Hi everyone, before today's episode, we want to tell you about What the Fact. It's a new show from Conor Tomlinson, who you know from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum, and Carter Roy from Murder, True Crime Stories. Every week they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Conor's infectious energy will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact, wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact On. This is Crime House. Welcome to Crimes of Colts, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios, where your hosts, Karin Bien and Sabrina Deanna Roga. Every Tuesday, we're exploring a different corner of the True Crime universe, examining cases that left a permanent impact on society. This season, we're stepping into some of the world's most dangerous cults, and the charismatic leaders who promised salvation, but instead, let their followers to ruin. We're going to ask the chilling question of when does belief become control, and how can you tell the difference between faith and manipulation, between hope and fear? If you're loving Crimes of, please follow, rate and review us wherever you listen. It helps us build this community, and we love hearing from you. To get early access, and add free listening, subscribe to the Crime House Plus community on Apple Podcasts, and you can also catch us on YouTube where we include visuals that bring every case to life. Today, we're talking about Nexium. On the surface, the group was nothing more than a self-help organization, but over the course of two decades, more than 17,000 people took Nexium courses, and many of them said the experience was nothing short of life-changing. But beneath that glossy self-help image was something much darker, and when the truth about the group finally came out in 2017, the details sounded almost impossible to believe. Headlines were suddenly filled with words like sex slave, master, and branding right alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood. But the very real stories behind the salacious headlines turned out to be even more horrifying than anyone could have imagined. So, before we dive in, we want to give a content warning because today's case is particularly heavy, and it contains references to rape, sexual slavery, torture, imprisonment, brainwashing, starvation, extreme body modification, and physical, verbal, emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse, including brief mentions of instances where the victim is a child. So please listen with care. The fact that Nexium managed to attract so many members and hold on to them for so long says a lot about how convincing the founder, Keith Reney could be. But that's also, it makes this story so complicated to tell, because just by the shocking headlines, this isn't a case built around one scandalous moment. This is a case built on thousands of small ones, the subtle ways that Keith picked out his followers, it's the little rituals that he introduced early on to slowly escalate into something more horrifying. Yeah. And it's the quiet emotional manipulation that, over time, pushed some of his victims to become perpetrators themselves. Sarah Edmondson stands naked in the dim light of the room, her skin prickling in the cool air. Hours earlier, she had been blindfolded for what she was told would be a secret initiation. When the cloth finally came off, she saw the other women for the first time. Her fellow slaves, all gathered for the same purpose in front of an examination table. They had been told and promised a small tattoo representing the four elements, fire, earth, air, and water. It was supposed to be the size of a quarter meant to show their connection to the world around them. But now, standing in this quiet house outside of Albany, New York, it is clear that this is not what's about to happen. They are not getting tattoos. They are being branded. One by one, the women take turns on the table. The others hold them down while a doctor presses a cauterizing pen into their bare flesh. The room fills with the smell of burning skin. Even through their surgical masks, the smell is overwhelming. A woman screams, "Not a cry of discomfort, it is something much deeper. A primal, like an animal." Sarah watches trembling as the red hot tip drags slowly across the woman's body. The process for each woman takes 30 agonizing long minutes. And then, it's Sarah's turn. She climbs onto the table, completely exposed, staring up at the ceiling. She hears herself say the directive, but they don't feel like her own words. Nester, please brand me, it would be an honor. And then the pen touches her skin, and nothing could have prepared her for the searing agony. She feels every millimeter of flesh as it burns open. And Sarah begins to sob, her mind drifting somewhere far away from her body, but the pain keeps pulling her back. I don't even know where to begin with that, like this is horrific. No, like the amount of pain I can't even imagine. Yeah, you hate needles. I hate needles, and you hate cults. I hate cults. I'm currently pregnant with my second child, and some people, some victims here, said that the branding hurt more than childbirth. So we can look at this moment and question how the hell did they get here? Right. And like something that we can hear and be like, that is so outright wrong. How are there so many people participating, right? They truly thought that they were a part of something and making this small sacrifice would help the greater good. But the truth is that they were making sacrifices throughout the years, years up until this. Yeah. This didn't just happen overnight. Yeah. So we're going to look at how the members of Nexium went from point A, which was attending these self-help seminars to point B naked branding and calling themselves slaves. Yeah. The first, like we said, we're going to give you some background on Nexium. And in order to do that, we have to tell you about the leader of Nexium, Keith Ranieri, who on top of what is already so upsetting, he was born on August 26, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. I share a birthday with this monster. It's upsetting. I did look it up. You're not too far from Brooklyn either. You share a birthday with Martha Stewart, Tom Brady, and Martin Cheen. I'm one of the goats, baby. Yeah. Also, I'm not alone because Melissa McCarthy and Kiki Palmer also have the same birthday. You have Kiki Palmer. Okay. Discussion over. You also have one of the best people in the world. Uh, I can't have it all. Okay. But so some 30 years before I was born, Keith was born. And according to Keith, of course, he was a child prodigy speaking in full sentences before he was even one years old and that he had the highest IQs in human history. He told people that he was in the Guinness Book of World Records for this incredibly high IQ, which, hey, it might not surprise you that almost all of this is complete bogus. He was actually a very average kid and not a great student like he nearly didn't graduate high school. And I guess he was in the Australian Guinness Book of World Records because he had taken like a fake IQ test and like submitted it. So even that was a lie. What was true was that Keith was a very good liar. That's pretty much the only thing. And he was very good at convincing people of things clearly because now we have one of the biggest cults ever. He was a great salesman, a skill that we see him use many times throughout many of the faces of his life. In May of 1990, when Keith was 29, he started a company called Consumer's Byline. It was advertised as a discount club for household goods like appliances and groceries, kind of like a BJ's or Costco, right? But to get those discounts, you had to recruit more people into the club. Some members paid monthly fees and made money by recruiting other members. And who profited off of their memberships? Well, Keith. To the tune of $19 a month for every recruit. And they had over 200,000 members. So AKA, he