Catherine Oxenberg was in the middle of a quiet life in 2016 when the text message arrived. A young woman who had recently walked away from NXIVM, a self-help organization based near Albany, New York, had reached out with information about a secret society hidden inside the group. The message was blunt: “You have to save her. ” Her was India Oxenberg, Catherine’s 25-year-old daughter, then five years into NXIVM and bearing a brand on her pelvic area, a cauterizing iron mark that federal prosecutors would later show encoded the initials of the organization’s leader.
“At that point, I lost my mind,” Catherine said. Catherine was not an ordinary mother. She was the granddaughter of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, the Serbian prince who had served as regent for his young nephew King Peter II and had governed the country through the lethal crises of the late 1930s. In March 1941, after pressure from Hitler, Paul signed the Tripartite Pact with three protective clauses: Axis forces would respect Yugoslav sovereignty, would not request military assistance, and would not cross Yugoslav territory.
Two days later, a British-backed coup deposed him. Hitler ordered the invasion, the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, and the country fell in twelve days. Paul and his family were placed under British house arrest in Kenya and then South Africa, treated as security risks despite his friendships with the British royal family. It was not until 2011 that a Serbian court annulled his conviction and recognized him as a peacemaker.
By then he had been dead for 35 years. Catherine’s bloodlines reached deep into Europe’s royal houses. Through her grandmother, Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark, she descended from the Russian Romanovs and the Danish Glücksburgs. Through her mother, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, born in 1936 in the Royal Palace in Belgrade, the family had been stripped of everything when the monarchy was abolished in 1945.
Princess Elizabeth grew up in exile, married American textile manufacturer Howard Oxenberg in 1960, and Catherine was born in New York City in 1961. She was raised in London, educated at the Lycée Français and St. Paul’s School, studied mythology at Harvard and psychology at Columbia, and went into modeling before landing the role that made her famous: Amanda Carrington on Dynasty in 1984, at the height of the show’s popularity. The actress with real royal blood played a fictional quasi-royal heiress, a piece of casting that resonated across American television.
She remained through 1986 and became the first descendant of a reigning royal family to host Saturday Night Live. Later roles, marriages, and divorces followed, including a brief annulled marriage to producer Robert Evans and a decade-long marriage to actor Casper Van Dien. NXIVM itself had been founded in 1998 by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman in the Albany region. Its public face was the Executive Success Program, a series of personal development seminars promising self-awareness and the removal of psychological limitations.
The real structure was darker. Raniere, a man who claimed to be one of the smartest people alive, built an inner secret society called DOS, an acronym from Latin translating roughly to “master over slave women. ” It operated as a pyramid with Raniere at the top, though most members did not know he was involved. Masters recruited slaves, who were required to recruit slaves beneath them.
Before joining, women had to surrender collateral: compromising photographs, damaging personal information, materials that could destroy them if they tried to leave. Once inside, a woman’s most weaponizable secrets were held against her forever. Members were kept on starvation diets of 500 to 800 calories a day, required to be available at all times, and subjected to branding ceremonies in which a cauterizing iron bearing a symbol of Raniere’s initials was pressed into their pelvic area, a ritual presented to them as an act of female solidarity. India Oxenberg was born in 1991, appeared in her first film at nine, and by nineteen had dropped out of college, describing herself as lost and without direction.
In 2011, Catherine brought her, on a friend’s recommendation, to an introductory NXIVM seminar. Catherine found the questions invasive and withdrew by 2013, but India was already inside. She moved to Albany, trained as a coach, and moved up the organization’s hierarchy of colored sashes. Over five years, what she later described as the slow drip of indoctrination and grooming deepened her commitment.
The organization deliberately recast family concern as a sign of the family’s limitations. India was told her mother was a psychopath trying to hurt her. In 2016, actress Allison Mack, known for her role on Smallville and a senior figure inside DOS, recruited India into the secret society. India provided collateral, became the first woman branded in the DOS initiation, and was placed under Mack’s authority, required to ask permission for everything, including eating.
