Collateral Damage

Hi, it's Kate Snow NBC News anchor, host of the podcast The Drink. This month I'm grabbing a matcha latte with comedian Taylor Tonlinson. The drink is always about someone's journey to the top and Taylor's story is remarkable. She tells us all about her unlikely path from performing in churches all the way to headlining her own Netflix specials like her latest prodigal daughter.

And she opens up about her religious upbringing, what drew her to stand up and how she feels when she gets on that stage. Hope you'll listen and follow the drink wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Craig Malef, cheers. I've always been a glass half-folk kind of guy.

And now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. So many of the people who shared their good-finding moments, their trials, their challenges, their stories are funny and my candid. So I hope you'll join me each week. Who knows?

You might just come away with your own glass half-full. Search glass half-full with Craig Malef, from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lester Holden, this is Dateline. It was the secretive self-help group, many called as sex cult.

Now for the first time, nexting them insiders speak out, including from prison, former leader Keith Ranieri. I'm the leader of community and this horrible situation. I joined us in 2016. The US was a secret society for women who wanted to become their best selves.

We were told that it was exclusively women, mentoring women. They used that front of self-help as a way to groom women for Keith Ranieri. Women were being physically burned with his initials. We wanted something that honored the permanence of our commitment.

There are women who have said I didn't want this when they were in the room with me. They wanted it. They were laughing. I chose to be branded.

I chose to be branded. The option to say no isn't really an option. The pain was like what is happening. As young women were on this runaway rollercoaster to help.

That's where Keith Ranieri was taking to help. Yours Kate Snow with collateral damage. It looks like a typical American subdivision. But the snow shrouds a dark past as if the blanket of white is covering up the crimes that took place here.

I can't imagine what you went through emotionally. You said I've wanted to end my life on numerous nights since leaving. It's heavy. Yeah.

These successful and accomplished women bonded here in friendship and devotion to a leader who they revered. He destroyed a lot of people's lives to the point where we're still fixing the messes of the chaos that he created. India Oxenberg grew up in Beverly Hills and Malibu and lived what seemed an enchanted life. Her grandmother is European royalty.

And her mother Catherine starred in the 1980s mega hit Dynasty. India's father wasn't part of her life so Catherine raised her as a single mom. What kind of bonded that create for you guys? I think a close bond.

I mean, it was sort of an unconventional childhood. I was filming a lot and traveling on location and she would come with me and spend a lot of time in a trailer. In fact, one reporter asked her, you know, you know what your mom does for a living. Yeah, she works in a trailer.

A young girl and her mother facing the world essentially alone but always as a team. My mom and I did a lot of things together and we were kind of, I mean, partners in crime, if you will. Then in 1999 when India was in grade school, their family expanded when Catherine married actor Casper van Dean. I married her stepdad when she was about seven and he arrived on the scene with two kids from a previous marriage.

All of a sudden we were blended family. Then I had two more kids. She was always the family mediator. She was great with her step-sibling.

Hey, you guys can get your jobs off tonight. In 2005, the entire family, including 13-year-old India, starred in a lifetime reality series called I Married a Princess. India talked about her mom. It made me feel like she believed in me.

A few years later, she hosted the pilot for a TV show called Teen Talk. I'm India Aksumberg. At 19, after taking a break from college, India was thinking about starting a catering business. That's when she and her mom learned about a course called Executive Success Programs from a family friend.

Initially, my mom and I weren't really that intrigued but she kept pushing and insisting that this was going to change our lives. That would turn out to be an understatement. Executive Success Programs was part of a company with a strange name pronounced Nexium. Nexium had headquarters near Albany, New York, but attracted 17,000 clients in branches around the world, including Canada and Mexico.

India and Catherine attended a meeting in Los Angeles to give it a try. You went to your first Nexium meeting with your mom, right? I did. I was back in 2011.

They said that they were going to be giving me what was like a practical MBA and that this was going to be my route to building the skills that I thought I was missing in order to have a career. How much was that first? Five day course. Thousands of dollars?

Yeah, thousands. At least twenty four hundred. The classes got more expensive as one advanced through Nexium's ranks. India thought it was worth it.

And to me, I thought this was going to be the road map for me to build myself and grow. Nexium was led by a man named Keith Ranieri. His acolytes recorded almost everything he said to promote his philosophy. Someone sees something as life threatening and it's more than life threatening.

It's self threatening. And posted YouTube videos to gain more followers. Sometimes I like to, most of the time I like to just be with a person and sometimes that's the very thing that people don't want. Ranieri didn't just market Nexium as a self help group but as an almost mystical community that served others.

But imagine if you could have a precise understanding of emotions. He even invited the Dalai Lama to Albany and as India saw at her first class, he quoted wealthy and well known people as prospective members. And there were people in the room who were notable even to me and I'm not even that good at noticing celebrities and things like that. India and other members were told Ranieri had one of the highest IQs ever.

