Under the guise of an “executive success program”, NXIVM recruits rich women and introduces them into a bizarre secret society that brainwashes its members using rituals and trauma-inducing techniques taken directly from the MKULTRA handbook.

When one learns about the dark, disturbing truths behind NXIVM (pronounced Nexium), it is difficult to understand how this organization has managed to remain active for over two decades. While accounts about the cult’s horrific methods first surfaced more than 15 years ago, NXIVM keeps recruiting rich women, funneling millions of dollars from elite families, and expanding across America.

Founded by the “charming and charismatic” leader Keith Raniere (who requires members to call him “Vanguard”) along with his associate Nancy Salzman (who is called “Prefect”), the organization sells self-help seminars for executives. However, within NXIVM is a secret society named DOS which turns women into slaves trauma-inducing methods resembling Monarch Mind Control.

Former members have depicted Raniere as a man who manipulated his adherents, had sex with them and urged women to follow near-starvation diets to achieve the type of physique he found appealing.
– New York Times, Inside a Secretive Group Where Women Are Branded

Here’s a closer look at this bizarre “sisterhood” and its methods that are clearly based on Monarch Mind Control.

Masters of Mind Control

Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman

In 1998, Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman founded Executive Success Programs (ESP), a company that offered life-coaching and self-improvement courses and workshops. The system was based on an “amalgam of therapeutic techniques” such as hypnosis and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Both Raniere and Salzman were trained in NLP, a well-known behavior-modification technique. Unsurprisingly enough, NLP is an important part of Monarch mind control.

Programmers were using NLP before it became known as NLP in 1976. (…) If one studies NLP, one will find that NLP books such as “Basic Techniques Book II” by Clifford Wright, teach people how to create dissociative states which are alternate personalities, and that they teach people how to develop different states of mind, and pseudo multiple personalities. It is difficult to express all the different cross-overs that NLP has with Monarch Programming, but at different times the concepts of NLP certainly would be helpful to the handlers.
– Fritz Springmeier, The Formula to Create a Mind Control Slave

In only a few years, ESP trained more than 3,700 people, including high powered individuals such as: Sir Richard Branson, billionaire business mogul; Sheila Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET); Antonia C. Novello, a former U.S. surgeon general; Stephen Cooper, acting chief executive of Enron; Ana Cristina Fox, daughter of the former Mexican president; and Sara and Clare Bronfman, the daughters of the heir to the Seagram fortune.

A few years later, ESP changed its name to NXIVM and raked in millions of dollars selling its patent-pending system called “Rational Inquiry”. Selling five-day courses for more than $10,000, NXIVM is said to provide “training in areas such as internal ethic, logical analysis, and problem-solving skills”.

It did not take long before journalists uncovered NXIVM’s bizarre, cult-like methods. In 2003, Forbes magazine published an article entitled Cult of Personality, which described some of the program’s particularities:

Students pay up to $10,000 for five days of lectures and intense emotional probing in daily 13-hour cram sessions. They remove their shoes for class, learn obscure handshakes and wear patented colored sashes in dozens of different variations that signify rank in the organization. When a higher-ranking student enters the room they must stand to show respect. They are taught to bow to one another and to “Vanguard.” When he makes a rare appearance, Elvis-like, students rush up to him. Some ex-clients say they have seen him greet each woman with a kiss on the mouth, although Raniere denies this.
– Forbes, Cult of Personality

All students must sign non-disclosure agreements and vow never to talk about what they learn. Not unlike most elite-secret societies, members’ secrecy is guaranteed by “collaterals”.

To gain admission, they were required to give their recruiter — or “master,” as she was called — naked photographs or other compromising material and were warned that such “collateral” might be publicly released if the group’s existence were disclosed.
– New York Times, op cit.

Bronfman Money

Sara and Clare Bronfman at the Dalai Lama event they organized for NXIVM

Sara and Clare Bronfman are the daughters of elite billionaire Edgar Bronfman Sr. who was the chairman of Seagram (once the largest distiller of alcoholic beverages in the world), President of the World Jewish Congress, and a prominent member of the Bilderberg group. They are the heiresses of a global empire that is still extremely influential in the world today. Needless to say, when they entered the ranks of NXIVM, things quickly escalated to another level.

