NXIVM Episode 8: The Oxenbergs, Failed States, Hollywood, and Human Trafficking Part 2

In which we discuss the life of Catherine Oxenberg and exactly how many connections a person can have to trafficking and shady cults before it starts getting really weird

Music by DiffuseTensor

Please head over to the Patreon if you would like to support me and my work:

https://patreon.com/TheDustlightArchives?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

About a year ago, I watched the film Salo or 120 Days of Sodom. It was made by a communist filmmaker, Pierpaolo Pasolini, who was brutally murdered in a case that still is very unclear before its release. Many people who watch this movie focus on the sheer grotesquery. You will find it in pretty much any list of most disturbing or hardest-to-watch movies, and it does deserve that reputation. But to focus on these things is to ignore the fact that the shock value has a purpose, and it is very much tied to the class politics of the man who made it. The question that has endured for me is what does it truly mean to be part of a long aristocratic bloodline? A single person can lose touch when their material circumstances drastically change, but deep down inside of them, there must still be a memory of the child or the young adult they were, even if buried. But what happens when you never have those memories to begin with? When your life is fundamentally different than everybody else's from the moment you're born. And how many generations must pass through this before it's bred out of your DNA entirely? Before a sort of psychological Habsburg jaw develops, and you've been bred into something recognizably different. Welcome to the Dust Light Archives. Catherine Oxenberg was born on September 22nd, 1961 in New York City to Elizabeth and Howard Oxenberg. Her parents would be divorced four years later, and there's not too much to say about her very early life, other than that she was raised by a series of servants and nannies, which would be a continuing theme throughout her childhood. And we'll get into the specifics of her life and what we know as we trace it. But it's important to understand what standard operating procedure looks like for these aristocratic families. First of all, for centuries leading up to the modern era, the wet nurse has been a mainstay in these circles. A mother gives birth, and one of the first things that happens is that the baby is handed over to a stranger to be breastfed. If that servant was lucky, they would have just recently given birth themselves, allowing them to naturally produce milk. But oftentimes that wasn't the case, and they needed to force a body with no reason to produce milk to begin producing. For a long time, and still in unregulated black markets today, it was common to have wet nurses that lack proper nutrition themselves begin to deplete their own body's nutrients in order to give them to the baby, sucking calcium out of the bones and weakening them, for instance. By 1961, it had largely been corporatized, but the system itself is still functionally the same at its core and serves the same purpose. By then the idea of a wet nurse would have seemed savage and gauche. They were replaced by maternity nurses, who would either use breast pumps to produce milk, or as was becoming the standard in that era, they would feed the baby bottled formula. We can say pretty certainly this is what Catherine Oxenberg's life looked like, because while her feeding schedule has never been spoken on or written about, we do have some writing, particularly from Robert Prentice in his biography, Princess Olga, Her Life and Times, that points towards a standard maternal nurse setup. Specifically in that book, he talks about Olga, Catherine's grandmother, helping Howard Oxenberg set up a bed for the maternal nurse in the dining room. Once brought home, the practice at the time amongst maternal nurses would be basically to do all the caretaking, like diaper changing, bathing, and feeding the newborn. In fact, Elizabeth and Howard went to the opera the night they brought their baby home. The four-hour feeding cycle was very popular at the time amongst these companies, where the idea was that regardless of the baby's cries, they were fed every four hours. I'm laying all of this out because this is part of a larger system that helps destroy natural human empathy almost from the moment an aristocrat is born. A newborn is taken away from their mother, largely separated from the family, and given to a rotating set of maternal nurses who clinically feed them out of bottles every four hours, regardless of whether the baby was asking to be fed earlier or crying out for attention. They were, in fact, taught specifically to ignore a baby's cries. After they have developed past the age where a child would normally breastfeed, their maternal nurses disappear, and they are now replaced by nannies. Their parents may come and go in between other projects, functioning almost as visiting dignitaries. Given what we know about Elizabeth and what Christina Oxenberg has written about their life, this is definitely the relationship they had with their mother. Being raised by a nanny is an incredibly strange dysfunctional relationship when you really think about the mechanics of it. If you think about it, they are both now a second artificial version of a maternal figure, and they're also an employee of the family. This person exists in a weird area that would normally represent a form of authority, but instead from a young age, you actually understand that they work for you and your family. Next, the nanny leaves their life, and the child is sent to an elite boarding school. Now there have been several good works on the way boarding schools are