If you read about Catherine Oxenberg’s life in a book, or saw it in a film, you wouldn’t believe the glamour of it. And you certainly wouldn’t expect its latest chapter, a chapter that involves her eldest child, a sinister cult and allegations of sexual coercion.
Catherine was born in New York in 1961, the daughter of the incredibly beautiful, thrice-married Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia (who, for a brief period, was engaged to Richard Burton, then the world’s most notorious actor) and Howard Oxenberg, an American Jewish dress manufacturer and close friend of the Kennedy family. Brought up in London, her formative years were filled with Society parties and balls, including royal ones – Catherine is the second cousin once removed of the Prince of Wales, and dated the Duke of York in the Eighties.
But she caught the acting bug young, and left the pomp and ceremony of life in London to move back across the pond and follow her dreams of becoming an actress in New York. Her first role? Playing Diana, Princess of Wales, in a television movie of her life, just one year after Diana married the aforementioned second cousin once removed. Unsurprisingly, Catherine’s extended family were said to be less than impressed with the gig, but her mother contacted Charles to ask his blessing. His response was, ‘Well, they are going to make the film regardless, at least Catherine can bring some dignity to the role.’
But her big break came two years later, when she moved to California – after a brief hiatus when she became engaged (and swiftly unengaged) to a dashing polo player, Manuel Prado, in Spain – and met American film producer Aaron Spelling. ‘He had this huge office,’ she recalls, smiling as she sips a glass of water in the kitchen of her temporary home in Malibu – her new house, up in the hills, is currently being built, and will have acres of land, ocean views and stabling for horses. ‘And in it there was this tiny little man smoking a pipe – he looked like a turtle. He came up to me, pinched me on the cheek and said, “I’m going to make you a star.” And I thought, “This is hilarious – my first time in California and I’m already getting the shtick.” But he wasn’t lying, actually.’
Indeed not. Spelling cast Catherine in his hit television series Dynasty, playing Amanda Carrington, the daughter of Joan Collins’ supremely glamorous and superbly bitchy character Alexis. At that point in the mid-Eighties, Dynasty was the number one show in the world with a weekly global audience of 100 million.
Given she’s in line to the British throne – 1,375th, give or take a few inevitable changes in the circumstances of the other potential successors – doesn’t her career path bear more than a passing resemblance to the royal family’s newest member? ‘Well, that could have been me!’ she laughs. ‘I was my mother’s date to the ball the night before Charles and Diana’s wedding. At the time I was dating Andrew, and before the ball he had filled my room at Claridge’s with boxes of roses. That night he took my hand, led me out on to the balcony and said, “Would you ever be interested in marrying someone like me, or would you prefer to be an actress?” I got a little bit uncomfortable and said, “Oh, I’d much prefer to be an actress!” And just turned it into a joke. That lifestyle never really intrigued me.’
Instead, she married the roguish film producer Robert Evans in 1998 (it lasted just nine days), before settling down with the actor Caspar Van Dien, with whom she has two children. The father of her eldest child, India, born in 1991, is William Shaffer. These days Catherine doesn’t have much time for soap operas or royal tittle-tattle - she's embroiled in a much more personal and harrowing crusade: getting her 27-year-old daughter (and former debutante), India, out of the cult in which she has been ensnared for the past eight years.
[India joined Nxivm (pronounced ‘nexium’) when she was just 19, after Catherine took her to one of their entry-level sessions, Executive Success Programs. ‘A friend of mine kept calling me and saying, “You’ve got to come to this intro, it’s this extraordinary business programme.”
I was pretty jaded and blasé – I’d done enough of these in my day – but she kept calling. One time, India happened to be in the house, so I said, “Hey, do you want to go with me?” And strangely, she said yes. Because what 19-year-old wants to go to an intro for business classes? But she was thinking of setting up her own gluten-free catering business at the time. So we went and I was not impressed – it was a bunch of generic platitudes. I was expecting India to blow it off, but when I said, “What did you think?” she said, “This is for me.”’
