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3 Years After Leaving NXIVM, Sarah Edmondson Is Still Questioning Everything
Sarah Edmondson didn’t get much sleep the night before I talked to her. “My kids got up so fucking early this morning,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Vancouver, between sips of coffee. “4:55.”
You’d never know she was tired, though. Edmondson is a fast talker, one of those people with a lot of chipper energy, clever, quick to punctuate a story with sharp, funny observations. Anyone who’s seen “The Vow,” the HBO documentary series that details her 12-year experience in the NXIVM cult, is familiar.
Edmondson, 43, and her family — husband Anthony “Nippy” Ames and their two young sons, Troy and Ace — haven’t been immune to the stress of the past year. But the chaos of 2020 has allowed them to catch their breath in a way they needed, she told HuffPost Canada.
“We never really got the slow-down we needed, after everything,” she said. “We can just be, and that’s something we’ve never done as a family. We’re either in a cult and super busy, or super busy taking down the cult.”
2020 was also the year that Edmondson and Ames taking down a cult, as she put it so breezily, was broadcast on HBO. And it’s the year the cult’s leader, Keith Raniere, was sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Edmondson had shared the story of her time in NXIVM before, in the 2018 CBC podcast “Uncover: Escaping NXIVM” and in her 2019 memoir Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life. But the HBO show reached hundreds of thousands of viewers every Sunday for nine weeks, thrusting Edmondson into a new kind of spotlight.
Suddenly, lots of people who didn’t know about the CBC knew her story. And at a time when stay-at-home pandemic orders meant the shared TV viewership experience was more significant than ever, that had a big impact.
“The filmmakers at one point said, in the documentary world, the buzz is that this is the next ‘Tiger King,’” Edmondson said. “I was like, Oh god, I just hope I’m...