And he was a world class athlete and musician and that he had numerous degrees and patents. Within Nexium, he was called Vanguard. India and Catherine rolled their eyes at first. At the time, what are you thinking as you sit in there and you take the course, some of it must have been attractive.

Well, I've had to think about this a lot because there were a lot of red flags that I sort of dispelled as okay, these are quirky people and they have idiosyncrasies. They're wearing sashes that delineate a certain hierarchy. They say it's the same thing as having a belt system. I've taken karate.

So for me that wasn't so odd. They were unusually friendly. They do this thing called love bombing which I didn't know was love bombing at the time. They're very flattering.

They make you feel very special. They seem like very happy, little too happy maybe friendly people. Over time, India and Catherine got more involved in Nexium. In 2012, about a year after signing up, they began to travel to Albany for events like V-Week, celebrations of Vanguard's birthday.

What were your first impressions of Keith Ranieri? Vanguard, they called him. Well, I'm laughing because my first impression of him was that he was very short and that he also resembled a teddy gram which is those little bulbous cookies. And he was unimpressive, like not what I had expected.

Catherine was also unimpressed but her then-husband, Casper, had an unsettling observation. I have to give him credit. Before I said hi, there was this line up of women of all ages except they were all very then, all coming up to greet him, throwing their arms around him, long lingering kisses, staring in the eyes, it was weirdly intimate. And my ex said they're all having sex with him.

Having sex with Keith Ranieri, India and Catherine thought the Nexium crowd was a bit odd but that seemed ridiculous. They didn't know the half of it. When we come back, exclusive new details of life inside Nexium. Including what seemed like a worship of its leader.

They had a lot of propaganda about him that they were spinning within the community. And then India makes a life-changing decision. What do you think when she said that? Not good, I just felt sick to my stomach.

India, Oxenburg and her mother Catherine often traveled to Nexium functions in Albany, New York. The biggest Nexium event was called V-Week, a birthday bash for Vanguard, Keith Ranieri, who was showered with affection. At first he didn't strike you as someone that people would idolize, put up on a pedestal, revered. No, no, not really.

I was so new into the program. They had a lot of propaganda about him that they were spinning within the community and that hadn't really reached me yet. It would. Catherine eventually left the group but slowly India got more involved.

More and more of her time was spent at Nexium events and she posed for photos with members who became close friends. Many of them, successful young women. India even recognized some of them. Like actor Nikki Klein, one of the stars of the sci-fi series, Battlestar Galactica.

People know your face from Battlestar Galactica. Yeah. You were in it for all of the seasons, four full seasons and many series. I loved.

I loved working on Battlestar. Nikki grew up in Vancouver, Canada, the shooting location for Battlestar and many other TV shows and movies. Looking to work on family relationships, she signed up for Nexium's executive success programs. Part of joining, part of going to those classes was to try to repair a relationship with that.

Yeah, even before I learned about ESP, I was very curious about why we humans do what we do. I was very much on this search for truth. She was my friend. She was someone who I considered to be a really good friend.

India also got to know Alison Mack, a star of the TV series Smallville. This is Alison addressing Renere at Nexium seminar in Albany. But I just kind of feel it all the time now. Like super exposed.

What you're doing is you're exposing a part of you that you've long denied. In addition to Alison and Nikki, India became close with Danielle Roberts. Danielle had always been ambitious. As a young girl, she was a star gymnast.

I competed up to the national level. I was hoping to go to the Olympics and around ninth grade I wound up having multiple ankle injuries, but I had great physical therapists. And I thought to myself, my God, like, if I can help people get back to doing what they love, that's what I want to do. And when she was older, she became an osteopathic doctor and had a thriving practice.

In her early 30s at a turning point in her life and career, she joined ESP and Nexium and soon gave talks about the group's philosophy. We've created specific awareness practices that help you become more aware of your body. If you were trying to get me to sign up to become a part of Nexium, what would you say? Well, I think it's different for every person.

I was very interested in personal responsibility, in empowerment, and in understanding how the human body and human behavior works so that I could help more people. Danielle believed her work at Nexium would revolutionize healthcare. She ran a business called XOSO, which was created by Keith and that was kind of his yoga type physical therapy program. India was impressed and thought she found a warm and loving community in Nexium.

I remember believing so strongly that what we were doing was good and wholeheartedly believing that Keith Renieri was a good person. This is India in a docuseries called Seduced inside the Nexium cult. A lot of my life was spent in this place. Over time, she became another of his devoted supporters, something that worried her mother.

At first, she had burgeoning careers. She was acting, she was modeling, she was working with photographers. Living in LA, living in LA, sometimes living at home, sometimes with a boyfriend. And then all of a sudden, everything became secondary to the mission to Nexium.

