Killer Thriller: The NXIVM Sex Cult Scandal: Branded, Breaking Free and Blowing the Whistle (With Survivor Sarah Edmondson)
episodePreviously titled “The NXIVM Sex Cult Scandal: Branded, Breaking Free and Blowing the Whistle (With Survivor Sarah Edmondson)” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Killer Thriller with your host, Alisa Donovan. Hey, everybody. Elisa Donovan here, back with a new episode of Killer Thriller. This is our second part of my interview with Sarah Edmondson, where she talks about getting out of NXIVM, the branding that they went through, and all of the work that she is doing today to help people escape cults and ideally never get involved with one. How much do you think actually being a mom in the midst of this helped you get out of it? Because you must have thought, oh my gosh, wait a second.
Yeah.
It definitely helped me. Having Troy, and I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit in the timeline.
I know. Sorry. That's my fault.
No, it's my fault. My fault. Paramenopause. I'll come back to it. Me too. Yay, winning. We'll just talk about the supplements we're taking later. Right, later. But having him not only grounded me in reality and forced me to heal so many things, I think I tell Troy that all the time, not to put too much pressure on him. He's 11 now, but he was almost three at the time. And he was such a gift. But I do think that the last two years before I left, I had been... You know, focusing on him and my marriage and, you know, we were traveling a lot. So we were also a bit stressed. But I think ultimately in the growth of the Stripe Path, which was the sort of backbone of an exam, I was not growing. Right. You know what?
Right. And they used to give me things to kind of keep me hooked. Like they promoted me to green sash at a time when I was like, I think I'd just given birth to Troy. And if anyone knows, for the NXIVM nerds out there, I was an orange three-stripe. Proctor. In other words, I had to get another stripe and then I would get my green sash. And I, that was taking so long. And then every week they skipped me, they skipped a rank and promoted me to Proctor or to senior Proctor, which is green sash, which is like, was great. And I was really happy, but I was like, Did I earn this? How did I... I think they just were trying to give me the thing that I was going for so I'd stay involved.
So you'd stay, right? And keep recruiting people and keep doing... Yeah, keep recruiting.
Yeah. So that had happened a few years earlier, but I hadn't got my first stripe on my sash and I wasn't working through my issues and I had stagnated. So when Lauren invited me, it was... the main selling point for me is that I'd get to spend time with Lauren and work with her and we get to check in daily and it's called a master slave relationship, but that's not, you know, it's not really a master slave. Like that's how she's, that's how she painted it. It was like, you know, we call it master slave. Like you're going to, you're going to, you know, text me as master and I'm in your slave, but like, right. Which to anyone else listening would be like, that's so fucked up.
Well, when you see the actual, you know, they share the text messages and the vows, you can see them.
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
4 identifiedMore from Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes Present
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