By the time the first podcasts on NXIVM were being made, I was already deeply obsessed with what was happening in Albany, New York. I don’t have any real connection to the group or some anecdote about almost being brainwashed in one of their introductory sessions; I just happened to go to Williams College, a small school only an hour drive from NXIVM headquarters where the Bronfman family, of Seagram’s liquor empire fame, maintained a legacy as alumni. They were huge donors to the school. The Bronfman Science Center bore their name. They offered a huge annual scholarship to students.
The Bronfmans were nearly synonymous with Williams College, and I worked in the alumni office. The family name frequently came up back then, but it wasn’t because of our science building—it was because of Sara and Clare Bronfman, and some weird group called NXIVM. I followed the early pieces about the group in The Times Union and knew classmates who had stories of NXIVM recruiters coming to campus to offer rides to Albany. When The Observer and Vanity Fair pieces about Sara and Clare came out, I was in my junior year and could already recite a history of their complex legal battles. It was the novelty of these two women, Sara and Clare, that made me so interested in NXIVM. They were two people who had been given every privilege and opportunity, but threw it away for a guy with a ponytail. I worked so hard to get into Williams while Sara and Clare could’ve just waltzed in on the legacy of their names, married some nice guys and spent the rest of their boring, peaceful lives making millions as consultants or something.
Instead, they assisted a man who victimized young girls and women, and participated in criminal activities. Eventually, the more salacious details of brandings and celebrity sex cults came out, and a New York Times piece forced everyone to pay attention to the little cult near my college. A few years after I graduated, Williams tore down the building with their name as “Bronfman” became synonymous with NXIVM (also it was a really ugly building).
When The Vow was first announced, I was glad someone would finally lay out all the pieces of a vast criminal conspiracy for people who weren’t cult nerds. Certainly, over nine episodes, The Vow, with a creative team led by directors Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, would look at the core of Keith Raniere’s evil and those that enabled him. Then, just as that HBO docuseries was ending its run, Starz announced its own four-part docuseries, Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult, directed and edited by filmmakers Cecilia Peck and Inbal B. Lessner. It seemed like another case of dueling Fyre Fest documentaries, with nefarious characters on both sides attempting to profit off of a story that had already been talked about in detail.
But The Vow and Seduced are two documentaries with completely different goals. The Vow, which premiered in August, spends most of its time trying to convince viewers that Keith Raniere really was saying something his followers thought was worth believing in, and that’s why they got so lost. The producers, directors, and those involved with The Vow are mostly former NXIVM members who seemingly still have some need to tell themselves that some of what they did as part of the cult was good. The Vow is as much them telling the story of NXIVM as it is an attempt to justify the money they made off of NXIVM. It’s long and tedious, as most overly explanatory excuses tend to be. If you want to understand how Keith Raniere was able to break down so many young women, The Vow won’t explain that. It exists so those who were involved can point to something in order to make sense of their actions as they try to get back to their old lives—old lives that often involved famous friends and positive attention.
As more details of Raniere’s crimes come out, it makes sense that high-profile ex-members would want to get ahead of the curve with their own narrative, which is what The Vow does. But when you finish The Vow, you’ll just wonder why you wasted nine hours learning about some pervert who stole money from rich white people and made filmmaker/NXIVM member Mark Vicente cry. There is no greater understanding of the evil Raniere has committed in the world to be had, no mention of the woman Raniere kept locked in a room under the eye of group leader Lauren Salzman. Nothing about the multiple abortions he forced women to get, or the children he tried to hide, or of the lost women who’ve disappeared around Raniere whose families still seek answers.
Despite The Vow’s length, if you want to actually understand Raniere’s crimes, you’ll have to watch Seduced. Through it, you’ll learn that Dynasty actor Catherine Oxenberg wasn’t just one of many rich white people to get involved with NXIVM; she had the resources and fame to go up against Raniere and the Bronfmans’ wealth and actually did it. Her plan to get her daughter, India, out of NXIVM was far more strategized than anything Keith Raniere could ever organize. Unlike NXIVM’s other victims, she couldn’t be sued into oblivion or mysteriously erased, which gave her a particular advantage. She wasn’t just trying to reach India; she was strategizing interviews to prove her daughter’s victimhood to prosecutors to protect her from charges, while scoping Brooklyn for clues about where NXIVM leader/Smallville actor Allison Mack was possibly hiding. Seduced also reveals some startling details about India’s time in NXIVM, when she helped normalized the group and boosted their reputation. Raniere viewed her as a commodity he had to hold onto. This is an important dynamic The Vow doesn’t address; in fact, the docuseries doesn’t seem ready to address any of the ways Raniere used people.
In The Vow, India Oxenberg is used more for fodder to show the depths of Raniere’s mind control than anything else. As her mother, Catherine carries the narrative, but the HBO docuseries trivializes her efforts by focusing on her wealth and personal quest for wellness prior to NXIVM. After a casual namedrop in a phone call with her mother, it’s revealed that Catherine is related to British royalty. The Vow uses this to play into its overall theme: NXIVM was just a group of privileged, rich white people who fell for the beautiful dream of a liar; India, by extension, is just a pretty, privileged white girl who needs to wake up and come home. While that is a narrative that can apply to NXIVM, like The Vow, it’s hardly the entire story. In fact, like The Vow, it’s the boring story. This is where Seduced tells the more interesting and necessary narrative.
The Vow paints India as a woman simply overtaken by her dedication to a man she thought was a genius with a good mission—as though she’s just another poor little rich girl like Clare and Sara who got lost trying to change the world. But it was not Raniere’s beautiful mission that inspired India or any of these celebrities to join him. It was the basic power of seduction. He promised them wealth, notoriety, and access. Seduced acknowledges this and sees India for the young girl she truly was. India was 19 when she joined NXIVM, the same age I was when I first read articles about the Bronfmans. Seduced shows us the excitement and insecurity of an impressionable teenager whose college happened to be NXIVM and the hell it led her to, a horrifying curriculum that left her mentally, emotionally, and physically imprisoned.
The Starz docuseries does not attempt to highlight or explain Keith Raniere’s flowery language or ideas. It gets straight to the point with clips of Raniere explaining a hypothetical situation in which a baby is “fuckable” and digs into his misogynistic views of women. The series tracks his misogynist views across NXIVM subgroups like Jness and the Society Of Protectors, not just in DOS, the branded sex ring inside the cult. The Vow doesn’t dive into the depths of Keith’s ideologies because it only shows how culpable the participants were to internalize these ideologies in the first place. Women who weren’t viewed as skinny were often left drowning in debt since they couldn’t advance in the organization. NXIVM higher-ups Sarah Edmondson and Allison Mack are seen nodding in agreement as Raniere’s leadership partner Nancy Salzman explains that women feel while men think. There was never a noble message, it was just the allure of power and money that got them to agree to some really dumb shit.
Sarah Edmondson and Mark Vicente were members of NXIVM when I was a sophomore in college, reading about Raniere’s decades-old sex crimes and secret children in the Times Union. Yet The Vow never explains how as members they could ignore these things, other than by saying, in essence, “He was just so great” before showing you a clip where Raniere shares wisdom on par with a Grey’s Anatomy monologue. Seduced makes it clear: These people were making a profit, so they looked the other way, or worse, helped Keith Raniere and the Bronfmans in their criminal activities and legal battles.