started a pyramid scheme. Yeah. And kind of a cult. Already. Super rich off of it. Yeah. He was pretty successful. But by the end of 1993, Consumer's Byline had sold over $1 billion in goods. But that kind of success also brought some attention along with it. By 1996, the company had been investigated and sued by more than two dozen states over its shady business practices. So this is not like Costco. No. Or BJ's. The legal bills piled up and eventually put Keith out of business. So yeah, it went out of business. But this is also where Keith learned something that he would then later apply to Nexium is that he didn't really need a product or a real product. You just needed to be able to sell people the idea that they were investing in themselves. Does this kind of not sound like Firefast anyway? I wish it was only a Fatis Firefast. Right. Basically if you say something with enough confidence, people will listen. That's our lesson from Keith. And so, with this business failing, Keith, fine to. himself brainstorming what's next, what's his next business opportunity. And again, this like, this part of the story reminds me of the very first case we talked about of Heaven's Gate this season where Marshall Apple White and Bonnie Nettles found each other at this like perfect time. Well, here Keith, as he's brainstorming his next business idea, he meets a woman named Nancy Salzman. Now Nancy Salzman was 42 years old in 1997 and she too found herself in a phase of life where like things were kind of unraveling and she didn't know what was next for her. She was a nurse and a trained therapist whose personal life had just fallen apart. So she also is like trying to rebuild. So here are two people, Nancy and Keith looking to rebuild in the universe brought them together right as Keith was cooking up his next big idea. This time though, Keith wasn't selling a product. He was basically selling himself and giving other people the chance to copy his ways of success through self-help seminars and motivational coaching. And when Keith met Nancy, who is a mental health professional, he's like, "Oh, having Nancy a part of my business actually gives me some credibility." So he's using her. Using her, but I feel like Nancy also is, she's not innocent in this. Keith wouldn't just be Nancy's business partner. He would also be her spiritual advisor. Together they built what would eventually become Nexium. In 1998, they launched a self-help program called Executive Success Programs in Albany, New York. Keith and Nancy started charging thousands of dollars per person for seminars about chasing your dreams and pushing past fear. And it took off. Within five years, nearly 4,000 people had taken Keith and Nancy's classes, even Nancy's daughter Lauren Salzman joined the team. And before long, the organization expanded beyond New York. And pilot programs popped up across the country, even in Mexico. And with all that momentum, Keith decided that it was time for a rebrand. And that is when he decided to change the name to Nexium, spelled N-X-I-V-M. I did not know this until probably for this episode, I need to share it. The history behind this name. So Keith had heard about there's an ancient Roman system of debt bondage where people would basically put themselves up for collateral in order to take out a loan. So if they couldn't pay back the loan, this is an ancient Rome. If they couldn't pay back the loan, they would become a slave, a physical slave to their lender. And that system was called Nexum. And that is how Keith came up with the name Nexium. Is that not on the nose? With the whole theme, with the branding and having masters and all of that, like, yeah, it's totally messed up. It's super messed up, especially because when you first hear the name, like it reminded me of just like a drug commercial. Right. Take Nexium, check with your provider. Nexium causes stroke, cardiac arrest, whatever. But knowing the history and why he chose that name, I'm like, oh, pretty messed up. Yeah. Keith and Nancy called it Nexium. They spelled it NXIVM. And I think because of that acronym and the way that they spelled it, not many people ask questions about it because you're like, oh, it doesn't really stand for anything, right? And no one really knows. I had never heard of Nexum from ancient Rome. Like, people aren't talking about that everything. You're showing up just self-help for sure. You're like, that's the least of the things that I'm interested in. Yeah, you're not really asking questions about the name, but there are, and we're plenty of other odd things that I feel like I would question. But when I was looking into all this, it made me think about, I'm like, it's so easy for me to say, oh, I would question that. But you and I were both in sororities in college. And they were plenty of really freaking weird, ritual type things that we did that I never questioned because it was like, oh, you're part of something bigger and grander and you're part of a tradition that goes on so much further than you. Oh, that's not true. I became chaplain and I re-wrote a lot of it. Well, I didn't question the wearing probes. This is unnecessary and the burning of a brisier cross that out. We didn't have anything like that. Well, it wasn't actual. It was like, you know, yeah. But we were literally burning broths, right? It was like part of the history and whatever. Yeah. Anyway, I was changing the way that my coat works. And I was like, I was like, I will sip from the chalice. I was like, I guess I'm going to be, we're going to make this a 45 minute thing instead of two hours. But anyway, it's very easy to like question some of these practices now after the fact and being so like on the outside knowing what it turned into. But let's talk about some of the strange practices. And every class students had to take part in these elaborate rituals, like bowing to Keith and clapping in sync with Nancy. And classes ended the same way every time. Each student had to publicly thank Keith, who they were required to call Vanguard. And then Nancy went by prefect. Thank you, Vanguard. So on the surface, none of it seemed overly sinister, right? Maybe just a little weird. But it did plan the idea that the students should push aside their own instincts and do whatever they're being told by Keith and Nancy. Even if it does feel a little weird and silly, it's not that different from like an acting class, or they're like telling you to like move or like do weird movements. You know, it's like about pushing past the embarrassment and just like kind of letting go. In between those strange openings and closings, Keith and Nancy would give these long lectures packed with self-help buzzwords. And the speeches would hint at professional growth, but were really like at the root of it were about loyalty and personal sacrifice and surrendering anything that stood in your way, which in the right setting are good. Yeah. But maybe not in this setting. And then those titles establish Keith as authority. In the world of nexium, the hierarchy was always spelled out very clearly. There was hierarchy. So letting surrendering, letting things go, it's like actually, it's very orderly. It's almost like opposite of what they're preaching. But Keith is at the top. Then number two in command is Nancy. Then is everyone else beneath the two of them. And these are the strategies that co-leaders use. We've seen them in every single case that we've covered pretty much so far. And it was very, very important to Keith that everyone knew where they stood in this hierarchy. So like he is Vanguard. Nancy is prefect. Everyone else is below them. And this is why everyone wore colored sashes to indicate their rank and level in the group. Yeah. Like a little karate belt. Except you're not becoming more powerful. You're actually becoming a little bit too far gone. Yes. You want to climb the ranks. You want to get this like reward system that they've set in place. Except instead of earning them through hard work and integrity, people kind of moved up just by flattering Keith. Whoever gave him those compliments or made him feel the best or by paying for class after class. So through money or compliments, Keith could move you up. Yeah. And we're talking about serious money here because a basic self-help course could sit you back about $5,000. And the advanced courses could easily be double that. So if people would spend life savings on these courses, one set of like a self-help thing where you do one course and like you're set back into the world like free as a little butterfly, like take your lessons and like spread your wings. No, it's like, I don't know. There's always more to be learning. And you actually have to pay more. You're not ready yet. You need to keep doing this. It's a cult. But it's also like they're getting like it's a con. It's a scheme. