In the monster's own words

Photo by Natalia Kochanska on Unsplash

In moments of rage, it helps to put feelings on paper. To think that a few years ago, I would have been punished for feeling the way I do. But rage is a natural and valid response in the face of injustice.

How did the lowlife felon that is Nancy Salzman manage to buy a get-out-of-jail card? Did her ex-husband, a cardiologist, or perhaps her friends in the medical community exaggerate her supposed symptoms? Whatever her ploy, she managed yet again to play the ultimate victim.

In honor of this newest deception, I want the world to see her as she truly is, through the damning nature of her own words.

I originally included this email in my letters to the Court as she awaited sentencing, but I excluded it to be respectful of my reader’s time. It is the last in a long string of messages, which she penned at the height of my exploitation. I was raging against her, at the years she exploited me as she orchestrated it all with glee, sometimes even without Raniere having direct knowledge of it. Not because he turned a blind eye, but because he was otherwise “entertained.”

The email thread started after I laid out a timeline of the meager wages she paid or entirely withheld as my employer over the course of 14 years (at the time of writing). She controlled my salary, work visa and major expenses such as rent and utilities—the timeline details the years she raised my rent and decreased my salary. Like all the businesses she ran, she used my employment to evade state and federal taxes, all while she enjoyed six-figure paychecks and tens of thousands of dollars on everyday luxuries.

How did she justify my forced labor? My enduring exploitation?

My supposed ethical breach against Raniere, of course. I came so close to leaving that time, writing:

I am not happy with my situation. My breach and my work exchange relate, but they’re not complex equivalents. You seem to indicate they are with certain consistency. And maybe they are to you/the company, but then I need to know that’s how it is. 

If that is the case, I would evaluate my situation differently. In other words, if I knew that working here meant that unless I lost weight, was in good standing with KR, etc., my work with corporate [NXIVM] would not be valued for what it is, and instead would be devalued/undervalued, that’s a very different exchange than the one I think I’m under.

If you were to say, “Ok, the deal has changed: your personal issues are one and the same as your work with corporate,” then we’d be working within a completely different framework and I would need to evaluate my options given that. 

Her response?

Please read your breach over again if you are not happy with your situation and see how it applies.

I pushed back, to which she said:

Keep thinking and prove yourself wrong here like in SOP.

I pushed again. I even roped in Loreta Garza, another lowlife whom I believed a friend who could help on my behalf (how wrong I was!). Finally, the monster’s coup de grace:

Ivy,

You had individual personal training from Keith, a personal interest free loan, your name on his books as a co-author (when you were a ghost writer), you got to participate in the creation of Ultima and the possibility to earn upwards of $100/hour, the rent on your dance studio was paid for years and I’m paying for your gasoline. You have been compensated well and your breaches are something that is considered because you are a proctor (as it is the territory of all proctors). Stop it Ivy, do you want the job or not?

She lied, of course. The loan Raniere ordered was used to entrap me. I authored the books I wrote—Raniere hardly lifted a finger. I never earned upwards of $100 an hour ever, not even half, in any of NXIVM’s ventures, much less as Salzman’s employee. Of the over $100,000 I paid to keep my dance studio going through nearly 10 years (which was another master entrapment), Raniere paid a total of $3,850 as my “silent business partner.” And the gas she paid was because I could not afford to drive down to an empty NXIVM center to serve out my sentence every day—a sentence she singlehandedly brought down and enforced.

I wish I had taken her implicit threat of firing me and ran with it. But the shackles ran deep and would still run deep for another four years.

I have found my people, in spite of the Oxford comma

As an International Relations major, I always imagined I'd end up in government. Didn't think it would take me this long.

I found such a job in mid-2022. Lots of things clicked along the way. The job description fit my skillset to a T. During a nearly hour-long interview, I clicked with the people on the screen and the work described.

After a decisive but spectacularly poorly-planned move from Florida to the Washington, D.C. area, I embraced the new job, ready to dive head-first into the somewhat unknown. A couple of weeks later, I was featured as the employee spotlight on the internal bulletin, answering the question, “Tell us something no one knows about you," like this:

I dislike the Oxford comma with colossal passion and my sense of humor is my saving grace (though I'm not joking about the Oxford comma).

Notice the diss on the Oxford comma right then and there, yeah. That felt good.

