How do we avoid being the subject of—and feeding the market for—trauma porn? If anyone knows, it’s India Oxenberg, who in less than two years (while under the unforgiving glare of a media firestorm) went from cult victim to survivor to anti-cult activist. Matthew sits down with her to discuss her recovery journey: learning to box, learning to love food, learning about “the strong yes” from her therapist. They also discuss the behind-the-scenes expertise that went into the documentary series India starred in and co-produced: Seduced.
In the Ticker, Derek wonders why wellness influencers are falling back on bad habits as the world reopens while Julian tracks how Bret Weinstein’s cries of censorship exponentially boost the exposure of his anti-vax, pro-Ivermectin science hipsterism.Show NotesHow Dangerous Is the Delta Variant, and Will It Cause a COVID Surge in the U.S.?Sah D’Simone: Transmission Hotline6 facts about economic inequality in the U.S.The Pandemic Is Turning the Natural World Upside DownWith almost 50 million Americans traveling on July 4 weekend, you may need to pack your patienceJune 28 Ivermectin Systemic Review and Meta-AnalysisSlavoj Zizek — Is Jordan Peterson the real Postmodernist?SEDUCED: INSIDE THE NXIVM CULTA Timeline of the Nxivm Sex Cult CaseJudge Says Allison Mack ‘Willingly Enslaved, Destabilized and Manipulated’ Women
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Conspiratuality 58, NXIVM, Recover and Educate with India Oxenberg.
How do we avoid being the subject of, and feeding the market for, trauma porn?
If anyone knows, it's India Oxenberg, who, in less than two years, while under the unforgiving glare of a media firestorm, went from cult victim to survivor to anti-cult activist.
Matthew sits down with her to discuss her recovery journey, learning to box, learning to love food, learning about the strong yes from her therapist.
They also discuss the behind-the-scenes expertise that went into the documentary series India starred in and co-produced, Seduced.
In the ticker, Derek wonders why wellness influencers are falling back on bad habits as the world reopens.
And I'll be tracking how, yes, Bret Weinstein's cries of censorship exponentially boost the exposure of his anti-vax, pro-ivermectin science hipsterism.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Manifestation, a word we've discussed often on this podcast.
The idea that your thoughts dictate reality has been a definitive feature of the American spiritual excursion for centuries.
And as expected, with the country opening back up a bit, although the Delta variant and other possible variants could dampen our enthusiasm, my social media feeds have been flooded with expectable fare from wellness influencers.
All of them agreeing that it's time to manifest the life you've always wanted.
I knew it was coming and I am not disappointed.
Well, to be clear, I am disappointed about how few lessons we seem to have learned over this past year and a half.
In some ways, it's understandable.
A lot of people and families, my own included, have had to use savings to get by or dig themselves further into credit holes.
Life is not easy for a lot of us.
But that doesn't mean we have to return to unhelpful gimmickry in order to monetize people's attention.
I recently came across this video by Saadi Simone, a radical spiritual guide, as Deepak Chopra calls him.
Let's listen to what he has to say about difficulties around money.
Thank you for calling the transmission hotline.
What can I transmit directly into your consciousness today?
Well, I'm in a really tricky financial place right now.
You know what I mean?
Say no more, darling.
You've called the right place.
Are you ready for this transmission?
Yes, 100%.
I'm ready.
Let's go.
Right now, I release any and all patterns that sabotage my financial well-being.
I commit to patience, boldness, enthusiasm, creativity, and wisdom when it comes to anything connected to my financial well-being.
The more money I make, the more people I can help.
The more money I make, the more people I can help.
The more money I make, the more people I will help.
Right now, I forgive myself and all others for greedy, sloppy, unwise financial decisions and behaviors.
So, as you can probably tell, Saw is a charismatic figure and a lot of his videos are quite funny.
I only highlight him on this segment because his take on money is common in the spiritual community.
Ideas such as you deserve abundance, your thoughts dictate how much money you make, you're responsible for your own financial well-being.
And of course, none of this is actually true.
Many systemic social conditions block a lot of people from achieving abundance, much less sometimes even getting by.
But no to his anodyne messaging around responsibility.
There's no actual advice.
Being responsible around money makes no sense without guidance as to what that entails.
Aspiring spiritual teachers are really good at making generic sentiments with no real-world weight behind them.
And sadly, DeSimone's take on money is all too common.
What most people will take away from such a clip is, the more money I make, the more good I can do, or the more people I can help.
And this refrain is everywhere, yet it rarely plays out in real life.
I am currently reading Will Storr's upcoming book, The Status Game, and he'll be on this pod in August to discuss it.
And Will is a social and literary critic, and in the book he investigates what happens when young lawyers leave law school to join a firm.
This following paragraph is not limited to law, as it happens to most every human in similar circumstances.
It is very difficult for a young lawyer immersed in this culture day after day to maintain the values she had as a law student.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, young lawyers change.
They begin to admire things they did not admire before, be ashamed of things they were not ashamed of before, and find it impossible to live without things they lived without before.
Somewhere, somehow, a lawyer changes from a person who gets intense pleasure from being able to buy her first car stereo to a person enraged over a $400,000 bonus.
If you think that this doesn't happen with spiritual aspirants, well, this might be the first time you're listening to this podcast.
There was a short time, like a month, during the pandemic when we saw the real-world ways that our lack of mobility positively affected the environment.
With our carbon footprint down, ecosystems quickly rebounded.
There's a famous photo of the skyline of Delhi, for example, in India, that was really eye-opening.
But as you can guess, the pollution has returned.
And as recent months have proved, such a trend was not destined to last.
We've roared back into our old bad habits with a vengeance, with our disregard for the environment, and with our return to demanding abundance from the universe with all those karma points we've been collecting.
But abundance is what gets us 115 degrees in Portland and 118 degrees in Siberia this past week, even 118 in the Arctic Circle.
The thing is, we don't think of global travel, indoor climate control, refrigeration, lighting, wireless technology as abundance.
But a few generations ago they became reality and humans have adjusted to that as normal, just like the young lawyer acclimating to the firm, and just like the spiritual acolyte moving up the ranks and manifesting previously unknown wealth.
Once you grow accustomed to such wealth, the likelihood of doing good becomes a relic, just as the notion of abandoning air conditioning and smartphones to save the environment is probably not going to happen.
And so we confront the paradox of the spiritual quest once again.
Always another level to achieve.
Always further pursuits.
A deeper layer of enlightenment just around the corner.
Enough is never enough.
Contentment is fleeting, but, in our view at least, abundance is forever.
Until it isn't.
Problem is, the planet is growing tired of our abundance.
It simply doesn't have much more to give, and we don't seem to have a spiritual framework to really comprehend that.
When the planet is done with us, there won't be any sweet consolations on Instagram.
We're running out of time to forgive ourselves of greedy behaviors because we're so deep in them we don't even recognize the greed.
In some strange way, we have become what we dreamed, and yet still we demand more because we'll never actually be satisfied with what's right in front of us.
Very often we won't have the moral courage or perhaps even the tools and encouragement to face what's really in front of us, especially when the messaging either has some kind of spiritual bypass mood about it or some kind of promise of just off in the distance there's some kind of acquisitional utopia that we can arrive in where all the problems will be solved and we'll be eternally comfortable and abundant, right?
It also reminds me of Matthew's conspiracy of everything.
I shared with you guys on Slack yesterday that Facebook post by another influencer who was conflating vaccines with 5G, with climate change, with everything.
And when things are getting tougher and tougher, it seems like people just are throwing everything together and they are part of the crew that's going to save us.
And yet they're not actually doing anything.
Well, in terms of the new age thing, I feel like this has been going on for at least a couple decades where there's been like a couple generations of Deliberate training in holding on to whatever the delusional, self-aggrandizing belief is, no matter what the outside world shows you, right?
Because that's ego, that's fear, that's buying into the conditioning, that's the mainstream narrative.
And we're going to hold true to our fantasy of being starseeds who will save the world as lightworkers or something.
I like that you said deliberate training.
It feels like that in the sense that it's extremely disciplined and constant.
I totally endorse this segment, Derek.
And the best part of it for me was you introducing me to Sade Simone, because I looked him up.
Pretty amazing character.
He's like the New Age self-help drag race guy.
Like, I mean, RuPaul is kind of a self-help icon now, so there's a genre.
And I know that that goes way back in gay culture and that there's some complex stuff in there about gay men assimilating into straight culture through comedy.
But like, scrolling through his IG is like one you-go-girl dopamine hit after another.
And I agree with you that it all depends on being content-free.
I had a couple of thoughts.
advice being entirely about affect, that your life will improve if you kind of will yourself into greater fabulousness.
And I had a couple of thoughts.
One was that it's totally on point that he has an endorsement from Deepak.
And I think that it says a lot about Deepak Chopra, who also has zero content, Because I imagine it's a relief for the older man when a younger man with a better wardrobe makes having literally zero content look amazing.
Hold on, hold on.
Wait, can I just say that a friend just pinged me, who is a podcast listener and a friend, and she saw Deepak in a coffee shop leaving and she ran after him just to make sure he was still wearing the diamond glasses and she said he updated to gold glasses.