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Whatever. Scam. Scam. There we go. There it is. Scam. My name's Jack Wagner, host of Other World, a podcast featuring real people who experience something paranormal, supernatural or unexplained. I have no idea how I got there. I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks like this. It felt like electric stars on fire. I started Other World to take a grounded approach to the paranormal, help people tell their own stories and encourage more to come forward. I certainly don't have the answers, but maybe one day we will. Join me as we explore our world's greatest mysteries. Listen to Other World now for free wherever you get your podcasts. There was a former member who later said she rocked up six figures of debt, trying to keep up with Keith's seminars. Another person spent her entire college fund just on a chance to hear him speak. And the deeper you went, the more you were expected to invest, not just money, but time. The introductory courses ran 14 to 16 hours a day. And once someone reached the higher ranks, they were expected to show up to Nexium events every single day, including on the weekends. So little by little, Keith pulled people away from their outside lives and wrapped them up in the whole routine of Nexium. And that just like became their entire existence. The schedule was so exhausting. And he did that on purpose. It was basically to keep people constantly busy, so they didn't have time to stop and think and question things. Or do anything else when you have to give up your entire life in order to participate in the beginning classes. Like it's not like, oh, the next level, it requires more. It's like from the beginning, you have to drop everything. It reminds me of Huband's Gate a little bit that we covered a few weeks ago, where it's like 4.59 pm. You can pee for the next two minutes. It's like it's very scheduled. You don't have a moment to think outside of what is presented to you. Yeah. And then and this is one of like the big things that people always talk about in the documentaries and things about Nexium, because followers were expected.
did to drop everything for an entire week to celebrate Keith's birthday every year. He named this week Vanguard Week, or nicknamed it V Week, and it was a week of celebrating him. And parts of this were meant to be fun. It was kind of like a summer camp, but for adults, they would go kayaking, hiking, dancing, and it all built up to the final day, which was Keith's actual birthday, which is also my birthday. And his followers would have to get on stage and perform in his honor, like a talent show, but it was like we're performing for you, dedicating this performance to you, Keith. Dance monkey dance. And they would literally sing his praises on stage. Jeez. And if you're wondering what kind of people were signing up for this and how people could afford to dedicate every minute of their lives to a self-help group, well, it wasn't just everyday people, or it wasn't even just people on the fringes of society, which is common with colds like the Manson family, which we talked about last week. No, Keith managed to pull in a lot of people. Nexium seemed especially appealing to ambitious young women who liked this idea of leveling up in their careers and social status. And Keith had a real knack for recruiting exactly that type of person. He targeted, in particular, the children of powerful actors, business leaders, and politicians, and pitched Nexium as the way for them to grow and step out of their parents' shadows. Man, he's really pulling on people's emotions. He is. And they're psyche. Right. Even though he lied about his IQ, there is a very menacing cleverness here. Probably the most infamous example of this, though, is Allison Mack, who is an actress from the hit C.W. Show Smallville. In 2006, her co-star, Kristen Crook, invited Allison to join her at Nexium for a retreat. And Allison later said that the moment she arrived, she was treated like royalty. By the second day, she had already been invited onto Keith's private jet, and from that moment on, Allison was in, like all in. She even recruited some of her own family members to join. And after Smallville finished filming, she moved to New York to be closer to Keith. And he used, and this is like the, what's so sick about it, is Keith used people like Allison Mack and other celebrities as the recruiting pitches. Like look at this successful woman, and they believe in it. And they're famous. You should too. If Tom Cruise can do it, so can you. And so with that momentum, Nexium started growing fast. By this point, it's fair to say that Nexium is starting to get both bizarre and very manipulative. So you've got these strange rituals during class that are meant to get students to follow orders. And then you've got these colored sashes and titles and the motivation to like rise and ranks. And then of course you have these huge demands of people's time and money. And one of the major parts of the curriculum was something that Nancy actually helped build. It was called Exploration of Meaning, or EMs. It was essentially a mix of hypnosis and NLP, which stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. So usually this is a therapeutic technique to help process trauma. How do I like EMDR? Yeah, totally. But Nancy was using it to garner information about members and use it against them later. So these were very intense rapid fire conversations designed to break down your emotional defenses. And you would share your deepest fears, your insecurities, your traumas. And on the surface, you could see how people might think that that's like a really good way to work through their deep issues. But in this case, instead of it being this really healing thing where you could work through these fears and these things that you would like to work through, and said it made them question their own instincts and rely on Nexium and the things that they preached. So a classic cult control tactic. And up until this point, Nexium hadn't really crossed any lines when it came to legal versus illegal activity. But that started to change when Dr. Brandon Porter got involved. At the time, Brandon was a practicing physician at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany, New York. Another example of another expert that's brought, and yeah, quote unquote, expert, to give Nexium and the leaders of Nexium, the appearance of being very credible. Brian claims that he could gear serious physical and mental conditions like OCD and Tourette's with just a few therapy sessions with him and Nancy with Keith's backing. He recruited around 40 high ranking Nexium students, all young women. And this next part is seriously disturbing, but it also really does set up what is to come. So without warning or consent, Brandon forced this group of women to watch extremely graphic videos. Like Snuff Films, where people are being mutilated and killed on screen. And then Brandon recorded their brain waves and facial expressions as they were watching these films. Like it really reminds me of like things that doctors did back in like the 