When Sarah Edmondson first joined NXIVM in 2005, she thought she was signing up for a wellness and personal development programme, designed to shape the world into a better place.

Founded in 1998 by self-help guru Keith Raniere, the group marketed itself as a ‘community guided by humanitarian principles that seek to empower people’, an organisation ‘working to build a better world’.

For Sarah - a struggling actress in her late twenties who was lost but still full of ambition and searching for her big break - NXIVM promised her everything: success, kinship, and a true purpose in life.

Back then, if someone had told her that 12 years later, she would be unknowingly taking a vow of lifelong allegiance to being a slave in an abusive sex cult with Raniere at the helm, she would have called them mad.

The Canadian’s time in the group culminated in a disturbing episode in 2017 which has left her with PTSD, during which a doctor branded her beneath the hip with Raniere’s initials using a white-hot cautery in a sordid ‘initiation ceremony’.

After that, she witnessed women being forced to 'punish' each other with paddles for disobedience, and soon realised they were being used as 'slaves' made to have sex with their leader.

She escaped the cult that year and went public with her story, quickly triggering, together with other whistleblowers, the arrest of Raniere and the dramatic demise of NXIVM on the world stage.

‘To explain the sociopathy of Keith Raniere, he really enjoyed destroying people's lives, and pretending that it was the opposite,’ the 48-year-old says from her home in Atlanta, Georgia, which she shares with her husband, Anthony Ames, another NXIVM defector, and their two sons.

‘There were women who were on their way to Ivy League educations, and they cancelled it to go study with Keith, and ended up being part of his harem, having multiple abortions, and their lives were ruined.’

Raniere was arrested in March 2018 and was sentenced to 120 years in prison in 2020 for racketeering, sex trafficking and possessing child pornography, as well as a litany of other crimes.

During his trial, the secrets of NXIVM were finally unveiled.

The self-help programme was merely a guise, concealing Raniere’s grander purpose, to preside over a harem of female ‘slaves’ who he forced into having sex with him.

He kept victims on 500-calorie diets, dictated what they read and thought, and kept one woman in solitary confinement for two years - all because she gained weight and asked to see a man other than him.

But the scale of the horror was concealed from Sarah and Anthony for years, who were convinced the group was a path to self-flourishing, carving them into the empowered leaders they were always meant to be.

It’s not just the couple who were manipulated: in its heyday, NXIVM coaxed at least 16,000 participants - including descendants of European royalty, Hollywood glitterati, and billionaire heiresses - into signing up to its Executive Success Programmes (ESP), with the ‘Five-Day’ intensive course costing $2,700.

NXIVM's teachings - grounded in a hodgepodge of pseudoscience and cherry-picked philosophy - were rooted in ridding people of their fears, and correcting their ‘limiting beliefs’, so that each individual’s full potential might be unleashed.

‘It was a school where you could work on yourself and your goals and - for lack of a better metaphor - your “operating system,” and upgrade the software to be more in line with who you want to be,’ Sarah recalls.

‘All of the snags of the software were called “limiting beliefs”, and we had a curriculum and an education that could help untangle those “limiting beliefs” so that you could be more optimal in the world.’

She was sceptical at first and found some aspects outright bizarre - including the way in which members had to wear coloured sashes to signify rank - but gradually grew accustomed to the eccentric ways of NXIVM, feeling its teachings were changing her for the better.

‘By day three, I had definitely put aside all the weird things and I was on board because I'd had such a positive experience by then. And by day five, I was like a zealot,’ she says.

Avid followers of the movement embarked on the ‘Stripe Path’ (after completing the first training, they received a red stripe on their white sash), referred to Raniere as ‘Vanguard’, and hosted ‘Vanguard Week’, an annual ten-day celebration of the leader’s birthday in Silver Bay, New York, costing each member $2,000.

For more than a decade, Sarah ascended the ranks of the Stripe Path, recruiting friends and friends-of-friends to the movement that she felt was akin to a mini-utopia, the key to her own and perhaps the world's salvation. 

Anthony, 51, an American actor and former college athlete, entered NXIVM after an ex-girlfriend from high school lured him in, and he maintains he was less psychologically enraptured by the programme than Sarah and other victims.

