The Megyn Kelly Show - 20240613_fraud-week-two-former-nxivm-members-speak-out-on-t

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June 13, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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My First Gaslighting Experience 00:07:48
	Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
	I'm Megyn Kelly.
	Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's broad week episode.
	My guests today were searching for self-improvement and a way to contribute to the good of society when they joined an organization called NXIVM.
	They found each other and got married, but they also found utter darkness and depravity in one man's desire for ultimate power and control over women.
	Sarah Edmondson and her husband, Anthony Nippy Ames, are former members now of the cult called NXIVM and the hosts of the podcast, A Little Bit Culty, and they join me now.
	It's so nice to meet you, Sarah.
	Thank you for being here.
	You as well, Nippy.
	Thank you so much for having us.
	And thank you also for being a key proponent of anti-Nexium from the beginning.
	We appreciate that.
	Of course, I remember so clearly where I was when that New York Times article hit featuring you in a lengthy article about you coming forward about what you'd been through.
	And I had chills.
	I just couldn't believe it.
	You were so beautiful.
	You were accomplished.
	You were so raw about how you'd been sucked into this thing.
	And not for nothing, but it happened in my hometown of Albany, New York, which was just so strange to me.
	Like Albany, you don't think of Albany as like, yeah, I don't know.
	It doesn't feel culty, right?
	To use your word.
	It's like the hardworking people.
	It's kind of like the Midwest.
	You know, I would think something like this would happen more in California.
	But it happened in Albany, and you were in it too, Nippy.
	And I know, you know, on the bright side, it brought you together, but not without a hell of a lot of trauma.
	So thank you for telling the story.
	I guess let's start at the beginning for the audience members who've never heard of, you know, this, or at least if they've heard of it, they don't really know what it is.
	Because I do think, much like some other cults, many other cults, it had some pluses, which is why smart, vibrant people like you got drawn in.
	So talk about how you first heard about it and what was attractive about it to you.
	Sure.
	It was 2005.
	I was an aspiring actress and I was looking for more meaning and purpose community in my life.
	I met a really talented filmmaker who I admired.
	I'd just seen his film, What the Bleep Do We Know?
	And the long and short of it is he said, Well, if you like my film, then you'll probably like this course I just took.
	And as somebody who is into self-improvement and workshops, my parents are both in the therapy field.
	It seemed like a no-brainer.
	I did not do any research, unfortunately.
	I've learned from that mistake now, but I jumped in.
	I really wanted to develop myself and work through limiting beliefs.
	And that was the beginning.
	And it was wonderful at first.
	Yeah.
	How about you, Nippy?
	My story is less glamorous.
	I had an old high school girlfriend who I went to boarding school with, and she's from the area.
	And she had taken the training.
	I had run into her in New York, and she kind of hounded me for about a year and a half.
	So I kind of went kicking and screaming to the training in part because of what she was saying and in part because she knew me when we dated.
	She knew I was into leadership stuff and all that stuff.
	And it was aligned with me and my principles.
	And finally, after kind of being pounded about it, I said, fine, I'll do your cult.
	So I called it a cult from the get, jokingly, but I didn't really.
	Did you have anything that was just purely a joke?
	It was purely a joke.
	Well, it sounded like a cult.
	And I didn't really have a strong understanding of what a cult is.
	It just sounded weird and it sounded like you're following the sky.
	And I was like, yeah, I'll do your cult.
	And I kind of jokingly went up and did it.
	And it didn't seem, I mean, it was weird.
	I mean, it was weird the whole time.
	But I kind of took it, you know, in stride and was like, well, you know, what's the worst thing that could happen?
	Well, cut two.
	Right.
	Right.
	So it is, this is kind of the study in how people can be manipulated, you know, how very bright, intelligent, accomplished people can be manipulated beyond what they ever thought possible, manipulated into doing things like self-harm against their better instincts and so on.
	It's like they separate you from yourself.
	They don't, they not only separate you from your family and your friends, they separate you from yourself, which is really one of the probably the worst things that they can do.
	But all right, again, I'm getting ahead of myself because before we get to that chapter, there's the, there's the wonderful chapter.
	You know, I talked to Catherine Oxenberg about this, princess and famed Hollywood actress.
	And she was saying the reason she got into it with her daughter India was they were just looking for female empowerment and to do better in business.
	They were both business aspiring businesswomen and they offered a lot of classes along these lines.
	So it's kind of where do you go, right?
	Where do you go for female improvement or better business acumen if you're not going to take a full MBA program, Sarah, right?
	I mean, was there any of that sold to you?
	Oh, absolutely.
	In fact, they even sold it as a more practical and useful MBA.
	That's what I thought I was getting.
	And I remember when Catherine and India came and did the program, I was so happy because I loved them both and wonderful, bright, beautiful energy.
	And that was such a big part of it as well.
	It wasn't just learn how to do business, learn how what success is from the inside out, how to map out your goals and work through things that you're, you know, your limiting blocks, your beliefs about yourself and the world, but also as a community of like-minded people and people who were going to achieve big things and wanted to do it with people that were in a similar mindset and do it together.
	So I have very fond memories of that time period.
	Right.
	It always starts well.
	That's why people say, so explain what happened with the money, because I think this story is very telling.
	And I am also attracted by this woman's message.
	Like I can already see why you were like, oh, okay.
	Cause you tried to complain or object a little to the expense of it when you were first being recruited and they had an answer for everything.
	Oh, yes.
	I was recruited by the best.
	I actually put a deposit down because I wanted to take advantage of the 48-hour discount, which is a red flag I warned people about with sales pressure tactics.
	I didn't know that at the time.
	And then I tried to get my money back because I was, you know, an actress living in a basement suite.
	I didn't have $2,000 to pay for a five-day training.
	And they said, well, you're in your 20s and you don't have $2,000.
	What's up with that?
	And basically was questioning why I didn't have money, why I had money issues and wanted to know if I was ready to change that.
	And do I want to be the master of my own ship?
	Of course I did.
	And then you said something like, well, what if I'm in there and my agent calls with a role for me?
	Yes.
	Well, I'm in this training and they had an instant answer for that too.
	Yeah.
	You're going to be waiting by your phone your whole life or you want to create your own, create your own life, be the master of your own destiny, the captain of your ship or something like that.
	That's your first experience with gaslighting.
	That's my first experience with gaslighting, did not know what that was and high sales pressure tactics.
	But I where your instincts are telling you one thing and they're trying to tell you you're basically a fool not to listen to your instincts.
	Those are the things that are holding you back.
The Lie of Vanguard Approval 00:14:38
	Exactly.
	And what you said earlier about separating you from yourself, that was the beginning.
	That was the beginning right there when my internal gut was saying, something's not right here.
	But I also have the belief, and this was fortified further on in the curriculum, that when you're uncomfortable, it's something to look at.
	It's a, you know, you're hitting up against a limitation, no pain, no gain, which is true, but that doesn't give any room for gut instinct.
	And when you're separated from yourself and separated from your moral compass, that's when things can go awry.
	And that was a very slow process.
	That was from day one, dripped out until, you know, 12 years later.
	This is why it's so important to keep away from these people to begin with, you know, to like, yes.
	The secret is almost just don't get near them because they're so effective.
	And we're all vulnerable to messages like this.
	Same, honestly, weirdly, when it comes to news.
	Like I, I'm very careful about my news sources because before you know it, I mean, you can be a little crazy if you take in too many news sources from the wrong people.
	It can really drive you a little nuts.
	So the whole answer to it is the screening up front before you would let people access your brain and your heart.
	Great advice.
	Yeah, I would, I would add, you know, all these things are case by case and people are susceptible in different ways.
	And the predators like Keith Ranieri, who are very good at it, are very good at spotting that and they're proactive in doing it.
	What they have going for them a lot of the times is they know what it's like to be you with your vulnerabilities and they know how to spot them and exploit them.
	People who are more susceptible, they can probably spot, they spend more time with.
	And with people like Keith, you know, for me, I wasn't targeted in the same way.
	He was targeting women.
	So I was more peripheral to some of his abuse.
	But the people that were susceptible to what he was looking for were the people that he spent more time with.
	And he was, you know, if you could turn pro in abusing people, he was a professional at doing it.
	And that's ultimately what came out, you know, when everything came out about what he was doing and how he was doing.
	Well, people talk so much about how he was this gifted, brilliant man.
	And it's true that in this one lane, not the lane.
	Look at him now.
	I mean, this is like, this looks like somebody who's trying to be a cult leader.
	He's got the Jesus there, the beard, you know, it's like, in retrospect, yeah, of course.
	Yeah, that picture doesn't do him any justice.
	No, he did get a makeover, by the way, and I want to say 2010 or 11, where he was a little more clean cut and would wear like poloed shirts and nice jeans.
	And yeah, because the people around him are like, you got to clean up a bit because you're not.
	But he would spend that, you know, he would spend that in the same way that say, you know, Einstein was quirky and he didn't care about that stuff.
	You know, that's Keith.
	He's just Keith.
	He's being him.
	He doesn't put value on himself and all that stuff.
	And then that's a total affectation.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's, it was built in.