What was even better was having fellow employees emailing me about it, to the tune of:

I know we haven't met, but my boss and I have long debated this subject. Anything you can do to help educate me on it?

That email and other chains were as rewarding as they were hilarious. At long last, I have found my people.

I MADE THIS IMAGE, BUT IT IS SO HORRID, I REFUSE TO CREDIT IT

Unbroken

Photo by SIMON LEE on Unsplash

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Peopleness

My three-and-a-half years in Miami were significant and formative. Professional accomplishments aside, it was a doorway out of my past and into the new, and I love the individuals I met along the way who made that possible. Honestly too many to count!

I find myself at the doorstep of my next incarnation and, I dare say: I. Am. Absolutely. Enthralled.

I'm finally in the Mid-Atlantic, a long-sought dream. The fall weather is spectacular and my commute to work has stunning views of our very Nation's monuments. Could I ask for anything more?

Apparently, I did!

I'm now working with a team who is breaking the mold: it’s an unusual, almost "heightened" mix of kindness, intelligence, good humor and well-grounded wisdom. The kind of people you want to be friends with, the kind you want to grow up to be.

So I'm experiencing a bit of “peopleness,” as I'm calling it—the happiness that comes from being around pretty amazing, wholesome people.

Photo by Eric Dekker on Unsplash

Transitions

I never thought I’d end up living in Florida, but I did. Miami became the backdrop to new beginnings, allowing me to reimagine a life risen from the past, a Phoenix from the flame. And for that, I will be forever grateful.

The fire still burns.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

No girls allowed

Photo by Miryam León on Unsplash

Several years ago, I had dinner with a man who became one of the most powerful executives during the 80s and 90s. He started as a lowly radio repairman in the UK and rose to the very top of tech companies then—huge names like Panavision and Atari. 

As he shared some of his experiences, there was no boasting or pretentiousness. He seemed to walk the talk. 

I imagined he’d earned his way to the upper echelons of Corporate America by working smart and working hard. But I had to know his secret: How did you do it?

I repeated the question several times—the answers simply didn't suffice. Finally, he said something to the tune of, “When you love what you do and do what you love, people will recognize what you bring to the table,” implying effort, innovation and results will be rewarded with recognition and the next level up.

Maybe that works for men, but not for women. Much of Corporate America is still very much a boy’s club. Sadly, many women have joined too.

Devil's in the details, as they say. It’s time to take the devil out.

At the core

Years ago a question was posed: Who would you be and how would you behave if you couldn't have a direct effect on the world?

TOUGH question.

Imagine walking around anywhere on Earth, sort of like a ghost. And no, no sexy clay-sculpting scenes involved with Righteous Brothers playing in the background. What if you could witness but could not influence what went on around you, despite what you saw unfold?

That probably sums up how millions of us feel about Vladimir Putin's atrocious war on Ukraine. The Kremlin's sadistic invasion and its ensuing catastrophes will be felt for years to come. Again and yet again: I stand with Ukraine.

Briefly back to the lone, existential question, which may serve no other purpose than to know oneself a little better: Who and how would I be?

Who I am—just that. And if there's any way I could improve the lives of those around me even just one bit—that’s exactly what I’m working to do.

Photo by Daria Volkova on Unsplash

I stand with Ukraine

Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

My statement at Nancy Salzman's sentencing

Your Honor,

This will be the last time I address the Court. Again, I am very grateful for the opportunity to do so. These statements have been a very important part of my healing.

In my written addendum, I detailed the crimes and abuses Nancy Salzman perpetrated against me, as well as her continued disdain for the rule of law. What I wish to share today is how she has affected my life and wellbeing.

It’s hard to look back on the years I spent in Albany. I see a woman, alone and afraid in her apartment, practically hiding from the world, ladened with shame and misplaced guilt. Her closest friends—most of them women—are all in on a complex scheme to isolate, deceive and exploit her.

I see her working in the middle of the night to barely make ends meet. She subjects herself to severe protocols to try losing weight and fears the morning coming. She rises before dawn, puts on a pair of sweats and a vinyl suit and runs for at least four miles. She sits in the sauna for an hour fearing the moment she’ll have to weigh herself in front of her coach that morning and face her scorn.

That Ivy is a far departure from the 24-year old who joined NXIVM, full of hope and possibility. She is a prisoner of Keith Raniere, with Salzman as her prison warden.

Some of the damage she did was visible yet remained invisible to me.

