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Why did female members follow a guru named Keith Raniere, who now stands accused of sex trafficking? He made them feel like they were in control.
Keith RaniereCredit…Stefan Ruiz for The New York Times
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One winter morning in a conventional suburb outside Albany, N.Y., Nancy Salzman, the 63-year-old president of a self-improvement company named Nxivm, sat on a mahogany-colored stool in her kitchen. Her tasteful home was surrounded by other Nxivm members’ modest townhouses or capacious stone mansions that seemed to spring up out of nowhere, like mushrooms, on the suburban streets. In Salzman’s den, a photo of her with her two adult daughters hung on a wall, the three of them wearing smiles as wide as ancient Greek masks of comedy; the same happy photo served as the wallpaper on Salzman’s laptop. A hairless Sphynx cat prowled the lovely buffet of croissants and fruit on her kitchen island.
Salzman, an extremely fit woman wearing the type of thin athleisure sweatshirt that’s all the rage with the middle-aged bourgeoisie these days, turned her attention to a woman sitting at the island: Jacqueline, a 27-year-old psychology student with long dark hair, who told me that she hadn’t experienced anything as effective as Nxivm (pronounced “nexium,” like the heartburn medication). Like Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard, whose 1950 handbook “Dianetics” was billed as the “modern science of mental health” and whose pseudoscientific methods were, in his view, world-changing, Keith Raniere, Nxivm’s 57-year-old founder, believed his organization could heal individuals and transform the world. The way Nxivm did this was through techniques, or “technology,” meant to rewire your emotional self.
Salzman, who has training in neurolinguistic programming, which involves hypnosis and techniques of mirroring another individual to create deep rapport, was about to embark on a therapy session in which she would ask Jacqueline to cast her mind back to her childhood, as Nxivm sessions often do. Jacqueline had come to her with a phobia: She flips out when she gets on a plane. One time, she had to get off an airplane that had boarded because she became nervous, and when she wanted to get back on, the flight attendants wouldn’t let her.
Salzman nodded. In a near whisper, she asked Jacqueline a stream of intimate questions not only about her fear of flying but also about her parents’ relationship. She ascertained that Jacqueline believed her mother was ill used by her father, who forced the family to move often, by air. “It was always gray around her,” Jacqueline said sadly, of her mother. “She had a horrible life.” But at the same time, she said, her upbringing made her feel as if she always needed a man to protect her.
Listening to Salzman’s questions, it became clear that she was positing that these issues — Jacqueline’s fear of flying; her belief that her mother was forced into a terrible life by her father; and her inability to be an independent woman — were connected. We are controlling our own lives all the time, Salzman said. We are all in complete control. Jacqueline’s mom had been in control but had chosen to be a victim. And Jacqueline was in control and had chosen to be a victim, too. “Are you pretending to be a helpless woman?” Salzman said earlier.
“That’s the way I receive attention, that’s kind of my thing,” Jacqueline said.
“Women are allowed to be dependent on men,” Salzman explained. “A great part of being a woman is no matter how you screw up your life, you can always move back in with your dad. Every time you have chosen to stay dependent, you have made a decision not to be independent.” What if she became the person she relied on?
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Inside Nxivm, the 'Sex Cult' That Preached Empowerment (Published 2018) – The New York Times
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