The Vow: Season 2, Episode 4 “The Breach”

Last episode we met Marc Elliot and Isabella who had treatment for their Tourette’s using ESP. Nancy, very tentatively, began to address her relationship with Keith.

We open with a video clip of Nancy, from an ESP instructional video: “What is the nature of an ethical breach and why does it occur?” What are its effects? Nancy isn’t doing that emphasizing every word thing. Instead she has a cheerful affect—almost giddy—-that seems kind of inappropriate for the subject matter.

In present day, Nancy tells us Keith thought the “ultimate crime” was a what he called an ethical breach. It’s going against your own morality by choosing to do the easier option if it “gives you a benefit” rather than doing the harder thing that allows you to be a better person.

Ironic as fuck. The filmmakers really set up Nancy with that one. Because it’s going to become more apparent through the following episodes that Nancy chose the easier more self-interested option when it came to dealing with Keith.

We cut to a video clip of Nancy reading the module for ethical breaches. She says repairing a breach is vital for our humanity and ability to love. We hear Keith say it’s how we create conscience and if you choose to not honor your ethics then you will end up destroying your own morality. Not that he has any idea. The closest Keith has come to experiencing a conscience or morals is by reading about it in a book or something.

Nancy tells us at one point she had started wondering if there was any person who had been involved with Keith who had not been accused of committing an ethical breach? She came to realize nobody was ever able to heal an ethical breach with Keith. Nancy tells us he used the charge to torture people. Intro.

When we come back Sarah is looking at the latest news regarding the trial. We hear audio of a phone call from 2017 between her and Lauren: Lauren is lying; she is denying Keith’s involvement in DOS and that the group has any bad intent. Sarah sounds a bit confused and unsure. She tells Lauren that she has some feelings she needs to work through. If she chooses to believe Lauren it’s because of the trust she has for her and what kind of person Sarah knows her to be.

Sarah tells us she still can’t get over the fact that Lauren was knowingly lying about putting Keith’s initials on women’s bodies. She betrayed friends she could have had for life.

When we come back we look at a sketch of Lauren in court as we hear the beginning of her testimony. The voice actress playing Lauren is really good. She sounds so much like her.

Lauren tells the court she has known Keith for about 20 years. She got involved with Nxivm because of her mom. After she graduated from college, Nancy had told her if she took six months of ESP courses, she’d support Lauren in whatever she wanted to do in her life, after. Lauren decided to work for Nxivm.

We cut to Nancy who tells us she and Lauren had a great bond. Keith called Lauren “Chippy” for “chip off the block,” because she and Nancy were so alike and so connected. Cue the theme music from Jaws when the shark is approaching. A close knit family?! That’s just the thing Keith likes to eat for breakfast.

We see lots of clips of Lauren receiving praise and gratitude from ESPians she has worked with and clips of her joking around. In voice over Nancy says that Lauren was “the happiest I’d ever seen her, but I had a concern.” Was Lauren so thrilled with her job at Nxivm or was something else going on?

Something else was going on. Keith and Lauren were in a relationship. Keith’s version of one anyway. We hear Lauren tell the court her sexual relationship with Keith was mostly between 2001 to 2008. Of course, he told her to keep it a secret, including from her mother.

We then cut to a video clip where Keith is in Lauren’s car while she drives. Keith chose to not have a license as a way to stay off the grid a bit. So, everybody had to drive him wherever he wanted to go.

Keith is talking to Lauren about the age of consent. One of his favorites. He says there is a “healthy percentage of the population that is sexually active at 16.” Yes, Keith. With other 16 year olds. Not with squat hairy middle-aged men. Lauren tells him she never told her mom about sleeping at her boyfriend’s house even when she was in college. Keith smirks and says, “Your mom doesn’t mind you sleeping with me.” Lauren laughs uneasily and replies,“I don’t know that to be true.”

Nancy tells us that for five years she didn’t know about Lauren and Keith’s relationship. Lauren only told her mom after things started going badly with him. Nancy, sounding uncertain, says, while she felt Keith had betrayed her, she wasn’t sure if she was wrong to feel that way. He was supposed to be this ethical person and all. And Lauren wasn’t a child, “but she was. The fact that he kept it from me… That’s terrible… Because he knew—he had to know that wasn’t okay,” she says, still sounding unsure.

