Surviving NXIVM | Investigation | Spy Sisters
50:46 Share

This episode features strong language throughout. Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills?

And what would you do in their position? This is True Spies. Everything in my body was on full hypervigilant alert. I could barely eat, I could barely sleep. All I knew is I had to get out, I had to save these women. Most of them had given very damaging pictures. This is True Spies. Episode 46: Surviving NXIVM. Some people, most of them in fact, become spies by choice.

Perhaps they're motivated by patriotism. Maybe it's cash. For this week's true spy, it was personal. My mama bear instinct to protect and destroy this motherfucker was so enraged in me I can't even tell you. And that's what set me on this warpath of trying to expose them and take them down. And no, she's not a spy in the traditional sense.

But she's a shining example of how ordinary people can use espionage techniques to manage extraordinary situations. Leaving a cult, for example,

Or more accurately, burning one down. I explained to them that there was possibly sex trafficking involved because women were being blackmailed to then have sex under the auspices of this personal growth program. If you've heard Sarah Edmondson's name before, there's a good chance that it was in the same sentence as NXIVM. NXIVM was a cult and pyramid scheme led by a self-styled guru named Keith Ranieri.

In reality, Keith Ranieri was a serial abuser of women. Since starting the cult in 1998, Ranieri had recruited thousands of students. Like many self-help programs, NXIVM offered training courses aimed at personal growth. In return for a kind of white-collar spiritualism derived from Eastern philosophy and psychiatric techniques, Ranieri's students parted with thousands of dollars.

For a long time, Sarah Edmondson was one of those students. She was one of those women. And in 2017, she played a crucial role in bringing Ranieri to justice. I was a member of the group NXIVM for 12 years, 2005 to 2017. When we were involved in the group, we thought it was the most beautiful community of like-minded people trying to

evolve themselves through personal and professional development. And it turned out that the things we thought were good about the group were actually a cover for some very nefarious activities. And when we discovered those things, my husband and I and a small group of what we called Team Takedown decided to expose the leader with the help of the FBI. We all think we know a cult when we see it. And most of us imagine that we would be too strong, too discerning to join one.

In reality, it's easier than you think. Joining one can be as simple as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was 27 about to turn 28. I had pursued acting at that point for less than a decade, but had not yet found my stride and found that it wasn't as meaningful as I had hoped.

And I was in a relationship that was good but not amazing, and I was living in a basement suite. So, you know, that stage of life that many people find themselves in in their 20s where they're like, what am I doing with my life? And craving more purpose and more meaning. But NXIVM didn't just offer guidance for lost souls. Its membership included a number of professionals working in the TV and film industries. For a young actor looking for a break, the group represented that most tempting of carrots.

a networking opportunity. Sarah's first encounter with NXIVM took place on a cruise ship sailing around the Caribbean. Her then boyfriend, David, an aspiring filmmaker, had had one of his short films accepted into the Spiritual Cinema Festival at Sea. The floating film festival celebrated films with social impact that aimed to raise consciousness.

And there was one director, the guest of honor no less, that Sarah and David were both very keen to meet. His name was Mark Vicente. During their conversations on the cruise, Mark began to open up to the couple about a life-changing personal development program that he'd recently become a part of, ESP.

ESP stands for Executive Success Programs. It was the personal and professional development component of Nexium that was the funnel that brought most people into the overall, the overarching company of Nexium. And that was the trainings that were designed at sort of an executive level coaching platform.

As Mark described ESP, Sarah realized that the aims of the group lined up with the future that she wanted for herself. A future full of success, happiness and spiritual balance. He told me he was part of this community that was, you know, building humanity and making conscious shifting projects. And I just said, sign me up. It just so happened that the group was holding its first training course in Sarah's native Vancouver in just a few weeks' time.

would she like to come along she decided that she would after i signed up i had buyer's remorse and i was like what am i what am i doing paying it was 2000 us at the time 2160 for a five-day training it was a lot of money for a barely working actress living in a basement suite so semi-reluctantly sarah attended the first day of the five-day course it wasn't an instant hit

By the first day, I was really turned off by a lot of things, but I had also been told that on day one, you would be naturally triggered and most people would have what they called the urge to bolt, but it just meant that there was something there to look at and if you stuck it through, you could work on it. So they preempted us to stay and to ignore our internal guidance that there were red flags. Sarah's parents had both been mental health professionals.

