Latest / The Dustlight Archives / NXIVM: Episode 9: The Oxenbergs, Failed States, and Human Trafficking Part 3
Transcript
- 0:01SPEAKER_00: One question I have grappled with as I've worked on this part of the series in particular is how much of a victim is India Oxenberg?
- 0:10SPEAKER_00: Not of Keith Rainier, but of her own family.
- 0:13SPEAKER_00: By the time she is fourteen, she is acting in a reality show.
- 0:17SPEAKER_00: By the time she is nineteen, she is a member of Nexium, and only a few years later she is administrating human trafficking.
- 0:26SPEAKER_00: Given her external pressures and the path laid out for her, did she even have a chance?
- 0:33SPEAKER_00: The same could be said of Catherine or of Elizabeth.
- 0:37SPEAKER_00: As I've thought more about this question, I've kind of landed on the idea that the answer is irrelevant.
- 0:43SPEAKER_00: I could ask the same fatalistic question of the child of an office worker or a crack addict, and frankly, those would probably be more fair or interesting questions.
- 0:56SPEAKER_00: The answers would certainly be starker.
- 1:00SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, we are not born in a vacuum.
- 1:03SPEAKER_00: History is never the story of a single person divorced from their origins.
- 1:08SPEAKER_00: And I suspect that everything is fractal.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: That world history has a strange way of repeating itself, just as family history does, and just as personal history does.
- 1:20SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dust Light Archives.
- 2:24SPEAKER_00: Since then, I've had the opportunity to work with Fergal of the Kingless Generation on our series I am very proud of about the Eranos Roundtable, and have also started my Patreon book club series on Sinister Forces.
- 2:41SPEAKER_00: Been so caught up in the work itself, I haven't necessarily taken stock of how this thing has evolved, and I haven't laid out in explicit terms what I want this show to be.
- 2:51SPEAKER_00: And as I progress through this Nexium series and other series going forward, I can see some significant shifts in the general tone that I want to address.
- 3:01SPEAKER_00: That's why I want to craft a sort of mission statement that we can return to as a sort of guiding light or north star going forward.
- 3:10SPEAKER_00: I realize this may be an odd time to do this, but it's on my mind, and I feel there's no time like the present.
- 3:17SPEAKER_00: The main difference I have noticed is that the Columbine series raised a lot of questions, but outside of the last episode that dabbled in a possible alternative theory, I did not attempt to craft my own competing narrative.
- 3:32SPEAKER_00: As this Nexium series has gone on, I have found myself speaking with more weight, sometimes in a tone that borders on authoritative.
- 3:41SPEAKER_00: So what am I doing here?
- 3:43SPEAKER_00: What is my goal?
- 3:45SPEAKER_00: I think what it is is still primarily what it was in the beginning.
- 3:49SPEAKER_00: To highlight contradictions and things that don't make sense, and to take stories our society has convinced us we know and to reevaluate them in a way that epistemically changes our outlook.
- 4:02SPEAKER_00: I guess what I'm driving at here is that I have crafted an alternative narrative for the story of Nexium.
- 4:08SPEAKER_00: But I think one of the worst things you can do when diving down these rabbit holes is to insist that you have all the answers and to become rigid.
- 4:17SPEAKER_00: I obviously have put a ton of research into this and want to get as close to the truth as possible.
- 4:23SPEAKER_00: But I am also aware that there is always more work to be done.
- 4:27SPEAKER_00: So with all of that being said, my mission statement is this I want to take the facts available to us, and I want to create a story with them that fits with what we know better, is more compelling, and rings more true than the one we are told by the corporate media.
- 4:45SPEAKER_00: I want us to think of these alternative stories I'm crafting as another possibility.
- 4:53SPEAKER_00: We want to create possibilities and ideas that can inspire others who have more facts or who think differently in the future to push even further and get closer to the bullseye.
- 5:05SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to lay these boundaries down because I think these networks and stories we talk about are intentionally obscured, and I think the point is to build scaffolding that others can keep building on.
- 5:17SPEAKER_00: Don't think of these alternative stories as dogmatic gospel.
- 5:20SPEAKER_00: Think of them as a working model.
