Don’t Call It a Cult

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AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

They draw you in with the promise of empowerment, self-discovery, women helping women. The more secretive those connections are, the more exclusive you feel. Little did you know, you just joined a cult.

Sex trafficking. Self-help coaching. Forced labour. Mentorship. Multi-level marketing. Gaslighting. Investigative journalist Sarah Berman explores the shocking practices of NXIVM, an organization run by Keith Raniere and his high-profile enablers (Seagram heir Clare Bronfman; Smallville actor Allison Mack; Battlestar Galactica actor Nicki Clyne). In her deeply researched account, Berman unravels how young women seeking creative coaching and networking opportunities found themselves blackmailed, literally branded, near-starved, and enslaved. With the help of the Bronfman fortune Raniere built a wall of silence around these abuses, leveraging the legal system to go after enemies and whistleblowers.

Don’t Call It a Cult shows that these abuses looked very different from the inside, where young women initially received mentorship and protection. Don’t Call It a Cult is a riveting account of NXIVM’s rise to power, its ability to evade prosecution for decades, and the investigation that finally revealed its dark secrets to the world. It explores why so many were drawn to its message of empowerment yet could not recognize its manipulative and harmful leader for what he was–a criminal.AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED for the 2022 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
 
FINALIST for 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book
FINALIST for the 2023 SCWES Book Awards

Praise for Don’t Call It a Cult:

“Don’t Call It A Cult is the most detailed, well-reported, and nuanced look at NXIVM’s history, its supporters, and those left destroyed in its wake. If you want to understand NXIVM—and other groups like it—reading Sarah Berman’s account is essential.”
—Scaachi Koul, bestselling author of One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Sarah Berman is absolutely fearless in Don’t Call It a Cult. Her determination to not only tell the difficult, often disturbing story of NXIVM, but tell it right, shines through in every aspect of this gripping book. I simply could not put it down.”
—Alicia Elliott, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
 
“Berman’s rigorously sourced narrative brings this über-creepy story to life . . . This deep dive behind the headlines isn’t to be missed.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“…investigative journalist Berman front-loads her startling, comprehensive exposé on the NXIVM group with key information on how the association became popular yet remained elusive to law enforcement…the author’s engrossing reportage meticulously reveals the tumultuous rise and fall of NXIVM after numerous criminal indictments and prosecutions…File this alongside Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear and Jeff Guinn’s The Road to Jonestown…An incendiary, serpentine report on criminal manipulation of staggering proportions.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Both captivating and frightening, Don’t Call it a Cult will astonish most readers.”
—New York Journal of Books

“Vancouver investigative reporter Sarah Berman’s nonfiction account, Don’t Call it a Cult, goes deep into the organization, meticulously tracing how it began and how it grew.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The gritty book is thoroughly researched and reported—and riveting from start to finish.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Journalist Sarah Berman brings her signature gimlet eye and impeccable reporting to the story of the NXIVM women in Don’t Call It a Cult, a chilling true crime account…Don’t Call It a Cult is the nightmarish, unflinching true story of the women who survived NXIVM—and the women who didn’t.”
—Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“Investigative journalist Berman’s account is a standout . . . Truly gripping, this is the definitive book on NXIVM.”
—Booklist

“Berman has crafted a tour-de-force and powerful homage to first-person reportage. A riveting page-turner, Don’t Call It a Cult is a must-read for anyone who is fascinated by the long term effects of cult culture, abuse, and pseudoscience.”
—Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo

“A new book reveals the shocking ways that “self-help guru” Keith Raniere trapped women into his sick scheme.” 
—Eric Spitznagel, The New York Post

“Sarah Berman’s reporting on the inner workings of NXIVM and its secret, coercive ‘women’s group’ fully elucidates how scores of incredibly talented, smart young women fell under the spell of a mousy, volleyball-playing con man. Don’t Call It a Cult is an incisive, empathetic page-turner.”
—Andrea bennett, author of Like a Boy But Not a Boy

“Don’t Call It A Cult is a thorough and compelling examination of a terrifying organization. Berman understands and brilliantly conveys the complexity of abuse, assault, and the lasting effects of each, and delivers a book that says as much about human nature as it does about NXIVM. Required reading!”   
—Anne T. Donahue, author of Nobody Cares

“Don’t Call It a Cult explains Raniere’s dark charisma and why so many people were attracted to NXIVM and stayed on, even as the manipulation, exploitation, and abuse got extreme. A thoughtful, deeply reported take on a sensational story, one that I won’t soon forget.”
—Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites
 
