NXIVM | Growing Up with Keith Raniere | 1

This episode contains descriptions and details that some listeners might find disturbing.

Listener discretion is advised.

It's January 2017 in Vancouver, Canada.

39-year-old Sarah Edmondson sits at a kitchen table and sips from a mug of tea.

Behind her, her best friend Lauren Salzman wipes down the countertop while chatting away.

That's something Sarah really admires about her friend.

She's always multitasking.

It's like she can't be still.

So when Lauren puts down the rag and finally sits at the table, Sarah knows that she must want to talk about something important.

Lauren clears her throat and starts slow.

It's about Nxivm, the self-help business they both work for.

There's something big going on within the company and Lauren wants to bring her in on it.

Something transformative.

Sarah sits up a little straighter when she hears that.

Lauren is one of the most successful people she knows, the type of woman who wakes up before dawn to get in a workout, then stays up late working into the night.

Sarah would kill to know what keeps her going.

But despite the fact that she brought it up, Lauren seems hesitant to go on.

She tells Sarah that she can't just give away her secret.

She has to be absolutely sure that Sarah will never spread this around, no matter what.

Sarah chuckles uneasily.

Lauren's acting like she's about to share the nuclear launch codes.

I mean, surely it can't be that serious.

But it is.

Lauren tells Sarah that she has Nxivm's formula for prosperity.

The secrets they've never shared with any of their customers.

When Sarah pushes for more specifics, Lauren gets cagey and won't go into detail.

All she'll say is that this is life-changing, but there's a cost.

Lauren slides a pen and pad of paper across the table.

If Sarah wants N, she has to provide some kind of collateral.

Sarah just stares at it for a moment.

Then Lauren explains that Nxivm needs something embarrassing on her.

Some piece of information they could use against her, just in case.

She doesn't use the word blackmail, but that's exactly what she's asking for.

Before her own initiation into this group, she handed over a nude photograph, but the collateral could be anything.

A written confession, a piece of evidence tying her to a crime, whatever.

The request seriously unnerves Sarah, but she trusts her friend.

And more than that, she believes in Nxivm.

So, after thinking for a minute, she writes out the worst thing she can think of, something she did back in her 20s, then slides the pad back across the table.

Lauren looks it over and shakes her head.

Not good enough.

It has to be something that would ruin Sarah's life if it became public.

Sarah goes pale, but she wants this.

She needs to be on the inside of this group.

So she thinks hard and eventually comes up with something that satisfies Lauren.

She watches as her friend takes a picture of the confession on her phone, then gives a thin smile.

Now, Lauren can reveal the secret she's been hiding for so long.

Within the ranks of Nxivm, there's a secret sorority called DOS, short for Dominus Obsequius Sororium.

She explains that it's like the Freemasons but for women.

And if Sarah wants to be officially inducted, she has to swear a vow of obedience to Lauren.

She has to become her slave.

Sarah sits back in her chair, scandalized by that word, but Lauren rushes to soothe her concerns.

She tells Sarah not to take the master slave terminology too seriously.

She should think of the relationship as more spiritual, like the bond between a nun and a mother superior.

Sarah's not quite sure she understands, but she has faith in her friend.

If Lauren says this is a good idea, then Sarah trusts her.

Her induction into DOS is set for two months from now.

And Lauren's right.

It will change Sarah's life into a waking nightmare.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

In 2017, a little-known consulting firm called Nxivm became the center of an international scandal.

One day, no one had heard of the group at all.

The next, people were calling it a cult.

But this wasn't your typical religious fringe group.

On the surface, Nxivm built itself as a self-improvement program, a company that made good money by offering courses in human potential and self-actualization.

Whatever that meant.

Sure, it might feel sketchy, but a cult?

As growing details of the group emerged, though, the terms started to feel more appropriate.

There were accusations of a secret society, psychological manipulation, imprisonment and occult sexual abuse.

Then there was the group's founder, Keith Raniere, a self-styled genius whose followers worshiped him and called him vanguard.

It was all textbook cult.

Slowly, the truth was uncovered through media and law enforcement investigations, and a full picture of the group began to form.

But the questions on everyone's lips remained the same.

Who was Keith Raniere?

And how had he hoodwinked so many people in this day and age?

Well, it turns out Keith had been building his empire his entire life.

