157. CULTS: How NXIVM Controlled Women & How Sarah Edmondson Helped Take It Down

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I walked through fire.

I came out the other side.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

This is going to be a fascinating episode.

Today, I want you all to know that we are going to talk about some hard things.

One being

cults and other organizations who are, as our guest would say, a little bit cult-y, including detailed discussion of cult culture and sexual coercion.

Now, I want you all to understand that I am slightly obsessed with the cults

and high control groups.

And

Nexium really got me.

Yep.

Here's the thing.

I don't look at it as like a salacious,

how could you get involved in this situation when I watch this stuff or learn about this stuff?

I think of it as

a way we can all learn

about how control groups work and how mind control works and how.

you know, all you have to do is look at our country and the divisiveness and see how people can control other people's thinking, smart people, seeker people, and the effects that that has, and how we are all, a lot of us are in groups that are a little bit culty.

Yeah.

Okay.

That was Sarah.

Absolutely.

Sarah Edmondson is an actor, podcaster, author, and cult recovery advocate.

Sarah has starred in a number of TV series, yet she is most recently known for her real-life saga, Escaping the Multi-Level Marketing Company.

Important to note that that's what they really are.

Nexium and DOS, a secret sisterhood within Nexium, which can also be seen on HBO's The Vow.

Watch it.

Abby and I may have watched it twice.

The entire thing, twice.

Sarah's memoir, Scarred, shares her true story from the moment she joined Nexium to her harrowing fight to get out and bring its founder to justice.

Sarah co-hosts the podcast, A Little Bit Culty, with her husband, Anthony Nippy Ames.

Nippy.

Nippy and Abby and I go way back.

We've probably spent more time with him than you have.

I think it's true.

Yeah.

And lives in Atlanta with her husband and two sons.

Sarah, thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

I have to say, this has been in my virtual vision board for a very long time, probably since Untamed came out.

And I just knew that we would talk one day.

I didn't know when, but I felt it and I visualized it and fantasized about it.

And to have it come true like this is.

truly very meaningful.

And

I'm grateful to be here.

I'm going to try not cry too much.

You don't have to try.

Yeah,

we do crying a lot here.

Let's go back, Sarah, to, I would love to spend some time talking about the specifics of what happened to you and then what happened to them because of you, which is amazing.

And then let's get into like how we can all freaking learn from this experience.

This is a meaningful Venn diagram for me because Untamed is largely about how do we create lives and relationships and families and communities where people are held by belonging, but also free.

Because in so many groups, we are not just cults, but like all groups, we have organized human beings in a way where we get to choose our individuality or choose our belonging, but we often don't get to do both in families, in churches, in companies.

So this is a fascinating.

conversation to me.

And I think specifically to this pod.

So long ago, in the olden days of yore, you were living in Vancouver.

You were a struggling actor.

Yeah.

You were setting all your intentions.

You were a seeker and a half like me and Abby.

Yes.

Seeking, seeking, where's my purpose?

Where's my people?

And you go on a cruise.

Yes.

And then tell us about what happens.

Probably also listening to the Indigo Girls activity.

Right.

Yeah.

Of course.

Yes.

So I'm going to this cruise with my boyfriend at the time, who I'd also been struggling with, like, is this the guy I'm going to marry?

Are we going to work through our stuff?

What's my purpose?

All the things you just said so beautifully.

And I meet Mark Vasunde, the director of What the Bleep Do We Know, which at the time, in the yonder days of your 2005, this was when this was a really big film.

And it had, it was a, it was a film that shifted consciousness.

It's my favorite film.

And she loves my ass.

Yeah.

Okay.

70%.

There you go.

And I, and I had set the intention of going on this cruise and finding my purpose.

I knew I was going to be with a bunch of spiritual people.

And

I was seated across from him where I

basically had a conversation with him that changed the whole trajectory of my life.

And he had just come from an extium training himself.

He wasn't a coach or anything, but he'd been a student and had a profound experience and asked me a couple of questions that shifted my belief system around

love and attention.

And I was, I'd been really sick and I had this recognition or they would call it an integration.

an aha that oh i was just trying to get love and attention from my boyfriend through sickness was just how i got it from my mother.

And that's an old pattern and blah, blah, blah.

And in the mix of this one week, by the way, it was in the Caribbean.

So this beautiful surroundings with all these spiritual people and I'm looking for my purpose.

And Mark Vicente basically tells me about a group of humanitarians that are trying to change the world.

And we're all doing these incredible projects.

And the main thing that drew me to him wasn't even so much about.

Like, I know he mentioned Keith, the leader who is the smartest man in the world, blah, blah, blah.

Didn't draw me.

It was the community.

I thought I'd found my wolf pack.

And I was, you know, so excited about that.

But also I really loved him.

I really

looked up to Mark.

And I thought that if I could transition from the kind of fluffy acting that I'd been doing to pay the bills into media that shifts consciousness

as with him, then that would be more meaningful.

And that's really what I wanted to do.

So he could have really told me that he was doing anything and I would have been like, I'm on board.

I want to work with you.

I want to do what you're doing.

And that was the beginning of him introducing me to executive success programs, which is we didn't refer to it as an X team at the time.

It was ESP.

And I really jumped in.

I had on my website and all over my room at the time, leap and the net will appear.

So I was doing that and not researching, which is something I recommend to everybody now if they're going to join a group, research.

And

the net did appear for some time, but then it disappeared.

So you go to an ESP executive.

Tell me what, I never knew what that meant.

Oh, yeah.

Executive success training.

Okay.

Executive success program.

It was a training.

Okay.

So he invites you to this training of this group.

It's called a human potential program.

Yes.

Right.

So tell us what happens at the first meeting.

Like what, what, what are they saying?

What are you feeling?

I believed I was taking a training that would upgrade my software.

That would upgrade my belief system in a conversation, conversational, philosophical.

I'm taking a personal and professional development program in a holiday inn with a group of like-minded individuals.

That's not what a cult looks like.

That's white robes and drinking blood and all the weird things that we used to think of with cults.

But there were weird things on day one.

And luckily, Mark had preempted me and said, it's going to be weird.

This is my experience.

It was very strange.

But wait till day three and everything will make sense.

And also the leaders were,

I've since learned, trained by Keith and Nancy, the leadership, to preempt our visceral, our gut reactions to the things that were bad and wrong.

