HBO
Warning: Graphic descriptions of sexual abuse.
The primary portion of The Vow, a docuseries from filmmaking couple Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (The Sq.), was a nine-hour exploration of NXIVM—the Upstate New York cult of character based by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman that, amongst different issues, branded various girls with Raniere’s initials and brainwashed them into changing into intercourse slaves to fulfill the diminutive deviant’s urges. The HBO doc was an excessively drawn-out affair, tracing the corporate’s roots from its 1998 founding (again when it was often known as Government Success Applications) by means of to the 2018 prison costs of intercourse trafficking and compelled labor. It additionally spent an inordinate period of time on Raniere’s weird volleyball fetish.
Now comes The Vow Half II, Noujaim’s six-hour docusequel masking the trial of Raniere, Salzman, and their most dedicated of disciples, in addition to the plight of the so-called “NXIVM 5,” a small group of cultists led by Battlestar Galactica actress Nicki Clyne who nonetheless swear allegiance to their “Vanguard” Raniere and hope to free him. For even essentially the most cult-obsessed amongst us, it’s one more exploitative effort that grants far an excessive amount of area to the aforementioned Raniere defenders in addition to Salzman, laundering her repute even supposing she ran NXIVM with Raniere, granted him legitimacy, manipulated his victims into rationalizing his abuses, enrolled her younger daughters within the cult, and allowed Raniere to provoke a sexual relationship along with her daughter, Lauren, proper after she’d graduated school.
“I had blended emotions,” the elder Salzman recounts within the doc. “I felt like, in a approach, it was a betrayal. However I additionally felt like perhaps it was improper to really feel that approach. I imply, he was alleged to be this very ‘moral’ individual and he or she wasn’t a toddler—however she was.”
There are, nonetheless, a couple of startling revelations in The Vow Half II, reminiscent of Salzman’s recollection of the time Raniere let NXIVM exec Pam Cafritz, who was dying of most cancers, lay in her personal feces whereas he completed his morning breakfast, or Lauren Salzman’s testimony that Raniere was establishing “a BDSM sex-torture dungeon” for the members of DOS, the all-female sorority inside NXIVM whose members have been branded and served as Raniere’s intercourse slaves, replete with a set of intercourse toys that included the “Good Boy Wi-fi Vibrating Distant Pet Plug.” In an effort to achieve entry to DOS, you needed to take a vow to serve Raniere and solely Raniere and submit damning “collateral,” usually within the type of nude pictures and/or letters smearing your self or your family members. In case you left, your “collateral” can be launched.
Essentially the most disturbing a part of the docuseries is the story of Camila, Daniela and Marianna, three sisters from Monterrey, Mexico, who joined NXIVM as youngsters. After the women’ mother and father fell beneath Raniere’s spell, he satisfied them to ship Daniela and Marianna to Albany, New York, and have them examine beneath him. Daniela, the youthful sister—who was solely 16 on the time—says the household lived an “idyllic” upper-middle-class life in Mexico and was even jokingly in comparison with the Flanders in The Simpsons. A gifted scholar, she’d first taken a NXIVM class in Monterrey in 2002, throughout her second semester of highschool, and had obtained a scholarship to an “elite faculty” in Switzerland. As a “parting present” previous to boarding faculty, her mother and father signed her up for a 16-day intensive at NXIVM, then often known as Government Success Applications (ESP). Raniere allegedly satisfied Daniela to desert her faculty plans and keep at NXIVM with the intention to assist stop an undescribed apocalyptic occasion that he mentioned would occur within the subsequent 10-15 years.
Nancy Salzman in The Vow Half II
HBO
At NXIVM, 16-year-old Daniela was charged with following Raniere round with a video digicam and documenting his deeds, in addition to analyzing complicated science books and delivering stories on them to him. She was by no means paid for any of her work. A few 12 months into her NXIVM keep, Daniela says she stole $6,000 from the administration workplace—solely to return the cash instantly. She confessed this to Raniere, who then smeared her to Salzman and others at NXIVM, rendering her persona non grata. However Raniere remained good to Daniela’s face, which drew her nearer to him. In the future, whereas Daniela was in the course of confiding in Raniere about her mother and father’ divorce, he kissed her. It was her first kiss.
