Warning: Graphic descriptions of sexual abuse.
The first portion of The Vow, a docuseries from filmmaking couple Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (The Square), was a nine-hour exploration of NXIVM—the Upstate New York cult of personality founded by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman that, among other things, branded a number of women with Raniere’s initials and brainwashed them into becoming sex slaves to satisfy the diminutive deviant’s urges. The HBO doc was an excessively drawn-out affair, tracing the company’s roots from its 1998 founding (back when it was known as Executive Success Programs) through to the 2018 criminal charges of sex trafficking and forced labor. It also spent an inordinate amount of time on Raniere’s bizarre volleyball fetish.
Now comes The Vow Part II, Noujaim’s six-hour docusequel covering the trial of Raniere, Salzman, and their most committed of disciples, as well as the plight of the so-called “NXIVM 5,” a small group of cultists led by Battlestar Galactica actress Nicki Clyne who still swear allegiance to their “Vanguard” Raniere and hope to free him. For even the most cult-obsessed among us, it’s yet another exploitative effort that grants far too much space to the aforementioned Raniere defenders as well as Salzman, laundering her reputation despite the fact that she ran NXIVM with Raniere, granted him legitimacy, manipulated his victims into rationalizing his abuses, enrolled her young daughters in the cult, and allowed Raniere to initiate a sexual relationship with her daughter, Lauren, right after she’d graduated college.
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“I had mixed feelings,” the elder Salzman recounts in the doc. “I felt like, in a way, it was a betrayal. But I also felt like maybe it was wrong to feel that way. I mean, he was supposed to be this very ‘ethical’ person and she wasn’t a child—but she was.”
There are, however, a few startling revelations in The Vow Part II, such as Salzman’s recollection of the time Raniere let NXIVM exec Pam Cafritz, who was dying of cancer, lay in her own feces while he finished his morning breakfast, or Lauren Salzman’s testimony that Raniere was constructing “a BDSM sex-torture dungeon” for the members of DOS, the all-female sorority within NXIVM whose members were branded and served as Raniere’s sex slaves, replete with a collection of sex toys that included the “Good Boy Wireless Vibrating Remote Puppy Plug.” In order to gain entry to DOS, you had to take a vow to serve Raniere and only Raniere and submit damning “collateral,” typically in the form of nude photos and/or letters smearing yourself or your loved ones. If you left, your “collateral” would be released.
The most disturbing part of the docuseries is the story of Camila, Daniela and Marianna, three sisters from Monterrey, Mexico, who joined NXIVM as teenagers. After the girls’ parents fell under Raniere’s spell, he convinced them to ship Daniela and Marianna to Albany, New York, and have them study under him. Daniela, the younger sister—who was only 16 at the time—says the family lived an “idyllic” upper-middle-class life in Mexico and was even jokingly compared to the Flanders in The Simpsons. A gifted student, she’d first taken a NXIVM class in Monterrey in 2002, during her second semester of high school, and had received a scholarship to an “elite school” in Switzerland. As a “parting gift” prior to boarding school, her parents signed her up for a 16-day intensive at NXIVM, then known as Executive Success Programs (ESP). Raniere allegedly convinced Daniela to abandon her school plans and stay at NXIVM in order to help prevent an undescribed apocalyptic event that he said would happen in the next 10-15 years.
Nancy Salzman in The Vow Part II
HBOAt NXIVM, 16-year-old Daniela was charged with following Raniere around with a video camera and documenting his deeds, as well as analyzing complex science books and delivering reports on them to him. She was never paid for any of her work. About a year into her NXIVM stay, Daniela says she stole $6,000 from the administration office—only to return the money immediately. She confessed this to Raniere, who then smeared her to Salzman and others at NXIVM, rendering her persona non grata. But Raniere remained nice to Daniela’s face, which drew her closer to him. One day, while Daniela was in the middle of confiding in Raniere about her parents’ divorce, he kissed her. It was her first kiss.
“When I got home, I received a phone call from Keith,” Daniela testified. “He said, ‘I think it’s better that you don’t tell anybody about our kiss. I think that should stay between us.’ And I complied. When I look back, I think I could have changed the course of history if I had told my mother. I don’t think she would have been very happy to hear that a 40-year-old man had kissed her 17-year-old daughter.”
Daniela testified that their conversations “escalated in a sexual way,” though Raniere teased that they wouldn’t have sex until her 18th birthday. With her 18th birthday approaching, Raniere asked her what she wanted. She wrote on his hand, “S-E-X.” “He said I needed to lose weight—that when a woman was overweight, it interrupted the energy, so he couldn’t share his sexual energy with somebody like that,” Daniela recalled. “I felt rejected.” (Raniere demanded that NXIVM’s women remain dangerously thin, were not intimate with anyone else, and claimed that having sex with him could “fix disintegrations” in them.)
A week after she turned 18, Raniere called Daniela and told her “it was time.” He escorted her to an office complex, and into a room with a “dirty mattress” and unwashed sheets. There, he had sex with her. She was then welcomed into Raniere’s inner circle at Flintlock—a residence filled with people who’d had sexual relationships with him. At one point in The Vow Part II, Daniela is seen filming Raniere, who turned to the camera and says, “So in other words, every time you start filming you can suck my cock?”
“Every time we were alone, my role was to give him oral sex,” Daniela stated.
