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Uncover: Ecaping NXIVM. Episode 1: “The Branding”

SARAH EDMONDSON: I'm the first one to arrive. And I know that I'm going to an initiation and I'm going to meet what she's called my sisters for the first time. And she says come upstairs. And I've been to her home before, so I feel comfortable. And we're going up the stairs, and she says "Go in to the guest room and get, get naked. Take off all your clothes and wait here." [laughing] And I'm like "What?" And she's like "Sarah, you have to get over your body issues." Like "It's just me and women you know. It's going to be fine. And I’m like, oh my god, what the fuck is going on.

and our families would often spend summers on Hornby. When we were teenagers,

we used to sneak off and smoke Indian Beedies in the tall grass behind Tribune Bay. I hadn’t seen her in about 15 years… and we had one of those disjointed conversations you have as you run after small children. I told her. “I work at the CBC,” And she replied “I just left a cult.”

JB: She let the words sit there for a moment, scanning my face for a response.

I laughed nervously and tried to keep my jaw from gaping open too wide. Silence is not Sarah’s thing. Her story tumbled out in fragments. She had come to the Island to get away

and spend some time reconnecting with her parents. Her phone had been buzzing non-stop. She was still processing what had happened.

JB: The group she just left, the one that she calls a cult, is known as NXIVM. And last year, Sarah was initiated into what she thought was a secret women’s-only group within the organization.

She was recruited by by one of her closest friends - Lauren Salzman.

JB - So how are you holding up? It’s been six months? Not even.

JB: Sarah and I followed similar paths growing up. We belonged to the same after-school theatre program. We were members of the same Jewish youth group called Habonim. And we spent a year after high school living with a bunch of friends on a Kibbutz in Israel. But we lost touch in our 20s. After we reconnected on Hornby Island last year, I started recording our conversations.

JOSH: This is Keith Raniere in one of the many videos that until a few months ago was available online. He’s The man at the top of NXIVM. Everyone calls him Vanguard.

JB: According to his website, Keith has an IQ of 240. He claims he is one of the smartest men in the world. He says he was speaking in full sentences by the age of one, reading by the age of two.

KR: You have people who are not self aware at all who are really pure innocent gems, and you have people who are highly self-aware that aren’t very nice.

JB: But to Sarah, Keith was her mentor. She admired him and sought his approval.

JB: Sarah started the Vancouver centre of ESP, which stands for Executive Success Program. ESP is a series of personal growth courses and falls under the NXIVM umbrella.

It was her life. Her profession. Her social network. She even met her husband Anthony Aames in NXIVM. Everyone calls him Nippy. Both were leaders in the organization. They were a NXIVM power couple. Sarah was an excellent recruiter. She quickly built a roster of ESP students, including people I'm close to.

JB: NXIVM headquarters are near Albany, New York but they have had other ESP centres

in LA, Mexico City and New York City to name a few. But the Vancouver offices stood out. Anyone who knows Sarah wouldn’t have a hard time understanding how at one point she was able to turn Vancouver into the biggest ESP centre outside of Albany.

JB: Sarah is entrepreneurial, she’s driven, she’s a good networker, she has business savvy.

Even when we were kids, she would run a side hustle charging girls to weave embroidery thread into their hair. But she’s also a seeker. She was always into yoga, and following self-help books.

ESP was the perfect fit. Other people interested in opening centres would come to sarah to learn how she did it.

JB: ESP operates as a multi-level marketing company - sort of like Amway — where people make money from their recruits, earning a percentage of the fees they pay for courses. It sells its students on the promise of profound change in their personal and professional lives. More than that… it claims to be a humanitarian organization that will change the world by transforming the powerful and elite into ethical leaders.

JB: Many of the former ESP members I talk to who used to call themselves Espians and now call themselves Expians, had been involved in multi-level marketing in the past. So has Sarah, she sold vitamins, and she did pretty well. And with ESP, she was one of the few people making real money. At one point, she was pulling in as much as $20,000 a month. But to get to that point, Sarah spent over a hundred thousand dollars on courses. She told me, she spent $15,000 on one workshop. Even the entry-level course cost $3,000.

JB: ESP asks a lot of its students. For Sarah to really work through her issues she took thousands of hours of courses. She often flew to Albany for training. And like a lot of people in ESP, she had a personal coach — someone to hold her accountable to her goals and measure her progress. She also paid for one-on-one sessions with higher-ranked members

JB: The ultimate goal of NXIVM is to achieve an enlightened state — what they call Fully Integrated. Not surprisingly, so far Keith is the only one who’s achieved that level. Sarah was told there was something fundamentally wrong with her — she had an inner deficiency. She was too dependent on other people, and she was too emotional. But if she followed Keith’s program, she might be able to fix it, or at least learn to manage it.