It’s so interesting to hear Nancy talk about what she knew then, what she knows now and still can’t face. She knew things were off with Lauren years ago. She didn’t say she was curious why Lauren seemed so exuberantly happy. She said she had a concern. But did she address it? Ask Lauren what was going on? They were very close. If she didn’t address it, why not? She knows it was wildly inappropriate that Keith was sleeping with her daughter and keeping it a secret. But even now with all that’s happened, she’s confused. Genuinely. She’s not faking that. I’ll never understand how the brain enables this state of semi-consciousness. You know, but somehow you don’t.

Nancy says she realizes now Keith started preying on Lauren right away. Keith kept pressuring Nancy to push Lauren to become more independent. He said it was really bad she was still living at home, for example. Soon after, Lauren got her own apartment. Once she moved out, Lauren told her mom, Keith started hitting on her.

Lauren tells the court she had discussed having children with Keith and he had said he was open to it. When she was almost 30, Lauren told Keith she wanted to start. Keith told her she wasn’t ready to, because 1) she didn’t have good work “output” 2) she hadn’t lost any weight and 3) her “state was very low.” Lauren says she began working hard to improve herself.

We cut to a video clip of Keith asking Lauren how much she weighs. 111 and a 1/2 pounds, she tells him, but she’s trying to lose more. He’s smiling gleefully. Clearly he very much enjoyed power tripping women on this particular issue. He is wearing a T-shirt that says “Ethics” on the front (no, really!) and you can see the tire of fat around his stomach. I just wanted to punch him in the face so hard watching this.

In 2011, Keith told Lauren it was a good time to start having children. But then, during a volleyball game at the Sports Barn, Keith accused her of committing an ethical breach against him. She had playfully jumped on a male friend when they were joking around. Keith told her she had relayed the message she was “open to having sex” and it was a very serious show of disrespect.

Lauren spent the weekend writing a seven page plan to mend her breach. It’s filled with such self-flagellating bullshit it makes me want to cry. She really believed she had done something wrong.

We see a video clip of Lauren teaching a class on the topic of ethical breaches. She tells the class that it’s important to mend them, but an ethical person wouldn’t demand the amends be unreasonable or irrational either. Good ethics goes both ways.

Lauren’s apology plan was not enough for Keith. He said Lauren’s behavior was part of a pattern of disrespecting their relationship by how she related to men. Even though, as he required, she was monogamous and he wasn’t. Nonetheless, it was another reason Keith felt she wasn’t ready to have children.

We cut to Nancy who says the government thinks it’s a sex case, but that’s only because that’s what everyone will buy. She thinks it’s really an abuse of power case. Keith used his romantic relationships with women to control them. I think it’s both. Keith is a sexual compulsive and a predator, too.

We cut to Vero who we met in episode one. She tells us she was in love with an idea of who she thought Keith was. It was Nancy and Lauren who told her Keith wanted to spend time with her and it was a special privilege. She compares her feelings for him as like having an infatuation with her teacher. Eventually their relationship became intimate. And, of course, Keith asked her to keep it secret.

We cut back to Lauren. She tells the court two years after she had committed her breach, she shared a kiss with another man. She told Keith, hoping he would end their relationship so she could move on. Take a wild guess what he did.

You didn’t think he’d get all mad and break it off with her for good, did you? No no no. Keith never misses an opportunity to be an evil fuck. He told her if she stayed with him he’d “reinvest” in their relationship and they could have children soon. When Lauren tried to pin down a timeframe—-in one year? Five years?—Keith was like, yeah, somewhere around then. But *heavy sad sigh* he was thinking about leaving the Nxivm community altogether. He was just so upset about what Lauren had done.

Lauren didn’t understand why he would do that. It didn’t make any sense. But she decided to stay with him. She wanted to believe the time she had spent being in this relationship was not a waste. She wanted to prove to him she was a good person so then she could believe it about herself.

We cut to Nancy who tells us many of the women Keith was sleeping with (and there was a shit ton) believed they were going to have a baby with him. These women had no concept of an adult normal life, Nancy tells us. Meaning one outside of Keith’s twisted universe. There’s a quick cut to Pam Cafritz, for example. Some of these women had gone through menopause and they still believed they’d get that baby. “It was… crazy,” Nancy says. Then he moved on to the next generation of women promising them the same thing.

We cut to Vero who tells us one day Keith asked her if she wanted to have a baby with him. After thinking about it, she said yes. Later, she found out Keith had promised to have babies with other women, including friends of hers. “That is so cruel,” Vero says to us. “You don’t do that. You don’t play with somebody’s motherhood.”