	So you formed it.
	So you, you've, you've talked on your podcast about the steps to realize you're in a cult or getting recruited by a cult.
	And people do need to be aware.
	There are tons of cults.
	It is not just this one.
	They're all over the United States.
	And you get, usually you get roped in the way you two did unknowingly.
	So one of the first red flags is what we just talked about, which is a lot of money.
	They want you to pay and it tends to be escalatory, like a pyramid scheme, like more, more and more for the next level.
	Because ideally, what they want you to feel at the end of the five day is it was super valuable, but also there's something in you that needs to be fixed.
	And of course, they're providing the answers to fix you.
	And that's the only way, or that's another red flag.
	This is the path forward.
	This is the, this is the way to evolve whatever it was that you've just realized about yourself is broken.
	And that's, by the way, like very commonplace.
	Nexium is, I don't know if you are afraid of Scientology or not.
	We're not anymore, but Scientology, Landmark, like all of these programs are all based on the same premise.
	You know, if you want to transform your life, then you have to pay money.
	You have to pay to play.
	And this is the path.
	And to justify the buy-in, too.
	You know, you're there working for five days.
	You want to make sure that you feel that your investment was worth it.
	And so they'll say stuff like, well, was having that awareness about yourself worth the price of admission?
	And you're kind of going, well, maybe I could have gotten that from a book, but I did spend two grand to be here.
	So we have confirmation bias.
	Yeah.
	So here's a question for you.
	Now in retrospect, knowing what you know, do you feel like, take Keith out of it?
	Do you feel like the emissaries around Keith were all along like knowingly pushing a pyramid scheme or whether everyone was brainwashed by this guy?
	You know, was I believe he was at the top actively manipulating, but how about everybody around?
	Nippy loves answering this question.
	So here's my delineation.
	And you can take it for what it's worth.
	I think there's a lot of people there.
	I'd say 98% of them, 99% of them who were there because we thought we were doing something good.
	And the closer to Keith Ranieri you got, the more abuse you experienced.
	And in cases of the worst case scenarios, he was sexually abusing them and they didn't think they were doing it, being sexually abused.
	They thought they were going on a spiritual path with someone sexually.
	So, and they were told to keep that secret.
	So 99% of the people stayed in the organization based on the capacity of the people around him to lie.
	We underestimated the people around him, their capacity to lie to us and keep us loyal to someone that they knew who wasn't, they knew he wasn't who they were pretending he was.
	Meaning he presented himself as celibate.
	He presented himself as these things and the people around him knew that he wasn't that and they were propagating the lie and they were propagating the lie because if they didn't believe in the lie, they had to admit to themselves they were being abused.
	So the buy-in for them was my entire life is a fraud and I'm and I'm propagating this myth knowingly.
	But if I let other people know, that means I have to admit I'm abused.
	So it's like knowing and not knowing at the same time, right?
	But a lot of people made major life decisions based on their capacity to lie.
	Because if I had known that's what he was doing and I found out afterwards that some of my friends that, you know, someone I knew was sexually abused by him and all that stuff, if I hadn't known that stuff when I had first done it, I'd have been in there raising hell from the get.
	But because I didn't know that stuff and I was peripheral, I didn't think this stuff was going on because I didn't think the people that I knew and were friends with were being abused because I thought they would have said something.
	So they couldn't, you know, and I didn't know what I was looking at.
	So, and I would have protected them.
	I would have been the first one in there.
	And I think they knew that.
	So I think that that's why they didn't want to tell me that.
	So there's a lot of things keeping this thing propped up.
	And once the truth came out, you know, everything fell apart.
	And so that's my delineation.
	Like it's hard for me to, I never knowingly lied about Keith Ranieri and who he was.
	I was unwittingly aligned with someone abusing people.
	And that was, you know, I had to go fix that, you know, and Sarah and I, you know, have done everything we can to fix that.
	But the people that were close to him have to reconcile being abused by him and them lying about who he was to keep people loyal to him.
	So can I tell you guys?
	It's kind of a double whammy.
	Yeah.
	I've said this before.
	In fact, whenever I talk about Nexium, this comes up for me because in many ways it reminds me of Fox News, my time at Fox News when Roger Nells was running it.
	He was a cult leader.
	And Fox News, when I was there, was in many ways like a cult.
	It was definitely, quote, culty.
	He was the leader whose judgment was not to be questioned.
	We were to defend him at all costs and not question his genius.
	Anybody who left was otherized and demonized immediately, you know, even just a correspondent who like got fired, you know, who didn't want to go.
	Doesn't matter.
	You're on the outs.
	It's us versus them.
	And I, as I got higher in the organization, you know, closer to the sun and got to know him better and better, all I could think of was that Carly Simon song, sometimes I wish, often I wish that I never knew all those secrets of yours.
	I was getting exposed to the reality.
	And I had a real wrestling session with myself on an ongoing basis about who is he?
	Who is this man?
	You know, is he this all-knowing television genius?
	Or is he this frail, conspiratorial, paranoid guy who's a genius at messaging?
	And I've been sucked into it and to be a cog in this massive wheel.
	And honestly, I don't, I don't know if I have a clear answer on that even right now, but I totally get what you went through.
	Well, the questions you're asking are valuable.
	And that's why our podcast is called a little bit culty, because the abuses of power that went on in cults or go on in cults aren't proprietary to cults.
	They go on a lot of places and putting language to it and shining a light on it is kind of in our lane.
	And the fact that you can make those connections is great, I think valuable for a lot of people.
	Absolutely.
	And it's so important right now because I think even if you use the word cult, people get a little defensive and they go, it's not a cult traditionally.
	It doesn't have all of the markers.
	But another way of saying it is, is this a healthy place for me to be?
	I remember when you were dealing with that publicly, I got goosebumps just now as you were talking that I started to make those correlations without obviously knowing everything that you just said.
	But anytime that there's someone who you can't question without getting in trouble and there's this air of fear in an workplace environment, don't have to call it a cult.
	It's just not good for you.
	You can't express your true opinions.
	You don't want to say what's really on your mind.
	And like you said, you're separated from yourself because, you know, you want to keep your job.
	That's not, that's not healthy.
	Never mind culty, whatever.
	Does that make sense?
	And at Fox, similar to Nexium, it came out in the whole Me Too scandal that he had this secret floor at Fox with these private detectives and others who would be digging up dirt on his enemies, anybody who turned on him.
	It was a very risky thing to do to challenge him in any way, which is why, you know, his Me Too scandal went on for so long without anybody speaking up about it.
	People understood you didn't cross him.
	And these leaders, they have that ability of scaring you through their emissaries, through their messaging.
	You know, they have ways of letting you know that you'll pay if you cross them or the group.
	And it's amazing how, again, you can be pulled into this, even though you don't think you're one of them.
	At Nexium, it was a step further where you guys actually called him Vanguard.
	You know, he had like the name.
	Was that at first?
	Did that feel silly?
	Were you like, what?
	Oh, God.
	At first and at last, Megan, the whole time it was that, you know, it was.
	But also it became normalized.
	Like, you know, people would say.
	Vanguard means it's the leader of a philosophical movement and that's what he's done.
	So, you know, you call him Vanguard.
	Some people called him V out of school.
	I know, out of the center, we called him Keith.
	But it just became normal, like all the things that were weird at first, the sashes, the bowing.
	And that was introduced on day one as these are the things we do.
	As in, you know, if you go to someone's house and they take off their shoes, you take off your shoes because that's the polite thing to do.
	So you go to their center, you wear the sash, you call them Vanguard.
	You kind of just like, I'm just doing it because you're asking me to, and I'm taking off my shoes.
	And then it becomes a courtesy.
	Yeah, it's a courtesy.
	Yeah.
	And then it's a dojo.
	So this is like a martial arts system.
	We wear these sashes.
	It denotes what level of rank you are, just like in a dojo.
	Oh, you don't want to wear one?
	Well, let's look at that.
	But what area in your life do you feel like you might have an issue with authority?
	You know, and then you, again, you don't know that you're being gaslit because they're saying it nicely.
	They're there to help you with your authority issues, which by the way, some of us may also have.
	So there's like truth mixed in with the gaslighting.
	And then you're questioning yourself and you're like, whatever, it's a piece of fabric.
	I'm just going to wear the stupid sash.
	And it was done effectively.
	I mean, Lauren Salzman was a really good head trainer and she would teach it in a way to normalize it pretty quickly.
	She's like, you know, she's the daughter of one of the co-founders, Nancy Salzman.
	Nancy Salzman.
	Go on to become Sarah's best friend.
	Keep going.
	And she would do it in a way that's like, look, we do these things at work.
	We do these things, you know, we have titles like Your Honor and Justice Systems.
	And so she was drawing parallels in the curriculum drew parallels in society of like, where you could go as a student, okay, I'll wear it for this training.
	Right.
	And so slowly you're starting to become acclimated and indoctrinated into a culture that you haven't seen anything bad about yet.
	You just think it's weird.
	And some people would be okay with it.
	I was never really comfortable with it, but we always, I mean, for the most part, we all thought it was weird.