- 5:22SPEAKER_00: We are building scaffolding over an intentionally obscured story.
- 5:27SPEAKER_00: The point of scaffolding isn't to stand alone forever.
- 5:30SPEAKER_00: It's to give the next person a place to stand so they can push closer, discarding what doesn't work and reinforcing what does.
- 5:38SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm shooting for here.
- 5:53SPEAKER_00: India's father, the international smuggler William White Schaefer, had his first serious run-in with the law in 1980.
- 6:02SPEAKER_00: They had been building the case for the past few years through an informant and fellow smuggler named Robert Durand.
- 6:10SPEAKER_00: He was given full legal immunity to testify against Schaefer, and the entire case hinged on his testimony.
- 6:18SPEAKER_00: Hilariously, in a strange twist of events, Schaefer's conviction would be overturned in 1985 because while Robert Durand, the man who was testifying against him, was doing this, he was also involved in a second DEA-sanctioned drug deal with another DEA asset named James Hoffman, who approached him because he needed a supplier for a multi-million dollar cocaine deal.
- 6:48SPEAKER_00: He had approached, of all people, John DeLorean, the inventor of the DeLorean car about.
- 6:56SPEAKER_00: Now, we don't know why exactly DeLorean, who had never been involved with smuggling drugs prior, was pushed by this DEA informant into this sting operation.
- 7:08SPEAKER_00: It may have been that he was becoming a serious competitor for the other Detroit car companies of the time who wanted to eliminate him.
- 7:17SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure it didn't hurt that this gave the DEA a big headline grabbing arrest.
- 7:23SPEAKER_00: But for my money, if I had to guess, the real reason would be that his main factory was in Dunmurray, Ireland, and he had been helping the Northern Irish and the British government launder money.
- 7:39SPEAKER_00: When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, she cut him off and he was going bankrupt.
- 7:46SPEAKER_00: So the British government, with the help of their allies in the US, decided to get him on video handy handling packages of cocaine because a drug bust means he is arrested instead of going bankrupt, and people aren't looking into why millions of dollars were going from the British government to DeLorean, and from DeLorean to a Swiss company called GPD Services before moving to Lotus Cars for engineering work, where a bunch of it seems to have disappeared into thin air.
- 8:19SPEAKER_00: I know that's a lot.
- 8:20SPEAKER_00: So to reiterate, India's father, William White Schaefer, was arrested after an informant agreed to testify against him for immunity.
- 8:30SPEAKER_00: But he was later let go because this same informant was also involved in a scheme by the DEA to set up the CEO of DeLorean in the same time period he was testifying against Schaefer.
- 8:43SPEAKER_00: Beyond just being a weird rabbit hole, I am mostly bringing this up to you to show you how entangled these worlds are.
- 8:51SPEAKER_00: Five years later, his conviction would be overturned.
- 8:55SPEAKER_00: And five years after that, he would get Catherine Oxenberg pregnant.
- 8:59SPEAKER_00: When we look at what William White Schaefer was doing in the 80s, we can see international intelligence, organized crime, legitimate business, European aristocracy, and Hollywood all merging together into a tangled web with one degree of separation.
- 9:17SPEAKER_00: This is the world India is born into.
- 9:20SPEAKER_00: And I definitely want to make it clear how weird it is that this is her father.
- 9:26SPEAKER_00: We don't actually know the specifics of how William and Catherine met or how India was conceived, but most biographies will act like it was just some sort of chance encounter in the Malibu party scene, which is insane.
- 9:42SPEAKER_00: The lives of this family are so much more curated than that.
- 9:46SPEAKER_00: As a random convicted drug smuggler, you don't get into the room with the house of Kara Georgievich, and you certainly don't get on such familiar terms with the matron that you end up sleeping with her.
- 9:59SPEAKER_00: There is just no way Schaefer slipped through the cracks and ended up finding himself in high society.
- 10:08SPEAKER_00: It's much more likely he was an asset with a decades-long history of maneuvering within the state's covert narcotics intelligence apparatus, which made him entirely qualified to cross that perimeter.