“Berman lays bare this longest of cons: lost souls and ambitious young people drawn into NXIVM’s vortex of sexual assault, child exploitation, fraud, manipulation, and blackmail. This too-crazy-for-fiction tale is expertly spooled out with journalistic precision and a screenwriter’s sense of scene and story. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Lorimer Shenher, author of That Lonely Section of Hell and This One Looks Like a Boy

“An absolute work of art.”
—Vancouver is Awesome

“This true crime is for readers of stories about cults and anyone looking for a deep dive into the recent news stories regarding NXIVM.”
—Book Riot

“Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call It a Cult is a thoroughly reported work that details a staggering amount of relevant information the TV series left out.”
—The Atlantic

“This investigative endeavor is riveting from start to finish.”
—HuffPostSARAH BERMAN is an investigative journalist based in Vancouver covering crime, drugs, cults, politics, and culture. She is a former senior editor at VICE and past contributor to Adbusters, Reuters, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun and other publications.PROLOGUE

“The Most Ethical Man”

Keith Raniere needed sleep, that much was clear. How much sleep?   
 
Well, for decades before his arrest in March 2018, that was a point of debate. Some thought he slept only one or two hours a night. But women close to him knew he was more of a day sleeper, and that day in March, in an upstairs bedroom of a $10,000-a-week vacation rental north of Puerto Vallarta, Raniere was napping.
 
According to testimony at Raniere’s trial, actors Nicki Clyne and Allison Mack were lounging outside on a patio overlooking an infinity pool when Mexican federal agents in bulletproof vests pulled up the cobblestone driveway. Armed with a warrant from the Eastern District of New York for sex trafficking and forced labor, the officers surrounded the property. Some of them appeared to be wearing masks and holding machine guns.
 
It was a big deal for Clyne and Mack—celebrities and recent subjects of relentless online gossip—to be staying so close to Raniere. Five months earlier he’d been accused in The New York Times of masterminding a strange blackmail scheme, and allegations that Raniere had sexually abused young girls were resurfacing online with a vengeance. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation wasn’t quiet about its interest in NXIVM, the secretive self-help company Raniere had founded in 1998. The feds had interviewed NXIVM associates in the United States and left business cards with allies in Mexico, asking for Raniere to get in touch. Despite all this, Clyne and Mack had come to Mexico to show their commitment to Raniere, whom they’d often called the most ethical man they’d ever met.
 
Raniere was technically a fugitive, but his hideout in Mexico resembled an expensive corporate retreat. A team of fixers had been buzzing around him, first in Punta Mita and now at their current location, the remote beach town of Chacala. Neighbors said they went on long walks and ordered expensive butter-infused coffees from a tourist bar; testimony later revealed they communicated through prepaid disposable phones.
 
Mack and Clyne had been invited to participate in a “recommitment ceremony.” The plan was to show loyalty to Raniere in the most vulnerable way possible, which might have included group sex had the cops not shown up that day. Under her clothes, each actor bore a scar in the shape of Raniere’s initials, burned into her skin with a cauterizing pen more than a year earlier. It symbolized her lifelong commitment to obeying Raniere’s every request.
 
Before getting caught up in NXIVM headlines, Nicki Clyne had been best known for her role as Cally on the sci-fi drama Battlestar Galactica, while Allison Mack had lit up TV screens as Chloe Sullivan, best friend to Superman in the CW show Smallville. Those roles had become less interesting to the women as they grew more committed to changing the world with Raniere. Through thousands of hours of coursework and mentorship, Clyne and Mack had learned to break out of limiting beliefs. NXIVM students compared this process to Keanu Reeves taking the red pill in The Matrix; no aspect of their lives was exempt from constant study, reflection, and redefinition. Raniere taught that everything was an opportunity for personal growth—even a faceoff with federal agents.
 
But as police moved inside, at least one of Raniere’s disciples was feeling some doubts.
 
For Lauren Salzman, the daughter of NXIVM’s president and cofounder Nancy Salzman, Raniere’s arrest punctured the bubble of secrecy and deception that had protected his reputation as someone of the highest ethical standards. Salzman was in a bedroom with Raniere when the cops came upstairs to take him into custody. As she later recalled at his trial, Raniere hid in a walk-in closet, leaving her to face the police.
 
“They were banging on the door,” she testified. “The whole time I was thinking they could just shoot through the door.”
 
As the door rattled in its frame, Salzman asked to see a warrant.
 