	And all of us were like, look, we got to lose the sashes.
	We're losing students.
	So it was kind of like one of those things where we all knew the optics of it.
	At Fox News, it was polyester bright colored dresses.
	Oh, everyone has their users.
	There you go.
	There you go.
	Could have been worse.
	I was going to say, which is worse.
	They said all these wonderful things about Keith.
	He's this, he's that, the other thing.
	And I remember talking to Catherine Oxenberg about when she got her first look at him.
	And of course, she comes from Hollywood.
	She's like, you know, she's, she knows what an attractive person looks like, you know, in a way Californians know acutely.
	And I remember her being like, she was like, that's it?
	That's him.
	Did you like, that's Vanguard?
	Do you, did you have a moment like that when you first got eyes?
Owning How I Got Trapped 00:15:44
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, he just looked like a schlubby, you know, volleyball playing.
	I think he actually had knee pads on.
	I'll take it to a disagree.
	I mean, look, I played sports my whole life.
	I was a college athlete and they were trying to sell this guy as an athlete.
	And I went and showed up to one of the volleyball things.
	You know, my friend took me one night and I was, it was late and I was kicking and screaming going to that because in my mind, I was going to take a training piece out.
	And I saw him moving around.
	I was like, do you guys really think this guy's an athlete?
	Like, look at him.
	Like, they were like all marveling at how he played volleyball.
	And I'm over there just kind of going, oh my God.
	Like, what is going on here?
	Wait, stand by because we have a little video of this.
	I'll show the audience and pick it back up.
	Great.
	Yeah.
	Don't take my word for it.
	Practice generating an extreme feeling of joy over it.
	And there's Alison Mack with Smallville.
	There are methods that we have, especially in 2C.
	Meeting him for the first time.
	It's one of our intense things.
	Thank you.
	That was good.
	I really want to do I have a die hung and I kiss.
	Oh my gosh.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Not a strong selling point.
	And he had, you know, I always joke about this.
	And I, and I always gave the people that the person that enrolled me a lot of crap for this because I was like, why is he putting the fact that he's a judo champion in sixth grade on his resume?
	Like, why is that a selling point?
	It's like, you know, there's a lot of things that I did in sixth grade that were as successful that I've forgotten about.
	Like, I don't like, just he's a judo champ.
	I was like, get over it.
	Why didn't he continue?
	Why didn't he go into like, you know, mixed martial arts in his 20?
	That would be more impressive.
	But the sixth grade achievements on his resume.
	I was a middle aged.
	I was running up for a class president in the fifth grade.
	I lost him.
	I'm really proud of you, Megan.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I feel really good about it.
	All was said and done.
	I don't think he hadn't yet been tried.
	So it wasn't all said and done.
	But after we get to, you know, and we'll get to this, but he got arrested.
	I had an interview with his lawyer, Mark Agnifolo.
	It was contentious.
	Yes, we saw that.
	And forgot about that.
	Remember that?
	We cuss.
	And yeah, you can curse.
	That was bullshit.
	I was pissed.
	I was so grateful for you, though, for asking the tough questions.
	Yeah, that was great.
	You were like, seriously, Mark?
	He was like, we don't do slavery here.
	What do you mean?
	We pick ourselves up.
	We're strong.
	New Yorkers are.
	I'm like, okay, you can be strong and be sexually manipulated as the women are alleging here.
	He was like, what do you mean?
	New York jury's not going to buy that.
	Well, okay.
	So here's a little clip where I got into it with him about what amazing, accomplished man Keith Ranieri supposedly was.
	Check it out.
	About Keith Ranieri and his tenuous relationship with the truth.
	He claimed he graduated from high school and started RPI at age 16.
	That's not true.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I don't know when he started.
	He claimed he could make full sentences by the age of one.
	If exaggerating about one's resume is a crime, I think we're all in trouble.
	No, I'm not.
	I'm probably not either, but other than the two of us.
	This guy is a liar.
	He has a long history of lying about himself and his achievements, including his time at RPI, where he was a 2.2 GPA and not a triple major who set records at the school.
	That doesn't worry me in the least.
	No?
	No.
	Well, my hero.
	My favorite line is, no, I'm not.
	And he's like, Yeah, no, me neither.
	I would actually, none of us really do that.
	That was like 19-year-old stuff.
	Oh, that was so great.
	You made him.
	He's not the brightest bulb.
	Even you have like, we're kind of like, I don't get it.
	Is this the genius?
	But okay, you know, but the women around him seem to have been really on, and men too, but like on and kind and warm and offering something.
	So it wasn't all about him, Sarah.
	Is that correct?
	Well, I'm going to add one caveat here.
	Just it's important.
	Like it's easy to sit back in hindsight and make fun of it and kind of distance ourselves from what we had fallen for.
	I will say, for me personally, I was all in on the curriculum.
	I was all in what I thought we were doing.
	So one of the things that I don't like is when people don't own what they fell for and try to distance themselves from like, you know, I fell for this.
	And it kind of minimizes the story and the magnitude of what can happen.
	You know, for me, I was somewhat evangelical about like, hey, this is these are ethics.
	These are changing the world.
	Yes, I thought Keith was weird, but I was hook line and sink or bought into what we were doing.
	And not totally sold on Keith, but like didn't think there was bad things going on there in the way that they were.
	So I think it's important to own that that's how I got myself in the situation and not minimize the fact that I did fall for this thing.
	And it's easy to laugh at now.
	So anyway, I just think it's important because I don't want to punch down on people that are in that situation because I do think you have to go take the bite out of that and really lean into it to understand what happened to you.
	So it's fun and kidding, but just putting that out there.
	Yeah.
	And it's therapeutic to laugh after the fact, too.
	It is.
	It is.
	I have plenty of laughter be through this trauma if it wasn't for the way that Nippy and I can laugh about it and continue to.
	But to answer your question, I think for me, it was a little different.
	Even though he was a schlub and I wasn't attracted to him, I was greatly respectful of what I thought that he built.
	I thought his mind created this tech, which is another red flag, by the way, that curriculum.
	It's not a technology, but we had been so changed by it.
	And I thought that came from him.
	And I obviously now know that he stole that from a number of other modalities that already exist and packaged it as his own.
	But then he was also propped up by these women that seemed to have their lives together and people that I really liked and respected.
	So I was getting so many of my social and emotional and spiritual needs met very, very quickly.
	Community, meaning.
	I was helping myself.
	I was growing, but I got to help others.
	I got to give people the transformational experience that I was getting, which totally filled my cup.
	I felt special.
	I got taken under the wing of women that I really looked up to and they were going to help me grow.
	And also it was measurable.
	The strike path, the martial arts system of growth, was so different than acting, which had what I'd been doing before, which is, you know, you never know if you're going to book work or not book work.
	And now I knew I could just do boom, and I would evolve.
	Like, that's what a great promise.
	I didn't, again, like Nippy said, I underestimated that, you know, how much bullshit that actually was.
	But if it was what it said it was, it would have been amazing.
	I know.
	I'm ready to sign up right now.
	I hear you.
	And I'm like, yeah, I want it all.
	And so he, you and he interacted quite a bit in the show, The Vow, which is on HBO, which is an excellent documentary about all of this and how he went down.
	Has this scene of you and Keith, Sarah, you and Keith interacting as part of like your training.
	We've cut a little bit of it just to give the audience a flavor.
	It's thought too.
	I keep drawing a blank.
	That's okay.
	And I know I'm giving you unbearable grief.
	It's okay.
	But if you could do it here, you can do it in New York.
	I know I should know.
	All right.
	He's ready to have fun.
	All right.
	Okay.
	So, in order to have fun, we don't want anyone to get hurt.
	Right?
	No, not fun enough.
	Who here is here to have fun?
	Fun?
	Come on.
	Fun?
	Okay.
	You shouldn't be trying to turn up their energy level.
	Okay.
	When the audience gives you the signal that they got it, you move, you move, you move.
	This is actually good.
	I mean, I'm listening to him like that's all good advice, I think.
	He was teaching basic rapport skills of how to like lead a group in the room.
	But I haven't actually seen that since the VAW came out.
	I forgot how painful that was, A, to watch, and B, in the moment.
	And that was actually one of the only times I was ever trained by Keith personally in sales.
	And it's crazy.
	I thought it was how beautiful you are.
	You're so beautiful.
	Like the angles of your face and the earnestness of you standing up there, actually trying to learn it.
	And I see it though, like he's charming.
	And what he's saying to you makes sense of how to relate to a crowd.
	He's actually trying to improve you.
	He's trying to improve you, I think, to sell his products and get more buyers into his cult, no?
	Yes, but also he was humiliating me.
	I don't remember if you see it in the whole clip, but like he pushed me and pushed me and pushed me, trying to get me to break down.
	And I refused to cry.
	And at the end, he gave me a little crumb and said, good job.
	And that's when I remember like looking back that that's how he controlled so many of the women.
	He was always humiliating them subtly under the guise of trying to develop them and then would give them these little crumbs of attention and affirmation that they were on track.
	And he didn't really mess with me much, mostly because I think I was out in Vancouver just bringing new fresh students to him.