The language of self-exploration was familiar to her and she took to it easily. And if you're trusting that what you're doing is a good process, the indoctrination happens very easily and very... you wouldn't know what's happening at the time. In fact, they might even say, "Sure, this is brainwashing, but we're washing the bad stuff out." Sounds tempting, doesn't it? Pretty words. It's the tantalizing promise of all self-help courses. Self-realization. A fresh start.

It would be years before Sarah realized the sinister weight behind those words. It's literally as if your belief system is being superimposed by another belief system. But NXIVM and derivatives like ESP were about more than just converting recruits to their way of thinking. If you want to really understand what the organization was about, you need to ask yourself a simple question: Who's getting paid?

So Nexium was definitely set up in the format of a pyramid or a multi-level marketing company where to go to any next level, you had to bring in new people, new recruits. And MLMs traditionally have a certain number that you have to bring in before you can get promoted. Funnily enough, we were told this was not an MLM because MLMs are unethical. And Keith Ranieri, the leader, was very ethical. Right. Well, that's okay then.

We'll come back to Keith Ranieri, don't worry. If the structure of the organization was dubious, Sarah felt able to move past it. After all, she'd been taught as part of the program that doubts, red flags, were a natural part of growth and had to be overcome. She began to climb the ranks. NXIVM was working for her, and she decided to work for it, too.

I started in NXIVM as anyone would, which is a student. I decided almost immediately after I got through my original objections that I wanted to be a coach and I wanted to help people the way that I'd been helped. I got very quickly to that rank before getting to the rank of proctor, which is the rank where you get paid. She was now being paid for her time. She even opened up her own NXIVM center in Vancouver alongside her friend and mentor, Mark Vicente.

In fact, Sarah became something of a poster child for the group. She'd gone from starving artist to affluent career woman. To her mind, NXIVM had given her everything, purpose and income and a huge, wildly supportive family. Now, who wouldn't want that? For a long time, Sarah was determined to share the love. I personally brought in

around 100 people who brought in other people who brought in other people who brought in other people. So in what they called my organization was around 2,000 people. But historically, not everyone's experience was quite as positive. So when I first started in 2005, there was a little bit of bad press that seemed to be generated from one family who didn't like what happened to their son in the group. And that's how it was explained to me, that one person came and he made a decision in his life that the parents didn't like.

And much in the same way that NXIVM's members were taught to ignore their instinct to bolt,

They were equally prepared to negotiate the reams of bad press that seemed to swirl around Keith Ranieri. Keith is a sociopath, but he's also brilliant. He preempted a lot of this for us. He said, you know, if you want to take someone down, if you want to smear them into the ground, what do you do? You call them a pedophile. You call them a, you know, a sexual abuser. That's the worst thing you could do. Of course, like a year or two later, something came out in the local paper that he said,

had had underage sex. And we were like, oh my God, of course they're saying this to take it down, Keith. Like we'd been preempted that that would happen to the most noble man in the world. The most noble man in the world. This did not describe Keith Ranieri, not by a long way. He'd begun his career in the 1980s, working for other multi-level marketing companies before starting his own in 1990.

That company was shut down three years later by the state of New York, which designated it a pyramid scheme. He started the company that would become Nexium five years later. But this was more than a cash grab. It was a way for Ranieri to disseminate his own particular slant on the world, namely that he was at the center of it.

And it was the women in his orbit who were most vulnerable to his twisted curriculum. In my opinion, Keith Ranieri is an absolute high-level misogynist. He despises women. As part of his largely performative spiritual practice, Ranieri claimed to be celibate, but he still spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about women.

Mostly, he thought about what he considered to be their flaws. So he felt like he needed to develop a curriculum that would give women the tools to truly understand their nurturing essence and what they bring to the world so that they could step into their own power in a way that was different from men and understand that essence. And oh God, it makes me nauseous just to even talk about it because it was such a load of... You can probably guess how that sentence ends.

