Perched on the kitchen table, I’m explaining to my roommate and her friend how I would get them to join a cult.
“You trust me, right?”
A few miles away, in a jailhouse in Brooklyn, Keith Raniere sits in a cell. Vanguard, as his followers call him, awaiting a 120-year sentence for charges of sex trafficking, extortion, and a smorgasbord of other crimes related to his role in NXIVM—a professional-development-program-cum-sex-cult which is the subject of two premium channel documentary series and a lot of public speculation. This fall, Sunday nights are for NXIVM and chill.
My audience concedes, and I continue.
“All it would take is the right branding.”
D and E are lounging on either side of our big, grey, secondhand couch. A coffee table scattered with candles, wine glasses, and the last dregs of a joint sits between us. I talk down to them from my perch, waxing on about the way mindfulness practices and self-improvement trends coalesce with capitalism and emerge as modern cults. I am far more vested than either of them to both NXIVM and the internet discourse surrounding it and dispense my expert testimony as such.
I tell them that hand-picking and transplanting spiritual practices into new commercial models are not completely new ideas. Raniere’s Executive Success Program (ESP), the pseudo-spiritual and pseudo-scientific technology upon which his organization was founded, is just another twisted sister to self-help pyramid schemes like Amway International and cults like Scientology. Their success is due to indoctrination processes tailored to a specific moment and audience.
They stare back at me, slightly glassy-eyed, as I offer my hot takes.
I sound off a list of true but possibly limited, and definitely convenient, shared characteristics of late capitalism and cults: both manipulate participants into categorically pathologizing personal problems. Both deflect attention from the actual material conditions contributing to these problems. And both center and uphold white, patriarchal modes of thought.
The scale of these practices’ potential harm is summed up by the charges brought upon Raniere and a handful of high-ranking women in his organization. In short, women were recruited to a secret society within NXIVM, blackmailed into a slave/master relationship with their sisters, branded with Raniere’s initials, and eventually manipulated into a sexual relationship with him. Any gut feelings of resistance were addressed in sessions called “Exploration of Meaning,” a manipulative line of therapeutic inquiry (closer to neuro-linguistic programming) that leads the subject to consider their negative reaction a personal choice. Like most power structures embedded in NXIVM’s world, the women and the weak are weaponized to become perpetrators of abuse at the behest of their toxic leader.
D is skeptical.
“OK, but this is exactly why I would never join a cult!”
I volley back.
“Well, duh. But what I’m telling you is that you’re already halfway there.”
As I watch each of the nine, hourlong episodes of The Vow, I’m shocked by how often I feel disdain towards the women on screen. Pity trumps empathy in more instances than I’d like to admit—they got fooled, but I would never. I would never because look, here I am lecturing two stoned twenty-somethings with the revelation that yes, indeed, we live in a society.
The Vow tells me that Keith Raniere’s early brand was all about vapidly philosophizing on a volleyball court in his chosen kingdom of Clifton Park, NY. This is where followers were invited to 2 AM games and courtside sermons, much of which was documented by Raniere’s personal documentary crew over the years. Upon seeing this footage, it’s impossible not to acknowledge the dissonance between his lazy, expectant appearance and the many women who worship him. Nothing about this man’s presence or tenuous intellect seems to compensate for the mouth-breathing image he presents to the world. With a stringy ponytail, terrycloth sweatbands, and white socks, Rainiere reads to me like a David Foster Wallace knockoff perfectly suited for strip-mall-spirituality.
But Foster Wallace arguably shirked material lavishness because of his more pressing concern with mediating the existential doom of the American spirit. Rather than actually critique the late capitalist culture that feeds his followers existential troubles, Raniere manipulates its tools for his own gain. People are told to question the very idea of victimhood. Not to consider their lives casualties of the world they exist in. They’re given satin sashes to reward their subscription to a philosophy instead of footnotes to explain it. Ultimately, what these two men have in common is an aesthetic, an overactive ego, and a lifetime of intellectualized misogyny.
The key difference between the author who wrote a notoriously pretentious thousand-page magnum opus and the man who boasts a dubious IQ of 240 and named his God complex after a video game is this: David Foster Wallace was not a sadistic cult leader, just an abusive asshole who has been let off the hook because of his proximity to genius. We reference his searing cultural critiques. We acknowledge his depression as a result of intellectual burden. But we do not remember the fact that he stalked, abused, and nearly killed Mary Karr by throwing her out of a moving car. The author’s harm is now mostly measured in scorn for the men who still love him rather than the women he left in the dust.