Yeah. And she dropped doing all her other business interests. India spent almost all her time on Nexium, moving up the ranks and recruiting others. She made little money from her work, but it had become her obsession.

By the fall of 2016, five years after she first joined, India told her mom she was moving to Nexium's headquarters outside Albany and taking on a new role with Renieri. Her friends Nikki, Daniel, and Allison were already living there, part of a tight-knit band of Renieri's closest supporters. What do you think when she said that? Not good.

I had a very, very bad feeling, especially as it was coupled with, and Keith is going to mentor me and we're going to start this business. And I just felt sick to my stomach. There was good reason for that. If India or Catherine or any of the others had simply googled the name Keith Renieri, they might have never gotten involved in the first place.

When they joined, they didn't know that in 2003, Forbes ran a cover story on Renieri. The article quoted critics who accused him of leading a cult-like program aimed at breaking down his subjects psychologically. One source for the article was Edgar Bronfman's senior of the Seagram's liquor fortune. Bronfman was angry that his daughter Claire, who was in her twenties, bankrolled Renieri to the tune of millions of dollars.

Reporter Robert Gavin of the Albany Times Union says Nexium tried to hide bad press from members. And these were widely circulated articles that any fair had written about Nexium. Many people local and non-local had written about it. When India and Catherine got involved, they hadn't seen the negative coverage.

For instance, this newspaper exposed A in 2012. After following the Nexium story for years, the Albany Times Union did a groundbreaking investigative series. What that series did is it told anybody who didn't know that Keith Renieri, among other things, has allegedly had sex with underage females. But the alleged victims did not come forward.

Renieri was not charged and never arrested for any crimes. One of the Times Union reports stated, a close-knit group of these women has tended to him, paid his bills, and shuttled him around. Several have satisfied his sexual needs, and a few have left their families behind to wrap him in their affections. Now India was headed to Albany.

Coming up. In Nexium, a secret society of women, where so-called master is required absolute obedience. Did you have to get permission to eat? Yes, to eat.

To go and see people, permission to travel, all of those things I had to ask for. When Dateline continues. In the fall of 2016, India Oxenburg joined her close friends, Danielle Roberts, Nicky Klein, and Alison Mack, near Albany, New York. Each devotees of Vanguard, Keith Renieri.

No one knew outside Nexium's inner circle. But India was there because she had been inducted into a secret sorority. When we were told about this women's group, we were told that it was exclusively women, mentoring women, and that there were no men involved. Mentoring each other, helping each other.

Yes, it was supposed to be about like executive coaching, but for women. And to me, that sounded great. I thought like, well, I can use help, I can use some guidance. This women's group had an odd sounding name, Doss, and Alison was a leader.

Were you asked to join Doss by Alison Mack? She recruited me. And at the time I didn't realize that I had been targeted for what Doss really was. I believed Alison when she told me that it was a women's empowerment group.

Nicky and Danielle were also members. Who brought you in? Alison headed by the Doss, and at the time where I was out in my life, it was something that I really thought would help me. But first, the women had to prove their loyalty.

They had to sign a document requiring members to provide what was called collateral, some would call it potential blackmail. What was the collateral that you had to give? So the collateral was damaging or compromising information about yourself or your loved ones. So if you break with the group, they're going to release this damaging information about you.

The way that they spun it was as if it was for your benefit. I'm not sure if you've talked about this, Indio, what your collateral was? A little bit. There was so much.

It was videos. It was recordings. It was photographs. India says the collateral included graphic sexual images of the women.

But that wasn't all. Really, a majority of it was made up information. The collateral became increasingly more stressful and difficult because we had to make up things about people that we cared about and people who we loved. Did you make up things about your family?

I did. And that was something that was so horrible for me because I knew that I would never break this secret because I would never want to hurt the people that I loved most. India was told it was to ensure they lived up to the goals they had set for themselves. An unbreakable commitment to the group.

India went along with it. Nikki embraced it. Yes, it was edgy. It was maybe a little extreme.

But for me, you're giving them naked videos of yourself, right? Things that might be damaging to your family. affidavits or letters about things that happen in your life that you're embarrassed and ashamed and don't want revealed. So my experience of doing that, how was that okay?

You know what I mean? Because people don't understand that. Why would you do that and allow someone to have your deepest secrets to hold over you as blackmail? Well, that's not what it was for.

How important is it to truly become the woman I want to be? And the collateral was me saying, I want that. And this is what the chips I'm willing to put in. Collateral was just one of the requirements of DOS.

Allison told India about another bizarre practice in which they used the loaded terms, master and slave. Did she become your master? She did. She was my master within DOS.

Allison McEnvy to use your terminology. She's the master, right? Yeah. And you were a slave to her.

DOS stood for dominance of sequious cerorium, Latin that roughly translates to master above female slave. And what did that mean? It meant that I was to be ultimately obedient to her and that she could instruct me to do whatever she wanted. That was what it really meant.

