I’m a Jaded Journalist. Why Was I Nearly Fooled By NXIVM?
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Lounging poolside on the roof deck of a friend’s gym in Nairobi, I was desperate to relax. I’d just spent 10 days reporting on sexual violence in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo after receiving a tip that toddlers were being raped in a small village in eastern DRC. This was in February of 2014.
I’d gone on a few emotionally intense international work trips by that point, and they weren’t getting any easier. Burning under that Kenyan sunshine, I couldn’t get the awful images and stories out of my head. But I was also dreading the return home to New York City. I knew that few people in my social circle would understand the horror now coursing through my body like blood. I was also heading back to a marriage on its last legs.
Just then, my phone buzzed with an email from a minor celebrity saying that she followed me on Twitter and thought we had “very similar visions for what we want in the world.” She said she was working with “an incredible women’s organization,” and asked if I’d be open to a Skype chat. I told her yes. Her next email explained what she wanted to discuss:
“The organization I work with is a global community of like-minded women from all different backgrounds who are seeking to redefine femininity from the inside out.
What I mean by this is, it is our belief that all the struggles that happen in the world stem from a lack of education and understanding on the part of those creating the problem, i.e. all of humanity.
We seem to be in an interesting position where the world is not craving more intellectual inventions or physical tools, more so emotional maturity, empathy and compassion. These are three qualities inherent in the feminine mind. So the organization I work with provides the women involved with the tools and curriculum needed to accentuate this [sic] tendencies and ultimately create a more empathic, humanitarian, authentic world to emerge.
I know this sounds epic. And it is. But I am reaching out to you specifically because you seem like [a] woman who is not afraid of epic circumstances and gains strength through adversity, which I greatly admire.”
Flattered, I told her that it sounded amazing. That I’d just met with men in Congo who were trying to redefine masculinity in a way that respected women, so my brain was steeped in rethinking gender norms.
She got back to me quickly: “I actually do incredible work in this specific area. I teach and study an educational model that is incredibly innovative and cutting edge in the realm of human behavior and emotional health and well-being. People have coined it ‘the science of joy’ and in my direct experience this title fits perfectly.”
Did I want to hear more?
“Yes!” I replied. My work had been quietly sapping me for years. Near the end of the DRC trip, I’d face-planted onto my bed, a sobbing mess. It’s a tricky thing, I told this complete stranger, to engage deeply with horrendous material. I’d yet to figure out how to tell soul-shattering stories that resonated with readers without ruining myself. “Joy” sounded exactly like what I needed in my life.
But over the next few months, being generally busy and relatively depressed, I dropped off our correspondence. She tried a few more times to reach me before eventually giving up.
I happened upon these emails by accident a couple of months ago, having had zero recollection of them. The woman I’d been corresponding with was Allison Mack, an actor who’d been on the TV show Smallville, and—I now know—a prominent member of NXIVM, a malicious cult headed by Keith Raniere, which branded women, turned them into sex slaves, and kept some locked away for years. Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in October of last year. Mack began her three-year prison sentence in September.
Reading the messages from Mack with new eyes, I was startled by how easily I seemed to have fallen for her gobbledygook “girl power” nonsense. What does redefining femininity “from the inside out” even mean—especially when it appears just a few lines away from stereotypical language about women being “empathetic,” “emotionally mature,” and “compassionate”? How could I possibly have skimmed over the line where she said we have “very similar visions for what we want in the world” when clearly she knew almost nothing about me?
“Cults will use whatever language they need to get you,” says Sarah Steel, who hosts a podcast with the excellent name “Let’s Talk About Sects.” “They draw you in and make you feel like it’s this really welcoming community, and it’s all kinds of wonderful. And then, once you’re invested in it, you start to sink maybe a bunch of money or whatever other things into it, and this kind of cost fallacy starts to kick in.” Aka, in for a penny, in for a pound.
If you’d asked me just a few months ago if I ever could have been drawn in by a cult, I would have laughed. But as I try to reconstruct who I was back then, and why I responded with anything but repulsion to Mack, I’m ashamed.
To Steel, shame is part of the reason why cults are so dangerous. They use coercive control to suck money out of their members, or gain power over them, leaving people kicking themselves when they realize what they’ve been a part of. I’ve been wondering if Mack targeted me because she saw me as weak, but Steel thinks it could happen to pretty much anyone. “I honestly believe any one of us, if we were at a certain point in our lives, and happened to find the wrong group, would be very susceptible to becoming involved,” she says. “You think that it’s only vulnerable people who get sucked in, but I think it’s more that they find people who are at a vulnerable point in their life.”
