It was a morning a little more than a year ago: A dapper, gray-haired gentleman was discussing his recently published novel with the two hosts of Fox & Friends, the morning show on the Fox News Channel. Anchors Tiki Barber and Kiran Chetry appeared enthralled by the author, Juval Aviv, who said that his book was actually a barely disguised account of the life and alleged 1991 murder of millionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell….
Natalie claims that she secretly dated Raniere for a while, but she became unnerved by all the women he kept around him, as well as his odd promises that she would bear his child and that this child would save the world. “So I tried to break it off with him,” she says. That’s when the stalking started. Raniere’s followers, Natalie says, “broke into my house; they would come and ring the doorbell at all hours of the day or night. They would tell me that I had to come with them, that he was dying, that if I didn’t stay with him, he was going to die. . . . They tortured me—I got down to, I don’t know, a hundred pounds.”
After six months of this, Natalie says she returned to Raniere and dated him until 1999, when she tried to leave him again and open a restaurant in Rochester. And once again, she claims, the torment resumed. “When I finally did leave, they would break into my house and flip pictures upside down, they’d unmake my bed, steal clothes out of my closet. . . . They stole my mail, they shut off my phone, they shut off my electricity. They called me up and asked me if I knew where my son was. . . . They used to stand in front of the restaurant for hours, telling my waitresses, ‘You don’t understand, she has to come back—she’s the chosen one!’ ”
Eventually, Natalie says, the hounding faded away, and she set out to rebuild her life. But last summer, Joseph O’Hara contacted Natalie and faxed her a document that might, he said, be of interest to her. The document, which Natalie provided to the Voice, was a January 14, 2005, invoice from Interfor to O’Hara, in which Aviv and his associates agreed to follow Natalie, spy on her in her house, and dig into her financial records. “Interfor will conduct a discreet, confidential investigation on Toni Natalie,” the invoice read. “Interfor will monitor the current activities of Ms. Natalie at her house and certain other residences as discussed. . . . Interfor will conduct an asset investigation of Toni Natalie focusing on current holdings as well as possible fraudulent activity (i.e., using her dead aunt’s credit cards).” O’Hara confirms that he sent the invoice to Natalie.
Only now, Natalie says, has she been able to discuss this ordeal in detail. “They’re scary, scary people,” she says of NXIVM. “I can talk about it now, but up until three years ago, I was a babbling idiot. . . . You have no idea. If a door slammed, I’d be stuck on the top of the ceiling.”
Asked about Natalie’s allegations, NXIVM spokesman Robertson (FRANK PARLATO SEE SALZMAN DEPOSITION PG 96) says that Aviv was merely retained to investigate whether Natalie committed fraud when she filed for bankruptcy in 1999. “I couldn’t tell you what Aviv did with this Natalie woman, except that he was certainly not authorized by us to do anything other than to find out if she’s committing fraud,” he says. As for her claims that Raniere and his associates stalked and terrorized her, Robertson replies that Natalie is a deranged felon who embezzled a fortune and defrauded numerous banks.
“She is a habitual thief, and she’s a criminal,” Robertson says. (The Voice, however, could turn up no evidence that Natalie has ever been charged with a crime.) “She’s psychologically damaged. The woman is—she’s a classic kind of person who likes to pretend fear where she’s really the victimizer. . . . It’s ridiculous to suggest, as Toni has, that she was harassed.”
Then, after denying that Natalie had been the subject of harassment, Robertson e-mailed the
Voice an obsessively detailed 25-page report on her compiled by NXIVM associate Kristin Keeffe (the same woman who was supposed to be on the ship in the Caribbean with Ross), which was the result of an investigation into every aspect of her life—including her family, her husband, and the restaurant chain they operate—with 47 endnotes, including references to credit-card statements and lease invoices. Keeffe’s report accuses Natalie of no fewer than 260 counts of bank fraud, racketeering, and money laundering. Somehow, Robertson expected that this report—almost frightening in its level of detail—would prove that Raniere has put his involvement with Natalie behind him.
Forbes article depicting NXIVM as a strange, manipulative cult was about to go to press. And the family of Kristin Snyder, who had allegedly committed suicide after fleeing one of NXIVM’s 16-day “intensive” courses, was starting to raise a fuss. According to Joseph O’Hara, a local attorney who worked as a liaison between NXIVM and Aviv, Interfor was initially hired to investigate the circumstances surrounding Snyder’s death.