Years before I left Albany, I was clinically depressed and had severe anxiety as a result of PTSD—I just didn’t know it then, because Salzman taught that depression was a personal choice. Who in their right mind would choose to be depressed?

I had nightmares five to six nights a week—often so violent they’d wake me up in sheer terror. She said they were an effect of my “suppressive” beliefs and my refusal to heal my so-called breach. I relied on coping mechanisms, including eating disorders, to numb the pain. She admonished and belittled me for it.

Having trained as a psychiatric nurse, Salzman knew my condition yet did nothing to help. Instead, she leveraged my suffering against me, using it as further justification for her abuses and exploitation. She may pretend to be contrite today, but your Honor, picture the woman in this room enacting these unspeakable acts while being self-righteous.

That is the Nancy Salzman I knew. That is the Nancy Salzman who nearly destroyed me.

I was fortunate to have a loving family and support network waiting for me that fateful June in 2018 when I left Albany. But the bonds that held us close also meant they would have to suffer with me as I spent the next months and years unraveling the web of lies she spun. Imagine my parents’ heartbreak, my sisters’, relatives’, best friends’ and confidants’—imagine their impotence and rage after hearing me break down and peel back the layers of an onion Salzman putrefied. I have not wept alone all of these years, and it pains me to have had to share my pain with the people I love. I believe it is through this shared pain that I am where I am today.

I continue to heal with the help of these blessed souls, as well as through therapy and medication. My healthcare professionals tell me it’ll be a few years before the trauma’s strength dwindles to that of an echo in a distant memory.

I’m building back my belief in myself as a woman and a professional, yet there are still minefields I must traverse in the process. Salzman crippled me financially to the point where I could have a child now but I cannot do so responsibly within my means—this weighs on me heavily every day.

I have self-developed skills and a work ethic that were forged in the fire of forced labor, yet I lack the confidence that comes with what I have professionally accomplished. There is still a part of me I fight every day that says I am undeserving of love and success.

Salzman’s damage is vast and deep. I did not deserve this.

Your Honor, please see NXIVM’s second in command through the voice of her victims, not the person she is pretending to be. Salzman has the capacity for empathy. However, she uses it to wield her victim’s own empathy against them, playing them to her self-serving interests. She will undoubtedly attempt to do so with the Court today.

Please: do not let her win.

Photo by Marcell Viragh on Unsplash

My victim impact statement addendum on Nancy Salzman

Last month, I submitted this statement on Nancy Salzman to the federal judge presiding over the NXIVM case. I am publishing it ahead of her sentencing hearing tomorrow, September 8, 2021.

A special thanks to Colin Moynihan from The New York Times for reporting on this. Click here to read his article.

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August 16, 2021

Hon. Nicholas G. Garaufis

Your Honor,

This is the second and final addendum to the original victim impact statement I submitted to the Court in November 2019.

As a direct victim of Nancy Salzman, I wish to provide a first-hand account of her character and criminal behavior, which I believe my unique position within NXIVM allows me to do. I was a member of the organization and one of a handful of actual employees for nearly 17 years. In October 2002, I became a member of the inner circle, which consisted of Keith Raniere’s sexual partners. I held a high rank and a few leadership roles within NXIVM and its affiliates under coercive and exploitative labor conditions. I reported directly to Salzman as her employee and was also personally coached by her for the last 11 or so years of my NXIVM career.

I wish to convey three key points: One, that Salzman was not only instrumental but essential to the existence of NXIVM and the crimes she and others committed. Second, that she continues to demonstrate an utter disregard for the law even since her arrest, violating her bail conditions and, more gravely, attempting to intimidate me into not writing this statement. Finally, that the physical, psychological and emotional abuse she subjected me to as my coach speaks to her character and lack of empathy.

Just as the sex trafficking crimes within DOS could not have existed without Allison Mack, the entire range of crimes within NXIVM would have never existed without Salzman. As the company’s president, she alone built and facilitated the structure within which all crimes—DOS-related and not—were committed. Yet since her arrest, Salzman has deflected responsibility by blaming everything on Raniere, pushing this false narrative on everyone she remains in contact with, including NXIVM members whom she is prohibited from contacting. But in my experience, she bears far more resemblance to Raniere than any of his victims.

