Catherine Oxenberg Spent Years Fighting to Get Her Own Daughter Out of a Cult

TLDR: Catherine Oxenberg played the picture-perfect Amanda Carrington on Dynasty. Decades later, she lived through something no soap opera writer would have dared script: watching her own daughter get pulled into a real cult, and spending years trying to pull her back out.

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Catherine Oxenberg has actual royal blood. Her mother, Princess Jelisaveta Karadjordjevic, belongs to Serbia’s former royal family, which made Oxenberg’s own casting as a wealthy socialite on Dynasty feel less like a stretch than a formality.

She joined the show in 1984 as Amanda Carrington, Blake’s daughter from an earlier marriage, staying through 1986 before other actresses took over the role.

She Brought Her Own Daughter to a Self-Help Seminar in 2011

In 2011, Oxenberg attended a leadership seminar with her 20-year-old daughter, India, for an organization called NXIVM. Both of them thought it might help India build her own business.

Oxenberg has said she noticed something off about the group almost immediately, a sense that the self-help branding was covering for something darker underneath.

Her daughter felt the opposite pull. India kept going back.

NXIVM Turned Out to Be Something Far Worse Than a Business Course

NXIVM presented itself publicly as an executive coaching company.

Federal prosecutors eventually proved it was something else entirely: an operation built around founder Keith Raniere, who coerced women, India among them, into a secret inner group where members were kept on starvation diets of roughly 500 to 800 calories a day, branded with his initials, and pressured into providing damaging personal material as leverage to keep them from leaving.

Raniere was arrested in March 2018 and later convicted on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges. India remained inside the group until that June, staying even after his arrest, before finally walking away.

She Carries Real Guilt for How It Started

Oxenberg doesn’t soften her own role in how this began. “I didn’t sign my daughter up for a sex cult,” she’s said, but she’s also been blunt about the fact that she’s the one who walked India through the door in the first place.

A former member warned her directly that India had been pulled into what insiders called a “secret sisterhood,” telling Oxenberg plainly: “You need to save India.”

The years that followed weren’t a straight line toward rescue. “The last thing I wanted to do was expose my daughter publicly,” Oxenberg told Closer Weekly. “It was a last resort because I failed at an intervention, and the fear was I could lose her forever… At times I lost hope.”

She Wrote the Book Before She Knew How the Story Would End

Oxenberg published her memoir, Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter From a Terrifying Cult, in August 2018, while India was still inside the group.

Lifetime later adapted it into a film, Escaping the NXIVM Cult: A Mother’s Fight to Save Her Daughter, though Oxenberg has drawn a clear line about whose story it actually tells. “I’m very careful to say that this is not her story,” she told Variety. “She has yet to tell her story.”

India eventually spoke publicly herself, in a joint interview with her mother on Good Morning America, describing how she’d first been introduced to the group by actress Allison Mack. “It was a trap,” she said. “And it was a ploy for Keith to enslave women for his own sexual desires.”

Since then, Oxenberg has kept supporting other former members trying to rebuild, saying she’s helped provide resources so women could afford the exit counseling needed to give credible testimony against Raniere.

You can read more about the rest of the Dynasty cast in our full guide to the show.

Catherine Oxenberg, Frequently Asked Questions