There are glad tidings in the Salzman family.
Michelle is pregnant. She and her husband, Ben Myers, are expecting a male child, according to an informed source. The baby is due August 1.
Her older sister, Lauren Salzman, also once expected to have a child, whose father was to be Keith Alan Raniere.
At the trial of Raniere, Lauren spoke of the anguish she felt as she waited years for Raniere to impregnate her, something she thinks he promised to do if she lived up to his high ideals — which, unfortunately for her, is something she never did, according to her testimony.
In the end, after ordering dozens of abortions for women he impregnated, Raniere chose to father a child in 2017 with Mariana, a Mexican woman he had lived with ménage a trois along with the late Pamela Cafritz for more than a decade.
Mariana conceived right about the time Pamela was dying, perhaps on the same day she died. The child was born nine months after Cafritz died of renal cancer and reportedly was placed in a bathtub with ice to preserve her for cryogenic entombment.
Afterwards, Raniere asked Lauren, who had waited nearly 20 years to have his baby, to accept the male child he sired with Mariana and to dote on it, and love the child, like an aunt.
As Raniere admitted from prison,”having children is not a given or planned.”
Lauren testified she once told her Vanguard she was considering having a child, but not with him, not as a woman in a harem, but with a husband who has only one wife, and embarking upon normal family life.
Raniere said in his letter from prison, published exclusively on Frank Report, that he told her, “I would have to step down from my position in order to live the life I perceived she wanted. I asked her if she would choose that?”
When Raniere said he might stop being the Vanguard, it stopped Lauren in her tracks. She did not want this most illustrious of all men to quit as the leader of the most important community in human history, the NXIVM community, which she loved so much and of which she was one of its top and most highly-paid leaders.
Raniere said, “I think with the force of my conviction and personality, [I] persuaded Lauren to put aside her life wishes. This was never my intent; it saddens me for I was blind to my effects, and caused her pain. Lauren. if you ever read this I am so truly sorry.”
Keith Raniere and his student and lover, Lauren Salzman.
Lauren Salzman and Keith Raniere on the volleyball court. Once she engaged in horseplay with a male player and it upset Raniere so much that he declared he would not have a child with her.
In the end, Lauren Salzman wound up with a hairless cat, a brand with Keith Raniere’s initials on her groin, and a likely prison sentence.
Today, as Lauren awaits sentencing for her plea deal conviction on racketeering and racketeering conspiracy charges, her sister, Michelle, who avoided the harem, will be making Lauren an aunt soon. It is hard to say if Lauren will be around very much to dote on the child.
Sister Michelle also had a chance to be in the master’s harem, according to sources, but she chose the route Lauren almost did — marry a man who has only one wife.
His name is Ben Myers.
Ben Myers, the husband of Michelle Salzman
Ben, by the way, was a pivotal person in the life of another member of the Raniere harem, a Mexican woman named Daniela, the sister of Mariana.
Daniela developed amorous feelings for Ben back around 2010, and, as she told Frank Report and later testified in court, she kissed Ben and then told Raniere about it. She said that if he could have other women, she would have other men.
He was so upset by this insolent breach that he arranged for Daniela to be confined in her room, she said, in order to heal her ethical breach, which was to sin gravely in the harem, whose membership required of its women complete faithful sexual loyalty to Raniere.
Daniela was confined in a room with an adjacent bathroom for 700 days.
With a kiss, she betrayed her Vanguard.
While Daniela was tucked away in solitary confinement in an unlocked room in her family’s home, Ben, who was up for more kissing, was free to meet and woo Michelle, whom he later married.
From 2010 to 2012, Lauren managed Daniela’s confinement, managing her written communications [she had no phone or computer in her room, only pen and paper] to Raniere about how to handle her ethical breach of the illicit kissing of another man, so she would be free to ethically leave the room.
Raniere never did approve of her plans to heal her ethical breach. One day, Daniela simply decided to leave the room and go back to Mexico, without her ID, which Raniere and Lauren chose not to give to her, according to the testimony of Daniela and Lauren at the trial of Raniere.
