff that we go over that I think is just so important. And even everyday life with, you know, relationships, and whether it be romantic, or familial, or just friendship, these types of grooming behavior can happen in so many different aspects of your life. And we really delve into that.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  So, um, yeah, I really hope that you guys tune into that. And thank you to India again for speaking with me. I look forward to you guys being able to listen to that. But for now, that is the NXIVM cults. If you guys have any other cases or cults or conspiracies you want me to look into, please let me know in the comments below. And until then, I will see your beautiful face. And please, please, stay safe out there. Okay? Bye.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

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