“After I acquired house, I obtained a cellphone name from Keith,” Daniela testified. “He mentioned, ‘I believe it’s higher that you simply don’t inform anyone about our kiss. I believe that ought to keep between us.’ And I complied. After I look again, I believe I may have modified the course of historical past if I had advised my mom. I don’t assume she would have been very comfortable to listen to that a 40-year-old man had kissed her 17-year-old daughter.”
Daniela testified that their conversations “escalated in a sexual approach,” although Raniere teased that they wouldn’t have intercourse till her 18th birthday. Along with her 18th birthday approaching, Raniere requested her what she needed. She wrote on his hand, “S-E-X.” “He mentioned I wanted to drop some weight—that when a lady was chubby, it interrupted the power, so he couldn’t share his sexual power with someone like that,” Daniela recalled. “I felt rejected.” (Raniere demanded that NXIVM’s girls stay dangerously skinny, weren't intimate with anybody else, and claimed that having intercourse with him may “repair disintegrations” in them.)
Per week after she turned 18, Raniere known as Daniela and advised her “it was time.” He escorted her to an workplace complicated, and right into a room with a “soiled mattress” and unwashed sheets. There, he had intercourse along with her. She was then welcomed into Raniere’s interior circle at Flintlock—a residence full of individuals who’d had sexual relationships with him. At one level in The Vow Half II, Daniela is seen filming Raniere, who turned to the digicam and says, “So in different phrases, each time you begin filming you'll be able to suck my cock?”
“Each time we have been alone, my position was to provide him oral intercourse,” Daniela said.
In accordance with Daniela’s testimony, Raniere then requested her to attempt to hack into various electronic mail accounts—billionaire businessman Edgar Bronfman Sr.’s amongst them, as a result of he was paranoid that Bronfman had designs to take NXIVM down. (Bronfman’s daughter, Clare, bankrolled the cult whereas his different daughter Sara had an govt position in it.) Raniere allegedly advised Daniela, “Look, if we’re making an attempt to construct a greater world we have now to do unethical issues ethically.”
In 2004, Daniela was compelled to return to Mexico as a consequence of visa points. So, she flew to Canada the place she was met by NXIVM members, who smuggled her by automobile to Albany utilizing a faux ID. She was now within the U.S. illegally. Round this time, Daniela found that Raniere was additionally having intercourse along with her older sister, Marianna. Upon her return, Raniere mentioned that he needed to take a nap with Daniela and Marianna, after which tried to have intercourse with them. When he eliminated his pants, Daniela and Marianna started crying hysterically, so he stopped.
“I had a dialog with my daughter not too long ago who defined to me that the one time that Keith Raniere ever loved any form of sexual relationship was when there was one thing somewhat bit wicked about it,” defined Nancy Salzman within the movie. “She mentioned to me, like, whenever you went away on trip, he used to like to have intercourse throughout your own home. And also you wouldn’t know. He would love that form of factor—or it needed to be a threesome, or it needed to be some form of off factor.”
Raniere satisfied Daniela to recruit her youthful sister, Camila, into NXIVM. He gave her the nickname VC, standing for “Virgin Camila.” Daniela testified that in 2006, she discovered Raniere was having intercourse with Camila. She was 16.
“I used to be additionally form of jealous. He made me wait till after my 18th birthday, and he’s having intercourse with my sister now,” Daniela testified. “It’s all form of tousled that I felt that approach, and I deeply remorse that I didn’t—at that second—get my sister out of there. However that’s the way it occurred.”