But Ranieri was undoubtedly charismatic. And he was a masterful manipulator. Very few cult leaders aren't. Regardless, over time, doubt did start to creep in for Sarah. Looking back, she identifies one conversation in particular as a turning point. The moment where leaving NXIVM became just slightly less of an impossibility. She'd arranged to meet the husband of a friend in a coffee shop in Vancouver.

He had concerns about the group, and Sarah, who at this time was a fervently committed member of Nexium, had offered to put them to rest. I sat down with my dear friend's husband, Pepe, who at that point I thought was just being a controlling husband, not wanting his wife to grow.

And he basically showed me all this press and said, what do you think about this and what do you think about that? I just dismissed it all. Instinctively defending NXIVM, Sarah deflected Pepe's claims. And he shut my computer. And I was like, see, you're not even willing to look at the good. He said, of course there's good, Sarah, otherwise you wouldn't be involved. You're not willing to look at the bad. Since joining the organization, Sarah had successfully managed to quash any doubts about NXIVM.

After all, to question the organization was to be labeled a "suppressive," a person who was unwilling to grow and change. And she dedicated over a decade of her life to NXIVM. She'd met her husband, Nippy, through her work there. Keith Ranieri's teachings sat right at the center of her life. But things were changing. She'd become a mother, for a start. Her priorities began to shift.

and her once blossoming career inside NXIVM had stalled somewhat. She was thinking about stepping back from her role as a proctor. Enter Lauren Saltzman, one of Sarah's closest friends and a fellow member of the group, also the daughter of Nancy Saltzman, Keith Ranieri's business partner. In 2017, she came to Sarah with an exciting proposition.

Lauren Salzman, my best friend, my maid of honor, Troy, my son's godmother, came to Vancouver to do a five-day, but I realized it was actually because she wanted to invite me to this very special thing. And so I said, "Sure, what is it?" She said, "Well, how committed are you to your growth? What would you do for it?" I'm like, "I guess anything, like what?" Sarah was intrigued. Could this be an opportunity to move forward rather than pulling back?

And she said that she wanted to invite me to something that was very cool, the most growth she'd ever achieved in her whole life, way more than NXIVM. And before I could even hear about it, I needed to provide her with collateral. A culture of offering collateral was something that had sprung up within NXIVM during Sarah's time in the group. Members would put money or embarrassing secrets on the line to incentivize themselves to meet their goals. In the intelligence community, it's called "compromat."

compromising material. I gave her something which was a written statement of a confession of discretions from my 20s which she took a photo of sent to somebody and basically told me it wasn't bad enough because this piece of paper is what she was going to hold as proof of me never revealing the secret of whatever it was that she was going to tell me. So she said just make it up make it worse so I elaborated on this piece of paper about other things that I didn't do

But that if it ever got revealed to the public, it would be embarrassing for me or my family or my career or whatever. And that was enough for her to tell me about the secret group called DOS. DOS. That's D-O-S. It stands for Dominus Obsequius Sororium. Roughly translated, that means Master Over Slave Sisterhood.

It was sold to Sarah as a women-only group with an unusually strict power dynamic between its members. And there was a number of different steps that I had to agree to to get into DOS, one of them being that I would be obedient to her. And I'd be like, well, obedient in what way? Like, you're going to get me to rob a bank? You know, what are we talking about? She's like, no, things like you're doing in ESP. Like, think of it as a heightened coaching relationship.

The women of DOS would enter into master-slave relationships. Lauren would be Sarah's master. For Sarah, that wasn't quite as unattractive a proposition as you might expect. She was head of education, she was teaching all these trainings. We didn't speak much, and now she was saying that she was going to mentor me daily. So that was a big draw. There was only one issue. Sarah was based in Vancouver, Canada. Lauren, along with the other big players in NXIVM, was based in Albany, upstate New York.

