Hi y’all! I just published part one of a series I have been working on about a story about the cult named NXIVM. I figured a good way into telling this very involved story I want to tell would be to compare and contrast NXIVM with Scientology. There were some great materials that I gathered to help me illustrate my points.
Ultimately, my aim is to do a deep dive series into a story about an event NXIVM hosted called A Cappella Innovations. Yes, a cappella singing festival is featured in this story. I wrote two articles for the Frank Report about this weird little pocket of the NXIVM lore in 2020 during the pandemic and it has been in the back of my mind ever since. I always felt like I wanted to revist this story and tell it with video and so it was one of the things I had envisioned working on when I set out to learn how to make youtube videos.
The first story I wrote was about how NXIVM tried to get their hooks into the a cappella community by throwing an all-expense paid a cappella festival called A Cappella Innovations in 2007 and 2008. The story was inspired by someone finding an old a cappella message board thread from 2008 and posting it on Reddit which sparked everyone’s curiosity and it turned out the the leader of the NXIVM cult, Keith Raniere, and a bunch of his actor followers like Allison Mack and Nicki Clyne had all posted in this message board thread and it is a rare and weird insight into cult dynamics because there were hundreds of long posts flying back and forth in this 2008 thread on an obscure a cappella message board.
Here’s a link to the first story I wrote:
How A Capella Efforts of Nxivm – With Mack, Bronfman, Salzman and Raniere – Broke Into Controversy with A Cappella Leader Deke Sharon
And a follow-up story
How Nxivm Monitored Deke Sharon and Others of the A Cappella Community
Anyway, let me know what you think. I have been doing interviews with some of the folks who were involved in A Cappella Innovations and the message board thread and it is basically taking over my life. Thanks for reading!