India says Allison controlled everything. Did you have to get permission to eat? To leave? To travel?

Yes, Allison McEnvy was a very intense person and she took her role as master very seriously, which also included having to ask permission to eat, permission to go and see people, permission to travel, all of those things I had to ask for. This whole thing is just so hard to understand from the outside. You're depriving yourself of food, you lost a ton of weight. I did.

And for India, there was another requirement and you were having, as I understand it, you were sleeping with Keith Reneary. Yes, I don't even know. It's such a weird thing. It's so hard to understand from the outside.

And one of the more complicated things was my relationship with Keith Reneary and what that was. India wasn't the only one. She says many of the Doss women were essentially coerced into having sex with Reneary. And I was one of many women that Keith Reneary abused and it was non-consensual sexual interactions because we were all collateralized.

And none of us wanted to engage with Keith in that way. It was not an option to say no. Nikki says her experience was very different and she was happy to say yes. I had a sexual relationship with Keith for over ten years.

That was completely separate from Doss. There was never once was I asked to do a sexual act with anything to do with Doss. But you were having a sexual relationship with him while other women were also having sexual relationships with him? Yeah.

From the beginning, he was very honest and upfront with the fact that he had other partners and most of those he had for ten or more years before Doss was ever conceived. And you call your relationship with him consensual? 100%. 100%.

Let's break it down. Okay. So I find it difficult when people view my decisions as something I'm only doing because some man is inspiring me somehow to do. I made all of my decisions because I wanted something and I got something out of what I chose.

So my relationship with Keith was in effect of something that I wanted and that I benefited tremendously from. But a woman of Doss, there was still another practice they had to say yes to, one that India would find terrifying. Coming up. A secret ritual.

I had a few of my friends with me. One was stroking my head, another one was holding my hand, another one was helping to secure my leg. Women submitting to the unthinkable. The pain was something that I had never experienced before.

India, Oxenburg had given up almost everything for Nexium, her life in California, her family and friends, her career. As part of the secret sorority called Doss, she handed over sexually explicit pictures of herself and damaging lies about her family. She had agreed to obey her so-called master, Alison Mack, who now had another demand. India and the others were about to be branded.

I remember saying to Alison, do we really have to do this? Like there was a part of me that was still there that didn't want this. Is it still vivid in your mind? India?

Yes. The answer is yes. The unusual ritual took place inside the Nexium compound. India's skin would be scarred with a searing hot instrument, a cauterizing pen, branded like cattle.

It seems unimaginable that the members of Doss would submit to this, but they did. India had already watched when Danielle Roberts became the first in her group to get one. I watched that happen to Danielle without even really registering that that was going to happen to me. It was almost like, oh, okay, that happened to you now moving on.

It's very common that people will dissociate from experiences that are traumatic. The brand to me is one of those experiences where we were really out of our bodies when it was happening to us. What was it seemed like when you got the brand? There were other women in the room watching, right?

Well, I had a few of my friends with me. One was up by my head kind of stroking my head, another one was holding my hand, another one was helping to secure my leg. She stroking my hair, whispering, encouraging things into my ear, helping my leg not move, so I don't get hurt in a caring, loving way. As an outsider, imagining the scene and hearing what you're describing, it is really hard to understand.

I know. Even your explanation right now, you describing it to me makes me wince, makes me think. I just can't imagine what about the pain of having a cauterizing pen on my flesh? I can't imagine why I would do that.

Help me understand why you would do that. I think it's very simple. I mean, we wanted to be part of a kick-ass organization where women were really committed to making a difference in the world. That was the price of entry, and that was something that would join us all together.

If we can do that, we can do anything. It was India's turn later. By that time, she was so used to following orders, she said she saw no way out. The branding is hard to understand.

How did you decide to go ahead with that? It's not really much of a decision. It was a command. So part of being in DOS and pledging to this sorority was agreeing to be branded.

But we were also told that the brand was going to be the size of a quarter. In fact, the scars on India and the other women were much larger on very sensitive skin in their pelvic areas. And it was going to be cauterized into you. And it was going to be cauterized into our skin.

None of that was explained to us in detail. We were talking about women that are sleep-deprived, women that are deprived of food, women that have already given tons of collateral. The option to run away and say no isn't really an option anymore. What on earth was that like?

It was mixed. I mean, there was a part of me and the other women that felt like it was a bonding experience, like we were doing something really difficult together. And then there was another part of me that was also terrified of what was going on. And the pain was something that I had never experienced before.

There was no anesthesia. There was no numbing cream. There was none of that. It wasn't clear at the time, but they would later learn the brand was KAR, the initials of Keith Allen Reneary.

The brandings were supposed to be secret. But when word got to India's mother, Nexium's days were numbered. Coming up, an alarming phone call, what an ex-Nexing a member told Catherine. I feel for India's life, she's in danger.