Keith addressed Vero at a group training session, she tells us, telling her she had problems with defiance and entitlement. We see a clip of Vero crying and apologizing profusely to Nancy during a group training for the “damage” she has done. She promises she will change. Vero tells us she thinks a lot of the ESP training was really about getting you to ignore your intuition. Vero says she had stopped listening to her gut.

One night Vero was hanging out with Keith and she smelled the scent of a woman (to put it delicately) on his fingers. I heard in a podcast or interview, Keith frequently had B.O, because he didn’t shower that much. I can’t help but think he got secret pleasure about having sex with various women without showering in between. A deliberate act of disrespect. His lack of showering was explained by others, if I’m recalling correctly, as his lack of interest in material concerns. Something like that. His B.O was a result of being evolved.

Anyway, Keith told her he was seeing other women. Did it bother her? Vero was hurt, but she tried hard to not react, because ESPians are taught “reactions” are a big no-no. It’s a sign you have an “attachment” and that’s not evolved.

We hear Keith droning on with his usual bullshit. I’m seeing red watching this, because he is so fucking self-important and so blind to his own stupidity. He literally talks nonsense. And when he’s not talking nonsense, he’s just lying.

After prattling on about there being no real truth and no real lies, and freedom is not caring either way (or whatever the fuck) he says, “Do you understand?” He always asks his followers that, because he’s so deep, y’all. He’s gotta make sure they can keep up.

We cut to Nancy who tells us one time she saw Keith do something very inappropriate with a woman though she doesn’t tell us what it was. She confronted Keith about it and he lost his shit. He told her she had no way to understand the meanings behind the things he did and if she ever questioned anything he did ever again, Nancy would never see him again.

Imitating Keith, Nancy raises her voice very loudly. She did that in another episode too, when giving an explanation about emotional reactions or something. To the point where she was actually shouting. It makes me uncomfortable to watch her. It’s like, calm down, lady. You can demonstrate anger without being quite so intense.

Nancy didn’t tell us what she saw Keith do, I suspect, because she knows she’d look just as bad for not doing anything about it. After Keith yelled at her she was “horrified” and she didn’t know what to do. Somehow she made herself wrong, she says. Denial. That’s what Nancy was doing, right? It wasn’t just indoctrination, it was denial of who she knew Keith really was. Throw in some manipulation and intimidation there too, though. All the ‘tions.

Vero tells us she was in love with Keith and it was hard to be objective. Nancy tells us everyone trusted that Keith was principled and well-intended. They did things for him because they believed they were being ethical.

Still, Nancy resented the damage control she was constantly having to do in regards to Keith’s endless streams of women. But she weighed it against all the people having “great experiences” in ESP. She saw Keith as just being in his own little world, separate from the work they were doing. She recognizes she gave Keith credibility he was able to use against people.

Nancy gets very emotional saying she will have to live with that for the rest of her life. Watching her, I think, you have a way to go, Nancy. This isn’t it. I believe she is genuinely baffled about her involvement in Nxivm being seen as criminal. But, at the same time, and at this point in the doc, she is terrified to take a closer look at the choices she made and the things she has done.

She’s just a mystery. So many, if not all, EXSPians had (have?) a lot of anger towards her. She could be helpful, but she was also abusive. She went way beyond the call of duty, Mark Vicente said in an interview, in the interest of protecting the company, not just Keith.

Lauren tells the court Keith was the one who invited her to join DOS as a first line member. I believe this was in late 2016. DOS had been around for a couple of years at this point. She gave her collateral to a friend in DOS and was told it was a lifetime vow. Ten days later, Keith told her he was having a baby with a woman named Mariana. Lauren says she had a complete meltdown. Keith had known about the pregnancy for months, but had withheld that information from Lauren until she took the vow. That way she couldn’t leave him.

We then hear an audio recording of a DOS meeting with some first line members regarding the brand. We hear Nicki’s voice saying she thinks it looks cool. An unidentified woman expresses worry about the security of DOS since people will be seeing the brand. “Understand it’s going to happen,” Keith says in a snotty voice. Husbands, sisters, gynecologists etc. will see it. Keith envisions a room of 10,000 women who have the brand. Keith thinks they could have the power to change the presidential vote in the US in four years or something. It’s amusing to hear his delusions knowing what is coming down the pike for him.