Nxivm might have just suddenly appeared to the general public, but it had been a long time coming.

This is episode one in our four-part series on Nxivm, Growing Up with Keith Raniere.

It's 1973 in the village of Suffern, New York, about 31 miles north of Manhattan.

13-year-old Keith Raniere sits next to a hospital bed clutching the frail hand of his mother, Vera.

She's just had open-heart surgery, and wrapped in the bright white sheets, she reminds him of an angel.

Vera's eyelids flutter, and Keith stifles a sob.

Ever since his parents divorced three years ago, he and Vera have been on their own.

Lately, he's been dividing his days between school and caring for his mom.

Her health isn't great to start with, and if he doesn't keep a constant watch on her, she turns to illegal drugs to soothe her pain.

It would be a lot for a normal 13-year-old to handle.

Too much.

But Keith knows he's not normal.

He's gifted.

When he was around eight, his parents took him to get an intelligence test, and to his immense pride, he scored higher than average.

Since then, he's believed himself smarter than everyone around him.

The thought of his own specialness keeps him going through the hard times, like right now, as he sits with his mom in the hospital.

Vera twitches in her sleep and squeezes her son's hand.

Keith squeezes back, determined to never let her go.

His mother's heart surgery changes Keith Raniere's life forever.

While still only a teenager, he's forced to take over the caregiving responsibilities in his household.

By day, he attends school, mostly just scraping by.

In the evenings, he waits on Vera, trying his best to keep things together.

His father sees him a couple times a week, but he can feel Keith slipping away as the years wear on.

The kid mostly keeps to himself, too busy taking care of his mom to maintain friendships with kids his own age.

At school, he embodies the slacker with potential trope, a non-conformist who's smart but never really puts in the effort to meet his potential.

As he gets a little older, this sensitive bad boy image wins him some admirers.

Slowly, Keith starts opening up, but only to girls and always with an ulterior motive.

He craves female attention so much that he leads girls on regardless of whether he's actually interested in them.

He treats it like a game, telling them what they want to hear, drawing them in, making them dependent on him for their happiness.

He likes being able to control their emotions so easily.

It's something that makes him feel powerful when other parts of his life do the opposite.

Around 1976, when Keith is 16, his mother's health worsens again.

Despite Keith's best efforts to help her stay clean, Vera's deep in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction.

Her decline makes Keith feel like a failure.

Meanwhile, Vera herself can't help feeling like she's failing her son.

At night, she can overhear him on the phone talking to his girlfriends in soft, hushed tones.

When she can make out the words, she's shocked at what she hears.

Keith gives them all the same rehearsed lines, that they're his one and only, the love of his life.

Vera's unnerved by how easily he lies, the lengths he goes to in order to get what he wants.

She tries to tell him he shouldn't treat people that way, but it doesn't do any good.

Keith loves his mother, but he doesn't think she has anything to teach him.

He's too smart to listen to anyone.

That goes for his school guidance counselors too.

He ignores their advice and loads down his schedule with extra courses despite his mediocre grades.

Somehow, he manages to squeak by and graduates a year early.

There's no grand plan behind his desire to finish high school though.

He just wanted to prove his genius.

When his mom encourages him to go to college, Keith hesitates at first.

He doesn't want to leave her behind.

But this time, she convinces him to listen to her, and he enrolls at a university about two hours away.

At the end of his first year in 1978, he returns home to celebrate his 18th birthday by his mother's side.

Birthdays have always been his favorite occasion.

The one day of the year that's about him, not Vera, and this one is truly special.

His mom goes all out, concealing her failing health to throw a party for just the two of them.

The kind of celebration Keith will remember for the rest of his life.

The next day, he bids his mother goodbye and heads back to school.

Four months later, Vera passes away.

For years, Keith has been mentally bracing himself to lose his mother, but he's still not prepared for the grief.

The only way he can make it through his university classes is to remember her encouragement.

He's smart.

He's destined for greatness.

That propels him through, and in 1981, he graduates.

From there, though, his life starts to waver.

Keith has ambition and a salesman's charisma, but he lacks direction.

In his spare time, he reads about Eastern spirituality, but he's far too materialistic to commit to any major lifestyle changes.

He wants money and power, which is what attracts him to the multi-level marketing company Amway.

After hearing a pitch from an acquaintance, he spends a few years as an Amway salesman, hawking health and beauty products.

