Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult and The Vow are both documentaries that explore the NXIVM cult and its leader, Keith Raniere, but ultimately Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult is a more incisive and compelling show. The Vow examines NXIVM through the lens of its high-profile defectors – primarily Mark Vicente, Bonnie Piesse, and Sarah Edmonson – and tries to show how they became members of Keith Raniere’s inner circle and what led them to eventually leave the cult. Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult focuses entirely on India Oxenberg, a member of NXIVM’s master-slave sex cult DOS, as she grapples with her trauma and abuse and reveals how she was finally able to escape NXIVM.
HBO’s series The Vow, which has been renewed for season 2, had nine, hour-long episodes that examined the draw of NXIVM for its members. Told primarily from the point of view of Mark Vicente, The Vow had access to hours of video that Vicente had taken over the years while he was involved with NXIVM. The show attempts to outline how Mark’s wife, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones actress Bonnie Piesse, escaped from NXIVM while he remained a part of Keith Raniere’s inner circle before deciding to leave as well. The Vow has been criticized for its abstract style, which obscures the timeline and details of NXIVM’s development, and its refusal to grapple with Raniere’s virulent misogyny and Vicente’s complicity in his behavior.
The Starz series Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult is, by contrast, a much tighter show. Made up of only four hour-long episodes, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult narrows its focus to India Oxenberg, a victim of Keith Raniere and former member of DOS as she tries to make sense of her experience inside of NXIVM. Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult has a much smaller scope than The Vow, but goes into significantly more detail about the cult and Keith Raniere’s crimes. Both shows offer very different explorations of NXIVM, but Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult is ultimately the better series, and here’s why.
The Vow’s NXIVM Bubble vs. Seduced’s Cult Experts
By almost exclusively featuring former members of NXIVM, The Vow successfully created a claustrophobic show that emulated the insular bubble that NXIVM members found themselves stuck inside. The Vow follows defectors as they try to grapple with their own complicity inside of NXIVM, as well as their close proximity to Keith Raniere and DOS. Unfortunately, although this successfully replicates the experience of the NXIVM echo chamber, it fails to interrogate now NXIVM developed and functioned as a cult. By only featuring NXIVM members, The Vow relied too much on their biased perspectives as they tried to accurately assess their own situations.
Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult does a much better job of balancing India Oxenberg’s perspective with a full panel of cult experts, who break down the ways that NXIVM isolated and brainwashed its members. Experts such as Rick Alan Ross and Janja Lalich succinctly identity how NXIVM was developed, and how NXIVM and specifically the Society of Protectors, DOS, and JNESS, programmed their members to accept increasingly horrific conditions. The Vow spends much of its time ruminating on what drew members to NXIVM and less on the crimes that were taking place, while Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult provides perspective on the scope of Raniere’s crimes.
The Vow Sacrifices Truth For Storytelling
The Vow holds back on Keith Raniere’s crimes for most of the series, focusing instead on building up his compelling personality and how he attracted so many people to NXIVM. The entire show builds up to a climax in episode 8 “The Wound” when The Vow finally plays audio of Raniere’s virulent misogyny, which was the foundation of NXIVM’s most horrific groups: DOS, the Society of Protectors, and JNESS. The Vow tries to craft a narrative, ruminating on the appeal of NXIVM before revealing Raniere’s true nature, and ending with a cliffhanger by playing a jailhouse call with Raniere.
Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult takes the opposite approach, and plays the damning audio as early as episode 1. Instead of holding back Raniere’s extreme misogyny and the extreme abuse that DOS victims suffered, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult makes that the focus on the show. By moving away from the idea of crafting a narrative arc in favor of a straightforward explanation of Keith Raniere’s many crimes, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult is able to sharply interrogate its material – something that The Vow completely abandons in favor of building up an atmospheric story in a similar way to Tiger King‘s celebration of the cult of personality.
Seduced Is The Better NXIVM Documentary
The Vow‘s primary mistake is focusing the show on Mark Vicente, the former high-level member of NXIVM and close friend of Keith Raniere who gave The Vow access to videos he had taken while in the cult. However, The Vow seems hesitant to interrogate the depth of Vicente’s twelve-year participation in NXIVM. Series creator Jehane Nourjaim (director of The Great Hack, a predecessor to The Social Dilemma) describes Vicente as a friend and focuses on Mark Vicente after he’s decided to follow in his wife’s footsteps and leave NXIVM while leaving out the years that he spent by Raniere’s side and willingly participating in his behavior.
Through India Oxenberg’s eyes, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult shows a very different side of Mark Vicente. Oxeberg repeatedly names Vicente as someone who drew her further into NXIVM and encouraged her participation in the cult, and the series shows footage of Vicente laughing at one of Raniere’s misogynistic jokes. While both documentary series explore the abuse and sexual assault that was a major part of DOS, India Oxenberg was the person who was actually victimized by Keith Raniere, and her perspective is far more enlightening when it comes to the actual machinations of NXIVM.
The Vow can’t properly address DOS or the environment of toxic masculinity and misogyny that was the foundation of NXIVM because its protagonist, Mark Vicente, is an unreliable narrator that was not a victim of either of those things. India Oxenberg, however, speaks movingly and emotionally about her trauma and abuse inside of the organization and is a much better narrator for Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult. In a particularly moving scene that is a great example of what Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult does better, Oxenberg discusses her assault by Keith Raniere with a therapist and untangles her feelings about consent, and the therapist cautiously tells her that, “there is never consent in a cult.”
The Vow took on the monumental task of explaining how NXIVM attracted so many members, while also trying to create a satisfying narrative arc. Unfortunately, The Vow‘s focus on creating an atmosphere took away from its ability to interrogate how complicit former NXIVM members were, and the show suffered for it. Comparatively, Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult was a much more straightforward story about India Oxenberg’s direct involvement in DOS and her repeated sexual assault and abuse by Keith Raniere. Both shows use much of the same footage, but The Vow suffers from a lack of direction, and the sharper and more critical Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult shines.
