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Uncover: Escaping NXIVM Episode 4: The Suppressives

JB: Previously on “Escaping Nxivm”...

JB: Were you afraid of him?

SE: I trusted the people around me that he was who he said he is and I went to bat for him

SE: Keith created his faux-women’s empowerment program within the structure of Nxivm to maintain loyalty and to feed his sex addiction.

JB: Things started to click…

[pause]

JB: When I started looking into Sarah’s story. I was surprised to discover that Sarah was not the first person to try and get out of NXIVM. Sarah knew what happened to others who stood up to Keith.

TN: Give me your shoes, and if you wouldn’t mind taking your shoes off…

JB: Their stories served as a cautionary tale…

TN: This is my war room, yes.

TN: Good morning!

Keith doesn't draw bad people to him. He draws really good people. You've interviewed these people, they're amazing. They're amazing. Nobody comes to ESP or NXIVM saying "Oh let me learn how to fuck people's life up." That's not what they do. They come because he presents so well this beautiful way of helping people make things better for other people. I think we're innately good in nature and we wanna do the right thing. People do things in a natural sense for betterment. It takes a while for them to realize that they've just been conned, so harshly.

JB: Can you just describe what this whole setup is?

JB: Here in her storage room between the washing machine and the free weights is a long desk with file folders, bankers boxes and a whiteboard the length of a car.

TN: I started off with moving paper, writing things down and I moved on to a whiteboard, and then I moved on to printing them and putting them in folders. Questions that I needed to get answered. And things that I felt were lies…

JB: This break up started in 1999, and it turned into a war with NXIVM.

Today Toni Natalie lives alone, with a large mutt named Ramona.

JB: Almost 20 years on, she doesn’t feel safe.

JB: Toni’s little green house backs onto the ravine. She told me she chose it for its almost 360 degree view. There's been a series of incidents over the years since she left Keith. Her house has been broken into, her dog was poisoned and died, a private investigator was monitoring her home and business. She believes Keith’s was behind these things — though that’s never been proven.

[Sound: Ramona likes to bark]

[/sc]

JB: Toni became one of the first people to speak to the media about Keith and NXIVM.

TN: I call it I am waiting…[mumbles] I'm waiting, yeah. My life is on hold.

TN: The thing that takes my fear away is I see Keith in an orange jumpsuit. [laughing] So Orange Jumpsuit has become a little bit of a motto. I wanna see him held accountable in the system that he has used to abuse many people, for years.

SE: They say there was a woman that was in the company, and she was a suppressive...

SE: He had to write those modules about suppressive behaviour because of Toni. She spends all her life force trying to take down NXIVM — isn’t that terrible? Now we now have to educate ourselves as to what suppressive people look like so that we don't get fooled again.

[pause]

JB: Across the country from Toni Natalie, I follow Susan Dones up a rickety ladder into her attic...she’s got her own battle scars.

JB: Susan wants to show me the bankers boxes full of documents from her fight with NXIVM…

JB: This one says legal docs.

JB: Susan’s bungalow is in Puyyalap, a middle-class neighbourhood in Washington State, just south of Tacoma. She works as a massage therapist. Though her she’s a got a no-bullshit personality that fits more with her career in the Navy, where she was enlisted for a decade.

SD: Well, I don’t have too…

JB: How was the mission expressed to you?

JB: She opened a NXIVM centre in Tacoma with her partner Kim. It was the first centre outside Albany.

JB: Susan was actually the woman who ran Sarah’s first five-day workshop. In some ways, Susan’s story is similar to Sarah’s. Like Sarah, her centre was thousands of kilometres from NXIVM headquarters.

[/sc]

SD: I thought the way they packaged it was excellent…

SD: I found him creepy…

SD: We lived pretty meager lives. I mean most of our money was spent on our centre, flying back and forth to Albany. Or it was, you know taking courses or putting money into our centre. And I think if I hadn't been so far in debt, I would have walked away a lot earlier. Even though I had a strong foundation of myself, I was always in a constant state of fear.

JB: Barbara was a NXIVM executive. She had been Keith's girlfriend for eight years. his so-called.... Dagny, who ended up in his harem. Susan says Barbara was also fed up with Keith.

JB: They became known as the NXIVM 9...