Yeah, I mean, he's got some he's got some swagger, too.
But like I anyway, I think I think that Sada Simone really pumps up the stock price for zero content media.
And Deepak is a winner because of that.
But you also said something, Derek, that I wanted to offer another point of view on, which is you said that what a lot of people will take away from his TikTok is that is the quote, the more money I make, the more good that I will do.
And like I agree that that's the aspirational takeaway.
And I do want to mention that I clicked through his link tree and I saw that he helps raise money for people experiencing homelessness in LA.
And that's a really specific interest that makes me wonder if he has direct experience with that.
But I also think, this is the second thing, that he's performing a kind of consoling function as well.
You kind of allude to this.
This is the line that hit me.
He even slows down at the end of the TikTok and he sobers up his tone for it.
He says, right now I forgive myself and all others for greedy, sloppy, unwise financial decisions and behaviors.
And it struck me that this is, like, one very important function of the clown in late capitalism.
Like, he's there to make you feel better about yourself, but also about the entire system.
Because, like, what is actually more pressing, more undeniable than, like, the guilt saturating our financial universe and what it creates?
Like, all of the inequality, the predation, all of the useless commerce.
Like, I don't think there's anybody among us who doesn't feel literally forced into making, I don't know, like greedy, sloppy, unwise financial decisions and behaviors.
Like, I had a moral crisis just a couple of weeks ago over finally having AC installed.
And anyway, that's another story.
But he doesn't say, I commit to stopping my greed and lack of wisdom.
Like his transmission to his alter ego client is that he is that everybody is forgiven for doing these things.
So it's kind of a stunning moment.
And I appreciate his transparency.
I think that we underestimate that new age entertainers, they bestow absolution on late capitalism.
So we talk a lot about when will the grifter stop, when will critical thinking prevail, when will we stop spiritually bypassing, but I think if we really get down to the heart of it, if we really accept that conspirituality has a religious function, I think We might have to admit that it's going to exist for as long as it has a market, and when the product is forgiveness in a totally absurd world, that market is really big.
And yet at the same time, he's not saying, I now forgive myself for all of these sloppy, greedy financial decisions and recognize the fact that I am enough whether or not I move into the next income bracket.
Right.
He's still he's still operating from inside the system saying forgive yourself for failing at the game.
Now, I'm going to give you the magical edge for how you can still win at the game.
Exactly right.
Right.
So so it's so it's consolation and then the aspirational upsell.
And, and I did not know of him until recently.
And that's why I didn't, again, he doesn't seem like a conspiritualist.
I don't see any conspiracy theories.
He's not genuine.
But when I, when I look at his page though, he posits himself as a teacher of tantric Buddhism.
And on the same page, he says that Buddha did not teach suffering.
He taught joy, which he did not.
No, he didn't.
He taught, if anything, contentment is the closest term that we can have as an overview.
And even that is, you know, a nuance.
Also tantric Buddhism has to be picked apart because that's a late historical development in Buddhist thought.
Like that's just a mess.
Yeah, whatever.
Yeah.
So it's a conglomeration of just things.
Things thrown at each other, where it's kind of like, I read one book on this, I read an Instagram post on this, and now I'm going to teach all these things I'm going to put into my own stew and then present myself as being this figure who can transmit the messages to a modern audience, and it's completely a failure on that level.
Well, and on that level I can also join with Julian and really say that I hate postmodernism.
I don't know.
Because that's, yeah.
I mean, except that, I don't know.
I know he does have self-awareness about what he's doing.
And I appreciate the humor.
Yeah.
And with regard to the homeless thing, I mean, fair point.
And right now we're experiencing such a crisis in L.A.
with homelessness in terms of the numbers of people that are living on the street.
And for the Fourth of July weekend, they're completely sweeping the boardwalk down in Venice Beach clear of homeless people and sanitizing because they want to have space for the tourists.
I can't even imagine.
I ride my bike that way at least weekly and I haven't taken video but I did share a video somebody recently posted riding their bike through that.
For people who've never been to Venice Beach and have this glamorized version of it, you're talking about Thousands of people in hundreds of tents on the boardwalk and on the beach itself.
Like it is another world there.
It is only kind of usurped by if you go to Skid Row downtown where there's something like a 40,000 person ecosystem of homeless people that live in that neighborhood.
Venice is number two.
It's another world.
So I don't even know how they're going to do that.
Exactly.
It would appear that they probably are not going to be able to pull it off, but that's what they're claiming to do.
Well, they would pull it off through a police action and would be violent.
Well, yeah.
And so we'll see.
We'll see if it comes to that.
Yeah.
So it's it's dire times in that regard.
All right.
So so give let's let's let's encourage Sade Simone and and and and his charities.
The censorship megaphone.
It was a big week for Brett Weinstein.
In case repressive big tech have kept you from finding out about him, he's the former professor at Evergreen College who has since appeared on Bill Maher promoting the lab leak hypothesis and scaremongering on COVID vaccines.
And a few weeks back, we covered his theatrical self-medicating with ivermectin during a Dark Horse podcast live stream, as well as the episode titled The Crime of the Century, in which he featured the medical huckster and ivermectin hustler Pierre Corey.
Incidentally, for anyone interested in the science, on Monday, the latest systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials for ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 was published by Oxford University Press.
It concluded that in comparison to placebo, ivermectin did not reduce mortality, length of stay, or viral clearance, and therefore is not a viable treatment option.
But what about free speech?
Which brings us back to Brett's big week.
He was joined by Pierre Cory on Wednesday, June 23rd for what Brett would later hype as the first time in history emergency episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
The average episode of Joe Rogan is estimated to be listened to by over 10 million people.
Now one can only imagine how much that number probably ballooned with Joe putting the word himself, putting the word emergency in the title as he did.
Amazing what a little censorship martyrdom can do to crank up the volume on your megaphone.
And notably, as Matthew pointed out, breath also hit a kind of peak conspirituality confluence.
Matthew shared this perfect Twitter screenshot with us that I will now describe to you.
It's a tweet from A Course in Miracles spiritual superstar, Marianne Williamson, to her 2.8 million followers, and it reads, as critically important as it is terrifying, meet the censored Brett Weinstein, and links to the Substack article by that title by former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi.
The cherry on top is that the tweet was liked by James Lindsay, who's been making the rounds as one of the most vocal opponents of critical race theory, And recently cut a propaganda video on that topic for conservative propaganda outfit Prager University.
It's clearly part of the censored cabal.
Next, former New York Times opinion editor and now Substack alum, Barry Weiss, also boosted Brett's signal, tweeting on Sunday that he and his spousal podcast co-host, excuse me, Heather, were made for this moment, as she shared the YouTube link to their latest episode.
That's one way of saying it.
On June 21st, Weiss also featured a column titled The Books Are Already Burning on her substack.
Now that was written by Abigail Schreier, author of the controversial book Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters.
That guest post was preceded by a lengthy intro in which Weiss mentioned Brett and Heather as courageous examples of people willing to ask critical questions about science and medicine, even though Big Tech, in the case of their Dark Horse podcast, and the ACLU, in the case of Schreier, are, and I quote Weiss directly, conspiring to silence them.
It seems like there's something uniting all of these people that we're covering.
Talking about critical race theory, what could it be?
What's the, what's the united factor here?
What a closed ecosystem.
It's incredible.
If only, if only it were a closed ecosystem, like on an island where they could have a dinner party and talk late into the night and enjoy each other's company.
But I don't think that's, that's, I don't think the personality types are cut out for that.
If it doesn't happen on social media, it did not happen.
That dinner party only happens on a stage live stream to 20 million.
Yeah, so I've taken to calling this the high-profile victim of censorship gambit.
That's when you claim your free speech is being infringed upon as a way of increasing the number of hours you're speaking and the millions of people actually listening to you.
It's worth noting here too that Bret Weinstein's Patreon grew by 57% over the last month since he started being censored.
Matthew crunched the numbers and has some estimates here for us as to how the strategy is probably cashing out.
Yeah, I mean, crunching the numbers might be a little bit much.
It's just some napkin math on his Patreon.
It has soared.
He's got 3,420 Patreons, and I worked out, like, four scenarios based on his five... What is it?
It's five tiers, so people can pay $2, $5.
They pay $2, $5, they can pay $25, $100, or $250 per month.
We're doing this wrong, guys.
We're doing it wrong, totally.
We need to be censored.
Let's be censored.
Let's be censored.
How do we get censored?
Just say you are.
Just say you are.
Let's just start saying we're censored.
We'll make a lot of money.
So, I mean, the lowest to the highest range on these breakdowns is $8,100 a month, up to $14,250 a month.
I mean, whatever the total.
He's headed for a six-figure year from indulging whatever he's indulging.
So the culmination of Brett's big week was a 15-minute Dark Horse podcast livestream on June 27th, announcing their censorship-busting move to the much less restrictive video platform Odyssey.
Now, perhaps inspired by the Homeric name of their new home, Brett felt the urge to wax mythological.
He unfolded a A really clunky interpretation of the story of David and Goliath.