	So he didn't deal with that a lot with me, but that was a particular painful moment that I'd completely forgot about until I saw the vow and was horrified.
	I also don't think you're susceptible in the same ways.
	I was not susceptible in the same ways.
	Well, we've since learned through mostly through our podcast and interviewing other survivors and experts, especially experts on gaslighting and narcissism and cults, that a lot of these guys really look for, it's such a, I hate to use the word, but like daddy issues, but like a bad attachment with their father in some case or bad, not good attachment with the parents.
	So then Keith would step in and be that father figure to a lot of these women, you know, to grow them, to coach them, similar to how he was doing with Allison in that clip.
	He never reached me in that way.
	Partly, I think, because I have a great relationship with my dad and strong attachment, if you believe in those theories with my parents.
	So, I mean, he got me in other ways, but not that way.
	Thank goodness.
	And also, you know, with Nippy long-term protected me, which I think also infuriated him, knowing what we know now.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Oh, God.
	I can relate to all of this too.
	I was just thinking like when Roger L started to feel like I was getting out from under his thumb, I was not, you know, just going to do whatever he wanted me to do or say whatever he wanted me to say.
	He started to insult me like a fair amount behind the scenes to try to, you know, cut down my confidence.
	And it just, I don't know if I'd identified that.
	I always just sort of attributed it to anger, but it, you're giving me a new way to think of it almost, you know, like it's, it's a manipulation almost, like to change you so that you'll go back to the way you were.
	There's a term nagging.
	I don't know if you've heard it.
	I don't know the book.
	It's called the game.
	Yeah, it's from the game.
	And the idea is, as I understand it, is I'll give you a little bit of approval so it feels good.
	And then you'll always be chasing that approval.
	And then also you would start insulting like the person, it's actually a dating training for men to try to get women, like men who can't just like date women normally would learn this way of like, yeah, it's basically dropping these little breadcrumbs of approval, but then also the nagging is sort of like an insult, these little insults.
	It's like establish interest and then take it away so that you'll want it more.
	It's why you see sometimes women with these men, you're like, what is going on there?
	Cause they're like giving, it's almost like a microcosm of sex trafficking and grooming.
	It's love bombing.
	I've had a couple episodes where women have described this valuing, you know, the cult of one.
	You know, we've had some episodes where people have described this strategy where men target women, find their vulnerabilities and exploit it in that way.
	And depending on, I'm giving, I'm kind of out of my lane here, but depending on your attachment, say with, you know, a loved one or a previous loved one or something like that, they recognize now that you might be vulnerable to that strategy.
	And if not, you might be vulnerable to another one.
	So this is how they operate and this is how they work.
	And this is how they filter a room.
	I think they can, I think they can walk into a room, according to some interviews we had, and spot the person just by the way they look, by the care of themselves, because they have such intel and such a body of work on people that they can kind of scan a room and go, this person probably is susceptible to this, this, this, and this.
	Yeah, right.
	And they do find out what your issues were.
	I mean, I was like you, Sarah, where I didn't really have that many.
	I mean, thankfully, I come from a great family, though my dad died when I was young, but a very loving family and I was a strong person.
	But you can still get sucked in.
	It doesn't just happen to weak people.
	It happens to strong, weak people with issues, people who have almost no issues.
	It's that's one of the things I hope people take away from your story is absolutely a lot of these women were very strong, very smart, accomplished.
	And before they knew it, you know, they were on the table without their clothes on saying, it would be my honor if you would do this thing to me.
	Right.
	So let's push it forward a little.
	Can we just talk one minute about the Seagram's heirs?
	Because he had strong and powerful and very wealthy backers too.
	Because, you know, you wonder, like Nexium wasn't just in Albany.
	It was in quite a few places.
	You're Canadian.
	He branched out quite a bit and he had some important financial backers.
	So can you talk about these pair of sisters, the Bronfmans?
	You want to feel that one?
	I mean, you can chime in when, as I understand it, because again, Sarah and I weren't the inner circle, right?
	So you have to understand we are observing it from the outside, but what we've gathered and what court documents have gathered is that I think, and this is what we've kind of ascertained, is once they came in, they became made that they the admitted powers that be made them special and promoted them very quickly.
	And then as I understand it, it's like getting a Bezos or a Gates wants to join the organization and help them.
	Sure.
	They were VIPs.
	And they were targeted.
	And I think Claire, from my assessment, was a little bit more susceptible when she was put in a position of authority and power and kind of ushered to the top where she was making decisions, but really it was Keith making decisions.
	Sarah, less so because I think Sarah, you know, wanted other things.
	I worked with Sarah a little bit in New York City because we ran the center there for a little bit.
	And I just think she constantly struggled with her commitment to the organization.
	I think she wanted a husband, a family, and that's ultimately what she ended up doing.
	So she ended up being peripheral ultimately, but her sister was in clinical sink.
	Claire was the one who held on to the bitter end.
	I mean, she was like, yes, we're taking She still does.
	She's still like, no, still till now.
	Yeah, still now.
Penance and Collateral Damage 00:07:15
	Wow.
	She's in jail.
	And she got the maximum sentence for her crimes.
	She got tripled the suggested amount.
	Because she refused to disavow Keith in court.
	Incredible.
	I think I said it, but this is the heir to the Seagram's liquor fortune and beverage fortune.
	Okay, so you guys were, things were kind of rolling along.
	And then something critical happened to you, Sarah, where your best friend, who we mentioned, who is the daughter of the co-founder, Lauren, came to you and wanted you to do something that would make you extra special, like sort of an exclusive thing she wanted to share with you as your best friend and in this lane of female empowerment.
	Can you explain what happened?
	Sure.
	And there's a lot of steps that led to this point.
	And this is often where people stop and go, sorry, what happened?
	And I need to give a little backstory, which is this is, you know, 12 years into the organization.
	We've had our first child.
	I'm starting to pull back.
	I'm starting to recognize I want other things and being a mom is more important to me than growing this company.
	And I get invited to a secret sorority.
	I've never been in a sorority, a secret club for women by women, a badass, sounds so dumb now, badass bitch boot camp where we're going to work on ourselves and take the tools to a whole new level, although it's got nothing to do with Nexium.
	And I sign up thinking this is going to take everything I've been working on to the next level.
	Also, Lauren invited me and I trust her implicitly.
	She was also, you know, she's our son's godmother, married us at our wedding.
	So, you know, I say, why not?
	And it's, it was many, many, many steps that occurred from saying yes to that and then being fully committed to this organization called DOS, which I didn't know what it meant till after the fact.
	Yeah, I, my body, I can feel my body.
	I haven't talked about this in a while.
	My body started to go into like a little bit of a trauma response.
	And I'm aware that I have to be careful.
	But tell me, what can I tell you about it?
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	I can see it.
	And I know people who have been through like really traumatic things, this can happen.
	It can have a physical effect just to speak about it.
	So I can help fill in some of the blanks.
	Oh, I can see you're getting upset.
	I'm sorry.
	I know what you're doing.
	It's okay.
	I thought it was, it's been seven years.
	I thought I was past it, but it's just been a while to revisit it.
	Well, it's deeply traumatizing because it's this organization to which you've devoted your life, your best friend, a person you trusted, a person you thought loved you, who asked you to do this extraordinary thing and manipulated you into doing it.
	So why don't we run a clip from the vow from HBO's The Vows, in which this explains she came to you with a proposal that you be her slave, quote, slave.
	She would be your master.
	And here's a little detail on how that was supposed to work.
	It's like a heightened level of a coaching relationship, which makes sense that she goes into, and we call it master slave.
	So what I knew at this point is that Lauren has sisters.
	She was part of a pod.
	I knew there were other sisters under Lauren.
	She said, one day you'll have slaves and you'll have six slaves and then you'll be a grandmaster.
	And I'm like, no, keep in mind, every step along the way is totally weird, just like sashes are weird.
	But then Lauren explains it and it's like, a little less weird.
	And I think we should tell the audience about collateral before we talk about what happened next, because this was an important piece of the story.
	Can you explain what collateral meant within Nexium or within DOS?
	Sure.
	So even before DOS was introduced, there was this term called collateral.
	And brilliantly, Keith set this up for years before this ever happened.
	I mean, think about if I joined in 2005 and they would have told me that 12 years later I would have the leader's initials on my body.
	I probably would have run for the hills, but it didn't happen that way.
	And I would say in around 2010, 11 is when collateral got introduced.
	And it was, it was earlier.
	It was much earlier than this.
	It was 2017 that I got branded.
	And collateral was basically a term that, well, it's a term in the English language, but Nexium, it was something that you'd put down as a commitment against your word.
	Is that something?
	Yeah, like if you were going to do a goal around weight loss or writing a screenplay, you'd say, if I don't do X, Y, and Z, I'm putting this $500 down and it's going to go, yeah, going to go to charity or something, or I'm going to donate it to the center, or I'm going to whatever.
	And that was also mixed with penance, which I think if anyone's religious, I was not religious.
	I didn't understand the term or have any background to it, but penance was a part of it as well.