Namely sashes, bowing to somebody I'd never met named Vanguard, having to call Nancy the prefect.

All of these things now, knowing what I know, are very, very obvious red flags.

But they said, you're here, you know, you've paid your money.

It's not refundable.

When when you're i think she even said something like um yeah wouldn't you wouldn't you agree that all successful people have limitations and they know their limitations and they're wanting to work on them we say yeah sure so you're like that's the first lift and they'd say okay great so what are your limitations so that now you've already admitted you have limitations and then there's the preempt of when you hit your limitations when you hit an area of growth it's going to be uncomfortable which is also true if you've been in therapy it's uncomfortable to work through your shit so we're we already agree to that and they say so when you hit up against your shit you're gonna want to bolt, you're gonna want to flirt, you're gonna want to eat, you're gonna want to smoke, and we just ask you to stay in the room and work through it.

And so, you agree to that,

but that's tricky because I had so many impulses to leave because it didn't feel right,

but I'd paid my money, I trusted Mark, and I was committed to my growth.

And we said before every class, clap, we are committed to our success.

Okay, I'm committed to my success.

I'm here to grow.

This doesn't feel right, but no pain, no gain.

I'm going to muscle through it.

And that was the beginning of my indoctrination right from day one, accepting that somebody above me in the structure, so this martial arts structure of growth, which is one of the things that eventually appealed to me, especially coming from acting where there's no measurement.

Now I could measure my growth.

And if I did one thing, I could get, expect an outcome.

And I loved that.

But in that structure, the person above you in the ranking system knows better than you.

So there's this immediate power over, which is one of the red flags that I'm now subjugating my own belief about myself and my own knowing about myself to what somebody else sees and knows.

And that's that set me up for the rest of my time there and

the eventual demise of

me as a leader and then ultimately the program.

And that sounds jarring at first, but that's what so many groups do.

That's kind of the first

tenet of this sort of high control group, which is

your intuition is is just fear right wasn't it like a saying in nexium your intuition is just a feeling to overcome it's just a viscera your feeling is just a viscera it's just a visceral thing inside you they'd even say like the metaphor they used was that if your um

car like like the gas light comes on saying you need more gas it's possible but it also could be that the light is broken oh my gosh

right so that if you have that feeling it could be that there's fear or it could be that this is broken and you have a disintegration Okay.

So, you know, all the things you hear, you'll be uncomfortable, but growth happens outside your comfort zone.

So you really can't win because it's like you either, it either makes sense and you like it or it doesn't make sense and you hate it, but that's a sign that there's something wrong with you, not that there's something wrong with it.

Correct.

Right.

But Christianity is the same thing.

I mean,

over and over again, I heard in the pews, I would raise my hand and say, wait, why are you talking about gays this way?

Or why are we doing it that?

And there was never an explanation.

It was just always, don't lean on your own own understanding that's scripture god works in mysterious ways don't lean on your own understanding so whenever you have an impulse or an intuition that is wisdom i mean didn't next even tell you like the body is just something to overcome yeah the body was something to overcome the body it was always like in the moment of staying in bed and being cozy in the sheets or getting out of bed and like fulfilling your ideology or your goals and you could never be principled unless you could overcome the needs of the body and that got more and more extreme

and telling people to override their body is very dangerous because their body is what tells you the truth.

Yes.

And if you're controlling people's minds and you're telling them to override their bodies, they're completely powerless to you.

Yep.

And also, if you have any sort of negative feeling, any concern, and you bring that to the leadership who knows better, they can always gaslight you and flip it back on you and say, wow, it seems like you're really reactive or it seems like you're really angry.

You may want to journal on that or go sit with that.

And that's why I think it's so confusing because in all of the leadership classes and courses that are out there, they talk about comfort zones.

And in order to grow, one of the principles of growing is getting out of your comfort zone.

And so I can understand how you can be in this space where you're like, well, I want to grow.

So this, maybe that's what this uncomfort is.

It's just me pushing the boundary of my comfort zone a little bit.

Yeah, it's exactly.

Every one of these has a little bit of truth.

And that's why it's so different.

That's why it's so different.

Oh, God, that's That's watching the documentary.

I was like, well, I totally get this.

Like, I get why this can happen to people.

Me too.

Because partly, there's so much truth inside of some of the limited beliefs at cause, the viscera, all of that stuff.

There's truth there.

There's so much.

There is truth there.

And it makes me laugh so much when people are like, oh, my God, how the hell could you do that?

Like, I could never be an occult.

We're all an occult.

Like, you know, white supremacy, patriarchy, we're all buying the same thing, spending all of our money.

We are counting our calories.

We have our gods.

They're just celebrities on Instagram.

We're all going against our intuition constantly.

I'm fascinated by this whole thing.

And I think it is really important to.

Two things.

I think we should circle back to the truth of the initial, like getting you in the door, because I think that's really, really compelling, that there's this whole moment that is like half truth, half manipulation, where there's so much truth there that your confirmation bias is kicking in and only seeing the truth.

And you said the whole rest of your time, you were just, you were just chasing that initial feeling of that original moment.

So I think that's really important to say.

But I also, I'm curious what you think, Sarah, because right now I feel like we're living in a moment where, as you said, like the white robes and we can really differentiate ourselves from, oh, I would never join, you know, Nexium or Scientology or whatever it was.

Those are a little bit crazy.

But we're now living in a world where half of people's aunts and uncles are on 4chan and QAnon.

We're living in a moment where people are losing people

to this conspiratorial

way of thinking that is

not necessarily new in this nation, but is dramatically refreshed and reinforced in this moment.

So I think it's important to be speaking to

the people who are losing people to these at this moment.

Absolutely.

So there was truth in it.

And you said you can change people's mindset in three days.

Yes.

You can essentially replace the core tenets of a belief system if they're open, which I was.

I mean, I was skeptical and I was very much like, you know, hey, my parents are therapists.

What are you going to teach me?

But I was also like, I want my money's worth and I want to work with Mark and I want to, you know, grow.

I've always been a seeker, you know, doing the artist's way and reading Salistine Prophecy and all, you know, all the things.

Check, check.

Chino's my favorite book, too.

The alchemist, don't forget the alchemist.

All the things.

All the things.

I wish I had my full bookshelf here.

I would show you all of them.

I'm sure mine's the same as yours.

Yeah.

Yes.