It's too good not to play for you.
But in order to understand how this myth emerged and what it means to us, I think we actually have to look at the story of David and Goliath and see what it is.
Now, if you dig into this, you will discover that historians actually believe that Goliath was a real person, and we'll return to him in a second.
David was also a real person, but David did not kill Goliath.
Apparently, Goliath was actually killed by a person named Elhanan.
The story was then subsumed into David's story, effectively by the authors of biblical So he goes on that Goliath was really a real person and then goes into the evolutionary explanation of how gigantism exists, right?
And how giants are actually quite vulnerable because of this genetic predisposition.
Also, he's exposing the deeper truth here of the real genesis of this myth.
And now here's his profound exegesis.
To the extent that the myth of Elan and Goliath, which becomes the myth of David and Goliath, emerged from an actual historical story.
The population of planet Earth when that story took place was less than 1% the population that we have now.
Goliath is not likely to be a person.
David, or Elhanan, is not likely to be a person either.
These are liable to be conglomerations.
Google is playing the role of Goliath.
That is what it has chosen to do.
I hope that it is free enough to un-choose that, but we'll find out.
David is not going to be a person.
David is going to emerge.
People who are courageous enough and see the picture clearly enough are going to join together and they are going to fight this battle.
If we correct for population growth over the last several thousand years, we can clearly understand that the metaphor here must refer to a group of people.
He's so bad at that.
I know!
I mean, he's as bad at that as he is at the science, but okay, anyway, go ahead.
I know next week, Julian, we're going to cover the Ben Shapiro, Russell Brand episode, which I have already a lot of comments on.
But Ben, I guess it's part of his shtick to start off with biblical mythologies, too.
He seems at least a little more competent than this.
I think he's maybe a little bit more immersed in that religious background and listening to rabbis do that kind of exposition on biblical stories, you know, for many, many years.
Yeah, the other offender here is Dave Rubin, who repeatedly makes sort of mythic references to the Avengers movies in terms of framing.
And then he also does the classic George Orwell, you know, this is Orwellian when it's actually not at all reminiscent of anything George Orwell said.
Aye yai yai.
So here comes the urgent call to action with some new metaphors mixed into this heady cocktail for good measure.
We are going to have to escape this infantilizing discussion of crucial life and death medical issues that we are seeing unfold on YouTube and on the other major platforms.
They have effectively created the Truman Foe Medical Show and it is intolerable.
It's going to kill many, many people if we are not careful.
What can we do?
Well, the Sword of Damocles continues to hang over the Dark Horse.
You can see our installation here to demonstrate that jeopardy.
And hopefully YouTube will realize the gigantic error that it is making.
And it will realize that actually, Dark Horse is meant something as a warning, right?
The podcast is named Dark Horse because the Dark Horse is an entity that is mysterious and does not know how to bet on it.
How would you bet in a fight between people like us and Google YouTube?
Well, the simplest thing to do is just to bet against us because, of course, Google is huge and we are not.
On the other hand, the story of Elhanan and Goliath tells you something else.
So I was digging each time he brought in a new metaphor into that wonderful patchwork of mythological, whatever you want to call it, cross-cultural syncretism, right?
Yeah, I think you even missed a few.
It is such a word salad.
Because I actually have been paying attention to him since The Evergreen College incident.
And he used to seem to have some level of sanity.
Like, even at that time, you can debate whether or not he was right for the instance, you know, why he was censored in the first place, but he just seems to have just run with it.
Now, any sort of criticism, anything that comes at him, he's wielding a censorship now.
Yeah, so you could argue on the position that he took, but at least when he took that position, it was still coherent.
There was an internal logic to it.
This is just all over the place.
And so this heroic brinksmanship also plays right into the heroic self-importance of both Brett and his older brother, Eric, who we haven't talked about much, I don't think.
On this podcast, they seem ever available to grab onto whichever conspiracy theme will confirm their status as misunderstood outsider geniuses raising the alarm on taboo existential threats that only they are uniquely positioned to calculate.
So not wanting to be left out, Eric Weinstein this week was on a roll with his characteristically definitive takes on Twitter, like, I don't know what Anthony Fauci is, but I want him removed and investigated.
And this classic piece of non-committal self-importance, if there's a fertility consequence, or an autoimmune crisis, or if these kids are dying from a vaccine that is more dangerous than the virus to young people, it will fall to people like me who spoke out to restore faith in vaccines and to clean up after Dr. Fauci.
This is a theoretical physicist and what is he, MD of steel?
At the weekend, Eric went on to tweet his list of courageous people to follow, a veritable who's who of the ever more right-leaning and conspiracist network of IDW amplifiers working the contrarian grift that included Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Gad Saad, James Lindsay, Ben Shapiro, to name but a few.
Eric probably regrets including author and mathematician Nassim Taleb on that list, who used his free speech to flame back with a reply, why the fuck are you putting me in the same category as Ben Shapiro, who's a total charlatan?
So I actually love, and then Eric's reply, I love that moment.
Nassim Talib is such an egomaniac.
I saw him give a keynote at a blockchain conference a few years ago, and he spent half the time talking about his weightlifting practice, which was just, he's such an egomaniac, but it was actually so perfect to like, because Eric's list, first of all, was just such nonsense.
And it was, it's just, It's him listing off the people he associates with and he wants to be in the company of, and then that's him throwing shade at Ben Shapiro.
It's such an incestuous little group that we have here and inter-fighting.
And let's not forget that Eric coined the term intellectual dark web, which has been, you know, only sort of half-heartedly embraced by some of those figures.
It's like he's trying to reassert like, hey, we're still all on the same team, right guys?
Yeah.
You know, zooming out a little bit, I think it's kind of a Waterloo moment when an influencer jumps the content shark altogether, like just abandons sense and sensibility and heads into this kind of meta-pomo territory.
I think of I think it's a real litmus test for followers because there's a fork in the road for Brett's listeners where, you know, they either hear that the whole content stream has become narcissistic and they bail or they are so successfully merged, uh, you know, or they have so successfully merged the content with the man that they become more or they have so successfully merged the content with the man that
But I want to come back to, you know, the usage of David and Goliath with a personal message for Brett, which I hope gets to him, so I'll just speak personally.
Brett, I understand that you're struggling to salvage your scientific credibility.
I can understand the impulse to want to go biblical with your language.
Speaking as a poet, novelist, a journalist, I can just say that there are standards for using metaphors, just like there are standards for understanding randomized control tiles of the effectiveness of horse pills on COVID.
So, if you're going to use David and Goliath, and of course, if you're going to identify with David, It isn't effective.
I want to help you with this.
It's not effective to talk about how these are composite figures written and rewritten through time and how their archetypes can be reduced to, you know, indie podcast versus tech giant.
There's so much more for you to grab onto.
David was a shepherd boy summoned by the prophet Samuel to serve King Saul, who God had tormented with an evil spirit.
So, you've got to work out those figures in your Imaginarium and figure out who they are.
David was said to be beautiful and of a pure heart, and he soothed the king with his lyre.
Maybe you know there's a song about that by Uncle Leonard.
And he wasn't just minding his business posting hot takes about alternative medicine when Goliath threatened to confiscate his sheep.
He heard about the Philistine thug and he decided on his own that he would go out to face down the terror of Jerusalem.
But here's the most important part for you to really milk if you want to pull on the hero strings of your Patreons.
When David asked King Saul permission to fight the giant, Saul at first said, no, you're an innocent boy.
You'll be slaughtered.
But David persisted and Saul acquiesced reluctantly and suited the boy up in armor and a helmet.
But actually, here's the most important part.
David felt that he couldn't move freely in the armor.
He couldn't be quick, nimble, or silent.
So he doffed the armor and he padded out onto the battlefield in his sandals and his robe, no weapon other than a sling and five smooth stones from the riverbed.
So, Brett, if you really dig deep and contemplate the metaphor here, it's offering you not just an heroic archetype, but a spiritual teaching that you can both absorb and then also pass on to your followers and create another Patreon tier, enriching your life and theirs.
Because going without armor or conventional weapons is kind of your thing.
You don't need to understand virology, epidemiology.
You don't know how to read CDC documents.
You don't need to check your bullshit via peer review.
All of that stuff is cumbersome.
All of that stuff will slow you down.
It'll get in the way of your intuition.
These things are no match for your purity of heart, your utter humility before your task, and your unwavering faith that God and the nation are on your side.
So, I just want you to know that there's so much in that myth, Brett.
Use it.
Seize the day.
Become the faultless king you have been waiting for.
Okay, so I've said a bunch of times I think on this podcast and maybe on our socials that we're living in a golden age of cult revelations and literature.
And there are a number of reasons for this.
There's the rise of social media that has allowed ex-cult members to find and connect with each other outside of their former groups.
The Netflix streaming revolution has created huge new demands for documentary content that are being fulfilled by waves of independent providers.
And they can use gear that's just getting cheaper and cheaper.
And the pre-digital archives of the older brick-and-mortar cults are making their way online.
So if you saw Holy Hell, that was a great example where The filmmaker for the group actually was able to bring their entire saved archive into the documentary process.
