CULTS: How NXIVM Controlled Women & How Sarah Edmondson Helped Take It Down
December 6, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
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 guests would say, a little bit culty, including detailed discussion of cult culture and sexual coercion. Now, I want you all to understand that I am slightly obsessed with cults-
Abby Wambach:
Yes, me too.
Glennon Doyle:
… and high control groups and NXIVM really got me.
Abby Wambach:
Yep.
Glennon Doyle:
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. 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 a lot of us are in groups that are a little bit culty.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. That was Sarah.
Sarah Edmondson:
Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
Sarah Edmondson is an actor, podcaster, author, and cult recovery advocate. Sarah has started 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. NXIVM and DOS a secret sisterhood within NXIVM, which can also be seen on HBO’s The Vow.
Abby Wambach:
Watch it.
Glennon Doyle:
Abby and I may have watched the entire thing twice. Sarah’s memoir, Scarred, shares her true story from the moment she joined NXIVM 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
Nippy.
Glennon Doyle:
Nippy and I go way back. We probably have spent more time with him than you have with this…
Sarah Edmondson:
I think it’s true.
Glennon Doyle:
Lives in Atlanta with her husband and two sons. Sarah, thank you for joining us.
Sarah Edmondson:
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.
Glennon Doyle:
You don’t have to try.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, we do crying a lot here.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s go back, Sarah, I would love to spend some time talking about specifics of what happened to you and then what happened to them because of you, which is amazing and then let’s get into 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 cult cults, but 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. This is a fascinating conversation to me, and I think specifically to this pod. Long ago, in the olden days of yore, you were living in Vancouver, you were a struggling actor.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You were setting all your intentions. You were seeker [inaudible 00:03:56] like me and Abby.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Seeking. Seeking. Where’s my purpose? Where’s my people? And you go on a cruise.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Then tell us what happens?
Sarah Edmondson:
Probably also listening to the Indigo Girls at the same time. I’m going to this cruise with my boyfriend at the time, who I’d also been struggling with like, “This is the guy I’m going to marry, we’re going to work through our stuff. What’s my purpose?” All the things you just said so beautifully. I meet Mark Vicente, the director of, What the Bleep Do We Know, which at the time, in the yonder days of yore, 2005, this was when this was a really big film. It was a film that shifted consciousness.
Abby Wambach:
It’s my favorite movie. 100%.
Glennon Doyle:
She loves it.
Sarah Edmondson:
There you go. 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. I was seated across from him where I basically had a conversation with him that changed the whole trajectory of my life. He had just come from an NXIVM training himself. He wasn’t a coach or anything, but he had been a student and had a profound experience and asked me a couple of questions that shifted my belief system around love and attention. I had been really sick and I had this recognition, 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. 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. 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
The main thing that drew me to him wasn’t even so much about… I know he mentioned Keith, the leader, who is the smartest man in the world. That didn’t draw me. It was the community. I thought I’d found my wolf pack. I was so excited about that. 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 with him, then that would be more meaningful. That’s really what I wanted to do. He could have really told me that he was doing anything, and I would’ve been like, “I’m on board. I want to work with you. I want to do what you’re doing.” That was the beginning of him introducing me to Executive Success Programs, we didn’t refer to it as NXIVM 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. I was doing that and not researching, which is something I recommend to everybody now if they’re going to join a group, research. The net did appear for some time, but then it disappeared.
Glennon Doyle:
You go to an ESP executive. Tell me what… I never knew what that meant. Was it executive…
Sarah Edmondson:
Oh yeah, Executive Success Training.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Sarah Edmondson:
Executive Success Program. It was a training. ESP.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. He invites you to this training of this group.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s called a Human Potential program.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. Tell us what happens at the first meeting. What are they saying? What are you feeling?
Sarah Edmondson:
I believed I was taking a training that would upgrade my software, that would upgrade my belief system in a 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. There were weird things on day one. Luckily Mark had preempted me and said, it’s going to be weird. This was my experience. It was very strange. Wait till day three and everything will make sense. 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
All of these things, now knowing what I know are very, very obvious red flags. They said, “You’re here, you’ve paid your money. It’s not refundable.” I think she even said something like, “Wouldn’t you agree that all successful people have limitations and they know their limitations and they’re wanting to work on them?” I say, “Yeah, sure.” That’s the first lift and they’d say, “Okay, great. What are your limitations?” That now you’ve already admitted you have limitations. 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, that’s uncomfortable to work through your shit. We already agree to that and they said, “When you hit up against your shit, you’re going to want to bolt, you’re going to want to flirt, you’re going to want to eat, you’re going to want to smoke. We just ask you to stay in the room and work through it.”