And I think ultimately

they do these things called preempts, right?

It's from the front of the room.

The facilitator would say things like, you know, a lot of people have struggled with the sashes and they don't want to wear them because they haven't learned to measure things in their life, which was true.

And perhaps they have, you know, issues with authority.

So everything that was weird, that like, you know, like the sashes and calling him Vanguard and all that.

Tell us about the sashes and calling him Vanguard.

So Nexium had this martial art system of growth.

You would wear a white sash, this like four inch by four inch long,

really just tacky, to be a totally honest, piece of satiny cloth around your neck.

And when you grew enough to become a coach, which required hitting certain benchmarks in your growth and in your ability to recruit and in your level of education.

There's three things which seem very measurable.

And then you'd go to the next level, which is proctor, orange sash, and then senior proctor, green, counselor, blue, and senior counselor, purple.

And there was a whole bunch of others that nobody ever hit.

Nancy was a gold sash.

You'll see that in the vow.

And Keith was a double white as the perpetual humble student.

Right?

Yes.

And Keith's the Vanguard.

Keith, the Vanguard.

Yep, Keith Runi is the Vanguard.

You called Keith Renerry Vanguard and Nancy Salzman

Prefect.

In the classroom.

Outside of that, you would say Keith and Nancy.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

Or PNV

if you were at that level of comfort with them.

Explain to us what you believe the purpose from knowing what you know now.

What was the purpose of the sashes?

Well, with everything, there was like what I thought it was then and what I think it is now.

What I thought it was then was

the first time that an inner process like psychology could ever be measured by in a scientific way, quantifiable, verifiable, peer-reviewed.

So we thought that that was like revolutionary and that it would be such a gift to the world if we could actually measure people's internal growth and happiness.

And basically, it was the path of joy.

Like if you could get to the end, you'd be enlightened like Buddha.

That was the goal to be integrated, to be non-reactive, to break through all limiting beliefs.

And this path would measure it.

I believe now, and I think this is a chapter in my book where the last time I saw Keith, he said, he was trying to get me to perform in some video where I was doing some like recruitment thing.

This last time I was in Albany.

And he said,

make sure your state's up.

You need to be excited because it's really the illusion of hope.

And I couldn't.

wrap my head around that at the time, what he was saying to me.

But later, as I woke up, I realized that the whole thing is an illusion of hope.

This is a path that you think you're on to gain success and to grow.

And it's just like with MLMs and why I equate MLMs and cults.

And I know that many of your listeners are probably in MLMs and this might be hard to get.

What's an MLM?

Oh, sorry, multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme at its worst or network marketing where someone's selling you protein powder or greens juice or skincare or leggings.

And it's in a pyramid structure.

Only people who make the money are at the top.

And the people at the bottom never do.

But there's this illusion of like, if you work hard and you're happy enough and you use the tools, you too can, you know, have your dream life and buy a Hummer and move to Hawaii or whatever it is that they're peddling, right?

Like that's the image on the newsletter.

It's like financial freedom and health and wellness and all those things.

So I believe that it was just a structure to A, keep people.

motivated to go to the next level and dangling the carrot of growth, if that was important to people.

It really did seek out seekers like myself, idealistic people who wanted to make the world a better place and evolve themselves and be in this community of like-minded humanitarians.

And

it's hard for me not to roll my eyes as I say that now because I know what it is, what it really is.

But I think that ultimately it was to maintain the structure.

When you are with somebody in XTM who's a higher rank than you, they can always pull rank and what they say goes.

And I'm certainly guilty of it as well with people that were lower ranked than me, as I was trained to do.

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So

really, and this is going to be oversimplified,

But what they were telling you was that they had turned human emotion into a science.

Yes.

Basically, that's simplified, but we have figured out people.

It's a science.

It's measurable.

It's all the things.

And we are going to teach it to you.

And you're going to be the people that solve people.

And then it became evangelical.

They gave you, they gave it to you as, first of all, this will fix your life and this will also fix the world because we will go spread our message.

We will spread the good news is how the Christian christian people would say yes and then your job was to bring as many people in the fold as possible yes but the challenge is the people in power know that it's bullshit and that it's controlling but everybody else doesn't and i think that all the time about like fundamentalist evangelical christian like there's a lot of people who believe in it they are think they're doing good they think they're doing good they they have pure hearts about it the people in power usually don't they know it's bullshit they know it's the illusion of hope right but that's what they were telling you they'd solve people.

And you believed it.

You were like, they have fixed humans.

Yes.

We, there was even a line of like, imagine if the world leaders had this curriculum.

They wouldn't bomb each other.

We'd all be a one big happy family.

That was the goal.

And that's specifically also why it was sort of elite and that how it, how it was justified, was not trying to reach everybody.

We're trying to reach people in power.

We're trying to reach politicians.

Like we had the son of the former president of Mexico and all of his inner circle.

Like that's, that was huge.

That's why I think it was so important watching the documentary at how

Keith and Nancy were targeting

famous people, people in power, because this is how the structure goes, right?

He was basically a car salesman that then created this

science, quote unquote.

And then he's like, okay, well, we need to get this to the masses.

And how do we do that?

And so there's so much intention and deliberate action on how the manipulation was not just forced on you, but trying to actually get this word out there.

I just, to me, that's like the most

gross thing about it is that it was all on purpose.

But you

have Bonnie said, I can't remember who, but it was like they'd hacked the human brain, like they figured out everything, like everything was explainable.

And they had the secret potion of understanding.

And I just, Sarah, as a seeker who's always trying to find it, like I'm just, I'm just one book, one show, one BuzzFeed quiz, one away from nailing it, whatever it is.

I'm so close.

It's like that temp.

We've talked about it before in the pod, but that temptation of simplification.

Yeah.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah.

Like, it's, it's, I really thought I'd found it.

Yeah.

And the word science, too, is, is really alluring.

Like when you, if you start calling something science, my brain, which is mostly cynical around this stuff, like, oh my gosh, my brain's like, I buy into that.

It's provable.

It's measurable.

You can recreate it.

Like, okay, maybe this is something.

I totally love it.

It wasn't woo-woo.

It wasn't woo-woo.

It wasn't woo-woo.

Although from the outside, the sashes, to me, I'm like, that's a bridge too far.

Okay, but listen.

But even the sashes, everybody's talking shit about the sashes.

Oh, come on.

