True crime: deadly devotion: the self-help cults destroying lives
Hiding beneath a facade of self-help, unscrupulous operators are exploiting the vulnerable for profit, power and sexual gratification. Now, the victims and their families are speaking out to raise awareness and caution others.
When India Oxenberg talks about having her pelvic skin branded to indoctrinate her into a sex-slave ring, what she remembers most is the smell. As the granddaughter of Princess Elizabeth of the former Yugoslavia, and daughter of actress Catherine Oxenberg, India does not seem the type to be enticed into a cult.
Yet she was the first among her group to voluntarily remove her clothes and lie down while her “sisters” gripped her ankles and wrists so a symbol could be seared into her skin one wintry afternoon in 2016.
India recalls how the smoky, singed scent of burning flesh seeped into every room of the suburban house in Albany, New York, where the ceremony took place, and how she convulsed as the red-hot needle approached her hipbone. But she endured the pain because, at the time, she believed she was doing something brave and strong.
A rising television star with a blonde bob, Allison Mack stood nearby reading incantations as India was admitted into a group known as DOS, which stands for Dominus Obsequious Sororium, or “master over slave”.
“I saw it as a positive thing,” India, 29, says now. “When [Allison] invited me into DOS, I felt special and singled out.
It was like a sorority. A secret sorority. I liked the idea of a sisterhood. We live in a world where there aren’t a lot of spaces for women to learn and feel safe. I thought that this was going to be that for me,” she explains in her documentary, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult.
With her royal blood and Orange County upbringing, India’s pedigree made her the ultimate prize for a cult that promises success and self-improvement. Her country-town-beauty-queen looks also made her irresistible to grandmaster Keith Raniere, who used members for sex.
Raniere is the founder of NXIVM, an Executive Success Program with a roll call of high-profile attendants whose credibility helped lure in others. And within NXIVM, he created the much more secret and sinister world of DOS.
India’s Dynasty star mother, Catherine, introduced her to NXIVM via one of its self-empowerment seminars, in the hope the two of them could share “an experience and adventure of growth together”. She knew her daughter was in a period of transition, and was seeking something that would help her forge her own way in life.
“I went into NXIVM looking for direction, looking for guidance, looking for structure, looking for something to turn me into the person I wanted to be,” India told People. “I was hungry for that … and I dove deeply into that organisation, thinking I was doing something good.”
Catherine quickly woke up to the group’s sinister purpose and embarked on a crusade to free her daughter. But experts say that once India showed interest, NXIVM’s top-ranked officers would have done anything to ensnare her. “If you’re a cult leader and you just attract gullible, stupid, needy people, then you’re stuck with a bunch of gullible, stupid, needy people. If you attract industrious people with a good work ethic, who are looking for something to believe – outstanding,” says Jo Thornely,
author of Zealot: A Book About Cults. “If you just find a way to get them to do your bidding a bit, you can achieve. You can reap the reward. You can keep some for yourself.”
NXIVM was both a pyramid scheme and a cult. It differed from the common blueprint for a cult in that, instead of preaching a pseudo-religious path to enlightenment, it championed professional success and self-improvement.
“Its front was basically a self-help organisation. They called themselves a leadership development program,” says Jean Brown, co-founder of SEEK Safely, which works to make the unregulated self-help industry a less dangerous space. In her view, NXIVM was the blackened tip of a toxic iceberg of self-help gurus, teachers, life coaches and spiritual retreats that use shady sales strategies and mind-control techniques to generate profits while disregarding the safety of their followers.
“I see it as almost a continuum from things that are very benign and harmless to the other end, where you have something like NXIVM that is clearly a cult,” Jean explains. “But along the way, all those tactics of control are pretty much the same and it’s just a matter of what the leader or organisation’s intent is and how far they want to take it. It’s so diffuse, it’s hard to draw a line around it and figure out where it starts and ends.”
The degree of criminality within NXIVM meant that, once its practices were exposed, police acted swiftly, but Jean says the self-help space is teeming with dangerously
“It never occurred to me that someone would stand in front of hundreds of people and blatantly lie.”
underqualified and unscrupulous operators. “The lack of professionalism within the industry itself makes it really hard for people to be adequately reprimanded when they harm their customers,” she says.
Jean and her mother, Ginny, started SEEK Safely after their own tragedy. Their vivacious sister and daughter, Kirby Brown, died at age 38 in a sweat lodge after her ambition to better herself was hijacked by a narcissistic con man named James Arthur Ray.
Deadly cleanse
Therapist Virginia “Ginny” Brown is by nature warm and trusting. When she was first introduced to the philosophy that would later kill her daughter, she approached it with an open mind. “Initially I thought, ‘This is not my thing’, but then I thought, ‘My daughter is inviting me to do something special with her – of course I’m going to go’.”
