We are studying the role that slave/master Lauren Salzman, the star recruiter of DOS, played prior to her epiphany that Keith Alan Raniere was an evil monster.
She is facing sentencing and, in studying her testimony, it seems at times beyond bizarre that grown women would tolerate and submit to such extraordinary insanity., while all the while claiming it was for their own growth.
This is Part 5.
Here are the other stunning and shocking reports on Lauren.
Part 1 How Lauren Salzman Described Her Branding Session
Part 3 Lauren Salzman Describes Collateral She Got From Her Slaves, After Lying to Them About DOS
At the trial of Keith Alan Raniere, Lauren was a star witness for the prosecution. She is being examined by Assistant US Attorney Tanya Hajjar.
At this point in her testimony, Hajjar is showing Lauren and the jury various exhibits. One of these is a series of photographs of Lauren’s slave Audrey’s brand, taken daily to show the progression of the healing of her brand.
Images of Audrey’s brand. [See complete photographs of the progression of Audrey’s brand]
Keep in mind that Audrey is an attractive, intelligent, young woman, employed in a coveted position in a humanitarian organization. She had given Lauren collateral of nude photos and a false confession that she had slept her way to the top with married bosses at her job.
Q So, the images in this exhibit, Ms. Salzman, what are they?
A This is Audrey’s brand which is Keith’s initials.
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Q Can you show the members of the jury where the defendant’s initials were…
A Yes, so this is K and then that triangle is the triangle of the A with the A and then the line, the middle line of the A becomes the back of the R and the R is reversed, it’s backwards (indicating.)
Q And what initials does that stand for, KAR?
A KAR, Keith Alan Raniere.
Q Now, does your brand and the brand of the other first nine slaves look like this?
A Mine is upside down, a mirror image of that.
Q Why?
A Because it was the first line, you could see that it was his initials in all the first line masters and everybody below the first line had it flipped upside down and reversed I think to conceal it.
Keith Raniere’s first line slaves had their brands with his initials reversed from the other slaves because they knew Keith was the leader of DOS and the brand contained his initials.
Q To conceal what?
A The initials.
Q So, in your brand the fact that it contains the defendant’s initials is more visible, more readily apparent than here?
A More visible, yeah, if you’re just looking at it directly but I always thought that that was suspicious because if you have the backwards one and you look at in the mirror, which is how you look at yourself all the time, it’s the right way so I thought for sure they [the slaves] were going to see it [was his initials] but…
Q But they didn’t?
A No, and that was also why I was raising questions to Keith about it but, yes, correct, they didn’t.
Q And did you ever ask permission to explain the initials, did you ask permission from Keith to disclose to your slaves the brand?
A Not to explain the initials but I did — I found out later that some people’s slaves did know about his involvement and I wanted mine to know and I did ask for permission and he said maybe at some point but didn’t give the permission so I couldn’t tell them. So, I mean — but I did have permission to read from (sic) them the book and so I told them that the supreme master had written the book for us and also that if we succeeded in our enrollment goals, we would qualify for additional curriculum and I was hoping that they would be able to connect the dots on that because it is almost exactly how the other organizations work and Jimena did. So, Carola knew about the initials and the brand and Jimena knew about Keith’s involvement.
Q Did the others?
A No.
Q Ms. Salzman, these photographs depict the brand over time as it healed?
A Yes, correct.
Q And for what period of time was Audrey sending you these photographs?
A I think these reflect the first six weeks.
Q Did she send these every day to you?
A Yes, they all did.
Q Did you send them anywhere else?
A To Danielle.
Q Why?
A I was told Danielle was the one who kept track of them.
Q This is the last image in that series. About how long after the initial branding was this image sent to you?
A This is probably up to six weeks.
Q You testified about acts of care?
A Yes.
Q And work that your slaves performed for you?
A Yes.
Q Was their work considered part of the vow of obedience to you?
A Yes.
Q And the monthly collateral, you testified that you submitted it and your slaves did, was that considered part of the vow as well?
A It was considered part of keeping collateral current but, yes, when I told them to keep it current, it was under the vow of obedience.
Q Did your slaves also track enrollment in DOS in some form?
A They did, yes.
Q Can you explain that?
A There were a number of things that I asked them to keep track of, who they were enrolling and in which stage of enrollment each of the candidates were, when they expected that those candidates would each move to the next stage of enrollment and be fully collateralized in the vow, and then there were other things I asked them to track; their acts of care, I asked them to track that they were doing their daily act of self-denial, their good morning-good night and anything else they were checking in on I asked them to keep track of. I didn’t necessarily need to see it but I wanted them tracking it.
Hajjar then presented another exhibit to Lauren.