You have to save her. And the date line continues. As darkness fell over Los Angeles one evening in the spring of 2017, Catherine Oxenburg had no clue what was really happening with her daughter, India, who had been involved with Nexium for six years, was on the other side of the country in Albany. Out of the blue, Catherine got a series of frightening text messages.

They were from an actor, Bonnie Pease. Bonnie was never part of DOS, but she was a longtime Nexium follower who had recently defected from the group. After reading the text, Catherine called Bonnie. And she said, I'm afraid to talk to you on the phone.

We'll leave you in person, but I have to tell you that I'm really, I fear for India's life. She's in danger. I'm afraid for her life. She's in danger.

Do you break down? Well, no, because I'm thinking, is this woman crazy? But I immediately, I said, okay, I'll meet you tomorrow. So I met with her.

She was shaking. And I wrote down everything that she said. And she basically gave me a breakdown of everything she knew up to that point. She told me about this inner circle called DOS, Dominus Obsequis Sororia.

India was part of a group that was a master's slave arrangement. When she says that, well, a master's slave. I mean, I'm really process that. Well, it takes me a while to process it before I'm writing everything down just so that I can figure it out for myself.

And then she says, they're on diets. She said they're sleep deprived. They're on what's called readiness drills, which means that if their master contacts them and they don't respond within 60 seconds, they're punished. The punishments could be that there's not even more.

They have these penances they have to do. If somebody fails at an assignment, then somebody else is held responsible. You have to pay the price. Yes.

And it just got darker and darker. And then she said they've had to sign over collateral in order to join the admission to this group. And then she said, on top of everything else, they've had to sign a lifetime vow of obedience to their master. So I'm reeling.

Catherine could not process what she was learning, but she quickly made the decision to lure India home to Los Angeles with the promise of a big birthday party, a party that was really a planned intervention. Then a few days later, another actor, Sarah Edmondson, who had also defected, told Catherine about the branding. And I found out two days before India was scheduled to come to LA for her, like the pseudo birthday party that I planned that was really an intervention. It looks like it really pains you when you talk about the branding.

It pains me on many levels. One young woman, her master said, I'm so excited for you. You're going to be involved in this very special ritual. You're going to be on lockdown for a couple of days.

I'm not going to tell you anything about it. Can you imagine? That's the very special ceremony being branded with this man's initials without anis- without a cauterizing pen without any anesthetic. Your daughter had that done.

Yeah. India, did you tell your mom about the branding? No. My mom actually questioned me first about the branding.

And I was shocked. I had no idea my mom knew about the branding. I had no idea anybody outside of DOS had spoken about DOS at that point. Catherine's attempted intervention did not work.

India was in too deep and had no intention of leaving DOS. In fact, she had her own so-called slaves and was actively trying to persuade other women to join. You did recruit other women. I did.

I was commanded to recruit other women into this group. And there was a part of me that really believed that this was good while I was in there. After India returned to Albany, Catherine declared war on Nexium and Kithraniri. And her first call was to an unlikely ally.

He had written some pretty incendiary blogs about Keith, about the Bronchmans, about the organization. And I called him and I said, I see that you haven't written any blogs recently. Are you aware what's going on right now? His name, Frank Parlotto, and he had quite a history with the group.

Ten years earlier, he worked for Nexium as a public relations consultant. What did you think of the organization at first? I thought the people were delightful. I thought that Keith was a very fun, loving, kind of charming person.

But that all changed. Frank says he uncovered financial improprieties by Renere. When he started to investigate, Frank says Renere fired him. Soon after, he was sued by Claire Bronfman, who bankrolled Nexium.

You believe they were coming after you legally as retaliation? That and just for the pure sport of it. Because I believe that Keith Renere does these things just to destroy other people. He's had more than 40 lawsuits against people that either worked for him, were students of his or were his lovers.

Most of the lawsuits didn't go anywhere. But by 2015, Frank was facing other legal problems. He was indicted on financial attacks charges, including fraud and money laundering. Frank who insists he's innocent has pleaded not guilty and is still awaiting trial.

But he vowed to expose Renere and Nexium and began a website called the Frank Report. You over the years wrote hundreds and hundreds of articles on your blog about Nexium. Critical, intensely critical of Keith Renere, right? You became like his arch nemesis.

Is that fair? I think that is fair. I wrote maybe 5,000 stories about him. And then Catherine handed him the biggest story of all.

She said my daughter is in Nexium and she has been branded. And in addition to that, she is being blackmailed because the group is holding some very compromising photographs and information about her so that she couldn't believe even if she wanted to. When you heard that, what did you think? My first reaction was if this is true, Keith is finished.

But with Nexium's history of suing its enemies, Frank knew he had to be extremely careful. I contacted Sarah Edmondson and some other people to verify that this was true. Then once I determined that it was true, I published it on the Frank Report. That was on June 5, 2017.

