Last night at 8 p.m. I watched a Lifetime movie that’s the first in a month-long series called “Ripped from the Headlines!” (though they’ve certainly done fact-based films before this, some of them quite good), which got shot under the clunky title The NXIVM Cult: A Mother’s Nightmare and was shown under the even clunkier title Escaping the NXIVM Cult: A Mother’s Fight to Save Her Daughter. The non-fiction book it was based on was simply called Captive — and a simpler title would have worked better for the film — and was written by Catherine Oxenberg. Catherine Oxenberg was apparently the product of a minor noble family in Europe who came to the U.S., pursued a career as an actress and got a small but recurring role on the TV series Dynasty. Oxenberg — who appears as herself in a prologue and epilogue as well as a Behind the Headlines documentary on NXIVM that aired immediately after the movie and gave invaluable background information, and was played by Andrea Roth (who oddly doesn’t look as good as the real one) in the main part of the film — was also a sucker for self-help movements, workshops and whatnot. As the film opens she and her daughter India (Jasper Polish) are living in a large home in Malibu that looks like it was built by someone out of an all-white Lego set, and India’s dad is in the picture but Catherine is in the process of divorcing him and raising India and her two younger sisters Remy (Gabrielle Trudel) and Francesca (Isabelle D. Trudel — well, that’s one way of making your cast members look like sisters: cast real-life sisters!) as a single parent.
She’s also trying to break out of
acting and into writing by selling a screenplay called Royal Exiles, and when a neighbor tells her about a new self-help
seminar called ESP — which here stands for “Executive Success Program” —
Catherine not only goes herself but takes her daughter. Catherine is put off by
the overall air of the event — particularly the veneration with which the
people running the seminar speak of the “Vanguard,” their term for the CEO of
ESP, and the way the people running it wear different-colored sashes to signify
how far up in the program they’ve risen, sort of like the different-colored
belts in Japanese martial arts. But India comes out of the program with
goop-eyed admiration and within a couple of commercial breaks she’s signed up
for the $2,500 advanced training available only at the Albany, New York
headquarters of ESP’s parent company, NXIVM. (Neither the dramatized film, the
documentary nor the Wikipedia page on NXIVM offer any explanation of what, if
anything, the initials in the name stand for, but it is pronounced “Nexium”
like the once ubiquitously advertised “purple pill” for acid reflux disorder.)
While I was thinking that this was at least $1,000 less than it would have cost
either of them to attend Trump University, India gets sucked in farther and
farther into what we’re beginning to realize is a particularly nasty cult built
around Keith Raniere (Peter Facinelli, who previously played an equally slimy
1-percenter on the TV series Supergirl — though in that show he was an Ayn Randian super-capitalist who
thought the world ought to be run for his convenience and here he’s a scam
artist and, eventually, a sexual pervert as well). Raniere, we learn later,
founded NXIVM in 1998 with Nancy Saltzman, his partner in both business and
life, after his previous business, Consumers’ Buyline, was prosecuted by the
state of New York as a pyramid scheme. The state won a consent decree by which
Raniere paid a $40,000 fine and agreed never to be involved with “promoting,
offering or granting participation in a chain distribution scheme” — a
prohibition which, needless to say, he ignored.
As presented in both the
dramatization and the documentary, NXIVM wasn’t a “cult” in the sense of
offering a religious or quasi-religious belief system, but Raniere seems to
have pulled together aspects of a lot of other private mind-control operations.
He seems to have borrowed a lot from L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of
Scientology, most notably an emphasis on recruiting rich people and celebrities
to his program, both for the money he could get out of them and the public
credibility celebrities could give the operation. From Werner Erhard (true
name: John Paul Rosenberg) and EST he seems to have borrowed the structure of
his initial workshops and his promise that you could achieve all the knowledge
you’d need to have a happy, successful life via his “technology” and “training”
without having to sign on to a new religion. He got his basic organizing scheme
from multi-level marketing: the people in NXIVM were pressured into recruiting
their family members, friends and anyone else into the program, and were given
a commission on the course fees paid by anyone they signed up. All of this
could probably have stayed under the radar of the authorities for years except
that, like many a cult leader before him, Raniere started thinking with his
dick; whereas L. Ron Hubbard was content simply to build up an elite corps of
young, nubile, big-breasted women he called his “Messengers” so he could
surround himself with female pulchritude (though one of the “Messengers” became
his third and last wife, Mary Sue), Raniere wanted girls he could actually
fuck; and, like such other cult-leading horndogs as Charles Manson, Jim Jones,
David Koresh and Warren Jeffs, he indoctrinated his top women staffers to think
that servicing him sexually was the highest honor he and his organization could
give them. One interesting wrinkle is he also behaved like a classic human
trafficker, not only recruiting women for sexual services (and somehow managing
to convince each one that he loved her and her alone) but enlisting some of his
female followers as his enforcers, essentially his “madams,” to browbeat
younger women in his cult into obedience and report them if they stepped out of
line.