designed to dismantle a child's psyche and remove compassion from them. But I think Dr. Joy Shaverine's ABCD grid is probably the most succinct and useful. She breaks it down in four parts. First, there is the abandonment of the family. This causes a child to conclude that their love and distress is completely irrelevant to their survival. Next is bereavement, a deep sadness at the loss of your home and family. This is usually treated by the school flippantly as homesickness, ignored and not validated. After that comes captivity, continuous containment inside a panoptic rule-bound educational grid. This subordinates the child's biological rhythms to strict institutional scheduling. Finally, there is dissociation. The child splits their consciousness to endure their environment. They learn to perform intellectually at high levels while totally shutting down their somatic capacity for compassion. This is what going to one of these schools is designed to do to a person psychologically. Because Elizabeth was constantly involved in international relationships, high society maneuvering, and nomadic shifts, Christina Oxenberg has stated that her and her sister changed schools 14 times. Catherine would first move to London at four years old and attend these boarding schools a few years later. One of the weirdest ones to me is the Chelsea Day School she attended at eight years old, where playing poker was part of the official curriculum. This might seem absurd at first, but honestly, I almost can't think of a better way to teach a young child how to hide their emotions and spot weaknesses in others. We can probably gloss through a lot of her childhood and teenage years because anything worth saying can probably be inferred from our last episode on her mother, Princess Elizabeth. The only thing I think I would add is that Catherine received private acting lessons from Richard Burden when she was 13 years old. Now remember, that is the actor that Elizabeth was briefly engaged to while she was married to Neil Bowerfor. And there is no evidence of anything untoward happening, but I will say a volatile alcoholic in his mid-40s giving acting lessons to a 13-year-old girl also seems pretty sketchy to me. Anyways, at 18 she attends Harvard, but drops out shortly after when she is scouted by the Ford Modeling Agency. While groups like Elite Modeling Agency at the time had more of a bohemian aesthetic, Ford Modeling Agency it marketed itself with a classier, more patrician upper crust branding, and Catherine Oxenberg was picked up and signed to the agency specifically for her admittedly brief Ivy League credentials. The Ford modeling agency was run by Eileen Ford, and it was really controlling and strict. They controlled the models' diets when they were allowed to leave, their sleeping schedules, and Eileen's husband, Jerry Ford, could basically show up anytime and just freely sexually harass everybody there. This is also another area in the recent history of the family that is at least sex trafficking adjacent. What I mean by that is that Ford Modeling Agency would absolutely bring international models from South American or European countries on visas. And between exorbitant rent has chutes and composites, these women would end up thousands of dollars in debt before any work began. In fact, Katie Ford, Eileen Ford's daughter, even said once that she understood how sex trafficking worked, quote, because of the parallels to how we brought models into the U.S. I also had a working relationship with Jean-Luc Brunel, the talent scout and photographer who was a procurer for Jeffrey Epstein. And in fact, Eileen's daughter Katie would take over the modeling agency for 12 years in the 90s. And in 2003, a DOJ antitrust suit, Shelton vs. Elite Model Management Inc., would place Katie Ford right alongside Jean-Luc Burnell in an intertwined closed-loop financial cartel. They shared talent, they shared financial networks, and they used the same set of tricks to strip agency from these models. In 2009, Katie Ford would pivot to creating an anti-sex trafficking NGO, which some might find suspicious. I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but her NGO, Freedom for All Inc., seems to be something between a fairly small, pretty straightforward scam that funnels money through consultant fees or private administrative rerouting, and a way of trying to redefine the narrative on sex trafficking in order to take the fuzzy lines between cartels and corporate modeling and draw distinct narrative lines between the two. I'm mostly just bringing this up because it's yet another moment where the Oxenbergs cross paths with sex trafficking, and also as just another example of how often, as we saw last week, sex trafficking NGOs are weaponized to be used in a way that is basically the direct opposite of their stated purpose. So Catherine Oxenberg works for the Ford Modeling Agency from 1979 to 1981. She also supposedly studied psychology, mythology, and philosophy at Columbia during this time period. And listener, trust me when I tell you, I would absolutely love to say she immersed herself in these things. Given that it would fit my theory that she actually was foundational to Nexium in an intentional way. But unfortunately, it appears she barely studied these subjects at all. She's never even achieved an associate's degree, and she took classes part-time while modeling, but had entirely dropped them by 1982, when her acting career began. However, this does not mean her time at Columbia had no utility for her or for Nexium at all. In fact, if you look at most standard biographical information for her, it will claim this as part of her intellectual pedigree, and ignore that she has little to no accreditation. In a world