Skip to content
Home » Why We Need To Understand Cults Better: Sarah Edmondson (Transcript)

Why We Need To Understand Cults Better: Sarah Edmondson (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Sarah Edmondson’s talk titled “Why We Need To Understand Cults Better” at TEDxPortland conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction to Community and Personal Journey

I have always been drawn to community. Being in community, building communities that I believe in. I’ve been a lifelong learner. Seeker, total joiner, brownies, drama club, summer camp. I was raised by fantastic hippie parents who taught me the importance of making the world better. Also, bring snacks. Be ready for sing-alongs. I’m incredibly organized. I’m a big connector.

I’ve been told I have big cruise director energy. No clipboard today. I was also in a cult for 12 years. And I’m here today to protect you all from the same shit show that I went through. Yeah. You want this! My talk is rooted in awareness. I want to help you to navigate all the culture groups out there so that you can seek safely.

The NXIVM Experience

So, in 2005, I was an aspiring actress/waitress when I was invited to NXIVM. A personal and professional development program with a seemingly altruistic mission to change the world, one person at a time. Big red flag. And I truly found an incredible community of like-minded humanitarians and a place where I could help people set and achieve goals and bust through their limiting beliefs.

It was wonderful, but it was also a facade for something sinister, something that would take over my life slowly, over a decade, with a slow build of coercion, obligation, gaslighting, and control. Wasn’t just a highly toxic workplace. This was a high control group, aka a cult. But I couldn’t see it. There are so many great things about the community clouding my judgment.

I rose up the ranks, became one of the company’s star recruiters. It was incredible. I thought that I had found the best club ever. My people, the chosen family, but more importantly, a place where I had community and belonging. Those were things I was looking for. Ever since I was a little girl, I had actually wandered onto the path of self-reflection and transformation without any tools for navigating or protecting myself.

But I was in deep. My actual friends and family saw less and less of me. As I’d spent more money on time and trainings and my worldview got more narrow. My language became coded. I sounded like a NXIVM robot. I was on the top of this Grifting iceberg and NXIVM pyramid. And it truly haunts me to this day.

The Awakening and Escape

How many people I brought in my friends and family, who in turn brought in their friends and family through leveraged trust. Till I had grown an organization so big I could open the first center in Canada, which was something I used to be incredibly proud of. Some of those people are still loyal to the cult to this day. It all came to a head when I was invited to a secret NXIVM offshoot.

A badass boot camp for women only sold to me as empowerment when it was actually enslavement. Just a way for Keith Ranieri, the company’s founder, to brand women, as if he owned them. Yeah. He also blackmailed many of them into sex. I managed to dodge that bullet, but literally dozens of women were not that lucky.

Thankfully, it was the branding that woke me up. I mean, one minute you’re selling a gold program, in the next minute, you’re sweaty and naked on a table being branded in a secret sorority. And it wasn’t the moment of the branding itself. No, not when I was sliced open without anesthetic. But later, when I found out that the symbol on my body was not that of the four elements as I’d been told, but actually Keith Raniere’s initials in a cryptic monogram.

Yeah, I had his initials on my body. He literally thought he could own me. He was wrong and I was out. But yes. Thank you. Wait. What happened to me was just the beginning. And when we found out what else was going on behind closed doors, I’m talking crimes ranging from blackmail, forced labor, child pornography, sex trafficking, I was mortified.

The Aftermath and Advocacy

So I went to the authorities with a band of fellow shocked ex-members, and we blew the proverbial whistle. But they didn’t do anything. Fell on deaf ears because they didn’t know what they were looking at. So we went to the press. Look, mum and dad, I’m on the front page of the New York Times. It’s not exactly what I was imagining my life would be when I started out as an actress, but here we are.

ALSO READ:  C.S. Lewis: A Prophet for Contemporary Christianity: Alister McGrath (Transcript)

After that, the rest is cult history. An investigation by the Southern District of New York. A dramatic arrest in Mexico, a six-week trial for our deliberation, and ultimately, a 120-year prison sentence for next NXIVM founder. Yes. Thank you, thank you. Big win.

And just for the record, by all cult expert assessments, Keith Raniere is now known as one of the most dangerous cult leaders of all time, on par with Jim Jones, whose rise to power culminated in the death of 900 people, 300 of which were children, for drinking poisoned Flavor Aid, which is where the term drink the Kool-Aid comes from by the way.

An FYI: if they hadn’t have drank it, they would have been shot. It wasn’t a choice. We don’t use that phrase properly. It’s called a bounded choice. Coercive control. Needless to say, Keith Raniere was not the noble, humanitarian, ethical genius I thought I was vouching for all those years. Quite the opposite, actually. Nobody signs up for trauma and tragedy on purpose. In fact, a wise man once said, “Nobody joins a cult on purpose. They join something good.”

Healing and Education

I was on my path.