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The Current Transcript for July 8, 2019

Host: Katie Simpson

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

Sounds of migrant children crying.

KATIE SIMPSON: Their cries for help are getting louder, but is anyone in the United States government listening? Migrant children are still being separated from their parents along the southern U.S. border, while others are being held in desperate conditions, forced to sleep on floors with little food and appalling sanitary practices. Canada has strict policies to prevent separation when possible ,but are those policies working. We speak with the executive director of Action Refugies Montreal to find out what is actually happening on the ground. We'll also speak with Dr. Samantha Nutt about the impact detention has on children and why this is happening more often around the world. Then.

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VOICE: Being a small town, that's I guess that's not how we think. I always knew something had happened to her. To just vanish like that.

KS: Whatever happened to the Cat Lady of Muskoka? Joan Lawrence's disappearance more than 20 years ago has never been fully explained, but now a CBC podcast has uncovered new information in the case. We'll speak with the journalist behind the investigation. Plus, the creator of a secretive sex cult that operated under the guise of being a self-help group waits to be sentenced after being found guilty on seven criminal charges. We've got the first episode of the CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM, which follows a Canadian woman who broke away from the system. I'm Katie Simpson and this is the summer edition of The Current.

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Separation of families at Canadian border is creating 'invisibly detained children': advocate

Guests: Paul Clarke, Samantha Nutt

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: They gave us little food. Some children did not bathe. They didn't bathe them. They were mean to us. There were many children and they were treated badly.

KS: The voice in translation is of a 12-year-old girl describing her time in a U.S. detention facility. She spent two weeks in a border patrol station in Texas along with her 6-year-old sister. She told lawyer Alison Griffith what it was like to be amongst hundreds of migrant children separated from their parents.

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VOICE: Some children were sick. They said they would take them to the hospitals, but they wouldn't take them. They would cry for their mother, for their father. They cried for their aunt. They missed them. It was ugly in there.

KS: But it's not something that is happening just along the US-Mexico border. Last week the BBC reported that thousands of weaker children in detention in China are also being separated from their parents. Amine Wayit escaped to Turkey, but her husband is in detention camp. Her stepdaughter has been sent to a boarding school.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It was about December, I guess, when I suddenly saw this photo on Facebook and I recognized her immediately. We don't have that kind of clothing tradition. That is traditional Chinese clothing style. She's being forced to wear something she doesn't want to do.

VOICE 2: If you could send a message to Akida today, what would you tell her?

VOICE 1: I would tell her I love her. Also, I would tell her not to lose hope and not to forget she's a Uighur.

KS: Family separation is something that Canadian officials have been criticized for as well. And the government vowed to take action. Here's Canada's Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale in 2017.

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VOICE: We're moving in the right direction. My objective is to reduce the number of children in detention to virtually zero.

KS: Two years later refugee advocates say the number is still nowhere near zero. Paul Clarke is the executive director of Action Refugies Montreal, a refugee advocacy and support group. And he joins us now from our Montreal studio. Good morning Paul.

PAUL CLARKE: Good morning, Katie.

KS: So your group visits the immigration holding centre in Laval, just outside of Montreal on a weekly basis. How many children do you typically see in detention there?

PAUL CLARKE: Well we're really not allowed to to say exactly how many we have noted. There are almost always children that director of that. Minister Goodale was was referring to 2017 said that you know we want to bring it to zero. So we were hopeful that in 2018 there would be fewer to nil children. All through 2018 there were a total of two weeks where we saw no children. So there are still the children there on a regular basis and this is continuing in 2019.

KS: What are the ages of the children that you're seeing there?

PAUL CLARKE: Oh by definition minors are under the age of 18. I would say we do see mainly children who are under the age of 10.

KS: So you say that you have seen fewer children, but have you noticed a change in in in these facilities since the government said that detention and family separation would only be used as a last resort?

PAUL CLARKE: Well there's no change in the facility at all. The facility that is used in the Montreal area, tthe main area is a former prison and that's where the men are housed. Where the families and women are detained are buildings that I qualify as sort of portable classrooms. They have that kind of look from from from the exterior. So they're the conditions have not changed. One thing to note is that in the Ontario context, in the Toronto area there's a holding centre and there are very few if any children there. For some reason there continue to be a large number of children in the Montreal facility.

KS: Is there is there any reason as to why?