1800s, early 1900s in mental institutions and testing things on patients. Like it's sick. Yeah. And keep in mind, this is all posed as he has this ability to cure physical and mental conditions by creating more trauma. But in reality, what he was doing was testing which woman tolerated the graphic videos with the fewest complaints. And then he would tell Keith that it's like weeding out who would become the victims in worse experiments. So messed up. Keith had been solely building nexium towards a very specific goal. There was a reason he targeted young attractive women, a reason he pushed them to spend so much time inside nexium and away from their families, and a reason that they were all expected to get up on stage and perform for him for his birthday. To Keith, nexium was really just a front for finding women and keeping women around that he could sleep with. I think we can all agree, Keith is an absolute predator. So a lot of effort just to sleep with someone. Right. Well, I mean, he's also trying to make money and grow a following base like he has so many different motives. He was targeting women who, while ambitious and high achieving, were looking for direction and trying to heal something, which is why people willingly participated in these tests. Like they wanted to be healed. They wanted what they were promising on the surface. And then when it came to sleeping with Keith, he told people that sleeping with him could heal emotional trauma and balance their energy because his semen had supernatural healing powers. Wow. And yes, it sounds absolutely outrageous to us, but keep in mind, this is like years and years of breaking people down, making them believe he is vanguard, but he is basically God. Right. When I also feel like even if people didn't believe it at this point, they're just still going through the motions of doing whatever he says. Yeah. And this did not happen overnight, but from the very first introduction to next time, everyone is told that Keith is this higher being and he's being idolized. He is the chosen one. He is the one with honor and men and women alike saw him as this sort of like superhuman figure. While Keith slept his way around the organization, each of the women was expected to stay completely loyal and monogamous to him. So by the mid 2010s, Keith had everything he needed, a loyal following, a rigid hierarchy and a system where people were trained not to question him, but instead to idolize him. He built the perfect system for a bigger and more sinister plan, a plan to use next time to build a group of what essentially became sex slaves. Okay. So before we get into DOS and the really disturbing details about it and behind next time, I do want to point out that next time didn't only target women, but men and women were groomed just in such different ways. Like men and women are like divided quite often and went through different trainings. Women were taught discipline, dominance, and control. They were put through physically and emotionally exhausting exercises, but women on the other hand were taught to be obedient, self-sacrificing and loyal. So these tactics are very different, but it is kind of coming out with the same results. Where am I? We have the Colton, the whole Waco, Texas. Yes. The result being members were broken down and built back up by Keith. This was an entire ecosystem of control through long hours, emotional breakdowns, strict hierarchy, constantly moving goal posts, meaning that there was never like, no one was ever achieving the final goal. It was like, oh, you did this level great. Now there's more. Well, because they can't have time or energy to think about anything else. You gotta keep them busy. Yes. So because of this, all of these different elements of it, people were taught to ignore their instincts and instead trust the system and quotes, which is a system imposed by Keith. So again, a lot going on here, different branches of Nexia and the Colt, but we are going to focus on what I believe is like the most disturbing, DOS. The truth was that Keith had been planting the seeds for something like DOS for a long time. Newer Nexia members were always told that Keith was celibate, basically that he was some sort of god who had evolved past sex, but then the signs are always there. Like, if for one thing, he would greet every single female family members with a kiss on the lips.
And he would regularly slip misogyny and strange sexual undertones into his classes. Like during a V-week lecture, he claimed that in many civilizations, it was normal for six to eight-year-old children to be in sexual apprenticeships with adults. I can't. It's-- Yeah. No. His warped logic centered on the idea that people control their own perceptions. And he used to claim that if you don't see yourself as a victim, then you-- aren't one. By that reasoning, he would say, complaining about abuse, meant you thought you were a victim and you hadn't fully internalized his teachings. I hate this. It's so messed up. So obviously, he's brainwashing everyone, spreading the idea very early on that women and children are nothing more than sex objects for men, but like not even men, just for him. Really? His members took more and more of these classes and got deeper into Keith's worldview. He eventually started pressuring some of them into sex. Yeah. His usual move was to invite them to a private one-on-one therapy session. And then he would insist on a very different kind of therapy. In several cases, Keith pulled this disgusting routine on people, members, children, as young as 15 years old. Yeah. Or while that was a norm, he would approach women or girls for sex. And it was expected that they would agree, even if they didn't want to, even if they were too young to consent. It's absolutely disgusting. And it's also like, keep in mind, this is a man who, from like the early days of signing up for next year, you're told, doesn't have sex because he's evolved and above. And when he starts to show you attention, and then it's like, makes you feel like you're the chosen one. You can understand why people would feel honored by this. It doesn't make you like confused, though. It's another one of those examples of just like something that's being pitched as like a belief in practice, not actually being true. And there's so many things like this within colds where it's like being outside of it. So easy to be like, that's the gacha moment. That's the like, wait a second. I thought that this was, but it's not like that because they're so deeply ingrained in like the culture of the cult that even if someone did start to question it, it is everyone else is doing it. Right. Or you leave. And he's like, whatever. There's thousands of others. Right. Do you even feel like you can leave at that point? It's so hard. Do you even have the money to? Yeah. Probably not. In 2015, the then 55 year old Keith raised the stakes by a lot. He wanted a formal system where he could keep track of his conquests. And of course, that was not how he presented everything to everyone else. That's what we know. Yes. Yes. Instead, he made it seem like there was this inner circle only for women. He made it look like he wasn't even a part of it. It was called DOS, short for a dominance of sequest cerorium. Now the actual Latin translation is actually completely gibberish. It doesn't mean anything. No. But he is a pathological liar. Why does anything need to mean anything at all? The important thing is that he presented this as the secret women's empowerment group and exclusive group indexing them only for the most dedicated and high level women where you could be your strongest self. They're like all like words that would be used to be like, oh, exclusive. It would be an honor for you. Only the best of the best. Right. Only the ones that like Keith excruciate. It's super manipulative. Yeah. It's very manipulative. Yeah. He made it that you had to be special and chosen in order to get into it. And then it was a secret. So you