Every religion has like, now you get your robe.

Now you get your hat.

Now you get your habit.

Now you get your whatever.

It's like.

Brownies.

Remember brownies?

Like, I wanted wanted to be a brownie because of the little outfit.

Love the brownies.

Yeah, the patches and the orange scarf.

Yeah.

When I made that recognition between wanting to be a proctor and wanting to be a brownie, I was like, oh man,

I'm in it for all the wrong reasons.

So, Sarah, you do the five days.

Yes.

And you say, now I know what it really was.

Yeah.

When you look back on your life, what does your life become

between the five days and that you were in for 12 years, correct?

A dozen years.

What was your life like during that time?

Well, it was, it changed a lot through the 12 years.

I'd say after my first five day, it was when I was the most zealous.

I came out of that five day feeling like

a person who just found CrossFit.

That's all you can talk about.

Yeah, I am.

All I can talk about.

I was a true recruiter and I made very, there was a group of people that came with me.

And there's a group of people that thought I was in a cult immediately.

And I was like, that's fine.

They don't get it.

When they're ready, they'll come talk to me and they'll see how happy and successful I am and they'll want to do it.

And that did happen with people who initially thought it was weird.

And eventually they came and some of them never did.

And that's fine.

But it changed.

It went from being like, this is amazing.

I want all my friends to do this.

And, you know, bringing people to Albany and then being like, well, Albany is way too far from Vancouver.

I need to get a center in Vancouver.

And I got a lot of

support from that desire because they wanted people to build centers, right?

They wanted to grow and

change the world.

So here's somebody like me who is, I've got a big network.

I'm very passionate about the things that I believe in.

I always have been.

I was a top salesperson of the candy bars to raise money for the school TV

in 10th grade.

That was me.

When your book came out, I gave it to all my friends who I felt needed it.

That's just who I am.

I promote the things that I love.

So this was, it was an easy fit for me to talk about it.

And I think when I showed up in Albany with a bunch of young, beautiful actresses, I was 28 when I started, 28 to 40.

I got out when I was 40.

Those 12 years was a, there was a huge range of levels of commitment and loyalty and money spending that take a long time to

sort of delineate the stages, but I see it in kind of three chunks.

And the first chunk was building and trying to get to Proctor.

Proctor was the level of the sashes where you could actually earn money.

So up until then, I wasn't able to earn money as a, so I was like

basically running these trainings and flying out people and working my butt off to get to Procter.

I went up the stripe path very, very quickly, which was really motivating to me, but I got stuck at the level just before Proctor.

And I believe they have shocked me.

Yeah, right.

Yes.

And that's the part when I say the illusion of hope is,

you know, it's actually not that measurable.

Certain things like

recruitment and how many levels of the curriculum you've taken are measurable.

But in terms of your personal growth, which was decided by somebody above you, your coach in the higher ranks, like, has she gotten through her control issues?

No.

I don't think she has.

Is she still concerned with people liking her?

So those were the things that I was working on as a person,

but they determined if I'd worked through them enough.

And so they could always say, well, you haven't really.

really gotten this nugget yet.

And that was always what was used against me when I felt ready.

And if I I ever were, if anyone ever expressed that they were ready to get promoted, it meant that you were definitely not ready to get promoted.

You'd only get promoted if you weren't like attached or vested, was the word annexien to the promotion.

So you had to pretend that you didn't care.

And then I had to be like kind of covert about like making sure that my coach knew that I was ready for promotion.

And it was very challenging.

And they kind of controlled your life.

It seemed like everyone who got deeper into this found themselves, all of their time suddenly taken by this.

What people are listening don't know.

You were with this group all the time, every day, morning until night, correct?

Correct.

Only difference for me and say somebody like Bonnie or some of the other people that moved there, if you're watching The Vow, the people that are still loyal to Keith, if you can believe it, that there is a small group.

Those people moved to Albany.

And I think ultimately the thing that saved me is that I didn't move.

So whilst it was my passion and I even like slowly gave up acting, I also never left Vancouver.

But I spent day in and day out coaching people, working with people, filling trainings.

Like literally, I'd be brushing my teeth before getting into bed and being like helping people with their goals.

I ate and I breathed and I slept next to him, but in Vancouver.

So I think when later, cut to 12 years later, when

shit hit the fan, I had something to go back to.

And I had a family that never cut me off.

And that was a strategic move on their part.

And we can get more into that later in terms of the recovery.

And there was no compound.

A lot of people think that these cults have compounds.

There wasn't, but there was a very close-knit community in Clifton Park and Albany.

And the people who moved there and gave up everything,

which is a huge red flag, by the way, if somebody asks you to do that,

those people,

they got messed with way more than I did.

And I think in many ways, they kind of left me alone because I was such a good recruiter and I was just constantly sending them fresh blood, for lack of a better word.

In fact, that's what Keith used to say.

And in the getting people there and taking up all their time and this becoming their community and their money, that's another way of controlling because you can't leave if your whole entire life is invested in this thing.

So, so you

have a baby.

And I thought it was really interesting that you framed it this way, but you felt like maybe they sensed that your loyalty was shifting a little bit to this baby and family.

And that is the time where your best friend in Nexium, Lauren, approaches you and she says, what?

She said the same thing to me that Keith said to her, which was, how important is your growth?

And what are you willing to do for it?

And she says, anything.

And let me back up for one second.

Before she comes to me and after I'd had Troy, I was a three-stripe proctor, which meant I need to get one more stripe on my sash before I could get to green, which is another place that they stalled me for three years to get to green sash, which there was only 12 or 13 of in the whole company.

So it was like the highest level of people that were alive.

Some of the purple sashes had passed away, which is a whole separate story.

So I was, the fact that they promoted me from three-stripe

proctor to senior proctor with a like literally had a newborn with me and they promoted me was like what?

But I found out later it was a motivational promotion.

They wanted to keep me motivated.

Of course.

And that worked for a little bit.

And that allowed me to keep my center and to be the green overseeing the center, which won't mean anything to people unless they are like super Nexium diehard nerds.

But

that was the first motivation.

And then, I mean, I felt stalled on my personal growth.

And when Lauren came to me, and had it been anybody else, had it been Allison Mack or anyone else involved in DOS, I probably would have said no.

So they were smart to send Lauren because I trusted her.

She was my best friend.

She was, she married Nippy and I back in 2013.

