By EILEEN FINAN
India Oxenberg was at home in Key West, Fla., one Saturday morning in July when she had the overwhelming urge to dance. She put on the song “Belly Dancer” by Imanbek & BYOR, blasted the driving beat and began twirling, swinging her hips and tossing her hair. And then she made her happy dance public on Instagram, a move that “made me sweat like crazy, but who cares? That’s the mindset I’m building,” she says. “I find myself having moments now where I let myself just enjoy being alive in this body. I feel free.”
Not long ago such unfettered joy would have been unthinkable. In 2018 Oxenberg escaped the headline making NXIVM cult, a group that subjected her to physical and mental abuse—including branding, forced sex and starvation—during the seven years she was in its clutches before her mother, actress Catherine Oxenberg, 62, helped free her, and the two assisted the FBI in bringing down the cult (see sidebar). But India carried the pain long afterward. “Getting out was only the beginning,” she says. “I had no f---ing clue what I was up against. These past five years have been heavy—and scary—but you can’t rush the healing.”
Now 32, India has built a new life in Key West with her husband of three years, chef Patrick D’Ignazio, 32, and has discovered a renewed confidence: “In NXIVM, so much energy was put toward self- hatred. My mind’s not consumed by that anymore, but it’s taken time to feel that I have value.”
With her new podcast, Still Learning, in which she interviews trauma survivors and experts, she’s on a mission to connect. “I want to use this unfortunate circumstance for something positive. It’s about asking, ‘What are the nuggets of gold after you’ve experienced something traumatic?’ ” she says. “I want people to come away with hope.”
In the years just after she was freed from NXIVM, as she provided evidence to the FBI and released a documentary about her experience (2020’s Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult), she found herself answering questions rather than asking them. The relentless focus on her past was draining: “It was 24/7, and it wasn’t healthy,” she says. She wrestled with the praise she received for speaking out. “People were saying, ‘You’re so brave.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t feel that inside.’ Shame will tell you that you aren’t worth loving.”
In her darkest days she struggled with suicidal ideation. “It was easy for me to go from a trigger to ‘Now I want to die.’ It was scary how normal that felt—and it was so fast I couldn’t interrupt the thought process.” She would text her mom messages of desperation: “I don’t want to be here anymore.” “I want to disappear.” Recalls India: “All of those things, I would say on repeat.” But “my mom could see that I had a future when I couldn’t see it,” she says. “To have people in my life that were able to ground me and say, ‘I want you here’—that is what helped me.”
One of those people was her husband. The two met in 2018—just one month after India’s escape—when they were both working at a restaurant in New York City. They became friends, and slowly India opened up to him about her past. They eloped in 2020, but it became clear how much pain was still beneath the surface: “There are scars you can’t see,” D’Ignazio says.
When emotions were elevated, India would retreat. “Anytime anybody raised their voice—even laughter—I’d go into a trauma response,” she says. “I became infantile.” Once, when her engagement ring went missing, “India was curled up in the bed, unable to do anything, upset and crying,” says D’Ignazio. “But even after I found it, [the upset] went on for another 24 hours.”
Food and exercise were fraught with fear as well. In NXIVM, “there was a huge emphasis on weight, because [convicted cult founder Keith Raniere’s] preference was to have people be very thin, anorexic,” India says. “I used exercise to punish myself. ‘I ate a lot, so now I have to walk 20 miles.’ ” After her escape, it became a way to forget: “I’d over-exercise like a crazy person because I couldn’t be with my own thoughts.”
Sex, too, meant danger. “As soon as I’d get remotely close, I’d start to freeze,” she says. “With sexual trauma, your body and mind feel disconnected. You might know you’re safe, but your body still responds as if it’s reliving the old trauma.”
That began to change during one of the couple’s camping trips, when D’Ignazio suggested they take hallucinogenic mushrooms together. “We started to get intimate, and I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. This is how it should be!’ My body actually felt good during sex. It helped me get out of my head.”
In combination with traditional therapy, psychedelics—as well as ketamine treatments, which have reduced her cycle of suicidal thoughts—have helped her “retrain my brain,” she says. They are not, however, a magic pill: “Psychedelics allow you to see that maybe the perspective you’ve been stuck in isn’t right,” says India, who is collaborating with her mother’s nonprofit foundation on Healix180, a project that promotes healing for trauma survivors. “But then it’s about taking what you learn and applying it without the drugs.”
That work continues at home with their cats Rice and Beans in Key West, where the couple moved in 2022 and where D’Ignazio opened his restaurant Eaton Good. “He’s helped me learn to love food again,” says India. She has been writing poetry and music—and building up the courage to take the stage to sing. “I feel so fortunate to be where I am now,” she says. “I wake up and feel excited about my day. I feel like I own my life.”
‘My life is really beautiful now’
— INDIA OXENBERG
HAIR & MAKEUP: LOLA TIMOTHY/ZENOBIA AGENCYBOTTOM LEFT, INSETS: COURTESY INDIA OXENBERG(2)