NXIVM leader forgoes loyalty
Nancy Salzman’s plea breaks her allegiance to spiritual leader Keith Raniere after 20 years
The guilty plea last week of NXIVM co-founder and President Nancy Salzman was a turning point in the ongoing federal criminal prosecution of the organization’s leaders.
For Salzman, a self-declared “psychotherapist,” Wednesday’s plea marked the first break in her more than 20 years of allegiance to NXIVM’S spiritual leader, Keith Raniere, who remains a top target of the Justice Department’s continuing prosecution.
Her downfall as NXIVM’S second in command also exposed the dark side of a once vibrant and charismatic nurse who had long been hailed within the organization’s ranks for her teaching abilities.
In court, Salzman, who was known in the organization as “Prefect,” admitted she wittingly took part in what federal prosecutors have described as a criminal enterprise engaged
in identity theft, computer fraud, immigration schemes, money laundering, sex trafficking, sexual exploitation of minors and kidnapping plots.
“I still believe some of what we did was good,” the 64-year-old told a federal judge in Brooklyn as she pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy.
Still, there is now clear evidence that Salzman had been aware for more than a decade that NXIVM’S dealings were often criminal in nature, and that she took part in the illicit acts — always defending Raniere — rather than questioning what was unfolding.
In 2007, for instance, Salzman allegedly boasted to a colleague that she kept about $1 million hidden in her Halfmoon residence in case she and Raniere needed to flee law enforcement, according to interviews with former NXIVM associates and court records.
Her once-secret escape plan was borne out a year ago after Raniere was taken into custody in Mexico, where authorities alleged he was hiding to elude arrest — which he disputes — and FBI agents seized more than $520,000 in cash during a raid of Salzman’s Saratoga County residence.
Barbara J. Bouchey, a former NXIVM board member and girlfriend of Raniere’s, met Nancy Salzman in 1988, when she was referred to her for stress management by a dentist who noticed Bouchey was grinding her teeth.
“She just called herself a therapist,” Bouchey said. “She was kind of always dressed very plainly. No makeup. Curly short hair. Motherly. Very warm, engaging and just really a lovely person.”
Bouchey said she was the one who introduced Salzman to Raniere in 1997, and they immediately found a connection.
“Nancy was an extraordinary teacher and therapist and, over the years, her command in front of a room teaching was brilliant, captivating,” Bouchey recalled. “Over the years she got more expressive, more confident. ... She started wearing makeup, changed her hair and grew into this more dynamic, attractive, polished woman.”
Inside NXIVM, Bouchey said, Raniere was the “brain behind everything,” and developed the training modules that became their trademark. He groomed Salzman on how to run them. In many respects, she became the public face of NXIVM.
At the time Salzman and Raniere met, she was a budding life coach interested in hypnosis, and he — according to prosecutors — was a cerebral con man in the making.
A year earlier, under a consent order with the state attorney general’s office, Raniere had agreed to shut down his first business, Consumers’ Buyline, which authorities had described as a multi-level marketing scheme.
Since roughly 1979, after Salzman had graduated from college with a degree in nursing, she began taking courses in clinical hypnosis. She eventually strayed from medical nursing into a therapy career, initially focusing on people who suffered psychological problems and trauma.
But there were also early signs of her willingness to break the rules: In testimony offered in a 2000 bankruptcy case, she admitted to lying about having a master’s degree in order to take a continuing education course.
By the mid-1990s, Salzman was running a Capital Region business called the International Center for Change, where she promoted teaching “strategies for success.” After being introduced to Raniere, and meeting several women who were part of his inner circle at a 1997 Christmas party, she quickly bought into his theories of what he called “rational inquiry.”
Together, they formed Executive Success Programs, which would become the foundation of NXIVM. Raniere set about developing selfhelp training modules that were patented as “intellectual properties,” Salzman said, and drew clients that included highlevel officials in New York government agencies.
Their business slowly grew, with annual revenues in the low millions and a client base that in the years that followed would expand to Canada, Mexico and the West Coast.
Although many NXIVM devotees have hailed the courses — which included hours-long intensive training on subjects such as “forgiveness” — federal prosecutors have cast it as little more than a pyramid-like scheme in which clients were lured in and trapped by indebtedness from paying for the expensive courses, and non-disclosure agreements that silenced them if they left.
The formulas promoted by Salzman and Raniere, prosecutors said, were a “means of exerting control over (clients) and to obtain financial benefits for the members of the enterprise.” The organization demanded “absolute commitment to Raniere, including by exalting Raniere’s teachings and ideology and not tolerating dissent.”