When you realize this, it’s almost offensive that The Vow ends with the promise of interviews with Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman. There isn’t anything we need to hear from them, nothing they can explain. Raniere and Salzman shouldn’t be allowed to use any of these platforms. While the finale of Seduced hasn’t aired yet, the series remains fixed on the women who brought NXIVM down, and their fight to change legislation around coercion laws in the United States. There is no Raniere or promise of more lurid details, just a call to action.
If we’re going to get multiple documentaries about NXIVM, they should focus on the women involved. There are still people who haven’t come forward about Raniere’s abuses. There are still literal lost women. Seduced displays the difficult path to healing necessary before some can even begin to reckon with the pain NXIVM caused them. India is privileged enough to have the resources and support necessary to get therapy for PTSD and Seduced shows us brief moments of her treatment. Rather than these scenes playing up the aspect of her wealth, the series wants us to consider how hard it is for most people to access these tools: those left in poverty by NXIVM, those mentally scarred by a harmful ideology that was never the positive thing it claimed to be. Will The Vow’s second season be focused on giving former NXIVM members the support they need to heal? Or will it simply be a prolonged rationalization meant to detract attention from the events people actually need to heal from? This docuseries duel, unlike the Fyre Fest competition, feels like Raniere’s principles come to life, as a far better documentary made by women arrives just as NXIVM fatigue may be settling in. Of course some people will watch both, but I fear most will just throw on the one from HBO. It’s nine episodes and has already been renewed—what could it possibly be missing?
The most telling difference between the two documentaries is in the use of footage from NXIVM’s Vanguard Week. Vanguard Week is described as “summer camp for adults” or a “high arousal” event meant to pull in new members, as Seduced puts it. This expensive week cost a fortune to go to, but splashy, fun trailers made by Mark Vicente made it look like an opportunity you couldn’t afford to miss. In The Vow, these clips play somberly in the finale as Vicente and his wife Bonnie Piesse walk through the old lodge where the event was held. The feeling is nostalgic, as though they can imagine the good times that were had despite the bad that followed (indicated unsubtly by the dead flies that litter the ground). There’s even a clip of Mark hugging India. Seduced opens with India bravely going back to the grounds of Vanguard Week. Clips of Vicente’s trailer play, but Peck and Lessner edit the footage to be as off-putting and cult-like as it truly is without Vicente’s music and pacing. There is no nostalgia here. There were never any good times.
117 Comments
I would think you would have to be kidnapped, hypnotized, drugged etc… to come to the conclusion that you’re gonna spend time in freaking ALBANY ?
But…the volleyball.
I can think of few worse fates than an eternity of compulsory volleyball and pre-dawn jogs in Albany.
not even albany. clifton park
I read a ot of stories about this and knew it was in the area. However, I did not know it was located in my hometown. It’s mostly one large suburb.
I mean, the big kink in the plan is that Albany-Rensselaer is, like, probably the most trafficked East Coast rail hub for people taking trains to Canada? So you have to wonder how much thought the cult leaders put into keeping their cultists in place and in the country.At least the Mormons had the smarts to sent their lunatics down to Mexico. That’s professional.
They trafficked between Albany and Mexico
I guess I just don’t understand why the Mormons didn’t pay off Canada to move their people north, unless they were into the warm weather or something.
Did you watch The Vow? There’s a part in it where Raniere is irritated that someone doesn’t want to move to Albany “We have everything here-arts, culture-we’re the modern Rome!”. I burst out laughing.
I missed that part. Wow.
There’s a moment in Vow where Mark wants to go after people saying the cult was a cult and Keith reals him in and says it’s okay, because the want free thinkers. Clearly the truth was the filter was working in the opposite way, and I can’t help but think all the stupid stuff also acted as a filter. Keith is a genius? sad scraps of fabric? Albany? volleyball? All screening the incredulous.
Raniere was sort of a ghost that haunted “The Vow,” through random clips. In “Seduced,” nothing made me want to punch him through my screen more than the footage of him kissing random women he just met on the mouth for 3 minutes straight.
God, that was fucking gross.
OMG The Vow was a tedious trainwreck. Too many videos of Raniere’s pep talks and not enough details of the branding, sexual abuse and human trafficking one would look for in a docuseries on the cult. It screamed “Mark Vincente’s effort to avoid being prosecuted”On a side note, as someone who had no interest in night time soaps in the 80’s, I primarily recognize Catherine Oxenberg from the syndicated nonsense action series Acapulco HEAT
I thought it screamed “Mark Vincente’s effort to get his documentary career back online” . The Vow could have easily been condensed into 5 episodes without losing much. The one thing I found odd was in the 1st or 2nd ep there is mention of Rainiere curing people of very severe Tourette’s I kept assuming it would be revealed as a con but it was never mentioned again.
The Tourette’s thing was and was not a con. NXIVM borrowed a lot of real therapy techniques and used them alongside their brainwashing nonsense. So, for example, they used some aspects of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), which has been shown to be very effective at helping those with Tourette’s. Also, that is a disease where the most aggressive symptoms can wax & wane over time, often peaking in the late teens/early twenties, right when the young person came to NXIVM for help. Likely, his symptoms would have reduced in severity no matter what, and that there were other alternatives to NXIVM he could have gone to and gotten the same benefit without the weird cult aspects. It’s not that NXIVM didn’t offer techniques that could actually help people deal with mental trauma or certain health issues, it’s that those kinds of things were a cover for a program centered around controlling people and taking advantage of them for the benefit of its founder. As someone who went through a Scientology audit, I can say that these kinds of things are weirdly intense, and can take you in if you don’t know to be wary. And that is who they are focused on, the unwary.
Nippy seemed a lot more appalled by his actions in retrospect than Mark did.
He also seemed a bit more self aware and more inclined to calling out the garbage of the cult than Mark was.
Nippy seemed ok until he said he didn’t want his kids growing up in Canada clearly an asshole.
I primarily remember Oxenberg from being tied up as a human sacrifice by snake-woman Amanda Donohoe in The Lair of the White Worm…
Oooh deep cut. I forgot she was that movie!
At first I thought the scene in The Vow where Mark’s mother was yelling at him on the phone to get his f*ing life together was harsh. Now I think she speaks for all of us who had to watch the mod, psychedelic footage of him staring off into fields of Clifton Park.
having attended NEXIUM sessions at the age of 19, the vow is the more valuable look at the situation. because without the ‘boring’ narrative of rich white people getting seduced by a con man, you don’t get to the situation where a guy who was otherwise best known for running a pyramid scam can set up the weird sex cult parts.
this guy wasn’t a charlie manson- without the money and the influence with connected people he cultivated outside of the sex stuff, there is no sex stuff, because he would be found out and cut off way before he got there. he’d just be some gross incel working a desk job
having attended NEXIUM sessions at the age of 19You should write out this experience for AVCLub or the Jezzies,
i have written a few things out a few times over the years, after this turned into a scandal. the sad thing is, i actually wrote down a pretty comprehensive essay right after i finished the session stuff with them, just to document the bugnuttery of the whole thing, but in an era pre-cloud it seems to have died with an old hard drive at some point
ed: i’d be happy to answer any questions obviously, but in short it was a combination of goofy nonsense, boomer ennui and what seemed like it should be an obvious con, but was clearly working on 90+% of the people there
I Understand, and I hope you have a full recovery from that abuse.
