They joined NXIVM hoping to secure an improved life. But when they left the organization, they found themselves entangled in the court system, bankrupt and in one case suicidal.

Some people who have defected from NXIVM have said the same leaders who preach humanitarianism are also master intimidators who will wring out opponents with years of litigation, use private investigators to bully and urge the government to pursue charges against those they believe have crossed them.

“They’ll go to the ends of the earth to destroy you,” Susan Dones, who once established a NXIVM training site in Washington state but broke away from the group in 2009, said in court last fall. She and her partner and former NXIVM trainer Kim Woolhouse were representing themselves against NXIVM’s claims they had violated their confidentiality agreements with the organization.

“NXIVM is a litigation machine that is quick to file legal action against anyone who expresses an opinion about their ‘leader’ Keith Raniere’s behaviors,” the women told the court.

The judge in that case, Brian D. Lynch, agreed with some of that sentiment while noting that Dones was not blameless. “NXIVM’s claims and litigation tactics were disproportionate and largely lacking in merit,” Lynch ruled in dismissing nearly all of the claims against Dones.

“NXIVM’s pursuit of Woolhouse is another matter entirely and sheds light on its true motivations,” the judge wrote in his Oct. 25 opinion, in which he called the treatment of Woolhouse “deplorable.” “Her ‘sin’ was to attempt to walk away after discovering that NXIVM was not what she thought or hoped. In return, she was labeled as ‘suppressive,’ a term that NXIVM applies to former associates who leave the company or whom NXIVM perceives to be its enemies, and subjected to protracted litigation from two large law firms and a phalanx of attorneys.”

Ross, the cult tracker NXIVM sued for publishing portions of its training program, has alleged private investigators hired by NXIVM rifled through his trash, searching for financial records. After being sued by Ross, the private investigators denied knowledge of it in court papers.

Toni Natalie, a former girlfriend and business associate of NXIVM founder Keith Raniere, said a breakup with the self-improvement guru began with pleas for her to return to him and developed into an eight-year bankruptcy nightmare, an alleged campaign outside the business she once owned and a report to police that one of Raniere’s close associates had been tampering with her mailbox

Bankruptcy Judge Robert Littlefield sized up Raniere’s litigation against Natalie this way: “The individual challenging the Debtor’s discharge is her former boyfriend this matter smacks of a jilted fellow’s attempt at revenge or retaliation against his former girlfriend, with many attempts at tripping her up along the way.”

Another woman mentioned the organization in her suicide note, only to have leaders of NXIVM suggest after her death that she was part of a drug ring, as recounted in sworn testimony.