Elizabeth Smart tried to help save actress’s daughter from sex cult

Elizabeth Smart, the Utah woman who survived a kidnapping as a teenager, sought to help the daughter of actress Catherine Oxenberg escape the clutches of the NXIVM sex cult, RadarOnline.com reports.

The revelation comes from Oxenberg’s new book, “Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult.”

Oxenberg, 56, has helped expose NXIVM and how the sex slave cult masked itself as a women’s support group.

Oxenberg wrote in the book about the major changes she saw in her daughter, India, who in 2011 began attending the “Executive Success Program” led by the group’s leader, Keith Raniere.

“She was showing signs of becoming secretive, distracted, and unreliable – showing up late for appointments or not helping out at home when she’d promised she would,” Oxenberg wrote.

The once “gentle, mild-mannered” daughter turned into an “Energizer Bunny missionary” by the fall of 2014.

Oxenberg tried multiple times to intervene. She asked Smart to help after learning India was being forced to have sex with Raniere and was subject to the same type of branding performed by Allison Mack of “Smallville.”

“We made a plan for her to send an email to India asking if she needed support, explaining that, she, too had been a victim of media exposure and experienced many emotions that India might be going through,” Oxenberg wrote.

Smart reportedly penned a “wonderful, heartfelt” letter to India, but the daughter failed to reply.

In 2002, Smart was kidnapped, held captive and sexually assaulted by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee.

Smart wrote in her own book, which was published earlier this year, that she believes rape is more harmful than murder.

India’s devotion to NXIVM was so strong that she wasn’t deterred when Oxenberg told her Raniere was going to face criminal charges for sex trafficking and racketeering.

India is said to have brushed it off, replying, “lots of people do those things.”

Oxenberg’s memoir is scheduled to debut in August.

 

[Feature image: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP]