Truth Be Told

Open a streaming app on your television, and chances are you’re going to be bombarded with true crime documentaries about serial killers and cults. The true crime explosion has caused many to ask: Is it ethical to exploit the horrible trauma of still-living victims for entertainment? And perhaps more importantly, does the act of repackaging that suffering for popular consumption further traumatize the survivors?

Though many true crime documentaries have been criticized for sensationalizing the harrowing experiences of their subjects, Cecilia Peck ’80’s projects have attracted attention for their sensitivity to the participants. Some have even said that contributing to the films was a major step on their road to recovery.

Peck, the daughter of trailblazing French journalist Veronique Passani and Hollywood icon Gregory Peck, explained that her father’s interest in making films with social themes — such as racism in To Kill a Mockingbird and antisemitism in Gentleman’s Agreement — inspired the arc of her career. “I did grow up with a legacy of striving to do work that matters,” she says.

Her 2020 Starz series Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult charted the journey of India Oxenberg in the eponymous self-help cult (pronounced “nexium”; it has no relation to the stomach medicine).

The Albany-based cult was the shell company of leader Keith Raniere’s constellation of exploitative organizations, but the group became most notorious for sexually abusing women who belonged to Raniere’s “DOS” secret society and even branding them with his initials. In 2020, Raniere was convicted of racketeering, sex trafficking, wire fraud, and other related crimes and sentenced to 120 years in prison.

Though Seduced was released alongside The Vow, an HBO docuseries on the same subject, Peck’s series has drawn praise from participants in both productions, including Rick Alan Ross, the director of Trenton’s Cult Education Institute. “Seduced is probably going to end up being the definitive documentary on NXIVM,” says Ross, citing the documentary’s concise, hard-hitting narrative.

Peck continued with the 2023 Netflix series Escaping Twin Flames, which followed several women who became ensnared in Twin Flames Universe, a Facebook-based cult of more than 65,000 members that promises to identify the soulmates of its followers — if they sign up for pricey webinars and obey the increasingly controlling and abusive commandments of husband and wife Jeff and Shaleia Divine. Escaping Twin Flames was the No. 1 show on Netflix in the U.S. and No. 3 in the world in its first week, and in 2024 received an Emmy nomination for editing.

Cecilia Peck ’80 pursued acting after graduating from Princeton but has since moved behind the camera.

Courtesy of Cecilia Peck '80

Peck first became interested in storytelling as an English major at Princeton, where she studied classic works of literature such as The Canterbury Tales at the insistence of celebrated author Harper Lee, whom she met on the set of To Kill a Mockingbird. After graduation, Peck pursued acting, earning a Golden Globe nomination for her role in a 1993 TV movie written and directed by Arthur Penn called The Portrait, in which she played the artist daughter of an aging professor — portrayed by her actual father. In one of the final scenes, Cecilia’s character confronts her father and asks him what he thinks of her work. “I think you are on the verge of finding yourself,” Gregory Peck’s character says. “I sense that you still need that crazy courage … . I know you have it.”

Today, Peck recognizes the double meaning of that scene. “There are moments when your film life intersects with your real life so powerfully that you’re not sure which is which,” Peck says. “I probably was at that moment in my career where I needed to make that leap.”

She discovered that calling after finding a mentor in Barbara Kopple, a documentary filmmaker. Kopple’s 1976 film Harlan County, USA, which chronicled a miners’ strike in West Virginia, introduced the style of cinema verité — “fly on the wall” filmmaking — to the American documentary scene. “Working with Barbara taught me to follow a story and not impose an agenda or an ending onto a project,” Peck says, explaining she tries to find “people who have an interesting, important story to tell and [allow] it to unfold.”

“Making sure the on-camera contributors to our projects are supported and not exploited is my priority.”

— Cecilia Peck ’80

Peck worked for Kopple at her production company in New York, and the pair ended up collaborating on A Conversation with Gregory Peck (1999), a retrospective of her father’s life set during a lecture tour, as well as Shut Up and Sing (2006), which explored the conservative backlash against the Dixie Chicks (now known as The Chicks) after the band criticized the Iraq War.

“Both of us just like to tell a story and dig deep with people and get them to really open up,” Kopple says. “She’s taken on some really tough, scary subjects head-on, and she’s shown an enormous amount of bravery in doing it.”

Peck came into her own with the 2013 feature documentary Brave Miss World, about the sexual assault awareness campaign led by Linor Abargil, an Israeli model who won the Miss World beauty pageant weeks after being sexually assaulted. “Along with The Hunting Ground, we were one of the first documentaries about rape survivors,” Peck says. “Our film premiered in 2013, four years before Ronan Farrow’s reporting and Harvey Weinstein’s victims started speaking out.”