couldn't talk about it to people who weren't in it manipulation, control cult tactics. And again, it appeared to be led by women. So Keith had built it to look like he had nothing to do with it, but in truth was controlling it the entire time. He gave the orders. He designed the rules and he selected the women. So this group was built entirely around obedience. And that part was not discreet. So despite the name having no real Latin translation, members were told that DOS stood for master over slave women. So in order to talk about this group and like the really horrific practices, we decided to share a narrative from someone who actually was in this group and we're going to talk specifically about one member named India Oxenberg. And for India, it all began in 2011 when she was just 19 years old. India's mom, Catherine, thought Nexium might actually be a great opportunity for the two of them to like one bond and then also explore this idea of like personal growth together. It was like a mother daughter bonding experience. Yeah. India was driven and passionate, but she'd always struggled a bit in school. So Catherine figured that this program in Nexium might help her daughter find a sense of purpose. Of course, if Catherine had known what she was introducing her daughter to, I think it's safe to say she would have made a very different decision. What's up, little psychos? I'm Investigators later, host of the Psychopedia podcast. Psychopedia is a true crime podcast delivering real, raw and insanely gripping episodes every single week. I dive deep way beyond the headlines to uncover a staggering amount of details about heinous true crime cases, while also exploring law, criminology and psychology theories to better understand the twisted mind of the perpetrator because exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche is my absolute favorite activity. Every episode is peppered with top quizzes for you, the listener to engage with because I gotta keep you sharp and on your toes at all times. Psychopedia is true crime like you've never heard it before. Investigated and delivered with pleasure by me, your Dark Queen, who's been on the front lines fighting for victim justice and exposing the darkness others might shy away from. Be sure to subscribe, follow and listen to Psychopedia everywhere you get your podcasts. Catherine had mixed feelings after her first class. She felt like some of the practices, like bowing, they were strange. She didn't love that Nancy had separated Catherine and India right away. She also thought it was weird when Nancy chose her to participate in an EM session. So it was one of those hypnosis revealing your deepest darkest trauma sessions in her first session. Yeah. Yeah. So basically forcing Catherine to be super vulnerable, but then also helping her to discover her deep fears. I don't know. It was all just, it was odd, but also kind of effective so there were some mixed feelings. She was more than happy for India to move on to the next level of next same classes and the next level was Janess. It was supposed to be all about women's empowerment, but it was advertised as quote, the first women's movement created by man by a man or sorry, yeah, by a man, Keith, okay, Keith, yeah, Janess was a program dressed up as empowerment, but underneath it taught women to doubt themselves, prioritize obedience and slowly reshape themselves into exactly what Keith specifically wanted. Yeah. The idea that the women's role was to be thin, beautiful, and monogamous, and a man's job was to use them. Next time didn't say this outright. It wasn't. Right. So I feel like people would have run for the hills at that point, but it was like subtle messaging. Yes. But as India moved deeper into Janess, the higher ups and next time slowly started to drive a wedge between her and her mom. It started with day one when they were separated and then it became more aggressive. They hinted that Catherine might actually be the one who's holding India back from reaching her full potential and wanting to hold on to her new friends and the opportunities that Nexium promised India did start to kind of buy in and pull away from her mother, Catherine. Yeah. After she finished Janess, India qualified for the next Nexium program and this one was called SOP. It's for society of protectors. So if Janess was a start of like the mental conditioning, SOP was where physical conditioning and breaking down picked in. Women were put through brutal challenges. They were deprived of food, water, sleep, and even bathroom breaks. And they were then humiliated and degraded. They were male instructors who forced the women to wear jock straps and hurled insults at these women at the entire time. And again, from the outside, this seems like obvious, terrible and bad. Like okay, this is too far while people walking away. But by the time that someone reached SOP, they had probably already spent at least if not more than a year in Nexium. It's also a hard thing when you've spent so much time and money and emotional energy to just like accept, even if you mentally are like this is bad for me, it's hard to walk away. Right. And it was all like framed as like you're becoming stronger. Like if you can get through this, like think about how strong you'll be on the other side of it. Right. These people now having spent over a year in Nexium were already used to their very bizarre rituals. And they had spent months absorbing Keith's message that while not outright stated was essentially that women were inferior. And like we saw with India, a lot of these people had also slowly already pulled away from their family and their friends. So you can see why quitting isn't really an option and for a lot of people not even something they thought.
of doing. Most of the women, including India, said that they started to feel attached to their SOP instructors. After days of being torn down verbally and physically, nothing felt better than finally getting a little bit of approval, which is exactly what Keith wanted. Because the members now were starting to become grateful for people who were abusing them. After SOP, India was invited to pay $50 a month for the honor of joining something called a readiness team. At any time of day or night, a higher ranking member could text "ready" and everyone on the team had 60 seconds to respond. Keith claimed that this level of discipline and readiness would foster immense personal growth. But if even one person was a second late to respond, the entire group would be punished. Right, 60 seconds. Any time of the day. Readiness team members were often scattered all over the country, so the punishments had to be things that they could do at home, like taking a freezing cold shower or standing for hours without sitting down or losing the privilege of sleeping for a night. 