Raniere, on the other hand, has been exposed as a dangerous fraud. There is no intellectual merit left to carry his name. His early, exaggerated self-advertisements as a piano prodigy, Judo champion, and wildly successful businessman come off as more ludicrous than anything else. And the people he harmed are stepping out in droves to finally name themselves as victims.
He is America’s newest norm-core demon—one who just happened to emerge in a moment primed to watch him trip all over our Twitter timelines in his New Balance sneakers.
HBO’s The Vow premiered early in fall 2020, followed closely by Starz’ Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult. The former spends much of its time following Mark Vicente, Raniere’s personal documentarian and close confidante. Vicente was also a NXIVM board member and a founding member of the Society of Protectors (SOP), a startlingly misogynistic subgroup that Raniere used to reframe and reenforce patriarchal gender roles and shape a militant group of “good guys” all too eager to lean in to a hierarchy that positions them on top. Vicente only leaves Raniere’s side after about ten years because his wife, Bonnie, who was frequently made to sleep in a dog bed beside their own as “penance,” defects and spends months convincing him to follow suit.
Onscreen, Bonnie’s pain comes across as caged and unresolved. Like a complicated thought left unsaid behind a pair of pursed lips. Her husband often speaks for or over her, and I get annoyed when she fails to assert herself. As if it’s so easy.
The Vow often feels like a redemption campaign for certain complicit characters to package their roles in the most convenient ways. It’s not until I watch Starz’ much more concise and damning depiction of the same series of events that I find out the degree to which Mark Vicente and other key players in The Vow recruited and manipulated members for their own monetary gain. Scenes of Vicente looking mournful on boardwalks and rationalizing his complicity to the camera are replaced with far less complimentary edits of him directing promotional videos for ESP and NXIVM while a narrator clarifies the extent of his wrongdoing. This dissonance, and my general disdain for him, is affirmed when I check Twitter after each episode. I barely notice that Bonnie’s name is absent from my timeline.
Vicente was, in many ways, NXIVM’s chief propagandist. I shouldn’t be surprised by this exaggerated performance of victimhood. I’d feel guilty for making my wife sleep next me on the floor, too. But he lets her forgive him a few too many times.
A reveals his upbringing in a remarkably casual tone on our first date at a Nepalese restaurant. The space is lit dimly by colored string lights, and we are surrounded by embroidered pillows that smell like old curry.
“Wait, wait. You were a Moonie? Isn’t that, like. . . a cult?”
I’m not sure how to ask the question sensitively.
“Moonie” is a play on the name of the Unification Church’s founder, Sun Myung Moon, and the glassy eyed expressions of his devoted followers across the world. Moon famously held a marital “blessing” ceremony for 2,000 couples at Madison Square Garden in 1982. My date’s parents were one of the thousands joined in holy union that day.
He kind of smirks and nods vaguely. Seems surprised that I’m having any kind of reaction to this news.
“Yeah, kind of. I’m not about it anymore though. How do you even know that?”
He’s being shockingly cavalier about the whole thing. This is a man who refurbished his own vintage Volvo and works for a company that makes and sells expensive, hand-crafted, raw denim products. When we matched on Tinder, he seemed more likely to ask if I’d read Infinite Jest than reveal that he used to believe an old Korean guy was the second coming of the messiah.
I tell him that I spent a year in the Hudson Valley, a part of New York that boasts a strong Moonie population. Their community was folkloric on my college’s campus.
“Oh yeah! I spent a summer up in Barryton once.”
When A tells me more about growing up with a promised partner and traveling around the world proselytizing (or “sharing teachings” as he puts it) on behalf of Sun Myung Moon, there is very little scorn for his upbringing. He shares that while his older brothers are now both traumatized, drug-addicted and damned to disappointing their families, he got out when the going was still good. He got to travel. Grow up with great friends who are now part of his budding indie-rock project. Etcetera.
A few weeks later, we’re sitting up in bed as I continue my queries. He finally tells me why and how he ended up leaving.
As part of the church’s fundraising mechanism, members were asked to peddle some kind of signature energy drink. Eventually, two of his best friends discovered that this money was actually being funneled into the private pockets of a popular and high-ranking church choir director rather than the oh-so-charitable hands of the church. The cherry on top: this choir director was also engaged in a torrid same-sex love affair with Sun Myung Moon’s son-in-law. A and his friends blew the whistle and leveraged their way out.
