How NXIVM Really Did 'Change the World'

When Sarah Edmondson offered me vegan gluten-free cake on June 4, 2018, I thought I was getting a taste of the super-virtuous lifestyle she’d cultivated over 12 years as a recruiter for an alleged cult.

I found myself sitting on Edmondson’s sectional couch with a handful of her friends and colleagues from NXIVM, the cultish self-help company she’d helped popularize among actors in Vancouver. Edmondson was a senior proctor and recruiter for the company until she left and became a whistleblower in 2017. We were about to watch an A&E documentary on cults and extreme belief—the first of many television hours that would try to make sense of the now-infamous NXIVM story.

NXIVM, pronounced Nex-ee-um, was a goal-setting program full of idealistic people who wanted to make a difference in the world. Or at least that’s what students who signed up were led to believe. Behind the scenes, something unthinkable started happening: women handed over blackmail material believing it was an edgy exercise in facing fears, and that blackmail material was then leveraged to extract naked photos, secrets, assets, and in some cases their participation in sexual acts with NXIVM’s founder Keith Raniere. The secret scheme, which branded women and called them slaves, would eventually lead to Raniere’s conviction for sex trafficking, racketeering, and other crimes.

That viewing party in 2018 wasn’t the last time Edmondson would offer me something exceedingly health-conscious to eat, and it certainly wasn’t the last time a documentary would try to unpack the group’s so-called world-changing mission. The latest nine-part series on HBO The Vow is the most comprehensive effort yet, with a first episode that hits many of the company’s purported selling points: language immersion for kids (not licensed), Tourette’s and OCD research (not peer reviewed), and classes that taught people how to get out of their own way.

Vegetarian food was one of many ways NXIVM’s community signalled that they were good people with good intentions. The Vow’s early episodes reveal many more of these virtue signals, from early morning yoga practice to talk of peacekeeping activism in Mexico. Juxtaposing this with blackmail and branding, the series underlines a mind-bending gap between good intentions and actually changing the world for the better. Edmondson ultimately realized she wasn’t supporting something good at all—she was setting her friends up for exploitation.

This mysterious gap between intention and real-world outcome has already stirred up a fair bit of chaos in 2020. You can see it in a video of a white influencer crying about Rwanda’s COVID-19 precautions, when a voluntourism charity self destructs in the face of criticism, or when the corporate anti-racism training market nearly buckles under the weight of one white author’s brand saturation. NXIVM is perhaps an extreme case of good intentions paving a hellbound freeway, but there are still lessons that can be applied to causes and movements more widely.

NXIVM monitored new students for a specific kind of good intentions. At Raniere’s trial, filmmaker Mark Vicente, a former executive with the company, testified that the psychological survey new students filled out appeared to be modelled on a narcissistic personality disorder survey. “I was researching narcissistic personality disorder,” Vicente told a jury last May, “and when I looked at it, I realized, to my horror, that it was the same survey that I had been filling out for 12 years.”

Clare Bronfman had trouble squaring her good intentions with her family’s astronomical wealth—until she found NXIVM. “For much of my life I was ashamed of my wealth,” Bronfman recently wrote in a letter to the judge who will sentence her later this month. “I felt it made me different, when all I wanted was to be accepted.”

Bronfman was not alone in coming to NXIVM with enormous wealth and guilt. She’d tried more traditional types of volunteering and charity, but Raniere presented NXIVM classes as more valuable than support for any other cause.

In one scene of The Vow, Raniere draws a circle on chart paper and tells students it represents the world. He then draws many overlapping circles, labelling them with world issues like “starving people” and “the whales.” Raniere says all these problems boil down to individual behaviour, and that creating a better world starts within.

This is how NXIVM validated good intentions, as long as students contributed time and resources to the company’s mission. It was a story of outlandish exceptionalism, but that was on brand for a company founded by a guy who claimed to be among the smartest on the planet. Bronfman, like many NXIVM followers, believed in Raniere’s story of exceptionalism.

Bronfman wrote that Raniere helped her stop feeling ashamed of her inheritance. Instead she embraced the responsibility of it, which meant pouring money into NXIVM’s many offshoot projects, and funding lawsuits against perceived enemies.

NXIVM followers also built up their own stories of personal exceptionalism. Some testified they wanted to be the best at something, whether it was running, show-jumping, acting, or filmmaking. Some had a habit of overestimating their own positive impact, former students told me. For members like actress Nicki Clyne, who remains loyal to Raniere and has attempted to harness excitement around justice reform for his benefit, this tendency has hardened into righteousness.

You can hear this righteousness in action in the first moments of episode three of The Vow, when NXIVM executive Lauren Salzman says she was motivated to join the slave group DOS because of Trump’s election in 2016. “I was super motivated by (the) fucking Trump election, and thinking like we have to do something in the world,” Salzman tells Edmondson. Salzman later testified DOS aimed to recruit thousands of women and even political candidates into collateral-bound obedience. The group successfully initiated women from high-profile political, media, and entertainment families with this “force for good” narrative.

Raniere has also remained righteous in the face of his own conviction. “I believe the sorority (DOS) is good—not just good and even noble, but great—and vitally important for women and humanity,” Raniere wrote in an email to Clyne following his guilty verdict. From this angle, coerced sex is a personalized vulnerability challenge, perhaps designed to help a woman overcome past sexual trauma.

All of these motivating forces—guilt, insecurity, overestimation, righteousness—seemed to drive the gap between intention and outcome wider and wider, until it became too much to comprehend. At one point in the series Edmondson compares this contrast to a Magic Eye illusion. If you’re only looking for good intent that’s what you’ll see, she explains, but once you see the opposite pattern, you can’t unsee it.

In the two years since I ate vegan cake at Edmondson’s house, I’ve started to see this illusion everywhere. I see glimpses of it in Justin Trudeau’s feel-good messaging and Mark Zuckerberg’s “share and connect” sermons. Fragility is a booming business, and activism is too often motivated by a need for absolution. We learn again and again that the super wealthy people who fall into these habits are ill-equipped to address the problems we face in 2020. As we’ll learn later in the HBO series, powerful people who mean well can actually do the most damage.

If Raniere does leave a world-changing legacy, it might be in the way feds prosecute future sex trafficking cases. The use of racketeering legislation in such cases was somewhat rare when the Eastern District of New York first indicted Raniere in 2018, but it has since been used in high-profile cases against Jeffrey Epstein and R. Kelly.

Expanding the definition of sex trafficking and racketeering may not be what Raniere’s followers had in mind when they joined NXIVM. Intentions aside, it’s definitely a change.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.