Sarah Edmondson:
You agree to that. 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. We said before every class, clap, “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.” That was the beginning of my indoctrination right from day one, accepting that somebody above me in this structure, 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
Now I could measure my growth and if I did one thing, I could expect an outcome and I loved that. In that structure, the person above you in the ranking system knows better than you. 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. That set me up for the rest of my time there and the eventual demise of me as a leader. Then ultimately the program.
Glennon Doyle:
That sounds jarring at first, but that’s what so many groups do. That’s the first…
Abby Wambach:
Tenant.
Glennon Doyle:
Of this sort of high control group, which is, your intuition is just fear. Wasn’t it like a saying in NXIVM, your intuition is just a feeling to overcome.
Sarah Edmondson:
It’s just a viscera. Your feeling is just a viscera. It’s just a visceral thing inside you. The metaphor they used was that if your gas light comes on saying you need more gas, it’s possible, but it also could be that the light is broken.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, my God.
Sarah Edmondson:
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.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. All the things you hear, you’ll be uncomfortable, but growth happens outside your comfort zone. 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. That’s a sign that there’s something wrong with you, not that there’s something wrong with it?
Sarah Edmondson:
Correct.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. Christianity does the same thing.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
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… There was never an explanation. It was just always, “Don’t lean on your own understanding.” That’s scripture. God works in mysterious ways. Don’t lean on your own understanding. Whenever you have an impulse or an intuition, that is wisdom… Didn’t NXIVM even tell you the body is just something to overcome?
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah, the body was something to overcome. It was always in the moment of staying in bed and being cozy in the sheets or getting out of bed and fulfilling your ideology or your goals. You could never be principled unless you could overcome the needs of the body. That got more and more extreme.
Glennon Doyle:
Telling people to override their body is very dangerous, because the body is what tells you the truth. If you’re controlling people’s minds and you’re telling them to override their bodies, they’re completely powerless to you.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yep. Also, if you have any 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.”
Abby Wambach:
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. I can understand how you can be in this space where you’re like, “Well, I want to grow.” Maybe that’s what this uncomfort is. It’s just me pushing the boundary of my comfort zone a little bit.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Sarah Edmondson:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
Every one of these has a little bit of truth and that’s why it’s so dangerous.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, that’s why it’s so [inaudible 00:12:49]. Oh God, I’ve been watching the documentary. I was like, “Well, I totally get this.” I get why this can happen to people.
Glennon Doyle:
Me too. I so appreciated that.
Abby Wambach:
Partly there’s so much truth inside of some of the limited beliefs at cause, the viscera, all of that stuff.
Glennon Doyle:
There’s truth there.
Abby Wambach:
There is truth there.
Glennon Doyle:
It makes me laugh so much when people are like, “Oh my God, how the hell could you do that? I could never be in a cult.” We’re all in a cult. 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.
Amanda Doyle:
I’m fascinated by this whole thing. Two things I think we should circle back to the truth of the initial getting you in the door, because I think that’s really, really compelling. That there’s this whole moment that is half truth, half manipulation, where there’s so much truth there that your confirmation bias is kicking in and only seeing the truth. You said the whole rest of your time, you were just chasing that initial feeling of that original moment. I think that’s really important to say. Also, I’m curious what you think, Sarah, because right now I feel like we’re living in a moment where, as you said, the white robes and we can really differentiate ourselves from, “Oh, I would never join NXIVM or Scientology or Landmark 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 for Chan and QAnon, and are anti-vaxxers. 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. I think it’s important to be speaking to the people who are losing people to these at this point.
Sarah Edmondson:
Absolutely.
Amanda Doyle:
There was truth in it and you said you can change people’s mindset in three days.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes. You can essentially replace the core tenets of a belief system if they’re open, which I was. I was skeptical and I was very much like, “Hey, my parents are therapists. What are you going to teach me?” I was also like, “I want my money’s worth and I want to work with Mark and I want to grow.” I’ve always been a seeker doing the artist’s way and reading Celestine Prophecy and all the things.
Glennon Doyle:
Check, check.
Abby Wambach:
That’s my favorite book too.
Glennon Doyle:
The Alchemist. Don’t Forget The Alchemist, all the things.
