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How I Found My Brainwashed Daughter in the Sex Cult NXIVM
from The Daily Beast:
CATHERINE OXENBERG
08.17.18 10:09 PM ET
Bonnie and I reunited at a dimly lit bar in Beverly Hills. It had been four years since I’d seen her, and she looked exactly the same—except for the haunted look in her eyes.
We hugged, but she was so jittery, she could barely stand still for it. Before we sat down, she scanned the room to see if she’d been followed or if anyone was watching her.
For the next two hours, Bonnie unloaded a torrent of information nonstop, sometimes sounding discombobulated, as she zigzagged through the last two years. I took notes, barely saying a word, and tried to keep both of us calm.
Bonnie and India had become the best of friends around India’s first V-week in 2012, she began explaining, but everything came crashing down once Allison Mack began mentoring India around the end of 2015 or early 2016.
“Allison derailed our friendship, as if she wanted to steal India away and wanted her for herself,” she said. “She felt threatened by me. I was worried and tried to warn India about her; I’d seen some very, very bad results from Alli’s mentoring.”
When Allison lived with Bonnie and Mark, including during the time India and I were their houseguests, “she would flip out in the middle of the night, and I’d hear murderous screaming coming from her room. She would get up and walk around Clifton Park all night long.”
Bonnie stopped to take a sip of water. Her hands were shaking.
Soon after Allison began mentoring India, she continued, India began to lose weight and act coldly toward Bonnie.
“Alli is obsessed with penance and weight,” Bonnie said. “I found out that Keith kept all the women on diets of five hundred to eight hundred calories, and if they gained weight, he punished them. It was to build character, he told them, because women don’t have any.”
It was around that time she noticed the relationship between India and Keith ramping up.
“He’d had his eye on her for years,” she said. “Then India told me last spring about a secret project she was working on with Keith and Allison. She called it ‘the Project,’ though I’ve since learned members use other code names for it, like ‘the Vow’ or ‘the Agency’ or ‘DOS’—which is Latin for ‘dominus obsequious sororium’ and means ‘master over the slave women.’
“Someone else tipped me off about what the secret group was about. I can’t say who—it would put us both in danger,” she went on. “In this master-slave club, there’s a lot of pressure for the women to sleep with Keith. Alli must have influenced India to get close to him because that’s how Alli got his approval, by bringing him women.”
Then came India’s life-changing walk with Keith.
“One day, India announced that she’d been for a walk with Keith, and when she returned, her opinion of him had completely changed. The way she talked about him was so different; she was flushed and almost giddy. I’m pretty sure Alli is having sex with Keith, and I think India is, too. He’s having sex with at least twenty of them at the same time.”
“Bonnie,” I interrupted, for the first and only time during her monologue, “are you absolutely sure of this? Are you sure India is having sex with Keith?”
I couldn’t bear to imagine this was true. I couldn’t. “No, I’m not sure. But it’s very likely.”
Bonnie explained that she’d been making plans to leave ESP well before she knew about DOS.
“I wasn’t happy for a while,” she said. “I was broke—we were all broke. The promise that once I reached proctor/orange sash I would finally be making money was a lie. Over time I started to notice major inconsistencies in the organization and blatant abuses.”
When Bonnie started asking questions about what was going on, Allison had her kicked out of a NXIVM program for actors, called “the Source,” and began ostracizing her and telling everyone else to shun her as well. Nancy accused Bonnie of being a narcissist and a “suppressive”—a term Keith had stolen from Scientology, no doubt. “I began having panic attacks,” she said. One day she left one of Keith’s classes early because she wasn’t feeling well. Afterward, he confronted her.
“He was furious. He said, ‘You’ve committed an ethical breach you’ll never be able to repair or heal in this lifetime, but you have to do everything you can to try!’
“As I took notes, each new piece of information was like a punch in the gut.”
“Then a friend of mine, another coach, confided in me that she’d been removed from her position as head trainer because she’d committed an ethical breach against Keith by refusing to have his baby. In this secret society, all babies go to Keith—it’s part of their vow of obedience. They have to sign a waiver that if they get pregnant with Keith’s child—or anyone’s, for that matter—they must give their babies to Keith.”
As I took notes, each new piece of information was like a punch in the gut, but I wasn’t about to allow myself to go down the emotional rabbit hole right there in public. This was a coping mechanism of mine in moments of emergencies and trauma: stay calm, carry on, take notes, digest everything. Later, I could scream and cry into my pillow.
During the last few months that Bonnie was still in Albany, Keith got even more psycho, she said.
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