While this gig doesn't bring Keith much material success, the business model will inspire him for years to come.

A multi-level marketing company, or MLM like Amway, works by allowing its distributors to earn money in two ways.

The first is by simply moving product and earning commission like a standard salesperson.

But the second, potentially more lucrative option, is to recruit additional distributors to work under them.

So, say Keith recruits five people he knows in the Amway.

These five distributors will peddle products on their own and then send a cut of their profits back to Keith.

The same rule applies to him.

Whenever he sells a product, he gives some of the proceeds to his recruiter and so on.

The more distributors he brings into the business, the more passive income he can potentially make.

Visualized, this structure resembles a pyramid, with the person at the top, the head of the company, making the most money.

The difference between a multi-level marketing business and a pyramid scheme is that a legit MLM allows distributors to make money solely as salespeople.

As long as they can make money through sales alone and aren't forced to recruit additional distributors, it's not illegal.

Sitting at the top of that pyramid quickly becomes Keith's fantasy, raking in money while plebs toil away beneath him.

But he's not in a rush to get there just yet.

For now, he drifts from place to place while keeping his part-time gig with Amway.

He lets his hair get shaggy, grows a dark beard that sets off his blue eyes, and dons a large pair of round wire frame glasses.

Though he's not making much career progress during these years, this period sets the stage for what's to come.

Keith finds that he likes selling himself, and he's pretty good at it.

On top of that, he has a knack for sniffing out vulnerable people, the kind who are looking for something to believe in.

And a lot of the time, it doesn't matter if that's a product, company or a person.

In 1984, when Keith is 24, he meets 15-year-old Gina Hutchinson and decides that he wants to be what she believes in.

He tells Gina she's a genius like him, with a Buddhist soul that's much older than her body.

He claims her public school is brainwashing her, that society disempowers women, and that only he can free her from the patriarchal system.

He doesn't just want to be her lover, he tells the teen.

He wants to be her teacher and spiritual guide.

One night, he makes a commotion, squeezing himself through Gina's bedroom window, and Gina's older sister, Heidi, barges in to find this grown man in her sister's bed.

Obviously freaked out, Heidi calls their mother in from the other room.

Yet as Gina's mother rushes down the hall, Keith doesn't pick up and run.

He thinks he's too old for that.

So he stays and talks it out.

Miraculously, he manages to convince Gina's mom that despite the age gap, he's sincerely interested in a mature, committed relationship with her 15-year-old daughter.

Of course, everything Keith tells her is a lie.

Gina isn't his only quote-unquote girlfriend.

He tells all of his lovers that women are monogamous, but men are hard-wired to be polyamorous.

Even so, Gina's shocked when she eventually finds out that Keith is seeing other women.

She breaks things off with him, thinking that's the end of it.

But Keith Raniere doesn't give up so easily.

He refuses to be rejected, to lose control of this girl he's been grooming.

The sex is one thing, but that's not what this is about.

It's about control.

He tries everything to get the teenager back.

He even thinks that a woman's touch might get the job done.

So he sends his other girlfriends to apologize on his behalf.

They try to bring Gina back into the fold, inviting her to join them in a kind of communal relationship, but Gina won't be swayed.

It's a bitter pill for Keith to swallow, but he has plenty else to keep him occupied.

After Gina rejects him, the remaining young women in Keith's orbit start to congregate at his townhouse in Clifton Park, New York.

Eventually, a couple of them start living with him, and he regales them with stories about how he's a super genius and a reincarnated deity.

That first part seems like a natural progression from Keith's already inflated ego about his own intelligence, but where that second part came from is a little bit of a mystery.

Given that he dabbled in various Eastern philosophies and mystic ideas, it's probably an extension of that, and the thought of being a god reborn on earth suits him just fine.

And he ain't just saying that to impress the women in his life.

He's decided that he wants to become a mentor to the rich and famous.

Gurus have been all the rage around the country lately, and Keith's sure he can mix the multi-level marketing strategies he learned at Amway with therapeutic and spiritual techniques he's read about in books to amass a devoted following.

Hopefully made up of people who are easy to separate from their money.

In 1985, he starts putting his plan into action.

The first step is to establish a reputation as someone worth listening to.

That April, the science magazine Omni publishes a 48-question IQ quiz called the Mega Test.

