Reckoning
In March 2017, Mark Vicente was reaching a point where he had to choose between Keith Raniere and his wife, actor and former NXIVM member Bonnie Piesse.
Piesse had decided in January to resign from all things NXIVM over conflicts she was having with the upper ranks. She thought NXIVM had turned against her. She was constantly getting critical “feedback” from Lauren Salzman and Clare Bronfman on what she was told were her defiance issues.
NXIVM had been encouraging her to move up the ranks, but to get there, Piesse had to show a concerning amount of obedience. “Bonnie’s this little firecracker who doesn’t really care what you say,” actor Maja Miljkovic told me. “They were trying to make her just into another woman who will do whatever.”
That wasn’t the only reason Piesse had backed away. She’d watched some of the other women in NXIVM become unhealthily skinny, tired, and stressed. Allison Mack was wearing a belly chain and India Oxenberg was wearing a similar chain around her neck. Both of them were wasting away, becoming increasingly frail-looking.
Vicente wanted to follow Piesse back to Los Angeles and escape whatever it was that was happening under his watch, but he still felt committed to his friend Raniere and his responsibilities as a senior proctor and NXIVM board member. The organization was also a steady source of income at a time when his filmmaking projects had stalled.
AT TRIAL, VICENTE recalled a conversation he had with Raniere during a springtime walk around Albany. The exchange planted seeds of doubt that would soon upend his life completely.
“We were walking and I was beginning to have very distant, at that point, doubts about him,” Vicente testified in May 2019. “And he said something to me that sounded, you know, one of the usual things that sounded very ‘principle.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, you could be a psychopath and say those exact same words.’
“He seemed to me to get very excited. And he said, ‘Well, I could be. Let’s say I am.’ And the whole discussion continued. To me it was a strange response, his what I perceived as excitement about it.”
Vicente told the court that his apprehension grew as his conversations with Raniere continued. “ ‘I don’t know what is going on with you and all these women, but I have deep concerns about this all blowing up in some way that is bad,’ ” Vicente told Raniere. “He said to me, ‘Well, I don’t think this will blow up; maybe other things will, but not this.’ I thought, ‘I don’t know where to go from here. He’s not engaging me on what I’m concerned about.’ ”
Vicente received a worrying phone call from an L.A. student who’d been propositioned about submitting collateral for entrance into a secret society. Around the same time, he was called to participate in a Jness intensive that solidified his suspicion that something sinister was happening. The program riffed on familiar NXIVM themes geared for women around not choosing victimhood, but it also went a few steps further.
“My general understanding of that intensive was, in essence, if somebody complains about abuse, they are, in fact, the abuser,” Vicente testified. “So if somebody says, ‘There’s abuse going on and so-and-so person is doing it,’ the whole idea is, ‘Well, actually you’re the abuser.’ ”
Vicente took Lauren Salzman aside and told her about his concerns. On top of the bizarre lessons, he was worried for Lauren’s health, as she was looking fatigued and experiencing bouts of vertigo. “ ‘You know,’ ” he told her, “ ‘all these skinny women and all these things that are happening, why don’t we start talking about that?’ ”
According to Vicente’s testimony, Salzman went pale and replied, “ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”
“ ‘You absolutely do know what I’m talking about,’ ” he said. “ ‘This stuff doesn’t happen without you knowing.’ ”
Vicente began to suspect that Raniere had wanted the amped-up Jness course to influence him and drive an ideological wedge between himself and Piesse. Raniere had reason to suspect that Piesse was exhibiting “suppressive behavior” behind the scenes and likely wanted her removed. “I began to piece together that this intensive was designed for me,” Vicente testified. “It was designed for me to turn against my wife.”
Sarah Edmondson was having her own doubts. An episode of Black Mirror sent her into a worried spiral of questions. In the TV show, a kid is blackmailed by text into escalating crimes—all because a hacker discovers his porn-watching history.