According to Daniela’s testimony, Raniere then asked her to try to hack into a number of email accounts—billionaire businessman Edgar Bronfman Sr.’s among them, because he was paranoid that Bronfman had designs to take NXIVM down. (Bronfman’s daughter, Clare, bankrolled the cult while his other daughter Sara had an executive role in it.) Raniere allegedly told Daniela, “Look, if we’re trying to build a better world we have to do unethical things ethically.”
In 2004, Daniela was forced to return to Mexico due to visa issues. So, she flew to Canada where she was met by NXIVM members, who smuggled her by car to Albany using a fake ID. She was now in the U.S. illegally. Around this time, Daniela discovered that Raniere was also having sex with her older sister, Marianna. Upon her return, Raniere said that he wanted to take a nap with Daniela and Marianna, and then attempted to have sex with them. When he removed his pants, Daniela and Marianna began crying hysterically, so he stopped.
“I had a conversation with my daughter recently who explained to me that the only time that Keith Raniere ever enjoyed any kind of sexual relationship was when there was something a little bit depraved about it,” explained Nancy Salzman in the film. “She said to me, like, when you went away on vacation, he used to love to have sex all over your house. And you wouldn’t know. He would love that sort of thing—or it had to be a threesome, or it had to be some kind of off thing.”
Raniere convinced Daniela to recruit her younger sister, Camila, into NXIVM. He gave her the nickname VC, standing for “Virgin Camila.” Daniela testified that in 2006, she learned Raniere was having sex with Camila. She was 16.
“I was also kind of jealous. He made me wait until after my 18th birthday, and he’s having sex with my sister now,” Daniela testified. “It’s all kind of messed up that I felt that way, and I deeply regret that I didn’t—at that moment—get my sister out of there. But that’s how it happened.”
Daniela was eventually impregnated by Raniere and pressured into having an abortion. Afterward, Raniere allegedly told her that the abortion was “a great opportunity for me to lose weight and get fit.” Shortly thereafter, the two had a falling-out. Daniela was subsequently shunned from the community and sent to “the room”—a small bedroom with a tiny mattress and the window blacked out, where she was tasked with penning letters to Raniere each day begging for forgiveness. Her only visitor was Lauren Salzman. She entered the room on March 9, 2010, and was confined there for over two years. Until one day, she escaped.
During Raniere’s trial, 1500 pages of WhatsApp messages between Raniere and Camila were presented as evidence.
“Would you accept a brand?” he asked her, adding, “You don’t want to burn for me?”
Another message from Raniere to Camila read, “I think it would be good for you to own a fuck toy slave that you could groom and use to pleasure me.”
This was, prosecutors allege, the beginning of DOS—a pyramid scheme of abuse wherein Raniere would get his “slaves” to recruit other “slaves” to have sex with him. Camila and Lauren Salzman were two of these recruiters, as was Smallville actress Allison Mack, who served as Raniere’s right hand in DOS. The messages also revealed that Camila was 15 when Raniere manipulated her into a sexual relationship, and the authorities additionally found a collection of 18 nude photographs of Camila that Raniere instructed her to take when she was underage.
The NXIVM inner circle in The Vow Part II
HBOCamila—or Cami, as she was called—bravely faced down Raniere during his trial, delivering a statement that read, in part:
He tried to replace my voice with his own, my thoughts with his self-serving ideas. He twisted my mind for so long that finding the strength and clarity to tell my story has been a slow and painful journey. And even now I realize that I still have a long road ahead of me…
I met him when I was just 13, and from the start…The very first time I was left to have a conversation alone with him, we talked about how I placed second on my eighth-grade spelling bee contest. I continued to avoid him after that for some time, but years later, he told me how he knew I was special from the moment we met at 13. He first had sex with me on September 18, 2005. He would expect me to celebrate September 18th as our anniversary together every year. That first time, which was my first time, I was 15. He was 45. He would often take me to his executive library where he would ask me to take my clothes off before coming up the stairs to the loft as he watched. During these secret meetings when I was still 15, he took naked pictures—naked pictures of me…
Your Honor, there is no outcome where I get the time back and the opportunity that’s lost—I lost, nothing that can be done or said to make me trust another human being the way I did before I met him. I believed in the goodness of people and giving them the benefit of the doubt, but that is exactly how he got away with so much. Respectfully, I ask the Court to take my 12 years of abuse and the effects of that abuse that I continue to experience today into consideration in sentencing him.
The hardest part of my story is over. Keith didn’t break me. I stand here today, now I can do my story justice. I will not stand idly by. I will not let somebody else tell my story. That is why I am here, to prevent him from almost destroying someone else ever again.
Lauren Salzman pleaded guilty to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy, receiving five years of probation (along with time served). Allison Mack confessed to the same charges, getting three years in prison. Her mother Nancy pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy—42 months behind bars. Clare Bronfman pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal and harbor an undocumented immigrant for financial gain and identification fraud, earning her 81 months in prison.
On Oct. 27, 2020, Keith Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison after being found guilty on all charges, including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, possession of child pornography, identity theft, sex trafficking, forced labor, and wire fraud. He was later ordered to pay $3.46 million to 21 victims (which was covered by Clare Bronfman), and is still—along with the aforementioned criminals and others—facing a civil suit from NXIVM survivors. He is in the process of appealing his sentence.