so- the way nexium worked at the time (i believe the sex stuff wasn’t yet happening) was it was basically a ponzi scheme. keith actually wasnt legally in charge- nancy was- because his previous convictions for his old fashion ponzi scheme meant he was bared from owning a business in the majority of states, including NY.They advertised themselves as an ESP- executive success program. the idea was similar to most programs like that. you go to a conference center and successful people tell you how they did it and then you ostensibly take what they tell you and apply it to your own business. So in that respect, i didn’t experience anything overtly abusive or nefarious- anyone could attend these things if you had the money (i didn’t, my dad brought me along.)
where it started to get abusive was how they did the recruiting- if you brought in new marks, you’d get a discount or even free sessions, which turned this into basically ESP: ponzi scheme addition. also, if you were super into it, they’d tap you to be one of the instructors/presenters. it was a really good scam- they didn’t pay anybody, they were in an office complex in a suburb of albany, so overhead was pretty low and their clients constantly generated new business for them. and then if you got really into it, you’d get opportunities to hang out with keith (volleyball was still a daytime activity at that point, which would have been 2003ish.)they were mostly just *goofy*. they all wore colored sashes around their necks to denote their ‘rank.’ they didn’t wear shoes. they bowed before and after leaving a room. i don’t remember why- damn you dead HD- but a lot of the outward trappings were just ‘white guy read the wiki for yoga’ so probably something about energy.the teaching was a combination of poorly understood and randomly stolen eastern religious ideas, mixed with some pretty shallow pop psychology. the ‘special sauce’ of it was that keith positioned himself as a messianic figure of science. he was referred to as ‘vanguard.’ salzman- the one we actually interacted with- was ‘prefect.’ I’ve forgotten the rest of the titles, but they were all dumb stuff like that. vanguard claimed that he was a super genius polymath and he had discovered that all adult dysfunction was due to issues from childhood (kind of thetan-esque as i recall ) and he had created a secret formula to quantify and purge them so long as you kept paying him thousands and thousands of dollars.in practice, this meant lectures from the volunteer teachers, followed by breakout sessions on a theme with a smaller group of one teacher and then maybe 7ish participants in which they encourage people to talk about ways in which their troubles hold them back. it was mostly highly successful boomers with a handful of highly successful gen-xers. think lawyers, dentists, finance people. i actually hung out with the at the time chief editor of vogue who had driven up from NY. she was cool and she was really skeptical of the whole thing, so good on her. two examples of the sort of things these guys were saying was a boomer dude who had a Z3 roadster and announced to the handful of us on a break outside that it was ‘the car that was going to make him happy’ in a tone that it obviously had done nothing of the sort. the other guy was a gen-xer who told about how when he got out of college, he set a salary threshold to meet to be happy, met it, set another one, met it, etc.
these were people who had bought the ‘capitalism at all costs’ stuff hook and line and were so brainwashed that they couldn’t figure out why having more things didn’t equal happiness. and at its core, what nexium was really saying was that being rich and getting more and more money wasn’t something to feel bad about- it was something to celebrate and double down on and also, keith needs 2k per week to keep telling you that. and thats why i think the vow is the more instructive example- i can find you hundreds of petty sociopaths who carved out little abusive cult/families. some of them are probably more vile- these guys hadn’t reached the point or torturing and killing anyone that we know of. but a guy who weaponized rich people’s capitalistic guilt to do horrible sex crimes? thats where the real meat of this specific form of grossness lands to me
That’s a lot/ I only read the parts of the women’s empowerment shtick – i.e. how to be the next Oprah or Martha Stewart or generally success oriented on your own terms.The directly materialistic shinies place it more on a see-what-I-earned level.Thanks for the sharing.
yeah, i had a weird perspective because i was not the target audience- the idea of not having to apologize or feel for your wealth when you’re pooling crumpled 5’s on the weekend to buy a 30 rack in college doesn’t really land. the film makers were basically the old rich sad people that i was observing with confusion as a 19 year old.
its also kind of interesting that that whole aspect hasn’t really been brought up in any of these things. maybe they dropped it after i attended, but when i was there it was the main focus
The Behind the Bastards podcast mentioned the Randian aspect in their episodes. That seems to be the only aspect that makes any sense to me was Keith was telling successful people the best thing they could do to improve the world was continue being successful.
It sounds like the secular version of Prosperity Gospel. “No, no….you shouldn’t feel bad or unfulfilled with all of your wealth. You have all this money because you’re BETTER than everyone else, and God/Keith loves you. Now put some of that money in the collection tray.”
you hung out with dame anna wintour at a NXIVM weekend?????
It’s hard for me to attack anyone trying to better their life. At the highest level, it’s seems like a legit way to improve life. I don’t agree but see the pull. It’s a shame Raniere took advantage of people looking for answers. Mentally, I’d say hey, no big deal- he took people for a ride. But financially screwing people really grinds my gears.
i’m a little torn- the people i interacted with (even a lot of the volunteer teachers, who were ‘ranked’ in the org) i think were generally good people who meant well. but it also was a little bit frustrating to see these people who had immense wealth and power going ‘but i don’t feel fulfilled’ and instead of say, volunteering at a soup kitchen, instead paying a con man thousands of dollars to effectively stroke their hair and go ‘no, no, you *should hoard all the wealth* because you’re *better* than other people’ and seeing them just buy into it.
also, side note, there was one young woman who told us in one session that she was basically broke but had won big on the horses (saratoga is right up the road, so she likely had actually won big on the horses) and a friend had referred her to nexium to give her the drive to try and get back into the work force. her friend literally got her to spend her windfall 2k, which was basically all the money she had in the world so they could get a discount on a future session.
I hope you are well! Thank you for your comment. This is beautiful: “he’d just be some gross incel working a desk job.” You capture so much in so few words. Really good nutshell depiction of that person.
It was pretty infuriating that the it took 7 hours and 50 minutes of that miserable slog before the guy with the footage finally uttered on camera “maybe I was stupid”. It is nice that the documentary would give some sense of voice to the personhood of the victims (see the Michelle McNamara doc on HBO to see that done well). Its another thing to prattle on for 9 hours trying to lend legitimacy to the “spiritual journey” these people imagined they were on.
There’s an interview with the filmmakers on Vox about how they ended up doing the doc; I guess Vicente was a friend of theirs and they finally came to a seminar right as he was getting out. When he came clean with them, they decided to film his journey.I think the fact that Vicente was both the subject of the documentary and the source of a lot of access/footage (yet not even credited as a producer) really compromised the filmmakers’ ability to present something unbiased.
Exactly. As a filmmaker, I found the whole process of the making of this film highly ethically dubious, as it completely blurs the line between subject and makers, and I I was really unclear just who was making this film. I gave up watching it midway when I became convinced I was watching a preemptive defense argument by some people motivated not by genuine remorse, but out of a sense of self preservation for fear of getting taken down as collaborators, which they arguably should have been.
That makes total sense; I figured Vicente was involved in some way. The Vow reminded me a lot of Wild Wild Country, which clearly pulled its punches when presenting the Rajneeshees so that they could secure Sheela’s cooperation as an interview subject.
I’ve never heard the accusation about WWC pulling its punches. It certainly seemed to paint with some broad strokes in terms of the realities of living on the compound, but I definitely got the impression they were very-bad-don’t-do-it. Maybe they focused more on the conflict with the surrounding community to make it seem more sympathetic.
