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[30]: Emphasis my own

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No one has complained about NXIVM more tirelessly than Rick Ross, a New Jersey–based “cult deprogrammer” who has spent years compiling information on predatory cults around the country. Ross says he first heard of NXIVM in late 2002, when a family called to complain that their son had gotten involved with a strange new group and had recruited their daughters for the seminars as well. A private eye dug up the pyramid-scheme accusations against Raniere’s earlier venture, and one of the daughters gave notes from her NXIVM seminars to Ross, who forwarded them to a few psychiatrists. John Hochman, a UCLA behavioral-psychiatry professor, concluded that NXIVM’s curriculum employed classic group mind-control techniques: long seminar hours, isolation from friends and family, redefining English words to fit the ambitions of group leaders, paramilitary rituals (Raniere’s followers are forced to wear sashes displaying their rank and to address him as “Vanguard”), and daily contact with group leaders “framed as personal growth.”

“They claimed that they had a ‘breakthrough technology,’ ” Ross says. “What they really have, in my opinion, is just another large group-awareness training program, very similar to [the personal-growth cult] Landmark Education, with certain aspects that are almost verbatim from the teachings of Scientology.”

NXIVM’s Robertson replies that Ross merely paid Hochman a fee to write the analysis he wanted. “Hochman was paid by Ross or others to create a report,” he said. “So he’s compromised. It’s not a scholarly report; he was paid to come up with a certain production.” As for Ross, Robertson claims that he’s just a “thug” who incites fear of cults in innocent people to make a buck. “Ross is paid to create cults. That is to say, the more cults, the more opportunities he has to make money deprogramming people. . . . The man’s a criminal—in my opinion, anyway.”

Armed with this report, Ross lured his clients’ son to a Florida vacation resort and tried to talk him into leaving NXIVM; however, the son refused and later moved to Raniere’s Albany headquarters. But the rest of the family got out, and Ross published Hochman’s report, along with everything else he could find on NXIVM, on his website. NXIVM’s leaders promptly sued him for copyright infringement; the lawsuits and countersuits are stuck in federal court to this day. As part of NXIVM’s legal strategy, Juval Aviv was allegedly given a new assignment in 2004: take on Ross as a special project.

Around November 2004, according to a lawsuit that Ross filed against NXIVM, an Interfor representative called and asked him if he wouldn’t mind speaking to a gentleman named Juval Aviv. “He told me that a very old friend of his, an old and dear friend—not just a client, but someone that was a personal friend—had a daughter in NXIVM and wanted to do an intervention to deprogram her,” Ross said in a later interview. “And he repeatedly said that the mother was very wealthy, the family was very wealthy—as if to impress me, I suppose, or get my interest.”

Ross agreed to meet the mother and Aviv at Interfor’s office on Madison Avenue. Later that month, Ross walked into the lobby and met Aviv for the first time. “I couldn’t help but notice that his hand was sweaty when he shook my hand,” Ross recalled. “And I thought that he was very nervous. And he seemed—how do I put it?—an oily creature.” The two men allegedly sat in a conference room with Interfor attorney Anna Moody and a distraught woman who called herself Susan Zuckerman, but who, Ross claims he would later discover, was really a professional actress.

“She tells me she’s very worried about her daughter,” Ross says. “That her daughter is brainwashed, that she’s in NXIVM, that she’s sold family heirlooms to pay for courses. That her husband is sick over it, that he had to go to pawnshops in Manhattan and find these things and buy them back. That they’ve had terrible arguments over this, that she’s very worried and doesn’t know what to do.” According to Ross’s lawsuit, Moody asked him what he knew about NXIVM. As a tape machine recorded the conversation, Ross spent at least an hour explaining what he’d discovered about the group, Raniere, and the psychological effects of the “seminars.”

After speaking with Zuckerman, the allegedly grieving mother, Ross agreed to conduct an intervention, but added that he wouldn’t have anything to do with physical restraint. The daughter, he insisted, would be free to leave at any time. “Aviv walks me to the elevator, even rides the elevator down to the lobby with me,” Ross later recounted. “And then he gushed to me that there would be other cases that we could work on, and that there would be other cults that he would like to go after, and so on. I thought, ‘Man, this guy is really nervous.’ And he just seemed to go overboard, and he was really solicitous.”

