two or more to a house, sometimes
alone. It all couldn’t look more
normal, more American, but in the
evening, Raniere would tomcat
down the shadowy suburban streets.
One of the central riddles of
Raniere’s case is that the women
who followed him were almost
uniformly extraordinary—beautiful,
eloquent, intuitive. Unlike Spahn
Ranch, where clocks and newspapers
were prohibited, Raniere’s women
moved in the world, aware of culture,
trends, movies. Their relationships
with each other were emotionally
complex and, in some cases, supportive,
but Raniere was the authority and
Buddha. “I always deferred to what
Keith thought,” explained Lauren
Salzman, a girlfriend turned cooperating
witness. “Keith knew what was right
and what was ethical.”
They were often women of means;
their stories could involve show-
jumping competitions and school in
Switzerland and travel on private
jets. They had the ability to simply get
on a train and leave Albany; indeed,
they did leave, often, and came back.
But Raniere’s control went deep.
One of the sickest aspects involved
leveraging women’s insecurities about
their weight. Though he promoted
the contemporary wellness ideal of one’s
outer beauty reflecting one’s inside
value, and he encouraged exercise, like
late-night volleyball games (his favorite
sport) at a local gym, he also severely
monitored some acolytes’ calorie intake.
He claimed the seven extra pounds
one woman put on “hurts my heart
physically when I am with you.”
In 2015, after his most cherished
girlfriend, DC heiress Pamela Cafritz,
died of cancer, Raniere seemed to
have become even more controlling.
It was at this point he developed
his next scheme: the sex-slave cult. Ever
paranoid that his girlfriends would
abandon him, he decided eight should
swear an oath of lifetime obedience
to him and become his slaves, referring
to him as master. They had meetings
in a home one of them purchased
in Albany, dubbed the sorority house.
During confabs, Raniere sat on a
chair, clothed, while women lay naked at
Only then would you know pure love,
or as Mack once explained, “Within
the shackles of commitment I find the
greatest freedom of all.”
It’s sort of amazing that Mack fell
for this nonsense while trying to fulfill
Raniere’s perverted demands, like
the time he told her to bring follower
India Oxenberg, daughter of Dynasty
actress Catherine Oxenberg, to him,
emailing her: “Does India know...she
needs to take all her clothes off, while
I am clothed, pose in a most revealing
way, and have me take a picture?”
This scheme could have kept going,
except that Raniere decided the slaves,
in order to further seal their lifetime
vows, should “monogram” themselves
with his initials—no, not a tattoo, but a
brand. Raniere had a grip on women
with whom he had sexual relationships.
But, intent on increasing his power,
his recruitment into the slave pyramid
accelerated, and suddenly some
slaves had husbands, and a brand at
one’s bikini line became impossible
to ignore. Sarah Edmondson, an actress
and Vancouver follower who was
branded, became furious. Word grew
that Raniere might not be the Buddha
they revered. The pyramid wobbled.
Meanwhile, things had been getting
crazier. A first-line master began
planning for S&M equipment like dog
collars and a cage big enough to fit
a human for the Albany sorority house.
The possibility of real danger hovered
in the near distance.
Soon the slaves began to scatter
into the night. The 31-year-old actress
recruited at the Ace tried to talk to
Raniere in Albany to inform him that
she was going back to New York City,
because he always said no one should
leave him without telling him why,
but he said he had a late-night
volleyball game, and after that he had
a meeting, and she kept texting him
over and over, but he wasn’t ready
to see her yet. Finally at 3 a.m., she hit
her boundary, and told him she was
leaving, but now he said he was ready
to meet. He asked if he would ever
see or talk to her again. She told him
“probably not” and got in the driver’s
seat of the car. She drove until she
reached the New York skyline, and the
blood-orange sun rose in the sky.his feet. While talking to them, he
went on quite a bit about the slaves
becoming an army, even a political
force...to do what? Allow him to be the
leader of all women the way post–
Helter Skelter Manson thought he’d
be the leader of all blacks? This
part is foggy. His sex addiction is the
only part that’s clear.
Things spun out of control over the
course of a year and a half, into ghost
story territory. To keep them under
his thumb, Raniere asked the women to
hand over blackmail material, like a
deed to a home or bank account
information. Raniere began making a
pyramid structure of this sex cult,pushing the first group of women to
become “first-line masters” and recruit
other women to be their slaves. Each
slave who recruited another slave made
a new step in the pyramid, and women
had other women as masters, but
Raniere remained at the top of the
pyramid—the “grandmaster.”
Trolling the hip precincts of
New York, Vancouver, and Los Angeles,
Raniere’s followers enticed women
into conversation and asked if they’d
want to be part of a very secret, very
special female empowerment group.
TV actress Allison Mack, one of the
first-line masters, took a meeting at the
Ace Hotel in Manhattan with a hot
actress and even approached Emma
Watson and prominent feminist authors
on Twitter to ask if they’d want to talk
to her. Here was the way they sold it:
Yoga was not enough, meditation was
not enough, activism was not enough—
you needed to experience complete
surrender to another human being.“Does Indiaknow...she needsto take all herclothes off, whileI am clothed?”