- 10:22SPEAKER_00: India is born in 1991, which situates her birth shortly after her mother Catherine has left the Show Dynasty, and her grandmother Elizabeth has started the Princess Elizabeth Foundation, which has massive unfettered access to the Yugoslavian refugee camps and trafficking networks that we talked about two episodes ago.
- 10:45SPEAKER_00: She went to the Point Doom Marine Science Elementary School in Malibu, which is an interesting history.
- 10:53SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'm sorry, I should say Point Doom.
- 10:56SPEAKER_00: It was originally Point Doom Elementary School, and it was opened in 1968 as a sort of middle-class agrarian experimental school.
- 11:07SPEAKER_00: But right-wing tax bills like Proposition 13 in 1978 and gentrification of the housing in the area eventually squeezed it financially until it was forced to close in 1980.
- 11:21SPEAKER_00: You can see one of the most obvious and frankly hilarious symptoms of the gentrification and the way the pronunciation of the area changes.
- 11:31SPEAKER_00: It is spelled D-U-M-E, and the original pronunciation was Doom, until land developers realized Point Doom was going to be a hard sell to elite families looking for secluded beachfront property, and went around adding an acute accent over the E on all of the signs and rebranding it Point Doom.
- 11:53SPEAKER_00: If you have ever seen the TV show Arrested Development, this is an absolutely arrested development ass way to handle this.
- 12:02SPEAKER_00: In 1996, when it reopens, it reopens as the Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School.
- 12:11SPEAKER_00: And it is still technically a public school, but within a larger gated community complex.
- 13:00SPEAKER_00: She spends from five to eleven years old at this school before moving on to the combined middle and high school called Malibu High School.
- 13:09SPEAKER_00: It was originally Malibu Middle School until 1991, when the parents in the district, upset about their children mixing with the rabble in Santa Monica or the Los Angeles basin once they hit ninth grade, hacked on four more years and changed its name to Malibu High School.
- 13:28SPEAKER_00: Now, India had been doing some minor acting roles ever since she was nine years old, pretty much exclusively in movies produced by her mother and her stepfather, Casper Van Dien, in the early 2000s.
- 13:42SPEAKER_00: Things you've probably never heard of, like The Miracle of the Cards or The Vector File.
- 13:49SPEAKER_00: But her serious introduction to the entertainment industry comes in 2005's I Married a Princess, which is a reality show starring Katherine Oxenberg and Casper Van Deen, where she is a regular presence at 14 years old.
- 14:06SPEAKER_00: She spends her days at an elite school with heirs to the Gerber fortune, or Brody Jenner, and in the evenings she's filming a reality show.
- 14:15SPEAKER_00: It only lasted for one season, but I can't help feeling that it probably gave her the skill set necessary to create convincing and supposedly real content for the camera once her later documentary about Nexium Seduced is filming.
- 14:32SPEAKER_00: It's also probably worth noting that around this time, Catherine Oxenberg and her husband were beginning to struggle for money, and things would not necessarily get better over the next few years.
- 14:44SPEAKER_00: Caspar Van Dien would move exclusively to acting in cheap straight-to-video movies, and Catherine would begin to watch her own wealth dry up as well.
- 15:03SPEAKER_00: India would finish high school, and this is when something really bizarre happens.
- 15:08SPEAKER_00: She enters university for a single year before dropping out to move to Albany and open a catering business.
- 15:16SPEAKER_00: This seems incredibly odd to me because if you are a scion of old aristocracy, you don't let your only child leave university to start a cupcake business with her friend.
- 15:29SPEAKER_00: And on top of that, the family has a history in the higher end side of Malibu.
- 15:34SPEAKER_00: And if one were to start this nonsensical business, it wouldn't make sense to do it in Albany.
- 15:41SPEAKER_00: But of course, this is where Nexium is.
- 15:44SPEAKER_00: I have a different theory here, which is that the gears were already set in motion to get her involved in Nexium.
- 15:52SPEAKER_00: The Oxenbergs are currently struggling for money.
- 15:56SPEAKER_00: And when you come from their class, that doesn't mean you get a job.
- 16:00SPEAKER_00: It means you look for some place that is rich in cash and could use some reputation validity.