In April 2005, according to the lawsuit, Ross returned for a second meeting. In a discussion about how such an intervention would work, Ross advised the people assembled that because NXIVM leaders had a habit of constantly interrupting the deprogramming with phone calls and e-mails, it was best to have it take place somewhere isolated. Someone at the meeting suggested a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Ross would later recall that the more the cruise-ship notion was floated, the more excited Aviv and Moody became. They even paid him a $2,500 retainer. But then Ross warned Moody that, as an ethical principle, he would never be alone in the room with the daughter; someone she trusted—her mother, or family friend Aviv—would always have to be present. Ross claims that Moody appeared crestfallen at the news. A few weeks later, an Interfor representative telephoned Ross and called the whole thing off.

Meanwhile, NXIVM’s consultant, Joseph O’Hara, was growing more and more disturbed at what Aviv and Raniere were planning for Ross. O’Hara ultimately stopped working for NXIVM, and now the company is suing him as well. According to records found in this lawsuit, Interfor faxed O’Hara a “confidential document” on November 23, 2004. The report was, in fact, a dossier that Aviv and Interfor had prepared on Rick Ross, detailing every piece of dirt they could find on him. “Ross’ past criminal record, psychiatric history, and financial bankruptcy leaves him extremely vulnerable if all the source information so far indicated checks out,” the report read.

Interfor tallied every damaging item its investigators could find: Ross saw a shrink as a teenager and was once diagnosed as “hyperkinetic child”; he was arrested for vandalism when he was 10; after a deprogramming incident went bad, he was sued for kidnapping and declared bankruptcy. (Ross had tried to help a woman get her son out of a church that Ross considered a Bible-based cult, but the son, who was over 18, claimed that he’d been held against his will. Oddly, it was the Church of Scientology—which had no relation to the son’s church—that encouraged him to file the suit against Ross and paid all of his legal costs. That famous case had bizarre repercussions: Eventually, the Church of Scientology won control of the Cult Awareness Network, its longtime enemy, through this case.) But the Ross dossier went much deeper than that. Interfor had also accessed Ross’s personal checking account, recorded his financial assets, and even listed all the checks he had written in October 2004—right down to the check number and the amount. In addition, Interfor had obtained Ross’s telephone records and listed phone calls that he had made from 2002 to 2004. “Some of the material in the report appeared to me to be illegally obtained,” O’Hara said in a later interview. (Interfor representative Stephen Braswell refused to discuss this report or anything related to Rick Ross and NXIVM.)~~

Majorly cut, but, you get the point... Read the whole thing!

NXIVM | Scientology

But wait! There's fucking more...

31. https://www.vanityfair - The Heiresses and the Cult | https://archive.is/SBeH1

_{From the U.K. Edition}

The Heiresses and the Cult

To family friends, Seagram heiresses Sara and Clare Bronfman are victims of a frightening, secretive “cult” called nxivm, which has swallowed as much as $150 million of their fortune. But the organization’s leader, Keith Raniere, seems also to have tapped into a complex emotional rift between the sisters and their father, billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. The author investigates the accusations that are now flying—blackmail, perjury, forgery—in a many-sided legal war.

_{by Suzanna Andrews}

October 13, 2010 12:00 am

Another long read, so here's the juicy bit:

~~As Raniere’s losses soared, he would tell people that Sara and Clare’s father was responsible. According to Bouchey, he said that Edgar Bronfman “had figured out a plot with the commodities clearing firm” to steal Raniere’s money. From January 2005 to late 2007, according to court filings, Raniere, trading through First Principles, a company registered in Nancy Salzman’s name, would lose close to $70 million—and the Bronfmans would cover $65.6 million of it. Between them, they would also spend close to $1 million to buy and refurbish Salzman’s house in Halfmoon; Clare would pay $2.3 million for a 234-acre horse farm outside Albany that nxivm would use; and Sara would buy a $6.5 million apartment in the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Manhattan that Salzman would use. They would also “lend” about $1.7 million to buy nxivm’s headquarters.~~