And about 30 so-called slaves bolted from Doss because they felt now they were safe to leave because of the exposure they wouldn't have to be as concerned about their collateral, their blackmail material being released. That story is like a bomb going off inside the organization, right? It cratered the cult. But some followers, including India, remained loyal to Renere and Nexium.

Coming up, will Catherine's efforts to expose Nexium cost her her daughter? I felt betrayed by my mother. I thought she was crazy. In the summer of 2017, the lid was blown off the story of Doss and the branding of women within Nexium.

Until then, the vast majority of Nexium members had no idea about the harsh requirements of the Doss sorority. Some members of Doss fled before they were branded too, thanks to the story published in the Frank Report. But India wasn't going anywhere. I felt defensive because I trusted these people for years.

They were who I considered my closest friends and authority. But Frank and Catherine were on a mission and joined by actor Sarah Edmondson who had been branded. I reach out to law enforcement and I get stonewalled. What did they say?

How we know about them, we've been following them, but there's really nothing we can do. Did they say the women were there by choice? Yes, and actually Sarah Edmondson went into one of the field offices in person and showed them her brand and they said, I'm sorry, but it sounds like it's consensual. There's nothing we can do.

Four months after the Frank Report story appeared, The New York Times published a front page article. Catherine did an interview and Sarah Edmondson came forward to show her scar from the branding. It ignited a firestorm, Robert Gavin of the Albany Times Union. It was a blockbuster.

When this came out, it was like, oh my God. A few days later, when Dateline first visited Catherine in her home in Malibu, she was clearly in agony. This is my last recourse. It is excruciatingly painful to expose my child like this.

I had a fantasy that when The New York Times came out that she would read it and go, wow, mama want to come home. That's not what happened. Instead, India remained loyal to Nexium. Catherine felt she had no choice but to continue her crusade in the media, even though she risked further alienating her daughter.

On November 2nd, she went on the Today Show. I love her to the end of the world and I'm only doing this to bring awareness because without awareness, there can be no outrage. And unless there's outrage, the authorities are not going to step in and do what they should do, which is shut this down and stop this from happening. The Today Show piece that I did was pivotal as far as I was concerned.

It was the strongest interview that I did and I literally got the call 48 hours after the Today Show. The call that I got from my lawyer saying that the FBI were moving in aggressively. But Catherine's effort to get India home was backfiring. Your mom kept asking you to leave.

She kept contacting you, trying to convince you. Yeah, and on television. And very publicly. Yes.

From your end, what did that feel like and what did you say to her when she was pleading with you? When I first went to the media, I was still very deeply involved in Nexium. And I felt kind of in shock. At that point, I felt betrayed by my mother.

I felt like she was exposing me unnecessarily. And I also thought that she was crazy. All the publicity from Catherine's battle helped expose more details about Ranieri's past. He grew up in a middle-class family in suburban New York and attended the prestigious Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

It should have been amazing, I do. As well, sometimes it even amazes me. After college, Ranieri started a business called Consumers Byline. The company was a multi-level marketing team that was sued by several states.

He had been in trouble years earlier with his former business, attorneys general, who went after him. But within a few years, he started another multi-level marketing business, executive success programs, part of Nexium. His lectures were often recorded. The longer-inductive process is sometimes the most useful one, depending on where you want to go, how you want to be.

Nexium is where Keith Ranieri becomes the Keith Ranieri. We now know who he is. That's where he decides to be known as the Vanguard. And Keith Ranieri was at the top of the Nexium world.

For me, I think for people who were familiar with this, we certainly weren't surprised to hear that Keith Ranieri was being accused of nefarious activity. It turns out Vanguard wasn't exactly who followers thought he was. Remember, he was supposed to be a world-class athlete and musician with multiple degrees. None of that was true.

And what about being the world's smartest man? Well, he had a so-so 2.6 GPA in college. Keith Ranieri was sold as this genius with an IQ of over 200, someone who was revolutionary who could change the world. Cult intervention expert Rick Allen Ross says if Ranieri was a genius at anything, it was manipulation.

He could determine what were the vulnerabilities of people that he had sway over, you know, who had personal issues with their family in their workplace and then exploiting those vulnerabilities to leverage control over them. Control over people like India who thought Ranieri was a victim. I was so indoctrinated into what they wanted me to believe we were doing, which was this great community of good people who want to grow and this poor martyr of a man who's being targeted by the media and the government. And as Catherine continued to speak out, India says Nexium loyalists called her mother the enemy.

She's out to get you, she's trying to destroy you, she wants to hurt your friends. India says the woman who bankrolled Nexium pushed her to turn on Catherine. Claire Brumpin wanted to discredit my mom completely. She wanted to get rid of my mom as a threat to Nexium and to Keith and part of that was using me as a pawn against my own mom.

