The signs were there, but for seven years, India Oxenberg got sucked deeper and deeper into the NXIVM cult and the lies told by leader, Keith Raniere.
She was starved, branded and blackmailed with nude photos. Finally, after Raniere was arrested and convicted, India Oxenberg left and got her life back. She shares her story as a warning for other women in her audiobook Still Learning: A Memoir.
India Oxenberg Photo: supplied
At 19 years old, Oxenberg had just left university and was looking for direction in her life. Wanting to start her own business but having struggled with traditional education, the idea of spending a couple of years in college was intimidating.
"So, I thought well why don't I just go about trying to work to create something for myself, I was 19 and kind of aimless. And a really trusted friend of both my mum and myself approached us about this amazing programme that she had been involved in and that amazing programme that she was referring to was Executive Success Programmes (ESP)."
ESP is the consumer front product that NXIVM, the cult, would to sell to their customers, Oxenberg says.
It proposed itself as more scientific than other personal growth programmes, she says.
"It was more accessible and an easier thing for them to promote and sell and still create distance from the leadership - which was Keith Raniere, who is also the creator of DOS [a secret sisterhood within NXIVM]."
Oxenberg says she was a prime target.
"Not only was I open to it, but I was looking for it, I was looking for direction. I was not looking for a cult, no one goes looking to insert themselves into a cult...I thought that I was going to be involved in an elite group of successful individuals that also cared about personal growth and that really spoke to me at the time."
Her mum Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg also took courses off and on for almost two years.
"In that time period, I also became a coach and that was a very rigorous, demanding position that was...an underpaid internship with the prize being eventually you'll be so skilled that you'll be able to make money from these programmes."
Her grandmother, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, "saw [it] and called bullshit". Her mum would eventually end up doing the same and doing everything to get her daughter out.
The last two and a half to three years she was in NXIVM, Oxenberg spent in its subgroup DOS at the invitation of Alison Mack of Smallville fame. DOS had a slave-master dynamic, she says.
At the time, Oxenberg says she was in a low place and not excelling in NXIVM.
"I think I was being strategically kept in this very place, I learned that later on. I was feeling kind of lost once again and I was looking for direction," she says.
Mack said DOS had changed her life.
"The way that it was pitched to me was a female empowerment group and really what it was was something entirely different and ultimately Keith Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison because of his actions and a lot of that had to do with the abuses he orchestrated within DOS," she says.
"The last couple of years specifically were much more aggressive and hellish."
In DOS, Oxenberg was branded with Keith Raniere's initials, as a number of other women were. She has since designed a tattoo that reads 'Still Learning' in Latin, to cover every inch of it.
"I just didn't want to live looking at myself naked or in a bikini thinking or having any feeling of disgust or disdain towards myself because that's not fair to me at all, that's not how I wanted to live."
She says she now feels really positive about that part of her body, reclaiming it in a sense.
Raniere knows how to manipulate people depending on their vulnerabilities, she says.
"What he does specifically is he detaches you from all of the things that would give you loyalty to your former life if that makes sense. Whether it's your career or your family or even where you grew up, he wants to remove all of those things from you so that you don't have anything except for to rely on him and what he's offering."
Predatory alienation is the term for this.
"It's the process of separating a victim from those who really are there to protect and look out for you."
At the time she says she was being taught to disconnect from her feelings and instincts, instead overriding it with Raniere's belief system.
"And that started to change the way I felt about my family, the way I felt about myself and a lot of other things."
The more you inform yourself about how this could happen to someone the more it could keep you safe, Oxenberg says.
"I think it's quick and easy to brush it off and go 'That would never happen to me, what nonsense, what a stupid girl' or whatever cruel judgements that I won't repeat that I've been told myself.
"You get the good and the bad and the ugly when you speak out against especially sexual abuse because it really does point a finger at an area of society that we just don't like to look at."
It can happen to anyone, she says.
Taking her story back in her own hands through her audio book is one of the most rewarding things she could do for herself, after being silenced for so long, she says.
"For me writing has been so healing because when I had first left the group, I was not ready or interested in speaking about what I had experienced and I couldn't, I couldn't actually express a lot of the things I was struggling with internally. The only way it could come through was in my writing because it felt so safe and so private and for so many years I had been told 'Keep this secret, do not speak about this, you'll never speak about this, this will go to your grave'."
Going against the indoctrination is challenging, she says.
"I just turned 30, I think it's kind of funny to write a memoir so young, but I also had a crash course in life these past couple of years and I did learn a lot of things that I probably never would have had to learn if I hadn't left the bubble of my Malibu life."