Three years after Daniela left Albany for Mexico, Lauren bought her home on Lape Street and reportedly set aside a room in it for a nursery.
Now more than half a decade has passed and it seems clear that the nursery will never hear the laughter and the joy of the child of Lauren and the Vanguard.
The likelihood of the two coming together again is very slim.
Raniere is serving a 120 year sentence in USP Tucson and Lauren, now about 44 years old, is watching the window for childbirth closing. She last saw Raniere in May 2019 when she testified against him.
True, anything is possible. Raniere is going to appeal his conviction and, possibly because of Lauren’s testimony, or rather the halting of her cross-examination by the judge, he has a chance at his conviction being overturned.
If it happens, it won’t likely happen for at least a year, by which time Lauren will likely be in prison herself. She cannot appeal her conviction since she took a plea deal.
No one knows what her sentence will be, but I will guess it will 2 to 5 years.
If Raniere wins his appeal, he will likely be charged again and retried and another year or more will pass. Even if he were to be acquitted at a second trial, there is a chance he might be charged in the Northern District and tried again on other charges including possession of child porn, the photos of Camila at allegedly age 15.
Camila is the sister of Mariana and Daniela.
Under the best circumstances, Raniere will not be out of prison in less than two years.
Regardless of the merits, I currently give the odds of Raniere
Winning his appeal at 10 percent.
If he wins his appeal, the odds of his not being retried at 10 percent.
The odds of his winning his second trial at 10 percent.
And if the above longshots are met, the odds of him and Lauren reuniting at 10 percent.
The odds of her being able to have a baby at the age of 50 at 10 percent
The odds of it all happening – at 0.0001 percent.
Which is to say it might happen. We are talking about a man who could:
walk in the rain and not get wet,
provoke snowstorms when he came up with a new curriculum
make radar detectors go off when he drove a car
get 20 plus beautiful women to agree to be in his harem while they could not kiss another man.
get women to vie with each other to spend 15 minutes with him.
get women to fight for the privilege of doing his laundry,
get women to run errands for him
get women to buy him gifts
get men and women to patiently wait to hear his pearls of wisdom
get women to provide any sexual pleasure he commanded,
get women to wait for months for a 15-minute visit
get women to starve themselves to be slender enough to please him
get women to sleep very little to show they were highly spiritual
get women to allow themselves to be branded knowingly with his initials as the eight first line DOS women did.
There is another reason why Lauren will not have her nursery filled with the sights and sounds of love, and the pitter patter of tiny little square feet in the house where she reportedly built a nursery/shrine to the unborn babe of the man who would be father to an avatar.
Last month, Lauren sold her home at 21 Lape, for $375,000. She bought it in 2015 for $332,175.
Per Realtor.com, the house was listed by former Nxivm coach and realtor to the NXIVM stars, Franca DiCrescenzo, a real-estate broker with Armida Rose Realty Group.
Franca Dicrescenzo has sold millions of dollars of NXIVM homes.
Lauren’s house comes with a bit of history too, as one hopes the new owners will appreciate.
As Lauren testified, some of her DOS slaves were invited there for a special initiation ceremony.
From Lauren Salzman’s court testimony:
“I invited them to my home… [in March 2017]. I asked them to come in staggered times [15 minutes apart] so they wouldn’t know who each other were, and I put them in different rooms of my house, and I asked them to remove their clothes and blindfold themselves, and then I led them downstairs to my living room, where they sat in a circle, and then they were able to take off the blindfold and see each other, and I did a candle lighting ceremony with them…to initiate them into their [slave] circle.
“Then they got dressed. We all had dinner and we went over to Allison [Mack]’s house to do the branding.”
“This cozy + charming farmhouse offers charm mixed with modern aesthetics all set on 3.73 acres” – realtor.com / The Vow’s Sarah Edmondson says she participated in a pre-branding initiation ceremony at this farmhouse with Lauren Salzman and four other DOS women, as she writes in her book ‘Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM.’
At the end of the day, one is almost speechless at the bizarre and the strange events of this little group, now disbanded and scattered, other than to utter the comforting phrase, “Viva Executive Success!”