The Bronfman sisters’ involvement with the organization did not please their father (who once called NXIVM a “cult”), but this disagreement did not prevent the transfer of massive amounts of the family fortune to Keith Raniere. Records show that Sara and Clare Bronfman gave Raniere over $150 million while rising to the top ranks of the company.

In 2009, the sisters’ crowning achievement was convincing the Dalai Lama to appear at an event in Albany, which gave NXIVM a new level of “spiritual credibility”.

Keith Raniere with the Dalai Lama in 2009.

However, Bronfman money was not only used for media-friendly events. A great chunk of that money is believed to have been used for more nefarious purposes.

In the last few months, people have begun to come forward with stories about nxivm. Stories about private detectives allegedly obtaining bank and phone records of nxivm opponents; stories of its critics being followed and threatened and, in one case, reportedly run off the road by a black limousine; accounts of a motherless three-year-old boy, brought into the group as a newborn under mysterious circumstances, and about the circumstances behind the Dalai Lama’s visit to Albany. Suddenly darker questions were being raised about how the Bronfmans’ money was being used. Indeed, today, in the multiple lawsuits involving the Bronfman sisters, there are serious allegations being lobbed—not just of possible blackmail and perjury but also of other “potentially illegal” activities, including theft and “a conspiracy to forge documents.”
– Vanity Fair, The Heiress and the Cult

Astonishingly, NXIVM is only the facade of an even more disturbing organization: An inner-circle, a secret that turned women into slaves.

DOS: The Mind Control Cult

Over the past 20 years, several journalists have exposed the sadistic and ritualistic practices of DOS (“Dominant Over Submissive”). Despite the gravity of the accusations against DOS, law enforcement has taken no action against it.

According to recent reports, one of the main figures behind DOS is Allison Mack, a former actress best known for her role in the series “Smallville”.

Mack interviewing Raniere in “Raniere Conversations”.

According to Frank Parlato, a former spokesman for NXIVM, Mack is second in command in DOS. Not only does she recruit slaves, she reportedly introduced corporeal punishment to the society. After promising them more “empowerment” and luring them in using famous actresses, DOS introduces women to a world of trauma and MKULTRA-inspired brainwashing.

Detractors say Raniere runs a cult-like program aimed at breaking down his subjects psychologically, separating them from their families and inducting them into a bizarre world of messianic pretensions, idiosyncratic language and ritualistic practices.
– Forbes, Op. Cit.

Most alarming were the accounts of near-psychotic breakdowns among some who had gone through the nxivm program, accounts that described what appeared to be classic brainwashing techniques, in which people were separated from their families and slowly broken down psychologically.
– Vanity Fair, Op. Cit.

In DOS, “masters” are told to recruit “slaves” into the circle.

Submission and obedience would be used as tools to achieve those goals, several women said. The sisterhood would comprise circles, each led by a “master” who would recruit six “slaves,” according to two women. In time, they would recruit slaves of their own.
– New York Times, Inside a Secretive Group Where Women are Branded

New recruits were then brought into initiation rituals that are, in actuality, torture sessions to cause dissociation. In short, it is trauma-based mind control.

In March, Ms. Edmondson arrived for an initiation ceremony at Ms. Salzman’s home in Clifton Park, N.Y., a town about 20 miles north of Albany where Mr. Raniere and some followers live. After undressing, she was led to a candlelit ceremony, where she removed a blindfold and saw Ms. Salzman’s other slaves for the first time. The women were then driven to a nearby house, where the branding took place.
– New York Times, op cit.

Yes, the women were branded like cattle.

Ex-member Sarah Edmondson shows the symbol that was branded on her body.

Sarah Edmondson, one of the participants, said she had been told she would get a small tattoo as part of the initiation. But she was not prepared for what came next. Each woman was told to undress and lie on a massage table, while three others restrained her legs and shoulders. According to one of them, their “master,” a top Nxivm official named Lauren Salzman, instructed them to say: “Master, please brand me, it would be an honor.”

A female doctor proceeded to use a cauterizing device to sear a two-inch-square symbol below each woman’s hip, a procedure that took 20 to 30 minutes. For hours, muffled screams and the smell of burning tissue filled the room.
“I wept the whole time,” Ms. Edmondson recalled. “I disassociated out of my body.”
– Ibid.