We hear audio of Keith and Allison talking about the branding ceremony while on a walk. Well, Keith is talking. Allison is just listening. He wants the women naked and held down like a sacrifice. He wants submission. They should say, “Please brand me, it would be an honor.” That way it won’t look like coercion.

August 2017, Nxivm Emergency Meeting.

Keith is talking about DOS since everyone knows about it now, because of the Frank Report. He compares the branded women to warriors. It is “ignoble” the secrets of the sorority have been made public and the sisters have been betrayed. The sisters are noble; the ones who broke their vows are not. “Shame on them,” Keith says. Every time he says sisters, it makes my skin crawl. I think it’s because I know how much he hates women and how full of shit he is with this spin.

We cut to loyalist Nicki Clyne who says in a mocking tone, “You can say this was a cult where women were branded! And that sounds horrible and I’d never wanna be a part of that. Or,” she continues in a more respectful tone, “you could say there was a group of women, who, out of an act of solidarity, chose to get a brand.” She shrugs.

We cut to loyalist Michele who says people love to get hung up on the brand stuff. She’s never spoken publicly about whether she has a brand or not. It’s nobody’s business what she chose to put on her body.

First off, Michele, we know you have a brand, girl. And second, you and Nicki are completely missing the point. What you two choose to do is all yours. But when other women feel coerced to do shit they don’t want to, because there is “collateral” hanging over their heads and/or they are being emotionally manipulated by people they trust, it’s not a choice so much, is it?

Back to Nicki who says in a (again) mocking tone, “If a man was like, I was part of this group and I got a brand and now my life is ruined! People would be like, who cares?” Sorry, no. And even if that was true, it doesn’t mean coerced submission to being branded is suddenly okay when it’s done to a man instead of a woman. This is not an issue of some kind of sexism, as Marc Agnifilo was trying to sell it. Nor was this an example of the Keith Raniere misogynistic take of, oh, women are just a bunch of princesses with no character, crying victim about the choices they made. This was about coercion and lack of free agency. That misogynistic take would never fly in a New York court, anyway, imo.

Back to the trial. Lauren testifies that once she had joined DOS, Allison had expressed to her how great it was they had all these sister wives. Lauren was incredulous. Sister wives?? She asked Keith if he was having sex with all of Allison’s slaves. He denied it. When Lauren asked Allison about it, she said he was having sex with some, but she was working on getting the others (such as India Oxenberg) to be as well.

I read later in Sarah Berman’s “Don’t Call It a Cult,” that it was something like this:

Allison: Welcome to DOS! Isn’t it cool we have all these sister wives?

Lauren: Sister wives?? Bitch, I’ve been a sister wife for going on 20 years.

It had sucked enough sharing Keith with his endless hordes of women through the years. Lauren was angry to realize being in DOS was yet another example of Keith devaluing their relationship. It was, symbolically, a demotion.

Trapped as she was (Lauren had given a shit ton of collateral), she compartmentalized her feelings and convinced herself being in DOS was all good. “[I] 100% went full force forward that DOS… was a growth program and it was amazing.”*

*Sarah Berman “Don’t Call It A Cult” taken from court transcripts.

Lauren shares with the court about the DOS sorority house. After posing for a naked photo, the women would send it to Keith first, and, after he sent his approval the photo was good enough, the meeting would begin.

Discussions centered around enrollment and recruitment for DOS as well as buying equipment for the BDSM dungeon Keith was setting up in the basement. No surprise at this point, honestly. Keith had told them only the slaves most committed to “growth” would be participating in the BDSM stuff. Let’s hear it for stagnation then, because nobody wants to do that shit with you, Keith.

Vero, if you recall from another episode, had joined DOS. She reached her limit when her master threatened her with releasing her collateral. She talked to Keith about it —I’m not sure when she became aware that Keith was the leader of DOS—but he would never give assurance it wouldn’t happen. Vero was terrified of that, but staying in DOS and being forced to comply for the rest of her life was not something she was willing to do any longer. At times she felt suicidal about continuing on. She decided she had no choice but to risk the release of her collateral. She sent Keith a video saying she was out and she hoped he would understand. She left before the branding, but every day she thinks about the collateral she gave and whether it could be released one day.