Founded by a man called Keith Raniere in 1998, Nxivm bills itself as a self-help organisation and has seen an estimated 16,000 people enrol in its courses over the years. Based in Albany, 150 miles north of New York City, the group has chapters across the United States, as well as in Canada and Mexico. Raniere refers to himself as the leader of a philosophical movement – members are required to call him ‘Vanguard’, and thanks are given to him at the beginning and end of each class. Numerous high-profile names have been connected with the group, including Richard Branson (Nxivm held seminars on his island, Necker, although Branson maintains he had no involvement with them), several actresses including Smallville star Allison Mack – who went on to become Raniere’s right-hand woman – and the billionaire Seagram heiresses Clare and Sara Bronfman, who are thought to have bankrolled Raniere and Nxivm. According to legal findings and public documents, as much as $150 million of the Bronfman sisters’ trust funds was transferred to the organisation, although both sisters claim it was less than that.
Until recently, most people saw Nxivm as a relatively harmless enterprise – although it was known there were accusations of brainwashing and that it worked as a sort of pyramid scheme, whereby members had recruitment quotas and were paid a percentage for every new person they enrolled – hence Catherine’s friend’s relentless pestering to get her to sign up. It was only when the New York Times ran a story last October that the general public started to realise it was much more sinister. In the piece, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Meier revealed that within Nxivm there was a smaller, secret group that was only for female members. It was called DOS, which stands for Dominus Obsequious Sororium, broken Latin for ‘lord over the obedient female companions’.
The group worked on a master-and-slave paradigm – to gain admission, women were required to give their recruiter, or ‘master’, some collateral to ensure they wouldn’t reveal the group’s clandestine practices. Collateral could include anything from nude photographs of themselves to sensitive information about their family members. They were kept on a strict starvation diet – between just 500 to 800 calories a day – supposedly to fit in with Raniere’s ideal aesthetic, and it is claimed that they were all expected to have sex with him. But it was the final part of the initiation that proved the most alarming. Women were told to undress and were then branded with a cauterising device below their hip, searing them with a two-inch symbol made up of Raniere and Allison Mack’s initials. Mack also allegedly used Twitter to try to recruit new members for a ‘unique human development and women’s movement’ – targets included global superstars such as Emma Watson and the pop star Kelly Clarkson (neither responded to her tweets).
When India first joined Nxivm, Catherine knew nothing about DOS or Raniere’s coercive ways, but it didn’t take long before alarm bells started ringing. Beautiful, softly spoken, intelligent and sweet-natured, India is, says Catherine, just about the last person you would imagine ending up in a cult. Of her five children (including her two step-children), she adds, India was the most stable and level-headed.‘I remember one person I spoke to said, “If India’s in a cult, I want to be a part of that cult!” That’s the type of girl she is,’ Catherine says.
But within a year India was made a ‘coach’ at Nxivm. Once that happened, she broke up with her then-boyfriend and started to distance herself from her family. Then her mother noticed that India’s personality was beginning to change. ‘The first thing that went was her sense of humour,’Catherine says. ‘All of a sudden she got very serious. Then her language started to change, using words from the cult like ‘suppressives’ and ‘parasite strategies’, to the point where I couldn’t understand her. The deeper she got in, the less sense she made.’ Catherine says it was when India turned 21 that the group really got their hooks into her – just as she received her inheritance. ‘She came into some money, not millions, but enough that she could live comfortably, and they wanted her to siphon it all off to them.’ To this day, Catherine doesn’t know how much India spent on Nxivm, but considering the entry-level classes alone cost a few thousand, the overall figure must be in the tens of thousands.
Catherine was torn – should she wade in and try to force India out of the group, or hold off and hope she came out of it on her own? For as long as possible she followed the latter path, wary of becoming one of those meddling mothers. ‘As a parent, you want to be loving and supportive and not go, “What the f**k are you doing?” I really tried to respect her process, until she crossed a line and she was in danger. Everything primal about my motherhood started blaring when I got a certain piece of information and I knew I had to step in. ’That piece of information came via a phone call from a woman called Bonnie Piesse, who had been a member of Nxivm with India. ‘She called me up out of the blue last April [2017, before the NYT article], absolutely terrified. She told me that India was in severe danger and that I had to save her.’ She started to talk about DOS, which was the first Catherine had heard of the inner group. ‘She said she thought Allison Mack might be India’s master and that she’d tried to warn India not to be mentored by her because she was very penance-oriented and diet-restriction-oriented. She was the one who told me all the girls were having sex with Raniere. So all of this was very jarring, but I said to Bonnie that I always thought India would wake up. And Bonnie said, “She went in so young that she might not. She might only get out if you stage an intervention.”’