Still, he was drawn to its goal-orientated mission statement, and gradually climbed up its ranks as a teacher before building centres in New York and Vancouver, where Sarah had started a chapter in her home city.

They fell in love and married in September 2013, using vows Raniere had written. More than 60 of their wedding guests, and half of Sarah’s bridesmaids, were involved in NXIVM, including her maid-of-honour, Lauren Salzman, who also served as their officiant.

Part of the reason Anthony says he is less psychologically damaged than a lot of his fellow cult survivors is because, as a man, he wasn’t Raniere’s prime target.

He adds: ‘He manipulated people and hurt them, enjoyed their demise, and got off on it. That's a dangerous, dangerous person.

‘Most people don't think that they're near those people, and it was probably a year out where I recognised I was next to a very dark force for a large part of my adult life.

‘I was peripheral to it. I wasn't the target of it. And still, I was in an airplane that flew close to a hurricane and had to get back on course. A lot of people went down in that hurricane.’

After years flew by in NXIVM, the couple’s experience of the group gradually grew from fulfilling, to somewhat dissatisfying (they began to think the movement was ran like a 'bad government', with constant new programmes and costs soaring), before turning outright sinister.

In January 2017, Sarah was recruited into a secret sorority within the organisation called DOS, which stood for Dominus Obsequious Sororium (an incorrect Latin translation that is intended to mean ‘master over the slave women’).

She didn’t know it yet, but all along DOS was Raniere’s personal and ever-expanding harem, where female ‘slaves’ were coerced into having sex with him and recruiting more women into the network.

Sarah was invited by Lauren - her best friend, the godmother of her child, and a woman with seniority in NXIVM - who promised it was an all-female community grounded in empowerment among sisters.

She says: ‘We thought DOS was supposed to be a badass group of women holding each other to our goals and the next level of accountability.

‘I was even told that it was nothing to do with NXIVM, that it was people from all over the world, like the Freemasons for women, and we were going to influence politics, and it was going to be incredible.’

Nothing could have prepared her for what came next.

Before joining, Lauren told Sarah she had to make four commitments: a lifetime vow of obedience; that she’d be Lauren’s slave; that she’d wear a piece of jewelry around her stomach at all times, symbolising a chain; and finally, she’d get a tattoo the size of a dime which she was assured would be ‘really pretty’.

Joining the group would also require Sarah to submit ‘collateral’, to cement the vow of utmost secrecy - including false confessions about her husband and nude photographs.

Being part of DOS meant abdicating total autonomy for the whims of her master, Lauren - from being ordered to cut out sugar and caffeine, to taking a cold shower and responding constantly to ‘readiness drills’.

At any hour of the day or night, she could receive a question mark, which was shorthand for ‘Ready?’ She’d then have 60 seconds to respond ‘R’, signifying ‘I’m ready’.

Failure meant punishment for the group, possibly with the release of their collateral, or sometimes physical - with women on at least one occasion being forced to paddle each other.

On March 9, 2017, she was told it was finally time for the official DOS initiation ceremony at a house in Albany, New York State.

Sarah and a group of women were ordered to enter a room blindfolded and naked where, one by one, they lay on a massage table and were ordered to say: ‘Master, would you brand me? It would be an honour.’

They watched as a group as Dr Danielle Roberts proceeded to use a cauterising device to sear a two-inch-square symbol below each woman’s hip, a procedure that took 20 to 30 minutes.

For hours, the smell of scorched skin filled the room as each woman had Raniere’s initials burnt into their most intimate parts.

In an excerpt describing the traumatic episode in her 2019 memoir Scarred, Sarah described watching another victim: ‘When the iron first makes contact to her skin, Gabriella’s whole body flips and tweaks, as if she’s being electrocuted. She screams out in pain.’

Recalling her own turn, she wrote: ‘Lying here now, I can feel each millimeter of my flesh singed open. I close my eyes and imagine staring into the face of my son.’

To bear the unimaginable pain, she disassociated, saying: ‘When the last line’s been drawn, my eyes need a moment to adjust to the light. I feel like I’m floating out of my body.’

When Sarah eventually found out that the brand had nothing to do with the seven chakras - as she had been promised - and everything to do with Raniere’s ultimate dominance over their bodies, there was no choice but to plan her escape.