Sarah Edmondson:
I wish I had my full bookshelf here. I would show you all of those.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m sure mine’s the same as yours, yeah.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes. I think, ultimately is they do these things called preamps, right? It’s from the front of the room. The facilitator would say things like, “A lot of people had struggle 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. Perhaps they have issues with authority. Everything that was weird, like the sashes and calling him Vanguard and all those things.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us about the sashes and calling him Vanguard.
Sarah Edmondson:
NXIVM had this martial arts system of growth. You would wear white sash like four inch by four inch long, really just tacky to be totally honest, piece of satiny cloth around your neck. When you grew enough to become a coach, which required hitting certain benchmarks in your growth and in your ability to recruit and then in your level of education. There was three things which seemed very measurable. Then you’d go to the next level, which is proctor, orange slash, and then senior proctor, green. Counselor, blue and senior counselor, purple. There was a whole bunch of others that nobody ever hit. Nancy was a gold sash. You’ll see that in The Vow. Keith was a double white as the perpetual humble student, right?
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Keith’s the vanguard.
Abby Wambach:
Keith Raniere. Keith Raniere is the van… You called Keith Raniere vanguard and Nancy Salzman prefect?
Sarah Edmondson:
Prefect. In the classroom. Outside of that you would say Keith and Nancy.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, interesting.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah, or P and V. If you were at that level of comfort with them.
Abby Wambach:
The nickname.
Glennon Doyle:
Explain to us what you believe the purpose, from knowing what you know now, what was the purpose of the sashes?
Sarah Edmondson:
Well, with everything there is 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 in a scientific way, quantifiable, verifiable, peer-reviewed. We thought that that was revolutionary and that it would be such a gift to the world if we could actually measure people’s internal growth and happiness. Basically, it was the path of joy. If you could get to the end then 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 was trying to get me to perform in some video where I was doing some recruitment thing this is the last time I was in Albany. He said, “Make sure your state’s up. You should be excited because it’s really the illusion of hope.”
Sarah Edmondson:
I couldn’t wrap my head around that at the time what he was saying to me. 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. It’s just like with MLMs and why I equate MLMs and cults. I know that many of your listeners are probably in MLMs, and this might be hard to hear.
Abby Wambach:
What’s an MLM?
Sarah Edmondson:
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. It’s in a pyramid structure. Only people who make the money are at the top and the people at the bottom never do. There’s illusion of like, “If you work hard and you’re happy enough and you use the tools, you too can have your dream life and buy a Hummer and moved to Hawaii.” Or whatever it is that they’re peddling, right? That’s the image on the newsletter as financial freedom and health and wellness and all those things. 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 team humanitarians. It’s hard for me not to roll my eyes as I say that now because I know what it really is.
Sarah Edmondson:
I think that ultimately it was to maintain the structure. When you are with somebody in NXIVM has a higher rank than you. They can always pull rank and that what they say goes. I’m certainly guilty of it as well with people that were lower rank than me as I was trained to do.
Glennon Doyle:
Really, this is going to be oversimplified, but what they were telling you was that they had turned human emotion into a science?
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
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. Then it become evangelical. 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 people would say and then your job was to bring as many people in the fold as possible.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
The challenge is the people in power know that it’s bullshit and that it’s controlling. Everybody else does it. I think that all the time about fundamentalist evangelical Chris… There’s a lot of people who believe in it. They think they’re doing good. 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, but that’s what they were telling you, they’d solve people and you believed it. You were like, “They have fixed humans.”
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes. 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. That’s specifically also why it was sort of a lead and how it was justified. We’re not trying to reach everybody. We’re trying to reach people in power. We’re trying to reach politicians. We had the son of the former president of Mexico and all of his inner circle. That was huge.
Abby Wambach:
That’s why I think it was so important watching the documentary how Keith and Nancy were targeting famous people in power because this is how the structure goes, right? He was basically a car salesman, then created this, quote, unquote, “Science.” Then he’s like, “Okay, we need to get this to the masses and how do we do that?” 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. To me that’s like the most gross thing about it, is that it was all on purpose.
Glennon Doyle:
You said-
Sarah Edmondson:
On purpose, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
… Bonnie that I can’t remember who, but it was like they’d hacked the human brain. They figured out everything. Everything was explainable and they had the secret potion of understanding. I just, Sarah, as a seeker who’s always trying to find it. I’m just one book, one show, one Buzzfeed quiz, one away from nailing it, whatever it is. I’m so close. We’ve talked about it before in the pod, but that temptation of simplification.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Right?
