(Illustrations by MK10ART)
Allison Mack is not the only person going on a podcast to re-BRAND their image.
In an exclusive interview available on the podcast Reality Life with Kate Casey, Nancy Salzman has given her first interview since completing her federal prison sentence on March 19, 2024.
While Salzman, 71, appeared extensively in The Vow (HBO) Season 2, which aired in October-November 2022, (while she was in prison) this is her first full interview following her release.
She responds to Allison Mack’s new podcast series. But mainly Salzman speaks about herself, experience inside NXIVM and how Keith Raniere is to blame. She had good intentions, she said.
It will be a two part podcast. Part One has been released. Part Two airs on Wednesday.
She goes into
How she first met Keith Raniere
The creation and expansion of Executive Success Programs (ESP)
Internal power dynamics and what she says was happening behind the scenes
How she claims the organization shifted into coercive control and the formation of DOS.
Her own role, responsibility, and reflections as she looks back at the events leading to her federal charges
Her life post-prison.
Salzman co-founded ESP with Raniere in 1998, which later operated under the name NXIVM. She pleaded guilty in 2019 to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy and Judge Nicholas Garaufis sentenced her to 42 months in federal prison.
Here are some quotes from the podcast.
On why she’s speaking now
Salzman:
“I’ve been silent since leaving prison. This is the first time I’m choosing to tell the truth about what actually happened—and what I wish I had seen sooner.”
On how long this ordeal has lasted for her
“This started in 2017–2018, then COVID dragged everything out. It’s 2025 now. It’s taken years just to find some semblance of a new normal.”
On Keith’s influence
“Keith didn’t go for the close right away. He played the long game. You would agree to small things, and before you knew it, you were in deeper than you ever intended.”
She was THE Product
Salzman said she was the product, was grossly underpaid and did not get her fair share of ESP
Blaming Raniere
“What he said to me was, this is your company. Figure out what you need to survive and just take that. Because it’s your company, you don’t want to be draining the company with a high salary… So I figured out what my expenses were. And I had a relatively, I had a lower salary that anybody pretty much.”
Keith used her “values” against her:
“He was incredibly skilled at eliciting your values and then feeding them back to you. He knew exactly what mattered to me, and he used that to convince me.”
Constant pressure to work harder
“No matter how much I worked—whether I was training, writing curriculum, or traveling—Keith always raised the bar. I never felt like I was allowed to stop.”
Relief when he was gone
“When he left the country (he went to Mexico in the fall of 2017), I thought I’d miss him. What I actually felt, after all that time, was relief.”
Never took a break
“For twenty years, I never took a vacation. If I mentioned needing one, he’d say, ‘What do you mean you need to vacate your life?’”
On fatigue and overwork
“I would teach all day, meet with people at night, and literally fall asleep mid-session. And still, people would say, ‘Just finish—please don’t fall asleep before you get to my problem.’”
Raniere’s control over her daily routine
“He wanted me to call him first thing in the morning before I did anything—not even my run, not even coffee. It was part of the control.”
He liked them skinny
“He liked women to be thin. The people who were in his orbit, most of the women were pretty thin. I’m not thin like that. I’ve never been thin like that… I was a size two when I was running my company…. He wanted me to lose weight, but he wouldn’t push the point with me because that was a place where I just said no… But he would say to me, ‘well, maybe you’ll lose the weight.'”
Not standing up to Keith
“I didn’t stand up to him about many things because at one point I remember, I think I questioned something that he was doing and he basically threatened that if I had no right. He would say I didn’t understand how he worked with people. And it was none of my business. And if I was, if I ever questioned him about how he worked with people, I would never see him again.”
The difference between ESP and DOS
“My company was Executive Success Programs. Nxivm was a name he created later… So my company was called Executive Success Programs. That was my responsibility. I also wrote the curriculum for JNess, which was a women’s organization. So those two companies I wrote the curriculum for, and I trained people, and I did trainings in both of those. There were other companies that were created under what we called NXIVM umbrella. They also had names.
“But there wasn’t one company called NXIVM. And then he created the ‘sorority;’ (that) is what I was told it was when I finally was told about it.
“DOS, the thing that created the problems, the thing that Allison is talking about in her (podcast), I was not privy to. There were about 100 or 125 women who were involved in that from the beginning to end.
“My company educated 18,000 people. We didn’t have problems in my company. We didn’t have branding or any of the things you saw on television. That was not my company. However, the media exaggerated this woman’s organization (DOS).”
How to listen to it:
The host is Kate Casey. The show is Reality Life with Kate Casey Podcast.