Kirby had seen self-help businessman James Arthur Ray at a free event in 2008 and signed up for his two-day
Harmonic Wealth workshop. The ticket price included a guest and so she invited Ginny. They arrived to a bustling auditorium that was thrumming with arena-show energy.
“There were a couple of things from the very beginning that kind of put me off, but I’m a pretty trusting person and I also like new experiences,” Ginny says.
She and Kirby were rushed through the entrance and given a waiver to sign, without really having the opportunity to read it. “His assistants were saying, ‘Oh, it’s just a formality, it’s no big deal. It’s something by law we need to do’,” Ginny says, talking to The Weekly by phone from her home in New York State.
It was a packed-out event with loud music. Just getting into the auditorium was like running a gauntlet. “There are people on both sides and everyone is jumping up and down and pumping up the energy. I said to one of the women, ‘Wow, you girls really had your coffee this morning!’ And she said, ‘Oh, we don’t drink that stuff’,” Ginny adds.
Ginny has since realised that many of the things she saw were “truly red flags”, but she dismissed them at the time. Once she and Kirby had taken their seats, Ray began his spiel on stage. He brought people up to testify to the success of his programs, then listed his qualifications and accomplishments. Ginny couldn’t help but be impressed. “This sounds so ridiculous to say, but it never occurred to me that someone would stand in front of hundreds of people and blatantly lie,” she says.
Ginny had every reason to believe Ray. His brand of self-improvement had already attracted praise from the highest echelons of the media. He had appeared on Oprah and featured on national morning news programs. Ginny assumed he’d been vetted. Ray combined Western and Eastern philosophies, and she found herself being won over by his message, and his conviction.
Ray touts himself as “one of the world’s foremost leadership and performance advisors”, and claims he gained his wisdom through a decade-long pilgrimage that included climbing the Peruvian Andes and meditating between the paws of the Sphinx in Egypt. The self-styled guru promised to help people “tap into unspoken powers that have lain dormant in you until now”.
“I was impressed with his presentation,” Ginny says. Kirby was even more so. “His messages really resonated with her. She liked the idea of living impeccably. She loved the idea that, if you pay attention to what you want, it’s going to grow.”
Kirby signed up for a Spiritual Warrior retreat that would be held in Angel Valley, Sedona, in October 2009. Hers was an adventurous and entrepreneurial spirit. Throughout her life she had managed horse farms, driven limousines in Manhattan and operated a successful art business out of Mexico. “I often say she was drunk on life. She was extremely open-hearted and generous. She lived with passion and purpose and joy,” Ginny says.
More than 50 acolytes joined Ray on this five-day, $9000 event, set against the wild beauty and red-rock peaks of the Sedona desert. The media would later rename the area “Death Valley”.
From the moment they arrived, it was clear that the retreat would be different from Ray’s other events. The participants were instructed to shave their heads, then Ray led them through a series of bizarre and demanding tests of endurance. At one point, Ray wore a white, flowing robe
and announced he was God and they were going to play a game. Those who “died” in the game had to lie still on the cold, hard ground. After five hours, those still standing were told to mime slitting their throats. Ray then marched them into the desert, and left them alone for a 36-hour “Vision Quest” with no food or water.
The retreat culminated in a cleansing sweat-lodge ceremony, which Ray said would push them and make them feel like they were going to die. Ted Mercer, who built the crudely constructed lodge out of wood poles, tarps and blankets, later told police it was hotter than most. In order to bring up the temperature, large rocks heated over a wood fire were brought inside.
Ray told his followers that it was necessary for them to stay inside the lodge for as long as possible to bring themselves “to the next level of consciousness”. His teachings were all about “playing full on” – and if they were claustrophobic or scared of the dark, they would have to get over that.
One participant, Brandy Amstel, told Guru podcast that the 50-odd participants had to squat down and crawl into the sweat lodge. Inside it was hot, dark, crowded and humid. Ray kept ordering more hot rocks to be added. “I could feel it going in my nose and down my throat, burning the insides of my body,” Brandy said.
They would only be allowed to leave the sweat lodge when Ray opened the flap – the only source of ventilation. Three times, Ted heard Ray say, “You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you are not going to die.”
“He was gloating about how exciting it was that he was going to be putting more rocks than anybody’s ever put. It’s going to be the hottest,” fellow participant Laura Tucker told Guru. “It was all-consuming.”
When people tried to leave, Ray told them: “You’re better than that.”
“The sounds in the tent were so intense. People screaming, bloodcurdling screams,” Brandy recalls.
Media reported the air in the lodge was like fire. “The emphasis was on trying to push oneself past their selfimposed conditions and borders,” the police report stated.
