Actress Catherine Oxenberg Opens Up About the Secretive Group She Claims Brainwashed Her Daughter
The following is an exclusive excerpt of Captive: A Mother's Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult, out this week. In 2011, Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg and her daughter, India, started attending personal and professional growth seminars called Executive Success Programs (ESP), as a way to bond. They were intended, writes Oxenberg, for "entrepreneurs who wanted to be successful and make money, but in an ethical, humanitarian way." As time went on, Oxenberg grew skeptical, and eventually alarmed, by ESP's parent company, NXIVM. Six years later, NXIVM and its founder Keith Raniere were accused of sex trafficking, among several other federal crimes, and of branding women's skin with Raniere's initials. Below, Catherine writes about the devastating realization that her daughter was deep in the clutches of this organization.
By the spring of 2016, India had grown more distant than ever — she just didn’t seem present. So much so that within a short span of a year, she’d totaled two cars in accidents, and now I was worried for her physical safety as well as her mental agility. What was going on with her that she was getting into these accidents? She’d asked me for a few tiny, loose diamonds I had from a ring so she could design a belly chain for herself, and I gladly gave them to her.
Around then, I received a third call from Hillary, reporting that my daughter had withdrawn the rest of her money and closed her account. When Hillary asked her what she was going to use the money for, India told her she was starting a new business. We crossed our fingers that this meant she was leaving the group and striking out on her own, and I waited patiently for India to tell me herself, which she did a few weeks later.
“Mom, I just wanted to let you know that I split from Michel, and I quit my job at the Rainbow school,” she said as we prepared dinner one night.
“Oh, really?” I tried hard to subdue my enthusiasm.
“Yeah. I’m going to start a new business.”
“That sounds great, India! Is this something ... you’re doing on your own?”
I had a split second of hope before the word salad came tumbling out of her mouth again. Keith had designed a new business just for her called Delegates, she said, her eyes lighting up.
“It’s innovative and exciting! Keith is brilliant! And he’s going to mentor me personally, Mom. This is an opportunity I can’t pass up!”
She explained the concept as best she could.
“India,” I told her, “that sounds just like TaskRabbit.” She didn’t hear me.
“And I’m going to develop an app for it, and I have to raise eighty thousand dollars for it and....”
Oh, God. Raise money? This is where the rest of her inheritance was going: as seed money for one of Keith’s inane, self-serving creations.
“And there’s more!” she said.
I didn’t think I could take any more.
“I’m moving to Albany in September,” she said, “to be a part of this new university program Keith created! I’m going to be one of the first guinea pigs — it’s going to be so much fun!”
I was at a loss for words at this point and could answer her only monosyllabically. I couldn’t say “Great,” and I couldn’t say “I’m excited for you."
I couldn’t say any of the things that a mother would want to say when her child was about to embrace a new stage of her life.
The best I could manage was: “Wow.”
She’d dumped so much upsetting news on me, one item after another, I didn’t even get a breather in there to enjoy the fact that she’d dumped Michel. She’d already traded up to Keith, which was so much worse.
Later, I would learn about two events that had happened a few weeks before our conversation and had swiftly hoovered her deeper into the ESP underworld. First, she and Keith had taken a little walk together around the town of Halfmoon, where he lived, and when they returned, India was flushed and giddy. Whatever her previous feelings about him were, they’d been erased, and from that moment onward, she’d wear the same adoring expression on her face around him as those volleyball cheerleaders from five years earlier.
Second, Allison Mack had recruited her into some new, top secret, badass female empowerment sisterhood sorority — “like the Masons, but for girls!” was the pitch. “We’ll be like ninja warrior women!” Allison told her.
Allison was to be India’s group “master.”
But I didn’t know any of that yet.
All I knew so far was that the devil himself had taken India personally by the hand, and now she was leaving us to move to Cult Central.
That September, she gave away and liquidated her possessions as if she were leaving the planet. All my daughter left behind were dozens of packets of colorless, zero-calorie noodles in the fridge in my garage — they looked like baby eels floating around in a murky fluid, like something that ends up invading the world in a horror sci-fi flick if you let it loose.
After our conversation, I saw her fleetingly over the next year. Our next extended visit with each other was in the spring of 2017. Again I rented the enchanting white house by the turquoise waters of Tulum.
This time I gathered three generations of Oxenberg women there: Celeste, Grace, and Maya came in with me from LA, my mother flew in from Belgrade, and India flew in from Albany. This was our own badass sisterhood sorority.