PAUL CLARKE: We asked the question are ourselves. In terms of there are people being detained, the children are with their parents obviously. There really is no answer that we've had from anyone as to why we're still seeing this in Quebec even though there is this national directive.

KS: You sort of touched on it just a moment ago, but can you describe for our listeners what the immigration holding centre in Laval, what does it look like and where the migrants and refugees held?

PAUL CLARKE: Okay well one thing I guess to say from the start is that the conditions that we're seeing you know on the southern border the United States that it's nowhere near that kind of set of conditions. That being said detention is detention. The families are being restrained of their liberty. So where the the families are detained in the Montreal area you've got one. One big common room. There are different bedrooms for four families and the family units of the mothers with the children. Are they generally will have their own their own room and there's a big common room with a TV fridge etc.. They are certainly provided with three meals a day. There are medical personnel available though not always there. But there are doctors and nurses that are around the children have to ask to go outside. They can go from time to time outside into if you can believe it or not a playground with slides and swings but with about 12 foot security fences all around one of the aspects is at this time of year of course it's not too bad to go outside but through the years we've have we've actually had calls from families you know could you possibly bring a winter coat or mitts or something to our soil our children can actually go outside. So there they are the conditions are all right if you will. If you think it's all right for children to be detained. One thing that does happen though is the men are kept on the men's side. So if you have mama, papa and two children, the children are with the mother and the family side and the father is over on the other side. They are allowed to meet generally speaking at meal time. So those are the conditions that we see.

KS: So when you hear the stories that are coming out of the southern U.S. border and you sort of touched on this, but you know the conditions down there are these are kids that are being forced to sleep on on floors. These are kids that are getting little access to food. These kids aren't able to shower or the kids are aren't allowed to have toothbrushes, they're not allowed to brush their teeth. Simple things like that we so take for granted. Those kinds of conditions that we're hearing about in the southern United States, they're not repeating themselves up here?

PAUL CLARKE: No not as someone who's a Canadian, I'm quite glad to see that the conditions are better in that sense.

KS: Though you do say that there are, it's still very problematic for kids to be held in detention?

PAUL CLARKE: Well there's lots of research that's been done over the years in the Canadian context and in other contexts to say that any kind of detention of children has negative effects and in fact this morning out of Geneva, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights is calling on countries not to detain gentlemen. It's never appropriate to be detaining children because it has terrible effects. I mean we've had know a couple of years ago where I remember there was a family with 2-year-old and the 7-year-old and the 7-year-old asked the parents why are we in jail? Like what did you do that we're all in jail here? So and the research shows that children have negative effects from being detained even for short periods of time.

KS: And we're going to talk about that statement from the U.N. official just in a short moment, but Paul I want to thank you very much for your time this morning.

PAUL CLARKE: Can I mention one more thing?

KS: Absolutely.

PAUL CLARKE: Something that we've noticed in terms of the directive of 2017, in terms of family unity is, I mean as all your listeners will know, there are a number of people who are crossing the border from the United States to to Canada and there seems to be a new tendency since the early 2019 of detaining one parent and not detaining the other parent with the children. But what this results in is there isn't the family unity is broken and so you end up with say the father at Laval who cannot receive phone calls. They can call out, but nobody can call in and then the family is staying at a temporary shelter where you can call out, but you can't call in. And so they don't even know where the other persons are. So sometimes at our office we get a call from a man detained saying I came to Canada yesterday, my family and my wife are no longer with me. I have no idea where they are. Could you possibly find out? And so some these are what we're calling the invisibly the detained children, in the sense that there's a family member who's detained and they're not even coming up in statistics now.

KS: Alright. Well thank you very much for for sharing that with us. Paul Clarke is the executive director of Action Refugies Montreal, a refugee advocacy and support group in our Montreal studio. The Canada Border Services Agency is responsible for the immigration holding centre in Laval. The agency gave us a statement about the detention of migrant and refugee children and it says in part: "The CBSA endeavours to limit the use of detention to those difficult cases where there are serious concerns about a parent's or guardian's identity, a flight risk or a danger to the public. CBSA detention decisions when minors are involved are guided by the best interests of the child. It is rare that a parent and child would be separated." My next guest has seen firsthand the impact of child separation in countries around the world. Dr Samantha Nutt is the founder of War Child Canada and she is here in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

SAMANTHA NUTT: Good morning Katie.

KS: We're seeing more and more stories of children being separated from their families. Why is this a, is this a growing trend and why?