Lauren testifies in June of 2017, after DOS became known to the public, activities halted. But, after New Year’s, Keith wanted things to get going again. How about a recommitment ceremony in Mexico? A DOS member told Lauren, in so many words, they were planning group sex, because they wanted to do something special for Keith. Lauren was upset and asked him, “Is this what you want from me?” He told her she had “control issues” and it was getting in the way of her reaching her full potential. Keith was adamant complete submission to everything and anything he demanded was the only way for her to get past them. Lauren says she decided to just believe Keith and go.

After they arrived to their villa in Mexico, Keith wasn’t feeling well so he took a nap. Lauren was in the kitchen when a fellow DOS member ran in and said the police were at the door and they were here for Keith. Lauren immediately went into “Protect Keith” mode. She ran into the bedroom and locked the door. Keith ran into the closet to hide. The police kicked the door of the bedroom in and terrified, Lauren called out Keith’s name. For months after Keith’s arrest, Lauren felt like she had failed to protect him.

The prosecutor asks Lauren if she was surprised Keith ran and hid in the closet like a little bitch. She admits she very much had been. The ESP curriculum and Keith had always taught they should choose love over everything. Even at the possibility of losing their lives. Lauren truly believed Keith meant what he preached. “It never occurred to me that I would choose Keith and Keith would choose Keith,” Lauren says.

Sarah, who has been following the trial, FaceTimes with Mark Vicente. Her anger towards Lauren evaporated once she learned of the horrible manipulations Keith had put her through all these years. Sarah is glad Lauren is free from Keith and can have a life now. She expresses hope Lauren can still have a baby if she wants. Crying, Sarah says to Mark, “I feel so bad for her. It was so terrible.” She is sure she and Lauren will talk when the time is right.

We cut to Nancy’s house and she is with her daughter Michelle who we met in the last episode. “My sister, she was destroyed by this. It’s fucking terrible,” she says. She doesn’t understand why they weren’t able to see how bad he really was? But it was always, “He must know better. He must know what he’s doing. He’s Keith!”

Michelle tells her mother she kept it to herself but when she was 18, Keith tried to get her to sleep with him. Under the guise of a special relationship of some kind. She didn’t really get it or understand fully what he was asking of her, but at some point, he accused her of an ethical breach. Nancy hounded her for the next 20 years to mend things with Keith, Michelle reminds her mom, but she wasn’t able to. Looking back, Michelle realizes how creepy it was given their age difference, that he was already sleeping with her sister and she had a boyfriend. “He’s 40 something years old and I’m 18. What the fuck was going on?”

“He never liked Michelle,” Nancy tells us, “But I didn’t realize it was because she wouldn’t have sex with him… So. I guess I should have,” she says in a tone of voice that is both bitter and a bit sarcastic. Like, how the fuck was I supposed to know he was preying on my youngest daughter?

Nancy, who is in a sad contemplative mood, tells the filmmakers she is realizing it was all like an experiment. “Keith enjoyed hurting us. He just wanted to see how far he could push us. Like, how much could he get away with.” He never intended to have a baby with Lauren. Crying, she says, “He stole her child bearing years. He practically broke her.” Nancy realizes he really fucked up her family badly and she let it happen. She couldn’t see it.

Nancy has so much to sort through. Maybe I’m a sucker. Cult expert Rick Ross thinks Nancy is a sociopath. In another episode, I’ll get into the victim impact statements at her sentencing. But for now, I have empathy for her. I really do. I know she did a lot of shitty things. A lot. But, she was skillfully manipulated, too.

We cut to New York Post journalist Emily Saul who says even though Lauren was clearly an intelligent woman, she stayed with Keith for a very long time. She thinks Lauren summed up her situation quite well at the end of her testimony. She was in love with Keith and it became too hard to face the truth about him. She could not confront he was not the ethical person she had thought he was. Emily says we have no way of knowing what we’d do if we found ourselves in a similar situation.

We cut to the voice of a prosecutor. Lauren is asked if she remembers if Keith approached her “about a plan for a young woman in Mexico?” Lauren says Keith told her there were “serious problems” with her. Stealing, breaking commitments. Just bullshit. Keith told Lauren she needed to issue an ultimatum. The girl needed to go into a room with no distractions and come up with a plan to fix her breach. It was that or get sent back to Mexico. Lauren tells the court “of all the crimes I committed, I think this is the worst thing that I did.”

We hear Moira Penza say the government calls its next witness, Daniela.

The outro song is called “Unraveling” written and sung by Bonnie Piesse. It’s melancholy and so fitting.

Next episode: “The Room”