People who score a high enough grade are eligible to join the Mega Society, a high IQ club similar to Mensa.

For context, the average person is purported to have an IQ of 100.

And generally speaking, a genius level score is 150 or higher.

Keith scores one of the highest grades ever recorded, putting his IQ somewhere above 176.

With this proof of his intelligence, Keith boasts to his girlfriends that he's smarter than Einstein.

He even lands an article in a local paper that labels him one of the biggest geniuses to ever live.

The thing is, it's just a marketing campaign.

A traditional IQ test gives its participants a time limit and it's supervised to prevent cheating.

But the mega test doesn't follow any of those rules.

So there was nothing to stop Keith from getting the women and girls in his orbit to help him look up the answers to anything that stumped him.

Still, even though it's all smoke and mirrors, Keith's media blitz takes him far.

His newspaper profile prints his own ridiculous claims, like how he understood quantum mechanics at age four and only sleeps two hours a night.

There's no fact checking done to prove any of this.

Keith's just taken at his word.

And on this basis, he manages to enter the 1989 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as the man with the highest IQ, along with two others who took the mega test.

It's everything Keith could have hoped for.

At the age of 29, he decides he's ready to make his next move.

Now, all he needs is money.

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It's 1991 at the Holiday Inn in Rochester, New York.

31-year-old Keith Raniere enters the bland beige ballroom to a smattering of applause.

A bluish haze of cigarette smoke fills the air.

Taking in the assembled crowd, Keith gives them a practiced warm smile.

His audience are mostly straight-laced, typical middle-class drivers, eager to climb to the next rung on the financial ladder.

By contrast, Keith looks a bit like a late-stage hippie stuffed in a suit.

So some of them probably have trouble taking him seriously.

But his flyers advertised him as one of the smartest men in the world, and they want to see if he lives up to that very specific hype.

Keith knows they're expecting a lot, but that doesn't shake his confidence.

He approaches a podium on the stage, smiles, and polishes his glasses on his shirt.

He savors the moment, takes his time setting the hook.

Then he launches into a spiel.

It's a fairly straightforward marketing pitch.

Keith announces that he wants to let his audience in on the ground floor of his new business, Consumers Byline.

Conceptually, it's similar to Costco or Sam's Club.

Members pay a yearly fee to join the organization and in return, they get to buy merchandise at wholesale prices.

The more members they recruit, the lower those prices can be because cumulative buying power allows them to purchase goods in bulk.

Unlike Costco, Consumers Byline won't have any brick and mortar stores.

Instead, customers will receive their purchases via mail.

As Keith explains, this will save people even more money.

It's a sound business proposition, but what really sells the idea is Keith himself.

He talks up his own credentials, repeating the claim that he's the smartest man in the world.

He says he's a judo champion who plays seven musical instruments, which I guess makes him exactly the kind of person who'd be great at running a business.

I don't know.

Sitting in the audience, taking in all of this bluster, is 32-year-old Tony Natale.

Her husband had to talk her into coming today, but now she's intrigued.

Keith's business model makes sense to her.

Still, she can't help but wonder what the smartest man in the world is doing here, in a holiday inn.

When Keith opens the floor up to questions, she raises her hand and asks him, why this?

Why a discount retail business?

Shouldn't he be out carrying cancer or something?

Keith smirks, oh, he anticipated a question like this.

Without missing a beat, he launches into a prepared response.

Don't worry, he tells Tony, he'll definitely be changing the world soon enough.

Consumer's byline is just the first step on that journey.

When the presentation is over, a number of attendees sign up for monthly memberships.

But some of them get more than that.

As Keith shakes Tony's hand on her way out, she's struck by his deep blue eyes.

He looks at her like she's the only person in the world.

She knows at that moment, she believes in Keith Raniere.

Four months later, Tony and her husband are spreading the good word about consumer's byline like wildfire.

They tap into the pocketbooks of all their friends, swearing up and down that being members will save them all money in the long run.

They do so well that they win a prize for being the top sellers in their area.

It comes with a $16,000 bonus.

Tony and her husband decide to travel to Clifton Park to accept the award in person and see the company's headquarters for themselves.

When they arrive, the tiny office is frenetic with a few dozen employees buzzing back and forth between computer terminals.