Q Ms. Salzman, I’m showing you what’s in evidence as Government Exhibit 425R. This is a spreadsheet to track the stages of enrollment and how much time they anticipated each person would be in each stage of enrollment. And so at the top when it says: “Prospect’s first guarantee approach,” “Pitch to saying yes,” Why “first said yes,” what does that mean?
A That means the prospect is who do you have in mind to approach to join. “First guarantee” means that they submitted the initial collateral for secrecy. “Pitch to saying yes” is when you’re in the process of telling them about the four aspects to the vow.
That the “lifer” said yes, which is the stage four-column, means that they’ve heard the four aspects of joining, which is The Vow of obedience, the master-slave concept, the collar and branding and they said, yes, that they want to join after hearing that. And then, stage five is they have fully collateralized.
Q And they are six rows underneath those headers. What do each of those — those rows [are] each a DOS slave of yours?
A Yes.
Q Did Audrey prepare this at your direction?
A Audrey offered to come up with a way to help track it, and I said, yes, that would be helpful to me.
Q Did you instruct that there needed to be tracking?
A Yes, I asked her to track a number of different things.
Q And so what is — what does this page of Government Exhibit 425R show, the second page, it says enrollment status tracking, what does this reflect?
A It shows the different people that each of my slaves had in the stages of enrollment and when they anticipated each — the dates that they would be moving through the different stages.
Q And are those dates reflected at the top?
A Yes.
Q At the bottom where it says: “Totals lifer, all including M,” what does that mean?
A It meant how many people that we would have fully collateralized in The Vow by each of those dates, including myself. So it was how many we would have in our entire group; myself included, my slaves included, and their enrollments, and anyone below them included.
Q So at 45, the lower right-hand column would be by July 3rd [2017] that corresponds to dates, in other words?
A That’s what they were striving for, yes.
Q Can you describe what this page reflects in group accountability and the chart that’s underneath that?
A I believe this is — these are the different things that they were tracking. So they were tracking their enrollment, a discipline that they were doing. I don’t know if that was daily acts of self-denial or weekly active care. I had asked them to notify me, so that was [what] they were tracking. They were updating their goals, sending pictures and brands, doing their active care, and being accountable to the data in the spreadsheet, and they were adding their penances as a personal list. And then for June, when they said “weight,” weight was another word that we used for collateral.
So where they’re saying monthly guarantee, that means the monthly collateral. And that they were reporting to me that they had submitted it. That they were fully collateralized and that were ready. So those were the things they were checking on.
Q And the “M” refers to you as master?
A Yes.
Q The highlighted box here, “take one spoon per person who fails.” Do you know what that refers to?
A Audrey called it a spoon, but I think she was taking paddle penances if they failed for all the failures of the people in her group. She had brought it to me and asked me — she told me she wanted to do it and asked me if I was okay with her to do that [being paddled] and I said, yes.
Q Was that something you suggested?
A I suggested that they take — that they figure out how they wanted to deal with the readiness failures, [readiness drills or tests were where the slaves had to respond to a text from their master by text within 60 seconds any time day or night or be punished. Masters were punished for their slaves’ failures] and that I was taking on penances for their failures.
So when they had failed at readiness, I shared [with her slaves]– I was taking on penances for them. So, they suggested that they would take the same penance I was taking. So, once I suggested — I told them I was taking [bare-ass] paddlings for all of their failures, then they wanted to take that as their penance as well.
And then Audrey, in this case, was taking additional paddlings for the failures of her group members.
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So there you have it. They were taking bare-ass paddlings for failing to wake up out of a sound sleep to respond to a text from their master within 60 seconds. These readiness drills were top-down drills. That is, Keith Raniere – who was up all night fucking around with women anyway – would send a text to his eight first line slaves – sometime in the middle of the night – and all the first line slaves had to respond to him within 60 seconds with the text “ready M” and then text their own slaves – who, in turn, had to respond to them within 60 seconds.
If the slave had a slave, she had to text that slave and get a response within 60 seconds.
In this way, Raniere could wake up every woman in DOS from her sleep within a minute or two.
If a slave failed, Raniere required their master to do penance – a punishment. He devised paddling as one darn good penance. In fact, he personally delivered a hard paddling to Dani Padilla’s bare ass. [Raniere was somewhat displeased when he found Dani enjoyed it.]
First-line slaves Allison Mack and Dani Padilla
But it was supposed to hurt and it did. And for some of the slaves, it was far from pleasant.
And here, we have the image of Lauren Salzman submitting to being paddled repeatedly because one of her slaves did not respond to some 3 AM text within a minute and then one of her slaves, Audrey, is offering to be paddled as well.
Is there no end to the madness of Keith Raniere and his women?