And all of this has been pushed forward by the courage and destigmatization effects of the Me Too movement, which shares the same themes like, did you consent to this?
Were you coerced in ways that aren't typically viewed as coercion?
Were you trained to view abuse as normal?
And how many layers of secrecy did you have to puncture in order to be heard?
So every day, I think, it's becoming less shameful to say, this group deceived me, this group abused me, and this is all really positive news in a world that has to now reckon with and hopefully welcome those who leave QAnon.
The ways in which this literature is produced will have a crucial bearing on whether high-demand groups will be treated like the public health threat that they are, or as yet another form of entertainment.
And this is why I was really happy that India Oxenberg agreed to sit down with me to discuss her post-NXIVM recovery and her road to becoming an educator in the field of cult awareness.
Now, I didn't want to ask India to repeat any of the details of her seven-year horror in Keith Raniere's group, because the details are out there for everyone to see.
And as she says in our interview, some of those details were told first, without her consent, by all of the breathless cult-sploitation reporting that preceded her getting out and working with the FBI as a witness.
But then, with the S.T.A.R.S.
documentary seduced, India got to give a hard no to the sensationalism mill and to lay out the details herself, supported by an all-women production team led by producer Cecilia Peck.
And crucially, she foregrounded the work of cult experts and recovery specialists like John Jalalich and Rachel Bernstein.
And I wanted to focus on this part of her marathon, because here's someone who was slammed from near-complete isolation within one of the most pernicious cults we know of, directly into coordinating with law enforcement to bring it down, and then, with almost no time to breathe, a media whirlwind that she manages to grab ahold of and own so that her version of her story can be heard.
And all of this has happened more or less in the public eye.
It's been a very extroverted process, and so I wanted to ask about what has happened behind the headlines.
And after talking about therapy, later in the interview we also talk about her experience with law enforcement and her advocacy for new legal approaches to address the clear harm that high demand groups cause.
Because the thing is, the vast majority of the damage caused by groups like NXIVM is perfectly legal.
And that's because our legal frameworks largely rest on the premise of clear adult agency, clear free will, the notion of the atomized self.
So if a cult leader or organization assaults, defrauds, traffics people, they can be prosecuted according to Conventional criminal statutes, you know, you're not allowed to abuse a person in those ways and we've got these laws that say so.
But if that leader or group can make it appear as though their followers are making empowered choices, that they're fully participating in activities that might seem misguided or against their own interests but that can plausibly be argued to be chosen No problem.
And as we know, the entire self-help industry is based upon those premises.
So, I don't know much about legal philosophy, but my impression is that if this particular problem gets the attention and change it deserves on the legal front, if legal activists are able to show how people can be coerced by means that look like promises rather than threats, by systematic processes that actually biohack the very agency our laws depend on to assign responsibility,
I think it might really change the way we understand and treat and punish a very common form of abuse, which is the abuse that is co-created in the cult Petri Dish.
Because without strong formal frameworks, survivors of cultic abuse will rely on the luck of the draw when it comes to jurists.
And I'm happy to say that India's network drew a really fortunate straw in 72-year-old U.S.
District Court Judge Nicholas Garifas, who just yesterday was tasked with the harrowing job of sentencing Allison Mack, NXIVM's top lieutenant and recruiter.
Now, it was Max's initials that were tangled into Keith Raniere's initials to form the rune-like symbol that a quote-unquote secret all-women organization within NXIVM called DOS, which is an acronym for a Latin phrase meaning Master Over Slave, and an in-house doctor branded that rune symbol into members' pubic areas with a cauterizing pen.
And the wider world first saw that brand on the body of Canadian actor Sarah Edmondson in a now-famous photograph that was included in the New York Times article in 2017 that began to break the story, or at least the ultimate chapter of the story, given that Keith Raniere's psychopathy had been openly reported on for decades.
So, Mack ran Doss under Raniere's direction, although she concealed his involvement from her quote-unquote slaves, one of whom was India.
And in Seduced, India describes a horrifying set of commitments—constant housework and menial tasks, starvation-level calorie counting, readiness drills that required her to answer meaningless, aggressive texts on her phone 24 hours a day, and constant sexual availability, all secured by humiliating collateral.
Now, I'm shorthanding the details because they're all out there, as I said.
The point is simple.
Mack's behaviors were integral to the group's function.
And Justice Garofas was crystal clear about this in his sentencing memo, writing, and I'm excerpting here, You willingly enslaved, destabilized, and manipulated other women.
The evidence presented at this trial, the evidence presented at his trial, demonstrated that you were not a begrudging or passive enabler, but rather that you were a willing and proactive ally.
But he was equally clear about something else.
Beyond Mack's cooperation with the FBI, beyond her furnishing key evidence that incriminated Regnier, And beyond her seemingly sincere statements of regret, Garofis wrote the following.
Your lawyers make a persuasive case that you, like the victims of your conduct, were ensnared in Mr. Ranieri's coercive and manipulative web.
Like your victims, you turned over collateral in connection with your involvement in DOS.
Like your victims, you were subject to abusive and unreasonable demands that were designed to destabilize you and deprive you of your agency.
I don't doubt that you were also manipulated, and that you also felt captive even as you were inflicting those very consequences on other women.
In the language of Doss, you were a slave as well as a master, and the harms that you inflicted as a master were, to some extent, demanded of you in your capacity as Mr. Ranieri's slave.
Even the letters from your victims reflect a kind of ambivalence.
Many of them see you both as their abuser and as a fellow victim.
That is something that weighs on me.
It is hard to determine an appropriate sentence for a perpetrator who is also her co-conspirator's victim.
I think it's remarkable to hear such clear soul-searching from the bench, where the very basis of what it means to be free and to make choices is understood as impossibly complicated by networks of coercion and compromise.
The most moving line in the statement for me is the reporting on the ambivalence in the letters from Max Survivors, that they recognize her as a survivor as well.
And that's a key thing in cults.
Everyone has this feeling that no one is alright.
And it occurred to me also this morning that the nuance Justice Garofas displays here really helps in turning the calculus of moral blame into a less personal project of, like, harm reduction.
And the metaphor of cancer treatment came to mind for me.
Because there's no question, like after a simple review of Keith Raniere's criminal behavior, that he's like an aggressive tumor that will grow without limits, co-opting a larger and larger circle of cells and bodies around him.
He just has to be surgically excised.
But the bodies surrounding him were recruited from healthy states to host him, to provide blood flow, and be reprogrammed against their own survival.
So he gets 120 years or death, like just medical trash.
And Mac gets three years of radiation and chemo, and the benefit of the doubt that she'll recover and repair if she can.
Now, I tried to reach India before we recorded this today for a statement on the sentencing, and I'm just sure her phone and inbox were on fire.
But I did find her statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
She told them, I'm still in a state of disbelief, but I trust and honor the judge's decision.
I hope that her victims, including myself, will feel vindicated and safer given that she has denounced Keith Raniere.
We all need time to process and digest everything.
This is a big moment for all of us.
And then her mother Catherine, as The Hollywood Reporter writes, who worked tirelessly to extract India from NXIVM, added, I concur with everything India said.
I do believe people deserve a second chance.
And Alison has shown remorse for her actions.
So, Derek, Julian, any thoughts before we get to the interview?
This is yesterday.
Yesterday we find out that Britney Spears still doesn't have control of her life.
That she is essentially under slavery, under her father's care, quote unquote.
And not only is that happening to her now and it happens to other people, we're watching it happen in public.
Yesterday, Bill Cosby gets let out of prison.
This is a man who drugged and raped many women and then goes on to make it a victory lap for all African-Americans, as he said, who were wrongfully convicted, which he wasn't.
And we know that.
And I wonder, seeing in the public gaze, how the women who were molested and raped by him Must feel watching that play out.
And then it's also the day that I listened to this full interview.
And as you mentioned, this is all playing out in public.
Women have endured so much for so long and now we have a form of media that not only do they have to deal with their trauma, but they have to deal with it in public where millions of people are talking about it at this point.
And I only have one comment on the interview because I want to let people listen and absorb everything, but how courageous she is to turn that trauma and going out and helping other people.
And what actually hit me the hardest, and I've talked about eating disorders before and that I had suffered from orthorexia, so it's something very close to me, but our relationship to food and our bodies is just so fucked up in this country, in this world, but especially in this country, when you have availability of food, For most of the population, any time of the season, and then we come up with these insane rituals around them.
I'll reference Danielle Bilardo, who's a cardiologist who I know has listened to this podcast, and we chat on social media, and she gets demonized because she says that carbohydrates are necessary and good for you, and people are so neurotic around food that they will go and attack her.
It's absolutely insane and that can only happen in a world of abundance and people can afford an abundance of food that they become so neurotic around it.
Now in this specific instance, as with other cults and Matthew references often, physical trauma and holding off of food and sleep deprivation are all tools that have been used.
But when she talks about You know, Raniere liking women as emaciated as possible to have sex with the image in it and the fact that she can share that and in the hopes of helping other people both understand the framework by which with these figures operate and to help people deal with their own trauma because they have someone they can listen to now.