Brave Miss World was influential to Peck’s ethical process for another reason. “When Linor, who seemed so strong and empowered, started to become overwhelmed, we realized that meeting other rape survivors was triggering her own trauma,” Peck says.

“Ever since then, we’ve implemented having therapy available and funded for any survivor of trauma who appears in our projects.”

As a 2024 fellow of the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma within the Columbia Journalism School, Peck has advocated for increased support of trauma survivors who participate in documentaries, and she has partnered with Hoyt Richards ’85, a former model and cult survivor, to raise awareness about cults and coercion.

“Even though the filmmaking team shapes the story, it’s really a partnership with the survivors,” says Inbal Lessner, a film editor who frequently collaborates with Peck, explaining that they make the subjects part of the process, allowing them to watch raw edits of the work and continuing to support them after production wraps.

“Making sure the on-camera contributors to our projects are supported and not exploited is my priority,” Peck says.

That impact has been felt by Oxenberg, who reflected in a 2021 Starz panel that Peck and Lessner fostered a safe place to process her trauma in the making of Seduced.

“They were so kind and respectful and so on board with stepping away from the salacious stuff, and wanted to focus on the problem, which was coercion,” Oxenberg said. “There can’t be a more safe place for me to share.”

Lessner explains their philosophy toward their participants as giving the survivors “the ability of taking agency over their story … and then using it as a force for good.”

According to Lessner, after they built an advocacy website for Brave Miss World that accrued 10 million visitors, they realized the impact campaign had become “bigger than the film itself.” To expand their reach, Peck also started a website soliciting the stories of NXIVM survivors. Through this effort, their next project came into view. Whistleblowers wrote to the platform about the burgeoning Twin Flames cult. In the process, they revealed the thorniest form of abuse the cult leaders pursued to achieve “divinely inspired” matchmaking.

“Because they recruited too many women, they were stuck with not enough men to match people up with within the organization,” says Janja Lalich, the founder of the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion in California who appeared in both Seduced and Escaping Twin Flames.

As a result, Lalich explains, the Divines matched many same-sex couples. However, because the cult leaders only believed in heteronormative relationships, they convinced several followers to transition to new genders. The Divines issued a statement after Escaping Twin Flames was released denying any allegations of wrongdoing, saying their members are “free to engage with our resources as they see fit.”

Peck worked with GLAAD, a nonprofit LGBTQ advocacy organization, and New School media studies professor Cassius Adair, who is trans, to make sure the topic was handled sensitively.

“This cult is trying to launder really retrograde, controlling, and coercive ideas about gender into a hypothetically liberal package, and we need to interrupt that,” Adair says, arguing that the Divines twisted the ideas of transness for their own ends. According to Adair, members of the trans community reacted positively to the documentary, suggesting that the inclusion of his perspective “made the documentary watchable for trans people.”

The influence of Peck’s documentaries intersected in a surprising way. At one point, Jeff Divine instructed his followers to watch Seduced and write an essay explaining why he was not a cult leader. The assignment had the opposite effect for cult member Keely Griffin, as the documentary made her realize that Divine was a cult leader. Griffin reached out to Peck’s team and eventually became one of the central figures in the docuseries, which covered her indoctrination, escape, and recovery from the cult. “It’s very validating for us,” Lessner says.

One of Peck’s goals is to educate and show that anyone can fall into the web of a cult. “These cults recruit very intelligent, productive people,” she says. “We’re all vulnerable.” In fact, she first got on the trail of NXIVM when a friend invited her to one of the cult’s Los Angeles events.

If a friend or family member joins a cult, Lalich advises not to confront the person, but to try to remain in contact. “You want to tug at their emotional heartstrings,” she says. “You want to reawaken that former self.”

For Jason Bivins, a professor of religious studies at N.C. State, the popularity of cult documentaries such as Peck’s has helped his students hit the ground running. “It’s great as a teacher,” he says. “Students come into my class with a higher level of baseline knowledge, which means that I can just get to work.”

Though NXIVM met its end with the conviction of Raniere, Twin Flames Universe has persisted. However, besides spreading awareness about the group, the documentary has also hit the cult in its pocketbook. Since the series was released, the cult’s income from sales has declined 63% percent, former member Keely Griffin said in December 2023. “You just hope that followers will wake up and leave,” Peck says, “or the cult will come to an end without anything dangerous happening.”

Harrison Blackman ’17 is a freelance journalist and writer based in Los Angeles.