She was kept on a five-hundred-calorie daily diet and ordered to seduce Raniere, a command framed as an assignment to make her feel less vulnerable. By that point, she had been so thoroughly reorganized that she could not recognize the coercion. In May 2017, Catherine confronted India directly, telling her she was in a cult and that she knew about the branding. India did not leave.
Catherine then joined forces with Frank Parlato, a Buffalo-area businessman who had once been NXIVM’s publicist and had become its most relentless enemy. They worked together at Parlato’s home in Niagara Falls, compiling a dossier that Catherine personally drove to Albany to deliver to the New York Attorney General. On June 5, 2017, Parlato published “Branded Slaves and Master Raniere,” the first public exposure of DOS. Defections accelerated immediately, and by December the New York Times reported that federal authorities had opened a formal investigation.
Raniere fled to Mexico in early 2018. Federal agents arrested him in Puerto Vallarta in March and flew him to Brooklyn, where he was charged with sex trafficking, forced labor conspiracy, racketeering, and wire fraud conspiracy. India did not leave immediately even after his arrest; the conditioning was deep enough that the leader’s capture alone could not break it. In the months that followed, as co-defendants pleaded guilty and the criminal architecture became legally undeniable, she finally broke free, becoming a cooperating witness and acknowledging her own role in DOS as a master who had recruited women beneath her.
During the trial, which ran about six weeks in Brooklyn, the evidence included seized documents, recordings, and testimony from more than a dozen witnesses. On June 18, 2019, after less than five hours of deliberation, the jury found Raniere guilty on all seven counts. At sentencing in October 2020, India flew from Los Angeles to face him. “He looked small,” she told Esquire.
Judge Garaufis sentenced Raniere to 120 years in federal prison and ordered him to pay a fine. India described the sentence as better than she had expected. Lindsay, Salzman, and the other co-defendants had already pleaded guilty and cooperated. India deliberately declined to participate in HBO’s The Vow, refusing to let her story be narrated for her again.
Instead, she executive produced and starred in her own four-part documentary, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult, and published a memoir, Still Learning. The documentary did not present her only as a victim; it included her acknowledgement that she had recruited women beneath her. She married in 2020, settled in Key West, and in September 2024 gave birth to a daughter. She continues to host a podcast on cult recovery and trauma, transforming her wounds into something useful for others.
The years of fighting had exacted a physical toll on Catherine herself. In early 2020, just as India had finally come to live with her in Malibu, Catherine found herself bedridden with severe migratory pain, swollen hands, numb feet, and an aching spine. Multiple specialists offered different misdiagnoses, and antidepressants and opioids provided no relief. A doctor at UCLA connected her history to her symptoms and explained that her brain had been creating physical pain as a coping mechanism for years of unprocessed stress.
Her recovery came through ketamine treatment in late 2020, which disrupted the entrenched neural patterns that conventional treatment could not touch. She has since channeled the experience into a therapeutic retreat program developed alongside India, offering ketamine-assisted therapy for female survivors of sexual trauma. The campaign had not been without its ironies. Catherine had been the person who first brought India to the seminar in 2011, a fact she has never denied and has described as a source of persistent guilt.
Through her alliance with Parlato, her delivery of dossiers to the Attorney General, her book Captive, and her cooperation with federal authorities, she played a documented role in dismantling an organization that had operated with impunity for two decades, all while receiving death threats and facing the possibility that her actions might send her daughter to prison. Keith Raniere is serving 120 years in federal prison. Allison Mack served three years. Clare Bronfman served six years and nine months.
India Oxenberg is alive, married, a mother, and an advocate. The royal blood and the dynasty fame did not win the fight. What mattered was that a mother refused to stop, and the bond between mother and daughter that NXIVM spent years trying to destroy was the one thing the organization could not break.