And she

was like the person I would go to for everything.

Like in the many ways, people idolize Keith and idolize Nancy.

I probably had that more with Nancy and more so Lauren.

Even though we were like the exact same age, she was the head of education.

And I just trusted her.

So there was no reason for me to ever doubt that she didn't have my best intentions

in mind.

She says, how much do you want to grow and what are you willing to give up for?

Or what are you willing to to do for it?

What are you willing to do?

I was like, well, anything.

Okay.

And then she says, what?

So I want to tell you about something that's incredible.

This is me paraphrasing.

An incredible thing that's super exciting and like totally helped me more than anything that's ever helped me in Nexium.

Nothing to do with Nexium.

And I want to tell you about it before I can, you have to give me some piece of collateral, which is also might sound bizarre to your listeners, but collateral had been introduced a few years prior as something that we all did to put something down against our word, like something you put down as a weight against your commitment.

So this is something we'd been doing for a while.

So her asking me for that wasn't that weird in that time period.

And I gave her a written confession about a bunch of stuff that I had done in my 20s

that I didn't want the world to know that she would hold to make sure I never spoke of this secret.

She sent that to somebody, a picture of of it to somebody in the, which I now know was Keith, and the feedback was that it wasn't bad enough, wasn't damaging enough, and so I had to lie and say worse things.

Again, for her just to hold, not to release, but just for me to keep my word.

And that's when she told me about the secret society and this group of

badass bitches that were going to change the world.

And just like the men had the Freemasons, the women were going to have something.

It was nothing to do with Nexium.

And we were going to uphold each other to the best versions of ourselves and keep each other in check and

just take everything to the next level.

And

it all, I mean, it all sounded like kind of crazy, but also kind of fun.

And interestingly enough, I heard you say,

you were furious about the Trump election.

Like this actually felt to you like something women empowering.

We're going to get together.

We're going to change the world in that vibe.

Yes.

And this is something we'd always talked about in other curriculums in Nexium is that like what you vote for matters.

and not just in politics but what you buy and where your money goes is a vote for something or if you if you um boycott it that's a vote too right so this was like where are your votes going who are you working with that part sounded exciting and i was you know like in and also the fact that lauren wanted to mentor me and she said that i would be and this is where it started to get weird like okay i'm going to be your master and you're going to be my slave okay so stop there yeah

this host is also called doss right so this is DOS.

What Sarah's being initiated into, what she's getting collateraled into is a group called DOS, which stands for, we thought it was dominant over submissive.

It is not, correct?

I can't even

dominate.

Something like basically when we found out later, master over the slave women.

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Okay.

Why?

Just explain to us, you were asked to take a life vow.

Yeah.

And to whom, and how did this master and slave thing come up?

And explain to us how that wasn't an

red flag.

Yeah.

Oh, well, it was a huge red flag.

And that was also spun for me saying the reason

it feels so uncomfortable is because it should feel uncomfortable because you're making this commitment to override that that comfortable feeling is an indication that you're doing it right in this case and the master slave thing is just like everything that was um explained away with esp well it's not slashes aren't weird it's just the martial arts system vanguard's not weird it's vanguard means the leader of a philosophical movement which he is so it was like that it's like master slave like obviously you can't be my slave you live in vancouver it's just a it's just like a guru disciple relationship and we're calling it master slave

Me going,

but in the next team curriculum, we talk about how everyone should always have the right to the products of their own efforts.

But now I'm your slave.

She's like, it's just a metaphor, Sarah.

I'm committing to mentor you through this vow of obedience, which to me was a real honor because it was hard to get Lauren's time.

Even though we were quote unquote, like such close friends,

getting one-on-one time with her was very difficult.

So I'm now being like, oh, I'm going to be mentored by this person who I really respect.

I'm taking a lifetime vow of obedience.

That even wasn't so weird because I already kind of had that with her.

We had made jokes about us like doing trainings together in our 80s down in Florida with our matching track suits and like, you know, teaching this curriculum for the rest of our lives.

So I already, I already had that with her.

I had that type of friendship.

Master slave thing was like, okay, it's just an exercise.

There was a lot of things that we did in Nexium that were metaphorical exercises.

So to me, it was like another thing like that.

And what else did she say?

So there's a lifetime vow, the master slave, and that we'd go through an initiation ceremony and that I'd have sisters.

And listen, I had so many questions along the way.

Every time I had a question, it was stop.

You're being controlling.

Trust the process.

You're not going to know everything.

That's part of the process.

Well, who's your master?

I can't tell you that.

But it's a woman?

Yes.

Lie.

So she lied upon.

There's so many lies from the beginning, even her telling me that it had nothing to do with Nexium.

She knew that Keith started it because Keith invited her.

Okay.

So you, she becomes your master.

Yes.

And then what happens each day?

What is your day like?

What is this program?

What happens to you each day?

Yes.

There's a lot of things that happen from this initial commitment to doing it to

like getting out.

few months later.

So and a lot of that's in the book because it's very difficult to explain and why I wanted to write it down so I could like hand it over to people and they could go through the steps because it didn't go from, hey, you want to join this group and have Keith's initials torched into your pubic area.

Like it wasn't laid out that way.

It happened in stages, which is part of the manipulation and deception that I'm now so passionate about explaining.

There's always a bait and switch.

You think you're joining one thing and it's actually something else.

And

I, that my recognition of what that something else was happened very slowly.

And the whole time I'm thinking this is strange, but also kind of cool.

Like I had this sort of like secret thing with the women.

Nippy didn't know about it.

I told him upon Lauren's suggestion that I was going to be picking up my growth a little bit with the greens and I might be doing some things that are a little bit weird.

And he was like, cool, whatever.

Like he had his thing with the guys and I had my thing with the women.

And we were just sort of like growing and, you know,

didn't really talk about it amongst ourselves too much, which is another thing that I understand is they were trying to divide us.

Right.

Men's ministry, women's ministry.

I know it well.

Yes.

Yes.

Exactly.

And I think there

it all very quickly became, I recognize it's not what I signed up for.

It started off with very simple assignments, like Lauren was trying to help me be more self-resilient and self-reliant.

So she's like, I want you to go a whole day without asking Nippy for anything.

No help with anything.

And in fact, you can't ask anyone for help.

They want you just to figure out everything on your own.

