Teah Banks was born into an evangelical Christian sect called the Radio Church of God. Founded in the 1930s by an advertising sales representative turned minister, the insular group promoted an ultra-fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament, eschewing divorce, premarital sex and even wearing makeup. “It was a super closed religion,” Banks, now 42, remembers. “We had pictures of the leader in our home. We worshipped him like he was a god.”
Although Banks started having questions about the group, she attended services until her 20s, when she was expelled from the organization. In 2004, she and her then-boyfriend, a filmmaker named Mark Vicente (best known for the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?), were approached by two women who wanted Vicente to make films for their organization, NXIVM, which taught a curriculum called the Executive Success Program, or ESP. The two women (one of whom was NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman) raved about their leader, a mathematician, scientist, judo champion and concert-level pianist who had patented a unique method of hacking the human brain. The man’s name, the women said, was Keith Raniere.
Banks and Vicente’s interest was piqued, and they agreed to join the women for lunch; when Salzman successfully used ESP methods to “cure” Banks of her lifelong lactose intolerance, she was even more intrigued. “I’m just like, wow, this is amazing. This woman is amazing,” she says. “And I said, ‘Nancy, I want to be one of your people.'” Blown away by the women and by ESP in general, Banks encouraged Vicente to take a NXIVM intensive; eventually, he bought an apartment in New York to be closer to group headquarters in Albany. She was involved with the group until 2005, when the two broke up, though she continued taking courses remotely for years afterward. Vicente, who eventually became a member of the NXIVM executive board, was involved with the group until 2017.
At the time she joined NXIVM, Banks had just left one large organization with an enigmatic leader at the helm. Vicente, too, had also just extricated himself from a similarly insular fringe spiritual organization: the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a group led by a New Age figure named JZ Knight, who claimed to be channeling a 35,000-year-old warrior deity named Ramtha. But even though they were both disillusioned with spiritual organizations, NXIVM struck them as different. “The first day you’re there, they’re like, ‘We’re not a cult. Cult is a bad word. It is used loosely,'” Banks said. “‘[We’re] a success school. We’re helping you raise your ethics.'”
At this point, everyone knows the rest of the story: in March 2018, Raniere and five of his NXIVM cohorts, including Salzman, were arrested on such charges as sex trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy to commit forced labor. Raniere is currently standing trial in Brooklyn, where his former supporters (including Vicente) have testified that he, among other things, imprisoned a woman for nearly two years, convinced his followers that he controlled technology and the weather, and ran DOS, a secret all-female organization of “slaves” who were branded with his initials and told to have sex with him.Later in the article, there is this:
Because cultic studies is a relatively under-researched field (unsurprisingly, cults themselves are resistant to outsiders conducting research on their practices), there isn’t much data attesting to exactly how prevalent “cult-hopping” is. But anecdotally, Eichel says, the practice is common, in part because those who are kicked out of a cult or excommunicated are looking for another organization to fill the void. Most cults, including NXIVM, teach adherents that they are wholly responsible for their own actions, which creates feelings of extreme self-doubt and anguish when they’e cut off from their support system. “That leaves [them] vulnerable to another group to say, ‘Well no, you’re in the wrong group, this is the right group,'” Eichel says.
Those who leave cults on their own – which Eichel says constitutes the “vast majority” of cult members — most often do so because they’ve had a bad experience with the group, perhaps observing something that violates their own ethics, or inconsistencies between the leader’s behavior and his teachings. But contrary to what you might expect, from the perspective of a former cult member, having one bad experience with a cult does not necessarily reflect on cult-like organizations as a whole. Eichel compares it to how most people would feel after they visit a bad dentist: sure, the experience of being poked and prodded by a poorly trained practitioner might make us slightly more wary of dentistry in general, but it certainly won’t stop anyone from hopping on Yelp and trying to find another, better dentist.
Read the rest of this fascinating story here: Rolling Stone Magazine: How People Leave One Cult — and End Up in Another