It’s been ages since I watched it and I don’t have Netflix anymore to check, but my impressions were 1) they took the idealistic/utopian aims of the Rajneeshes at face value, giving ex-members a lot of time to explain why they were good at heart; 2) the filmmakers were obviously charmed with Sheena and turned her into something of an antihero; 3) especially early on they tended to buy the line that the locals were just xenophobic, and a lot of bad stuff the Rajneeshes did was glanced over. In general I got the impresssion that the doc presented them as weird and kinda corrupt but mostly harmless.
Haven’t seen seduced yet but completely disagree about the vow. It absolves the ex members it follows too much, I agree, but the amount of footage they had access to was great. Focusing on the detail of Keith’s philosophy is absolutely essential in understanding how he connected and manipulated so many people. Because it is, on the surface, not so different from most self help philosophies that seem harmless, maybe even positive. But it insidiously fosters a world view where abuse can’t exist and nothing can be questioned. If the series doesn’t show what’s appealing about the cult then it’s just easy to write everyone who got involved as either idiots or abusers. I think the vow did a better job of anything I’ve seen in showing how pimps and cult leaders can indoctrinate people who are ordinary, even successful.
Seduced presents Keith’s true ideology. The Vow presents a candycoated version of his ideology meant to make the people who believed it look better. If you want to understand how he manipulated people, you have to watch Seduced. On it’s surface, Keith’s teachings were always harmful. There’s a reason why Nancy asked them to destroy footage of Keith’s teachings. The Vow doesn’t want you to know that because it makes them look like shit.
I think there is value in both documentaries. I understand and agree with much of your criticism, but think that The Vow is more about how people sucked into this cult justified it to themselves, as well as how their disillusionment helped bring the cult down. Seduced, meanwhile, is what I EXPECTED the Vow to be, a hard light shining into this group and exposing its dark, twisted underlying purpose. But I get value from both. Admittedly, I am only one episode into Seduced so far, but it’s interesting to hear stories from alternative perspectives (a good example is when Catherine jokes in the Vow about Bonnie sleeping on the floor next to Mark’s bed, and Mark cannot handle it, revealing how damaged he feels about this decade of disillusionment. Meanwhile, in Seduced, Catherine explains seeing the same event to the audience, without using Mark or Bonnie’s names, and talks about how that was one of the big red flags that this group was dangerous). I feel like seeing the Vow gives me a better perspective of what it was like to be in NXIVM, while Seduced gives me an objective look at what NXIVM was trying to accomplish.
I will watch Seduced, probably this weekend, but I think that the ideology is presented to the adherents in a candy coated to start and so it’s effective the way it slowly reveals it’s rotten core. And I can’t imagine watching the second to last episode and thinking the show itself is candy coating how deeply fucked up and misogynistic the organization actually was, and how abusive Keith is. It works for me in helping understand how a person could get sucked in, and how a person like Keith manipulates insecure people. I think the ex-NXVIM members’ attempts at justifying their complicity come off as such
Watched episode 1 of Seduced and it is very good, but doesn’t make me like the Vow less
I don’t agree with your take on The Vow at all. I haven’t seen Seduced yet, though I would like to. And I agree that The Vow runs on too long (6 episodes or so would have been enough, with better editing and a tighter focus). Nonetheless—the purpose of the structure of The Vow seemed, to me, to be less about absolution and more about showing the process of seduction (ironic, given the dueling titles here). We START with a candy-coated version of Raniere’s philosophy, the banal platitudes and reprocessed/regurgitated self-help-and-scientology stuff. Which is why it packs a punch when, after everything about DOS has been revealed, they devote an entire episode to showing the inner workings of the men’s group within NXIVM, including a healthy dose of Raniere at his most toxic and awful, as well as a direct explanation of how those sessions led to DOS; and a long scene of Vicente castigating himself for dismissing what was right in front of his eyes, while endorsing things like his wife sleeping on a dog bed as a self-punishment for contradicting her husband.
In short, The Vow isn’t a one-dimensional screed, but a slow rollout that takes its time to make you understand how people could be lulled into a cult, before reinforcing just how rotten the center was the whole time. I was fascinated by that aspect of it. And I doubt that a short series bent at every turn on saying “Yes, Keith is EVIL” would pull off such a trick. But I’ll find out for myself soon.To me, I found real value in the approach of The Vow, because while I’ve hoovered up documentaries and books about Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians (among others), I’ve never felt like I remotely understood the appeal of any cult to any of its members. This was the first time I was watching and said, “Yeah, I almost get it.” And it was all that footage of Raniere at his most presentable, in the early episodes, that made me feel that.
‘We START with a candy-coated version of Raniere’s philosophy, the banal platitudes and reprocessed/regurgitated self-help-and-scientology stuff.’The thing is, I don’t think this is accurate–the MLM pitches and misogyny were really baked in from the start. There wasn’t a slow reveal; if you weren’t a dupe or mark you could see what they were doing pretty clearly.
And you know this factually because??
I was gobsmacked at the different portrayal of Raniere in both Docuseries. And I am just one episode in on “Seduced”. In reading your article, it does make clear the point that the “The Vow” appears to be a sanitized version of actual conditions that existed. Superb article regarding the contrasting docs!
I haven’t seen Seduced, but I think first season of The Vow is essential for understanding the more salacious details of Seduced and (possibly) season two of The Vow, as it makes the big revelations hit that much harder. I feel like it follows the journey of the members of the cult as they would experience it: a (supposedly) good thing for them initially, and once they’re in deep, the insidious nature of the cult reveals itself slowly, and the constant gaslighting makes it hard to recognize how wrong it is.Starting with the horrifying sexual misconduct of Keith makes the audience wonder how anyone could possibly fall under his spell and allow such things to happen; by making NXIVM sound so appealing, you can better understand how members could justify the branding/sexual misconduct/terrifying emotional manipulation.(However, watching the season finale, I did have a similar thought about the members trying to get ahead of the curve in terms of their story; it feels at times that you are being manipulated by the documentarians to absolve the the main players, like Mark and Sarah, of their sins ).
Agreed – the fact that in episode 1 of Seduced I heard more problematic behavior from Raniere than in all of The Vow means something is amiss. And this was straight from video of him talking.
I don’t see how the Seduced, for all its merits, can be seen as anything other than an attempt to absolve India Oxenberg off of her own complicity in recruiting and abusing DOS members (going off of the two episodes that I’ve seen). In this sense Seduced does as much for the Oxenbergs as The Vow does for Sarah Edmonson and Mark Vicente. Furthermore, I don’t really understand how you see Sarah and Mark as unreliable narrators because they made money off of the recruiting (which made them willing to put blinkers on), when that very fact also makes it clear what a big risk they took in whistleblowing the operation that was the center of their lives and livelihood. The Vow makes this pretty clear in the multiple times Sarah talks about how her work and income comes from the org, and also talks about how she sees that she was inducted into DOS because she was a top recruiter and therefore money-bringer. That this wasn’t an issue for the Oxenbergs because they are millionaires and highly connected, and therefore don’t need to make money does not make them reliable narrators, especially when Catherine Ox’s entire angle was explicitly about ensuring India’s victim status while siccing the FBI onto nexium (I’m not going to bother spelling their shitty spelling).In any case, both documentaries have value and seeing Seduced as some kind of a pristine narrative against The Vow doesn’t make any sense. It’s like the netflix fyre festival documentary being produced by fjerry but having better content because of that – they’re both interesting and come from mixed agendas. We as the viewer need to be cognizant of the context and consume this stuff.