As law enforcement worked its case against Nexium and Ranieri, Nexium loyalists tried to intimidate Catherine. Did anyone from Nexium contact you until you stop? Yes, I got calls from what I would call their enforcers. They were called the ethics police and people would call you.

And say what terrible harm I was perpetrating. Catherine was frightened but less concerned about her own safety than she was about India's. Coming up, Keith Ranieri takes off, triggering an international manhunt and a dramatic confrontation. Some of them had like Balaklavas and they had machine guns and both were best.

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Streaming on Peacock. These men are going to come after me. Taking them out. Smell going to be chance.

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MIA. Streaming now. Only on Peacock. As the day wraps up, get this scoop on what's been happening with Here's the Scoop.

The podcast for NBC News with Meteor host Gazem Visukyen. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News' trusted journalist. It's a fresh take. A sharp, thoughtful hand is informative for you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world.

On the front page, the Zeitgust. Here's the scoop from NBC News. Listen daily on SiriusXM. India Oxenberg was still loyal to NEXIGUM and Kethrineri.

Afraid for India's safety, Katherine went looking for her near Albany in late November 2017. That's a courageous thing to do to go drive to where you think your daughter is being effectively held and not knowing if they have security. Did you think she was in danger? Did you worry for her life?

I did at that point. I did worry for her life. I knew also that they would be blaming her for all of this public outrage because it was her mom. It's her mom.

Yeah. So I thought that if anything would increase her jeopardy. As Katherine looked around the neighborhood, she was anxious. And who did we bump into?

Kethrineri and two of his horror members. What happened? Well, not much because he ran. He ran from you?

Yes. He ran and hid in his house. Katherine didn't find India who had left Albany for New York City. Soon after that, Katherine learned that Reneeri had left Albany too.

He took off for Mexico while American authorities were looking into the allegations against him. His followers, Nikki and Alison, were with him. By this point, Alison and Nikki were more than close friends. They had become a couple and gotten married.

You described earlier that you were in a sexual relationship with Keith. You're married to Alison. Is that a loving sexual relationship also? I think, yeah, that isn't something I want to discuss.

Here, there's just no way that I could do justice to the beautiful soul that she is in a short answer. Nikki, Alison, Reneeri, and others hung out in Porter, Viarda. Then in March, 2018, a knock at the door. At first, Reneeri hid in a closet.

Nikki captured the scene as he was arrested and taken away by Mexican authorities. We're going to follow them. Are you standing right there? Yeah.

And some of them had Balaclavas and they had machine guns and bullet professes and we didn't know what was happening. What happened was Reneeri was immediately deported back to the U.S. where he was charged with crimes related to Nexium. Did you get a phone call?

I did. I was getting a facial. My lawyer's called me up. My phone went ballistic and said he's just been arrested and I was always so facial.

I had tears pouring down my face, creams all over the place. Yeah, best phone calls of my life. Did it feel like an end? It felt like it worked.

It felt like the beginning of the end. Keith Reneeri was charged by federal prosecutors with a litany of felonies, including racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, conspiracy and sex trafficking. When Keith Reneeri was arrested, did you worry that you might be in legal trouble too? I was definitely worried when Keith Reneeri got arrested.

I think I was also in a great deal of shock because it was starting to hit me that this was not going to just go away, that this was gaining speed. Catherine warned India she faced legal risk. She could technically be arrested. You don't know that they're not going to go after her because technically she has women reporting up to her as slaves.

I know. I know. That was my fear. That's why I kept texting her saying you're in a very dangerous situation.

Then two weeks later, Alison Mack was arrested. And it really wasn't until Alison Mack was arrested that I started to fear that I could be too. And that's a very scary place to be. Would India be next?

Coming up, India reveals her darkest moment. That's heavy. It is. That was a really vulnerable thing for me to share.

India was in a very lonely place. By herself and at risk, she was still in Nexium's clutches. It would take months to find her way out. It was a process for her to remove herself or to recognize the danger she was in and what was happening.

Right? It didn't just happen overnight. No, it was not a light bulb moment when she said, I'm leaving. I think it has for other people who have left cults.

They have a clear, concise moment of shifting. But with India, it was incremental. After Keith Ranieri and Alison Mack were charged in July 2018, Seagrams' Eris Claire Bronfman was arrested along with other Nexium insiders. India finally acquiesced to having her first session with a cult expert who had been working with Catherine, the goal to finally bring her home and deprogram her.

We were in a hotel room together speaking with a woman who was the deprogrammer that my mom introduced me to, who really was my entry point into rebuilding my capacity to think critically again because it had been so tampered with. The effort took months, but slowly India took halting steps to leave Nexium behind. But India's friend Danielle, the doctor, was still loyal to Ranieri. It would have been a lot easier for me to just say, I made a mistake.