“Open the door and I’ll show it to you,” an agent replied.
 
Salzman didn’t open the door. The cops kicked it open and pinned her to the floor. With guns pointed at her, she yelped out Raniere’s name. The man known to acolytes as Vanguard, Master, and Grandmaster stepped out of the closet and was then cuffed on the floor and taken downstairs.
 
For Salzman, Raniere’s arrest left a small but significant crack in the edifice he’d built. “I chose what I believed we had been training for this entire time, which was to choose love over everything—including the possibility of losing my life,” she later testified. “There was no need to send me to shield him or negotiate with them; he could have just protected all of us and just gone.”
 
For months Salzman felt guilty for not doing more to protect Raniere. It would take the better part of a year for her to realize that the flaw she saw in him that day went much deeper.
 
“It never occurred to me that I would choose Keith and Keith would choose Keith,” she said.
 
Nicki Clyne kept a cool head considering the dramatic scene unfolding in front of her outside the house. With phone in hand, she captured a short video of the police raid.
 
“We’re going to follow them,” Clyne said to Allison Mack as Raniere was installed in the back of a navy cruiser with Policia Federal emblazoned across its doors. Mack turned to look at Clyne with a worried crease between her brows, her green eyes obscured by shadow. Clyne told her to get out of the way.
 
In the following weeks, Mack would be apprehended in New York on trafficking charges and four more top NXIVM leaders would be indicted for racketeering. Their alleged crimes would amount to identity theft, forced labor, confining an undocumented migrant for twenty-three months, wire fraud, extortion, and obstruction of justice. A year later would come the charge that Raniere took sexually explicit pictures of a fifteen-year-old NXIVM student, adding possession of child porn and child exploitation to his rap sheet. These allegations laid the foundation for a massive racketeering trial beginning in May 2019.
 
“Let’s go, you guys,” Clyne called out to Mack, Salzman, and others as the cops pulled away. Raniere was on his way to becoming federal inmate #57005-177, scrutinized under the unflattering fluorescent light of the American justice system.
 
 
On the first day of his trial, May 7, 2019, Raniere appeared diminished but not broken. He was smaller than you would expect from his photos—all head and shoulders, with a squat torso and a lower body that seemed to taper off quickly. His hair was shorter and greyer, floating in uneven waves around his temples. From a certain angle, the glare of his glasses obscured his glances across the room at a jury of his peers.
 
“Keith Raniere is the only defendant who will stand trial before this jury,” Judge Nicholas Garaufis told the jurors settling into their places in his Brooklyn courtroom. “Please do not speculate as to why this is the case.” (After many months of pretrial dealings, Judge Garaufis seemed at ease correctly pronouncing the name Ra-neer-ee and his organization Neks-ee-um.)
 
Raniere’s codefendants had already pleaded guilty to serious crimes, ranging from extortion and forced labor to identity theft and harboring a migrant for financial gain. Three of the women—NXIVM president Nancy Salzman; her daughter, Lauren Salzman; and actor Allison Mack—had admitted that they’d participated in a racketeering conspiracy with Raniere. He was standing alone because his alleged partners in crime had agreed with the feds that Raniere was leading a dangerous mafia-like organization.
 
This was a big change for Raniere, who was used to the company of rich and beautiful women. Since the 1980s he’d cultivated a subculture of adoration around him in which he was compared to Buddha and Albert Einstein. The way true believers talked about him, it was as if he had magical powers, perfect recall, the keys to world peace. They commended his contributions to science, his commitment to the harnessing of human potential.
 
This was the myth built up over Raniere’s two-decade career leading NXIVM, an international self-help movement that appealed mostly to dreamers with deep pockets. (The NXIVM name has many layered meanings, from “next millennium” to “place of learning” to the more hidden meaning that allegedly references the Roman concept of debt bondage.) Though the company began as boutique executive coaching for aspiring millionaires, over time it grew into a massive-multi-level marketing enterprise spanning the globe, with active communities in Vancouver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, London, New York, Miami, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City.
 
Followers started daycares, yoga schools, advocacy groups, science foundations, and humanitarian funds in tribute to Raniere. They incorporated his lessons into small businesses and startups, crediting Raniere as mentor and cofounder. Federal prosecutors estimated that NXIVM had launched close to one hundred offshoot companies, many of them drawing funds up a pyramid-like hierarchy. What held them together was a feverish belief that, with the right mindset and plan, anything was possible.
 
