Captive by Catherine Oxenberg

Author:Catherine Oxenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

11

* * *

GANGSTA MOMS

I prayed and prayed, but still I spiraled into an abyss of despair.

Hundreds were leaving the cult, but not my India—and now she was refusing to talk to me, too. Once again I felt completely powerless to penetrate the cult’s ironclad indoctrination of my daughter. All I could do was double my frenzied efforts to find help.

In addition to reaching out to Frank Parlato, I called the FBI again. They didn’t return my calls.

I got in touch with a friend who owned a private plane and asked if we could whisk India away to a deserted island with no cell phone reception and have her forcibly deprogrammed. “Isn’t that illegal?” my friend asked.

I checked with two top security firms to ask if they could kidnap India and bring her home. The days of forced cult extractions and interventions were over, I was told. A cult member had recently sued his parents for $4 million for kidnapping him from a cult—and won.

The only people I didn’t try were the US Special Forces and the Mafia, but, believe me, I asked everyone I knew if they had a Guido in their back pocket just in case.

My powerlessness was made all the worse by the guilt and unanswered questions that began haunting me at night when I desperately needed sleep to keep sane and remain a functioning mom to Grace, Maya, and Celeste through this nightmare.

Why had this happened to India? I wanted to know.

Had she inherited a gene that predisposed her to brainwashing? Did this happen because I took her to Deepak Chopra’s ashram when she was a baby? Should I not have told her about the self-help adventures of my past? Was her entrapment my fault because of what I did to Keith or because I took her to ESP in the first place? Why, why, why?

I spent days and nights pondering and agonizing over those questions and blaming myself.

Then I remembered someone who might have the answers.

Ranking right up there with Frank was one other man just as vilified by Keith Raniere and considered an archenemy by all Espians: Rick Alan Ross.

Rick has been called a “cult deprogrammer” or cult intervention specialist—some say he is a “cult buster.” He is the founder of the nonprofit Cult Education Institute and online educational database. In the 1980s, he deprogrammed two former members of the Branch Davidians religious cult, long before the 1993 siege in Waco, Texas. More recently, he’d had success deprogramming Espians. As with Frank, the Espians had all been ordered not to pay attention to anything Rick said—which was one big reason why I knew I had to call him. If Keith said someone was lying, you could be sure he or she was a truth teller.

Keith, backed by the Nxivm clan, tried for fourteen years in federal court to sue Rick into oblivion. He claimed Rick had defamed the cult by posting online the reports by a psychologist and a psychiatrist who were critical of Nxivm’s programs and practices.

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