The local sheriff’s office responded to an emergency call around 5.35pm on October 8 and arrived to find “numerous people in various stages of medical distress”.
Kirby Brown and fellow attendee James Shore were taken to a medical centre, where they were pronounced dead. “Other participants were in altered levels of consciousness and having difficulty breathing,” police said. A third victim, Liz Neuman, died of multi-system organ failure a few days later.
“When people in that sweat lodge observed that others were struggling, the leader, James Ray, ignored them,” Ginny wrote for SEEK Safely. “He did not answer their pleas for help. Being exhausted and physically depleted left some of those individuals unable to help themselves, but they were not willingly there to die!”
Ginny says techniques like limiting sleep, dehydration, neuro-linguistic programming, sound bombardment, shaming individuals and deliberate isolation can affect a person’s rational decision-making process. These factors were already in play at the Harmonic Wealth seminar
Ginny attended with Kirby. The audience was denied toilet breaks so as to make them uncomfortable. There was an exuberant atmosphere, little to eat and high-pressure sales tactics.
“This is what a cult leader does to generate false compliance and susceptibility, so you’re more inclined to go along with a suggestion that you wouldn’t normally and you’re more inclined to start believing something
that, in the past, you would’ve questioned,” Ginny says. “Some of these tactics are used in interrogations … Ray is an influential, charismatic speaker who knowingly uses cult-like tactics to create suggestibility and exercise power over strong, intelligent, independent people.”
In the immediate aftermath of the sweat-lodge deaths, Ray refused to co-operate with police and within hours had fled the state. He was eventually arrested and found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide. He served just 20 months in prison.
Rogue gurus
Ray’s Spiritual Warrior retreats were not a cult in the way NXIVM was, but the recruitment and coercion followed the same playbook. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Steve Salerno, who spent years investigating the self-help industry, said, “Large Group Awareness Training incorporates tactics more commonly identified with psychological warfare.”
Ginny says there are a lot of people in the industry, like James Arthur Ray, who operate unethically and unsafely. Looking back on his Harmonic Wealth conference, she said she got “swept up in the energy” of the situation. “I was kind of horrified, thinking, ‘Oh God. I should have known better’. But I understand the power of these techniques.”
The self-help field is fertile ground for cult leaders and those who seek to emulate their power because the people drawn to that space are self-identifying as wanting more. Jo Thornely says cults lure people who are looking for something, and try to help them find it. “They attract people whose current religion or lifestyle is lacking …
Once people are in, it’s usually very difficult for them to leave,” she writes in Zealot.
NXIVM began to crumble when one of its top recruiters, Sarah Edmondson, broke ranks and exposed the inner workings of DOS to the media. The training modules, binders and coloured sashes that marked the progression and “success” of its members were revealed to be the flimsy window dressing for the dark work of Raniere.
Once Sarah went public, NXIVM unravelled quickly.
India Oxenberg came to accept she was brainwashed, and played a key role in helping the FBI bring down Raniere, who is currently serving a 120-year prison sentence for crimes including racketeering, fraud and sex trafficking. India can see now how she was ensnared by what she calls “a slow drip of indoctrination”.
“NXIVM promises a lot of success,” Jo says, “but it has its own definition of what success means. You get different coloured sashes. You move your way up. You get more and more responsibility. I might say, ‘I want to be a successful actor’, and this group is telling me, ‘We will help you be successful’, [but] they quietly take the actor out of it … It’s not the success you wanted, but you’re constantly being told that you’re achieving.”
Ginny and Jean hope that revelations of the extreme activities within NXIVM could help to convince policymakers to do more to protect people who want to pursue self-help. In addition to the resources they have created with SEEK Safely, they are working with New York state legislators on a bill that would require self-help providers to have risk-mitigation strategies, be more transparent with their customers, and register with the state. Jean points out that while it might not prevent all future tragedies, it will create a legal framework.
“We are all seekers by human nature. We want to know and we want to expand,” Ginny says. “I want people to know that even though Kirby lost her life while seeking, we should never be afraid to seek. We should never be afraid to grow because that’s what makes our life beautiful and gives it depth and complexity, and creates internal satisfaction.”
“If Kirby had survived, she would have been very vocal about the experience she had and what she saw that was problematic,” Jean adds. “We think her story is compelling because a lot of people will look at what happened in Sedona, or even the NXIVM situation, and they’ll think, ‘Those people were weak, they were easy to manipulate’, but that’s not the case at all. Kirby was a highly motivated person and it was the manipulation of that motivated part of her personality that got her in so much trouble.”
After he was released from prison, James Arthur Ray published a book, titled The Business of Redemption. The felon still works as a public speaker and coach today.
“Large Group Awareness Training incorporates tactics more commonly identified with psychological warfare.”