“I actually wrote to Lauren and I was like, ‘Who has my photo?’ I didn’t freak out, but all of a sudden I was just like, ‘What am I involved in?’ ” Edmondson asked Salzman who her master was and where all the photos were stored. The answer she kept getting in return was “You don’t need to know.”
In April 2017, Vicente learned about a “vow” found on Allison Mack’s computer. “The vow was to Raniere, vowing in essence that she would never leave. And that if she ever did, she would give up any children she had to him and all her possessions,” he testified. Vows were already a part of NXIVM’s curriculum, but this was more extreme and disturbing than anything Vicente had encountered before.
“I had finally asked myself the question, the most terrifying question, which is, What if he is not who he represents himself to be, but what if he’s the exact opposite? What if he is in fact evil? What if all of this is a mask to do heinous things to other people?”
Vicente told Sarah Edmondson what he knew: that there was a secret society involving “collateral” and lifelong vows. “Her response I recall was something along the lines of, ‘Well, if something like this existed, then a person that was involved probably couldn’t talk about it.’ ”
Edmondson was trying to signal to her friend that she was already branded and had given collateral. But it would take another few weeks for Vicente to catch on.
AT ANOTHER INTENSIVE in L.A., Vicente warned two coaches about the secret society he had discovered. “I believed that their girlfriends had been approached for the secret society. And I said to both of them, individually, I said, ‘You need to get your girlfriends away from Albany. You need to get them away from these women that are trying to enroll them in something. You need to protect them, they are in danger.’ ”
Finally, on May 20, Vicente told Sarah Edmondson that he was going to resign. “ ‘I think that something is going on that could be illegal,’ ” he recounted telling her. “ ‘I think it’s a huge problem.’ ”
Edmondson had been playing along with assignments simply to avoid punishment. She felt thankful she wasn’t in Albany with the other women, who were punished with a studded leather paddle if they went against orders texted to them or failed to respond in under a minute.
Still, she gave Vicente the same answer she’d given the previous month: if somebody was involved in something like what Vicente was describing, she probably couldn’t say anything about it. “That’s when the light bulb went off,” Vicente said. He asked Edmondson if she’d been invited to the secret society and her demeanor changed.
“They have too much on me,” Edmondson said after a stressful silence. “They have confessions, recorded confessions, they have naked material, and I’m trapped.”
“And I said, ‘Well, if the consequence of you leaving is that all these things end up on the internet, then you better leave, because what you’re involved in is illegal and you’re complicit in this if you continue.’
“ ‘You have to make peace with it,’ ” Vicente recalled telling Edmondson. “ ‘So maybe your naked body is going on the internet, fine. Make peace with it.’ ”
Finally, Edmondson revealed that she’d been branded. She told Vicente about everything: the video recording, the punishment, the readiness drills keeping them up at all hours of the night.
That conversation spurred the first of many phone calls to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agency would eventually open a file on NXIVM that led to Raniere’s trial and conviction in 2019.
“I was horrified,” Vicente testified, his voice breaking. “I just—in essence, the walls just came tumbling down. Oh, my god, this is what is really going on.”
JENN KOBELT USED to celebrate each May 31. It was the day she’d joined NXIVM, and it became an anniversary that represented a turning point in her life.
But May 31, 2017, was a different kind of turning point. After a roller-coaster four years in which she’d left a yoga studio job, launched an acting career, and become Sarah Edmondson’s assistant as a way to fund her NXIVM education, she had begun to think the company had some terrible secrets.
“That was the day it all fell apart,” she told me.
Kobelt had just finished a training session with the women’s group Jness when she noticed that Edmondson’s husband, Anthony Ames, had left all the NXIVM group chats almost simultaneously. Then her phone rang.
It was Edmondson. She had only cryptic things to say. “I’m sorry, we’ve been horribly misled,” she told Kobelt. Edmondson said they could still be friends, but not in the context of NXIVM. She and her husband were quitting, effective immediately.