And that actually was kind of a cool exercise because I saw even how like I had asked, asking for directions, like I interact with people when I'm out in the world.

I'm not one of those people who tries to figure it out on their own.

I'm like, oh, sorry, do you know where the soap is?

Like, like, I, I'm very, I like, I engage, right?

Other people aren't like that.

So I realized how

not self-reliant I was.

But that kind of example was like, oh, that's, this is, you know, this is good for me.

This is good for my growth.

Also isolating.

Cause also isolating to anyone.

Right.

Exactly.

But there were some things that right away I was like, uh-uh.

Uh-uh.

As soon as I was committed, I had to give, they said I had to give more and more.

I had to give new collateral every month.

So like what?

Nude photos.

Lauren asked for the deed to my home,

which of course I never gave her, but I had this vow of obedience.

So at this point is when I started to lie.

And I was like, okay, I'm not sure how to do that, but I will talk to my lawyer about how to draft up a deed and put it my home in your name, just for you to hold, just for you to hold, not actually to have, just to make sure I stay on the path.

So, and also we were doing things like we had to respond to text messages, which also had been happening for years in the SOP and the Jeunesse training.

So that wasn't that abnormal either.

But that was something that happened at a certain time.

Somebody would text, are you ready?

At noon?

And we'd go, I'm ready.

And if people didn't show up, people would come looking for you or call your spouse or your employer being like, where's Sarah?

Oh, sorry, she's at yoga.

And then I'd get in trouble and have to explain like how I wasn't taking responsibility for notifying my team.

And so that just got more and more elevated to the point where we had to be ready all the time.

So I had to keep my phone on all the time.

I had a toddler at this point,

like a two-year-old.

And I was very much sleep deprived.

And now I had to keep my phone on for these readiness drills that could happen at any point in the night, which really messed with me because now I was even more sleep deprived on top of having a toddler who didn't sleep sleep through the night.

And

meanwhile, I'm thinking, how do I get out of this?

I figured that Nancy didn't know.

Maybe I'd write a letter to Nancy anonymously.

I was trying to find a way to get out.

And Sarah, I don't know if this happened to you, but there was a lot of food things.

There was a lot of right away, people would say that the women that are being initiated into this are too heavy.

And the master would start controlling the person's calories.

And you started noticing that everyone in DOS was getting thinner and thinner.

What the hell was that about?

Yeah,

I mean, the food thing and the calories started even way before DOS.

The women of Nexium were always obsessed with their weight and being skinny.

And every time I went to Albany, they were on a new diet.

They were juice cleansing or doing raw veganism or doing keto or something.

And they were all doing it.

And like there'd be some.

Just the women, right?

Just the women.

Just mostly the women.

Yeah, I didn't.

really notice it with the men.

It was something that I never went through,

but I saw it and I saw people getting thinner and thinner.

And I knew of a couple of people who were bulimic and people who were doing diuretics.

And I found out later, of course, after leaving that that was all for Keith, that these are people that he was having a relationship with.

And he wanted them to be like 100 pounds.

Wow.

He was manipulating those.

So this gets.

weirder and weirder.

You get more and more controlled by these text messages.

You have more and more collateral on the other side.

So while your intuition is yelling at you, you're also more stuck than you've ever been because they have everything on you, right?

So you're,

then that comes initiation day.

And I don't want you to get too much into it, into the details, because I want you to protect yourself.

Thank you.

In your safest way, explain to the pod squad what happened that day.

Sure.

Yes.

And I have to keep a kind of bird's eye view.

If I go into the like the visceral of it, it just is super triggering.

But I think what's important, like what if I could pass on to your pod squad in terms terms of something that's relatable, is that it's like any moment, it's like extreme peer pressure.

There's something going on.

You know, you don't want to do it.

You feel like there's a major downside if you don't do it.

And the downside for me is that my collateral would be released because I'd taken a vow of obedience and now my master's saying, this is what you have to do.

This is the initiation ceremony.

And just to backtrack for a second, for me to accept.

this invitation after when she first told me, I had to give more collateral to what they called being fully collateralized.

And one of the things was videos of me being disparaging against the people I love most.

My husband, Nippy, my mom, my dad, my brother.

And these videos were set up in a way that Lauren was holding the phones to make it look like I didn't know that she was filming me.

So I'm like, oh yeah, Nippy's so blah, blah, blah.

My mom, you know, and just shit talking them.

So that.

They knew, Lauren knew that my family is very important to me.

And that would, that was the worst.

But people had different types of collateral.

People, like there was a lawyer who had a letter about how she planted evidence.

There was people like revealing their family's deepest secrets.

A lot of very, very graphic sexual videos that were made, close-ups of genitals taken to go, by the way, to Keith,

which infuriates me.

And I'll get to that later when I recognize that and how that fueled my escape.

This is the first time I met my, quote, sisters.

I was asked to get naked in a room and put a blindfold on.

And Lauren led me downstairs.

I was in her home and I took the blindfold off to be sitting in a semicircle with five women that I knew from Nexium, but I didn't know well enough to be like, oh, cool.

We're all naked, sitting cross-legged with candles on a sheepskin rug.

Like, okay, this isn't weird.

And then Lauren going, guys, you have to get over your body issues.

Just get over it.

Like, we're all, this is all natural.

We're sisters now.

Then we put our clothes on and had like a pot luck.

A pot unluck.

Yes, exactly.

And then she blindfolded us again and drove us around the neighborhood and brought us into Allison Mack's house, which I recognized right away because I was cheating and looking underneath my blindfold.

And I recognized the carpet.

I recognized the smell.

I've been to her home enough that I knew Allison's sense.

And I was led into a room where it was just a like massage table and very basic furniture.

And we were told to get undressed.

Everyone got undressed except for Lauren and a woman who is like a doctor in the community.

And

that's when we found out that we weren't getting a tattoo as I'd been told, that it was actually a brand and it would be done without anesthetic.

I knew that it was going to be something I'd been told it would be painful.

Like I assumed the tattoo is going to be painful and this would be a bonding experience.

But

the details of that were left out.

The main detail being that Lauren told us it was a symbol for the elements.

that the there was a horizon and a symbol for the mountains and the water.

And that was a commitment to to our growth and a connection to ourselves and our sisterhood and the earth and all this bullshit.

And

then we went through it.

And the first person who lay on the table, I mean,

you see, I can't help, but

if I connect to it, but I have to say it, like, it was torture.