	People were doing penances and putting down collaterals against their word.
	And in Nexium, your word, your commitment, your integrity was one of the highest values, which may not make sense to the average listener, but there's just certain components of the belief system that was slowly infiltrated into our belief system over time that was of the utmost value.
	And one of those things was commitment, your word.
	And so it was very normal to give collateral to back something up.
	And then it went next level in DOS, as I understand it, where they didn't want you to just give $500.
	They wanted something much more personal and potentially damaging.
	Yeah.
	And every step along the way with DOS, there was more and more collateral.
	And then once I had finally fully committed, I found out that there was going to be collateral collected every month.
	So people were giving things like nude photos, like sexual videos, false testimonies, false accusations of like the worst possible thing you could say against your parents that your master would hold.
	So that if you ever defected or left the group, that those things would be released, those letters would be released.
	One person, I think, that wrote that their parents had molested them, or that there was a lawyer involved who said that she had falsified evidence in a trial that would have gotten her disbarred.
	Terrible, terrible things.
	But these things were meant, we were told, to keep, help you keep your word, never to be released.
	Otherwise, that would be blackmail, which is what it was.
	That's the appropriate word.
	Yeah, speaking of Scientology.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, just to jump to later, deprogramming and watching Go and Clear and all the Scientology content, I was just blown away by the similarities there, the collection of all the secrets, which also happened in Nexium even before DOS was introduced.
Naked Ceremonies and Blackmail 00:02:25
	When you came to do a training, you'd write down on the intake form like what your goals were, why you were there.
	What was your worst moment ever in your life?
	What was your worst decision?
	I mean, depending on bad things you may or may not have done in your life, those things in the wrong hands 100% be blackmail.
	So this is their strategy.
	Yeah, very scary.
	So your best friend, Lauren, asks you to engage in this ceremony where you're going to take off your clothes.
	And first of all, that must have been like, you know, women will change in front of each other or going out or like you don't ask your friend to get naked in front of you.
	So was that, do you remember having a big reaction to that moment?
	Yeah.
	So when she invited me to DOS originally, what she told me was that I was going to be having a special, very special ceremony with my other sisters who hadn't met yet in the sorority, you know, initiation.
	She didn't say anything about being naked.
	She said we were going to get a matching tattoo that was really pretty.
	And she showed me the location on her body and told me it was dime-sized.
	That's what she told me on the night of is when she asked me to get naked and put a blindfold on.
	And it's just like, you know, even now to this day, it's, it's difficult talking about it, obviously, but explaining why somebody would say yes to that.
	And ironically, I've recently just talking to somebody who was in a fraternity, heard my story.
	I was like, oh, I get it.
	Like when I was in a fraternity, like we're sort of agreeing to like, this is a game and like you're, you know, you're above me and I'm going to let you paddle me.
	And like, okay, but as part of the, you know, we're just in a fraternity.
	You're not really my master.
	You're not really, I'm not really your slave.
	And that's always how I felt about it.
	So when she asked me to do that, I was kind of like, okay, okay, we're doing this.
	All right.
	Like, and I, you know, I knew Lauren well.
	I had been, you know, I changed in front of her and like laid down naked in front of her.
	Like, it's just, it's crazy.
	It's, I understand how crazy it is.
	And, you know, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to explain 12 years of indoctrination to lead one to this point to understand what could be going on in my psychology that I would say, okay, and not like, this is fucking weird.
	And like call Nippy to come pick me up because he'd dropped me off to have what he thought was soup and salad growth night or something, right?
	Oh, boy.
	You guys, you are married at this point, right?
	You're married.
	We were married.
Proof Required for the Group 00:05:16
	Two-year-old.
	He was three.
	Oh, yeah, almost three.
	Turned three five days after we blew it up.
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	So you, I mean, I mean, this is just like you, you know, you did absolutely nothing wrong.
	What your decisions are completely understandable given the context.
	And she was the villain here.
	And so she, so now she reveals it's not a tattoo, it's a brand.
	And that too was misrepresented.
	Like, what am I getting branded on me?
	Like, what, and she did not, what did she tell you it was?
	She told, so at this point, I'm with all my sisters.
	So there was four other women and Lauren and then the doctor.
	I say that loosely, who was branding.
	Yeah.
	And she showed all of us and she said it was a symbol for the elements.
	And it was, I still can't remember if she said Greek or Latin or something, but it was another language symbolically and also looked like the elements, like a symbol for water and air and earth and whatnot.
	So it was, it was a symbol.
	And but what we were told it meant overall was it was a commitment to our growth, which is where the indoctrination leading up to this moment kicks in, because not only am I committed to this group and I'm committed to Lauren and I'm committed to my growth, but I have also learned through the many, many years of programs and workshops that I've taken that no pain, no gain, and there's all these other correlations that I don't believe anymore, that pain is love and love is pain.
	And you have to experience pain to grow and to love and all these other, you know, word salad bullshit meanings that were part of our belief system.
	And then in addition to that, we have the female male training that we'd been learning that women, and this is Keith's misogynist beliefs around women, is that we are always looking for the back door.
	We lack commitment.
	We're too feelings driven and we don't have any honor or character.
	And this is my opportunity to prove that I'm not that way.
	So even when I'm like literally looking for the back door in this little complex, this duplex that I later found out belonged to Allison, in my head, I'm gaslighting myself and saying, you know, this is what women do.
	You can't back out now.
	You said you were going to do it.
	You got to do it.
	Just fucking do it.
	Just get on the table and do it and prove that you can do it.
	And I did it.
	And I did probably one of the most difficult physical things I've ever done other than childbirth to be branded with a clatterizing iron in a ceremony that took somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes without an aesthetic.
	And that is something that I was only able to do because I completely disassociated.
	I didn't know that at the time, but I was thinking about love of my family, the love of my son, getting through childbirth, knowing that I could do that.
	I could do it again.
	And I'd also seen what happened to the other women who went before me.
	It looked like torture.
	And I was determined to be strong and prove to everybody that I could do it because I'm a strong fucking woman and I'm a badass and I'm going to be part of this group.
	And that's what it takes to be part of the group.
	Yeah.
	And so I did it.
	Why did it take 30 to 40 minutes?
	Because she would do a line and then stop.
	And then Lauren would recite something and I would repeat it back.
	It may have been less.
	It's one of the reasons why I was not a witness in the trial because I thought it was just one brand.
	So it was repeated.
	I was a little bit branding.
	In other words, burning of your skin.
	I was just one mark, you know, that was drawn.
	Cast me that pen.
	It was like, imagine a clutterizing iron has a tip like a pen and every, it basically slices through your flesh in a line.
	So you'd be like, like, so every line that you see in that diagram was done individually.
	And some of the lines took longer than others.
	And that's why I was determined to do it quickly because I wanted it to be over with.
	So it may have, it may have been less for me, maybe 25 minutes or so.
	I know some of the women took almost an hour because they had to stop and like gather their wits to keep going.
	So you weren't the only one getting branded that night.
	I was the third of the fourth, but I recall.
Keith's Initials on Flesh 00:15:52
	Wow.
	That's kind of worse in a way.
	You know, it's like, I'd rather be first, I guess.
	So you don't have shrieks before you.
	Yeah.
	I honestly don't remember that much about the night, but I remember looking at one of the women that I was branded with.
	And at first we were wearing surgical masks because of the smell.
	And I remember looking, seeing her eyes like over the top of the mask and just pure terror in both of our eyes of like, what in the actual fuck?
	And then we just went for it.
	And I do remember like, you know, making light of it and trying to, you know, muscle through it with humor and completely disassociated.
	Later, I got to see the video because there was a trial against the doctor.
	And I mean, that was horrific, also that that even still existed and that was kept, which was also further.
	I saw the video of her branding you.
	I had to watch it for the trial.
	Whoa.
	Whoa.
	Yeah.
	And by the way, Way was the only woman in DOS that would speak to that because they were still either too afraid to speak or still loyal to Keith and had believed that it was, you know, a good thing to do.
	What is this lunatic doctor saying?
	How is she defending her branding of you?
	There actually, there's, there's some, she went on, was it 2020 with Mickey?
	She went on dateline to defend herself and is still loyal to Keith, even though she's had her doctor's license taken away.
	And would be, I, you know, I let it go and forgive her and would have had a very different approach had she just been like, hey, that was a major fuck up on my part.
	But she, even to the day, to the end, still now says that we committed to this thing, knowing that we wouldn't know the details.
	She branded me knowing that the symbol was not what we said it was.
	And by the way, that it's that evening itself is not what woke me up.
	It was finding out that it was Keith's initials in the monogram.
	And there's proof that she.
	Sorry?
	That's the big reveal about this, right?
	Yeah.
	It wasn't a symbol of the elements at all.
	It was the initials KR for him.
	You've been branded with another man's initials.
	Yes, that's that's my body.
	That's like one or two days after the branding.
	That's us inside.
	You can see it so clearly now.
	Just for the listening audience, it's a K, capital K on its side.
	So the straight line is at top at the top.
	And then the R is in reverse inside the lower triangle.
	You can see if you zoom out, it's clearly KR.