Very well said, I agree totally, spot on.
I agree. NXIVM in episode one sounds like a mash up of self-help religions. Some parts of Scientology, the Forum, the Secret, etc. It seems pretty harmless. If you don’t show why people would want to join, it just seems like only idiots would do this. No one is signing up if the pitch is “let me get some nude photos of you and then brand your crotch.” Like Mark Vincente says, no one joins a cult. They join a good thing.I do think The Vow would’ve been better at 6 episodes instead of 9. As someone who liked both Fyre Fest docs, I’ll probably watch Seduced as well.
I agree with you. The Vow is frustrating in that it doesn’t go far enough and spell ds way too much time on the self-flagellation of those involved in the doc. All we see is their perspective, which does not make for a compelling and complete story. We need the objective perspective of someone who wasn’t in the cult so to truly understand it.I am interested on part 2 though because I want to hear what Keoth has to say. It may be BS, but I do want to hear it. I have a fascination with understanding people with perspectives and ideaology I don’t agree with and hearing what he has to say Amy helpmpaint a fuller picture of how he got people to buy what he was selling. I mean, where did he come up with that stuff? I suppose I will have to get the Starz trial on Amazon so I can watch this too.
After the excellent “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark”, I expected something of similar quality from HBO Max. I do like documentaries, so I watched until episode 9, and it was a chore, but STARZ has done way better, and it’s gonna be only four episodes.
The Vow is also only 1/2 (?) done as they are going to have season two that discusses the criminal trial and I suspect will deal more with the really fucked up shit that was going on.
Since it’s being made buy high ranking ex-members, I’d believe that they want to get the story out of why they were there and what they thought was happening first; then in season two dig into the messed up things and what they knew and when they knew it. At least I hope so.
Check out Seduced. It will change how you feel about “the Vow”. The 9 part season 1 of “The Vow” was just a Mark Vicente propaganda film.
Damn, I guess I then have to Seduced as well. I’m currently stuck after episode 6 of the Vow, trying to get myself to finish those last three episodes as it is such a drag to get through, and I think this review on so many parts of that documentary that fail. Especially after having read on NXIVM when all the stuff was originally coming out, I couldn’t comprehend why the documentary constantly skirted around how deeply sexist the teachings of it were as that was a core part of conditioning people for what was going to happen next. It was especially infuriating when Sarah was complaining how the NYT didn’t do enough to explain how the cult worked its members over while the documentary actively refused to the same. It was such a bizarre focus point.
Also, reflecting on what I’ve seen so far and reading this review, I think one of the core issues in the Vow is that it is committed in presenting Keith as this brilliant individual while, to be honest, as cult leaders go, he was pretty boring. He just happened to get lucky and rope in people who built the thing around him, and there were some smart things in his approach, but he had always been a con man, yet at least over the first six episodes The Vow continuously skirts around that.
I’m in the same boat, struggling to find the will to finish the series. I’m also having a hard time reckoning The Vow with everything else I’ve read about the cult. The only conclusion I can draw is that Mark either had final cut by contract or by de facto in what video he offered and I think he hid the absurd stuff and the damning stuff. I think Ashley correctly points out this documentary is about the members doing some Hail Mary’s and getting on with their life.
I was also put off by the mythologizing that continued through the series, as though Keith was a great man who faltered. The truth was he was just a conman, Keith never said a word on screen that rose above “empty platitude.”
Follow up, Seduced is so much better than The Vow. It has pacing, they also have cult and psychology experts to explain what was going. They actually delve into the beliefs and walk through how people got sucked in compared to The Vow where the first episode sets up Keith’s claims and then go straight to the perspective of true believers.
Seduced also cuts in more video of Keith being really gross. Episode 2 ends with Keith going through someone’s wedding photos, commenting to Mark how one woman wasn’t wearing panties then says a good way to tease women about their “odor” is to say she’s “a fish hole” which sounds like official. I’m now more convinced Mark hid damaging material from The Vow.
I’m sure he was the one filming during the rape a baby comments as well
Good luck on finishing the Vow. I found it to be a slog as it went on but I finished. However, Seduced coming right on the heels of the Vow is really tough. It took me 4 times before I could finally finish the first episode. I honestly can’t understand how people can distinguish the two series anymore. It’s all starting to play like wallpaper to me.
I think one of the core issues in the Vow is that it is committed in presenting Keith as this brilliant individual while, to be honest, as cult leaders go, he was pretty boringI reember being somewhat impressed with his piano playing. He wasn’t bad,probably not concert level as he said though. But overall brilliance? An IQ of 240 just doesn’t exist. He did pull these people in though. It didn’t seem obvious but he had some kind of charisma. The scene where he first meets Alison Mack she’s basically eating out of his hand as he spouts psuedo-philosophical nonsense.
I thought the piano playing scene was a great illustration of how much people were seeing what they wanted in him; Moonlight Sonata is very pretty but it’s the sort of piece you learn as a beginner.
Not to mention the claim of being a Judo champion which it turns out happened when he was 11
He is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records but only one addition and only the Australian edition. That’s really weird but still an IQ of 240 is impossible.
I watched all of The Vow. I liked it, but as much as I found it fascinating, it was deeply frustrating. What bothered me about it makes me think you are pointing in the right direction to get the story from this superior program. Unfortunately, A., I don’t get Starz. B., I am pretty thoroughly over it on this story. I’ll be interested in news (e.g., the misogynists’ sentencing), but otherwise I think I’m ready to put this crazy aside. (Although Seduced does sound a lot better — if I did have Starz, and if I were willing to go back in for more, I’d check it out.)
Starz is available through Amazon channels – once the whole series airs you could get the 7 day trial and binge it.
Starz is worth subscribing to anyway, just for its regular content. It has some very good original programming. I watched all of The Vow on HBO, and I have watched the first episode of Seduced. I will watch all of it as it does take a different approach from The Vow, which I watched with fascinated horror, trying to understand the appeal of this vaguely creepy little twerp who gained such power over seemingly intelligent people. The very young women, I suppose I can understand, they are young, insecure and vulnerable, but the more adult, males and females, they must have seen something enticing in him and his “prefect” and their childish sash rituals, that is just not coming through to me. That being said, he used absolute classic brainwashing techniques, straight out of the brainwashing handbook, and then added neuralinguistics and hypnosis to the potent mix, for a very effective method for breaking down the personality, that is especially effective on some women and men, for a number of societal reasons. I like both series for different reasons, The Vow was anything but boring to me, so I differ from the reviewer in that regard. I do agree that Mark, in particular, spends far too much time trying to absolve himself and his wife, as does Sara Edmonson and her husband, of some of the smarmy, destructive business they were involved in, for years! The summer camps, the volleyball, the yearning desire to be in the presence of this dweeby charlatan liar, it all seems so silly to me, I’m fascinated as to how Keith accomplished it, and held it together for so long. They must have made tubs of money while they sold their souls to him and for him. I am thankful to Mark Vincente for his help in exposing this monster, but I still think he has blood on his hands for helping his “Keithos” all those years. “Seduced” is more personal, India is obviously a sweet, vulnerable naive woman who has been deeply damaged. Her mother’s relentless determined fight to get her daughter out of this dangerous and destructive cult, using any method, including the feds, is gripping and inspiring to watch. The Vow lays the groundwork, Seduced is the personal side of the story, a look at the damage done.