SAMANTHA NUTT: It is a growing trend throughout the world. In fact, the United Nations just released a report that shows that we have more refugees and displaced persons throughout the world than at any point since World War 2 with more than. With more than 70 million people displaced from their homes out of those 25 million would constitute legal refugees and half of those are children. So it's a significant number of kids who are being displaced for a variety of reasons often fleeing war and violent violence and economic desperation. And so for that reason we are seeing more children throughout the world who are arriving across borders hoping to seek asylum.

KS: Now the conditions in Canada are obviously not the same as what's going on at the southern U.S. border right now, but when you do hear that Canadian, that in Canada children are being separated, it still happens, what is your response to that? What do you think?

SAMANTHA NUTT: I mean it's incumbent I think upon us as a country to provide children and their families with the services that they need and to do the best job that we can under the circumstances to ensure that families are kept together, that they're being provided with appropriate shelter, everything that they need to meet their basic needs and to be supported as much as possible. Having said that ,I think we have made some important progress and your previous guest spoke about this over the last four or five years, but there's obviously more work that can be done.

KS: What kind of tool does, what lasting impact does this kind of detention have on children?

SAMANTHA NUTT: To be honest it's it's absolutely horrifying. I've spoken with and interviewed hundreds if these children if not thousands of these children throughout the world who are separated from their parents for various reasons who are arriving unaccompanied who have witnessed horrific violence and horrific abuse in some cases they have witnessed the death or murder of their own family members and they experience lifelong challenges many of them arrive they feel anxious depressed they have sometimes behavioural issues many report sleep disturbances I've report I've I've interviewed young girls for example who have what's called selective mutism who are not able to speak or to connect and it can take months if not years of of intense psychological support for these children but also making sure that we're creating a safe and supportive environment getting them back in with their families with relatives that they know if not their immediate parents back into school provided with that sense of safety and security which children in particular desperately, desperately need and crave.

KS: And these are some of the most vulnerable kids, so I imagine that having access to the intense support that they would need, how often does that happen? That's got to be rare.

SAMANTHA NUTT: It's not as rare. I mean it's something when you're looking at refugee camps, there are services that are being provided to these children throughout the world. But it's it's often in fits and starts and it will depend on the level of support that. These that these communities are receiving often from international donors for example so no longer a conflict will drag on the fewer financial resources are available and the fewer supports are available to these children. And remember kids who are displaced and who are out of school for several years will have a very tough time reintegrating back into their communities and we know that as well from the research that that the longer a child is in detention or the longer a child is away from their family members the harder time they will have ultimately reintegrating with the host community.

KS: What's the biggest obstacle in trying to bring these families back together after they have been separated if in fact their parents are still alive, if they do have family members that they can connect with, what's that big obstacle in bringing everyone back together?

SAMANTHA NUTT: One of the biggest obstacles is proof of identity. Obviously if someone arrives with a child or if a child arrives unaccompanied, knowing who that child is and who that child can safely be placed with is a very complicated complicating task. You know for example in a refugee situation imagine you're a Syrian refugee, bombs are landing around you, you grab your children or you hand your children over to another family member to take across the border to find safety, the last thing on your mind is well where is that child's birth certificate and where is that passport, if indeed that child has a passport. Many of the environments that War Child's working in throughout the world, for example in South Sudan and in Darfur and elsewhere, families simply don't have any proof of identity. They don't even have birth dates that they can provide and so it's a very difficult task to establish that that child is who they say they are and that the family members are indeed the family members of that child and not for example someone who might be trafficking that child for unsavoury purposes.

KS: Dr. Samantha Nutt, thank you very much for your time this morning. We really appreciate it.

SAMANTHA NUTT: Thank you Katie.

KS: Dr. Samantha Nutt is the founder of War Child Canada and she's joins us in our Toronto studio.

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KS: You may have heard the sad news over the weekend that our colleague and friend in Ing Wong-Ward has died. Ing was a former CBC Radio producer and a disability rights activist who had spinal muscular atrophy. She died of complications from colon cancer. Those who knew her well knew what a force of nature she was determined, strong funny and kind. But when she spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti last year, she made it clear there's one attribute she did not want to hear.

