Susan Dones’s post, When I First Saw Sara Bronfman She Was Kissing and Hugging on Edgar Boone Right in the Training, gave readers a glimpse of a Seagram’s heiress Sara Bronfman, aged about 25, at an Executive Success Programs intensive in what may have been 2002.
Prior to coming to ESP, Sara had divorced her husband, Irish jockey Ronan Clarke. She had several romantic relationships with Nxivm associates, apparently beginning with Edgar Boone. She went on to Emiliano Salinas, then Keith Raniere. She also had a relationship with Lama Tenzin Dhonden who was the American emissary for the Dalai Lama. In 2012, she married Libyan ex-patriate Basit Igtet, who was living at the time in Paris. Today, they have two daughters.
Keith apparently approved of Sara Bronfman’s relationship with Lama Tenzin. Kristin Keeffe tells us that Raniere would refer to the monk, Tenzin, who had taken a lifetime vow of celibacy, as Sara’s husband. He lived with Sara for a time in Clifton Park.
Lama Tenzin was instrumental in securing the appearance of the Dalai Lama in Albany, with Sara and her sister, Clare, on stage with him, and Raniere in the audience, who after the lecture came on stage and received the gift of a white scarf or sash from the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama gives Keith Raniere a white scarf symbolizing purity before an audience of around 2700 in Albany NY in May 2009. This photo is particularly interesting since we can see the audience and it appears that to the right is Nancy Salzman and Pam Cafritz who gave risen to their feet. To the many hundreds, of not more than a thousand Nxivm members in the audience, this must have been seen by them as an historic, spiritual occasion.
In this post, Shivani offers insights into Sara Bronfman and about how she was likely encouraged to stay with Nxivm and to make Raniere her mentor and to make this her life’s work, something she arguably did from 2002 until at least late 2017.
While the story of how Nancy Salzman immediately became a mentor and what some believe a mother figure for Sara, Shivani raises another point that might have also lured Sara into a sense of belonging to this community: That Sara had an opportunity to meet intelligent, good looking and a very different kind of man.
Although Sara has been silent on Nxivm and Raniere for the past three years, up until recently she was promoting a version of Raniere’s childhood experiment/school, Rainbow Cultural Garden in Provence France. An unfortunate scandal there caused the municipality to evict her from her government owned campus for the experimental school.
Her website bio states she is not associated with Nxivm, but does not explain why. She has not made any public comment about Raniere since 2017 when she gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine in his defense. This was prior to his arrest, though the article was not published until after his arrest.
The Dalai Lama speaks in Albany on May 6, 2009 L-R Dalai Lama, Roman Catholic Bishop Howard Hubbard, Clare and Sara Bronfman and Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings.
Artist depiction of Shivani
By Shivani
To milk the Sara cow and to get as much as possible out of her, there had to be a different set of incentives (given to her) used to keep her around. She had no economic needs and probably never will. That is not her hook. Her hook is more superficial and is somewhat status-driven, but with a hunger to be seen by others as sexually hot, desirable and yes, sexier than ewe or ewe or ewe, and this is very easy to exploit. Ah, yes it is. Trying to be an It girl.
Sara with Keith Raniere
Sara’s success is not Susan Done’s “success.” That is obvious.
Clare and Sara Bronfman
One can see that the now more matronly Sara, unlike her sister, Clare Bronfman, was and probably still is, a sensualist, rather a sybarite. This is no judgment of her. We all have our ways and means, our strengths and our tender spots.
Unfortunately, Sara hooked up with harmers and exploiters, and she still might not have faced up to it. ‘Cause, gee, she does not want to appear to be a sucking suckee sucker. Who does?
Easy-to-come-by orgasms can be a very popular hook. Like not working and getting it ALL, just with a brief come-hither.
Cum to mama bear! Papa bear. Cousin bear, whatever cuddly-wuddly “awwww yeah” bear floats one’s orgasms.
Sara Bronfman Igtet’s game could have been ooh la la! – the unencumbered seductress, and these men or women cannot be successfully fenced in with the nonsensical sexual rules which kept the more desperate hens and half-assed roosters inside of the coop for years and years, futilely digging into their poop-grounds of superfluous and deceptive off-centeredness, pretending that was it was all soooo good for their “growth.”
Raniere-directed miseries. What fun, huh. The “growth” of what? Mold? Your 19th nervous breakdown?
From American Greed: Nightmare on NXIVM. Sara Bronfman and Clare Bronfman with Keith Raniere at Vanguard Week
The ringmaster, Raniere, and his head pimpstress, Nancy Salzman, knew how to keep Sara Bronfman happy and how to use her to get others involved … or seduced, when it was convenient to use her services in that manner. Sara could stay SPECIAL because she needed to be special, for crying out loud.
Sara Bronfman and her lover Lama Tenzin [2009].
She might have required more orgasms than most of these poor disciple turkeys who were easier to make into sexually disenfranchised targets. And Sara could always jet off. So it was wiser to allow her to keep on jacking off like a fairy godmother. Give her a few ego-fulfilling titles and let her helpfully fill her swamp!
Susan Dones, ex-member of NXIVM
Susan Dones is no sybarite, but she seems to have observed how Sara was treated liberally and indulgently, and Susan appears to have resented it. The Saras of this world are not paying much, if any attention, when the Susan Doneses arrive at the playground. The entire territory is dimensionally, implicitly different. Susan had nothing to offer to Susan, and vice versa.
These objections to “what is”, vs. what is being presented, are the alarm bells which some tend to overlook, discount or to simply ignore.
Susan Dones has mentioned discounting a LOT of her own, personal alarm bells about what she was witnessing, observing while she was in Nxivm. Had she not discounted herself, Susan could have suffered a lot less. Eventually Susan was done with them, the accumulation of those very conflicts, which she was seeing repeatedly in various forms, reached the saturation point.
[Ed. Note: Susan Dones left Nxivm in 2009, along with eight other women, who have been called the Nxivm 9.]
One of the major points here is to help others not to get trapped, to be able to think independently and to listen to your own mind and heart and its feelings and evaluations. There are some very good voices of experience here about the deceptiveness of what are often called cults. Like Susan, who is seeing this experience through. And very probably, she has herself back. Much respect to her.
The very best wishes to her and to her partner, too.A lot of pain is over now.
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