It was like watching somebody be electrocuted.

It was, her flesh was cut open with a cauterizing iron.

It's not a brand, like, even what they do to cattle, I think, is more humane than what was done to us.

And

it took about 45 minutes for her.

And it wasn't 45 minutes of consecutive cutting.

It was like she'd do a line and then she'd have to stop.

And Lauren was reading, it sounded like scripture, honestly.

It was all about like guru, disciple, and devotion, and master and slave, and higher principles, and character, and honor, and all this like word salady bullshit that I could not even tell you if I could remember it because

we were disassociated.

not even as disassociated as when I went.

And by the time I went,

I think I went third or fourth, I don't remember.

And meanwhile, the whole time I'm going, how the fuck do I get out of here?

I don't have a car.

Nippia dropped me off at Lauren's hours earlier.

It's dark.

If I run with my, you know, maybe I could call a taxi.

What am I going to say?

Meanwhile, I'm thinking, I committed to this.

So I'm gaslighting myself.

We've been taught in Genesis and SOP, which ironically, we thought we were looking at the roles and the relationships of the two genders and what our indoctrination was so we could break free of that indoctrination and be a new type of woman.

Meanwhile, while there were lots of truths in it, Keith was planting his own fucked up, misogynist hatred of women.

And one of the beliefs I had is that women are flaky and we don't uphold our word and we're always looking for the back door.

So I'm like, okay, here I am doing what what I've been what I've been taught.

I'm looking, I'm literally looking for the back door.

I have to stay.

And I'm also the other than Lauren, I was the highest ranking woman of all the women there.

I was only green.

Everyone else was orange or yellow or white.

And I said, okay, I'm, and even Lauren pulled me aside at one point and was like, you got to show them how it's done.

And so I made a decision, like, I'm going to get it over with.

I'm going to lie on the table.

I'm going to show them how it's done.

I'm going to get it over with.

I saw that the more you moved, the more painful it was.

And I just went into a disassociated, like when you're kind of floating and like, and then I was thinking about my son and giving birth to him and how fucking painful that was, which was really hard birth and how much much I loved him.

And it just went somewhere else.

It went into a whole different place.

And truthfully, I was proud of myself for what I had done.

I was like, I went from being, I don't want to do this.

This is terrible.

This is crazy.

And then to opening my eyes and seeing Lauren look at me lovingly and being like, you're so proud of you.

Like you did so well.

And feeling what I actually do believe is her pure love, just terribly misguided because I've since forgiven Lauren.

At the time, it was meaningful because I was like, you know, somebody who completes a marathon.

I'm guessing I've never done it, but like, you know, I didn't want to do it.

And then I did it.

And I'm so strong now.

And that's, that's what I believed I had done.

Um,

but it was definitely horrific, painful, barbaric.

I now see it for what it is.

It was, you know, to create trauma bonding for people to also be ashamed that, you know, like for me to be public about this and speak of it when I did, I had to admit that I did this.

And also like, there's video footage of me having this done to me.

And I actually actually had to look at it when the doctor was on trial for her medical license, which three years later, I had to look at this video footage, which, by the way, all these men had to look at to decide whether or not she should keep her medical license.

Me totally naked being held down by my so-called sisters while this brand goes into my body.

Thank you for sharing that story.

I

just thank you.

Yeah,

it's something that I,

you know, obviously I wish I'd made different choices.

I wish I'd, knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn't have ever been taken the five-day because I felt pressured to take it.

And I'd be like, oh, you're pressuring me and making me feel like there's scarcity here to get me to do it.

And no, thank you.

That feels wrong.

And I'm going to trust my gut.

So, like, I know that about me now, knowing what I know.

But at the same time,

it's had to happen for me to wake up ultimately.

Even though I didn't wake up right then, I woke up.

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So you go through the initiation.

You have this horrific experience, but you reframe it as we do.

It's a survival technique.

You reframe it in the moment because

we are not people who want to frame things as we're a victim, and especially not Nexium when you're indoctrinated to think there is no such thing as a victim.

Yes.

Correct.

If you you feel like a victim, that's because you have done that to yourself.

So you go home that night, and we haven't addressed this yet, but Nippy, your husband, is also in Nexium.

So that's why all of there's no like big shock from him.

But you go home that night.

And is he aware of what happened to you that night on that night?

No, he just thinks I'm having a girl's night with Lauren and some other women.

And he was like, how is that?

Cool.

Okay.

Back to it.

Like it was, meanwhile, like we're not super connected because

I mean, we're just, just, we just were in a rough patch anyway in our relationship.

But I couldn't tell him.

And we had, Lauren had hatched a plan to, like, we knew that actually we were going to be in separate cities for the next following weeks.

Snippy was doing a training in New York.

I was going back to Vancouver.

So I was going to, I mean, this never would have made sense, but Lauren was trying to separate this thing, which eventually he would see from Albany.

So I could keep it from him for a bit.

That was the plan.

That didn't go well.

That plan did not go well.

So what happened next?

So then I was ordered to start recruiting slaves myself.

And I didn't want that.

And I was trying to figure out how to not.

And there's a whole series of things where

I had asked for somebody, the person who was like my best friend in the organization even before.

Okay, look, if I'm going to have a lifetime vow, I want it to be this person.

It's Paige in my book.

And

not her real name.

And I was told, no, she's not available.

And I slowly figured out, because I know her well, that she was definitely also in DOS because I could tell she was responding to the the drills at the same time and her phone was on at night.

And I just, you know, I just figured it out.

It was, it was pretty obvious who the other women were.

And we weren't supposed to know who the other women were except for our own sisterhood.

And a lot of things happened in a very short period of time that were weirder and weirder.

And Bonnie actually had, I got branded in March and Bonnie left, I believe, in January.

So Bonnie had already gone.

And meanwhile, this is Mark's wife.

Mark's wife.

The original Mark

Vicente.

Mark.

Okay.

His wife.

And because I was what's called her upline green, I was supposed to make sure she signed some documentation, which is also another red flag that when you leave, you're supposed to say everything's fine.

And it's essentially a gag order that you're not going to speak of anything that ever happened ever in Nexium.

And she wouldn't get back to me about that.

And at the time, I was totally happy for Bonnie that she was going back to LA to pursue her dreams.

Meanwhile, everyone else was like.

shit talking her and being like, how dare she?