Sarah Edmondson:
I really thought I’d found it.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
The word science too is really alluring. 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. Okay, maybe this is something I totally love it.
Sarah Edmondson:
It wasn’t woo-woo.
Glennon Doyle:
It wasn’t woo-woo. It wasn’t woo-woo.
Abby Wambach:
Although from the outside the sashes to me, I’m like, “That’s a bridge too far.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, but listen, 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-
Sarah Edmondson:
Brownies. Remember Brownies?
Glennon Doyle:
Brownies, girl scouts.
Sarah Edmondson:
I wanted to be a Brownie because of the little outfit.
Abby Wambach:
Love the Brownie sashes.
Glennon Doyle:
The patches.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah, the patches and the orange scarf. 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.”
Amanda Doyle:
Sarah, you do the five days.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Then you say like, ‘Now I know what it really was.”
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
When you look back on your life, what does your life become between the five days… You were in for 12 years, correct?
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
A dozen years. What was your life like during that time?
Sarah Edmondson:
Well, it changed a lot through the 12 years. I’d say after my first five days, it was when I was the most zealous. I came out of that five-day feeling like-
Glennon Doyle:
Like a person who just found CrossFit. It’s all you can talk about yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sarah Edmondson:
All I can talk about, I was a true recruiter. There was a group of people that came with me. There was a group of people that thought I was in a cult immediately. 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.” That did happen with people who initially thought it was weird. Eventually they came and some of them never did. That’s fine, but it changed. It went from being like, “This is amazing. I want all my friends to do this.” Bringing people to Albany then being like, “Well, Albany is way too far from Vancouver. I need to get a center in Vancouver.” 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
Here’s somebody like me, I got a big network. I’m very passionate about the things that I believe in. I always have been. As 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. It was an easy fit for me to talk about it. 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
Those 12 years, there was huge range of levels of commitment and loyalty and money spending that take a long time to delineate the stages. I see it in three chunks. The first chunk was building and trying to get to proctor. Proctor was the level of the sashes where you could actually earn money. Up until then I wasn’t able to earn money. I was basically running these trainings and flying out people and working my butt off to get to Proctor. 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-
Amanda Doyle:
Shocker.
Abby Wambach:
Shocker.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah, right. That’s the part when I say the illusion of hope is actually not that measurable. Certain things like recruitment and how many levels of the curriculum you’ve taken are measurable. In terms of your personal growth, which was decided by somebody above you, your coach, and 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?” Those were the things that I was working on as a person, but they determined if I’d worked through them enough. They could always say, “Well, you haven’t really gotten this nugget yet.” That was always what was used against me when I felt ready. 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 attached or vested was the word in NXIVM to the promotion. You had to pretend that you didn’t care and then I had to be covert about making sure that my coach knew that I was ready for promotion. It was very challenging and…
Glennon Doyle:
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?
Sarah Edmondson:
Correct. Only difference from me and say somebody like Bonnie or some of the other people that move 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. Whilst it was my passion and I even slowly gave up acting, I also never left Vancouver, but I spent day in and day out coaching people, working with people, filling trainings. Literally I’d be brushing my teeth before getting into bed and being like helping people with their goals. I ate and I breathe and I slept NXIVM, but in Vancouver. Cut to 12 years later when shit the fan, I had something to go back to. I had a family that never cut me off.
Sarah Edmondson:
That was a strategic move on their part. We can get more into that later in terms of the recovery. There was no compound. A lot of people think that these cults of 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 asked you to do that. Those people, they got messed with way more than I did. 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.
Glennon Doyle:
In 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 entire life is invested in this thing. You have a baby? 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
That is the time where your best friend in NXIVM, Lauren approaches you and she says what?
Sarah Edmondson:
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? She says anything. 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. It was the highest level of people that were alive. Some of the purple sashes had passed away, which is a whole separate story. The fact that they promoted me from three stripe proctor to senior proctor, I literally had a newborn with me and they promoted me. It was like, “What?”
Sarah Edmondson:
I found out later it was a motivational promotion. They wanted to keep me motivated. 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 super NXIVM diehard nerds. That was the first motivation and then I felt stalled on my personal growth. 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’ve said no. They were smart to send Lauren because I trusted her. She was my best friend. She married Nippy and I back in 2013. She was like the person I would go to for everything. In many ways people idolized Keith and idolized Nancy. I probably had that more with Nancy and more so Lauren, even though we were the exact same age, she was the head of education and I just trusted her. There was no reason for me to ever doubt that she didn’t have my best intentions in mind.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. She says how much do you want to grow, and what are you willing to give up for or what are you willing to do for it?