- 16:06SPEAKER_00: Thanks to the Bronfmans and the Salinas family, by 2011 Nexium would already be really wealthy.
- 16:14SPEAKER_00: Now, given that we know Catherine introduced India to Nexium, and Catherine herself has been openly obfuscating exactly how much she played a role early on in telling contradictory stories, which I covered in the last episode.
- 16:32SPEAKER_00: I think it's possible that Catherine would have seen this high-end project flushed with cash and attached to these powerful families, and it would have been a natural fit.
- 16:45SPEAKER_00: And remember who, according to interviews, introduced Catherine Oxenberg to Nexium?
- 16:51SPEAKER_00: Gabrielle Anwar, who was working on a documentary called Sexology with her from 2009 to 2010.
- 17:01SPEAKER_00: I am finding as I travel through this story that so often the timing works out perfectly when we start digging into these connections.
- 17:10SPEAKER_00: 2009 to 2010, Catherine and Gabriel Anwell on War are working on a self-help documentary, which would have put Nexium in their purview if it wasn't before.
- 17:25SPEAKER_00: Then, in 2010, India inexplicably quits university and moves to a place where she has no roots and no established history to once again, I shit you not, start a catering business.
- 17:43SPEAKER_00: Then, within months, Catherine is dragging her to Nexium meetings, and when asked, she claims she was introduced to the group by Gabriel Anwar, which adds even more fuel to the speculation she would have known about it at the latest in 2010.
- 18:01SPEAKER_00: Now, as we covered before, Catherine is not clear about how long she was involved with Nexium.
- 18:07SPEAKER_00: Her story changes and it is hard to pin down when she left.
- 18:12SPEAKER_00: But here's what we do know for a fact.
- 18:14SPEAKER_00: Catherine claims Keith Rainier wanted to do a sit-down video with her where they have a conversation in 2013.
- 18:23SPEAKER_00: At this point, according to what Catherine has said, she calls up Anwar, who tells her Nexium is untrustworthy and could endanger her reputation.
- 18:34SPEAKER_00: So she chooses to decline, and also stops flying out to Albany.
- 18:39SPEAKER_00: What she does not do though, is seemingly anything to get India out of Nexium.
- 18:45SPEAKER_00: This to me only makes sense if Catherine's involvement was seen as too much of a liability with her age and history, but India's was not.
- 18:56SPEAKER_00: And another interesting thing happens when India joins Nexium.
- 19:01SPEAKER_00: She is immediately put under the mentorship of Mark Vicente and Sarah Edmondson.
- 19:07SPEAKER_00: It's hard to parse exactly the level of intentionality here, but it is hard to believe there is none when India is being plugged into this node and immediately ends up with a guy like Vicente.
- 19:20SPEAKER_00: I suspect that this family had enough familiarity with espionage to recognize the utility of a guy whose dad was a spy and whose mom was a diplomat in South Africa.
- 19:33SPEAKER_00: A guy who went from making one sleeper hit film for one cult before jumping to Nexium and being their main narrative architect.
- 19:43SPEAKER_00: It's possible somebody pointed the Oxenbergs in his direction, but it's also possible that they recognized who he was based on his family history and background.
- 19:53SPEAKER_00: And I think reading intentionality into this bears itself out even more when we consider that Vicente, Edmondson, Frank Parlado, as well as Catherine in India, would be the five people who would be more responsible for destroying Nexium and controlling the narrative afterwards than anybody.
- 20:14SPEAKER_00: India acts as an administrator and one of the high-level members for the next one to two years, learning the landscape, delivering authenticity to the group, and making money off of it.
- 20:26SPEAKER_00: And then she becomes an administrator for Rainbow Cultural Gardens.
- 20:31SPEAKER_00: These strange underreported international schools run by Nexium that we keep coming back to.
- 20:38SPEAKER_00: This is the black hole of the Nexium story that I suspect contains its dark art.
- 20:51SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about what we know.
- 20:54SPEAKER_00: One thing is that information on these schools is locked the fuck down.
- 21:00SPEAKER_00: You have to really search to find anything.
- 21:03SPEAKER_00: A lot of what I've found is going to be in the chapter on the Salinas family.
- 21:08SPEAKER_00: That will come after this and most likely conclude this series.