This is at the Internet's inception, before most companies are taking advantage of the World Wide Web, so all the hubbub goes a long way toward impressing Tony.

But it's Keith who really wows her.

He rushes up to them like a whirlwind, dressed in a button-up shirt and gray sweatpants.

It's a ridiculous outfit, but in Tony's eyes, it just amplifies his rebellious, genius mystique.

And Tony, to put it lightly, she is in to it.

The whole thing.

She likes that Keith has more women employees than men.

She likes that he seems to work around the clock rather than sleeping.

And she likes it when he catches her arm before he ducks out to take a smoke break.

He holds her gaze like he did the first time they shook hands and asks if she's interested in quitting smoking.

She tells him she is and he smiles.

He can help with that if they can talk somewhere in private.

Tony shrugs, glances at her disinterested husband and accepts the invitation.

The next thing she knows, she's sitting in Keith's office.

It's a small room cluttered by stacks of paper and a big computer with a fan that roars like an airplane.

Keith takes her hand, tracing the lines of her palm.

Apropos of nothing, he tells Tony she has beautiful eyes and she gets a bit flustered.

Then he asks her to lay back.

So why not?

She reclines in her seat and closes her eyes.

From there, Keith starts asking her questions, delicately pressing down on her hand as they talk.

He says he's stimulating pressure points, connecting physical touch with her desire to quit smoking.

Tony's skeptical that this will help, but she does what he says all the same.

He asks her what makes her nervous, how she relaxes, and what kind of music she likes.

Slowly, his soft voice lulls her into a kind of trance.

For about 10 minutes, she lays back while Keith whispers to her.

Then finally, he calls her name and breaks the spell.

Tony shakes her head, rubs her eyes, and sits up.

When Keith leads her outside, Tony's surprised to see the sun so low in the sky.

It turns out she was in Keith's office for almost three hours.

Yet she barely remembers anything he said.

When her husband asks if she wants a cigarette, she presses down on her palm as if it's a reflex.

Relief floods through her.

No thanks, she tells him.

Thanks to Keith Raniere, she smoked her last cigarette.

That evening, Keith watches Tony Natale leave with a smile.

One of his inner circle, a woman named Pamela K.

Fritz asks Keith if Tony is the one.

Is she family?

Keith nods.

He has her now.

Every day after that, Keith takes time out of his schedule to call Tony on the phone.

He tells her that despite all the smart and capable people working for him, only she really gets him.

During their conversations, he peppers her with questions about her childhood and previous marriages.

He's a great listener, and Tony finds it both liberating and scary to open up to him.

She eventually tells him that as a child, she was sexually abused by one of her uncles.

Keith doesn't shy away from talking about those traumatic memories.

Instead, he probes deeper, asking for more and more details.

He claims he wants to heal her.

Of course, even Tony picks up on the fact that Keith's got other motives.

That becomes clear when he starts asking about her sex life, and when he says he thinks her husband is cheating with their nanny.

Tony doesn't really believe it, but she wants to.

Because then there wouldn't be anything so wrong with her spending hours every night talking to Keith Raniere.

Around six months after their first meeting in January of 1992, Keith invites Tony back up to Clifton.

She and her husband are having some financial problems relating to their own business, and Keith says he can help find a solution.

But before they talk shop, he takes her to see his place.

Tony's excited for the chance to see how the smartest man in the world lives.

She's been imagining a tech lover's paradise, a house full of computerized gadgets and stacks of books.

That is not what she finds.

It turns out Keith lives in a bland townhouse with a couple of his female employees.

To make matters worse, the house is a dump.

It's full of dirty cat litter and crusty dishes.

Tony's disappointed, but chalks it up to Keith's enterprising attitude.

She tells herself that he's too busy to worry about keeping his home clean and that he lives with these women to save money for the business.

They're all just friends, right?

That naivete also leads her to entertain Keith's plan for her finances.

He offers her a salaried position selling a new line of cosmetics.

It'll be a separate company from consumers' buy line, but she'll be able to tap into their existing customer base.

Tony's interested.

It sounds like a good opportunity, but she might have to make some sacrifices to make it work.

For starters, she'd probably have to move to Clifton, leaving her husband and son behind.

That's a big ask.

So, she doesn't say yes right away.

She wants to think about it.

Keith is determined to have Tony, though.

So late that night, he comes to her hotel room.