	So we actually have a, we have a bit from the vow of you confronting Lauren, your best friend, on the fact that this is not the elements.
	This is Keith Ranieri's initials.
	And here's that in SOT5.
	I didn't make the brand.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I know you didn't make the brand, Lauren.
	And now I just looked at it from the side and it says KR.
	I have Keith's initials beside my vajana.
	Do you think Nippy's ever going to want to go down there again?
	I mean, is Keith behind Doss?
	Is Keith the one who organized this?
	It's not something that we discuss, Sarah.
	Yeah, Lauren, Lauren.
	It's a real Lauren.
	I use some of the tools.
	He gave them permission to use collateral and pendants.
	Okay, but he didn't know about the branding.
	He knew about it, but he didn't cause it.
	And he didn't create the brand.
	The girl did.
	Oh my God.
	I haven't seen this in a while.
	It's so absurd.
	What's that?
	I mean, so what's not in the vow that it's not too super clear is that I knew more than I let Lauren know that I know, if that makes sense.
	So I was trying to figure out what she was going to do.
	So like something had switched for you.
	Yes, like I was more out than she knew.
	So to hear it, to hear me ask her straight up and to hear her pause and not answer me is just, I just like, my, my whole body is shaking just remembering that time period, those two weeks where I, you know, we were out.
	We had figured out that Keith's initials were my body.
	We'd spoken to Mark Vicente, the man who originally introduced me.
	We had shared what we knew.
	I knew about the branding.
	He had heard all this stuff about the sex.
	We're putting it all together and we were like, holy fuck, like our worlds had just got flipped upside down.
	But we knew that we couldn't just, you know, go to them and be like, you're a cult and you're a sociopath and you're a sex trafficker.
	We had to play our cards right because otherwise they were going to turn on us because we'd seen them turn on people who defected.
	So we had to kind of figure out a strategy where we were like, wait, what's going on?
	That's why when I'm hearing it, do you remember?
	It was like, we were kind of double agents.
	We were like, wait, his initials are on my body.
	And do we know about, like, does he know about this?
	I knew he knew about the branding because I already figured that out from a number of other, like we put things together.
	So I had to pretend to be a little bit more.
	We just started talking.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	We all started talking.
	So yeah, what?
	You came home from the branding and saw Nippy for the first time.
	And Nippy, you like what describe that moment when you find out Sarah's been branded?
	So I was actually asleep with our son when she got home.
	Well, that's that's the night that I came home.
	But then, but six weeks later is when you found out I found out I was in New York City.
	She was in Vancouver and I got a phone call and she told me about it.
	And I was driving with a friend of mine who's no longer a friend.
	And she told me and my initial reaction was, wait, what?
	Didn't Mark tell you first?
	Mark told me first.
	Yeah, Mark told him because I was about to say that she'd been branded or that it was Keith's initials.
	That she'd been branded with Keith.
	He hadn't seen it yet.
	I hadn't seen it yet.
	And there's a part of me that was like, there's got to be more to the story.
	Right.
	And then I was like, okay, my wife potentially got physically hurt here.
	Like I'm piecing it all together.
	And then it dawned on me, we might be in the grips of something diabolical here.
	And we need to get out.
	And I need to get my family out as quickly as possible from this.
	And Mark wasn't sure if I was going to be all in or whatever, because, you know, everyone had their doubts.
	Right.
	And they didn't think Keith was going to be this.
	And you have to admit to yourself.
	But it didn't.
	It was by the end of the conversation.
	I was like, okay, how are we going to blow this up?
	And I was pissed, obviously.
	And I had to, you know, reconcile all the primordial reactions to having your wife physically hurt.
	I didn't know that me being around Keith would have been smart because I don't know really what I would have done had I had to confront him.
	And we made a lot of really good decisions in a short amount of time to blow this up.
	A lot of that is documented in the Vow.
	It's very, it's very powerful to see you all working behind the scenes.
	It was a gift to us all for you guys to start taping and filming.
	And Mark, Mark was a videographer, right?
	Wasn't he?
	Yeah, he was the one who was part of your filmed all the stuff that hung him.
	Yeah.
	Well, he was a filmmaker before he got into Nexium.
	And then he was kind of hired internally to document everything because Keith wanted a library of his genius to live on.
	And Mark was an incredibly skilled DP and trained a bunch of people in Nexium to film every waking moment and sleeping moment sometimes of Keith and all the trainings and all his all his wisdom.
	As soon as shit went sideways, uh, we just continued to film.
	So, yeah, we didn't know this was going to be an HBO series.
	We just knew if anything, we were filming things to protect ourselves.
	Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how we thought about it at the time.
	We thought, okay, look, we didn't do anything wrong here.
	The perpetrator is Keith Renieri, but we know that they're going to come after us, start making stuff up about us, start gaslighting us, saying victimize themselves to us.
	So, we need to, which they tried.
	I mean, Claire came to Vancouver to try to get me arrested.
	She flew to Vancouver to speak to the Vancouver police, Trump Bronfman, and made up a bunch of things I stole from them.
	It was theft, mischief, and fraud.
	And all of those things.
	I had to hire a criminal defense lawyer.
	It was a very bad, stressful time.
	Some of my friends that, you know, ultimately, ultimately, people saw the truth that were loyal at the time.
	They called me and they were like, Yeah, she came to me and she said, Okay, give me the dirt on Nippy and Sarah that you have.
	He's like, I don't have any.
	Like, what?
	Like, what have we been doing?
	Yeah.
	That they were in an existential crisis, that Nexium and its fate hung in the balance.
	Yeah, we created a lot of mentioned that Keith knew that it was his initials that were being used in the brand.
	There was evidence of that submitted during his 2019 trial.
	This clip we're going to play here is via USA Today.
	And it's, it's Keith and the actress Alison Mack, who we've mentioned a couple times here.
	She was one of the stars of the show Smallville and was a critical part of all this, including DOS and the branding and so on.
	And then a master of quote slaves and his sort of right-hand person.
	And here's the two of them on tape discussing the brand.
	You think the person who's being branded should be completely nude and sort of held to the table like a sort of almost like a sacrifice?
	I don't know if that's a feeling of submission, you know?
	Videoing it from different angles or whatever gives collateral.
	It probably should be a more vulnerable position type of the thing.
	Back, leg slightly for legs spread straight, like being feet being held to the side of the table, hands probably above the head being held almost like tied down, like a sacrificial whatever.
	And the person should ask to be branded.
	Okay.
	Should say, please brand me.
	It would be an honor or something like that.
	Not an honor I want to wear for the rest of my life.
	I don't know.
	And they did make say something like that, something along the lines of honor.
	Master, would you brand me?
	It would be an honor, which is basically him proving in his mind that we asked for it, that it was a consensual thing.
	Oh, that must be so galling to listen to.
	Horrific.
	And also vindicating because he's in jail.
	He's in jail.
	Until that point, there were still people saying who were defending him.
	He had nothing to do with the branding.
	This is a bunch of women who made some bad decisions and they shouldn't have done it.
	And Keith had nothing to do with the branding.
	And now there's video or audio evidence of not only that he knew about it, but he came up with the idea of how to do it and pass it off to Allison so that she would take the fall.
	So it's, it's triply aggravated, not, there's no word astonishing, horrific.
	Well, you get the peek inside of a guy who's just diabolical.
	I mean, but you know what?
	You know what we're missing?
	And like, I want to address that portion of the audience that's like, well, that was, that was not a great decision, but you made it.
	You know, you accepted this brand.
	It went well beyond.
	That's not why he's in jail right now.
	It was a sex trafficking scheme.
	I mean, he was having young women who he was brainwashing into starving themselves nearly to death entering this so-called sisterhood, which was really a sex cult meant to service him.
	You weren't one of those, Sarah, right?
	That was, but many other women were basically being groomed.
	I mean, not basically.
	They were being groomed to be Keith Ranieri's sex slave.
	Yep.
	And that's the thing when people say you chose it, you could have left, whatever.
	It's really important to understand in my mind, I've committed to this game, like in a fraternity or sorority, where someone's telling me what to do.
	And I'm saying yes, because that's the commitment.
	A vow of obedience is what I've done.
	I think this is an exercise.
	And one of my exercises is to get this brand.
	So I do it.
	Other women had other things.
	And so the collateral, this is a key point.
	It's like a gun to the head.
	If you don't do the things, your collateral is going to be released.
	So that's not really a choice.
	In the cult space, they call it a bound, a binded choice, a bounded, sorry, bounded choice, a bounded choice where like there's no actually no way out.
	You have to do the thing.
	Yes.
	So the other women had assignments like, you know, go seduce Keith.
	India talked about that in her story, that that was her assignment.
	And other women had to do other things with Keith.
	And that was their assignment.
	And that's what they committed to.
	And they went along with it as well, because what are you going to do?
	You're going to lose everything.
	And also admit, hey, I just made a really bad decision, which is one of the components of it that keeps people kind of, you know, doubling down.
	The India Oxenberg story, she's Catherine's daughter.
	They join this again.