How was Sarah supposed to be anyone's slave at that kind of remove? And she said, "It's just, they're just names. It's just an exercise. It's a game." Was how it was presented to me. It wasn't a real thing. But soon enough, it began to feel very real indeed. Ultimately, the main thing that I had to commit to was getting what she had called going through an initiation ceremony, which included getting a small mark on my body, a tattoo, which is what she explained it to me as.

Sarah was invited to Lauren's home in Albany, where the initiation would take place. There she was asked to strip naked and introduced to other women, whom Lauren called her "new sisters", fellow initiates of a secretive elite cabal. Lauren delivered a short speech on the virtues of DOS, how she, as their master, would push Sarah and the others to their highest potential. The women were allowed to dress before being moved to a secondary location.

the house of another top-ranking female member of NXIVM. There, they were stripped again. And that particular night, the details of that are just something that I have to not get into for my own personal protection, my own boundaries around being triggered and re-traumatized because it was a very traumatizing event. Sarah doesn't like to talk about what happened next. The details of this particular event are drawn from her memoir. A doctor entered the building. Sarah recognized her.

She too was a member of Nexium. Sarah watched as a fellow initiate was asked to climb onto a medical exam table. She saw Lauren Sulcman set up a camera. This was being filmed. Sarah didn't know why. Not yet. This was a lot of preparation for a tattoo. The initiate spoke. "Master, would you brand me? It would be an honor." The doctor stepped forward. She was holding an electrosurgical device about the size and shape of a pen. It had a white-hot tip.

Sarah watched as the doctor began to scorch the initiate's flesh. The women, Sarah included, were branded with a symbol that, they were told, represented the four elements. People will say, "Well, how could you have said yes to that?" And it's a fair question. But put yourself in Sarah's shoes. You've given years to this organization. It's more than an employer. It's a way of life, a family. And nobody wants to disappoint their family.

especially when they've been conditioned to believe that to do so represents serious moral and spiritual weakness.

By the time that that happened, I was 12 years in and had been indoctrinated to believe that everything I was doing was for my own good. Even on the night of it, when I wanted to leave and everything my body said, leave, I also was gaslighting myself with saying, well, you committed. Having Keith's voice in my head saying, this is what women do. They back out. You can't trust them. They're always looking for a back door. Even women get married knowing they could get a divorce. So I was like,

I gaslit myself and I had Lauren there as well gaslighting me saying, why don't you want this? This is just a symbol for your growth. The brand would take weeks to heal and as time wore on, the doubts that had been growing at the back of Sarah's mind began to snowball.

As soon as I got branded, another thing that had happened was Lauren had asked for the deed to my home as more collateral. Every month there was now going to be a need to give more collateral. And I said, well, that wasn't part of the deal. We didn't sign up for that. She said, no, you signed up for full obedience. That's what I'm commanding you to do. The final straw came a few weeks later during a meeting with Mark Vicente, her friend and business partner. He disclosed that he was about to leave the organization.

He had sensed that something was very, very wrong among the women of NXIVM. Mark told me in a conversation that he saw that women in Albany were acting very strangely and that they were very skinny and seemed miserable. Sarah's stomach dropped from the way he was talking. She could tell that he knew about DOS, but Mark had more to say and it didn't make for easy listening.

Mark knew because somebody had come to him and shared with him that they were part of this thing and there was an assignment from, now we know it was their master, that their assignment was to go and seduce Keith and get a photo of it to prove it. This was news to Sarah. Control? Yes. Domination? Sure. But sex? Until now, that hadn't entered the equation and neither had Keith Ranieri. Now, I hadn't had that assignment.

I didn't know that Keith was involved. Now, Mark was telling her that at least one woman had definitively been asked to sleep with the cult leader. He'd heard rumors about more, too. Finally, everything fell into place. The collateral. The nudity. The camera present at the DOS initiation ceremony. Always watching. To get into the group, I had to give a nude photo of myself.

So I'd already given a photo. I had to give more collateral. I'd given video testimonials of me revealing things about my family that would have been devastating if it ever got out. And that was bad enough for me. I found out later that other women gave full frontal, like inner labia shots of their vaginas to get into DOS. That was one of the reasons why I decided that I couldn't just leave quietly. DOS was not empowering. DOS was not for women.