Salzman played an integral role in controlling their clients.
“Nancy Salzman ... personally encouraged many students to go into debt in order to take expensive NXIVM classes or to enter into low value ‘exchanges’ by which students would take a week-long class in exchange for teaching that same class three times,” federal prosecutors said. “Nancy Salzman, a registered nurse, also developed purportedly therapeutic techniques called ‘Explorations of Meaning’ (‘EMS’), which were sometimes used in coercive ways to manipulate NXIVM students.”
Salzman’s devotion to Raniere’s teachings, including a relationship the government said at one time included intimacy, resulted in her unwavering commitment to the man who called himself “Vanguard,” even as published reports and court filings began detailing the organization’s relentless attacks on its enemies and Raniere’s alleged penchant for manipulating women, including minors, for sex.
In one instance, Salzman is alleged to have participated in Raniere’s decision to keep a young Mexican girl — whose family members were NXIVM devotees — locked in the upstairs bedroom of a Halfmoon town house, in a neighborhood where Raniere and many of his followers have lived for more than 20 years. Federal prosecutors say the young woman was held there against her will for 23 months.
The young woman’s “breach” that led to her punishment was that she had shown affection for someone other than Raniere. Her crush, according to court records and federal prosecutors, was Benjamin T. Myers, 41, who oversees NXIVM’S computers and married Salzman’s younger daughter, Michelle, 39, also a NXIVM devotee.
According to a new indictment unsealed last week, Salzman in 2005 allegedly helped facilitate Raniere’s sexual relationship with the young Mexican woman’s sister, who was at the time 15 years old.
Prosecutors said the exploitation included taking illegal photographic images of the girl, which they recovered during raids of properties used by Raniere and Salzman. The allegations have elevated the charges against Raniere, who faces a minimum 15-year prison term if convicted on the child pornography and sexual exploitation charges.
Raniere’s attorneys, in turn, have fought back against the charges, accusing the government of overreaching in the case and mis-characterizing his work and relationships. They allege Raniere never coerced any women to have sex and they are asking a judge to throw out much of the evidence, including computer storage devices, seized during
FBI raids last year.
The others charged in the case, brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, are Salzman’s older daughter Lauren; television actress Allison Mack; Clare Bronfman, the organization’s operations director and an heiress to the Seagram’s liquor empire; and Kathy Russell, a longtime bookkeeper for NXIVM.
Federal prosecutors contend Raniere’s sexual relationships with the women who worked for him was an intrinsic part of the organization, and that he had intimate relationships with all of his co-defendants at various times, including Salzman and her daughter Lauren.
Since founding NXIVM, Raniere “maintained a rotating group of 15 to 20 women with whom he maintains sexual relationships,” according to the Justice Department. “These women are not permitted to have sexual relationships with anyone but Raniere or to discuss with others their relationships with Raniere.”
Court filings also have included allegations that the organization, with the help of Salzman and Bronfman, secretly brought large amounts of cash back to the United States from its Mexican operations.
In June 2014, a female member of NXIVM who was in a sexual relationship with Raniere sent an email to Salzman detailing a disturbing dietary regime she was following at his direction.
The woman’s email, referenced in the federal criminal case, indicates she told Salzman that her goals were to “uphold caring for Keith above urges to abuse and indulge.”
She outlined her physical goals, including a daily diet with no more than 500 calories and her plan to get her weight down to 95 pounds.
The woman wrote that she needed to text Raniere her weight every morning, call him every night to confirm she remained on track, and “weigh in Tuesdays and Fridays.”
“This is very good for the most part,” Salzman responded in an email to the woman.
Raniere’s ability to manipulate women to engage in arguably dangerous dietary regimens — many of the women close to him and those he allegedly groomed for sex were railthin — has been affirmed by multiple women and others associated with NXIVM. Despite Salzman’s nursing background, and her former marriage to an internist, Dr. Michael Salzman, she supported Rainere’s perilous instructions to the women.
Salzman’s failure to intervene may raise questions about her medical ethics beyond the criminal acts she has now admitted to committing, which included hacking email accounts of NXIVM’S perceived enemies and unlawfully manipulating evidence in a federal court case.
A Canadian woman who had enrolled in NXIVM courses between 2012 and 2017 provided the Times Union with a detailed account of Salzman’s treatment of her during a “self-love” intensive training course in February 2017.