	Catherine has such guilt over this because she thought she was bringing her daughter to a self-help program to help her learn business skills and did not foresee what was going to happen.
	Shortly into it, Catherine recognized this is not for me.
	I don't know.
	I'm out.
	But India was getting something out of the lessons and stayed.
	And before Catherine knew it, India was completely untethered from her, was being intentionally separated from her, her loving mother.
	And Catherine knew she's gone.
	And now it's turned from like, it's turned into a rescue operation and was doing everything within her power to try to get India back.
	But India at this point is brainwashed.
	And the mere threat of like, I'm going to take you out.
	You need to get out.
	Keith is a threat would otherize Catherine even more.
	I mean, that the person who's inside the cult is like, oh, hell no.
	And Catherine spoke to me in her first interview about this before India had got been, you know, pulled out, before Keith had been arrested.
	And India, I mean, Catherine is a very well-known Hollywood actor and going to the media was truly her last resort.
	Here's a little bit of that interview from early or it was early, it was late 2017.
	Any program that seduces people to abandon their lives to serve their agenda rather than empowering your pre-existing life, there's something off about that.
	So I watched her get sucked in.
	The more I learned, because the factors came and told me about their experiences, the more concerned I became.
	And I realized that I did, well, I did an intervention with her at the end of May and I failed.
	This is my last resort going to the media.
Authorities Investigate Something Wrong 00:03:21
	My daughter is very, very angry with me right now.
	And she has every right to be angry with me because I would hate my mom if my mom came out and publicly exposed her in this way, exposed me.
	But I love her to the end of the world.
	And I'm only doing this to bring awareness because without awareness, there can be no outrage.
	And unless there's outrage, the authorities are not going to step in and do what they should do, which is shut this down.
	What's your reaction to seeing that, Sarah?
	I remember that interview.
	I was so grateful.
	I don't know if you remember, but I was, your team had asked me to be there and I wasn't emotionally strong enough to do live TV.
	I just didn't think I could handle it.
	But I was so grateful that Catherine had the strength to speak when we couldn't and brings back a lot of memories of a time when, you know, we were all just throwing our punches and that media punch and, you know, Catherine's role in the takedown was really important.
	We all had a very different role.
	Me with showing the physical abuse and Mark Vicente and Bonnie and Catherine, like Nippy, like there was, there wasn't many of us that were willing to talk.
	People before us too.
	Yeah.
	And people before us who tried and in 2009, like it just, like, this was a fight that took so much of our life force, you know, our life force in it.
	Thank you and resources.
	And then afterwards and watching it, it just brings back a lot of memories of a very stressful time because we didn't know what was going to happen in the trial.
	We didn't know if Keith was going to be convicted or not.
	Even now to this day, he's still appealing to, you know, a couple this week found out his third or fourth appeal was denied.
	He's still trying.
	Like it's, it's an ongoing stressor.
	And that seeing that video is, yeah, it's a reminder of what we've been through.
	And also so happy.
	Let me tell you something petty about me.
	You just said that you didn't accept our invitation to come on because you were not ready for live, which makes absolutely perfect sense.
	I remember at the time, because I really wanted you, your story was amazing.
	And we were really covering this case aggressively.
	And honestly, I was so disappointed.
	And I remember thinking, oh, she doesn't want to come on because I was with Fox.
	Oh, no.
	No.
	No, you know, we make up these stories in our heads, right?
	I mean, I'm just sitting here.
	Well, I mean, that's the time we're in, too, right?
	Yeah.
	Oh, I'm so glad that we've cleared up this.
	I know.
	This dynamic.
	No, I, I, I just tell it because I bet there's a million women out there and guys who tell themselves stories about, oh, it's something about me.
	There's something wrong with me.
	What I did, why I didn't get this thing or why I didn't get invited to this thing or this person didn't say yes to my invitation.
	We make up the worst stories about ourselves.
	Like, there's something wrong with me.
	I'm, I'm branded too, right?
	I'm branded in a way.
	And then you, you know, you talk to the person, you find out I'm a fucking idiot.
	Why do I do this to myself?
	I love that you shared that.
	And I love that I got to tell you because it's, you know, it's been a long time, a long time coming.
	And I've been so grateful for your activism around it because it was such a, that interview was such a, um, an extra punch in an already very, we just didn't know what was going to happen.
Testifying Against Greased Wheels 00:10:18
	And that was, that really helped us.
	So the authorities weren't doing anything.
	They weren't doing anything.
	No.
	I mean, they did.
	For the record, I show Sarah clips of Megan Kelly on off Twitter.
	I go see she gets it.
	Oh, yeah.
	You get it.
	We, know you get it.
	Yeah.
	Oh, thank you.
	Especially the culture shit everywhere right now.
	Oh, I mean, it's terrifying.
	And the more vulnerable people are post-COVID and in our weird world where we don't know who to trust and the media's falling apart, uh, even more so.
	So finally, the police, the FBI, they, they do get involved.
	It, it took all of you, all the names you just mentioned, Catherine, all of you.
	And by the way, I should mention before I forget, India, thank God, finally saw the light, got out and did her own documentary that she did on her own terms.
	And so I was very happy for her and for Catherine too.
	I mean, that story individually is just about a mother's incredible love for her child and what a mother will do.
	But she's in this about to, all of you are there working, as you say, your own pieces of it.
	Everybody had a different sort of gift and a risk to take.
	And ultimately, he does, he does get brought down.
	He gets arrested in Mexico.
	And still, the top echelon of the women are like running after the car as they take him away.
	They just were completely brainwashed that he was some sort of messiah.
	He was genuinely important to them.
	Yeah, it was nuts.
	And did you ever think that there actually would be a trial or that he'd kill himself or flee again or somehow find a way to manipulate the system?
	Because he's a very good manipulator to get the charges dropped.
	Narcissists don't kill themselves.
	That's a good point.
	That's a good point.
	Yeah.
	I did think that he would, that he was a flight risk.
	There, you know, Claire owned this island in Fiji.
	And I did, we, I just really did think that he would get away with it somehow, even with every appeal.
	I'm like, oh, my goodness.
	We're going to, are we going back to square one?
	He is so manipulative.
	He's so conniving.
	He's such a sociopath.
	Will he get out of it?
	I mean, there, there was my word where I remember thinking, shit, this is going to be the next five to 10 years of our life with Claire Bronfman just filing suits against us, bankrupting us, you know, that, because that's what she had done previously.
	She did very litigious on his behalf.
	Sorry, keep going, Nippy.
	Yeah.
	And I just remember thinking, shit, this is not good.
	And then I remember thinking about my kids, you know, when my one son at the time was like, his childhood is going to have this going on until he's nine or 10.
	And I just remember thinking, like, and then once the New York Times article came out, I felt, I didn't feel entirely safe, but I felt safer because I knew they had other problems.
	And Sarah and Nippy weren't, you know, enemy number one.
	We were, because they had to put out a lot more fires because a lot more people were speaking and a lot of other problems were happening.
	And they took their guns off us.
	I didn't know.
	I didn't know that we were in the clear.
	And the way the FBI and the way this thing happened and how quickly it happened, he was arrested in March of 18 and he was tried and convicted by June of 19.
	So in under two years, really, this whole thing happened and he was sentenced to 120 years.
	And oh, and five years probation.
	That's my favorite part of it.
	And what, can you explain what for what was he convicted?
	What did what did the there were seven counts?
	I don't know.
	I think it was wire fraud, sex trafficking.
	Conspiracy to commit.
	Oh man.
	It's been a while since I've recited this.
	Labor, Rico, there were Rico.
	The heart of the case was the manipulation of the young women into becoming like his sex cult.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	They didn't use that.
	Moira Penza.
	I think it's important to mention Moy Rapenza because she read the article and it wasn't tried in the district.
	It was tried in the southern district, right?
	Eastern Eastern District.
	Would Eastern, would JFK be Eastern District?
	Where's the Portland?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	JFK Airport.
	So that would be the Eastern District because that's where the sex trafficking happened at the JFK airport, technically.
	So that became their jurisdiction.
	So she was able to try the case.
	Because originally we went to the Northern District and they were like, well, you agreed to it.
	And then they were like, cool story.
	Thanks.
	And didn't.
	There's a whole case there.
	The corruption in that district, it's hard to tell.
	It's hard for me to believe that he could have gotten away with the things that he'd gotten away with, with the complaints that have been going on up there without greasing some wheels.
	I don't know how that works.
	I'm kind of again, I'm out of my lane on that, but it just seems to me there was a lot of abuses of power that are going on up there.
	And if I were to pick somewhere to try and get away with it, I think upstate New York would be kind of a sleepy place where you could just kind of get away with it and no one would be suspecting.
	That's my guess.
	No, I know we used to call it small banny because it's like small.
	I think people were shocked that anything like this could happen.
	And there may have been a measure of embarrassment that it went on for so long, right under everyone's nose.
	So, you know, absolutely.
	I may not be wrong on that.
	So, did you have to testify at the trial?
	I did not.
	I was one of the first people to speak with Moira and her team at the FBI and spent two and a half days with my lawyer and just gave them everything I knew.