He wants to talk some more about her childhood sexual abuse.

He interrogates her endlessly, making her tell him the story three, four, five times.

By that point, Tony's begging Keith to let her rest, but he says no.

Sleep is a construct, he tells her.

Then he makes her go into more detail about her family secrets.

Finally, as the morning sun starts seeping through the hotel room blinds, he makes his move.

Tony is sleep deprived and emotionally rung out.

She's at her lowest.

That's when Keith tells her he has the answers.

He can fix her problems, all of them, but she has to be near him.

She has to move to Clifton no matter what her husband says.

Tony nods quietly.

Whatever he wants.

Keith's manipulation of Tony is far from an isolated event.

He wins over the rest of his inner circle, at that time around half a dozen other women, using similar tactics.

He gets them to open up about their insecurities, then uses those to pressure them into unequal relationships.

On top of that, he seems to be practicing some kind of hypnosis on his subjects, which might involve depriving them of sleep under the guise of psychological healing.

He feeds them his pseudo-intellectual ideas, promising that together they can change the world.

Oh, and he also uses them for sex.

These women form Keith Raniere's base of operations.

They coordinate consumers by line and manage the company's many freelance salespeople.

Meanwhile, Keith takes care of the profit.

His business becomes the fastest growing MLM in the country, so he's making money hand over fist.

Over time, he refines his sales techniques to join new devotees, leaning on the same strategies he deployed on Tony in the hotel room.

After his marketing spiel in meeting rooms and conference halls, he launches directly into a Q&A session.

He goes on for hours to wean out anyone who isn't 100% committed.

Eventually, almost everyone slips out, leaving only the most desperate marks behind.

Keith seizes on these lone remaining attendees, inviting them to continue their conversation in private.

It doesn't work every time, but when it does, he gets a very committed recruit out of it.

And if they happen to be a vulnerable woman, all the better.

Even so, not everyone who buys into Keith's company is willing to take a leap of faith for him.

And soon enough, some of them realize that consumer's byline isn't following through on Keith's grand promises.

And that puts his budding empire in jeopardy.

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It's May 21st, 1992, at the Consumers Byline Offices in Clifton, New York.

The employees pass around a newspaper in whisper and hushed tones.

The Albany Times Union has just published an article about Consumers Byline, calling it a potential pyramid scheme.

It turns out that Keith Raniere's company is being sued by the Attorney General in Arkansas for using deceptive trade practices.

And New York and Maine are in the midst of their own investigations into the business.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Though almost none of Keith's employees know about it, he's already settled multiple lawsuits bringing similar charges against his business.

Not to mention, he's being sued for sexual harassment by a woman in Massachusetts.

So the atmosphere is tense when Keith struts out of his office that morning and gathers his employees for a chat.

He can see in their eyes that they're looking for assurances.

His mind reels as he searches for an explanation.

In the end, he settles on a tried and true tactic.

Deflect.

According to Keith, his critics are too stupid to understand what he's trying to do.

And the government is out to get him.

Why?

Because consumer's byline is too good of a deal.

Big retailers are hitting back through corrupt politicians because Keith's company's discounts threaten their bottom lines.

As he hits a stride, he goes further.

The government is spying on him.

They're reading his mail.

It's a nightmare that no one could possibly understand.

No one but him.

His employees buy the story.

They all still believe Keith is a genius.

If they didn't, he never would have hired them in the first place.

He paces around the cramped office and repeats a favorite quote from author Jonathan Swift.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

In other words, haters are just proof you're doing something right.

And Keith Raniere is going to amass a lot of haters.

The exact legal argument against consumers byline is a little complicated.

Like other multi-level marketing companies, the success of the business depends on recruiting more and more members.

Salespeople are incentivized to bring people in and collect commission on their memberships.

But that's not inherently illegal or technically considered a pyramid scheme, as long as members get their promised discounts.

Remember, that's the whole point of consumers byline.

Members get wholesale prices on merchandise like they would at Costco.

The problem is that customers aren't getting the price cuts they were promised.

And it turns out the salespeople aren't receiving the commission checks on time either.

Complaints about these issues eventually prompt investigations into the company in 22 states.

This doesn't need to be a deathblow to Keith's company, though.

He could cooperate, pay some fines and change his business practices to comply with the law.

