If youve heard of Nxivm in the last couple of years, it was probably because of shocking, salacious headlines sex cult, starvation diets, initials branded on womens crotches, master slaves organized by the former Smallville actor Allison Mack. The extent of the groups abuse, as exposed in court, a New York Times expos and several memoirs, was indeed galling and nauseating, but the most horrifying details overshadowed a confusing, chameleonic and far more deceptive road to ruin. As documented in The Vow, a nine-part HBO series which follows former members as they reckon with their participation in the group and attempt to destroy it, the path to involvement in Nxivm which billed itself as an ethical training program under the vanguard leadership of Keith Raniere was far more insidious and seemingly innocuous than one might assume.

Its not as though the women of DOS, the secret, all-female group orchestrated by Raniere to twist female empowerment into coerced sex under threat of collateral blackmail, joined Nxivm looking for a master/slave relationship. (The name DOS is a Latin acronym allegedly meaning Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions). Had Raniere initially said, Hey guys, welcome to executive success, Im going to burn my initials into your crotch, I wouldve thought differently, Sarah Edmondson, a former Nxivm member who displayed her branding scar in the 2017 Times article and serves as co-narrator for The Vow, told the Guardian. If you think it would never happen to you, it makes you a prime candidate, she said. Because you need to understand how it would.

The Vow provides ample space for former members of Ranieres orbit, in particular Edmondson and documentarian Mark Vicente, to explain their journeys into and out of the organization in at first benign, then harrowing detail. The show, created by the Oscar-nominated film-makers Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (The Square), derives its sensitivity toward former Nxivm members in part from personal experience; Noujaim once participated in one of Nxivms five-day executive success intensive programs.

In 2006, Noujaim was at the top of my game, she told the Guardian she had just become the first woman and youngest person to win the Ted prize for her film Control Room but had some very big questions in my life. At a Ted-related retreat on Richard Bransons island, she was introduced to Nxivm by Sarah Bronfman, the billionaire heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune who, along with her sister Claire, bankrolled Raniere. Two years later, Noujaim met Vicente, who convinced her to sign up for the five-day workshop at the groups home base outside Albany, New York.

There were a few red flags, she recalled the reverence with which members of the group spoke of Raniere, the hierarchy demarcated by strange colored sashes but overall, Noujaim found the group fascinating. She met executives, Harvard graduates, ambitious creatives who believed that they could change their lives and that they could change the world with this new ethical mission, she said. They shared a kind of idealism that I found refreshing.

Edmondson had a similarly warm experience with Nxivm at first; when she joined on Vicentes recommendation in 2005, she was going on 27, adrift in her career, and wondering whats my purpose here? Whats meaningful to me? What do I want to do? Who am I?

Nxivm appeared to offer a chance at radical self-improvement, its multi-level marketing recruitment tactics masked as an empowering commitment peddled above a stream of always be optimizing, boss-bitch feminism. As women, in this culture, were never OK were never thin enough, were never perky enough, nothing is ever enough, said Edmondson. That was the motor behind so much of what we did, and I hate that. Edmondsons parents were therapists, but she found the weekly work of therapy tedious and boring; Nxivm was sort of like a diet pill in that it proposed to fix you in five days. As documented in The Vow and her 2019 memoir Scarred, Edmondson threw herself into the group as a mentor, overriding concerns about Ranieres unquestioned leadership role.

In 2017, a decade after she first enrolled in a Nxivm class, which she paused because of a work commitment, Noujaim reconnected with Vicente in Los Angeles, who encouraged her to finish the program. So she was surprised when Vicente missed the programs closing party at her house, and no longer responded to her texts.

A few weeks later, Vicente explained why: he and his wife, the former Star Wars actor and musician Bonnie Piesse, had defected from the organization. They, along with actor Edmondson, another longtime Nxivm member who had founded the center in Vancouver a few years prior, were awakened to Ranieres sexual abuses, psychological control and the terrifying realization that for years, they had participated in and recruited for a cult. Amer and Noujaim started filming what seemed at first to be two individual stories of escape, as Edmondson and Vicente/Piesse tunneled their way out and attempted to bring others close friends, members of their wedding parties, people they had introduced to Nxivm with them.

The Vow burrows under your skin in ways hard to predict, largely because of the accounting by Edmondson and Vicente, who unravel Nxivms toxicity and abuse through reconsideration of their memories, photos and pamphlets from a group that became their career and family, and, most importantly, extensive audio and video evidence. The first episode presents what seems to be a weird but ultimately harmless self-improvement group; the second and third reveal the depths of manipulation and smokescreens to be near bottomless. Edmondson in particular speaks to the bizarre experience of waking up in an indefensible pot of water you didnt realize was boiling. Its so hard to explain these things in soundbites, because its over 12 years of indoctrination, she said.

Nxivm, she explained, seemed initially to make your impulses legible why you sink into the couch when you should go to the gym, why you turn to cheesecake when youre stressed. DOS was introduced to Edmondson by her best friend, Lauren Salzman, who pitched the group as committing to override that for a higher principle, to not indulge in those feelings, to follow through on those goals you set. (Salzman later testified against Raniere and pleaded guilty to racketeering.) The idea that your ideology could be stronger than your body theres truth in that, Edmondson said. Thats the fucked-up thing about Nxivm theres a lot of truth and a lot of good nuggets, but then those are warped for personal gain.

Raniere and the women closest to him, most notably Mack, twisted self-improvement into self-blame; Keith tried to teach us that the victims are the abusers, said Edmondson. We were taught in Nxivm that there were no victims, that you can never be victimized.

The Vows later episodes document DOSs unraveling in the fall of 2017, as the #MeToo movement triggered a wave of public reckonings, as well of the depths of Ranieres depravity (in June 2019, Raniere was convicted of federal crimes including sex trafficking of children, conspiracy and conspiracy to commit forced labor; his sentencing is scheduled for 27 October). For Edmondson, the days since coming forward to the New York Times have been a really, really long journey. Shes done extensive therapy with cult experts, worked with a psychologist, a couples counselor with her husband, Anthony Nippy Ames, also a former Nxivm member. Shes connected former members with pro bono attorneys (Nxivm was notoriously litigious with defectors). Some days shes reaching a new normal at her home in Vancouver, others she becomes infuriated, because these are friends of mine, people who were at my wedding, she said. And I want to shake them and wake them up. But I cant.

The series will, she hopes, break stereotypes about how groups like this form and how people get hooked and impart lessons beyond the judgment wall that is the polarizing word cult.

This isnt about cults; this is about abuses of power, she said. And those happen in organizations, in churches and religions, it happens within families.

Everybody is indoctrinated in some way, it just depends what your indoctrination is, said Noujaim. And looking at the process of questioning each one of us, no matter what we believe, need to continually go through a process of questioning.

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'This is about abuses of power': the shocking true story of the Nxivm cult - The Guardian