SE: Hello?

SE: Welcome to my house!

SE: OK how are you?...

JB: She still likes her labels…

JB: Framed photographs line the walls… pictures of her parents… her wedding.

She is doing her best to wipe NXIVM from her life, but it’s difficult.

JB: There is a large framed photograph on the wall beside her bedroom. It’s a photo of her and her bridesmaids. The women are all dressed alike and smiling. But right in the middle there is yellow sticky note over one woman’s face. It’s Lauren Salzman.

JB: A temporary solution to a bigger question — what to do with remnants of her former life?

JB: Can you imagine it coming down at some point?

JB: In January 2017, Lauren was standing right here in this condo. She had flown from Albany to Vancouver to pitch Sarah on joining a secretive women’s group within NXIVM. The group is called DOS, which stands for Dominus Obsequious Sororium, which is latin for something like master over the slave women.

JB: Lauren described it as the freemasons for women. Though I doubt the freemasons would appreciate the comparison

JB: Lauren would be Sarah’s master. And Sarah her “slave.”

JB: Sarah would have to obey Lauren’s commands.

JB: Lauren explained that Sarah would recruit her own slaves, and get to be their master. Sarah remembers Lauren laughing as she first described it. Don’t think about it like a master-slave relationship she told Sarah. The master represents a devotion to something outside yourself. This is about being selfless. This is about challenging women not to be indulgent.

JB: Sarah wanted to know who else was in DOS. Who was Lauren’s master?

JB: Lauren told her it was a secret.

JB: But it turns out that no one actually knew within... no one knew much about anyone else within the system.

SE: And then she comes in and says ‘‘welcome everybody to the sisterhood. She says ‘I want to introduce you to your sisters, you can take your blindfold off.’

SE: And I recognize the carpet. I actually recognise the smell. I recognized Allison Mack's perfume. I recognized her plants. She's got a very ornate... well decorated… very pretty home.

SE: But we've been told it's for everyone's security — we're not supposed to know who else is involved. So please don't... like Lauren's asked us ‘please don't peek.’ And, of course, I peek. And Lauren leads us into a small, like the extra bedroom I guess. the room itself is very plain like there is a chest and a medical, like a massage table in the middle of the room and that's it. [Takes a deep breath] This part is a blur. Dr. Danielle Roberts came in, and we're introduced to her as the person who's going to give us our mark or tattoo…

SE: What happens first? I believe we were asked to get naked again, and Dr. Roberts has a stencil. We're supposed to place it on our body so that we can figure out where it needs to go so it's underneath our underwear lines, so we can still wear a bathing suit, and people won't see it. And Lauren tells us something about, um, that they're a symbol for the four elements. And there is this is the horizon for air. And this is the mountains for Earth. And this is a symbol for the elements. And for our strength and our connection to the Earth as women or some bullshit.

SE: The hardest part for me is just when I go through it like recognizing so many opportunities that I had just to run. You know, and it's so hard to explain to people why I felt like I couldn't. And so there's, well I'm talking about it, it's just mixed with all this like regret and shame of like... we think about making a stupid decision. This feels like the worst stupidest, most awful decision.

SE: I don't like the symbol. I say to Lauren, "This is a lot bigger than you said. This is not a dime size." And she was like, just brushed it off like like she didn't know how to measure it like "oh, you know I guess its big... hehe." We asked to see hers, and that's when she, um you know didn't take her pants down all the way, but pulled it down far enough so she could see hers, and it was like this awful red scar. It wasn't like the delicate lines of the, of the traced pencil, the stencil.

SE: And the first person lies down on the table, and Lauren suggests that someone goes to her head and kind of go above her like this and hold onto her arms as if something to hold onto and grip. And suggested that two women go down and help keep her legs down so she wouldn't you know move and twitch too much so that the... Danielle could do a straight line. At this point, I’m recognizing there's no anesthetic. And then um... Dr. Roberts takes out this, like a pen, that has a laser tip to it. And I find out that it's a cauterizing iron.