Daniela was ultimately impregnated by Raniere and pressured into having an abortion. Afterward, Raniere allegedly advised her that the abortion was “an important alternative for me to drop some weight and get match.” Shortly thereafter, the 2 had a falling-out. Daniela was subsequently shunned from the group and despatched to “the room”—a small bed room with a tiny mattress and the window blacked out, the place she was tasked with penning letters to Raniere every day begging for forgiveness. Her solely customer was Lauren Salzman. She entered the room on March 9, 2010, and was confined there for over two years. Till at some point, she escaped.
Throughout Raniere’s trial, 1500 pages of WhatsApp messages between Raniere and Camila have been offered as proof.
“Would you settle for a model?” he requested her, including, “You don’t need to burn for me?”
One other message from Raniere to Camila learn, “I believe it could be good so that you can personal a fuck toy slave that you might groom and use to pleasure me.”
This was, prosecutors allege, the start of DOS—a pyramid scheme of abuse whereby Raniere would get his “slaves” to recruit different “slaves” to have intercourse with him. Camila and Lauren Salzman have been two of those recruiters, as was Smallville actress Allison Mack, who served as Raniere’s proper hand in DOS. The messages additionally revealed that Camila was 15 when Raniere manipulated her right into a sexual relationship, and the authorities moreover discovered a set of 18 nude images of Camila that Raniere instructed her to take when she was underage.
The NXIVM interior circle in The Vow Half II
HBO
Camila—or Cami, as she was known as—bravely confronted down Raniere throughout his trial, delivering an announcement that learn, partially:
He tried to exchange my voice together with his personal, my ideas together with his self-serving concepts. He twisted my thoughts for therefore lengthy that discovering the power and readability to inform my story has been a gradual and painful journey. And even now I understand that I nonetheless have an extended highway forward of me…
I met him after I was simply 13, and from the beginning…The very first time I used to be left to have a dialog alone with him, we talked about how I positioned second on my eighth-grade spelling bee contest. I continued to keep away from him after that for a while, however years later, he advised me how he knew I used to be particular from the second we met at 13. He first had intercourse with me on September 18, 2005. He would count on me to have a good time September 18th as our anniversary collectively yearly. That first time, which was my first time, I used to be 15. He was 45. He would usually take me to his govt library the place he would ask me to take my garments off earlier than arising the steps to the loft as he watched. Throughout these secret conferences after I was nonetheless 15, he took bare photos—bare photos of me…
Your Honor, there isn't any consequence the place I get the time again and the chance that’s misplaced—I misplaced, nothing that may be accomplished or mentioned to make me belief one other human being the way in which I did earlier than I met him. I believed within the goodness of individuals and giving them the good thing about the doubt, however that's precisely how he acquired away with a lot. Respectfully, I ask the Court docket to take my 12 years of abuse and the consequences of that abuse that I proceed to expertise right now into consideration in sentencing him.
The toughest a part of my story is over. Keith didn’t break me. I stand right here right now, now I can do my story justice. I cannot stand idly by. I cannot let someone else inform my story. That's the reason I'm right here, to stop him from nearly destroying another person ever once more.
Lauren Salzman pleaded responsible to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy, receiving 5 years of probation (together with time served). Allison Mack confessed to the identical costs, getting three years in jail. Her mom Nancy pleaded responsible to racketeering conspiracy—42 months behind bars. Clare Bronfman pleaded responsible to conspiring to hide and harbor an undocumented immigrant for monetary achieve and identification fraud, incomes her 81 months in jail.
On Oct. 27, 2020, Keith Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in jail after being discovered responsible on all costs, together with racketeering, sexual exploitation of a kid, possession of kid pornography, identification theft, intercourse trafficking, compelled labor, and wire fraud. He was later ordered to pay $3.46 million to 21 victims (which was coated by Clare Bronfman), and remains to be—together with the aforementioned criminals and others—dealing with a civil swimsuit from NXIVM survivors. He's within the means of interesting his sentence.