60 seconds that you had to get to your phone. Keeping a normal job would be nearly impossible. You'd almost get no real time with your family. Traveling would be completely out of the question. Sleep, no way. In other words, there was barely any room left in these people's lives outside of nexium. Your mind, your body, schedule, sleep, attention, everything belonged to nexium, which is exactly what Keith had intended. So by 2015, India had been deep in nexium and all these courses for four years. She had spent two of those years glued to readiness drills and had gone through round after round of brainwashing, a physical torment between Janess and SOP and these readiness teams. She had also completely cut off Catherine, completely cut off the rest of her family, and all she wanted to do was continue to rise in these ranks of the group. After four years in nexium, she has not earned a new sash in over a year, which you can imagine made her feel really, really like stuck. And it's at this time that India met Allison Mack, again, one of the smallville actresses. And Allison represented everything that India wanted to be in nexium. Her story was completely opposite of India's. Allison had risen through nexium faster than almost anyone else, even became a proctor, and was the highest rank possible underneath Keith, now the same rank as Nancy Saltsman. If Nancy was Keith's right-hand woman for the professional side of things, Allison was Keith's right-hand for the more personal side of nexium. And when India met her, she was like, I want to be just like Allison, like I want to be as revered and respected as Allison is in Keith's mind. And when Allison approached India and said she had the perfect solution for India's recent stagnation, India wasn't just interested, she was honored. But there was a catch. Before Allison could share the secret, India had to give something up collateral. The collateral had to be serious, something that Allison could hold over India's head if she ever revealed what Allison was about to tell her. Sometimes nexium members would give up the deed to their house's collateral, but usually it was even more personal, like nude photos, scandalous secrets, things that could ruin your life if they got out. And India's family cat, like Catherine and her family were pretty well known, like had some celebrity to their names. And so India ended up like giving information about her family. She had the letter notarized and then handed over to Allison. Because to her, it was like, well, nothing is ever going to happen with this, right? Like it's such a small price to pay for the chance to finally move up in nexium. Once Allison had India's collateral, Allison told India that there was a secret program within nexium, one dedicated to women empowering other women, women like India. And that secret program was called DOS. Almost as soon as India agreed, Allison started laying out various strict rules, the rules of DOS. And these are the same rules that all of the new members of DOS were to follow. This wasn't just another class. Allison told India this was a life-long commitment. Every new member of DOS was assigned a master. For India, the master would be Allison. India would have to obey Allison completely. She would even have to call Allison master. India was now Allison's leave. India had to text Allison good morning, master, and good night, master. Every single day, she had asked permission before doing anything at all, before taking a shower, before getting dressed, before deciding what to eat. Everything was decided by Allison. I mean, you would think like the second set, like your friend starts calling you a slave. You're like, I'm out, but no. At this point, India's mindset had been completely reshaped. She'd spent years being taught obedience and loyalty. I mean, even just the like readiness drills were an example of this, like that she had been doing for years. Her whole life revolved around next year and she had no other support system beyond the cult. And keep in mind, they had every dirty secret about India and her family. So even if she wanted to leave or other people wanted to leave, they would be blackmailed into staying. And honestly, by this point, India was just so deep in that it never even occurred to her that leaving was an option. And things didn't get more grueling. They got more abusive. And India wanted to please Allison and ultimately Keith. So she just kept going. Yeah. On top of attending and teaching Nexium classes every day, Allison told India that she needed to lose weight and a lot of weight. And keep in mind, India is already a very, very thin woman. When India didn't meet Allison's goals, she was forced to move from Los Angeles to Albany, New York to live with Allison, where Allison kept her on a strict 500 calorie a day diet. 500. My 22 month old toddler has more calories than that a day. Yeah. And that kid is like a foot tall. Yeah. Allison expected India to get down to a hundred pounds or less. So this is incredibly dangerous. Yeah. An extreme diet, lack of sleep, extreme exercise. It started to take a toll on India obviously. And the other woman brought into DOS. We're feeling it too. Her hair started falling out. She became so underway that she stopped getting her period. And to be very, very clear about what this is, Allison didn't come up with these requirements. Keith did. And Allison had gone through the exact same abuse like this collateral, the starvation, the branding, the sexual relationship with Keith. She didn't come up with any of this. She experienced it first. And then Keith put her in charge of running the same system on other women. So she was his victim. And then his instrument. All of this was designed by Keith. Shortly after moving into Allison's house, India started to understand much more clearly what she'd gotten herself into. Because of these hints that had been scattered through Nixam from the beginning, like the sexual undertones in the lessons, the humiliation rituals during SOP, the Keith insisting on kissing every woman. It was all starting to make sense. India wasn't just serving Allison. Allison was serving Keith, which meant that India was also serving Keith. And Keith even had a word for that grand slave. Shortly after this realization, Allison told India she had a new assignment that she needed to go and seduce Keith. To Jesus Christ. Yeah. And by this point, as you can tell, India was in a place where she would do and wanted to do anything and everything Allison told her to do. And from that point forward, she was essentially a sex slave. Keith in total had eight women. He called his first line slaves. And these were women. He had personally co-washed into the system. So like Allison and then Lauren Saltsman, who is Nancy's daughter. And then once a member reached the first line, like a pyramid scheme, they were then required to recruit their own second line slaves. So like Allison's a first line slave. She recruited India and three other women as sex slaves. So much messed up with this whole thing, the language of it all. It's just so disturbing. They were then to groom the second line slaves in the exact specifications built by Keith and when they were ready, they were then brought to Keith as a like, it's truly so sick, but as a sexual offering. Oh, disgusting. Yeah. So no matter their rank, these people, the offerings were subjected to Keith's sadistic torture. The punishments inside DOS were so sadistic. Women were physically hurt. They were humiliated. Sometimes they were forced to punish one another or forced to watch each other's punishments. And Keith insisted all punishments be recorded so he could watch them back. It's so gross. One of the most talked about aspects of DOS was the branding. India did not learn about this until January of 2017 and keep in mind she first attended a meeting in 2011. So this is six years that she had been a part of this group. In 2017, Alison told India that it was time for her and the other second line DOS slaves to be branded. She tried to frame it as some sort of like weird bonding ritual. It was meant to build character.