Kobelt knew from Edmondson’s tone that something bad was happening, but Edmondson couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say what it was. “That freaked me out a lot,” Kobelt says. If there was a good reason Edmondson was fleeing, she wanted to know about it, and likely flee with her.
After pacing around her apartment for two days, Kobelt decided to reach out to Edmondson using the secret chat function on the messaging app Telegram. She hoped Edmondson would feel safer answering her nagging questions there, not realizing that DOS slaves used Telegram to communicate with their masters. Edmondson instantly called her with a barrage of her own questions, apparently thinking Kobelt was in DOS.
“She was grilling me on whether I’d ever been in a secret group, and I’m just like so confused,” Kobelt recalls. “I remember saying to her, ‘You mean like ESP? That’s kind of secret.’ And she was like, ‘Yes, but different.’ ”
Kobelt grew more disoriented by Edmondson’s line of questioning: Had Kobelt ever wondered why ESP was so expensive? Or why asking questions was so strongly discouraged? At one point, when Edmondson burst into tears and yelled “Motherfucker!” Kobelt thought she might be listening to her friend unravel in real time.
“She was helping lead me down my own rabbit hole,” Kobelt told me. “I decided I needed to resign and figure this out.”
Edmondson had spent the better part of a ten-hour train ride making many similar calls, trying to figure out who was in DOS and to warn the women she knew without giving away too many details. If Lauren Salzman found out that Edmondson had broken her vow of secrecy, there was a chance her collateral could be released. So Edmondson had everyone swear not to tell. She told Kobelt that even her live-in boyfriend couldn’t know about their conversation.
While Edmondson headed to Toronto to visit family, her husband took a noisier approach. He confronted NXIVM’s leadership, including Lauren Salzman, at a gathering of more than a hundred coaches. Portions of a secret audio recording of the meeting were first published by the CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM.
“Sarah tells me she got fucking branded,” Ames told the gathering. His voice was icy, as if he was holding back stronger words. “This is criminal shit…. Don’t even try to wrap your head around how this is okay. I’m out.”
On his way out the door, he added, “You’re branding my fucking wife!”
Causing a scene was part of Edmondson and Ames’s plan to leave without setting off alarm bells. Ames was known for his “anger” issues, and Edmondson had spent plenty of exploration-of-meaning (EM) sessions working through her “dependency” issues. Ames’s “tantrum” was intended to frame their exit as a spontaneous attempt to save their marriage, not a move to get the authorities involved. They were afraid of intimidation, lawsuits, and worse.
Lauren Salzman immediately jumped into damage-control mode. She texted Raniere “911.” When she finally spoke with him, he acted as though he were learning about the branding for the first time. “How do you think I feel learning that this wife branded my initials next to her vagina?” he said. Salzman took this as an instruction that she needed to lie to protect Raniere. If anyone asked, she stuck to the story that he didn’t know anything; he wasn’t involved; he was as shocked as anyone that women went around branding themselves.
In the weeks after she’d been branded, Edmondson had showed the scar to a close friend, who pointed out that she could see a downward-facing K. But there also looked to be a small zigzagged M tucked under a letter A—possibly a reference to Allison Mack.
Edmondson called Salzman to say she had to leave in order to stop Ames from divorcing her. She asked about her naked photos and confessions, and if it was really Raniere’s initials on her body. She wanted answers, but she was also testing how much Salzman knew and what she was willing to reveal.
Salzman admitted that Raniere knew about DOS and had given permission to use concepts of collateral and penance. She defended the initiation ceremony, saying, “It wasn’t supposed to be a horrible experience…. I don’t believe it’s bad for women to build honor and character.” This was a message Salzman would repeat many times over the next year as she spearheaded a wider damage-control plan within the NXIVM community.
THOUGH EDMONDSON’S EXIT was quiet at first, one week later an all-out war erupted in Vancouver. The branding allegations appeared on Frank Report, former NXIVM publicist Frank Parlato’s tabloid-style blog. Kobelt remembers that she and her boyfriend were driving over a bridge when she first read the details. “I read the article out loud,” she told me. “I was flabbergasted.”