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ING WONG-WARD: I am unapologetically disabled and definitely not inspiring. So yes, that would be me. I don't see myself as an inspiring person at all. I don't think that people should look at me simply because I'm a person with a disability and say oh you're so inspiring. It's you know, it says something about how we see disability in the society. It makes me really uncomfortable and I'm not alone in that. I think many people with disabilities do not want to be seen as inspiring, simply because we are disabled. It's become a trope. It's the first thing people say, oh you're so inspiring, as opposed to getting to know me as an individual, as a person. You know like I like to joke, I hope you're inspired because I love shoes. I hope you're inspired you know the number of books that I read or that I'm a really proficient knitter. You know I hope you're inspired that I'm a loyal spouse and a good mother, although the only person who can determine if I'm a good mother is my child. I think I am an incredibly stubborn person to the point of utter obnoxiousness. I really do. You know when I think back upon my life, I just wanted to jump into doing everything full hog. I've looked at it as yeah I have a disability. There are real barriers, but how dare society impose those barriers, not just upon me, but so many other people disabilities. And I've taken a great deal of solace in the community of people with disabilities. I belong to a much broader movement of people who have done incredible, incredible things. I want us to really consider what dignity means and what dignified living means to the most vulnerable in our society, particularly when it comes to disability because I think people with disabilities can have the most amazing lives if they're given the support that they need. And too often people aren't getting the support they need and there's always a level of despair and that I feel that despair in a way non-disabled people don't. That's ultimately about equality and making sure that everyone has a shot to achieve what they're going to achieve, whether it's, in my case, having had an incredible career and family or for someone else it might be something that's very different, but it's no less dignified and it's no less meaningful.

KS: Ing Wong-Ward died this past Saturday. If you'd like to hear that interview in full, her last conversation with Anna Maria, we'll post a link to it on our site at cbc.ca/thecurrent and we'll link the edition of The Current she hosted, a special about disability. The CBC News is next. I'm Katie Simpson and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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2

A decades-old missing persons case continues to haunt Ontario's cottage country

Guests: Zander Sherman

KS: Hello. I'm Katie Simpson and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

KS: Still to come a look inside the so-called self-help group NXIVM through the eyes of one of its most active members. Spoiler alert: It turned out to be a cult. But first, The Curious Case of the Cat Lady.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: She had a very distinctive silhouette and very recognizable. You know I would see her walking into town.

VOICE 2: A handkerchief on her hair. Long overcoat like somebody that lived on the street.

VOICE 3: I always knew something had happened to her. To just vanish like that.

KS: They're talking about a woman named Joan Lawrence, although for people who saw her around in Huntsville, Ontario, she was also known as The Cat Lady. Her disappearance more than 20 years ago has become local legend. Police investigated, but it never resulted in any charges. That despite lots of chatter about what might have happened. Now a new season of the CBC podcast Uncover is taking a fresh look at Joan Lawrence's disappearance. It's hosted by journalist Zander Sherman who grew up in the Muskoka area, not far from where Joan lived. He's uncovered new information, not just about her disappearance, but about other elderly people who've also gone missing over the years. All six episodes of The Cat Lady case drop tomorrow and Zander Sherman is here with me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

ZANDER SHERMAN: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

KS: Tell us more about Joan Lawrence, the Cat Lady, and why she was such a fixture in the community.

ZANDER SHERMAN: Joan was an elderly woman who you would see driving into town. She often had plastic grocery bags in her hands. She would walk up and down the side of the road. She had a kerchief on her hair and she looked like she wore second hand clothing and she was an icon. She would be seen by thousands of people every day and when people stopped to give her rides and help her out, she would let them give her a ride, but she wouldn't say anything about who she was or where she was from or what she was doing there. And so she became kind of a local legend where she was so highly visible on one hand, but totally unknown on the other.

KS: What was her life like before she disappeared?

ZANDER SHERMAN: It was marginalized. She was living in an 8 by 10 shed on the side of a muddy lake and she was paying hundreds of dollars in rent to to own that, to rent that property, which wasn't heated and had no washroom facilities. She also lived in that shed with 30 of her most beloved cats.

KS: And and why, no electricity, no water there, why would sge be paying that much to live there?

ZANDER SHERMAN: That's a great question and I think the police wondered that question too. It's because it was the only place that would keep her. It's the only place that she could find that would accommodate her cats. Everyone else said no no. Everywhere else had you know animal issues with her. Her large number of cats. So she she found this one place where the landlords said, sure you can come with all you cats here and I'll charge you this much a month in rent.

KS: And so she was allowed. How many cats, she's known as The Cat Lady to people in the area, how many cats did she have?