It existed for the benefit of one person. One sick man. Marc Vicente had discovered that DOS was a means to coerce young women into sex with Keith Ranieri. Everything he had trained his female students to believe about themselves had been to groom them for physical and mental submission to him. Sarah was more mature than the average DOS member.

It emerged later that Ranieri had specified that Lauren Saltzman and the other female leaders of DOS should recruit members that aligned with his predilection for young, thin women. Now, she assumes that she was brought in for her skill as a recruiter, someone who could guide more women to that examination table. And if those women refused to fulfill, as Ranieri saw it, their ultimate purpose, well, they were welcome to leave.

but they'd have broken their vow to DOS, and that would mean that Nexium would have no choice but to release their humiliating collateral. Graphic sexual photographs, their deepest, darkest secrets. There would be no coming back from that. When Mark and I finally spoke and I saw the full picture, Keith is a sociopath. He created a black male MLM with photos.

By this time, Sarah had been given her own slave within DOS. This friend of mine, she's a friend who also is technically my slave in this weird new relationship. I bring her over and I say, "Listen, we're not doing this anymore." Put yourself in the room. You know intimately that NXIVM's indoctrination will be hard to break. Members of the group were trained to recontextualize negative feelings, to make it good. How would you convince a friend to see the light?

You know that pointing to the bad press around Keith would be all but useless. What incentive could you offer that would overcome the fear of having one's collateral released? You could try to use NXIVM's own techniques against them. Somehow make it bad. Or you could fight fear with fear. Perhaps the thought of permanent physical injury would make humiliation seem less onerous.

I said, I want to show you the tattoo you were supposed to get. And I showed her my brand and I said, we're not doing this. And she's the one who looked at it and said, oh my God. And she turned her head to the side and she said, there's a K and an R. Keith Ranieri's initials were branded on Sarah's body. They make up one half of the symbol. The other half is the monogram of a high-ranking female member of DOS, Keith's second-in-command.

And Sarah wouldn't be the last to undergo this horrifying procedure. I found out that these women, under the instructions of Keith, had recruited almost my entire female coaching staff in Vancouver into DOS. Most of them had not been branded because it was all so new, but most of them had given very damaging pictures. And my mama bear instinct of to protect and destroy this motherfucker was so enraged in me, I can't even tell you. And that's what set me on this journey

Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work, and some of the most interesting things in the world.

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s.

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, socializing,

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. And that's when we decided that we had to get out and to be very strategic about it because we knew that people who left were sued, destroyed, um,

You know, their lives were ruined in litigation and we had to be careful on how we did it. NXIVM was extremely litigious and it had the money to tie up its critics in court, crying defamation. As any intelligence officer will tell you, it's always a good idea to have an exit strategy, but usually you'd have the luxury of figuring that out before the mission begins. In Sarah's case, figuring hers out was just one of several equally important objectives.

We were gathering information as to what was really going on and at the same time prevent the next round of women who were slated to come to Albany to a coach summit where we knew because everybody was going to be there, there would be another round of branding ceremonies. But first things first, you need to get your team together. Up until now, Sarah's husband, Nippy, also a long-standing member of NXIVM, had been kept in the dark. The couple often worked apart, splitting their time between Canada and the USA.

Sarah had been able to hide the brand from him so far. Now, she and Mark brought Nippy in on the plan to bring down the cult. As you can probably imagine, he was more than willing to strike back at the people who had branded his wife. So I was in Vancouver at the time that we figured it out, and I was supposed to be in Albany the following week for this coach summit where I was a leader helping to run it. And Nippy, my husband, was already in New York, and Mark was in Los Angeles, and we all met there.

We all met on the phone to decide how we were going to leave. After some back and forth, they hashed out a plan. Sarah would meet Nippy in New York City and then travel to Albany as planned, ostensibly to work at a retreat for NXIVM's coaches. However, they would take the scenic route upstate. Through a contact in law enforcement, Mark had arranged for Sarah to drop in on one of the FBI's Albany offices.