The woman, who suffered severe symptoms from obsessivecompulsive disorder, said in a letter to the Times Union that Salzman had singled her out during the course and, in front of the attendees, belittled her as “entitled, a brat, immature, trying to be special, not responsible, a child, defiant.” She was devastated when Salzman then threatened to pull her out of the class.
By that time, the woman said, she had already been directed by Salzman to undergo what the state of New York now alleges were unsanctioned studies run by Dr. Brandon Porter, a physician who worked for NXIVM.
The woman — whose identity is being withheld by the Times Union at the request of her attorney — said the study took place in 2016 and that Porter, asked her bizarre off-topic questions about her weight, body-part obsessions, murder, harming herself or others, and similar “depraved topics.”
The woman said that a year later, during the 2017 “self-love” course in Albany, she was allowed into the program in exchange for being a study participant.
After Salzman’s demoralizing comments, the woman said she was isolated from the group. She broke down in tears.
“When we finished that night, I went back to where I was staying and thought about how I could kill myself and end the emotional pain I was experiencing,” the woman wrote in her letter to the Times Union. “It was very cold in Albany at the time and I thought about freezing to death outside, or driving too quickly in icy conditions to crash my car.”
Frank Parlato, formerly a publicist for NXIVM, runs news blogs in Buffalo and has been at odds with the organization for years. One of his blogs, Frankreport.com, in June 2017 published the first public accounts of women being branding with Raniere’s initials as part of a secret club within NXIVM. The New York Times published a story about the secret club four months later.
Parlato said that in 2007, he had been hired by NXIVM to improve its image, including its relationship with the Times Union, which had been reporting on the organization’s operations for several years.
“At that point, I was well-paid and willing to believe the best of my clients,” Parlato said. “I think Keith was always rotten. But I think there was a grain of truth in what Nancy said (in federal court last week) … that they were trying to do some good. They weren’t being branded in those days.”
The practice of having NXIVM devotees break off contact with their families has also been a common complaint about the organization dating back years, and among the reasons some experts have characterized it as a cult.
About nine years ago, Raniere had encouraged Salzman’s daughters, Lauren and Michelle, to shun their father, according to Parlato and Bouchey. It was done, in part, Bouchey said, because Michael Salzman had given a job to a woman who had defected from the organization.
Parlato recalled that, for the short time he worked for NXIVM,
Nancy Salzman had been a “curious creature.”
“She’s got charm, but she also knowingly participated in acts that were criminal,” he said. “She loved the adulation. She was the mini-guru ... wellhonored. She would walk into a place and people thought of her as this amazing, wise woman.”
In a 2003, Salzman was interviewed by the Times Union at the Silver Bay Association YMCA Christian Conference and Training Center on Lake George, where the group for years held an annual retreat — called Vanguard Week
— in honor of Raniere’s birthday.
“It’s just a normal business,” Salzman said then, in response to questions about a federal lawsuit describing the organization as tearing families apart and controlling the minds of its students.
“I don’t think we’re cult-like,” she said. “We are anything but a cult.”
Bouchey said she eventually uncovered Raniere’s dark side. In 2009, she and eight other women met with Raniere to address their concerns about unethical practices and the alleged abuse of his leadership status to sexually manipulate women in the organization.
“His secret weapon was secrets,” Bouchey said. “He was the wolf and we were, in effect, the sheep’s clothing.”
Bouchey left the organization in 2009 and went to federal authorities. Accompanied by two attorneys, she outlined questionable activities involving people associated with the group. She said her allegations were brushed off by federal officials and other law enforcement agencies in Albany.
In the years that followed, NXIVM’S leaders hit Bouchey with litigation — and computer trespassing charges that were later dismissed — in what federal law enforcement authorities now acknowledge was a tactic repeatedly used by the organization to punish defectors.
Through it all, Salzman remained loyal to Raniere and had aided in many of the organization’s allegedly underhanded and criminal tactics.
Parlato said people associated with NXIVM told him that Salzman had been unaware women were being branded with Raniere’s initials in the secret women’s society, which included her daughter Lauren. Some of the women were also being coerced to have sex with Raniere, according to prosecutors, who allege the Raniere at one time also had a sexual relationship with Lauren Salzman.
Nancy Salzman learned of the branding when it was reported on Parlato’s blog two years ago.
“People who witnessed it said she had never challenged Keith before,” he said. “She was pretty upset, but she stayed on board.”
When she pleaded guilty last week, to charges that could put her in prison for several years, Salzman apologized to Lauren, and rationalized in open court that many of the things they had done were “for the greater good.”
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