[pause]

SE: Two things happened, I had pulled Lauren aside, and I said I don't want this mark on my body. And she said, you know, "Why? What are you what do you make it mean?" And I said, "Well, it's a mark. It's a scar. I don't have any scars, I've got, I've got a pristine temple here. There's no piercings, there's no tattoos. I don't want this mark on my body. It's ugly, it's atrocious, it's painful. And she goes "This pain is a symbol of your commitment to yourself, to the highest version of yourself. You're going to go through this, and this will be a mark on your body that," and she's like "It's not a tattoo because tattoos you can take off. This scar you will have forever. Because you're always going to be committed to your growth, and to your, to your highest self in this journey, and blah blah blah." And she also said to me, you're the highest rank here. Show them how. Show them how to do it. Show them how you don't have to be so indulgent. And… that fuckin' worked on me. I mean I had that going on, and in my head also like "Sarah, you said you were going to do this. You committed, you always, you know, you back out, you don't follow through. You know you're looking for the back door just like Keith says women do, like just fucking do it! And fuck, just fucking do it! And I did. I lay on the table, and I just went to the most like relax like a Shavasana, like and I try to lay still as possible because I saw what happened to the other women when they moved, and how much longer it took. And how it was like, so much easier if you just didn't move.

SE: AAnd so I lay there, I thought about childbirth. I thought about how I’ve already been through pain before, and how I could, like reach down and touch the top of his head. And how loving I was as a mom. And I could go through this. And I just went into the most loving, best place that I could, while the most searing awful pain was being dragged across my body. [crying] Like a fuckin' fire or flame across my skin. And every time I opened my eyes, there was Lauren staring at me lovingly and reading me this fucking religious scripture about whatever the fuck, commitment and honour, and I just was weeping... and was like...I looked at her, and I loved her, and I was feeling pain. And I then I had all these women around me like, holding me, and it was like, awful, and at the same time, in those moments, like crazy intense. To go through this with a bunch of women that I was like starting to feel close to because we're going through fucking trauma together.

SE: I don't understand that at the time. I just look like oh my god this is crazy. And I'm also like pushing myself just to get through it. It's like, "I can do this. I can do it," and this like almost competitive side of me like I get through it, I'm the fastest, be the best at it. I'm gonna show them all how to do it, and I'm gonna just do it. And I did! It was like, I think I don't know like 20 or 30 minutes like it was the quickest. And Lauren was so proud of me, and she was like you were amazing. And like you're so strong, and you know… bolstering me up like that and you know, holding, I was holding women's, like two women's hands like this, at my shoulders and there was two women here, and Lauren was right here. And I just was like, "I did it." I was proud of myself when it was done. I remember being like I was, I was proud I was, I was happy it was over. And I was, I had a moment of like. Yeah, I can do this. I can do anything.

SE: Before we put our clothes on, she asked us to take a photo a group photo all naked with our brands, and we keep doing it until everyone's happy. Everyone looks happy and not hiding any part of their body. So it went from being like "hehe" to like you know, like girls on a beach but we're not wearing our clothes like we're just happy. And that was a forced, fake photo. I don't even remember how I got home. I don't know how I got home. But I remember walking in and seeing Nippy at his desk and just being, like wanting to tell him so badly, and all he knew is that I was at Lauren's, doing something with the women, and then he was like just totally indifferent. [laughs] And I wanted to be like I just had the craziest experience and like... But I couldn't tell him. I had a really hard time sleeping because I kept kind of like reliving the you know the worst parts of the pain.

SE: Oh god. [sigh]

SE: What’s it like to hear that?

KG & JB: It’s hard

JB: Yup.

[pause]

SE: What’s it like to… I know yeah, you’re right, we didn’t speak the whole time during this. You didn’t really know me then, but you did know me when I was 18, and you knew me when I was 16, and What’s it like to hear this? Like are people talking about it?

SE: Absolutely.

JB: What I’m trying to say there… what I wanted to say... is that I that know growing up she struggled to feel like she belonged. I know she felt rejected, she felt left out and insecure...I think NXIVM recognized that in Sarah, and it made her vulnerable to them.

SE: No, it totally was. [laugh]

SE: No, I think that’s a really astute. In many ways I feel that was exploited in me. Because that desire to create community and to be accepted and be liked and be part of something, was what my biggest toolset was in growing the most successful centre in the company at certain points, you know? So I agree. I think you just fucking nailed it, and it’s emotional to hear you say that because I sensed that.

SE: Yes.

SE: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, being in charge. I like being in charge.

JB: Sarah was, in fact, recruited into NXIVM on a cruise ship…

JB: That’s on the next episode of Escaping NXIVM

JB: But how did ‘getting her life on track’ turn into, agreeing to hand over material that would destroy her if she ever chose to leave?

JB: And did she even know what she was really getting into?

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

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