Another tactic Raniere borrowed from Hubbard and Scientology was to
maintain a staff of private investigators to dig up and leak damaging
information on anyone who tried to leave the cult, or any outsiders who posed a
threat to it, and to have a lot
of lawyers on retainer so he could drive any potential critics out of business
by suing them into bankruptcy and oblivion. At least some of the “deep pockets”
he had to finance this operation came from sisters Sara and Clare Bronfman (no
actress playing Sara is listed on the film’s imdb.com page but Clare is played
by Trina Corkum), daughters of Edgar Bronfman, Jr. and hence heirs to the
Seagram’s liquor fortune. The Bronfman sisters were apparently worth billions
in their own right and a lot of that money went to Raniere and NXIVM. The basic
conflict of the film is between the unscrupulous people who run NXIVM and Catherine
Oxenburg’s single-minded determination to get her oldest daughter out of it,
including hooking up with cult deprogrammers and Frank Parlato (Sam Rosenthal),
a man who worked as an accountant for NXIVM for nine months, became convinced
it was a scam, and started a blog exposing it and appealing to people in NXIVM
to leave the way he had. Catherine Oxenburg appeals to the FBI — where the
African-American agent she speaks to, Lathan (Conrad Coates), at first couldn’t
be less interested — and also to the New York Times, which publishes an anti-NXIVM piece based on her
information and also that of Sarah Edmondson (not listed on the imdb.com page
even though she’s portrayed in the film), a Canadian actress who was recruited
into the cult by Allison Mack (Sara Fletcher), who’d had a recurring role on
the TV series Smallville and thus
had a “name” credibility in enrolling fellow members of the entertainment
industry.
Edmondson reveals in the article that she was literally branded
between her waist and her crotch with the letters “KR” — indicating that she
was the sexual property of Keith Raniere — as part of a ritual involving a
subgroup of NXIVM called “DOS,” which in this case means “Dominance Over
Submission” and involves Allison Mack and a group of other women initiates
holding down their latest victim as they sear her skin with a blowtorch to
create the brand. The publicity from the New Yor Times story finally propels the FBI into action, and they find incriminating tapes between
Raniere and Mack that show them planning the DOS branding “initiation” together
and essentially confirm that he appointed her as second-in-command and “master”
to the “slave” girls he was exploiting psychologically, physically and
sexually. Among the kinkier things Mack did for Raniere — which gets them both
arrested for human trafficking and
immigration violations — was arrange for two teenage girls from Mexico to be
smuggled into the country and locked in a room so Raniere could have sex with
either or both of them at any time. Eventually the FBI brings the hammer down
on NXIVM and take Raniere, just
about all the women involved in the cult plead guilty and turn on Raniere,
Nancy Salzman and Nancy’s daughter Lauren (a significant character in the movie
and played by Amy Trefry) after they’re arrested following an ill-advised
flight on Raniere’s private plane not to some remote place that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the
U.S. but to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where the FBI was able to cut a deal with
the Mexican federales to arrest
them.
If there’s a flaw with Escaping the NXIVM Cult it’s that a 90-minute Lifetime time slot (two hours
less commercials) simply isn’t enough for this fascinating story. Writer Adam
Mazer and director Lisa Robinson (who turns in a magnificent job within the
limits of the script she was given — the scene in which India Oxenberg is
actually branded is scarier than a lot of the campy blood-fests we get in
today’s “horror” films) compress the time frame from seven years to two — in
fact, according to the Behind the Headlines documentary, Catherine herself continued to take
classes from NXIVM for two years even though she had her doubts about the group
and had started to suspect it was a cult — in the movie her exit is
precipitated when she finds the wife of a friend of hers literally sleeping on
the floor of the group’s compound in Albany, and when she asks why the woman
explains that she’s being punished for being disobedient to her husband — while
her daughter was involved for seven years, not just two years as shown in the
dramatized film. We really don’t get the insight we want into why India Oxenberg fell so hard for NXIVM’s line of B.S.
— though the one thing they do for her in the real world is buy her a
coffeehouse to run after her previous attempt at a home-based muffin-baking
business had gone nowhere — and I also found myself wondering how India’s two
younger sisters handled being increasingly neglected by their mom as she
conducted her obsessive quest to bring her oldest daughter back from the cult.
(It’s probably much the way the non-prodigal
brother of the prodigal son felt when the prodigal returned and their dad
brought out the fatted calf.)
Nonetheless, Escaping the NXIVM Cult emerged as strong drama and evidence that cults are
functioning now (Ranieri and company weren’t busted until 2017 and the trial is
still going on — as of the air date of this film Ranieri has been convicted but
is still awaiting sentencing) and they’re getting slicker and subtler, locating
in and among suburban neighborhoods and blending in instead of living in
clapboard houses in the middle of nowhere and wearing robes — though as I noted
above Ranieri’s operation had a lot of similarities with the Church of
Scientology, and had he been a bit smarter and less sex-obsessed
(interestingly, he’s introduced playing volleyball with some of his male
adherents, acting like just one of the guys, but otherwise we don’t see any other male NXIVM members in the dramatis
personae and the role of men in the cult is
one more issue left tantalizingly unexplained) he probably could have kept the
organization going to the end of his life and even beyond, as L. Ron Hubbard
and his successor David Miscavige have done with Scientology.