Sarah Edmondson:
What are you willing to do? I was like, “Anything.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, and then she says what?
Sarah Edmondson:
I want to tell you about something that’s incredible. This is me paraphrasing, an incredible thing that’s super exciting and totally help me more than anything that’s ever helped me NXIVM. Nothing to do with NXIVM. I want to tell you about it before I can, you have to give me some piece of collateral, which 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. This is something we’d been doing for a while. Her asking me for that wasn’t that weird in that time period. I gave her a written confession about a bunch of stuff that I had 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 the secret.
Sarah Edmondson:
She sent that to somebody, a picture of it to somebody, which I now know is Keith. The feedback was that it wasn’t bad enough, wasn’t damaging enough, 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. That’s when she told me about the secret society and this group of badass bitches that were going to change the world. Just the men have the Freemasons, that women were going to have something. It was nothing to do with NXIVM 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. It all sounded like kind of crazy, but also fun.
Glennon Doyle:
Interesting enough, I heard you say you were furious about the Trump election. This actually felt to you something women empowering.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re going to get together, we’re going to change the world in that vibe.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes. This is something we’d always talked about in other curriculums in NXIVM is that what you vote for matters, not just in politics, but what you buy and where your money goes is a vote for something. Or if you boycott it, that’s a vote too, right? This was like, “Where are your votes going? Who are you working with?” That part sounded exciting and I was in. Also, the fact that Lauren wanted to mentor me and she said that I would be… This is where start to get weird like, “Okay, I’m going to be your master and you’re going to be my slave.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so stop there.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
This was also called DOS?
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
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? You don’t even know.
Sarah Edmondson:
I can’t even remember, Dominus Obsequious Sororium. Basically when we found out later, master over the slave women.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, just explain to us, you were asked to take a life vow and to whom and how did this master and slave thing come up and explain to us how that wasn’t a huge red flag. Yeah.
Sarah Edmondson:
Well, it was a huge red flag. 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. The master slave thing is just like everything that was explained away with ESP, “Well, sashes aren’t weird, it’s just the martial arts system. Vanguard’s not weird, vanguard means the leader of a philosophical movement.” Which he is. 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 guru-disciple relationship, but we’re calling it master slave.” Me going… 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
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, “Such close friends.” Getting one-on-one time with her was very difficult. 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 had that with her. We had made jokes about us doing trainings together in our ’80s down in Florida with our matching tracksuits and teaching this curriculum for the rest of our lives. I already have that with her. I had that type of friendship. Master-slave thing is like, “Okay, it’s just an exercise.” There was a lot of things that we did in NXIVM that were metaphorical exercises, so to me it was like another thing like that.
Sarah Edmondson:
What else did she say? There’s the lifetime vow, the master-slave, and that we’d go through an initiation ceremony and that I’d have sisters. 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?” “Can’t tell you that.” It’s a woman? “Yes.” Lie. There’s so many lies from the beginning. Even her telling me that it had nothing to do with NXIVM, she knew that Keith started it because Keith invited her.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, she becomes your master.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Then what happens each day? What is your day like? What is this program? What happens to you each day?
Sarah Edmondson:
Well, yes. There’s a lot of things that happen from this initial commitment to doing it to getting out a few months later. Lot of that’s in the book because it’s very difficult to explain why I wanted to write it down so I could 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?” 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. My recognition of what that something else was happened very slowly. The whole time I’m thinking this is strange, but also kind of cool. I had this 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 a little bit weird. He was like, “Cool, whatever.” He had his thing with the guys and I had my thing with the women and we were just growing and didn’t really talk about it amongst ourselves too much, which is another thing that I understand is they were trying to divide us.
Glennon Doyle:
Right? Men’s ministry, women’s ministry. I know it well.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes, exactly. I think very quickly I recognize it’s not what I signed up for. It started off with very simple assignments. Lauren was trying to help me be more self-resilient and self-reliant. She’s like, “I want you to go a whole day without asking Nippy for anything.” No help with anything. In fact, you can’t ask anyone for help. I want you just to figure out everything on your own. That actually was a cool exercise because I saw how asking for directions, 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?” I engage. Right? Other people aren’t like that. I realized how not self-reliant I was. That example was like, “Oh, this is good for me. This is good for my growth.”