it's not bad, it's not as bad as it sounds. Many of the other women were told that they were just going to go get a tattoo. That it would be a symbol of the elements like fire, water, earth, air, and about the size of a quarter. All placed near their hip bone. But when the day came for the branding, the women were told to enter Alison's bedroom completely naked. Alison films the entire thing and directed the women. The other women were told to hold India's arms and legs down. Alison instructed India to say, "Master, please brand me. It would be an honor. An honor I want to wear for the rest of my life." Oh, it's so hard to like, it's horrible. Get through this. Then another member carefully traced the design onto India's skin and used a red hot cauterizing pen to burn it permanently. India later said she could smell her skin and burning before the pain registered. When it did register, it was overwhelming. It felt like she left her own body like the shock just pushed her somewhere else to help her cope with trauma, literal torture that was happening. To be very clear, this is not a typical branding like a quick stamp the way that livestock are marked. That would have been more humane. This process involved slowly burning the same lines of skin again and again in this torture lesson more than 30 minutes. When it was finally over, and India's mind came back to itself, she looked down at the mark, expecting to see that symbol of the elements she had been promised. But here's the truth about that mark. It did not represent the elements. It was actually the letter's K-R, which stood for Keith Ranieri. So one of maybe the scariest parts of Nexium is how Keith used a pyramid scheme to create victims and then force the victims to create more victims. Yeah, Alison Mack was 100% an abuser, but she was first a victim as well. Keith put her through the exact same things, the brainwashing, the starvation, the branding, the sexual exploitation, before turning her into someone who would enforce that system on other women. So that is how the cycle kept going. Even India recruited three of her own slaves. She gave them the same seduction assignment, Alison had given her and then told them it was their turn to be branded. So just like that, again, the victim becomes the perpetrator. As India is being drawn deeper, the outside world was finally starting to see Nexium for what it really was, which is a dangerous cult. The collapse didn't happen all at once, but in 2017, three things did kind of happen simultaneously that ultimately led to the downfall of Nexium. So the first major crack came from former member Sarah Edminson, who had spent more than a decade in Nexium. She had risen in the organization, she recruited others into it, she had been groomed by Keith. But in 2017, after she was branded in DOS and after those 12 long years, she finally hit her limit. And she didn't just leave. She went public with the story. And prior to this, like many rumors had been spread about Nexium, but there was never any proof, or there was never someone coming forward with like the full story of everything that had happened. But here was Sarah, who did come with a story and proof. Remember how Nexium and Keith took collateral? This was not just like a bluff. No, Keith released her collateral and even sent a video of her branding to the press, which actually totally backfired because it was like what you're just proving the point that you're doing horrific things inside this cult. So the world outside is like kind of starting to see this that there are horrors happening inside Nexium, but everyone who's still on the inside is seeing it as a clear warning. Like stay in line or I will put your collateral out to the world. At the same time as Sarah going public, other former insiders and reporters were bringing Nexium secrets into the public view, which made it harder for Keith and the higher ups inside the cult to continue to control the narrative. Yeah. One of those members was a former insider named Frank Palato, Jr. Frank was once a consultant and publicist for Keith. Ironically, he was hired to help run smear campaigns against anyone who crossed Keith, but here he was ready to cross Keith himself by publishing a series of explosive posts about Nexium on his blog. His blog still exists and it's like a great resource if you want to learn more about Nexium. Yeah. The first report on Nexium was called branded slaves and master Reneerie. The stories became known as the Frank report and they caused a huge stir because finally people seem to start listening to what was going on. Right. So now those are two things. Sarah Edmondson and Frank report are happening and then the third thing to hit Nexium's public image came from none other than India's mother Catherine Oxenberg. So according to Catherine, she got this really bad gut feeling that something was wrong when India started Janess back in 2011. India started pushing Catherine and other family members away. At first, Catherine really did want to support her daughter. I mean, she had brought India there in the first place, but then it got to the point where India completely stopped talking to her altogether. And as you can imagine, that guilt of being the person who brought her there, started to really eat at her. And then she felt like something was wrong and like the more time they went by, she was like, I need to help my daughter. So she kept trying to pull India out of Nexium, but nothing worked. Then a few years into this, Catherine learned from another ex-nexium member that India had been branded. And when she heard that, she was like, even I'm thinking about that like breaks my heart. She couldn't reach her daughter and she was drowning and gilded over the fact that she had been the one to introduce India to what now looked like a sex cult. So Catherine did the only thing she could think of. She used her connections and took the story to the New York times exposing what Nexium had done to her daughter and blowing the lid off the whole operation. By late 2017, the story Nexium had spent years controlling, was slipping away. With Sarah Edmondson going public, the Frank report gaining traction and Catherine's face on the front page of the New York Times begging for her daughter's safe return. All within a few months, in 2017, Keith had to know that the walls were closing in on him. As you can guess, he was coward. He fled to Mexico, trying to avoid any responsibility here. Then in early 2018, Keith called one of his first line, DOS slaves, including Alice in Mac and Lauren Salzman to join him for what he called a commitment ceremony in Mexico. Yep. By then, federal investigators were already closing in. And on Valentine's Day of 2018, they issued a federal warrant for his arrest. So in March of 2018, Keith Ranieri was arrested at a luxury villa outside of Porto Vierda. The feds found him cowering in a closet and arrested him on charges of sex trafficking and forced a labor. He was deported that same day, arraigned and fort worth, and remanded to custody without bail. He was later transferred to Brooklyn and held in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center for more than a year awaiting trial. But here's where one of the more complicated parts of this case comes in. So it's very clear. Keith is guilty. But investigators now had to look at what justice looked like for everyone else. Because yes, Keith is at the top of it. He is a clear perpetrator. But then there's at the bottom, there are countless women who had been abused for years, clearly victims. But what about the area between people like Alice in Mac, Lauren Salzman, even India, Oxenberg had been enslaved, tortured, and branded. But then they turned around and did that same thing to other women. So what did accountability look like for them? And it's pretty obvious that by the time that these women joined DOS, they had already spent years being manipulated and brainwashed. But there had to be some type of consequences for some of them. So with that in mind, after arresting Keith, investigators zeroed in on the first line of DOS members, the ones that seemed the most involved in recruiting the other women. And that included Alice in Mac, who was arrested in April 2018 on sex trafficking charges. Then a woman named Claire Bronfman was arrested in July on financial charges. And then soon after Nancy and her daughter Lauren Salzman were taken into custody on charges of racketeering, identity theft, and obstruction of justice. But the story doesn't just end there. Even as Keith, Alice and the other leaders were being arrested, and Nexium was collapsing from the inside out. Virtually nothing changed in India's life. She kept living in Alison's apartment. She stayed glued to her phone for readiness drills every hour of the day. She stuck to her strict 500 calorie limit diet. Keith and Alison's hold on her was that strong. Even with both of them behind bars, her own inner voice still was drowned out by theirs. Meaning that this cult was still fully operating with the leader arrested. Yeah. In fact, it wasn't until months after Keith's arrest, when federal investigators started looking into her, the India gradually cut ties with Nexium and accepted her mother's offer to pay for a lawyer. Through that olive branch, India and her mom Catherine's always started to talk again and rebuild their relationship. Unlike some of the other women who had been higher up in Doss, India and the other second line members were not charged with the crime. They all had to relive their experiences to assist the investigation, and they also had to go through a lot of work to unlearn.
