Sarah Berman

Don't Call It a Cult follows NXIVM from the self-improvement seminars Keith Raniere sold in Albany to the inner group in which women were branded with his initials and made to hand over material that could ruin them. Sarah Berman covered the federal trial for VICE from Vancouver, and the book leans on the testimony rather than on the tabloid version, giving most of its length to the women who joined, what the courses actually promised, and how the demands escalated by degrees rather than all at once. Steerforth published it in 2021. Raniere was convicted in 2019 on racketeering and trafficking counts and is serving a hundred and twenty years. Berman's argument, which the title carries, is that the word cult lets everyone else off: it makes the members foolish and the rest of us safe, when what was on offer was ordinary ambition and the group was full of capable people.