I already like “seduced” better after one episode. “The Vow”, as many have said, is insufferably long and unfocused.Its most impressive feat, after its excruciatingly long slog, is to totally sap any sympathy you might feel towards Mark Vicente.And apparently the guy was previously in a Ramtha cult before NXIVM! And, of course, made “What the Bleep Do We Know.” Critical thinking is not the guy’s strong suit.Aunt Beru deserves better. She needs to drop him and move on. He owes her so much! A shame her music career imploded before it got off the ground.
She’s selling tarot sessions for $175 for 50 minutes, so she’s a bit dedicated to immersing herself in spiritual quests for monetary gain herself…
If she dresses in her star wars costume, worth it.
You gotta hand it to his parents, they named him well. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear about his work on What the Bleep and involvement in Ramtha. I got the sense if it wasn’t some cult he’d just get cleaned out by a phone scammer.
Same. Had no idea who he was and looked up his credits and when I saw he was the mind behind What the Bleep Do We Know I thought “Yep, this tracks.”I imagine the next step in his career will be making an anthology series about all the subsequent cults he has been taken in by.
I want him to be the Morgan Spurlock of cults. Just joining them and documenting it until his wife pulls his dumb ass out of the thing.
Holy God that movie was horrible. Now I’m wondering what Marlee Matlin’s caught up in.
This was a really great read. Thank you. You summed up what I have been thinking about The Vow for awhile, that it was just created to make Mark and his cohorts look good and never have to take responsibility for what they did.
Supposedly, (IIRC) India was Allison Mack’s DOS “slave”, so I hope “Seduced” has a lot more Allison Mack content than The Vow wound up having.
Absolutely goes more into Mack. The Vow is oddly sympathetic to Mack, Seduced shows how she organized things
Mack was also a victim. That’s the thing about a cult like NIXVM. Once you get past the Keith’s and the Nancy’s, everyone is both a victim and a perp. I really couldn’t get into the first episode of Seduced, but I also thought The Vow would have been better without Catherine Oxenberg so perhaps I am biased.
Why does one of them have to be bad? I’ve found them both to be fascinating, and they offer different perspectives so one gets a fuller idea of what was going on, and where people’s vulnerability lies. The reasons men got sucked in are different than the reasons women got sucked in, and understanding both vulnerabilities is very helpful, if your goal is to understand the psychology of the situation, and how easy it is for people to be pulled into a cult. If your goal is merely to be outraged, I’m sure The Vow is frustrating and Seduced very satisfying. But most of us want more than that. Genuine insight comes from examining things somewhat dispassionately, and requires more than demonizing a leader and his enablers, and labeling everyone else a victim. The most important thing to understand is that people need to feel good about themselves, and to feel that they’re making a contribution to the world. Cult leaders play on these needs, using a variety of techniques, and people start out feeling great. This was true of the Jim Jones followers, as well as every other cult I’ve ever read or watched a doc about.I think an analogy would be the seductive qualities of heroin. I remember Danny Boyle talking about making the film Trainspotting, and that they were being accused of excusing heroin use by showing how pleasurable it is, but if they didn’t show how pleasurable it is, Boyle argued, how could anyone understand why otherwise rational people get into it? It feels really good! The warmth of the friendships and the family feeling, the acceptance, the sense that you’ve found your tribe and your place in the world, is undeniably a deep human need and when fulfilled, it feels really good. Joyful, safe, everything one has ever wanted. Obviously, this group made the people in The Vow feel they’d found a real home, and were also helping others to find that. Raniere’s therapy-speak is often exactly what you hear from a good therapist, and I was struck by how much of it is both reasonable and helpful. Growth and self-examination are worthy endeavors. What was remarkable to me in The Vow was how quickly Bonnie began to sense that things were off, even though she had no evidence. Her spider-sense was tingling and, ironically, having learnt to trust her instincts, she did, and set in motion the process of getting free herself, and helping others to see what was happening.And of course they feel nostalgic! They were happy then, and life was simple: Do it the Keith way, and we’ll all live beautiful, happy lives. Now their lives are as complicated as those of the rest of us. There aren’t easy, obvious, answers. They have to figure life out all over again, and have to unlearn a lot of crap they ingested without question. I imagine it’s very much like leaving a religion like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, where everyone you know is one, and every decision and point of view has been decided for you, long in advance of your arrival. I imagine it’s very scary and lonely, and there are moments of wishing it was all simple again, and you were part of a family of people who loved you.I understand the impulse to focus on the bizarre ways these women were hurt but the fact is, they were all hurt, they all hurt others, they all worked together as a single organism to keep that organism alive. That’s what a cult is. The more insight and understanding one can gain, the better.
This article was 10 minutes of me and my wife just nodding in agreement only stopping to say “Yes! Exactly!”
‘These people were making a profit, so they looked the other way, or worse, helped Keith Raniere and the Bronfmans in their criminal activities and legal battles.’Thank you for encapsulating exactly why I got angrier and angrier after every week of The Vow. Vicente specifically seems so complicit in the cult–he’s essentially Raniere’s consigliare, at least as The Vow presents it–that I’m starting to wonder why he’s not up on charges (and why he really left.) Sarah Edmondson–whose role in NXIVM is, I suspect, also whitewashed in The Vow–seems to have learned something from her time in the cult, as she’s putting together a new grift as a ‘survivor’. I haven’t watched Seduced yet but I can imagine that a doc that’s not from the point of view some self-dealing collaborators might be interesting.
India, the main focus of Seduced, is also a collaborator, arguably worse since she was actively involved in the sex trafficking
True. FWIW I’m not convinced Vicente or Edmondson weren’t involved in, or at least weren’t aware of, the trafficking long before either left.
Well the Vow has a phone call where Vicente confronts Keith about DoS so at the very least, if Vicente knew about it, Keith didn’t know he know about it. That seems unlikely to me
I think it’s important to note that India was 19 and a college dropout when she was introduced to NXIVM and subsequently Keith and in her first session, was purposefully separated from her mother. Biologically, her brain wasn’t fully formed when she was indoctrinated into a cult. Mark and Sarah were both fully grown adults with careers when they joined NXIVM. I guess what I’m saying is having seen the first two episodes of Seduced as well, to me, India is a victim, Mark is not, Sarah, I’m still not totally sure.
Personally I feel bad for anyone indoctrinated into a cult, no matter the age. I do feel the worst for India but I think Mark and Sarah are victims too (and victimizers)
My major problem with The Vow is that it completely jumbles up the timeline. It’s hard to grasp at times whether they are still actively involved or looking at something in retrospect.
What you somehow don’t get is that the members of this organisation often give up great jobs to support the organisation. Saying they made money from the organisation is a falsehood you make to support your theory that their must justify their being part of the organisation. As somebody who has seen The Vow and who has had nothing at all to do with this organization, I can clearly see there are many things that one could have benefitted from this organisation, as with many “personal growth” seminars. This part of your article seems largely in place to bolster your own need to justify your stance on these kinds of activities. I hate cynicism.