There, she would finally blow the lid on what was really going on inside NXIVM. This was phase one, reporting. So I went, I was on my way to the coach retreat, and instead Nippy dropped me off at the local FBI in Albany. Probably the scariest meeting I've ever had in my entire life because I didn't know fully what I was involved in. I also didn't know if I was complicit. There's a thought.

Remember, Sarah's been working among the upper echelons of this organization for 12 years. From the outside, and by Keith Ranieri's design, it looks like the events that took place at her DOS initiation were consensual. Not to mention her role as a recruiter for the organization. If NXIVM goes down, there's a good chance she does too. Would you take the risk?

As it turned out, securing a prosecution of any kind for anyone would prove more difficult than expected.

At that point, they couldn't wrap their heads around what I was saying. I showed them the brand, I explained to them that there was possibly sex trafficking involved because women were being blackmailed to then have sex with Keith under the auspices of this personal growth program in the form of a sorority with a master-slave dynamic. Like, it was so much for the poor FBI agent to even wrap his head around. How do you pack 12 years of events into one short interview?

The FBI agent might not have fully understood the magnitude of what Sarah was saying, but she had said it. A weight had been lifted and the first domino on the path to victory had been toppled. At the same time, you know, as I was leaving, messaging Lauren saying, "I'm on my way, can't wait to see you guys." And now I'm a double agent. I'm working both sides. For now, Sarah had to maintain her cover.

But she couldn't really attend the coaching retreat. If anyone saw her mask slip, it would raise suspicions about her commitment to the group. She had to get out of Albany, but she needed an excuse. And as all professional bluffers know,

The best lies are built on a foundation of truth. The truth of it was that my grandfather was sick in Toronto, which is not far from Albany. So on my way to the summit, I said, "Hey guys, I'm so sorry. My grandfather's going in for surgery. This might be the end. I'm going up to Toronto to see him. I'll possibly say goodbye. I don't know, but I'll come back and catch the end of the summit." With her young son in tow, she packed up her valuables, bought food and water, and made her way to the train station.

It would be a 10-hour train ride from Albany to Toronto. Everything in my body was on full hypervigilant alert. I could barely eat. I could barely sleep. All I knew is I had to get out. I had to save these women. I didn't know yet that we were going to be able to expose Keith, but it was one step at a time.

Meanwhile, back in Albany, Sarah's husband was putting the second phase of their plan into motion. And what I had learned is that if you're going to leave a group like this, like a cult, you have to leave in a way that's consistent with your issues that are already prevalent in the group. So Sarah needed a reason to leave NXIVM that wouldn't raise suspicion or attract damaging litigation.

That way, she could continue working behind the scenes to de-enroll other members of the cult. Nippy stayed to do business as usual and gather information. And on day one, he confronted the leadership and he said, what the fuck? You branded my wife. Now, he made the scene so that I would have a reason to say, listen, Nippy found out about this. I didn't tell him. One of the other women told him.

Because I was afraid my collateral was going to be released for breaking the secrecy. Now, Sarah had a cast-iron excuse for breaking a vow she'd made when she joined DOS. So that's what they thought. They thought I was like, oh my God, my husband's really mad and he found out about the branding and now I've got to go fix that. And him having an anger moment was consistent with his behavior. So we step out. Sarah was an influential figure within NXIVM.

She might not have been able to go public with her story, but that influence counted for a lot. Sometimes there's power in what you don't say and how you don't say it.

Everyone that knows us knows that we are leaving. And I don't tell them why. I don't tell them that I'm being branded. I don't tell them that Keith's a sociopath. I'm just incredibly cagey and say, I'm sorry, I can't tell you what happened. All I can tell you is that I'm leaving and I'm stepping down. And everyone in Vancouver who knows me was like, well, if Sarah's leaving, if something is not right for her, then there's something wrong. So I didn't even have to tell people why. People began to leave the community in droves.

But the hardcore, the women who had been enrolled into DOS, would be more difficult to sway. The people who didn't were the women who had given so much collateral and decided that, you know, I was doing the thing that Keith taught us women would do, which is to have a tantrum. Sarah Edmondson was having a tantrum, and this is the very reason why DOS needed to exist, because...

