With any cult story, often told these days in long-form documentary TV, I suppose the main question is: Could it have happened to me? Might I have fallen prey to this charismatic guru, gone chasing after the better, more enlightened life they advertised all while they vampired my individuality, my life force (and often my money) right out of me? It’s a shivery thing to ponder. The answer is usually no—because the tragedy in Jonestown is so baroque in its awfulness, the Manson Family such a tumor of another time, the Wild Wild Country settlers so woo-woo and naively utopian. That stuff is, we think, for loons and lost souls, for the all too vulnerable. (We think this with great empathy, of course.)
Which is partly why the NXIVM cult—documented in the new HBO miniseries The Vow (premiering August 23)—seems especially insidious. The ethos of the group, founded by now convicted (but not yet sentenced) sex trafficker Keith Raniere, is steeped in corporate empowerment jargon that’s not so far off from stuff we might have heard in seminars at our own jobs, or seen spooled out in a long Instagram caption below a filtered snap of a thoughtful-looking influencer. Raniere’s career in manipulation got its start in the heady pyramid scheme days of the 1980s, and while some semblance of that grainy VHS hokiness persisted in his marketing, it also took on the more modern trappings of wellness culture, that increasingly sinister industry of organic snake oil.
It’s no wonder that Raniere’s Executive Success Programs (or ESPs, the main public engines of NXIVM), attracted so many actors beginning in the late 1990s. What Raniere was preaching—essentially a mix of Scientology’s personal auditing and The Secret’s goal actualization, wrapped up in the language of talk therapy—easily fed off of actors’ warring insecurity and vanity. The role they were offered to play was the best version of themselves; by divesting their psyches of such pesky things as pride and doubt, they could achieve a higher sentience similar to the one offered by many happily lucrative lifestyle brands. NXIVM saw a viable client pool, and with the names it reeled in—Allison Mack from Smallville, a couple actors from Battlestar Galactica, the daughter of a Dynasty star—came a vague conference of validity. Raniere eventually landed a meeting with the Dalai Lama.
It wasn’t just actors, of course. Raniere ensnared a variety of men and women who were in search of community, which is the common exploitation of all cults. Their MO is almost always to seek out longing and bend it into devotion. Raniere was a more affable, seemingly “normal” cult leader than some, a talkative, shaggy nerd based near Albany. That this guy of all guys (living just a few hours’ drive from the Burned-over district) had made such a breakthrough—learning to rid the mind of its cobwebs, freeing it from self-negating habit—lent it more credibility. The ESPs’ source was humble, and thus their vision for the world seemed actually applicable to everyday life. Raniere’s adherents had to wear sashes, sure, but plenty of organizations have some kind of uniform—a T-shirt, at least. And though Raniere would eventually demand that he be referred to as “Vanguard” (at least one deputy was called “Prefect”), for those already converted to his cause—living seemingly richer lives out in the real world because of what they’d learned in the ESPs’ immersion tank—that was a minor ask.
Inevitably, though, the truth of NXIVM began to creep out, revealing the squalid heart of it all. Which is where so many of these stories of totalizing men end—and, of course, where they begin. Raniere was sexually abusing many of the women in his thrall, having them branded with his initials and brainwashing them into thinking they were on an empowerment journey as they ceded away more and more of themselves. His retribution against apostates was swift and severe; for all his talk of ethics and self-actualization, all he really wanted was unilateral fealty, no matter his transgression. Raniere is yet another bad, predatory man, dressing up his megalomania and sexual violence in the soft-dominant clothing of self-help tutelage.