JB: There were a lot of secrets in NXIVM, people operated in silos. So right off the bat it was rare for members to come together like this and exchange notes. Their main complaints were that the company wasn’t functioning professionally, it was disorganized, and there was favouritism, oh and Keith was sleeping with most of the executive board and many of his students.

JB: Keith agreed to a three day meeting to hear them out...

BB: Here's the other thing you need to understand. Did other people confront the leadership? Has anybody told you they confronted?

BB: ‘Cause they didn't. Just me. [laughs] Anybody that knows me knows that I'm a tough girl. I'm assertive. I'm a dog and a bone. And I have a strong will. And if I believe in something, I will stand up for it and I will fight. And I'm not afraid of confrontation.

KR: The process that you are doing… you have accused people of ganging up collaborative… ganging up on you. It is yet what you sort of manifest here…

BB: His face was beet red. His veins were popping out of his neck. He was sweating. He had bags under his eyes. He was nervous, he was tense, he was like kept holding like it's pulse like he was trying to calm his pulse down. He was not articulate. He was losing track of what he was saying, he wasn't making sense. It was like scattered garbage. You know what I'm saying? non sequiturs. because he wasn't used to being on a hot seat

BB: But what I’m trying to say though, Keith is that we believe that there are certain problems that pink or white elephants or whatever you want to call them in the room. And yet, we as a company don’t ever address those elephants.

(cross-talk / interrupts) BB: The effects are our company is falling apart

KR: You don’t have the experience of leadership

KR: You don’t have the experience of presurving people’s lives with what you say. And the truth of the matter is...

Barbara: Well, in a way neither do you…

JB: This part of the meeting sounds like a calm exchange,

KR: Well, it’s not...

KR: Here’s the thing... I’ve been shot at because of my beliefs, I have had to make choices should I have body guards, should I have them armed or not. I’ve had people killed because of my beliefs and their beliefs.

KR: And because of things that I’ve said. And I’m mindful of that. And I’m leading an organization that’s doing something very good.

[pause]

SD: The hair on the back of my head stood up…I got scared!.. I'm like "oh my God he has just admitted to having people killed."

JB: Like you were in tears?

JB: ‘Cuz you had put so much into into it?

[pause]

BB: All nine of us got it. We got it. And it was in that moment when we finally got it. We all decided we were going to resign.

JB: After the NXIVM 9 left, The amount of negative publicity about NXIVM exploded. The New York Post, Vanity Fair, even Maclean’s magazine starting writing about this strange organization. And someone leaked the ‘I’ve had people killed because of my beliefs’ video.

JB: You know there are a bunch of options for organizations when they face a PR crisis like this.

They could hire a PR company. They could do media interviews. That’s not the NXIVM approach.

When Sarah was figuring out how to get out of NXIVM, she thought about the very particular way the NXIVM 9 was dealt with. It started with internal damage control right after they left. And it turns out when the going gets tough in NXIVM… the leadership screens the Oscar nominated film…”The Contender.”

ACTOR: Understand that for those of you worked to bring Laine Hanson down that she has to have her name from…

JB: It’s so weird that like for you coming to have this meeting, and then you all just watch a movie for two hours [laughing]

JB: “The Contender” is about a politician who, out of principle, refuses to address false rumours about her personal life spread by her political opponents.

JB: So in this case, Keith has cast himself as the principled politician… and Barbara and Susan are his opponents spreading nasty rumours about him.

JB: Sarah tells me she bought the idea that these rumours weren’t even worth addressing. She was told Susan was difficult and Barbara was crazy. They were suppressives, trying to harm the company.

[pause]

KR: Just imagine being in a life struggle with someone… you’re wrestling, back and forth. Back and forth...

KR: Do you kill your opponent…

KR: Or if you hesitate, they’re going to stab you.

KR: Do you hesitate?

[pause]

JB: Sarah Edmondson was worried she could be next….

JB: I have heard from several former members of NXIVM that they were afraid of the way Clare went after adversaries. It’s something the FBI has investigated as well. The FBI says Clare maintained a list of critics and their supposed crimes against Keith. They say she orchestrated abusive litigation meant to intimidate and attack perceived enemies and critics of Raniere. We’ve tried to ask Clare Bronfman and her lawyers about this directly, but we’ve not heard back. In a statement, her lawyer says the government is overreaching in its case.