Catherine began to craft a plan. India’s birthday was coming up, so she invited her to come home to celebrate it. When India arrived she was dangerously thin and admitted to her mother that clumps of her hair had been falling out and that she was no longer having periods. Catherine immediately took her to a doctor, who confirmed that India was underweight and was putting her chances of ever being able to have children in serious jeopardy. ‘I was really worried about her physically as well as mentally, but when she first arrived I was going to hold off and not do anything. But then I saw her recruiting somebody for the cult at her birthday party and I just lost it.’
There were no temper tantrums or screaming arguments. When Catherine confronted India, she says it was like hitting a brick wall. ‘She was in a closed loop of thinking. By then I knew about the branding, so I said, “Well, are you branded?” And she said, “Yes, but why is that a bad thing?” And by then, my eyes were crossing. “Why is that a bad thing? Do you even know what you’re branded with?” And she said, “Yeah, some Latin symbol.” I said, “No. It’s Keith’s initials. Don’t you care?” And she just said, “It’s not important to me.” Never once did either of us raise our voice, but I said all the wrong things – I said she was brainwashed, that she was in a cult. The result was that she went back to Albany and I didn’t talk to her for nine months.’
Catherine decided she needed to take the next step. Immediately afterwards she took the case to law enforcement, getting in touch with the FBI and the New York City Police Department, but found that doors were slammed in her face. The authorities insisted that because the people involved were consenting adults there was nothing they could do – even in the case of the branding. So Catherine decided to go to the press. 'I was really tortured - do I expose my girl, is there a way of telling the story without revealing her name? But at this point, I just had to find a way of stopping it. The press were my last resort.’
And it worked. After Meier’s story broke in the NYT, the authorities finally started to take notice and Catherine began pulling together as much evidence as she could get her hands on. At this point in our interview, she breaks off and walks to the other side of the room to retrieve a huge black ring binder, filled with hundreds of pieces of paper. Flicking through it, she points out different documents – text message exchanges between DOS ‘slaves’ and ‘masters’, Nxivm bank statements, letters from other parents, testimonies from defectors. At the front of the folder is a close-up photograph of one of the women’s branded flesh. ‘I got a meeting with the Attorney General up in Albany, and I took this with me. I plonked the book down, opened it to that first page, and said, “This is happening in your own backyard.”’ Not long afterwards, Catherine got a call saying the police were taking over and that they were ‘moving in aggressively’.
In March, Keith Raniere was arrested and indicted on a variety of charges related to DOS, including sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labour. The following month, Allison Mack was arrested and indicted on similar charges. Their trial is scheduled for October, and if all the charges against them are proven and they are found guilty, both face a minimum of 15 years up to life in prison. Nxivm’s website currently states that it has suspended all business until further notice due to ‘extraordinary circumstances facing the company’. Both Raniere and Mack deny all charges, and have pleaded not guilty.
And what about India? ‘She’s waking up,’ says Catherine, with a hope and buoyancy she says she hasn’t felt in years. ‘I think India’s at the point of understanding that Raniere is addicted to money, sex and power; that he manipulates people. India’s seeing an expert, and slowly but surely she’s starting to see what happened to her.’
But Catherine admits their relationship is still fragile, not least because her latest venture has been to write a tell-all book, Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult. ‘She’s very angry about the book, and she’s scared, because she feels like I’ve stigmatised her with a scarlet letter. But now the book is no longer just about saving India – if the information in there can give other people protection against falling prey to these organisations, then it’s worth it.’
Catherine smiles ruefully, thinking back to that failed intervention. ‘You know, I really thought I would say the magic word and the gates would unlock and she would go, “Mom, you’re right! Thank you for saving me!” And off we would go, arm-in-arm. But if that had happened, Raniere would still be recruiting, he would still be branding women and coercing them into having sex with him. The whole thing would still be operating as business per usual. India’s stubbornness ended up being the cult’s Achilles’ heel – every time she said no, I had to take the next step. Ultimately, India was their demise.’
Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult, by Catherine Oxenberg (Gallery Books, £21), is out now
