'The Vow' Episode 4: Who is India Oxenberg, did the cult victim escape Keith Raniere and NXIVM's hold?
In HBO's miniseries, 'The Vow', viewers get in-depth retellings from former members of NXIVM (pronounced Nex-e-um) that dominated the news a few years ago when it was revealed that a secret society within NXIVM was operating as a sex trafficking front. Both the founder, Keith Raniere, and actress Allison Mack — a prominent member of the group — were arrested on trafficking charges among others.
Previous episodes had taken us through the experiences of actresses Bonnie Piesse and Sarah Edmondson and filmmaker Mark Vicente, who had all joined NXIVM in the 2000s. Piesse was the first to leave followed by Vicente, to whom she is married. Edmondson was later recruited into DOS — the "master/slave" secret society. However, Edmondson believed she was recruited to bring in more people rather than to have sex with Raniere.
The fourth episode of 'The Vow' navigates around India Oxenberg, another cult member, who was close to Edmondson and Piesse. The two actresses describe feeling responsible for their involvement in the cult and that they are determined to help India's mother, Catherine Oxenberg, get her out. Catherine Oxenberg is an actress best known for her role as Amanda Carrington in the 1980s soap opera 'Dynasty' which has recently been rebooted by The CW. Catherine's mother is Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia.
India is described as a lively, fun person as Piesse and Edmondson fondly recall meeting her. They also talk about the changes they had started noticing in her, like how she was counting calories and losing weight. As described by those in DOS, Raniere wanted women to be a certain shape and the women in DOS were encouraged to lose weight to adhere to that. Catherine also describes learning that India was having health problems such as not getting her period in a year and a doctor telling her that her uterine wall was that of a woman in 40s — India was only 27 years old at the time.
In a 2017 interview with 'Good Morning America', Catherine described introducing India to NXIVM because the group appeared to organize self-help workshops and she thought her daughter could benefit from it. "It was a recruitment funnel for sexual partners for him, but you didn’t know that walking in," she said.
After a six-week trial in 2019, Raniere was convicted in June 2019 of charges including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, forced labor conspiracy, sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy and attempted sex trafficking. Catherine revealed that India left NXIVM soon after Raniere was arrested in June 2017. In the interview with 'Good Morning America', when asked how India is coping with the experience, Catherine said, "Today she is doing amazing. It’s been a year since she’s been out. There’s been a lot of healing and she’s in a very empowered place. I’m really, really proud of her. It was a terrifying ordeal."
In August 2018, Catherine's book 'Captive: A Mother's Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult' was published. In an interview with Access Hollywood in 2019, Catherine said that India plans to write her own book about the ordeal, saying, "I think it’s important as part of India’s healing process, as part of her reclaiming her sense of autonomy, feeling empowered as a woman and not as a victim anymore. She’s been bantered around and exposed so much in the press, largely at my hands, but it was the only recourse I had as far as getting her out."
'The Vow' airs on HBO on Sunday nights at 10/9c.