It was just it was so impressive and it was such a powerful interview.
So I'm very glad you did it.
you were able to ask her those questions.
India Oxenberg, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
It's great that you were able to take the time.
Thank you for having me.
It's my pleasure.
I wanted to open by asking about two sequences that come up in Seduced, which, by the way, I just have to say was, like, profound for me to watch as a cult survivor in terms of its educational value and its sensitivity.
So, well done.
Thank you.
In the first segment, we see you training in a boxing gym, and in the other, we meet your fiancé, Patrick, who is a chef, and it looks like you're making a really foodie-type pizza with him.
There's a wood-fired oven, looks like a beautiful restaurant that he has.
The documentary leaves the implications of these two montages unspoken, but I think people gather that while you were in NXIVM, your bodily strength was denied and your food was controlled.
So I'm wondering if we can just start by you talking a little bit about how these things and other activities are helping you recover.
Sure.
Yeah, both of those things have been enormous parts of my healing and have been unique challenges on their own.
I think, for one, you hit the nail on the head.
While I was there, I really was tremendously weak, more so than I thought.
And actually, when I was there, I thought that I was perfectly fine, because that's what I was being told.
And although my sleep was limited and my food was controlled and limited, I was incapable of building muscle.
And really, I was getting thinner and thinner by demand.
And that was due to Keith Raniere's sexual preferences.
And he preferred people to be, I mean, I'm just going to be blunt about it, but like nearly emaciated or looking kind of like Really young.
And I am 5'5", so I'm naturally more in like, you know, I don't weigh myself anymore because of my experiences in NXIVM.
I decided that that wasn't the way I was going to measure health or my body at all.
And I was going to base it off of how I feel and my nutrition.
And so I've gone through a lot of waves when it comes to my body, and the boxing specifically helped me really rebuild my strength, but also really rebuild my confidence and my trust in my body.
Was not in opposition, but that we were able to work together and that's been very beautiful for me and I also just love the experience of boxing because sometimes you really do need to just punch the shit out of something when you can't verbally communicate your Anger or your pain it helps me to just who I'm pretty much a somatic person in general so I I really do process a lot through my physical body and sometimes I just can't I
Speak about what's going on and I just need to be I need a physical release and Boxing has been that for me and I joke that it's it's the cheapest therapy that I do Because it kind of is and and it gives me so much great benefit not only Mentally, but also physically and then regarding food that's also been a real challenge and I
I just now in the last couple months feel like I have a really good handle on what my body needs, when I want to eat, when I feel hunger, and just respecting that communication that I can have with my body.
Whereas I was really in opposition with it for so long, and I felt like it was the problem when really the problem was outside, and that had to do a lot with the level of control that Allison Mack put on my food, put on my weight, and all of these things that created a lot of stress and a lot and all of these things that created a lot of stress and a lot of issues, even long-term
Like for instance, I didn't have a period for two years, and it took a while for me to start to get my hormones balanced.
I mean, I'm just lucky now that I have love and support in my life because it really helps me to see the stark difference between what I was being programmed to believe that was love, which, as you know, was the opposite.
Well the relationships have flipped and now it looks like you're with somebody who's actually giving you food.
Yeah and he really does and he's always I mean he's a chef so it's sort of funny but also not funny because you really do I think look for people in your life to kind of complete your healing.
And for me, Patrick is just such a wonderful partner.
He's been so supportive through some really challenging times.
And I joke that he met me at my worst.
I just feel so grateful that I have the type of relationship where I can be honest about what I'm feeling and that I can really lean on someone when I need support and I can do the same for him now and so it's a little more balanced.
You referred to boxing as the cheapest therapy that you do, but I want to ask about some other therapy in Seduced.
You introduced us to your therapist, Rachel Bernstein, and you allowed the audience a few moments of eavesdropping into a session with her.
Now, she's an expert providing commentary throughout the documentary as well, and I'm going to get to some of your choices around that in a bit.
I've relied on Rachel's podcast Indoctrination for years to enrich my understanding of cults and my own experiences in them.
I've been a guest on her show, and so I know her a little bit.
Are you comfortable describing what your sessions with her were like?
So Rachel is, Rachel's incredible.
I mean, I learned so much from her and really a lot of our sessions were about forgiveness and forgiving the parts of myself that I was still really like punishing towards.
And I think, I mean, you know this very well because you yourself were in a high control group, uh, in a cult and a lot of that, Critical commentary came from the programming and the indoctrination that I experienced in NXIVM.
And so our sessions have been about undoing that type of commentary and then rebuilding a more loving relationship with myself and learning how to Just be kind in the process of healing and recovery.
And I think that's a huge step, for me at least, because I thought that I could bypass all the challenging parts and kind of just get on the road to recovery.
And really, it starts with an internal dialogue.
And that has to be loving, and that has to be gentle, and that has to be understanding.
And it really is like having a parent who is There for you when you feel chaotic and erratic inside.
And, and, and I have felt like that quite a bit through this untangling of, of NXIVM.
And I, I feel like I have a better handle on that now, but Rachel has certainly helped me a lot with the languaging and being able to express and communicate my needs to set boundaries with people.
all things that I felt sort of weakened in, she has kind of helped me to strengthen.
And she gives really practical, you know, no bullshit answers.
And I appreciate that because I don't need the runaround.
The down to the sort of granular aspects, Is there an aspect of learning about better internal dialogue or recognizing internal criticism that were there any specific tools that she communicated about, you know, how to listen to yourself or how to identify when you're hearing an echo how to listen to yourself or how to identify when you're hearing an echo from a previous time versus when
Yeah, actually, one of the most important things she told me was to recognize whether something is a strong yes or not.
And that that is a really good indication in an area where you might be questioning, but because of all of the, you know, continuous self-doubt and kind of, you know, You know, second-guessing myself that I did for so many years.
I'm a little weak there sometimes, and I often will say yes to things that I don't really want to do.
And so she would remind me, like, is this a strong yes for you, or do you have reservations about this?
And I had to be honest about that.
That's a really great tool and formulation, I think, because what so many charismatic leaders do, I think, is they capitalize upon the weakness of the yes and turn that into a kind of spiritual challenge.
Like, if you're expressing doubt, you're actually proving that you need to say yes.
And so there's something very, very twisted about that.
In its essence was that whole process of deny the feeling that you're having in your body, override it and do, you know, I'm doing air quotes here, but what is for the highest, your highest good, which actually just serves Keith.
It doesn't service you.
It does harm to you.
And so it's really actually hard to undo that way of thinking.
Um, and it's, it's caused me problems, you know, even coming out of NXIVM, I've fallen into a couple other narcissistic traps that I've had to, you know, luckily I've been able to rebound out of them a lot faster, but I'm still like, Oh shit.
Wow.
I really have a lot to learn here.
And, um, mostly about listening to myself and my instincts.
And I'll just say as well, too, that it seems that the NXIVM discourse and jargon is not only dependent upon overriding the internal feeling, but also making a virtue out of performing the strong yes.
Right?
Yep.
Without thinking.
Without thought.
Like a robot.
So, yeah, whatever Rachel is asking you to sort of do, it's to override another type of fake strong yes that have been part of the program.
Exactly.
And that is something that I'm still learning now.
And I have, you know, the opportunity to have a lot of challenges because I relate with all sorts of people.
And my current work is having me do a lot of research and meetings and investigating.
And I have to really tune in with myself and be like, how do I really feel about this?
And that's a skill, especially when your self or your instinct or your intuition or your soul, whatever you want to call it, has been diminished for so many years.
It's a good thing to remember that it's never totally abolished.
It's just maybe faint, and then it's like a muscle, and you really just need to work it out.
You know, the way you're describing that points to this somewhat controversial theory within cult studies about the pre-cult self and the cult self.
You know, and some people don't like a hard distinction between the two.
Some people say there's no research to substantiate the pre-cult self.
I can give you a real example!
I mean, I agree with you because if we're saying the same thing, I was not the same person as I am now that I was in NXIVM.
I mean, yes, on the outside, but internally, I was not connected to myself.
I was so dissociated.
I was so fearful without being allowed to express my fear that I was kind of numb.
And I mean, so many things, even scary things.
I'll give you an example, but my feelings towards animals were totally different when I was in the cult.
Like I was irritated by animals.
I didn't want them around.
I didn't want to really be comforted.
I'm an animal person.
I live with two cats.
I've traveled across the country with animals, but the fact that what we were going through in my mind was sort of Sociopath training to disconnect you from your feelings and from your emotions and from maybe the things that you did love prior to your, you know, enrollment into the cult is a real thing.
And they systematically sever those ties to whatever it was that you were connected to, whether it was your family or your career or your loved one or yourself.
And they change you into, in this, In this particular experience, Keith's form and That's a, that I will never deny because I did feel differently and I actually was being told that I was improving and that I was becoming more elevated and I was becoming more, you know, more, I hate using this term, but more enlightened because that was the sort of ideal that they were building for people.
And really the fact was my life was shrinking.
I was becoming more disconnected and more robotic and I wasn't feeling love anymore.
