By Paul Serran
The Vow, Part 2, has rekindled greatly the interest by the media in the whole NXIVM tale, and the cast of ‘characters’ that became familiar to the mainstream public over the last two years.
Fashion magazine ‘Elle’, for example, published a long and detailed article called ‘Where is Nancy Salzman Now?‘
‘Part Two also offers new insight into the people who supported and enabled him—perhaps nobody more so than the group’s co-founder Nancy Salzman, who is interviewed extensively.’
Nancy Salzman
The magazine goes on to present a ‘guide’ to ‘Salzman’s role in NXIVM, and what’s happened to her since the group’s crimes came to light.’
Elle reminds readers of how ‘the Prefect’ Salzman worked with Raniere for two decades, and the result of that work.
‘According to former NXIVM member Ivy Nevares, […] Salzman held a deeply abusive role within NXIVM as a coach and a teacher. […] [A]fter Raniere sexually assaulted Nevares, Salzman told her that she was lucky to have been singled out.’
MK10ART’s painting of Nancy Salzman
Nevares: ‘As prefect, she had the second most powerful and exalted status: We bowed to her, we thanked her as a ritual at the end of every class. […] But as a teacher, she was brutal and punishing, often using public humiliation and verbal abuse to quash dissent.’
Salzman tries to defend herself in The Vow Part 2.
‘In The Vow, Part 2, Salzman continues to defend herself,’ the Elle article notes, adding that she ‘insisted that she had no knowledge of DOS, the so-called secret society within NXIVM which was used to seduce female members into being branded and giving up compromising information that was later used to blackmail them.’
We have noted previously in other articles how the Prefect keeps miserably insisting that her multilevel marketing scam was a healthy and positive force in the world.
SALZMAN: ‘I spent twenty years trying to make the world a better place, and this is where I ended up.’
[After pleading guilty, Salzman was sentenced to 42 months in prison. Salzman serves her sentence at FCI Hazelton in West Virginia. She’s scheduled for release in December 2024.]
Oneida free-love cult.
On the other hand, once you have wet the public’s appetite for the NXIVM saga, it’s also possible to start finding it in all those different little contexts.
One tasty example is ‘The Curious Connection Between Food and Cults‘, where they interview food historian Sarah Lohman.
Ever since she discovered that Oneida ‘made flatware to make money for their 19th century free-love cult’, she went into a rabbit-hole and ‘I realized that there are often a lot of connections between food and cults.’
Many would immediately focus on ‘the tragic mass poisoning at Jonestown in 1978’, but she reminds us that ‘many late 19th-century cults were founded on agrarian principles that promoted vegetarianism and eschewed animal cruelty’, which she considers to be a positive thing.
Fruitland museum.
Sarah Lohman brings many other examples to the plate: author Louisa May Alcott joined ‘Fruitlands’, a Transcendentalist vegetarian cult cofounded by her father in the 1840s.
They ‘saw the divine good in nature and humanity. At Fruitlands, that meant a simple, agrarian society that didn’t use animal labor and stressed a vegetarian diet.’
Ironically, owing to their lack of farming skills, ‘the community struggled to feed itself and disbanded after seven months’.
How about a cult- affiliated restaurant in LA that attracted the likes of John Lennon, Warren Beatty, and Steve McQueen?
Father Yod and his 13 wives, Los Angles, 1973.
‘In the 1960s and ’70s, locals seeking healthy, natural food headed to the Source Family restaurant. The Sunset Strip space was run by the followers of ‘Father Yod” – Yes, you read it right – a ‘former marine turned spiritualist leader’ whose real name was Jim Baker.
‘The menu of organic salads, soups, and fresh juices revolved around the dietary wisdom that Yod found in the teachings of Jesus Christ as revealed through the Essene Gospels of Peace.’
The restaurant closed when the master went to Hawaii to be with his many wives.
Allison Mack [r] and Lauren Salzman. Both women were on low cal diets.
Finally, as it had to be: NXIVM is mentioned: ‘a pyramid scheme and personality cult founded by Keith Raniere in the early 2000s.’
Lohman notes how ‘forced starvation played a role in breaking [the slaves] down. […] India Oxenberg, who details her experience in the documentary Seduced, was limited to a 500 to 800 calories each day.’
For easier control Raniere was ‘having them calorie-count and starve themselves to a point that made them completely malleable. […] That puts people into a very manipulative state where it’s easy to coerce them.’
The food historian ends with a reflection that’s perhaps a bit obvious, but can never be said enough: ‘When wielded carefully, food can fund and fuel a community, but in the wrong hands, a diet can be a very dangerous thing.’