what they had learned and to rebuild their own identities. - At this point, it's like seven years. - Yeah. - Of brainwashed. - I think there's a lot of punishment just in existing after that. - Yeah. I can't even imagine what that mental work would be like to process what had actually, 'cause they're still so stuck in it. And then you have to learn that it was brainwashed then process what actually happened. - Yeah, it's confusing 'cause you're like, "Why are you brainwashed?" - Yeah. - Getting told by someone else that what you were thinking was wrong and then it's like, "Well, who am I supposed to trust?" - Right. - I can't trust myself. - I can't even imagine. But so as they're trying to break free from the Nexium ideology that they had lived and believed for so long, the investigators are building their case. In the spring of 2018, they raided Nancy Saltman's house and found piles of incriminating evidence. They were flash drives packed with collateral in branding videos. There were nude photos of Nexium members including several children. And then investigators also have proof that Nancy, Keith and other higher ups were actually hacking into people's bank accounts, committing identity theft, and even trafficking women across the US, Mexico border. - Unreal. One by one, key members pleaded guilty or were sentenced. Alison Mack pleaded guilty to racketeering and received a three-year sentence. Nancy Saltman received 42 months and Lauren got off with the only probation. - The Nancy one really shocks me because she was there from the beginning. - Yes. - That we can say her sentence in months. - Yes. - It should be yours. - Yeah. Claire Bromthman got six years and nine months in federal prison for identity fraud and harboring an immigrant for a financial gain. - And that leaves Keith. Unlike the others, Keith insisted on going to trial because he seemed convinced that he could persuade a jury that everything happening inside Nexium was completely consensual. So delusion, but also he believes in his own charm, so much that he thinks that he convinced 12 strangers of his innocence. - Well, I mean, he's got a lot of examples of convincing way more than 12,000. - Yeah, 1,000, so. But when the trial started on May 7, 2019, federal prosecutors told a very different story. They showed all of the evidence from Nancy's house. They called witness after witness to this stand who helped show that DOS was just one part of Keith's abuse. Women described years of coercion, sexual exploitation, and punishment far beyond just the branding itself and it's so gut-wrenching because it wasn't just one or two witnesses. There were so many, each of them with such traumatic experiences at the hand of Keith. And there's one woman, Danielle, the her story is so heartbreaking, but she had been abused and kept captive in isolation for two years. She was then abandoned without anyone or anything and despite all of this, everything that she endured, Danielle and the other witnesses chose to show up and see that justice was served. And their testimonies all proved that Keith was, in fact, an abusive, sadistic predator. - After all of the evidence and testimonies, the jury deliberated for only four hours before finding Keith guilty on all counts, including racketeering, sex trafficking, force labor, and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 120 years in federal prison and fined $1.75 million. In a separate sentencing, he was forced to pay out another $3.4 million to his victims. He is continued to appeal because he takes zero accountability. - Creasy. - But so far, every single appeal has been denied. As expected, he hasn't shown an ounce of remorse and he still tries to lead what is left of Nexium from his jail cell. - And that's what's also really sad is that Nexium, and the members still worshiped him. Like some of them even gathered outside his federal detention center every night and sang and danced under his window. - Shhh. - Claire Bronfman, who was originally sentenced to six years and nine months. She was moved to a halfway house for good behavior. She is still so fiercely loyal to Keith and she has even footed the bill for every single one of his appeals. - Oh, that makes me so sad. - Yeah. So it's so clear that they are all not all, but many people are still under his control. There are so many victims here. Even the ones who got away have to live with the horrors of what was done to them and what they did to others for the rest of their lives. Both Allison and Nancy were released after serving fractions of their sentences. Other survivors have tried to turn their experiences into something meaningful, like they've spoken out, hoping that their stories might help others recognize the warning signs of a cult before it's too late. Sarah, Edminson, India and Catherine Oxenberg have all published memoirs about their experiences and there are also several detailed docu-series that explore the case from very different angles. Like the vowel on HBO, which follows a number of former members, including Sarah, Nancy, Lauren and Allison and even his phone recordings from Keith himself and then seduced on stars, focuses specifically on India and Catherine's story. - Before we wrap up, we want to share a few resources for some of the heavy topics that we discussed today. All the support we're about to mention is free, it's confidential and available 24/7 anywhere in the United States. If you or someone you know is experiencing sexual assault or has experienced sexual assault, please know that you are not alone. The National Sexual Assault Hotline offers support in both English and Spanish. You can call 800-656-HOPE, which is 4673.
[email protected]/hotline or text Hope to 64673. The National Human Trafficking Hotline is also available in more than 200 languages. You can call 1-888-373-7888 or chat with a live advocate at humantraffickinghotline.org. They also have a confidential tip line if you believe someone may be experiencing trafficking. There are also resources available for people trying to leave high control groups or cults. So if you or someone you know is part of a group that pressures members to cut off loved ones, forces sexual situations without consent or shows other warning signs that we talked about today, you can visit cultrecovery101.com for more information and resources. (upbeat music) - Thank you so much for joining us this week. We are your hosts, Sabrina Dianne-Roga and Karen Vienn. Join us next Tuesday for another peek inside another crimes of cults case. - And if there are any cases that you would like us to cover, please let us know in the comments. Here at Crime House, we wanna thank each and every one of you for your support. And if you like what you heard today, please reach out on all social media at Crime House and don't forget to rate or review and follow CrimeZub wherever you get your podcasts. - Your feedback truly makes a difference. - Thank you, jurors. Court is adjourned. (upbeat music) - Looking for your next podcast? Check out what the fact. It's a new show from Connor Tomlinson, who you know from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum, alongside Carter Roy. Follow what the fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at what the fact caught. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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