You can't trust her. You can't trust women. See? Sarah is not following the plan. Their reluctance to break with Doss necessitated phase three of the takedown, evidence gathering. I specifically made screenshots of things I thought would be helpful, you know, where we were instructed to keep things secret. She also began taping her conversations with Lauren Solzman. These days, there are any number of apps that allow you to record your phone calls.

Honestly, the entry requirements for amateur espionage are perilously low. A smartphone is a ubiquitous, innocuous and surprisingly powerful tool. At this point, we were recording everything. So every time I spoke to Lauren, I was recording her and getting her on tape, lying straight to my face. I said to her, is Keith having sex with members of the community? I thought he was supposed to be celibate. Lauren's response, even after everything she'd been through, shocked Sarah.

And she would say things like, well, that's not really any of our business. Like, he can do whatever he wants. Like, what? I thought he was the celibate monk, and now he can do whatever he wants? And he's the therapist. He's the role of a mentor. He can't be having sex with these women. And I was furious, because understand, I'd been an advocate for this guy for years. Sarah's sudden deprogramming was its own kind of trauma.

At the same time as she was trying to save other women from the fate she had suffered, she was also trying to reconcile the fact that, for more than a decade, she'd been living out a complex delusion. As time went on, her patience began to wear thin. She accelerated her efforts to discredit Keith Ranieri and NXIVM. Sarah established a proxy, a fellow NXIVM proctor, who was not affiliated with DOS and therefore lacked any serious collateral against her.

When people asked Sarah why she had left, she could refer them to this proxy, who would fill them in on the stomach-churning details. Around the same time, Team Takedown reached out to the press. We told this local blogger who'd been trying to expose Keith for years. His name is Frank Parlato. He has a website called The Frank Report. And I went to him and I told him about the branding. Another tradecraft tip.

When you're mounting an operation, it helps to figure out exactly who your potential allies are. And you have to be certain of their allegiances. For Sarah, Frank Palato was one such ally. His blog, The Frank Report, published a shocking expose which went viral within the cult. And that was enough to stop the next round of brandings, except for we found out later one continued anyway. The plan was proceeding relatively smoothly.

Sarah had become a confident spy, outwardly maintaining her friendships with key members of NXIVM while working to bring them down. But that wouldn't last. The end of Sarah's subterfuge began with a call from her proxy. She said, oh my goodness, Beth is supposed to move to Albany. She's freaking out. The proxy had been speaking to a young woman whom Sarah calls Beth NXIVM.

who was struggling with the idea that NXIVM could be anything other than a positive force in the world. She saw the Frank report. She doesn't believe it. Will you talk to her? And so I was like, oh, I don't want to put myself at risk in that way. Eventually, against our better judgment, Sarah called Beth. And she's like, I got to call you right back. So she calls me back.

And I get her on the phone and she's like, I don't know. This Frank report, it's full of lies. What is this? And I said, in a moment of exasperation, because I was dropping my son off at daycare, I said, oh my God, Beth, do you need me to show you my fucking brand? Do not move to Albany. This shit is real. It is dangerous. Please, for the love of God, do not move to Albany. And she goes, oh, I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me. Of course I won't. And she hangs up. A few hours later, the phone rang again.

This time, it wasn't Beth. This other woman contacts me, who I've been in touch with, and she admits to me that she's in DOS. Beth is her master, and she has already been branded. Beth's slave, Melanie, wanted out of DOS. She told Sarah that the leadership had become suspicious of Sarah, Marg Ann Nippy, and she had worse news than that. They had asked Beth to record Sarah, admitting that she was working against NXIVM.

According to Melanie, Sarah had walked into a trap. Remember those phone recording apps we mentioned earlier? Which is why she had to call me back because she had to set up the recording app on her phone, call me back and get me on tape saying, I've been branded, don't move to Albany. And now I was labeled officially as a defector. Not just somebody who was unhappy and leaving, but now the whole organization knew that I was bad news. The geek was up.