built largely on reputation and perception, I think it's probably fair to say that having these words attached to her name isn't nothing. Her first acting gig is for the 1982 CBS made-for television movie The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana. She seems to get this role partly due to the brand she created under the Ford modeling agency, and more importantly, because she's literally related to these people. In fact, Elizabeth, her mother, was initially nervous it might offend their more powerful relatives, the Windsors, but Catherine eventually got permission from Charles before filming began. Now, as an insane side note, ten years later in 1992, she would film a sequel called Charles and Diana Unhappily Ever After, where she plays Diana again, but this time as crazy, mentally unwell, and on the verge of snapping. But this time it was quietly supported by the royal family because a hit piece on Princess Diana is exactly what they needed at the time, and Catherine Oxenberg had no problem with helping to destroy her relative's reputation. But back to 1982. But eventually a scorched earth contract dispute between her and Aaron's spelling leads to her being unceremoniously replaced with a different actress in the season seven premiere. In fact, season six ends with her and another woman getting in a fight where they fall into a pool, and then season seven begins with them coming out of the pool, and it's just a flat-out different actress. Um, but she leaves Dynasty and she almost immediately moves into the high society of the American government, going to parties with the Raggins and schmoozing at DC social events, while also starring in a series of pretty forgettable movies, hitting the exact register of tabloid Hollywood and aristocratic socialite that her mother would also be hitting at her age. In 1991, she gives birth to India, and we will definitely be spending more time on her in the near future. But for now, I really just want to bring up the strange story of her father. When she was born, and for decades after, the identity of her father was totally hidden from the public. Catherine Oxenberg leaned hard publicly into a kind of empowering single mother narrative, but made it a point to never mention the circumstances under which she was conceived. Several rumors floated around, including that it was another aristocrat who didn't want the scandal of a baby out of wedlock, or that it was the Hollywood producer Robert Evans. In 1999, Catherine would get married to Casper Van Dien and he would adopt India, putting what appeared to be the final seal on any chance her biological father would become public information. But in 2017, while supposedly trying to get her daughter India out of the Nexium cult, she releases a statement to People magazine with her biological father quoted by name asking her to return home. There are a couple of options. First, you have the mainstream story that basically suggests she did it in a desperate bid to reach India. I find this to be the least compelling option because I don't actually think the story is presented in the star series Seduction or her book Captive A Mother's Crusade is told in good faith. Also, India knows who her father is and has had a relationship with him her entire life. So I can't really see what would be gained as far as getting through to India by naming him publicly. The second option is that this was a smoke screen meant to muddy the waters and avoid people looking too deeply into the frankly pretty shaky story the Oxenberg family is trying to sell the public. You know, get people talking about India's real father instead of exactly how involved her and Catherine were in this cult. I would be able to buy this if her father was a different person than he actually was. I actually think he's such a strange liability that he makes the family and their credibility look worse. The third option, and for my money the best one I can come up with, is that this information was probably going to come out soon. Either because they knew court hearings on Nexium were not far around the corner, and things like Discovery would almost certainly expose who her father was, or because it had been discovered by Interfor or divulged in a session and was being held as collateral by Nexium or some faction within Nexium. If they knew the information was going to come out soon anyways, and it was being held over the family's head as leverage, it would make sense to get out ahead of the story and put their cards on the table in a highly sympathetic puff piece about a desperate mother trying to get her daughter out of a cult so it could no longer be used as blackmail or wouldn't be dropped at a less opportune time in the near future. Equally as compelling as why they chose to leak the father's identity when they did, in the way they did, is who her father actually is. His name is William White Schaefer, and he is a high-level cocaine and marijuana smuggler who at the height of his career was making over fifty million dollars smuggling drugs through the Golden Triangle pipeline from Thailand to the United States. I obviously find this interesting given how so much of the story of this family seems to return to trafficking. Because trafficking massive amounts of drugs, just like trafficking human beings or organs, requires the same skill set, the same connections, and the same access to the same trafficking routes. Moving this amount of money around also requires a sophisticated understanding of shell company banking protocols, which has also been something we have explored pretty heavily this series in relation to Nexium. Now, William White Schaeffer would be arrested in 1992, so I am not saying I think his specific expertise was directly used