ZANDER SHERMAN: They say that she had 30 cats. That she was living with 30 cats at the time of her disappearance. Many of which she had taken in from the community and raised from kittens.

KS: So you say this is a woman who is known very well throughout the community, she would walk long distances, people would you know help her out give her rides. She was known for where she lived, known for having all of these cats and so at some point, when did people notice that she was missing?

ZANDER SHERMAN: In the fall of 1998 she just disappeared. You know she had this regular routine that she would take from her shack on the side of a muddy lake into town to get groceries to go back again. It was a set routine, it was a daily occurrence and then suddenly she was gone. And police began to investigate her disappearance and within a few weeks they were at her property. They were searching by air, land and sea. They dug up the earth. They dredged the lake. They couldn't find any sign of John Lawrence, but what they did find were her 30 cats shot dead with a hunting rifle.

KS: And did that, when police found that and discovered that, did it trigger an urgent search for her or did it trigger an urgent investigation?

ZANDER SHERMAN: I think the investigation was urgent at that point. You know they considered it a homicide investigation at that point. And from there they continued to search for Joan and and the DPP say that they've been searching ever since. Although into their investigation and I don't get too much into this because this is what this show is about. But fair enough as they get into it more they they realize some startling things about Joan and other people like Joan who were living in the area and living with the same landlords as Joan.

KS: So we'll get to that in just a second, but as part of this investigation that you did, you spoke with a former neighbour of Joan, a man named Bob Earl. Let's hear a little bit of what he told you.

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VOICE: 7:00 in the morning, there was two shots.

[Gun shots]

VOICE: But when I looked in the binoculars, there was like two silhouettes and then I couldn't see, it looked like another silhouette. Because it was very, very foggy, like white. And then there was two shots. And then a couple hours later that's when the shed down below by the water, they burned the shed.

KS: So what is significant, what stands out for you in what Bob Earl just said?

ZANDER SHERMAN: Well Bob is a well known local man and he at the time of Joan's disappearance was living on the lake the same lake as Joan. And what he's saying in that clip is that around the time of her disappearance according to him he heard gunshots across the lake on the property where she was residing. And then he says he saw a group of silhouettes burning a shed similar to the one that she was living in and then driving around the lake and dumping presumably whatever they had burned into a dump site. So this is a story that Bob says he tried to tell the OPP initially and he says he was dismissed. He says that's they wouldn't talk to him because he's known as a local character and because he was at the time being charged for public intoxication. So he is someone who I've spoken to, he's breaking his silence officially for the first time in 20 years and he and a number of other people are also doing that for my show.

KS: I'm not sure if you can get into this, this goes too far into your show and the investigation, but you say at the time he was dismissed by the OPP. Are police now listening to what he has to say? Can you you speak to that or is that too much into what's going to happen over the next six episodes?

ZANDER SHERMAN: Sure. Well I mean let me add that I was able to corroborate some of what Bob said, even though he was that the admission about being arrested for public intoxication doesn't exactly make a journalist feel good. I was able to corroborate a lot of what he said using hundreds of pages of police documents that I had access to and his statements match the statements of a key witness back in 1998 named Al Marshall who has since deceased. So that was significant. That was a significant kind of development for my team when we heard that.

KS: You also talked to a friend of Jones named Linda and she told you about a conversation she had with Joan about her really horrific accommodations and Joan had said that her landlord had offered to let her come to his place.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: She told me that the landlord did offer that you know she could come in and take a bath and use the toilet, which I'm thinking of myself like she didn't have a toilet, she didn't have running water, she didn't have you know a bath, shower or anything. So I immediately said well Joan like why don't you go in there and use the toilet and have a shower and stuff you know because her hygiene was not very good. So just like I was kind of like saying I want you to use the shower and she wouldn't go in and she goes no, I'd never go in there. And then I went, why? Like I was puzzled, I didn't understand and she goes, no I'd never go in there. She goes you just never know what he's going to do.

KS: So why do you think Joan didn't want to go to her landlords?

ZANDER SHERMAN: Well people told me that she was scared of her landlords. You know one of the stories that one of the other stories Linda tell us is a time when her landlord was allegedly stepping on her cat. One of her cats in a threatening way which you can kind of extrapolate and say that he may have been making a threat against Joan herself. Also people told me that Joan had taken steps to hide her money from her landlords that she had taken out a post office box in town that she was scared of her mail coming to her property because she said that the people at the house were taking it on her who was Joan's landlord. Well she had a number of people who in the same family were performing landlord duties. Her most immediate landlord was probably David, but this man that we're talking about is David's uncle Ron Allen.

