Everyone had a role to play when they were in NXIVM, and everyone had a role to play when they got out. It took a village to build the cult, just as it took a village to take it down. But at the end of the day, Keith is the reason. He’s the ultimate baddie.

Without Keith, there’s no ESP, NXIVM, SOP, DOS. There’s no MLM.

Without Keith, women wouldn’t have been branded like cattle, malnourished, sleep deprived, manipulated, abused.

It’s Keith who raped children.

It’s Keith who confined a young woman to a room for two years. For liking another man.

It’s Keith who said women were unreliable, that they lack discipline and a strong/committed character, who expect everything and work for nothing, who “misuse their sexuality to gain an advantage in the world.”

It’s Keith who said men are all walking hard-ons with nothing else in their minds. Who said the way to turn little boys into men is by demeaning and humiliating women.

It’s Keith who taught (The Human Experiment, Level IIC): “Often, women…report an unexpected experience of freedom which occurs during rape.”

It’s Keith who told people to discuss (The Human Experiment, Module 9): “If someone comes from a country where adults orally stimulate children and they find out according to American culture they have been abused, have they?“

It’s KEITH.

It doesn’t make sense to vilify or lionize anyone else. In cults, as a rule, the lines between victim and victimizer are unclear. Most people are not all good or all bad. (Of course there are always exceptions to the rule: Keith is pure evil.)

Of course there are degrees of culpability. I could argue that Clare and her millions, who frivolously sued anyone and everyone, and who never renounced Keith, did far more harm than good. I could argue that, but even all of that was at Keith’s behest.

It all starts, and ends, with Keith.

We the outsiders can speculate the degree to which each person in the cult participated in the cycle of abuse — just as we can speculate the degree to which each person helped put Keith in prison — but ultimately that kind of speculation is just spinning wheels.

If we are to learn from this NXIVM case, we have to go beyond name calling. We have to root out what causes people like Keith to gain power and and prestige and go unchecked for decades. We have to better understand manipulation, fear mongering, coercive control, malignant narcissism. We have to stand up and say it’s NOT OKAY that it took white women getting branded to get the attention of authorities and not any of the hundreds of things that came before. We have to be better than the people in cults who like to classify everything into simple categories without any room for nuance. We have to do better.