- 21:13SPEAKER_00: Let's go over what we know outside of information tied directly to Mexico and the Salinas family.
- 21:19SPEAKER_00: The schools first began in 2006 at the latest, and there are at least four of them we can say for certain exist.
- 21:28SPEAKER_00: One is in Albany, another is in Miami, a third is in London, and a fourth is in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
- 21:38SPEAKER_00: Four schools in four different countries.
- 21:42SPEAKER_00: One thing we know for certain is that tuition was$10,000 a child.
- 21:46SPEAKER_00: It was supposedly a multilingual school, primarily for babies and toddlers, where they were given a different nanny each day that constantly spoke a different language than the nanny the day before.
- 22:00SPEAKER_00: Everything was recorded and biometric data was logged twenty four seven, but none of these recordings or the content of the recordings was made public.
- 22:11SPEAKER_00: Presumably, when Reniri was arrested and a bunch of digital video was confiscated, a lot of it was from the schools.
- 22:20SPEAKER_00: It makes you wonder what our government has buried in their classified vaults and if any of it was useful to an institution that has proven itself very interested in behavior modification and predicting behavior.
- 22:34SPEAKER_00: We can say with reasonable certainty that some of the people who sent their kids in these schools are part of the Kaffritz social circle.
- 22:42SPEAKER_00: We can infer this because since Rainier and Salzmann continued to use Pamela Kaffritz's credit card after she died, financial audits were done and money moved through her and her family to Rainbow Cultural Gardens.
- 22:58SPEAKER_00: Some of this is presumably paying for the infrastructure, but some of it appears to be tuition fees paid by other people.
- 23:06SPEAKER_00: Keep in mind the Kaffritz family is tied to people in high levels of the DC infrastructure in the Pentagon.
- 23:15SPEAKER_00: Also, as I mentioned in the Kafritz episode, keep in mind that this family also has direct ties to the Manson family, and that in both cases they had a daughter involved in the cult die under very mysterious circumstances.
- 23:36SPEAKER_00: I struggle to articulate exactly what to even make of that, but it certainly makes your head spin.
- 23:45SPEAKER_00: It certainly is a very dizzying idea.
- 23:48SPEAKER_00: There is a civil case, Edmondson vs.
- 23:51SPEAKER_00: Rainieri, where some of these files were dug up in Discovery, but unfortunately every student named in them is a John or Jane Doe, and generic placeholder names are used for the nannies.
- 24:04SPEAKER_00: We know that India's main job seemed to be coordinating the international movements of children and nannies.
- 24:11SPEAKER_00: These nannies were victims of human trafficking, and this is one reason why we have focused so hard on her family's history.
- 24:19SPEAKER_00: Because it's no accident that in her young and mid-20s, India finds herself in this position.
- 24:26SPEAKER_00: At a certain point, you have to question how long this family has been doing this, and when human trafficking can be called a family trade.
- 24:36SPEAKER_00: Coercion, including taking visas and turning nannies into immigration, were used to keep them compliant.
- 24:44SPEAKER_00: Also, we know that whatever was going on here was in the interest of a lot of people to keep secret.
- 24:52SPEAKER_00: This almost never gets brought up when talked about in documentaries about Nexium.
- 24:57SPEAKER_00: In fact, I guarantee you, most people with an interest in true crime who have devoured Nexium content have little to no knowledge these schools even exist.
- 25:08SPEAKER_00: Like I already said, the governments of multiple countries have gone out of their way to classify the identities.
- 25:17SPEAKER_00: Also, when a scandal like this erupts, you would expect a bunch of lawsuits from parents.
- 25:24SPEAKER_00: And yet, not a single parent has filed a single court case against Rainbow Cultural Guardians.
- 25:33SPEAKER_00: Now, what could have been going on here?
- 25:37SPEAKER_00: What was the point of these schools?
- 25:40SPEAKER_00: We will delve deeper into the Selena's episodes.
- 25:44SPEAKER_00: And there I think we will find more answers.
- 25:47SPEAKER_00: Once everything is on the table and see what we can come up with.