This change towards animals is kind of extraordinary.
Isn't that weird?
I mean, now, explicitly or on the surface, would there have been kind of an ideology around detachment or maybe Keith didn't like animals?
He didn't.
I mean, it was about detachment.
And I think anything that competed with his love and his admiration, I swear to God, that's how, I swear to God, that is how much of a narcissist this man is.
Anything that competed was like a lesser value.
So you couldn't pet a cat around the guy?
No!
I mean, you could, but it was like a weakness.
It was a dependency.
It was something outside of yourself that you needed in order to feel good, which really meant something about your weakness.
But that didn't apply to Keith.
I mean, he was willing to have everybody bow down to him.
So, I mean, it's ironic.
What I also hear, maybe this is resonant too, but what I hear, I mean, whatever's going on for Keith is going on for Keith, but with regard to your disposition towards animals, the animal has to be hanging around, reminding you of your animal self as well, that you have to be suppressing in some way.
Yeah, you're going to make me cry.
That brings up a memory because I have been a cat person for my whole life.
I have always kind of, I was an only child for the first, you know, six, seven years of my life.
And so I really relied on my pets as sort of my friends.
And I remember a moment when I was there and one of the girls had brought a cat into Alison's apartment.
I felt so angry towards this cat.
I didn't want it around me.
I didn't want to be affectionate towards it.
I didn't want to feel love towards it.
And I was frightened by that, actually.
I remember even having the wherewithal to recognize that I was scared of the fact that I had this animal around me.
And there was a part of it that was That I couldn't control and I felt so out of control with my own life because it was really being controlled by Allison and Keith, that this animal was like, you know, showing me this irritation that I couldn't express.
And I was placing it on the animal, like, well, this little pest in the house is causing so many problems.
And that's very not me.
And so there are many moments like that, that I, was recognizing things that were not natural to me but were becoming part of my personality.
Yeah, it's really stunning.
I mean, I don't have anything similar to that from my own experience except maybe something that's similar is recognizing, I've talked about this in a number of different places, but recognizing at a certain point after maybe my
Third or fourth year in high demand involvement that I couldn't really string more than two sentences together and I had been a writer like an incessant writer from the age of 12 or 13 years old and you know notebooks and notebooks and notebooks and stories and stories and stories and and that
Internal voice, that space that I had always had for myself to make sense of things, that just vanished.
It collapsed.
This is exactly that.
I feel like we're speaking the same language because that is a really deep part of your pre-cult persona and I also am a writer and I identify with that and that was a very sacred space for me even since I was 10.
I was writing poems to be able to process my own feelings and I couldn't write.
I look at my journaling, it is a bubbling, babbling mess of, you know, pretty much the same scribbles over and over again, the same.
All of it was cult jargon.
All of it was things that I thought were wrong with me that I needed to fix.
It was not my mind anymore.
And that is a startling thing.
And I think people, you know, Brainwashing seems like so sci-fi to some people and so does, you know, reprogramming and deprogramming.
Deprogramming?
Sorry.
Reprogramming and deprogramming when really it's real and we are being programmed by things whether we like it or not.
In this case, the element of coercion is being programmed towards Keith's likeness without your awareness.
And also how destructive that is to yourself.
I'm glad that you brought up the term.
There's a lot of, maybe you've come across the kind of academic turf wars over whether or not brainwashing is a real thing.
I think from a survivor's perspective, I think what we're trying to describe is Something got amputated or unwired there was a part of one's brain and body that just was inaccessible for a set period of time and it feels it feels
I mean, it's traumatic in the long-term sense, but it's acute and sharp and very identifiable, and then it comes back in these chunks, almost like, you know, bits of a computer coming back online.
And so there's a, you know, brainwashing might not be a scientific term, but it's a, the notion of something being so complete and so overpowering, I think, is certainly a very common experience.
Yeah, and when you have sleep deprivation, food deprivation, you know, high stress environment, readiness drills, all of these things aid to that sort of brainwashing and helped their indoctrination sink in deeper because of the repetitive nature of all of those things.
Um, and we're talking about seven years.
And so that, that's something that I like to make sure is super clear to people is that this is not something that happens overnight.
I mean, if, if Alison had, you know, met me on day one, when I was 19 years old and said, Hey, why don't you come join this master slave group and, um, see how you like it.
I would have been like, what?
No fucking way.
But the truth is I had been primed.
For five years before DOS was even introduced to me.
And so my way of thinking had already been changed by the time that I got to that place where I was going to make a life-altering decision that most people would say, how the hell did you?
What?
No way.
I'd never do that.
You know?
And they would be screaming and running in the opposite direction.
I had already been groomed to accept that type of question.
And from the age of 19, which is not childhood, and yet... Very young.
It is very young.
We know now that there are, you know, components of brain maturity that aren't fully online by 19.
Far from it.
Far from it.
And I think that, you know, one of the things that your story really communicates is the fact that we really don't have much of a language around consent and coercion and what it means to be indoctrinated over time.
Most of our journalism, most of our legal, you know, frameworks are premised upon this idea that everybody is a free adult making free choices and they're consenting to whatever it is they're consenting to.
And yeah, the training aspect that you're talking about, the gradual, in fact, if If NXIVM is successful as an organization, it's successful to the extent that it's able to hide the extremity of the commitment it's going to demand and then to time it perfectly with regard to how it's going to pop it on you.
Yeah, they were very good at that.
They were very good at identifying people's weaknesses.
You know, I don't like referring to them as weaknesses, so possibly vulnerabilities.
Um, I think they were experts at that, but that really comes from Keith and I don't love to give him a lot of credit because I don't think he's a genius whatsoever.
I think he's just a master at manipulating.
And one of his, you know, expertise was to identify where people could be, um, taken off course and redirected.
And one of the things that we do touch upon in Seduced is the fact that he was able to identify that people who had parents in, you know, positions of power or, you know, the spotlight or whatnot, were looking to identify and self-identify from their families and parents.
And, you know, there's a whole term called parental alienation that describes this process in which a predator identifies its prey and separates them from those who actually have their best interest.
That is something that Keith did on repeat, and that was how he was able to have such a loyal base of, you know, People kind of concealing his behavior was because he had their loyalty and he had them believing that what he was doing was empowering them.
And if we use a term like parental alienation, it really removes the sort of age question too, because it can happen at any point that the person is separated from their caregivers.
And so the fact that you're 19 versus 25 versus 12.
Or 60 even.
Or 60 becomes a lot less material.
Yeah, and that's something that people, I think, is a common misconception, that you need to be young and that you need to be, you know, even a girl, because that's not true.
There are all sorts of people that were enrolled into NXIVM.
There was an entire Harvard contingency, so it had nothing to do with intelligence or age.
It had everything to do with I mean, in my opinion, wrong place, wrong time and having, you know, vulnerabilities because we're human beings.
Every cult survivor, you know, will have a unique story.
And, you know, we've shared some similarities, but there is a substantial difference in our stories.
And one of them is, I mean, there's lots of them, there's lots of differences.
I'm sure more similarities than not, though, I will say.
Yeah.
But one of them is that in your story, there's a public and celebrity context.
And on one hand, you know, your family background, your acting, your film history made you a prime target of this organization because it actively recruited from the entertainment industry.
You know, it wanted to seek out people who were charismatic and well-connected.
And if there was family money, all the better from their point of view.
But on the flip side, these are all the same connections that really contributed to the organization's swift downfall because the extroverted nature of the culture that was recruited has given you and some of your other former co-members a lot of powerful tools to expose this abuse on a global scale through various media platforms.
I do imagine that there are a lot of challenges in having your recovery unfold in the public eye.
No kidding.
I mean, even this podcast is probably, you know, to blame for part of that.
Hopefully it's... It is and it isn't.
And I am naturally a very private person.
So all of this being public is not something that I would have chosen.
Let's just be real.
Adapt to it being public and and really take control of the narrative of my life and the direction that my life is going and also You know, rewrite my story because this was my story was told through the news initially without my consent.
And that was really scary because I was not ready in my own recovery.
I mean, I was brand new, brand spanking new out of this cult.
And here I am all over the news at one point when it was falling apart, thinking like, how am I ever going to recover from this?
Like not only just the, you know, Being called a branded sex slave in the news, but also just my personal life, like who would ever want me?
And I was really scared and I didn't know what path I was going to take in order to kind of take my life back in my own hands.
And it took me a while to even decide that I wanted to write about this, let alone to do a documentary, because I knew that there was no going back after that.
That once I put it out there, it was really just in the public's hands to decide.
And that can be a blessing and a curse.
And in my case, it was a blessing because there was so much positive feedback about Seduced and about the way that we told the story that it made me feel really proud and empowered and really affirmed that my voice and speaking my truth was important it was a blessing because there was so much positive feedback about Seduced and about the way Because I'm not gonna lie, like there have been a lot of days where I just couldn't handle it.
And I would just break down, you know, have full body panic attacks.
Like, everything I was doing by speaking out went against everything I was indoctrinated to believe.
And that was to keep this a secret until I died and to also protect and be loyal to those very people that were abusing me.