By that point, she had shown Anthony the brand, and he agreed the only way was out. 'Once she told me that she was branded, I was like: "We need to get out of this thing and tear it down."'

Together with other NXIVM whistleblowers, Sarah took her story to The New York Times which published an explosive exposé in October 2017, leading to an FBI investigation.

In March 2018, police armed with machineguns stormed a $10,000-a-week villa in Mexico to arrest Raniere, who was surrounded by seven ‘first-line slaves’ as he prepared for a group sex session.

It was uncovered that he had a rotation of 15 to 20 such women, who were barred from having sexual relations with anyone but Raniere, or reveal the contents of their relationship to anyone else.

At his sentencing hearing, the court heard victim statements from 15 individuals, including ‘Camila,’ a survivor who was sexually exploited by Raniere when she was 15 years old.

She said the cult leader forced her to recognise the date of her first abuse as their anniversary and that a 12-year relationship ensued, during which she attempted suicide and had an abortion ‘at his direction’.

Another victim, Daniela, moved with her family from Mexico to the US aged 16, when they found out about NXIVM.

She was groomed by Raniere for weeks until he took her virginity when she turned 18.

She testified that she was asked to perform oral sex on Raniere on a regular basis, often more than once a day, and that she and both her sisters were impregnated by him and forced into abortions.

After her abortion, Daniela said Raniere told her the procedure would be an opportunity for weight loss, telling her ‘Olympic athletes get abortions as part of training’.

The victim was placed in solitary confinement in her bedroom for two years, and was threatened that she’d be sent back to Mexico if she did not satisfy the chief’s whims.

Smallville star Allison Mack - one of Raniere's top female deputies - was also sentenced to three years for her role in recruiting women into the sex cult. 

Sarah says: ‘All of the things that we know now about Keith Raniere - him being predatorial, sex obsessed, needing a harem, needing adoration - so much of that was kept from us.

‘There were a few things that were in the news while we were there, but unfortunately, we were strongly encouraged to not read it, because it was all a "smear campaign".’

In 2020, HBO released ‘The Vow’, a nine-part documentary series following Edmondson and other NXIVM victims-turned-vigilantes during their mission to bring down Raniere.

Since then, the couple have launched their own podcast, ‘A Little Bit Culty’, interviewing fellow victims of abusive networks - from former Jehovah's Witnesses and former Scientology fanatics to reformed disciples of the Atman Yoga Federation.

In March, they self-published a book of the same name, offering readers a handbook into how to avoid cult-like communities where charismatic leaders manipulate victims using tactics of coercive control.

After Sarah left DOS and exposed the abuse to the public, a fellow ‘slave’ gave her a nickname: ‘The original abolitionist.’

Now, alongside Anthony, she’s continuing that work into the present day at risk of re-traumatising herself - telling her story again and again to protect future victims from stumbling down the same dark park.

‘By the time you've read experts' books, it’s too late. You probably had something happen to you and you're piecing your life back together. Hopefully, this is a book that people can get their hands on and get sound bites [before it's too late],’ says Anthony.

Sarah adds: ‘When we got out, we couldn’t find anything that had the A to Z about how cults work: how they get you, how they hook you, how to get out, and how to heal if you've been in one.

‘We wanted to put all those things that we learned since we left NXIVM into one place so we could give it to people.’

It’s now almost a decade since the couple left Raniere’s orbit and burnt NXIVM to the ground, but the scars from Sarah’s trauma in the cult remain.

Most days, she’s focused on her podcast, exchanging cathartic words with survivors and experts, or taking her sons to baseball tournaments, but on others she spots a headline about NXIVM in the news and feels like she’s been ‘hit by a truck’.

She says: ‘I’m still hyper-vigilant and on edge in a way that I hope I'm not always working on, but it's an active daily practice to get grounded.

‘I go to yoga, I put my feet in grass, I walk in nature, I do Epsom salt baths. I do a lot of things to keep my inner peace and my nervous system regulated, which is just an ongoing journey.’

Order A Little Bit Culty by Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Ames on Amazon

Listen to the couple's podcast, A Little Bit Culty, on Spotify