That I was. And I was hardly alone. As I began telling friends about this brush with NXIVM, I heard stories about other women who had received similar messages from the group. A friend of a friend named Sarah (she did not want her full name used for fear of retribution) had just graduated college in 2001 when she was approached. Sarah now has a successful career in the hospital software industry.
The message she heard in NXIVM’s pitch was “mostly how you can take control of your life, be a leader, make the most of it,” Sarah says. “I was graduating college and wanted to make a mark.” She says she was left with the impression that she was “missing out on taking over the world” if she didn’t join. (She did not.)
Another woman approached by Mack around the same time I was recalls a love bombing–like correspondence. She was hit with flattery about her leadership potential and called a “powerhouse.” This woman (who asked that her name not be used) was and is a high-profile woman in media and tech, while in that same year I was at a middling point in my career.
Evelyn Kirkley, a professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego, says that NXIVM’s efforts to recruit women in media was likely a means to an end. What group doesn’t want good press, or a bigger public profile? The women who got involved in the cult “were up-and-comers,” Kirkley says. They had Hollywood connections and were, as she put it, “visibility or celebrity adjacent.” So, not an A-lister, but maybe an A-lister’s cousin. “These movements are really genius,” she says. “They try to recruit you with, ‘You’re like me, I’m like you, and I want to make you happy like me.’ It’s slimy.”
Cults like NXIVM tend to target middle- or upper-middle class, college-educated women with promises of personal empowerment, while also trying to make them feel special—at least at first, Kirkley says: “It sounds like an authentic connection. You’re being complimented, someone respects your work, values what you’re doing. They say they understand how hard it is. I really think that it’s only in hindsight that a group like NXIVM is exposed to be as dangerous and really damaging as it is. But by the time you recognize it, you’re in too deep.”
Of course now NXIVM’s faux-feminist recruitment strategy raises several red flags. “It’s this kind of ‘you-go-girl’ promise,” Kirkley says. “But with a male leader, it just was unable to—and may not have ever had the pretense of—delivering on career development, empowerment, or becoming a better person.” Instead, Raniere reportedly told members that women can be disloyal, have tantrums, and get away with whatever they prefer, all while manipulating them into having sex with him.
The idea is to break you down, then build you up into whatever pliant Frankenstein is most useful to the leaders. “When you get down into it, these self-empowerment-type cults often have this line about how all of your problems are your responsibility,” Steel says. “So, it doesn’t ever do anything to actually address the systemic issues in society that might be holding women back. Nope, it’s your fault, you know, so therefore you are being locked up for the next few days.”
According to Steel, cults have a way of manipulating people into feeling that they deserve punishment. “It’s always making you turn inwards and focus everything on yourself and your own failings, and that’s something that really keeps people under control and always questioning themselves,” she says.
Seven years after the fact, in my mid-40s now, I wonder about the woman I was when Mack made her overture. Was I really that naïve? I’m a writer. How did I ignore all those sentences that said so much but meant nothing? Maybe I was too trusting. But, more likely, I was looking for a community that would make me feel supported.
My trip to DRC also included a stop in Rwanda to talk to genocide survivors. And my subconscious coping mechanism was to hole up and write incessantly, something like eight 2,000-word drafts in 10 days, including a piece exploring how a whole country reckons with the mass trauma of genocide, and another about how female rape survivors rarely see justice.
As antisocial and manic as my outpouring of text was, it was the best antidote I had found to combat the disturbing disconnect I always felt upon reentering my life in New York (at least it was better than heavy drinking, not sleeping, or yelling at my partner). Doing this kind of work was isolating, but also addictive; how do you just drop a story about tiny girls being raped? I continued to follow the tip I’d been given about the girls for the next seven years. My reporting wound up helping lead to the arrest of the Congolese perpetrators, as well as awards and recognition. It would also lead to years of neglecting myself. How could I be happy when my sources and the girls were suffering so much?
Mack found me at this vulnerable time, when a small part of me knew I needed more support, but wasn’t sure how to seek it. Fortunately, I can see now that I had a near miss with people who wanted my money and control over my thoughts. Unfortunately, however, I’m not sure I can say that such offers of sisterhood would never tempt me again. It’s a lonely world, and we—me, you—all tend to seek whatever connective sustenance we can get, wherever we can get it.
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