Let me go through the deprogramming. I just asked because so many people who were in Nexium did kind of break tight. They didn't have strong relationships anymore with their families. Did you have that happen?

You repaired it? Yeah. I mean, my family never left me. They never disowned me, which I know there are some friends of mine that their families have done that.

They've stayed true, not because it's easier, because it's not. It's a lot harder. It was hard for Nikki Klein, too. She was losing her close circle of friends after spending 10 years of her life in Nexium.

It's a whole decade of your life. Yeah. Yeah. How do you look at it now?

Those 10 years. I'm just so grateful that I had the opportunity to experience the people, the tools, the community that I did because it's not here anymore, at least not in the same way. By fall 2018, India had finally left the Doss group and Nexium and moved back to California, but the process was excruciating. How did you repair your relationship with your mom?

A lot of work. My mom and I are a lot of time. We knew that our love was strong and that we had to just keep the communication open, keep sharing, keep talking, even when it was really uncomfortable. My mom did that for me.

She was there from the moment that I got out with open arms. She said, I'm here with you for whatever you need. I'll give to you. I wonder if now, India, now can you see that your mom was driven by nothing but love?

Now I can. Everything that she did came from love. Everything she did came from the fact that she knew that I had a life beyond this, that I couldn't see for myself. Emotionally, India, this, I just, I can't imagine what you went through emotionally.

You said, I have wanted to end my life on numerous nights since leaving. Yeah, it's heavy. It is, and it's, that was a really vulnerable thing for me to share. And the more I've been able to speak about my experiences, the more I see the similarities with many other women and men who have experienced trauma or abuse.

D'Aunty and leaders were now accused of orchestrating that kind of trauma and abuse, but just as they were to have their day in court, there were new revelations. Coming up, one revelation, the person who did most of the branding of Doss women, was none other than Dr. Danielle Roberts. Now, she speaks out about it publicly for the first time.

You are a doctor. How could you then put pain on people? I think people are making an assumption that people were harmed. Nobody was harmed in this.

These women wanted this. They asked for this. When Dateline continues. As the leadership of NEXIA was charged with multiple federal crimes, another investigation was underway in the spring of 2018.

Not criminal, but a medical investigation into the person who branded India and most of the other Doss women. Someone you'll recognize. Danielle Roberts. My intent was never to hurt any of these women.

Remember she was an osteopathic doctor, and now her medical license was at stake. Danielle is now answering questions about branding Doss members in an exclusive interview. She says she was asked to do the branding by her so-called master in Doss, Alice and Mac. They say the women were naked and that they were restrained by other women.

Is that true? I branded 17 women total. All of the women that I branded were naked. That was part of the process.

It wasn't a bad process. Some people are outraged that you did this as a doctor, frankly. That you used a cauterizing pen and put a brand in people because you took a Hippocratic oath to protect, to help people, to keep them from pain. And you were inflicting pain.

What do you say to that? I mean, I think it's a very misunderstood thing. It's going to take a little bit of pulling apart. The first thing is that this clearly wasn't the practice of medicine.

Danielle says she was not acting as a doctor during the Brandings, that she was a member of a social group, taking part in a social activity. These women didn't come to me because they thought I was a doctor. They had no idea who the branding technician was going to be. There was no patient-physician relationship.

But my question, as a human being hearing the story, my question is you are a doctor. I understand you weren't practicing medicine in that moment, but you are a doctor. You're a trained doctor. You took an oath.

How could you then inflict pain on people? Well, I think pain and harm are two different things. I think people are making an assumption that people were harmed. Nobody was harmed in this.

These women wanted this. They asked for this. I understand. I understand now that narrative has changed and they're saying, because there are women who have said, I didn't want this.

I felt like I had to do it. There are women who have said, India, said, India asks what were said to me. I didn't really want this. She's now covered it up with another tattoo.

She's ashamed that she has the brand. I feel badly that that's how they chosen to perceive it. I feel badly about that. When I understand that when they were in the room with me, they wanted it.

They said they wanted it. They were laughing. Danielle says she has convinced the women really made a free choice to get the brand. All their body language, all of their words, all of their mannerisms, were they nervous?

Sure. Were they excited? Absolutely. But they wanted it.

They would say they wanted it because they were brainwashed. That's what they would say. They only wanted it in that moment because they had been led down that path and their minds were not their own. Well, I mean, this leads to a very key issue.

I mean, like, when do we say you're responsible for your decisions and when are you not? You know, I believe that we're responsible for all of our decisions, no matter what the consequences of those are. That was the case Danielle made to the New York State Office of Professional Medical Conduct after the investigation, the OPMC determined that Danielle would not lose her medical license. That clearly wasn't the practice of medicine.

Very clear. How much of an effect was there? Danielle was able to continue with her medical practice and even gave seminars. But in 2019, as the Nexium trial was about to get started, the medical board began another investigation and the case is ongoing.