Bony and blond, Sylvie wore a baggy gray pantsuit and a pink scarf to court the day she testified about her experience. She was smart and well-spoken, with an accent from her native England, apologizing often to Assistant U.S. Attorney Moira Penza as she answered questions. Though she mostly remained composed, when she described how her father came upon naked photos of her that she’d handed over to NXIVM on a shared iCloud account, Sylvie cried so hard that U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis handed her tissues.
She’d grown up in a supportive environment, she said: “I normally describe it as a bit of an enchanted childhood.” She had a large, close-knit family and was raised outside Bristol, traveling and competing in horse jumping as a kid. A naturally gifted athlete, Sylvie left school at 16 to focus on her sport. After a bad accident on a horse that knocked out a front tooth, however, she lost some confidence. So she accepted a job in America with Clare Bronfman, a fixture in the international riding scene, hoping it would advance her career.
When Bronfman encouraged Sylvie to take NXIVM courses and, as Sylvie recalls, offered to foot the bill, she agreed, wanting to please her new boss.
The notion of cults, Shaw explains, and the stereotype that they are filled with “a bunch of weirdo hippie deadbeats,” has been shaped tremendously by Charles Manson and other coercive groups like his of the 1960s and 1970s. At the instruction of cult leader Manson, several male and female followers committed a string of brutal murders in 1969, feeding a narrative that people in cults were desperate, naive, and drug-addled. But before Raniere’s trial, Lalich said in an interview she hoped it would show the public what she knows—that in the last few decades, cults have been “mainstreamed.”
“Business cults, leadership, new-age training—they’re rampant,” she said. After the trial, she reiterated: “Cults have so infiltrated into the business world. And NXIVM fits right into that.”
“People don’t want to think it can happen to them,” she says. “So they want to denigrate the people it happens to—‘these crazy people.’ And in fact, that’s not at all who cults want.”
According to the testimonies of witnesses like Sylvie, DOS enlisted privileged, driven women with big dreams and lofty career goals and promised to help them succeed.
Over the next 13 years, Sylvie took more and more NXIVM classes, especially after Bronfman stopped riding horses. “I didn’t have another life path, honestly,” Sylvie testified. “I didn’t have another career planned out; I didn’t have anything else that I thought I was going to do with my life or that I had envisioned for myself.”
Over and over in the courses she took, members read aloud a mission statement written by Raniere. Sylvie testified she had repeated it “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.”
“There are no ultimate victims,” it declares, “therefore, I will not choose to be a victim.”
Part of the allure of NXIVM—and essential to its disguise—was the extent to which it co-opted the language of start-ups and new age companies. It spoke in a tone at once vague and aggressive, using spirited jargon and invoking “hustle” culture while also extolling awareness and self-knowledge.
Shaw acknowledges that some groups do attract outliers or people we’d think of as lost, but “far more pervasive,” he explains, are those that attract “educated, middle-class people.”
Lalich agrees. “The [cult] population today is the career person,” she says. “Cults want productive people. They want A-type personalities, they want people who can perform for them, who can run their businesses, who can bring in their social network, who have money.”