More drama than DYNASTY
A new series tells how Catherine Oxenberg rescued her daughter from a sex cult – but that was just the latest adventure in her tumultuous life
You honestly could not make it up. Descended from European royalty, society playmate of Prince Charles, proposed to by Prince Andrew and the star of one of the most popular drama series of the 80s (not to mention her very colourful love life), Catherine Oxenberg has seen more than her fair share of drama. But it’s the latest chapter in her astonishing life that’s been the most heart-wrenching, and today she says she always felt it was destined to happen.
As Amanda, the petulant daughter of Joan Collins’s scheming Alexis Carrington in Dynasty, Catherine’s face was one of the bestknown in the world. ‘The show was seen across the globe by 100 million people,’ she tells me. ‘Nobody really understands the reach it had, because that type of viewership doesn’t exist any more. The funny thing is, I used to wonder what purpose I’d been given with this platform. It kind of felt something had been set in place, but I didn’t know what it was then.’
Three decades later she discovered what that destiny would be – a desperate battle to rescue her daughter India from the grip of a sex cult. That alone sounds like the kind of bizarre plot Dynasty was famed for during its eight years on air – but for Catherine and her daughter it was all too real.
India was just 19 when she became ensnared in the clutches of Nxivm (pronounced Nexium), and over the next seven years she fell so deeply under its spell that she was starved, forced to sleep with the group’s founder Keith Raniere and branded with his initials. As the daughter of a Hollywood star with royal lineage (Catherine’s mother is Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia) India was an attractive ‘recruit’ for the group, but ironically it was also the reason Catherine managed to free her. ‘I can honestly say it’s thanks to my fame that I was able to rescue her,’ she says.
Her battle is told in Seduced, a new four-part documentary chronicling India’s terrifying ordeal and, ultimately, her escape. It’s eyebrowraising stuff even for Catherine, who at almost 60 retains the glacial good looks that have captivated all manner of men including, reputedly, Donald Trump and US senator John Kerry, as well as Prince Andrew. Throw in a 12-day marriage and a love affair with a convicted drug dealer (India’s father, as it happens) and Catherine is the first to admit her life has been extraordinary. ‘You could say that,’ she laughs.
Her mother, now 84, is a second cousin to Prince Charles while her father, clothing tycoon Howard Oxenberg, was a friend of the Kennedys, and Catherine recalls a privileged childhood od punctuated by glamorous dinner parties thrown by her mother. ‘I was five when my parents divorced and we moved from America to London,’ she says. ‘I remember spying over the banisters while my mother was giving dinner parties and there would be Prince Charles at the table.’
For a time Elizabeth was involved with actor Richard Burton between his divorce and remarriage to Elizabeth Taylor. Burton would take Catherine on hair-raising drives up the mountain roads near his Swiss home, and it was joining him on film sets that sparked her acting ambitions. ‘My mother was engaged to Richard when I was 13, and that had a tremendous impact on me,’ she says. ‘He was wonderful. Royalty, mum’s background, none of that seemed glamorous, but Richard and Hollywood and flying first class and diamond rings did. I thought, “Wow, that sounds fun!” So I went back to the States when I was 14. It was a different era.’
She won a place at Harvard to read Oriental Studies, but shortly afterwards she was discovered by photographer Terence Donovan and moved to New York to model. At 19 her aristocratic and acting worlds collided when she was cast as Princess Diana in a TV film, just a year after the royal wedding and long before Emma Corrin’s much praised performance in The Crown. ‘I was thrilled, then torn, because my mum was concerned about how the royal family would take the fact I was mimicking one of theirs,’ she once recalled. In fact, Charles gave his approval. ‘He said. “If they’re going to make the film anyway, at least Catherine can bring dignity to the role,” which was very sweet,’ she says today.
Charles was not her only fan. His brother Andrew once asked her to marry him on the palace balcony before Charles and Diana’s 1981 wedding. ‘He said, “Do you think you would be interested in marrying someone like me, or would you prefer to be an actress?” I said, “I’d really prefer to be an actress,”’ she recalls.
It was in the mid-80s that she won the role in Dynasty, for which
she was paid a rumoured $20,000 an episode. Caught in ever-more-ludicrous plots, in one episode she married the prince of the fictional Moldavia only for their wedding to be the scene of a massacre. She left Dynasty in 1986, reputedly after a row over pay.
Her love life, meanwhile, has been tumultuous. When she became pregnant with India in 1990 she refused to name the father, referring to him only as ‘a modern-day Robin Hood’. Many years later he was revealed to be William Weitz Shaffer who, two years after India’s birth, pleaded
guilty to a multi-million-dollar drug-smuggling operation.
Eyebrows were raised even higher when in 1998 she married Rober t Evans, t he f ive -t i mes married producer of Love Story who was 30 years older than her, only to seek an annulment a week later. later Within four months she was engaged to Beverley Hills 90210 star Casper Van Dien – seven years her junior, and by whom she has two daughters, Maya, 19, and Celeste, 17. They divorced in 2015.
It was Catherine who in 2011 booked herself and India onto a Nxivm course. Founded in 1998, the group claimed thousands of people – among them stars including Jennifer Aniston – had enrolled on its ‘empowering’ programmes, and Catherine hoped it would help India with her plans to open a bakery. In fact, it was a cover for Keith Raniere’s depraved regime – a regime that India was inexorably sucked into.
Catherine felt powerless to reach the daughter she felt gradually slipping away from her, until a Nxivm defector told her that India was part of a ‘master-slave’ dynamic and – horrifyingly – had been branded with Raniere’s initials. ‘She laid it all at my feet – and then that became my job. I went down the rabbit hole and my mantra was, “Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. Make it incapable for them to do business as usual.” I made mistakes, but I just kept trying. It was the most authentic role I’ve ever played, it was a “me” I didn’t know I had in me.’
In 2017 she went public and, under mounting pressure, Raniere was extradited from Mexico to New York the following year. Last month he was sentenced to 120 years in jail after being convicted of sextrafficking, racketeering and possessing child pornography. India moved back in with her mother in Malibu, her emaciated state reminding Catherine of her own 20-year battle with bulimia, triggered after she was molested by a relative when she was a child. But in yet another dramatic twist, the house Catherine had built from scratch was destroyed by the California wildfires. She lost everything, yet astonishingly today she is unfazed, in part because she has found love again. ‘So I lost everything, but I got love,’ she says. ‘He’s not in the entertainment business either, which is lovely.’
India, too, has managed to rebuild her life and is now engaged. ‘One of the things I find hardest to reconcile with is that I was the one who introduced India to Nxivm,’ says Catherine. ‘I feel a lot of guilt about that.’ But she hopes it marks the end of her family dramas. ‘Basically I told my other kids, “Don’t give me any problems”,’ she laughs.
Kathryn Knight
Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult is available now on Starzplay (via Amazon Prime).
‘Charles was very sweet to let me play Diana’
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