It was our first vacation together as a family without Casper, so it was an important one. We’d all survived the wreckage of divorce, and now I wanted us to share an inspiring, magical, celebratory time together. I wanted us to feel our solidarity and unity as a family again. I wanted us to bond and heal from the last two years. Tulum had healing powers before; I was counting on it having them again.
We went for long walks on the beach and visited the Mayan ruins nearby. My mom hired a chef to whip up fantastic, fresh meals, and the kids spent all day in the water. And while I was there, I worked on the mission statement for my next creative project to help women: a nonprofit human rights organization I was going to establish as soon as I returned to LA.
“The Catherine Oxenberg Foundation is a human rights organization dedicated to empowering women to lead more embodied lives,” I wrote. “This can only become a reality in an environment where women are free from subjugation, exploitation, and abuse. We champion issues essential for the enhancement of female health and well-being — emotional, physical, and sexual — through the areas of research, rehabilitation, and restoration.”
We all had an amazing, rejuvenating time together in Tulum, but ... there was something off about India — more than before, I mean.
She had a weary lifelessness in her eyes that I’d never seen before, and her usual radiant luster was replaced with dark circles under her eyes. She looked gaunt. While the rest of us basked contentedly like beached whales soaking up the sun on the sand, India couldn’t sit still. She was constantly jumping up, restless, in perpetual motion — going on endless runs up and down the beach. At one point, oddly, I overheard her telling my other kids, “I don’t want to have children.”
Why would she say this? That didn’t sound like her at all.
“Mom, I’m down to a hundred three pounds!” she said, proudly, drinking some liquid concoction while the rest of us wolfed down mountains of food from the huge spread on the terrace. I smiled, and nodded. She hadn’t been that weight since she was thirteen.
“Darling, you look beautiful. I hope you don’t think you need to lose any more weight.”
India tried to hide the fact that she carried two phones now, but it was pretty hard to conceal when both of them beeped constantly and she was always leaping up to answer a text or a call. The fact that she couldn’t get decent cell reception in Mexico made her frenzy even more frenetic.
But she felt happy and purposeful, she told me, even though she didn’t look it. My daughter seemed more burdened and serious than ever before.
Even my mother noticed something wasn’t right. After chatting with India out on the terrace one afternoon, she came in to talk to me in the kitchen.
“I asked India what she was doing in Albany and what her plans were, and I didn’t understand her answer at all,” said my mother. “It sounded like she was talking in circles. Maybe I’m just going senile.”
“No, Mom, you’re not,” I assured her. “What she says doesn’t make sense to me, either.”
Something was definitely wrong — more wrong than before — but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
A few days after we got home, and India rushed back to Albany, I got a worrisome phone call from India’s father, Bill.
“India told me she was a hundred thirty thousand dollars in debt,” he said.
Neither of us knew that the unaccredited university program she had signed up for was costing her five thousand a month. How was she going to dig herself out of this? I hoped the money she owed was to ESP and not credit card companies.
I was trying to figure out a way for her to get out of her financial mess when another phone call interrupted me. It was Bonnie, whom I hadn’t spoken to in four years — ever since I’d left ESP for good and distanced myself from everybody involved.
I’d heard she’d recently defected from the group.
“Bonnie, how are you doing?” I asked.
“Catherine, you know I’m no longer with ESP, right? I left, I’m back in LA.”
She was talking fast and sounded afraid.
“Yeah, I just heard that. Hey, are you okay? What about Mark?”
“It’s complicated,” she said, haltingly. “He’s still in. But I’m not calling about us, Catherine, I’m calling about India.” My heart skipped a beat, and I held my breath.
“Wh—what about India?”
“Catherine, I don’t know if you know what’s going on, but ... you have to save her,” Bonnie said. Her voice was trembling.
“You have to save India!”
In March of 2018, after years of Oxenberg's efforts to call attention to NXIVM, Keith Raniere was charged with identity theft, extortion, forced labor, sex trafficking, money laundering, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice by the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn, New York. Two other women, Clare Bronfman and Smallville actress Allison Mack, who worked closely with Raniere, were also indicted. Raniere is currently in federal custody awaiting trial and has been denied bail. He's pleaded not guilty.
CAPTIVE: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult by Catherine Oxenberg with Natasha Stoynoff Copyright ? 2018 by Catherine Oxenberg. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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