It was time for Sarah to come out of the shadows. And if you have to reveal your hand, you might as well come out fighting. At this point, it's full on gloves off, full on war. And I was not shy about it anymore. And I would tell everybody, I would show them the brand. Sarah and her team were waging an information war. But NXIVM's speciality was information. They could manipulate it, withhold it, and recontextualize it to suit their needs.

As a result, many of Keith Ranieri's most devoted followers could not be swayed. And those people, by the way, are still in. Those people are still devoted to Keith. They've still not woken up. They still cannot see that he is a sociopath. They still think that what he did was for maybe not conventional, but for our growth. In the years that have passed since Sarah's defection, she's worked tirelessly to expose Keith Ranieri.

In the absence of any meaningful interactions with the FBI at the time of her leaving, she continued to use the press as a weapon. If she could apply enough heat, NXIVM's denials would lose their credibility.

In the wake of the publicity, the FBI would be compelled to take action too. What happened was we did an article for the New York Times, which came out the following fall. And that article was what initiated the case to be opened by a different district in New York.

With law enforcement back in the picture, Sarah could finally bring to bear the huge cache of evidence that she'd collected against the NXIVM leadership. And because women came through Brooklyn to get to Albany, it was sex trafficking in that region. And they took it on. And I went to them shortly after, spent two and a half days with them, gave them everything I knew. I gave them my computer and my phone to mirror.

After Sarah's marathon interview session, the US government had enough evidence to seize Keith Ranieri's computers. What they found was revealing. Revealing in the way that only 12 terabytes of potentially incriminating data can be. So there was so much data, I think they could have scrapped that entire case and started with entirely fresh evidence and they'd still have enough to convict him because they had so much footage, tapes, emails, proof against him.

Ranieri and his underlings had filmed everything. Every conversation Keith had with NXIVM members, the initiation ceremonies, it all existed as cold, hard data. From his perspective, what we were told, it was to have a library of his wisdom eventually, but he also was a sociopathic, narcissistic megalomaniac. Sarah and her team had worked hard to bring Keith Ranieri's crimes into the spotlight, but his own ego had dealt the killing blow.

Ranieri was arrested by the FBI in a raid on a luxury villa in Mexico. It was March 2018, just one year after Serra had been branded. The great guru and most noble man in the world was hiding in a closet when agents took him into custody. His acolyte and Serra's former master, Lorenz Salzman, was also present.

I did not need to testify in the end because Lauren turned on Keith. Lauren apparently woke up. On the 27th of October, 2020, Ranieri was sentenced to 120 years in prison. The charges against him include sex trafficking, conspiracy, and racketeering. Today, Sarah Edmondson is healing, but there are still those who would defend their leader. Sarah knows that a double agent, a defector, always has to be on their guard.

They have to learn and utilize counter surveillance measures every single day because no attacker is more dangerous than one who truly believes in their cause. I have to, you know, hyper vigilant with my safety and, you know, making sure I'm not being followed and I installed extra locks on the doors. And, you know, when I post where I am on Instagram, it's like a day late. So no one knows where I am. Like it's,

It's ridiculous the level to which I feel like I had to protect myself because of these indoctrinated soldiers for a sociopath. Sarah's brand is no longer a red angry thing, but the scars remain in place.

I see multiple therapists, regular therapists and cult therapists, and do a lot of things to stay normal and healthy and balanced, but it's also very dark to talk about. I'm so driven to make sure other people don't fall into the same traps that I did. And I feel like I have this template that now that I can very clearly hand to people, especially with the book and the vow, which goes through the whole thing very step-by-step,

Part of my healing is in telling my story again and again and again because I know it helps people. And people tell me all the time that because of me speaking out, they were able to see, you know, that they're in an abusive situation or in a high control group and are able to get out or to heal from something that happened and they didn't know what it was. And that's meaningful to me. I'm Vanessa Kirby.

You can learn more about Sarah's story in her memoir, Scarred, the true story of how I escaped NXIVM, the cult that bound my life. For more information about cults in general, as well as resources for survivors, visit the International Cultic Studies Association website. Join us next week for more unique experiences with true spies.

We all have valuable intelligence skills and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your skills created by a former head of training at British Intelligence now at spiescape.com. Disclaimer, the views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.