I’m completely blown away by this new story development when he looks at me and says, “You know it’s funny. You’re one of the only people I’ve met who has any real interest in all of this.”
I find this hard to believe.
When I look into the scandal A describes, there’s no record of it online. This doesn’t diminish my faith in its reality—money and influence can easily obstruct truth, and A seems far less impressed with the event’s drama than I am. He has no reason to lie to me. Hasn’t realized the panty-dropping potential of the “I left a cult” pick-up line. Though I do fear I led him there.
Eventually, A becomes “The Moonie” and his story becomes one to pull out of pocket over drinks with friends. From a distance and full of booze, the whole thing is especially titillating. The reality of an otherwise kind of boring and selfish guy, who probably would have preferred pillow talk about his side hustle (a burgeoning artisanal candle business), is obscured by the details that satisfy my purpose: entertainment.
Four years later, I watch The Vow evidence numerous attempts women have made to take down Keith Raniere after leaving his inner circle since the early aughts. Their failures are uniformly related to a lack of economic resources in the face of NXIVM’s systematic legal and financial threats. Those no longer useful or beautiful to the master they once served are shrugged off and incinerated.
A got away with a clean slate. He advertises his past to me as the absurd and sometimes funny backdrop to his real life. The one that started when he and his best friends defected. The one that I was (and still am) far less interested in. It’s only years later that I realize I never asked what happened to the girl who was promised to him.
The atrocities perpetrated by NXIVM are far more clearly delineated in Starz’ Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult. Keith Raniere is presented as a sadistic psychopath rather than a dangerous kook whose shenanigans got out of hand. The far more streamlined and effective depiction of his rise to power, and NXIVM’s eventual downfall, is narrated by India Oxenburg, who was a second rung “slave” in the secret society Raniere created to emotionally and physically manipulate women.
India appears only as a ghostly presence in The Vow. Her rich, famous, beautiful, and well-connected mother, Catherine Oxenburg, takes center stage as she is filmed working to rescue her just-as-blonde and beautiful daughter and take down NXIVM with the help of Mark Vicente and co. Like Mark, Catherine is revealed to be far more complicit in her daughter’s introduction to NXIVM in this second project.
Unlike The Vow’s subjects, who are often eager to name themselves as victims, India describes struggling to recognize herself as one even now. The series follows her story of indoctrination and she emerges as a perfect protagonist for this project. Both her placid good looks and the delicately emphatic way in which she speaks offer a palatable springboard for the reflexive voyeurism of white woman’s pain. I envy her beauty. I pity her pain. I trust her story.
In one scene, India receives a healing form of massage therapy meant to help resolve trauma through physical release. A kind-eyed and sturdy woman with a thick ponytail places her hand on India’s lower torso, then her other elbow on top of this hand. Slowly, she leans forward. Her chest comes closer and closer to India’s body as she gently applies more and more pressure. India begins to quiver. Then shake. Tears run down her face. The woman stays.
“It’s okay. . . Yes. . . Feel the release. . . Good. . . ”
I’m crying too now. I want to feel soft and touched. Held and released by a woman I trust. But most of all, I want to feel pain in the way I’m fetishizing it on screen: tender and triumphant and full of possibility.
After I finish Seduced, I call J. They are yet another friend I have roped into my web of cult neuroses and the two of us started a Starz free trial together just to watch more NXIVM content. We spend most of the conversation dissing Mark Vicente and comparing disgust for new footage of Raniere rationalizing the idea of raping a baby. I’m on a walk around my neighborhood in Brooklyn wearing the same grey New Balance 990’s he does when summoning followers for late night gaslighting in his Clifton Park kingdom. I continue my own walk and talk with J, sounding off like a Twitter Discourse bot. I once again lament the ways capitalism has destroyed our sense of purpose. I double down on how this vulnerability makes it easier for people who call themselves Vanguard to do the things they do. I do not bring up the scene with India because I do not have a hot take, just a knot in my stomach.
At one point in Seduced, Raniere is shown joking about the way kingdom’s often end up in uprisings if the citizens are not kept complacent.
“Where you once were a king, you will now be the subject of mockery and torture.”
It’s easy to cast Raniere as a demon. It’s harder to discern what I’m to do with his darlings. But my Twitter timeline continues to confirm my self-awareness. An echo chamber that tells me if I’m clever enough to acknowledge this, I’m not the kind of girl who could ever fall prey to it.