Note that “dissociating out of one’s body” is the ultimate goal of Monarch programming. Other trauma-inducing techniques included exposing women to “ultra-violent” footage.

Dr. Porter, as part of an “experiment,” showed women graphically violent film clips while a brain-wave machine and video camera recorded their reactions, according to two women who took part.

The women said they were not warned that some of the clips were violent, including footage of four women being murdered and dismembered.
– Ibid.

Not unlike most MK slaves, those who went through DOS programming often broke down mentally.

After sleepless nights and 17-hour days of workshops, a 28-year-old woman from a prominent Mexican family says she began to have hallucinations and had a mental breakdown at her hotel near Albany. She went to a hospital and required psychiatric treatment. Her psychiatrist, Carlos Rueda, says in the last three years he has treated two others who have taken the class; one had a psychotic episode.
– Forbes, op cit.

Toni Natalie, one of Raniere’s ex-girlfriends (or, more accurately, ex-slaves) described in 2012 the trauma she was forced to endure.

 During her years with Raniere she was so broken psychologically that, according to court filings, she gave up the care of her child because Raniere had encouraged her to. (…)

He was truly brilliant, she says, but in the way “that brilliance is the closest thing to insanity,” recalling how he had insisted she keep the body of her dead puppy in her garage freezer and look at it daily in order to better deal with death.
– Vanity Fair, op cit.

Forcing slaves to neglect their children and to face dead pets are classic mind control techniques to induce trauma. And when Natalie attempted to leave Raniere, she was faced with dire consequences.

Natalie’s home was broken into; police were sent to her mother’s house; her family was threatened. (…)

During those years, Natalie would learn that nxivm had hired the controversial Israeli-born private investigator Juval Aviv to monitor her home and look into her private life and business activities. Several times, she says, she was visited by F.B.I. agents, most recently this past February.
– Ibid.

At least one woman did not make it out alive. The circumstances around the disappearance of Kristin Snyder are extremely unsettling.

In 2003, Kristin Snyder, a 35-year-old environmental consultant, disappeared after a nxivm session in Alaska. Her body was never found, but in her truck, parked on the shore of Resurrection Bay, was a note which read, “I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. . . . Please contact my parents . . . if you find me or this note. I am sorry . . . I didn’t know I was already dead.”
– Ibid.

While most victims are women, another bizarre story involves a motherless child who is being raised by NXIVM.

It is alleged that the Bronfmans’ foundations had used funds to pay for the care of Gaelen, the three-year-old boy who has been living in the Halfmoon “compound.” His identity is a mystery. The oft-repeated story is that he was “given” as a weeks-old infant to Barbara Jeske, one of Raniere’s longtime followers, by his grandfather, after the baby’s mother died—either in childbirth or in a car accident. He may have been born in Michigan—where sources say Jeske went to get Gaelen—but even that cannot be corroborated. Today Gaelen lives with Kristin Keeffe, the Bronfmans’ and nxivm’s “legal adviser.” Raised as Raniere’s “heir” and according to Raniere’s child-rearing theories, he is reportedly fed a raw diet, kept away from other children, and tended to by five nannies who each speak to him in a different language—including Russian, Spanish, Hindi, and Chinese. Former nxivm insiders have been so concerned about the child they have phoned child protective services, but to no avail.
– Ibid.

Is Gaelen an MK slave, too?

In Conclusion

NXIVM has been recruiting and brainwashing people for the past two decades, subjecting its participants to horrific abuse in order to break them down. Using the natural charisma of Keith Raniere, the NLP knowledge of Nancy Salzman, and the elite money of Sara and Clare Bronfman, the organization has become a high-powered cult, apparently operating above the law.

After years of revelations being all but ignored by the media and law enforcement, recent stories appear to have finally blown the organization’s cover as a “multi-level marketing organization”. However, many unsolved mysteries remain and one can easily wonder if this is just the tip of a very dark iceberg.

These revelations prove that elite organizations can and do use ritualistic mind-control techniques to create mind-controlled slaves, and, further, that these techniques actually work. The stories here are of real women and their real experience with a real, operating organization. This is not a “conspiracy theory”. It is a fact.

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