When asked if she ever thought the day would come when India would be out, Catherine said she “lived in fear for probably two years” but that her faith had always been stronger than her fear.
“When I first confronted her at the end of May in 2017, I thought I could wake her up,” Catherine, who has spoken out about her daughter’s experience for years, told ABC News. “I told her she was brainwashed and that she was in a cult. I said, ‘I know about the blackmail and I don’t care if it’s about me. Don’t let that be the reason you stay in.'”
However, India said she was “too deeply in,” “scared” and “confused” at the time. “It was stages of revelations,” she said when asked how she “woke up.” “And I started working with a deprogrammer, who helped me tremendously. But you have to be open to it. Like, you can’t force somebody to see the truth. They need to want to, and I didn’t want to for a long time.”
Now, she’s looking to the future and has covered up the branding with an empowering tattoo of an evil eye with a phrase that translates to “still learning.”
“We all have metaphorical scars,” she said. “I have a physical scar, but you don’t have to live with that. You don’t have to live with Keith Raniere haunting you. You can reclaim your life. You can learn from it, and you can move on. And you can heal, and you can have love. And I just feel so lucky that I can have that.”