The only names mentioned in the June 5 post were Keith Raniere and Allison Mack, but the post described the nude photos collected as “collateral,” the hours-long branding process that was recorded on cell phone video, and the vow of slavery taken by each recruit.
Not long after the post went live, Edmondson got a phone call from one of her coaches. “I heard about the Frank Report and I’m supposed to move to Albany,” the Vancouver coach told Edmondson. Though she can’t recall her exact words, Edmondson replied with some variation of “Please don’t move to Albany.”
“Why, it can’t be true, can it?” the coach asked.
“Do you need to see my brand?” Edmondson fired back.
The woman on the other end of the call sounded concerned and confused, so Edmondson kept going. “I said, ‘I got branded, please don’t move to Albany,’ and I hung up.”
Later that day, Edmondson found out the call had been a trap. The coach was already in DOS and already branded. “She was taping me, to prove that I was breaking my vow of secrecy.”
NXIVM leadership had discovered that Edmondson was warning Vancouver students about the branding ceremony and helping people cancel their memberships, and Salzman had quickly mounted a campaign to stop supporters from leaving. “That’s when shit really started to hit the fan,” Kobelt said.
KOBELT CONFRONTED ONE of her closest Vancouver allies, Lucas Roberts. Roberts ran a local computer support and repair business, and as one of the city’s few NXIVM proctors, he often played the role of personal assistant to Lauren Salzman when she visited town. Kobelt said, “What would it take for you to leave NXIVM? What would you need to know?”
Roberts paused to think about it. He said he needed to know that they were really hurting people, and that they weren’t doing anything to try to make it better. It seemed to him that Sarah Edmondson was lashing out because of her own marital problems, not because of any real injustice.
Kobelt says she nearly convinced Roberts to leave. He told her he was 80 percent of the way there but that first he wanted to talk to Salzman. Kobelt didn’t yet know that Salzman was one of the first-line DOS masters, responsible for having recruited Sarah Edmondson and several others into a vow of lifelong obedience.
Apparently Salzman “ninja minded” Roberts into staying and taking on a bigger role within NXIVM. He immediately dropped all contact with NXIVM’s critics and would later pick up the responsibilities that Edmondson had left behind.
This kicked off a period of elevated paranoia, where former members couldn’t be sure who to trust. Innocuous messages of concern and wanting to help would often escalate to strong-arming manipulation.
Edmondson discovered that most of the women working as coaches in Vancouver had either joined DOS or had submitted first-round collateral to hear the DOS pitch. She guessed that fourteen of the eighteen women coaches had been propositioned, and that many had accepted. “There were women at different stages of their commitment to DOS. Many of them weren’t branded yet,” she said. “When I left, a ton of women left.”
Jenn Kobelt was still coming to terms with the fact that DOS was very, very real. She discovered that some of her close friends were part of the secret slave group and had been subjected to disturbing punishments and threats. There was much more beyond what was said on Frank Parlato’s blog. She didn’t yet know about the dungeon the sorority had been building in the weeks leading up to Edmondson’s departure. At Raniere’s trial, prosecutors would show an itemized list of purchases from the website ExtremeRestraints.com, including ankle shackles, a hanging rubber strap cage, a studded paddle, a suspension kit, an electrified dog collar, and two human-sized cages. Punishments that DOS slaves may have received from these instruments of torture were apparently filmed, and probably on a hard drive somewhere.
There was another solid two weeks of constant phone calls. It wasn’t easy for Kobelt and Edmondson to determine everyone’s allegiances. Some members went totally silent, which was usually an indication that they were sticking with Salzman’s version of events. But it became clear that some of the people calling in were essentially spying on enemies, trying to get whatever information they could to use against defectors in court.
NXIVM later accused Kobelt and Edmondson of accessing their servers and canceling over $100,000 in credit payments.