Women, who outnumbered men in NXIVM’s ranks, were particularly captivated by Raniere’s lessons on taking responsibility for your own feelings. Students explored how they created their own suffering, and how they could use any perceived harm done to them as a teaching moment instead. People with access to vast resources appreciated Raniere’s theories about value and money: as long as you were clear about your own ethical principles, each dollar spent represented an effort to change the world for good. As the “philosophical founder” of these concepts, Raniere earned immense regard and praise, and every August he was lauded at an annual retreat held on the week of his birthday.
 
Raniere still had access to his share of a $14 million irrevocable legal trust made available by heir Clare Bronfman in the wake of his arrest. Bronfman had been released on $100 million bail in 2018 and was one of the last defendants to plead before the 2019 trial began.
 
Lead defense attorney Marc Agnifilo had chatted with press gallery reporters before the jury arrived, his sky blue tie briefly escaping from his unbuttoned suit jacket. He came across as the most comfortable guy in the courtroom, exuding a kind of confidence that money can’t buy.
 
With Raniere on his feet facing the jury, Judge Garaufis began listing off the charges, which sounded intense and technical and strangely removed from the story that all those in attendance had read in the papers. The words “branding” and “slaves” were never mentioned. Instead there was talk of an “enterprise,” a “pattern,” “interstate foreign commerce,” and “predicate acts.” There were seven charges in total, one of them a multipart racketeering charge. The United States first passed racketeering legislation in 1970 as a means of taking down mafia bosses who ordered violence but didn’t physically carry out the crimes. It’s since been used to prosecute bikers, bankers, cops, and politicians for coordinating complex schemes that might seem legit but obscure all kinds of illegitimate conduct, from embezzlement and bribery to murder and kidnapping.
 
To prove any kind of racketeering, there needs to be an “enterprise” of multiple people. Over a period of up to ten years, each member has to have agreed to commit at least two crimes in service of a common goal. Law books call this “a pattern of racketeering.” The goal itself doesn’t have to be criminal, as many gangs and Ponzi schemes have purely money-making ends. Raniere’s goal, according to prosecutors, was allegedly to enrich and promote himself, which facilitated his access to women.
 
Raniere was accused of eleven racketeering acts, among them identity theft, altering court records, forced labor, sex trafficking, extortion, sexual exploitation of a child, and possession of child pornography. On top of that were separate non-racketeering counts covering similar territory: forced labor conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking, and attempted sex trafficking.
 
Over the coming weeks, lead prosecutor Moira Kim Penza and her colleagues would walk the jury through a gut-wrenching version of the Keith Raniere story. Raniere secretly groomed three young Mexican sisters into sexual relationships, photographing one of them naked when she was fifteen years old. He confined one of them to a bedroom for nearly two years because she dared to kiss another man. The youngest sister later became part of a secret pyramid scheme that threatened the release of life-destroying allegations and photos if women did not comply with Raniere’s escalating sex games. These women, at one time numbering more than one hundred, were treated as modern-day slaves, and many of them were branded with Raniere’s initials.
 
 
The trial would reveal secrets that had been hidden even from Raniere’s closest allies. Private messages showed how he’d threatened and manipulated women, using insults, shaming, and misinformation to break down their will to resist. Medical records and testimony would show that his many concurrent girlfriends were compelled to get abortions under the close supervision of his loyal fixers. NXIVM’s inner circle arranged marriages and threesomes and secret border crossings and tax evasion, but jurors didn’t learn any of this from listening to the charges. The only hint of what was to come appeared in a lengthy juror questionnaire that asked about the #MeToo movement, abortion law, tax evasion, immigration and border crossing, policing, and polyamory.
 
I sat in awe of the jury, who would decide what was right and wrong in a complex, potentially groundbreaking case. It had taken me more than a year to get my bearings as a reporter on the NXIVM file, and yet this newly assembled group of New Yorkers were expected to render a verdict in a matter of weeks. Though their faces would grow increasingly familiar to me as the trial progressed, they would remain anonymous by court order. How and why they reached their decision would likely remain unknowable. Whatever the verdict, it would have wide-ranging implications about power, consent, and women’s agency.
 
In some ways Raniere was a Rorschach test for what we see wrong with the world: the right of the political spectrum sees liberalism run amok, the worst example of moral breakdown among the monied elite; the left sees textbook toxic masculinity blown up to epic criminal proportions. But like the jurors, I would try not to make up my mind until all the facts had been heard. I’d learned so much about Raniere already, yet I was prepared for the trial to turn everything upside down.US

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