Plenty of success regimens endorse and deploy cultlike tactics. Popular self-help books like The Secret and the more respectable Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience associate happiness with achieving an altered state of consciousness. The Church of Scientology, Landmark Education and the Kabbalah Centre merely deliver customers to that state by subjecting them to marathon classes in overheated rooms with limited access to food, water and the outside world. As a rule, disciples are expected to shell out large sums of money. NXIVM charges about $10,000 for a full 16-day regimen.
NXIVM is much like its forebears in that it has attracted zealous devotees and equally vehement (and paranoid) communities of apostates. But perhaps no group has succeeded as thoroughly as Mr. Raniere’s at peddling the promise of “executive success” to people with so little actual need for success in any conventional sense-the scions of the wealthy.
There is a certain genius to targeting such people for a “success” program, since it eludes any requirement to help followers achieve material results: They are already rich. Yet the program clearly filled a gap in the lives of Sara and Clare Bronfman. A former NXIVM employee familiar with both told me that Clare struck him as withdrawn and awkward with people, whereas the more sociable Sara’s malaise was a more typical case of someone with too many parties to attend and too few responsibilities to uphold. Both sisters likely suffered from an inferiority complex in the shadow of their self-made socialite mother.
THE BRONFMAN FAMILY has of late exhibited a rapidly diminishing ability to control its own wealth. In 2003 Edgar Bronfman Sr., who initially encouraged his once directionless daughters’ journeys of personal growth, said he believed Mr. Raniere was operating a cult. He has since remained silent about Mr. Raniere.
Mr. Raniere, according to Mr. Plyam, blames Edgar Bronfman Sr. for his $65 million losses in commodities speculation and claims his followers’ father was trying to poison their relationship by “rigging the market” against his bets on corn and oat futures.
Mr. Plyam alleged that when the sisters’ trust funds began to run dry, Mr. Raniere hired Frank Parlato Jr., an Albany property developer, to fly to L.A. with three “thugs,” clad in sunglasses and long leather coats, and impersonate an emissary of “Papa Bronfman” to intimidate Mr. Plyam into ceding his own assets to cover a portion of Mr. Raniere’s losses. (Among Mr. Parlato’s more sensational claims about “Papa Bronfman,” according to a cross-complaint Mr. Plyam filed against Mr. Raniere and Sara and Clare Bronfman, was that he had installed a camera in Sara’s bedroom in order to spy on his daughter having sex with Mr. Raniere.)
Mr. O’Hara told me he doubts that the real “Papa Bronfman” has any further plans to intervene in his daughters’ involvement with Mr. Raniere and NXIVM. “I don’t think anyone wants to go after them at this point, least of all Edgar Bronfman,” Mr. O’Hara told me. Citing the NXIVM plot against Mr. Ross, he said, “this is criminal activity we’re talking about, and his daughters have been financing the entire operation.” The patriarch may have resigned himself to hoping that his daughters meet new friends.
Georgiana Bronfman, for her part, appears to be trying to extricate her daughters from Mr. Raniere’s thrall by subtler means. In an October 2009 post on her blog, sarabronfman.com, Sara Bronfman recounted a recent evening when her mother took the sisters to see the David Mamet play Oleanna, which depicts a struggle between a manipulative professor and a female student who threatens to sue him for sexual harassment. “From the opening monologue, and throughout the entire eighty minute performance, I sat with my arms folded tightly across my chest, attempting to counter the extreme discomfort ignited and fueled by the controversial performance,” Ms. Bronfman wrote. “My feelings grew with increasing intensity and while part of me was drawn in, hanging on every word, another part was repulsed, resisting a strong urge to bolt right out of the theater.”
UNTIL SARA AND CLARE Bronfman bolt from NXIVM, anyone who flees Mr. Raniere’s discipleship risks legal hell. Several have been bankrupted, and few have escaped unsued.
The defection, meanwhile, of Barbara Bouchey, who retained power lawyer Nathan Goldberg (of Allred, Maroko & Goldberg) to represent her in court against the Bronfmans, could prove to be Mr. Raniere’s undoing. Ms. Bouchey controlled the purse strings of Mr. Raniere’s operation for a decade, until she left abruptly with eight other followers in April 2009. In a deposition taken that summer, she detailed how the sisters handed over their wealth to Mr. Raniere.
When the sisters’ trust funds ran out, Ms. Bouchey took the pair to Citibank to open two $20 million lines of credit using their future inheritance as collateral-a move that first required a change in trustee. Because the Bronfman family trust was structured by Edgar Sr.’s father, Samuel, to favor younger generations, there was little any concerned party could do to stop them.
INHERITED MILLIONS ARE often fraught with an array of pathologies and dysfunctions. In 1987, Joanie Bronfman, then a Brandeis philosophy doctoral candidate and the daughter of Edgar Bronfman Sr.’s cousin Gerald, investigated the peculiar psychoses of the idle rich in her 429-page dissertation The Experience of Inherited Wealth: A Social-Psychological Perspective. In the course of her research, she attended 50 “wealth conferences” and interviewed 100 heirs and heiresses. Drawing from her own experience of growing up “visibly wealthy” and full of “shame” as a result of it, Ms. Bronfman argued that inheritors of massive wealth tend to be emotionally stunted. They adopt paranoid worldviews and come to see humans as radically selfish. They perceive relationships to be transactional. Their misanthropy derives from the attempts of absentee parents to buy their affections as compensation for outsourcing their rearing to hired professionals. These feelings are reinforced when they interact with the world outside their class and are alternately solicited for donations or mocked as dilettantes by the media. It was that last many-tentacled villain she accused of promulgating a destructive bias toward inheritors, one that she termed “wealthism.”
Back then, the self-hating rich were more apt to assume a new name and withdraw from wealthy society, as Sara and Clare’s elder half-sister Holly Bronfman did when she married an Israeli guru and tea entrepreneur and took the name Bhavani Lev. But during the decade that started with Paris Hilton on video and ended with Bernie Madoff in cuffs, Mr. Raniere’s materialistic and militaristic philosophy, glorifying the ruthless pursuit of wealth, has had a certain timely appeal. As Sara Bronfman explained in the 2009 radio interview when the host politely asked if it was appropriate to compare Mr. Raniere to the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa when the latter two repeatedly disavowed materialism: “If you look at both Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama, they are based in completely different countries with much more ancient traditions. In order to survive in a Western capitalist country, one needs to be able to exchange the products of their efforts for money that’s going to allow them to live.”
It is no accident Sara and her sister were ripe targets for Mr. Raniere’s capitalist mysticism. The Bronfman family has floated for generations on a fortune amassed by bootlegging Canadians during Prohibition. Its scions can hardly be blamed for losing their gri
p on reality. And who, without a tether to reality, could be expected to hold on to money? Lucky for the Bronfmans-and for Mr. Raniere-they have plenty more to lose.
editorial@observer.com
Ms. Tkacik will join the staff of the Washington City Paper next month.