The Vow’s main problem is the same as several other HBO docuseries, taking something that needs maybe 2 or 3 hours and trying to stretch it into a “season” of tv. We watch several episodes about the banality of the pyramid scheme/life coaching. We have an episode that uncovers women being coerced into giving up compromising photos and statements, them being pressured to “seduce” Keith, then being branded, and there’s a whole underground of them called DOS that are basically a harem for Keith…then we go over those details again in the next episode…and AGAIN in the next episode…AND AGAIN later when its personalized with India. We discover members who leave face legal harassment from NXIUM, then we watch as they just repeat that again in several other episodes with other ex-members, feigning surprise and shock everytime they re-learn it, obviously cause the producers didn’t know how they were going to edit it so just told everyone to act like it was always the first time they were learning info (and then instead of just picking one reaction just decided to throw them all in the show). Several episodes of “we’ve contacted the FBI but they say there’s no case…then the me too movement happens and now there’s interest in the case!” We watch Mark continually shed crocodile tears as he monologues about his guilt. I don’t even remember what the last 2 or 3 episodes were really about. Though I did wonder how they spent so much time talking about India and never bothered to resolve it. I guess India and her mother wanted to make sure that was saved for this documentary,
I even thought I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which people generally raved about, was overlong and repetitive in parts. It could have been at least an episode shorter and more focused.
Before digital, filmmakers had to keep their work short because film was expensive. Now that it’s all cheap pixels, there is little incentive to edit.
Excellent point!
“It gets straight to the point with clips of Raniere explaining a hypothetical situation in which a baby is “fuckable””What in the actual fuck?!
Yep, one of the most disgusting things he did and said that was left out of The Vow. He also trafficked children and young women from Mexico with the lure of getting a Green Card. Then the Bronfman sisters and Laura Salzman put them to work as slaves and they were all forced to have sex with Keith. He imprisoned a couple of them as well. He also had multiple rape allegations the decades before the cult. I guess they do talk about that a little. I cannot forgive The Vow for not even touching on those things when I find out about them half way thru watching it. His crimes were seriously on par with Epstein. Giving him any opportunity to ‘speak for himself’ is unconscionable. I will not be watching the 2nd season unless I read about them discussing these practices.
Does it finally cover his actions against minors in Mexico? The child sex trafficking, the immigration fraud, the the forced slavery, and the imprisonment of young Mexican women, with the help of other women and some of their parents!!! B/C that shit NEEDS to be put into context here.
Seduced includes a young woman from Mexico who was a victim and kept locked in a room for two years under Lauren and Keith.
Thank goodness this is finally getting out. Which goes to explain the recent sentence. Laura Salzman and Allison Mack need to go down too. I didn’t realize that Clare Bronfman was in jail as well. She only got 7yrs, though.
I watched the entire first season of The Vow. It was long and tedious, and towards the end, Oxenberg becomes crucial to the documentary. Then it just ends when everyone learns that Keith Raniere has been finally arrested (in 2018). Then they announced a second season (WTF? Is it because it is an ongoing investigation?). Mark Vicente gets to scream that he and Australian actress Bonnie Piesse (the two main ex-NXIVM members of the whole show) are not stupid people. TBH, they fell for it, so they were stupid and gullible, in a sort of “white folks problems”. Getting India Oxenberg out of the cult is her mother’s priority.I’ve only seen the first of STARZ’s four-part NXIVM docuseries, and from the get-go, we get India Oxenberg onscreen, telling her own story. It truly feels like I wasted nine hours watching HBO’s long-winded version. Sure, they had lots more footage from inside the cult, but there’s editing and editors for a reason. STARZ wins big time.
Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult is infinitely better (and leaner, in contrast to Vow’s endless shoe leather-montages stretched over 10 episodes), with women recounting their stories in front of and behind the camera, i.e. sans access to Mark Vicente’s bottomless well of B-roll footage and insistence on his depiction be given final approval.Vicente isn’t a hero or whistleblower; He’s a shit husband, who ignores his wife and made her sleep on a dog bed!srslyWTF??…N o b o d y would’ve been the wiser had Bonnie (& Mark) just slept in their bed per usual, and agreed to flat out lie about her ‘penance,’ should anyone require confirmation. But baby brains insisted on enforcing Raniere’s punishment, forbidding his wife from sleeping A N Y W H E R E else but in a dog’s bed on the floor??That’s not brainwashing, that’s Bonnie Piesse marrying down. Season 2 ought to be about her finally escaping from her mini-Raniere husband.- – – – – – – -Also, the scene (epi 9) Mark shouts down Catherine Oxenberg (and wife, Bonnie) for expressing genuine humor from tragedy, lambasting, ‘Too Soon!’ is chilling, but not surprising.Raniere recruited misogynistic boob(s) into his inner-circle & delegation of scouts for good reason.
How is NXIVM any different from Scientology other then the coveted non-profit status that keeps this “religion” cult still going with all those celebs still recruiting new members? Scientology is the biggest BS of them all, even with all the negative press and facts on the abuse suffered by members, it’s still thriving. No matter the facts, the abuse, the broken laws, these groups will always find ways to “seduce” the mindless sheep of the world – such is religion in any form.
Couldn’t agree more. The Vow spends HOURS on NXIVM ideology and barely gives the audience what they obviously came for (the evil sex cult shit). It never challenges the crap that the cult preaches and only alludes to the pyramid scheme nature of the program. The first episode of The Vow is especially tedious and boring.
Yes. I’ve learned more from two episodes of Seduced than from slogging through all of The Vow. All through the HBO series I kept wondering why Vicente and the rest ever found Raniere inspiring—there’s exhaustive footage of him saying the most banal, substance-free crap. Seduced shows the nuts and bolts of how brains were washed. (Apparently, without Salzman Raniere wouldn’t have been able to accomplish this. Salzman was brilliant at breaking people down.) There’s a great moment when India’s granny (she’s the Duchess of Moldavia or something), having gone to an early “class” that eventually led up to NXIVM, describes her immediate reaction to what she witnessed in that class. Everybody else, including her daughter and granddaughter, was engrossed. Granny says “It was rubbish.” Nowhere in The Vow are we shown this rubbish.
I have to disagree, to a certain extent. These were two different series, both about the cult NXVIM, but about completely different aspects of the actual program. The Vow was the first docuseries I’ve watch where I actully thought “Wow. I could see myself joining this thing”. It was a bit of a mind f#ck (or as they say in the doc “head f#ck”) to picture myself falling for the kind of brainwashing I’d normally consider myself immune to.
The Vow was shot from the POV of people who either weren’t involved in DOS (the secret sex cult) at all, or (in Sarah Edmondson’s case) were only involved in a very shallow kind of way. Sarah, the only person in The Vow who was actually in DOS, had no idea sex with Rainier was even a part of the DOS equation until she left. So how could The Vow be a documentary about this deeper, more destructive “program” DOS; when the series’s main participants weren’t even an actual part of it?
The Vow could have been shorter. It could have delved deeper into the isolation, manipulation, and coercion that’s required to get a person to commit as much time, energy, and money that these people commited to NXIVM. But I can plainly see why it didn’t.