Like, she's a proctor.

She's got responsibilities.

I had always been one that secretively like my inner pre-cult non-indoctrinated self was like we're doing these goals to fulfill our dreams if someone wants to take the goals and like go be an actor or musician or whatever they should do that

and they were trying to keep her in albany so i'd been sent to get her to sign this paperwork and it was really weird that she wasn't getting back to me so like that was weird lauren was asking for more collateral I was trying to figure out how to get out of it.

All these other things were happening in Nexium that I didn't like that Claire Bronfman was doing.

Like she wasn't paying us for the work that we'd done.

So I was like generally unhappy and overworked.

And I wasn't okay with so many things, but also you couldn't express that.

If you express it, like when I said to Claire, like, I think it's important that we get paid for this work, she said I was being entitled, which is another female toxic trait, according to Jeaness.

So you can't complain.

Jeunesse is the like women's, we're going to teach you to be better women women group.

Yes.

And so what Jeunesse teaches all the women is that all of these controlling, entitled, victim, those are all female qualities that we need to

like get rid of, eliminate from our personalities.

So any concern you have that has to do with emotion or your rights is a toxic feminine trait.

Yes.

Even to raise a concern is a complaint, which is what women do.

Got it.

And we need to develop more character and honor like the men.

And on the other side, the men were developing their empathy and their and their softness.

Like there was, again, some good things,

right?

For on both sides and some really, really terrible, toxic things.

And when I was in it, I just couldn't see, like, I didn't like it.

I knew that

I could feel my

view of women eroding.

And

instead of being like positive towards my sisters, I'd be like, ugh, like there's another.

flaky woman or like oblivious was another one like that women would just stand in the way and not notice that people were trying to get by and be like, Oblivious woman, like it was so bad that I would see that.

I'm still rooting these things out five years later.

We all are.

So, so Sarah, what people who don't know don't know yet

is that

the branding, the initiation, this master and slave situation was a literal pyramid scheme.

And there was one person at the top

of the pyramid, and that was Keith Ranieri.

So,

tell us really what the point of DOS was.

For Keith to lock down his women and to secure loyalty.

Just before DOS started, if you look at the timeline in the history of Nexium, one of his right-hand women is Kristen Keith, who did all his legal stuff.

And she was the mother of the child that

he denied was, we thought it was like a child that was

brought in to be raised by the community, but it was actually Kristen's child and Keith's child, but that was hidden.

We found that out later.

So Kristen had left in the middle of the night with their child and was like on the run.

And I think he realized that

he couldn't count on these women to stay.

And I've since spoken to women who were in his inner circle before DOS.

And she said when she learned about DOS, she's like, well, that was just a formalized version of how things were before.

He had collateral on them.

They were all at his beck and call and had, they weren't saying, yes, master, I'm ready.

But that's essentially what it was.

They had to be available to him whenever he wanted.

And he basically formalized it.

And he had said, he had told Kristen, who told me when I got out, that he'd wanted to start a black male multi-level marketing, MLM.

So a pyramid based on black male, which is what he did.

That's what he did.

And he was having sex with, I don't think you got this assignment, but many of the new slaves, their assignment would be.

you know, yours might have been, don't ask for help.

Some of these women's assignment would be go seduce Keith Fernieri.

So there were certain women in DOS whose job was to be available to the grandmaster sexually.

Yes.

Yes.

And that's ultimately what woke me up to skip to that.

Bonnie helped Mark get out and Mark started to see what was going on in Albany, which keep in mind, I didn't live in Albany, so I missed a lot of this stuff.

Meanwhile, Mark was leaving at a time when, even though I wanted out of DOS, my lease was over in Vancouver and I was looking at a new lease space, which meant like...

committing to another five-year chunk.

And Mark's my business partner and Mark's like, yeah, I'm leaving.

And I'm like, what the fuck?

Why are you leaving?

And he wouldn't tell me unless I signed an NDA.

And under that NDA, he shared with me what he knew about these assignments.

And he'd found out about that through some people that had confided in him in Albany.

So he knew about the sex.

And under this NDA, I somehow eventually felt comfortable to tell him what I knew about the branding.

But if you watch the vow, it takes some time for me to gear up to that because I'm so afraid to have my collateral be released.

And I'm saying things like, well, if somebody was in this group and they, it was secret, how would they let somebody know?

Like, I'm trying to get to him.

But yeah, so eventually we have an open conversation where we share what we both know because we'd all been siloed, which is a lot of how these groups operate.

Nobody knows what the other groups are doing.

It's like a terrorist cell.

Yep.

And when they start talking to you about this, when Bonnie and Mark start talking to you about this, like, what the hell, this isn't right, you resisted it.

Because you said, if I took in what she said about him, about Keith Ranieri, if I question him, I'd have to question everything about me.

And I think that is so important.

That's why people, they think that the first question about the group is like the little Jenga piece, that if I pull that out, the whole, my whole ideology, my whole community, my whole life will crumble.

So we avoid the obvious red flags.

Yes, it's a self-preservation piece.

And that's why I believe that there's still people who are loyal, because if they really admit that they were duped, they have to, A, recognize that they were wrong.

And that's obviously a huge shit sandwich that I've had to eat multiple times over the years.

But also that they were duped and that they were abused and that they abused people.

Yeah.

And they were part of not something that was good, or though there was good, but was also very, very bad.

And that's, you know, who wants to admit that?

So that's why they're doubling down.

No, Keith is good.

Keith is good.

Keith's misunderstood.

You know, that bad stuff's not true.

That's all evidence planted by the FBI.

All those women are lying.

All of them are making it up.

So when they're saying Keith is good, Keith is good, what they're meaning is, no, I'm good.

I'm good.

Yes.

I'm good.

Yeah.

Just to add one thing that I've recently learned about is that a lot of these leaders know that people won't talk about it as I am now because there's so much shame involved.

And the shame is induced by, like, you know, the naked videos.

And the women that stuck through it to the end were going down to Mexico.

This is after he fled.

I'm skipping a little bit ahead into the future.

You know what?

Let's stop there.

Pod squad, we're going to stop here.

We're going to come back with Sarah because I just need to know more things.

And I'm sure that you do too.

And this is a super important conversation.

So we're going to stop there.

Come back next time.

We'll be back with Sarah Edmondson.

We love you, Pod Squad.

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