in the creation and running of Nexium. What I am saying is that they wouldn't need it, because the Oxenbergs, just like the Bronfmans, are already immersed in this world. Catherine Oxenberg's mother is somebody who had a deep knowledge of some of the most extreme trafficking networks on earth and was directly interacting with them through her NGOs. And the man Catherine would conceive her child with is also a high level trafficker. India had relationships with her father and grandmother her entire life. So when you have this context, it starts to become really hard to see her as a naive simpleton. Who was engaging in trafficking without understanding what was going on, or that an entire external force like Nexium would be required to manipulate and brainwash her into it. But we can get back to that later. Let's keep following Catherine, because things will keep getting stranger. In July of 1998, she marries famous owner of Paramount, Hollywood fixer, and political player Robert Evans, before getting an annulment. If mentioned at all, this usually gets treated like some sort of whirlwind romance they got caught up in before coming to their senses shortly later. Well, let's be real. A 36-year-old European aristocrat does not elope with a 68-year-old man who produced The Godfather in Chinatown, who is good friends with Ted Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. Like they're a couple of love-struck teenagers. It's an incredibly mysterious move by two powerful people, and the mainstream story here doesn't make a lick of sense. Given what we know, two possibilities come to mind for me. The first one is that some sort of asset transfer happened in that nine days. Some sort of financial shenanigans protected under the privacy of a marriage before the marriage itself is annulled nine days later. The other possibility I can come up with is similar, but of a fairly different flavor. In early May, Robert Evans suffers three strokes in the same day and never fully recovers. If this was the case, it would almost certainly be at the behest of a third party, like his children or his handlers, and done against his will. In July, he is isolated, barely functional, and barely able to forbid. Neither Andrew entirely satisfies me. The whole thing is fucking weird. And to be honest, I don't know totally what to make of it. I would add that obviously his physical state also very much uh puts the lie to the idea that this was some sort of whirlwind romance. It's uh almost ridiculous that any serious person would write that, whether journalist or a biographer. Uh also I did look into it out of curiosity, and this is something that is a legal gray area, but you absolutely can technically do uh just because a marriage gets annulled, does not automatically mean that any sort of financial maneuvers done in that time period also get annulled. That is its own separate, very laborious legal process that requires a lot of time and money and also requires somebody to want to do it, which if Robert Evans was incapable of taking care of himself, and this was something that worked out financially well for the other people involved, there wouldn't really be anybody to fight this. So moving on, the next year she gets married to Casper Van Dien, an actor with deep ties to the military industrial complex. His grandfather was a Marine, his father was a U.S. Navy commander and fighter pilot, and he was a student at the very exclusive Admiral Farragut Academy, where he graduates third in command. This school is traditionally a foundational pipeline for the military elite, and it also probably doesn't hurt that he comes from Dutch old money. And it's also 1999 and the Balkan refugee camps are beginning to empty as NATO forces take over Yugoslavia, which means the specific human pipeline Elizabeth's NGO would have access to would be drying up. Surely, listener, surely there is no way that within a year Catherine and her old money military husband would have executive level roles in a multi-million dollar shady anti-trafficking NGO. What is that? Oh, they did that with two separate NGOs? And one is sex trafficking and the other is organ trafficking? Well shit. One is called Child Help USA, and the other is the Global Organization for Organ Donation, or Good. The former has the ability to move through foster homes and custody grids with little oversight, and the latter is a literal database that connects people who need organs with available organs. And of course, in both cases, these places are racked with scandal and ethics violations. That's weird, but surely they wouldn't exit either of these organizations in 2011, the very year Catherine in India would officially join Nexium. Oh. It closes down entirely, and they go from heavily being involved in child help USA, filming PSAs, holding conferences, meeting with government officials to being virtually non-existent from 2011 until they lose their titles in the 2015 divorce. I see. So to reiterate, their organ donation NGO closes down almost exactly at the time when they become involved in Nexium. And their sex trafficking NGO it technically goes on for four more years, but there were other people involved in that. So when Catherine Oxenberg claims her in India stumbled into an ESP meeting in 2011, she is disconnecting from one trafficking network and just happens to be entering another. This timeline is so clean it's almost insulting. The official story is that she brings India to an initial meeting, doesn't care for it, and doesn't go again. But India gets sucked further in. Supposedly, she was first introduced to it by a friend named Sheila Kelly, an actress who ran a high-end pole dancing studio caring to the elite called S Factor. This really doesn't make a lot