SD: Oh gosh! That I destroyed their business. That I tried to extort money from them. And that I was teaching their courses afterwards. That I refused to give them their materials back...

JB: : And is this part of the bankruptcy filing, or is this separate to the bankruptcy?

JB: Susan could not afford to hire a lawyer, so she took the work on herself. She tells me the bankruptcy case became a full time job for her. At the trial, Susan and her partner Kim were facing off against 3 high-powered lawyers.

JB: NXIVM lawyers filed motion after motion. They argued Susan and Kim were on a campaign of hate against the company. That she damaged NXIVM by talking to the press, and leaking that video of the NXIVM 9 meeting. They wanted her to pay damages.

JB: On the stand, because they are representing themselves, Susan’s partner is the one to ask her questions. Kim asks Susan: “Do you believe NXIVM will go to any lengths to destroy you?

SD: I believe that they will. I don't think that this is the last legal round with them. I left, I defected. And my understanding is if you do that and you have information that could possibly substantiate the illegal activity, that they'll go to the ends of the earth to destroy you.

JB: The audio quality is not great, but you can hear Susan’s frustration at this point.

when I was in NXIVM, I just believed them when they said, "Oh this person is a thief. This person is this, this person is that."

JB: And then Susan says: I believe I was lied to when I was in NXIVM, I just believed them when they said, "Oh this person is a thief. This person is this, this person is that." And they would make all kinds of allegations, and then lose the case. In his closing argument, Bob Crockett — one of NXIVM’s lawyers — provided a different view...

BOB CROCKETT: They blame Keith Raniere and NXIVM for their income problems. They claim Keith Raniere and NXIVM for their credit cards issues. These are capable women — one with a masters degree in psychology. One a former navy veteran. I mean these are capable women who have the ability to control their destinies. And instead, they have gone from caring, loving, nice people to being mean-spirited. They make allegations that NXIVM uses litigation to crush people and dissidents. That is untrue…..NXIVM doesn’t bring actions to crush dissidents. It just doesn’t happen. I just want to stand up for my client. And that is it is not an evil, manipulative organization. They make money. It is not a cult. It just makes money. It’s got a successful leader at its helm, who is a capable man. It’s now time for her to honour her agreements. Thank you, your honour.

[pause]

JB: And then when it comes to cautionary tales... there’s what happened to Barbara Bouchey.

JB: I meet Barbara in her hotel room in Manhattan. She sits proud and upright in a blue velvet chair, and looks a bit like a queen on her throne. Barbara was the highest ranking defector when she left NXIVM. She was Keith's girlfriend. She had been on the executive board, so she knew a lot about the company.

JB: Between the Bronfmans and NXIVM, Barbara’s had seven lawsuits filed against her. Just like in Susan’s case, NXIVM pointed to Barbara speaking out. They accused her of being involved in a malicious grassroots effort to destroy the company by going to local, national, and international media.

JB: Barbara won’t tell me where she lives… she’s worked hard to conceal her whereabouts because she is still afraid of NXIVM coming after her. She’s got a mailing address in one state, and a car registered in another. And presumably neither of those is the state where she lives.

JB: It’s more than the legal battles that keeps Barbara up at night. She says she learned that Keith might have had other plans to go after her…

JB: In 2014, Kristin Keeffe — one of the original so-called spiritual wives — defected from NXIVM. She is the mother of Keith’s son Gaelin. Kristin had been in charge of NXIVMs legal battles with Toni, Susan, and Barbara. When she left, Kristin went into hiding, and she called Barbara. Barbara recorded one of their conversations.

JB: Some of the stories Kristin told her are so bizarre they make your head spin. She said Clare Bronfman hired a company to dig up dirt on adversaries, including journalists and federal judges.

She says Keith worked closely with Clare. And the two of them lied in their court filings.

JB: And then there is this...

JB: The Mexican plot.

BB: I remember Toni calling me. We didn’t talk a lot. But every once in a while, maybe every three or four months, we’d have a chat. I remember this one time calling and saying are you getting calls from this Mexican journalist? And I said I’d gotten some, but I hadn’t actually connected with the person. She wanted me to come down. I said I’m not going to fucking Mexico. You know, what are they crazy?