So I, there was a lot of things that were going on with me physically and emotionally that I couldn't have anticipated, but I had to keep focused on the goal.
And the goal was getting through this and getting out of it and coming out on top.
And that was kind of like how I kept focused and I also leaned on my mom a lot and it brought us closer.
Was there a moment when being able to say something direct and true and I would say exposing about the organization or about Keith Raniere actually felt elating instead of terrifying?
Yes, you know I've had a couple moments where it's really shifted significantly.
One when I started working with the FBI as a cooperating witness for nine months.
There was a time where like every time I would talk I felt like my throat was just closing up and I couldn't communicate and the messages would be really disjointed.
And then as I continued to speak with them and go back month to month I began to feel really Free in a sense, but also very aware that I wasn't allowed to communicate with anybody about what was going on.
So there was still a high level of secrecy around what I was doing.
So that was like one stage of relief, but not total.
And then while I I mean, I wasn't allowed to talk about anything then and I was like strangely familiar with that once again.
You know, here's this secret.
Here's this project.
Here's all of this information.
Don't talk about it because that's the nature of the business that I'm in.
And then when Seduce was released and I began to do press and I began to get really positive responses from, from press and more requests, it was like, holy shit.
something really shifted and I began to kind of like step into my own and I felt like I could there was no question anyone could ask me that I wouldn't be prepared for and that I knew what I needed to do and that was just tell the truth and so that was a relief because I finally felt like I had enough protection
It gave me a lot of confidence in just being able to speak about NXIVM in general, and then also to be able to speak about really challenging things that make people very uncomfortable, like sexual abuse and rape and manipulation is something people generally don't want to talk about.
And so you get a lot of pushback and I'm not saying that it was all sunshine and roses because there are times where you get critiqued because you're exposing something that makes people angry and it has nothing to do with you.
And so I've experienced a lot of that too.
And you know, I've had some stalkers and I have had some people who, you know, maybe want to be a copycat of Keith and, um, have reached out to me and I just have to block them and deny it and move forward.
But overall, more positive than not.
How did you first meet Cecilia Peck in Ball Lessner and how did you come to trust that they would be right for helping to tell your story?
Okay, well, so Seduced was in production before I was attached to it, and I was introduced to Cecilia Peck and Imbal Lesnar, the director and co-producers that I worked with on Seduced, through my literary agent.
And they approached her, and they came to me, and that was while I was writing a book, and we had a conversation.
August of 2019.
And they started to describe, you know, their goals with the series.
And I was kind of hesitant because I had had a lot of people reach out to me and say, hey, do you want to do this?
Hey, do you want to do that?
And I was like, no, no, no, no.
I'm running away to the mountains.
I'm changing my name.
Leave me alone.
Like, I don't want to be involved.
And I was really trying to focus on my own healing.
Like, come on.
I was kind of fucked up.
And I was really trying to figure out what had just happened to me for the last seven years of my life.
And when I spoke to them on the phone, they shared with me that this was a primarily female production, it was going to be focused on the women's viewpoint, it was not going to be focused on Keith Raniere, and that it was going to talk about the nuances of coercion and be educational.
And I thought, wow, I don't think there could be a better fit for me than this combination.
And I did trust them because I had seen the type of work that they had done before with Braveness World and Shut Up and Sing and they were provocative and they were looking at things that people generally don't want to look at.
And so that made me feel more trust to work with them.
And then when I decided to be an executive producer on the project, that made me even more involved in the day-to-day telling of this story.
So it was a process, but it was like one of those moments where I just really felt that strong yes.
And I thought, okay, this is my chance to take my life into my hands and direct it towards where I need to go for my own healing.
And in that initial pitch phone call, did the description of this is going to be survivor-centered and educational, that obviously stood out, but what were some of the other pitches that you had heard before?
What did they sound like to you?
They sounded like sensational bullshit.
Honestly, they were like, I don't want to name names because I don't want to offend anybody.
But there were things that people wanted to focus on and that were so off course and off You know, off topic for me personally and what my goals are that I was like, why would I want to be involved with that?
Like I'm not a, I'm not the poster child here.
Like I'm my own person and I'm trying to tell a story that I hope will inform people enough so that they know what to look for.
And if it wasn't going to be that I wasn't interested.
Um, So there was a lot of things that wanted to focus on the sensational aspects and the things that kind of make news headlines and I was like, nah.
I mean you came in with some education and some background and I think that really served you well because in my journalism I'm often contacted by cult survivors who they might be at the end of a period of seeking an outlet for telling their story.
They might have had bad experiences with journalists already.
Which I did.
Right.
It's not it's not an easy thing to get right.
And, you know, we're also we're in a boom age for cult literature in general.
And there's this huge range of quality.
There was the really deplorable, in my opinion, wild, wild country where, you know, the filmmakers didn't even bother to interview any rank and file survivors of Rajneeshpuram.
They chose to focus on on Osho's top lieutenants and loyalists.
And loyalists and have them cry on screen.
But then there's seduced, which is like at the opposite end of the spectrum.
It avoids the entire reality TV feeling that's so common these days.
It's survivor-centered.
It's slow-paced and digestible.
And it also platforms these top researchers like John Jalalich and Rachel Bernstein, who you mentioned already.
Yeah, Rick Ross.
So, how did, you know, your, how did the expert panel evolve?
Was that sort of in place before you arrived?
No.
No, okay.
No, that came from our research and our Our work as a team.
I think they might have intended to have that in the beginning, but I can't confirm that.
I just know that it developed while I was on board and it was part of my investigative process and my own healing and recovery that we filmed and those experts lent their expertise to what was happening in real time.
So it really kind of affirmed what I was going through and also what the other women in the series were going through.
And I think that it really helped kind of make it digestible, like you said, and to have people be like, "Oh, that's what was going on," rather than it be ambiguous or up to interpretation.
It was very clear.
One of the things that I found so moving about the production were the And, you know, there was this muted color palette and the subjects were obviously so cared for by the drawing, but then also there was this eerie emptiness to a lot of the landscapes.
It felt like a kind of art therapy to me.
Like a way of returning to this prison-like environment, almost like in a dream, so that one could creatively find their way out.
How did the animations come together?
You got it!
Basically, we worked as a team with the illustrators.
They're a women-owned illustration company that do a lot of beautiful work.
Elise, the lead artist on there, worked with us Just put so much love and so much detail into every single shot.
And she was able to kind of create my memories in images.
And, and that was really unique.
Uh, obviously I've never done that before.
So it was a collaborative process between me, myself, Imbal, Cecilia, the illustration team, uh, sorry, the animation team and, So I think we worked together to make sure that it took people through this emotional process and it didn't subjugate real people in real time.
And that was part of why we used animation.
I actually saw it in, in Taylor Swift's documentary, Miss Americana, which is on Netflix.
And I was like, wow, that's really impressive.
And that really evoked a lot of emotion.
And I'm not, you know, A big anime person, but I saw the value of that and so we reached out to that team.
Can you just describe a little bit the logistics of that?
Well, it was during COVID, so we did everything remotely.
So you're on a Zoom call and are you kind of in... I mean, what it feels like to me is the animators taking notes on you in some sort of hypnotic trance, you know, as you're positioning yourself in space and remembering various aspects.
Is that kind of how it went?
Yes, and then they would watch the footage, they would talk to us about those moments that they were going to be illustrating, and then we would go back and forth between slides, color palettes, imagery, and then figuring out what worked in the cut.
And that was done all over Zoom because it was during the time that we were in a pandemic.
Yeah.
I mean, it was very, it was reminiscent, I don't know much about the animation world, but it was reminiscent of some of the images that I remember from ages ago from the Linklater film, Waking Life.
Um, where the subjects are recounting memories and there's, there's, there's a realism to what they're offering, but they're also communicating with another world, uh, but also a future world hoping for something different.
Anyway, it was very, very, it was like, it was, it was so good.
It was so good how that was done.
And also it's like the, I don't know, the poison chalice of NXIVM as a cult subject is that the stories are incredibly evocative.
And because they're so, or I would say provocative, and because they're so provocative, I think they can easily distract from both the emotional reality of what's happening to the members.
and also the mechanisms.
And that's where I think, you know, spending a lot of, choosing not, for example, to use NXIVM archival footage to, you know, unfold the narrative.
Yeah, we did that sparingly because we had so much.
And because, as you know, Keith was obsessed with recording everything that he did.
Everything was documented.
And so we had tons of footage that we had access to and we really, really were very deliberate about what we chose.
And the thing about all of that footage is that it's really what he wanted to be seen.
It's it's how he wanted to be framed himself.
And that's he doesn't need any more of that.
No, exactly.
And that was one of the things that I really appreciated about what the other filmmakers chose was to not give him the platform that he would have wanted and to really focus on survivors and on the whistleblowers and on the people who took it down and also on educating people on the inner workings and really not be trauma porn.
For people, you know, I hate being so crude, but I think a lot of series out there do a disservice to survivors.
And part of why I'm so passionate about what I'm doing now in my work with stars as a producer is I get to go out and find other survivors who want to share their stories in a safe place and that want to have that respect and that kind of collaborative process that I got to do in Seduced.
