Catherine Oxenberg Speaks Up About Daughter's Sex Cult Experience
by EG
The sex cult NXIVM roped in several celebrity members and even resulted in the arrest of one of them, Smallville's Allison Mack. Now Catherin Oxenberg is talking about her own daughter's experience with the cult. Read on for details.
Via People.
Back in 2011, when Catherine Oxenberg first brought her daughter, India, to a workshop of the controversial group NXIVM, which billed itself as a self-help group, she thought it would be a way to “bond” with her then 19-year-old daughter. But the opposite occurred as India quickly became more and more entrenched with the controversial group led by Keith Raniere. A group which Oxenberg says “has all the earmarks of a cult.”
Oxenberg, 56, tells the story of her fight to save her daughter from NXIVM in a new book, Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult, featured in this week’s PEOPLE, on stands Friday.
“I just wanted my daughter back,” says Oxenberg, who is the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. “And if India had left the group when I first tried to get her to leave in June 2017, I would have walked away and Keith would still be up there branding, coercing and threatening women.”
It was over a year ago, that a former NXIVM member warned Oxenberg: “You’ve got to save India.”
In the months that followed, the Dynasty star found out her daughter was part of what was known as a “secret sorority” within NXIVM, a group of women who were considered “slaves” and ordered to go on a near starvation diet and forcibly branded with Raniere’s initials.
When India revealed she had been branded, Oxenberg was horrified. As she recalls: “India kept telling me ‘I haven’t been brainwashed. This was all my decision.’”
Oxenberg went on the warpath, compiling research, speaking to former members and cult experts, and putting the information into a report. She presented that report to the State Attorney General and the FBI, which, in part, led to their investigation of the group, which resulted in several arrests.
But her crusade further alienated her daughter, who, by then, had begun recruiting friends to the group and had moved to Albany, New York, where NXIVM was headquartered.
In March, Raniere was arrested on charges of sex trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. He now sits in prison awaiting trial this coming January.
Get the rest of the story at People.
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