BB: Yeah, yeah...

KK: The emails... they were serious as a fucking heart attack. He worked on this for years. Fucking years. This was like a three-plus year plot in the making.

JB: I've heard a lot of outlandish stories about this group. And sometimes it's hard to know which ones are true. But Barbara tells me that NXIVM did file a criminal charge against her, in Mexico, for extortion. And that just this summer, U.S. border guards detained her at the airport because of it.

JB: I have a ton of questions for Kristin about what she told Barbara on that phone call. But she is in hiding. I don't know where she is. I asked someone who does if she’d speak with us. And she said no.

One of Keith’s lawyers told me this story of a Mexico plot is a red herring.

JB: For Sarah, she had heard these stories as rumours or fragments. That she was certain leaving could be very dangerous. How does she avoid this fate?

JB: This is Peter Skolnik...

JB: And he offered legal advice to Sarah...

JB: If someone came to you from NXIVM and said I want to leave, and I don't want to have happen to me what happened to Susan or Toni or Barbara? What would what would be your advice to them what would you say to them?

JB: Sarah wasn’t just in NXIVM, she had to get out of DOS. Unlike Susan, Barbara, and Toni she had handed over collateral. She wasn’t even sure how Nippy would respond when he found out about DOS and the branding.

SE: No. Nippy doesn't know...

SE: I think, well I guess the first time I actually showed you... I showed you the brand because it was at your parents place, right?

NIPPY: And I wanted to punch a lot of things at that time.

SE: Yeah, he was really angry. And I was a... I was a wreck. I mean keep in mind that this had been unravelling for a couple of weeks even before I told Nip. And umm.. I hadn’t been sleeping. I was just a basket case.

NIPPY: Plus, it was also like we're sleeping in different beds, because we can't sleep at night, you know?

SE: I'm also having drills SOP and a DOS drills that wake me up every night.

SE: Not even just to respond, I have to spend sometimes an hour dealing with the thing.

NIPPY: And we’re like ok, what do we do? How do we get out of this?! This is when I’m scared, you know? I'm scared at this point ‘cause I know like getting out’s not gonna to be easy. We're going to have to deal with the Bronfman legality things, if this thing, worst case scenario. I know that playbook. I've seen it in action. And I know it's bullshit. So leaving was an easy decision. It was just how? Do I want to cowboy up, go up there with a baseball bat and take it to his head.

SE: The plan was that we were going to go to Albany anyway. And we already had our tickets and everything and, you know, also so my grandfather had just been admitted to hospital. And whenever anyone saw me they were like "you look awful what's going on?" I'm like "My grandfather is sick.” So my grandfather goes to hospital with stomach cancer. I realized that I'd been in a cult for 12 years (laughing, exasperated). It was like, I was a, I was just, I was a wreck. And we decided to do business as usual.

SE: I went back to the house and packed up the house.

SE: Packed up like this is the stuff I'm taking with me... this stuff put in New York City... the rest just give away or sell. I told the leasing agent we need to get out early.

SE: And that ten hour train ride was like one of the most stressful travel days of my life.

JB: As far as they could tell… no one in NXIVM had figured out what was going on. That two of their leaders had jumped ship. And Sarah and Nippy had no idea what would happen when they did.

NIPPY: and I’m just like [makes sound, big exhale] my heart is...

SE: Yeah, I don't think I've ever been in as much fight or flight.

JB: Next time on Escaping NXIVM:

SE: With Clare?

JB: “Escaping NXIVM” is produced & written by Kathleen Goldhar, Anita Elash, and me, Josh Bloch, and Mieke Anderson, who also mixed the series. Heather Evans is our senior producer. And Arif Noorani is the executive producer. Subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts. We’re at: www.cbc.ca/uncover. If you want to discuss this story with others and get the latest updates? Join our online communities by joining the Uncover: Escaping NXIVM Facebook group, or following us on Twitter: @uncoverCBC. “Escaping NXIVM” is proud to be part of the larger CBC Podcasts family. Another podcast you should check out is “On Drugs”. Explore our complicated relationship with drugs from caffeine to cocaine, from ibuprofen to ayahuascaa.

TRANSCRIPT: Uncover: Escaping NXIVM - Season 1, EP 4

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