- 25:51SPEAKER_00: I think when we look at India's family connections, how she entered the group, and who she was that it becomes clear she was too savvy to fall for DOS because she thought it was a good idea.
- 26:06SPEAKER_00: She would have understood the dynamics of high-level blackmail, and I certainly don't think would ever have fallen prey to it through some dope running a pyramid scheme.
- 26:15SPEAKER_00: I do, however, think that agreeing to brand herself was the perfect operational move.
- 26:22SPEAKER_00: The second she gets those initials burned on her, it gets rid of any doubt in the average true crime watcher's mind that she is a perpetrator and it fully cements her as a victim.
- 26:34SPEAKER_00: Now, this is obviously speculation, but I would say keep in mind that everybody who did prison time outside of Alice and Mack, who was particularly powerless and particularly tied into the inner workings of DOS, got no jail time.
- 27:00SPEAKER_00: So I do think there is a basis for this speculation.
- 27:03SPEAKER_00: In March 2018, Keith is arrested and India moves into a via with Alice and Mac for the next two months, managing what's left of Nexium and controlling the lower levels while her mom continues to run a massive PR campaign to establish her victimhood.
- 27:22SPEAKER_00: It makes me wonder how coordinated this was that India wasn't with Keith in Mexico.
- 27:29SPEAKER_00: Everybody who was with him would get some jail time, but she stayed in Albany.
- 27:33SPEAKER_00: I'll grant it could also just be operational necessity.
- 27:37SPEAKER_00: They were running low on Inner Circle and could have needed somebody to keep the home base secure.
- 27:43SPEAKER_00: In late April, Alice and Mac is arrested, and India stays for about another month, keeping things in order and allowing lawyers and cult D programmers to visit her, ensuring even more that the story her and her family want sticks.
- 27:58SPEAKER_00: Eventually, she is brought back to Malibu.
- 28:01SPEAKER_00: Once it becomes clear the Nexium operation is closed down, and she can move on to the next phase, where she has a tearful reunion with her mother and grandmother.
- 28:11SPEAKER_00: India is never prosecuted, and she never takes a stand.
- 28:16SPEAKER_00: There was an obvious intent to keep this a small contained lurid sex cult story, and I can only imagine what sorts of questions she would be forced to answer under a cross-examination.
- 28:29SPEAKER_00: Instead, she is never charged, never testified, and everything she will disclose about her time there comes after the story has solidified, and it's clearly exactly how little a person who spent basically their whole time in the inner ring can say.
- 28:56SPEAKER_00: Her equally useless book, Still Learning, comes a little later.
- 29:00SPEAKER_00: Since then, India has mostly kept quiet and only appeared to give brief interviews on her history with Nexium to people that are very supportive and people who will not ask any sort of hard questions.
- 29:19SPEAKER_00: And that is where we will leave it today.
- 29:23SPEAKER_00: This has been the end of the Oxenberg section, and we will be moving on to the Salinas family next.
- 29:31SPEAKER_00: I want to thank you guys so much as always for tuning in.
- 29:36SPEAKER_00: And I would encourage you if you have the money and you're interested in some extra content to maybe jump over to my Patreon and check that out.
- 29:48SPEAKER_00: It always means a lot to me.
- 29:50SPEAKER_00: It means a lot to me psychologically to see the support, and it means a lot to me to have a little bit of breathing room to do some more of this.
- 30:16SPEAKER_00: If you truly can't afford it and you want the contact, you want the content, go ahead and message me and we will figure something out.
- 30:26SPEAKER_00: Because I don't have a lot of money now.
- 30:30SPEAKER_00: I've been very broke before, and I want to get this content out there.
- 30:35SPEAKER_00: I certainly don't want somebody to feel prohibited because they literally can't afford it.
- 30:39SPEAKER_00: So uh on that note, if you are looking to support this content in some sort of a way, not involved in Patreon, if you could give me five stars on whatever podcast app you listen to, that would be wonderful.
- 30:56SPEAKER_00: Give me a review, that'd be even more wonderful.
- 31:00SPEAKER_00: And I will be doing a Sinister Forces episode next week, and then after that, we will begin our Salinas family installment.
- 31:10SPEAKER_00: So have a good day, you guys.