Consumers byline is likely grossing millions at this stage, so it could take the hit and remain profitable.

The problem is that confronting all those lawsuits would mean admitting to a mistake.

Keith would have to go on record that he's engaged in shady business practices.

And that's something he'll never do.

He's incapable of admitting fault.

So he digs in for a fight.

Unfortunately for Tony Natale, this is around the time she chooses to leave her husband.

She moves into a townhouse across the street from Keith, and he starts barging in at all hours of the night.

Their relationship becomes romantic, yet Keith insists on keeping it a secret.

Otherwise, he claims, people will assume she slept her way to the top.

Doesn't matter that she does a good job running the cosmetics line.

Her achievements will be undermined by their romance.

It breaks Tony's heart, but she agrees to stay quiet for the time being.

Then, things start going downhill.

Not only does Keith's insatiable sexual appetite get old real fast, he starts getting more controlling.

He demands that Tony only wear loose-fitting clothing around the office.

He becomes unpredictable, scheduling meetings and then showing up two hours late.

He enters her house to sleep while she's not there, so he can maintain the façade of only needing two hours of rest a night.

When he's awake, all he wants to talk to her about her is paranoid delusions, and to rave about the lawsuits.

It's a nightmare that has Tony questioning why she ever left her family behind.

In 1993, she tells Keith she needs a change.

He turns on her immediately and calls her uneducated.

She's got no prospects without this, he says.

She'll have nothing if she tries to leave.

She tries to negotiate with him, to at least get their relationship out in the open, but he won't hear of it.

The confrontation leaves Keith rattled, though.

He can tell he's losing control of Tony, and in the aftermath, he starts lashing out.

For months, Tony's been planning to go to Dallas and lead a training course there for her employees at the Cosmetics Company.

But at the last second, Keith calls to tell her that if she attends the conference, things are over between them.

There's no explanation, just a line in the sand.

Either Tony obeys him or else.

In response, she yanks the phone cord out of the wall.

She's done with Keith Raniere.

Keith can't believe it.

He's furious, maybe more angry than he's been in his entire life.

He hates people slipping out from under his thumb.

It happened once before with 15-year-old Gina Hutchinson.

But it's even worse this time.

He thinks of Tony as his primary girlfriend, the woman he hopes will eventually help him rule his empire.

If only she weren't so stubbornly independent.

If this is going to work, he needs her totally under his control.

He refuses to give up.

So he waits for a few days for Tony to fly back from Dallas and deploys a member of his inner circle, Pam K.

Fritz, to do his bidding.

Over the last couple of months, Pam and Tony have become close friends, so it doesn't seem suspicious to Tony that she wants to spend time with her.

But Keith has given Pam a mission, telling her exactly what to say to win Tony back.

Over the next few weeks, Pam plays on Tony's weak points.

Whenever the time feels right, she catches her off guard and steers the conversation towards Keith.

She even breaks into Tony's house in the middle of the night to plead with her to take him back.

None of it works.

Tony's adamant about leaving Keith.

In the end, she takes time off work and visits a yoga retreat to pull herself together.

There, miles away from Keith and Consumers Byline, she sits under a tree and wonders what her next step should be.

Where her life should go from here.

All of a sudden, as if by magic, a short bald man in red robes approaches her.

With a wide smile, he hands Tony a rose and a note, then walks away without a word.

She looks at the note.

It's from Keith.

This right here is stalking.

But that's not what it feels like to Tony.

To her, it feels like a sign from the universe.

So she calls Keith.

This time, he says all the right things to her.

He promises to make their relationship public, to give her whatever she wants.

Even as his business is collapsing around his ears, he says he'll buy her a house and raise a family with her.

It's everything Tony's been wanting.

She decides she still believes in Keith Raniere after all, and agrees to take him back.

It's one of the biggest mistakes of her life.

From Airship, this is episode one in our series on Keith Raniere and Nxivm.

On the next episode, Nxivm picks up where consumer's byline left off, and Keith's cult of personality solidifies.

We use many different sources while preparing this episode.

One we particularly recommend is the program, Inside the Mind of Keith Raniere and the Rise and Fall of Nxivm, by Tony Natale and Chet Harden.

This episode contains reenactments and dramatized details.

And while in most cases, we can't know exactly what was said, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Christian Faragha.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Terrell Wells, managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham.

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