of sense because by 2011, the Bronfmans would have supposedly dumped millions of dollars into this for almost a decade, and it was absolutely a scandal amongst the very high society circles the Oxenbergs would have run in. There would have already been exposes about the Bronfman's ties to this group in Vanity Fair. There's no conceivable way that in 2011, Catherine Oxenberg, who also had been engaged with these high-end self-empowerment retreats, would have no idea what Naxium is. Also, for good measure, Sheila Kelly would end up having her own pretty large scandal in 2021, involving multiple allegations of systemic psychological abuse, blackmail, and manipulation that would be reported on in a Hollywood reporter expose. On top of that, Catherine had been promoting Sheila Kelly's whole brand of female empowerment since at least 2008 when they filmed a documentary called Sexology Together. Whether we look at it through the lens of trafficking, the lens of high society, or the lens of empowerment seminars, this was her world, and she would have been very attuned to it. When she walked through that door to ESP with India, she wasn't a naive tourist. She was an executive operator entering a known facility that was financed by her peers and scouted by a close business partner. And Catherine can't even keep her own story straight. In her book in the documentary Seduced, she will tell you she went to a single ESP meeting, which to remind you, ESP is an arm of Nexium, uh, before realizing she didn't like it and never going back. But in a 2021 debrief, she gave to Karen Ortman, a retired cop working for NYU, creating a campus safety and cult awareness seminar, she let slip, and I quote, okay, so we're truncating a couple of years because I took classes periodically. I was pretty gung-ho in the beginning. So even based on her own story, it's very unclear how long she personally outside of India was actually involved in this, and she definitely lies multiple times. Uh, because both of these things can't be true at once. And when Seduced inside the Nexium Cult comes out in 2020, it fits in perfectly with all of the narrative framing from the pro podcasts of Bronfman-related media outlets and the Mark Vicente documentary, The Vow that we mentioned earlier. India Oxenberg and Catherine Oxenberg are literally executive producers, which means in my mind the whole thing can be disregarded right there as narrative containment. If the people the documentary is about are also the executive producers, the obvious result is that only what they want to show will be presented in the final cut. Also, the other executive producers of Seduced are Cecilia Peck, an old money daughter of Gregory Peck, Inbal B. Lesnar, who made her bones creating training videos for the IDF, and Alexandra Milchin, daughter of Arnon Milchin, an admitted intelligence asset that also has ties to Israel through the Lackham Bureau, which deals in aerospace data and technology procurement. It really is pretty incredible when you consider all the media that came out at the same time about Nexium, how it was created or funded by each of the major exposed parties that would walk away clean, and how it all stays exactly on the same message. And Catherine would go on to absolutely capitalize on the Nexium publicity. She would executive produce the lifetime movie Escaping the Nexium Cult. She would also start yet another anti-trafficking NGO called the Catherine Oxenberg Foundation. And most sus of all, she would co-found the Helix Immersion Program, which is ketamine assisted therapy for sexual trauma and cult survivors. Almost as if the Oxenberg family pivoted from Nexium, an organization doing intensive high stress behavior modification in unregulated psychological experiments, to Helix, an organization doing intensive high stress behavior modification in unregulated psychological experiments. Oh, and Catherine would also go on to publicly advocate for one taste. Remember them? The orgasmic meditation cult that Frank Parlato would use his blog to attack until they started paying him a consulting fee and he pulled a total 180 and defended them instead. Frank Parlato, who would also be one of the main people coordinating the informational campaign to portray Keith Rainier as the mastermind of Nexium with Katherine Oxenberg and Mark Vicente as help. Best not to think too hard about that. Alright, thank you guys so much for tuning in again. I will be back probably next week with another Naxium episode. If not the week after that, if I just can't get it done in time. Um, I will also be doing another Eranos episode, which will be dropping next week with the Kingless Generation. So please check those out if you haven't already. Um also I uh have very much appreciated the people who have signed up to my Patreon already. And please, if you like what I do and you want to support it and you want to give me more breathing room to do more of it, uh please go over there. The $5 donations, they make a big difference, and you will be getting content as well for it coming very shortly. I do want to start that book club on Sinister Forces, like I have talked about before. And right now there are exclusive episodes of the Aranos series that are available on that Patreon. Um, I know I've said it before, but I will say it one more time. Beyond just the financial breathing room it gives me, uh it's an incredible feeling to just know that somebody cared enough to want to participate and to want to uh help move this project forward. And I appreciate the support I've been getting. Please leave uh five stars if you haven't already on whatever podcast app you're listening to, and uh comment if possible or review. And thank you very much. I will see you again very soon.