I don’t think exposing DOS was ever the point of The Vow. It was the foundation for Seduced. It showed how a woman could be lured into a program like NXIVM, then be broken down and manipulated to the point where they literally gave away their freewill and allowed themselves to be branded and ultimately made a slave to another person.
Both docuseries have their own value. The Vow showing us why and how more than 10,000 people joined this group, NXIVM, that was ultimately just a MLM cult. Seduced showing how and why a “sorority” of women would go even further to the point where their entire freewill was given away to another person using extortion and blackmail.
There’s space for both to exist. I think they almost need each other to really be successful in helping an outsider understand the full picture. I do have some reservations about season 2 of The Vow. I hope the filmmakers don’t give the cult leaders as big of a platform that was given to the ex-members in The Vow. There’s a very big difference in giving the ex-members that platform, vs possibly giving the leaders a platform. The ex-members in The Vow (mainly Mark and Sarah) were trying to right the wrongs they made by being such a critical part of NXIVM’s growth. They put their own mental and emotional well-being aside in order to help take down the leaders and “save” the very people they brought into the program.
If it wasn’t for Sarah and Mark, India (the person telling the story in Seduced), might not have gotten out when she did. Rainier could still be plodding along, stealing these young women from their families and bright futures. So as long as NXIVMs leaders voices are not louder than their victims voices, I’m all for season 2 of The Vow. However, if that proves not to be the case, I’ll agree that The Vow was better off sticking to the picture and message the 1st season gave us.
Spot on, great take
Part of the reason that The Vow was so frustrating and weird is that a very large chunk of it is these “whistleblowers” patting themselves on the back for getting out of the cult without mentioning how much money they were making. I thought their party for the New York Times story was in poor taste, putting it mildly. And their obsessive personalities are still in full gear and they don’t even realize it. Their lives were the cult, now their lives are about how they got out of the cult, with Mark Vicente still crying and filming everything. They were pretty damn complicit.
I’m interested to watch Seduced. I couldn’t stick with The Vow because I just didn’t feel much for the “victims”. It just seemed like a bunch of skinny, pretty white ladies trying to defend falling for this bozo. Like they would talk about how Keith was so mesmerizing and then cut to this sweaty little dweeb in a headband playing volleyball and I was like “Wha?” It just felt like this was not the whole story. Sounds like Seduced is closer to the truth. TBF, I often have that feeling watching cult docs, which I love. Like, how do people fall for these dudes? Ultimately, it’s insecurity I suppose…
Like, how do people fall for these dudes? There’s definitely a cult personality type. I’ve had some experience/interaction with various cults, which all follow the same playbook and prey on the same types. I’ve even known victims to go from one cult to another. There’s just a real distinction between people who see through the bullshit early on and people who get sucked in. And cults really do know how to pick their victims.This in no way absolves the cons from their crimes. They are the ones who make the decision to victimize vulnerable people. They fully know what they’re doing.
Haven’t been able to see Seduced yet (no Starz) but I mostly agree with your thoughts on The Vow. I did think it was interesting as a look into how seemingly intelligent people can be taken in by a cult leader (although your point that they were making tons of money off it isn’t something addressed in the show, and should have been) but it waits until episode 8 or so to really start exposing Keith Raneire as the raging misogynist that he is. (I mean, he says sexist shit before that but it’s not till they start focusing on Jness and SOP where it goes from “shit my dumb uncle who thinks he’s smart says at Thanksgiving” to “holy fuck, dude, what is wrong with you” levels.) I really really want a documentary that focuses on the actual crimes: the sex trafficking, the immigration fraud, the tax fraud, etc. There’s a level that goes beyond cult when it comes to NXIVM and so far it doesn’t seem like there are documentaries interested in exploring that. (Although maybe those are coming considering some cases are still pending.)
I do not know how I feel that this “documentary” stars a rather famous actresses’ adult child who is now trying to profit off her own stupidity. It seems like they are cashing in (money and publicity) on her bad decision to join a cult. It isn’t like this is being made years later. Most people do not have the “name” to do that and were just stuck with all the bills and trauma.
Says the anti-masker who whines about “virtue signaling” and thinks journalists should blindly agree with Trump and should only ask h…
I hated the experience of watching that painfully long “the Vow” mainly because I couldn’t shake the feeling it was trying to indoctrinate me and the whole thing was a Mark Vicente propaganda film. Even without knowing the details left out (like Mark having been involved in the Ramtha cult before even joining NXIVM… that quackery that claims it’s leader can channel a 35,000 year old warrior deity… literally, his “What the Bleep” movie was a promotion video for it), I came away feeling like Mark knew way more than he lets on and was far more complicit in all of this than “The Vow” portrays. I’ve now seen a couple episodes of “Seduced” and it’s clear that’s exactly what “The Vow” is. It’s a pro-Vicente propaganda. He had 15 years of red flags he ignored, because he was making a fortune victimizing the people under him in the pyramid. It wasn’t until his abused wife Bonnie made it clear shit was about to hit the fan, that Mark suddenly flipped and over-cooperated with the FBI sharing all his footage and gaining immunity from prosecutors in the process. I’m disappointed in HBO.
Two episodes in, I love how “Seduced” only mentions Mark, Sarah, etc. in the context of being villains.Because as much as we empathize with them (finally!) waking up and leaving, for a years(!) they were MAJOR supporters and recruiters who personally profited off of Rainere’s awful bullshit and ensnared countless people into his web of horror.
I srsly thought the HBO presentation would have been the most objective (based on their 2019-20 investigative series lone). I only tuned into Starz’ offering outta convenience, i.e. HBO finale. Had it been a week a later, I probably never would of thought about Vanguard or NXIVM again.But after finishing Seduced’s (most recent) 2nd episode, I’m now recalling some of those more frequent Vicente-nuances I probably readily dismissed w/out much consideration initially (like how Mark frequently grasped women’s shoulders with both hands when approaching or addressing them — in archival or B-roll footage). Or, more particularly…That In The Bedroom scene, episode 8, where Mark shouts down Catherine Oxenberg (and his wife, Bonnie [? ?]), for genuinely finding humor from their surreal adversities, specifically, Bonnie’s ‘penance’ and Mark reinforcement of Reiner’s self-punishing tactics, regardless of their marital bliss or personal allegiance. It’s now obvious Mark the victimized cult member video editor clearly recognized his depiction in that instance and how it would play in the editing room; He not only, immediately, derails Catherine & Bonnie’s personal expression of (their) disbelief regarding those shared or affected past behaviors, but he also shames them, for finding humor, ‘…Too Soon!’ in such an awful, despicable tragedy (experienced by Mark, feigning he was duped into administrating Vanguard’s self-punishment …was how I probably dismissed this dramatically-tinged overreaction, initially).He yells at them, guising his woke ideal:‘Nobody Joins A Cult on purpose..’to excuse his deplorable behavior(s).In other words: ‘It’s Not My Fault, I’m Totally Not That Person, Keith Made Me Do It! He Tricked Me!’Mark’s posturing was so aggressive it just felt like he blocked out the scene from any sincere follow-up or reasonable query, like, why he felt Bonnie needed to sleep on the floor when NOBODY would have been the wiser had she just slept in her bed, with her husband (negating Vanguard’s adjudicated self-punishment any further).Does anyone else feel duped or am I over-reaching? Or was that bedroom scene w Oxenberg the Real Vicente? e.g. was that one of few sequences broadcast without Mark’s final blessing?