I recently watched the first four episodes of The Vow, a new HBO series about the cult of Keith Raniere. It tells the story through the experience of former leaders of the cult Mark Vicente and his wife Bonnie Piesse and Sarah Edmondson and her husband, Anthony Ames and then expands to Catherine and her daughter India Oxenberg and Allison Mack. I think the first few episodes give a window for the public to see how intelligent, educated well meaning people including actors, filmmakers, businesspeople and billionaires get deceptively recruited into a destructive cult. It is well known in the media as NXIVM but had other recruiting front groups like Executive Success programs or ESP. It was the secret DOS group which branded women by their genitals as a sign of their life commitment to be a slave to their master, ultimately Raniere. Keith Raniere, known to members as Vanguard, is a malignant narcissist and claimed to the world’s most intelligent person. Of course, it was only one of the many lies he told. What is true is that he had previously been busted for running a multi-level marketing group (MLM) called Consumer’s Buyline which was shut down by twenty Attorneys General as an illegal pyramid scheme. Part of the settlement was Raniere was told to never to operate a multi-level marketing group again. However, the cult he created essentially was just this, as it sold coaching and seminars instead of products. Former NXIVM member Sarah Edmondson talked to me about being recruited into and escaping Raniere’s cult and bringing charges that led to him being convicted of 7 felony counts in the criminal case of United States vs. Raniere, which was conducted in the federal court in the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn courthouse). He is awaiting sentencing while in jail. I did a long post on mind control methods used by NXIVM including a BITE model analysis.