Glennon Doyle:
Also, isolating because you’re not talking to anyone.
Sarah Edmondson:
Also, isolating. Right? Exactly. There were some things that right away I was like, ” Uh-huh, Uh-huh.” As soon as I was committed, they said I had to give more and more. I had to give new collateral every month. 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. 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 my home in your name just for you to hold. Not actually to have, just make sure I stay on the path.” 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 ESP training.
Sarah Edmondson:
That wasn’t that abnormal either. That was something that happened at a certain time. Somebody would text, “Are you ready at noon?” And we’d go, “I’m ready.” 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.” Then I’d get in trouble and have to explain how I wasn’t taking my responsibility for notifying my team. That just got more and more elevated to the point where we had to be ready all the time. I had to keep my phone on all the time. I had a toddler at this point a two-year old and I was very much sleep deprived. 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 through the night. 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.
Glennon Doyle:
Sarah, I don’t know if this happened to you, but there was a lot of food things. 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. You started noticing everyone in DOS was getting thinner and thinner. What the hell was that about? Do you believe…
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah, the food thing and the calories started even way before DOS. The women of NXIVM were always obsessed with their weight and being skinny. 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. They were all doing it. There’d be somebody-
Glennon Doyle:
Just the women, right?
Sarah Edmondson:
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. I knew of a couple people who were bulimic and people who were doing diuretics. I found out later, of course, after leaving that that was all for Keith. These were people that he was having a relationship with and he wanted them to be like a 100 pounds. He was manipulating their diets.
Glennon Doyle:
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. While your intuition is yelling at you, you’re also more stuck than you’ve ever been because they have everything on you, right?
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Then comes initiation day. I don’t want you to get too much into the details because I want you to protect yourself.
Sarah Edmondson:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
In your safest way. Explain to the pod squad what happened that day.
Sarah Edmondson:
Sure. Yes. I have to keep a bird’s eye view if I go into the visceral of it, it just is super triggering. I think what’s important, what if I could pass on to your pod squad in 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 valve of obedience and now my master’s saying, this is what you have to do. This is the initiation ceremony. Just a backtrack for a second. For me to accept this invitation, when she first told me I had to give more collateral to what they called being fully collateralized. One of the things was videos of me being disparaging against the people I love most.
Sarah Edmondson:
My husband Nippy, my mom, my dad, my brother. 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. I’m like, “Oh yeah, Nippy’s so…” My mom… Just shit talking them so that they knew, Lauren knew that my family is very important to me. That was the worst. People had different types of collateral. There was a lawyer who had a letter about how she planted evidence. There was people revealing their family’s deepest secrets. Lot of very, very graphic sexual videos that were made closeups of genitals taken to go, by the way, to Keith, which infuriates me. 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.”
Sarah Edmondson:
I was asked to get naked in a room and put a blindfold on. Lauren led me downstairs. I was in her home and I took the blindfold off to be sitting in a semi-circle with five women that I knew from NXIVM, but didn’t know well enough to be like, “Oh cool, we’re all naked sitting cross-legged with candles on a sheep skin rug.” Like okay, “This isn’t weird.” Then Lauren going, “Guys, you have to get over your body issues.” Just get over it. This is all natural. We’re super sisters now. That we put our clothes on and had a potluck.
Glennon Doyle:
Pot unluck.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes, exactly. Then she blindfold 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. I recognized the carpet, I recognized the smell. I’ve been to her home enough that I knew Allison’s scents. I was led into a room where it’s just a massage table and very basic furniture. We were told to get undressed. Everyone got undressed except for Lauren and a woman who was a doctor in the community. 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. I assumed tattoos going to be painful and this would be a bonding experience. The details of that were left out. The main detail being that Lauren told us it was a symbol for the elements. That there was a horizon and a symbol for the mountains and the water. That was a commitment to our growth and a connection to ourselves and our sisterhood and the earth and all this bullshit.
Sarah Edmondson:
Then we went through it. The first person who lay on the table… See I can’t help it if I connect to it, but I have to say it was torture. It was like watching somebody be electrocuted. Her flesh was cut open with a cauterizing iron. It’s not a brand. Even what they do to cattle I think is more humane than what was done to us. 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. Lauren was reading, it sounded like scripture, honestly it was all about guru, disciple and devotion and master and slave and higher principles and character and honor and all this word bullshit that I could not even tell you if I could remember it.