KS: Now you mentioned this is part of a local family, the Lans. What kind of reputation do they have the community?

ZANDER SHERMAN: Well the Lans were beloved, local, church-abiding family. They they seemed like the perfect Christian family. They played softball on the weekend. They went to church. They helped out at various community events, but they were actually notorious to local law enforcement and who discovered that they had prior criminal records for break and enter, for impersonating a police officer, for extortion. And I think pretty soon they began to suspect members of this family of murdering Joan Lawrence.

KS: Now no charges have ever been laid in this case from from what I understand. Were you able to speak with the Lan family?

ZANDER SHERMAN: They have not responded to my numerous attempts to reach them.

KS: I understand that they also had a series of rentals once that they described as retirement homes.

ZANDER SHERMAN: Yes that's right. Yeah. That's something else that I think you'll you'll get into when you you hear the show, but they were owning, they owned and operated a series of unregulated retirement homes at the time that including a family property known as the farm. That's where John was living and she was paying great sums of money to live there.

KS: And I understand that there are a number of other disappearances that happened in and around similar times to Joan's disappearance. What can you speak to about that?

ZANDER SHERMAN: Well there are four missing persons posters connected to this case and without giving too much away, you can see that the faces on these missing persons posters look similar. They're elderly, they're visibly homeless, they're clearly marginalized and all four people do have a connection to this story and do have a connection to this family. All four people are missing, presumed murdered.

KS: Again no charges have been laid in this case, but where does the police investigation stand right now?

ZANDER SHERMAN: It kind of depends who you ask. The OPP have always said that it's active and ongoing, but the OPP has no cold case designation. The extent to which it's actively being investigated is kind of subject to debate. But I have heard from the current case manager that thanks to this podcast he will be taking steps to to reinvestigate.

KS: And you expect that once again this podcast comes out tomorrow, there has been much attention around this in the past in terms of your investigation as well. This is something that you've been looking into for years. Do you expect, are you hopeful that that more information more people will come forward and speak up once they hear the podcast?

ZANDER SHERMAN: Yeah absolutely. I mean Detective Rob Matthews, the case manager says the same thing. We agree that the final piece of the puzzle could come forward now that this podcast will be heard by so many people.

KS: The last thing I want to ask you really quickly is just how much closer do you feel now to understanding what might have happened to Joan?

ZANDER SHERMAN: I feel closer than I've ever felt before. I think that the case finally feels solvable to me. When I started it I just was drawn by the mystery and the unknown. And now I've year by year come closer and closer to to really understanding what happened.

KS: Alright Zander Sherman, thank you very much for your time this morning.

ZANDER SHERMAN: Thanks so much for having me.

KS: Zander Sherman is an investigative journalist and the host of the new season of CBC's Uncover: The Cat Lady Case. All six episodes dropped tomorrow. You can find them at CBC podcasts or wherever you download your podcasts. And he joins us from our Toronto studio. Thank you.

3

Uncover: Escaping NXIVM – Episode 1

KS: You're listening to the summer edition of The Current. I'm Katie Simpson. We're taking the opportunity this summer to play some of the best of CBC podcasts. Today, we begin Uncover: Escaping NXIVM. It's a fascinating look into a self-help group that turned out to be so much more. Just last month its leader Keith Ranieri was found guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering. And a warning, this podcast deals with difficult and disturbing subject matter. Here is Episode 1: The Branding.

SOUNDCLIP

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: Did you have a clipboard?

SE: I had a clipboard. I had a clipboard. They used to call me the cruise director.

[Laughter]

[Music]

KS: You've been listening to the CBC podcast, Uncover: Escaping NXIVM. Just last month, NXIVM's leader Keith Ranieri was found guilty of sex trafficking and other crimes. We'll hear more of the podcast throughout the week. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One. The Canadian indie music icon Feist is coming up next on Q. Every summer one particular song emerges as the soundtrack of the season. CBC Music has narrowed the Canadian list down to nine contenders and you can see that list at cbc.ca/music. Here's one of the finalists: Mother Mother with "It's alright." I'm Katie Simpson. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Song: "It's Alright" by Mother Mother]

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July 8, 2019 episode transcript

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