And part of why I'm so passionate about what I'm doing now in my work with stars as a producer is I get to go out and find other survivors who want to share their stories in a safe place and that want to have that respect and that kind of collaborative being so crude, but I think a lot of series out there do a disservice to survivors.
And so I feel really excited that I get to kind of go out there and find other opportunities for people to have that if they want it.
Because I know it's not an easy path to go public, but it is a very specific decision that when you know, you know.
One thing that haunts me about Seduced, and The Vow does this a little bit too, are all of the shots of returning to the totally banal Albany suburb where NXIVM was headquartered.
And one of, I think one of NXIVM's really pernicious strengths was its ability to pass as a kind of, you know, corporate, neoliberal, normie organization.
And the feeling that I come away with So, I wanted to ask whether your experience with this has changed your general perceptions of the world?
Yes, it has.
in such plain sight.
So I wanted to ask whether your general, whether your experience with this has changed your general perceptions of the world. - Yes, it has.
But I think for the better, actually, because I don't like to be someone who lives fearful every day, although there have been times where I have been very afraid and suffered a lot of anxiety and panic and paranoia.
and paranoia.
And I that's not my natural state.
And so I think now I feel like I kind of have a little bit of a superpower because I've seen this world so clearly now and I'm able to identify it.
In the world and it's not so much of a blind spot for me as it was before.
I mean, granted, I still make plenty of mistakes, but it is something that I do feel very heightened and attuned to.
And I actually feel safer.
Because I can see it, whereas before I was more vulnerable.
Is it possible to see too much of it?
Yes.
Because one of the things on this podcast that we study is we study conspiracies and conspiracy theories, and NXIVM was absolutely a conspiracy against its members, and it radiated out and hoodwinked others.
You know, I'm thinking of the Dalai Lama's office, for example.
But, you know, its story could also serve as evidence for the kind of QAnon paranoia about the elites allegedly engaged in trafficking and demonic rituals.
And so I'm wondering if there were conspiratorial stories about the outer world that circulated within NXIVM, and are you aware of former members who were drawn into the QAnon landscape after leaving?
That's a very good question, and to answer the first part, I do believe there is a line where it can be too much, and I think that can be dangerous to one's psyche because it takes you out of reality and kind of creates this paranoia and distrust that I think can be dangerous and do harm to people, as we've seen in the news.
And there are many stories and tons of propaganda that were circulating within NXIVM, all coming from Keith, but obviously never directly, just through his henchmen.
And they lasted for years.
One of the biggest lies was that Keith was not a predator and that those women that came out against him were all liars and that it was all fake news and it was a big conspiracy against him because he was doing so much good.
And I say it that way because I believed that at a certain point and so did many others.
I mean, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people believe this bullshit.
And it was so strongly propagated within the community that we didn't even dispute it.
Well, we were also advised to not read the news.
So there was that too.
And there was a lot of fake news.
And I think culturally we can all relate to feeling swindled and kind of manipulated by the news and by information.
So I think it's a balance between investigating and being aware of what sources you're allowing into your mind and also having boundaries for certain information because some of it is not healthy for you.
And I know for myself, I don't go down the rabbit hole of Reddit on NXIVM.
I just don't.
I don't need to.
I did a, you know, Ask Me Anything, and that was the most that I will ever do, because it's not healthy for me to go and start googling myself and googling all the conspiracies about NXIVM.
I don't need to do that!
I was there!
I already know!
And the same could apply to most people, I think.
Well, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I had somebody say to me the other day, someone who was born and raised in Mexico, and I was down there on a trip, and he said, what is with Americans getting in everybody else's business?
Like, don't they have enough to do within their own families?
Like, what about family values?
Why can't they just focus on that?
Why do they have to go focus on what everybody else is doing?
And I was like, damn, you're right.
Like, why do I need to spend so much time Putting myself in other people's business when I could just be focusing on myself and my own life.
It's a good question for people who maybe are lost in that world of QAnon or conspiracy theory land.
It's like, what are you doing with your life?
Why are you sitting on the internet right now?
Yeah, well... Sorry, I have strong opinions about this!
Well, that's also another episode.
I know, we could talk about this for hours, I know!
We might have to have a part two!
You know, I wanted to ask about the post-cult landscape for you in relation to other survivors.
I often think of the aftermath of a story like this as kind of like a...
I don't know.
It's like France in 1946 or something like that.
The questions are, what did you do during the war?
Did you resist enough?
Did you collaborate?
How many people did you have to kill?
What are your injuries?
Who were your friends?
And in these stories, there is always stories of forgiveness and solidarity, but there's also survivor's guilt.
There can also be rage, there can be resentment, lingering sense of betrayal.
Is this all in the mix for you?
Yes, it is.
And I mean, I'd be lying if I said I haven't felt all of those things.
And the truth is, I have.
And sometimes they're more challenging to deal with than others.
But I feel like I'm in such a better place.
And I feel really grateful for my life now.
But there have been stretches of these past couple of years that were really dark and really challenging and, you know, caused me a lot of pain and, and people that I loved.
And, and so I've had to confront those things.
And there's been plenty of messes that I've needed to clean up along the way and many of many casualties and, you know, collateral damage, no pun intended, but it's just the nature of the beast.
And, and, Because my decision to go public has kind of left me in the public.
A lot of what I do in my own life, I actually keep private because that's the way that I prefer it.
And if I do put something out there, it's very deliberate.
I've thought about it.
And so that's because I really do care about a lot of the other people who are involved.
A lot of them have maintained their anonymity, which I commend because I think that's a really, really big deal and that should be respected.
And it's not my place to tell anybody else's story.
I just am here to share my own experience and to inform people about what I experienced.
and the heat and the process of healing and how messy that can be but also how lucky I feel because there are still people who are inside of NXIVM that are loyal to him now and they don't sorry they don't have their lives back And there's nothing that I can do about that because I feel like I've screamed enough.
And if you're not willing to look at maybe how you were fooled or you were wronged or any of those things, then it's unfortunate for them.
Are there any of those instances in which you maybe have not had enough social capital with a person who's still involved to be in contact with them in a really productive way, but you know family members or you know ex-friends that they might have?
Have you consulted in that zone of helping sort of family members?
I have, and I do a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff.
Um, because sometimes I think that it works better that way when, when somebody feels like it's their decision and that they don't feel forced because, um, that's the exact thing that they've been, you know, feeling for years in a high control group is just force and coercion.
And so it really should feel like a decision that comes from them.
To leave or not.
And so I do a lot of work with mothers and siblings and I advise a lot of people and I refer a lot of people to other counselors and cult experts.
So I spend a lot of my time doing that.
Sometimes too much time.
And my fiance's like, Don't forget about yourself!
Don't forget about yourself!
So I have to have boundaries there too because I do love to help people and it makes me feel good and it's part of my own healing but there is definitely a balance in taking care of yourself and also taking care of others.
Your mother worked with the FBI and legal experts for a long time to bring this group to justice and then you signed on as well.
You were a cooperating witness for nine months.
What was your experience with law enforcement?
What did they get right?
What can they do better?
Do you have thoughts about policies or laws we should advocate for that would help stop organizations like this?
I could talk to you about this for hours because this is a big part of how I spend my time as well.
I had a positive experience with the law enforcement that I worked with.
Specifically, the agents that I worked with in Brooklyn were incredibly sensitive to me and to the situation and very helpful.
Um, I probably couldn't have asked for a better team or a better judge, to be honest.
I mean, I think we're in the lucky category that we got justice as quickly as we did because so many people don't.
And, um, so I have only like praises for them and in, in that respect, but when it comes to policies and how things could be done better, I,
I can't tell you how angry I am by just the fact that certain Statue of Limitations are restricting survivors from coming forward when I know for myself that it has taken me three years to honestly express my anger and pain around Allison Mack and the abuse that she Inflicted on me.
And so the fact that there are those types of limitations drive me crazy because I know for my own recovery and healing that it was impossible for me to express what had gone on immediately after leaving.
Literally impossible.
I could not even say that anything sexual happened to me for a minimum of eight months.
So let alone go into court and have to be a witness like many other people had to.
That is so hard and such a big challenge and I find it really disrespectful that there are those types of limitations on survivors coming forward and having justice.
So I'd love to be able to make change there.
I would love to be able to make change When it comes to laws around coercion, because right now the only law that we have in the U.S.
I think is in family court in California.
So I'd like to see some legislation around coercive control, making that more tangible, less of a gray area in the law.
I'm working on that sort of advocacy and activism with other groups like Fact family against cultic teachings with RAINN, which is the premier sexual assault hotline in the US.
And also with my mom's, uh, my mom and I have a, and a, um, nonprofit called the Catherine Oxenberg Foundation, which allows therapy and, um, well, it allocates funds for therapy and people to
Get their lives back on track because as you know many people that leave cults have no money, have no resources, have severed their ties to their family and friends and they're starting at a deficit and they have to rebuild themselves and so I have a lot of goals to be able to raise more money for that so that I can give that away to people and so that they can have the support that I had because most people don't get it.
