The weirdest thing about the Nxivm website — which doesn’t exist anymore — is how not-weird it looked. Instagram-style squares floating in clear white space showcased beautiful scenes of the organisation’s centres in the US, Mexico and Canada. By clicking on one of them, you could learn more about the Nxivm mission to “raise human awareness, foster an ethical humanitarian civilization, and celebrate what it means to be human”. You might even recognise some of the faces working the room — hey, isn’t that the woman from that Superman show, Smallville?
If that intrigued you, you could sign up for one of its “Executive Success Programs” (ESPs for short), which promised to help you overcome your “limiting beliefs”, or the “Jness” scheme for “female empowerment”. The centres also don’t exist anymore and nor do the ESPs or Jness or any of Nxivm’s other vowel-light offerings; in fact, the entire organisation was wound up in 2018, because Nxivm was not after all a benign vendor of self-improvement snake oil.
Nxivm, as two new true crime documentaries explore, was a sex cult in which women were enslaved, trafficked, abused and branded. The brand was a design consisting of the letters “KR”, in tribute to Nxivm’s founder and leader Keith Raniere (or “Vanguard”, as Nxivm inductees called him). In 2019, Raniere was convicted on seven counts including sex trafficking and child pornography; he’s currently serving a life sentence.
At what point in the Nxivm process might you have realised something wasn’t right? Perhaps in the very first session you went to, when you were made to relive some traumatic experience in front of the audience in order to achieve a supposed “breakthrough”. But maybe you would have been reassured by the celebrity endorsements (Allison Mack, the woman from the Superman show!) or the general sense of good intention.
Perhaps, it was as you were completing your first course — but then, these were very expensive and you’d wanted to get your money’s worth. (One ex-member says she spent $145,000 on classes over the years.) Or perhaps when you were invited to join the ultra-elite secret society DOS, which stood for “Dominus Obsequious Sororium” — a bastardised Latin phrase roughly meaning “master over the slave women”. The woman inviting you would be someone you looked up to in this organisation, someone you trusted, a friend.
In any case, once you were in, you would be too compromised to think of getting out, because DOS members were required to hand over “collateral”: naked pictures or exposing information. Anyway, who would you turn to? Nxivm taught its members that anyone who criticised it was a “suppressive”; if you were close to friends or family, you would be commanded to separate from them in order to resolve your “dependency issues”.
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