Sarah Edmondson:
We were disassociated and not even as disassociated as when I went. By the time I went, I think I went third or fourth, I don’t remember. Meanwhile, the whole time I’m going, “How the fuck do I get out of here?” I don’t have a car. Nippy had dropped me off at Lauren’s hours earlier. It’s dark. 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 Jness 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, 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.
Sarah Edmondson:
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. I’m like, “Okay, here I am doing what I’ve been taught. I’m literally looking for the back door. I have to stay.” Other than Lauren, I was the highest ranking woman of all the women there. I was the only green. Everyone else was orange or yellow or white. Even Lauren pulled me aside at one point and was like, “You got to show them how it’s done.” 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. I just went into a disassociated like when you’re of floating.
Sarah Edmondson:
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 I loved him. It just went somewhere else. I went into a whole different place. Truthfully I was proud of myself for what I had done. 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, “We’re so proud of you. You did so well.” 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 it’s like somebody who completes a marathon. I’m guessing I’ve never done it, like, “I didn’t want to do it and then I did it and I’m so strong now.” That’s what I believed I had done.
Sarah Edmondson:
It was definitely horrific, painful, barbaric. I now see it for what it is. To create trauma bonding for people to also be ashamed that… For me to be public about this and speak of it, when I did, I had to admit that I did this. Also, there’s video footage of having this done to me and I 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 sister as well. This brand goes into my body.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you for sharing that story. I just thank you.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yeah. It’s something that I obviously I wish I’d made different choices, knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have ever even 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. No, thank you. That feels wrong and I’m going to trust my gut.” I know that about me now knowing what I know. 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…
Glennon Doyle:
You go through the initiation, you have horrific experience, but you reframe it as we do as a survival technique. You reframe it in the moment because we are not people who want to frame things as we’re a victim. Especially not NXIVM, when you’re indoctrinated to think there is no such thing as a victim.
Abby Wambach:
Yes,
Sarah Edmondson:
Correct.
Glennon Doyle:
If you feel like a victim, that’s because you have done that to yourself.
Amanda Doyle:
You go home that night and we haven’t addressed this yet, but Nippy, your husband is also in NXIVM.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s why there’s no big shock from him, but you go home that night and is he aware of what happened to you on that night?
Sarah Edmondson:
No, he just thinks I’m having a girl’s night with Lauren and some other women and he was like, “How was it? Cool.” Meanwhile, we’re not super connected because we just were in a rough patch, anyway, in our relationship. I couldn’t tell him. Lauren had hatched a plan to… We knew that actually we were going to be in separate cities for the next following week. Nippy was doing a training in New York. I was going back to Vancouver. This never would’ve made sense, but Lauren was trying to separate this thing, which eventually he would see from Albany. I could keep it from him for a bit. That was the plan and it didn’t go well. That plan did not go well.
Glennon Doyle:
What happened next?
Sarah Edmondson:
Then I was ordered to start recruiting slaves myself and I didn’t want that. 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 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. I was told no, she’s not available. 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 drills at the same time and her phone was on at night and I just figured it out. 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. A lot of things happen in a very short period of time that were weirder and weirder. Bonnie actually had… I got branded in March. Bonnie left, I believe in January so Bonnie had already gone, and meanwhile-
Amanda Doyle:
This is Mark’s wife, right?
Sarah Edmondson:
Mark’s wife.
Amanda Doyle:
The original Mark who…
Sarah Edmondson:
Mark Vicente, 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 is essentially a gag order that you’re not going to speak of anything that ever happened, ever in NXIVM. She wouldn’t get back to me about that. At the time I was totally happy for Bonnie that she was going back to LA to pursue her dreams. Meanwhile, everyone else was shit talking her and being like, “How dare she. She’s a proctor. She’s got responsibilities.” I had always been one that secretively like my inner pre-cult, non-indoctrinate self was like, “We’re doing these goals to fulfill our dreams. If someone wants to take the goals and go be an actor or musician or whatever, they should do that.”
Sarah Edmondson:
They were trying to keep her in Albany. I’d been sent to get her to sign this paperwork and it was really weird that she wasn’t getting back to me. 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 NXIVM that I didn’t like, that Clare Bronfman was doing. She wasn’t paying us for the work that we’d done. I was generally unhappy and overworked. I wasn’t okay with so many things. 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 that I was being entitled, which is another female toxic trait according to Jness, so you can’t complain.