	I set the scene, like how the company worked, the stripe path, everything I knew about DOS, all my photos, all my text messages, everything.
	I think I actually gave them my phone and my computer to mirror and said, have at it.
	And then that brought in other people and subpoenas and everything.
	I ended up not having to testify, I believe, because I would have been testifying against Lauren, and Lauren, in the end, turned on Keith.
	So I didn't need to.
	I think also I would have been a bad witness because I had done a lot of press at that point.
	You just said, and that would have been something that Mark Agnifila would have gone in on, like, isn't it true, Sarah, that you've written a book?
	You know, that kind of thing.
	And I was like, yeah, I wrote a book.
	Like, so I wasn't a good witness at that point.
	And what had happened to me wasn't even so bad compared to what had happened to other women.
	So I didn't have to testify.
	Thank goodness because I also had a newborn infant and was breastfeeding.
	And I was did not want to have to go to Brooklyn and testify and see that motherfucker's face.
	Did you ever get the chance to have the come to Jesus moment with Lauren, like friend to friend?
	No, I wish I had, I wish I had.
	The closest we've had is she wrote a letter around just before her conviction, a very heartfelt apology, which I totally believe she seems to have completely woken up, takes full responsibility for what she was going for, how she was able to maintain the cognitive dissonance and basically lied to me to bring it, bring me into this thing so she could be in Keith's good graces.
	Her testimony did put the nail in the coffin for Keith.
	Yeah, her testimony meant that I didn't have to testify.
	And yeah, it was the final straw specific prosecution.
	But like, what was the crux of what she said that was so damning for him?
	Oof.
	I think she laid out his psychology pretty well.
	Yeah.
	And just how specifically, I'd have to go back and look at the transcripts.
	It's been a while, but I think specifically how he mastermind the whole thing and how it was like that from the beginning, not just with DOS, but this is the world that he created.
	And that's, um, I don't know legally what it was that that fortify how, like why?
	She was the star witness exactly but um, she knew where, all the bodies exactly yes exactly yeah yeah, yeah.
	I remember when we did our NBC primetime special on this, a separate show um, we got into.
	He has this long history of being a pyramid scheme guy, a failed businessman like this was not his first fraud or attempted fraud.
	He'd had it actually a couple before this.
	He was a con man yep 100 yep yeah, he's.
	He'd been caught.
	And then, of course, when we heard about that story, he spun that that you know he was a threat to the government and they had to shut him down.
	And of course, that's what happens when you teach ethics in the world.
	You know he was good at getting.
	He had a lot of good people advocating for him.
	So Lauren, Jail too didn't, didn't she or she?
	She got three years probation yeah probation yeah, oh.
	And just to wrap up yeah, sorry that overlap that what you asked earlier.
	I i've been begging my lawyers to be able to have um, you know, heart to heart or zoom or see her but um, until there's a civil case still, until that's wrapped up, we're not allowed to communicate, but I hope that one day we will.
	Don't know if we'll ever be best friends again, but I i'd love to just close that chapter with her personally.
	Please give us a heads up when that's going to happen, because we will listen to and uh, we'll definitely talk about it here on the show.
	Um, so she gets probation.
	Allison Mack, the Smallville actress, actually got, I think she got uh, three years in jail.
	She served two.
	She's out now, if my math is correct.
	Yes uh, Claire Bronfman got sentenced.
	She to actual jail time a year.
	Did she get a year?
	She got triple the, the maximum sentence.
	She's still in jail triple the minimum sentence she's still in jail.
	She'll be in jail, I think, till 2025 and she just got moved to a halfway house, I think like two, three weeks ago, in the Bronx Or The Queen Or Queens far, far way away from Fiji.
	Um, so there's been actual accountability, there's been actual punishment for those involved and then Keith in jail for the rest of his life, plus the probation, as you point out at the end.
	So where does that leave?
	You guys, right?
	You, you tamed the tiger like you got it.
	It happened he, the nexium is done.
	It's been exposed and he's in jail and all of his enablers are in jail.
Recovery After Taming the Tiger 00:05:52
	You've come out publicly, the world knows.
	So what happens to you after that?
	There's a lot of therapy, a lot of time in nature.
	Uh, Covet was actually a wonderful.
	It was a blessing, blessing for us actually to pause and just go for hikes and make pancakes and be with our family, our beautiful sorry, we have a beautiful family um, and we had time to enjoy it.
	We'd been in the group for so long and then fighting to expose the group for so long we hadn't actually had a break, and that was um much needed break.
	And then um, the HBO documentary came out in Covid and then our lives blew up again in a very strange And also very meaningful way to be, to have people reach out to us and say, holy shit, I didn't realize I was in a cult or in a force of or abusive relationship until I saw the vow and like thousands of messages and letters.
	And because it was COVID and we'd stopped acting, we decided to start a little podcast to keep the conversations going.
	Oh, we had someone reach out to us whose birthday it is today, actually.
	Our associate producer, Jess Tardy, wrote us an email and said, you guys should do a podcast and laid out a season for us.
	Call it a little bit culti, call it this.
	And I was in the inertia of no.
	I was done having my personal life becoming other people's entertainment.
	It was kind of my reluctance to be a part of a documentary in the first place.
	And Sarah was kind of like, well, maybe.
	And then we spoke to someone else about it.
	Well, citizens of sound evangelical Christians seen it and reached out to us.
	So those two people kind of came together and sort of laid out this path for a podcast.
	And we, you know, we loved talking about it.
	And it was a healing like another, another, other people that we know needed to go not talk about it.
	And for us, talking about it was very cathartic and helping others see the red flags and heal was our recovery.
	So that's, that's been our recovery.
	And I wrote a memoir to, that encompasses my time in the book, but now we're working on a more of a part two of everything we've learned since the podcast.
	It's kind of a pit forward to all the experts who've helped us.
	And serendipitously, a lot of the, I was saying, I'm sure it's going to change, like what you've learned and you're going to change.
	You're still pretty close to it all.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, that's the thing.
	When I look back at the memoir, I was like, that I did not, I was still healing.
	I was only a year out when I decided to write that, which was in many ways was a draft, a draft of an understanding.
	I know so much more about cults and coercion and narcissism and gaslighting and all of these things that have become such a huge part of the zeitgeist now.
	And serendipitously, a lot of friends talk about this and their dating partners.
	I think this could be helpful.
	Well, go ahead, Nippy.
	I was going to say, you know, serendipitously, as we've educated ourselves on what goes on in cults, you know, a lot of the parallels that go on there are going on, you know, everywhere you look for, you know, whether it be in politics, whether it be, you know, with the vaccine, with all, you know, there's not any real field that's not immune to what these abuses of power look like and sound like.
	So putting language to it has been educational.
	And it's also been, you know, a really important journey for us because we're running into it in our day-to-day lives.
	And, you know, I want my kids to know what this looks like and sounds like.
	And I want other people to know what it looks like and sounds like.
	And I think if people are armed with this education, armed with this language, they can walk into situations and point it out in real time.
	So when you're faced with something like in your situation or other people's situations, they can go, oh, that's just like this, just like this.
	And they can at least attempt to have a civil discourse about it.
	And when the flat red flags come up, they'll know what they're looking at so they can make an informed decision.
	It's a way of inoculating yourself to be informed and to recognize these warning signs and just know when it comes to you, whether it's in a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a business, an employer or a real live cult that you may have inadvertently fallen into.
	Thank you both so much for coming on and telling this story again.
	I know it wasn't easy, but I really hope you've done some good here too.
	I know that you have and I hope you feel okay about it.
	Well, thank you, Megan.
	Appreciate it.
	Thank you so much, Megan.
	And maybe one day you'll come and tell us your full Fox News story on our podcast.
	I'll come on a little bit culty.
	Yeah, I've got a couple of Fox News, a little bit culty.
	Oh, I would buy.
	I'd be happy to.
	The more I learn, the more I'm like, oh my God.
	There was no Kool-Aid, but we were one step away.
	Lots of love.
	There's a water cooler.
	That's right.
	Good luck with it.
	I'm glad we got to clear up the misunderstanding from six years ago.
	Oh, there wasn't even a misunderstanding.
	This is my own deranged thinking.
	So thank you for helping me learn to be better.
	See, there you go, still empowering other women.
	Wow, what a story.
	Thanks so much to all of you for joining me today.
	I want to tell you, tomorrow we conclude Fraud Week with my own story.
	Yes, I have a story that not only fits the theme of our true crime week, it could have been the centerpiece of it.
	Arguably it is.
	I think you're really going to enjoy hearing this.
	I have never told this story before.
	And let's just say we went all out for you so that you could experience it in the same way I did.
	We'll see you then.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:30 My First Gaslighting Experience
00:08:19 The Lie of Vanguard Approval
00:22:58 Owning How I Got Trapped
00:38:42 Penance and Collateral Damage
00:45:58 Naked Ceremonies and Blackmail
00:48:23 Proof Required for the Group
00:53:40 Keith's Initials on Flesh
01:09:32 Authorities Investigate Something Wrong
01:12:54 Testifying Against Greased Wheels
01:23:12 Recovery After Taming the Tiger