Glennon Doyle:
Jness is like the women’s we’re going to teach you to be better women group.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Jness teaches all the women is all of these controlling, entitled, victim, those are all female qualities that we need to get rid of, eliminate from our personalities.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Any concern you have that has to do with emotion or your rights is a toxic feminine trait?
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes. Even to raise a concern is a complaint, which is what women do.
Glennon Doyle:
Got it.
Sarah Edmondson:
We need to develop more character and honor the men. On the other side, the men were developing their empathy and their softness. There was again, some good things on both sides and some really, really terrible toxic things. When I was in it, I didn’t like it. I knew that I could feel my view of women eroding. Instead of feeling like positive towards my sisters, I’d be like, “Ugh, there’s another flaky woman.” Oblivious was another one that women would just stand in the way and not notice that people were trying to get by and like oblivious woman. It was so bad that I would see that. I’m still rooting these things out five years later.
Glennon Doyle:
We all are. Sarah, what people who don’t know yet is that the branding, the initiation, this master and slave situation was a literal pyramid scheme.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
There was one person at the top of the pyramid and that was Keith Raniere.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us really what the point of DOS was?
Sarah Edmondson:
For Keith to lock down his women and to secure loyalty. Just before DOS started, if you look at the timeline and the history of NXIVM, one of his right-hand women is Kristin Keeffe, who did all his legal stuff. She’s the mother of the child that he denied was… We thought it was a child that was brought in to be raised by the community, but was actually Kristin’s child and Keith’s child, but that was hidden. We found that out later.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Sarah Edmondson:
Kristin had left in the middle of the night with their child and was like on the run. I think he realized that he couldn’t count on these women to stay. I’ve since spoken to women who were in his inner circle before DOS. 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 they weren’t saying as yes master, I’m ready. That’s essentially what it was. They had to be available to him whenever he wanted. He basically formalized it. He had told Kristin, who told me when I got out that he had wanted to start a Blackmail multi-level marketing MLM. A pyramid based on Blackmail, which is what he did.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s what he did.
Sarah Edmondson:
That’s what he did.
Glennon Doyle:
He was having sex with, I don’t think you got this assignment, but many of the new slaves, their assignment would be… Yours might have been, don’t ask for help. Some of these women’s assignment would be go seduce Keith Raniere.
Sarah Edmondson:
Correct.
Glennon Doyle:
There were certain women in Doss whose job was to be available to the Grand Master sexually.
Sarah Edmondson:
Yes. That’s ultimately what woke me up to skip to that. Bonnie help Mark get out. Mark started to see what was going on in Albany, 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 committing to another five year chunk and Mark’s my business partner and Mark’s like, “Yeah, I’m leaving.” I’m like, “What the fuck? Why are you leaving?” He wouldn’t tell me unless I signed an NDA. Under that NDA, he shared with me what he knew about these assignments. He’d found out about that through some people that had confided in him in Albany. He knew about the sex and under this NDA, I somehow eventually felt comfortable to tell him what I knew about the branding.
Sarah Edmondson:
If you watched The Vow, it takes some time for me to gear up to that because I’m so afraid to have my collateral be released. I’m saying things like, “Well, if somebody was in this group and it was secret, how would they let somebody know?” I’m trying to hint to him.
Glennon Doyle:
I remember that.
Sarah Edmondson:
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.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. 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 Raniere, if I question him, I’d have to question everything about me. I think that is so important. That’s why people, they think that the first question about the group is the little Jenga piece. That if I pull that out, my whole ideology, my whole community, my whole life will crumble so we avoid the obvious red flags.
Sarah Edmondson:
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. That’s obviously a huge shit sandwich that I’ve had to eat multiple times over the years. Also, that they were duped and that they were abused and that they abused people and they were part of not something that was good, although there was good, but was also very, very bad. Who wants to admit that? That’s why they’re doubling down, “No, Keith is good. Keith is good. Keith’s misunderstood. That bad stuff’s not true. That’s all evidence planted by the FBI and all those women are lying. All of them are making it.”
Glennon Doyle:
When they’re saying Keith is good, Keith is good. What their meaning is, “No, I’m good. I’m good.”
Sarah Edmondson:
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. The shame is induced by 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.
Glennon Doyle:
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. I’m sure that you do too. This is a super important conversation. We’re going to stop there. Come back next time. We’ll be back with Sarah Edmondson. We love you pod squad. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially, be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it, it’s fine.