Unlike most victims who were young and inexperienced when Raniere entrapped us, Salzman was a powerful, self-made 44-year-old woman when she met him. Working with industry giants such as American Express and ConEdison, she was at the top of her game as a corporate trainer in New York when she willingly chose to be his sexual and business partner for life. In partnering with Raniere, she used her credentials as a corporate trainer, psychiatric nurse, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Ericksonian hypnosis expert to establish credibility and trust with NXIVM’s clientele. Like Raniere, she also dishonestly exaggerated her qualifications and propagated these lies through endless self-promotion to increase her authority and power. For instance, since leaving NXIVM, I learned that Salzman lied about being a licensed therapist. She allegedly registered her own clients under licensed therapists she employed at her company, the International Center for Change.

As NXIVM’s president and Raniere’s second-in-command, Salzman held near-ultimate power. She ran the business, served as its public face, and signed off on all legal and financial decisions. She elevated people to power within the company who would later commit crimes, principally Clare Bronfman, Allison Mack, Kathy Russell, her own daughter, Lauren, as well as dozens of others who have not been brought to justice. Salzman also oversaw the training of coaches and higher ranks, as well as the “work exchanges” through which people bartered for workshops, which frequently led to massive debt, financial dependence and forced labor.

Salzman used her clout to build Raniere’s empire, knowingly and intentionally lying to do so. He was too lazy, sex-crazed and self-involved to build such a conglomerate on his own—he absolutely needed her to do the work for him, and she did so proactively and enthusiastically until the very end. For this, I hold her responsible right alongside Raniere for all of the crimes that were proven in court, as well as other crimes that were not included in the criminal case. None of them would have existed without her direct involvement, the structures and systems she built or the individuals she personally empowered and inspired to become criminals.

Salzman’s lies directly enabled NXIVM’s abuse, to which three types of victims fell prey: One group consisted of people who served the organization’s agenda because of their wealth, clout, connections or their ability to sell the workshops—they profited the most and received preferential treatment, some predominating the investigation and subsequent media narrative upon defecting. A smaller group of less-advantaged victims who provided labor, skills or amusement to Raniere—we were subjected to the worst, most hidden abuses. Finally, everyone else of lesser consequence, essentially the client base needed to maintain a revenue stream and veneer as a legitimate company. It is unfortunate these distinctions have not been described by the media and others, as this has effectively confused and conflated the cast of abusers, victims and unwitting participants.

The most personal, illustrative example I can provide of Salzman’s direct criminal behavior is my own forced labor beginning in 2002, 13 years before DOS ever existed. Believing her intentions were true and that NXIVM would indeed “help make the world a better place to live,” I accepted a job as the company’s communication specialist. Salzman simultaneously became my employer, work visa sponsor and landlord. The trust I placed in her was in direct proportion to the lies she fed me—she promised me a successful, profitable career with NXIVM; she promised she could help me overcome my personal limitations and raise my self-esteem. In 2018, I left NXIVM a victim of trauma and forced labor with very little to my name.

In my position, I fulfilled the responsibilities of a communications director, but Salzman refused to pay me as such. I carried the brunt of NXIVM’s communication work by writing and editing the educational materials, film scripts, web presence, PR and marketing materials, internal communications, technical documents, etc. I also did most of Raniere’s writing—while he slept and bedded women all day—unbeknownst to me precisely because Salzman constantly obfuscated, lied and concealed his behavior from me.

Deceit is immoral, but lying to get money or labor from a person is a federal crime—a crime for which Salzman has not yet been charged. As my employer, she single-handedly exploited me for hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of labor while she held my work visa over me. She controlled my income and largest expenses, including my rent. By lowering my pay and raising my rent, she crippled me into financial debt for about 13 years to make me even more dependent on NXIVM. In addition to financially exploiting me, she also violated multiple state and federal laws, including refusing to pay overtime, refusing to provide worker’s compensation or health insurance, and using a payment structure that allowed her to evade state and federal taxes.

She also required that I be available to work 24/7 and often called on me to do so in the middle of the night. I tried many times to fight this horrid exploitation, but her response was always the same: I was the one who owed her and the organization because of my “ethical dilemma” with the conceptual founder.

My “ethical breach” against Raniere was not weighing 95 lbs.

Her exploitation of me peaked in September 2015, when she forced me to work at our mostly deserted corporate offices for at least 48 hours a week to pay off my debt, threatening to fire me unless I complied. I was completely trapped: I desperately wanted out of this abusive situation, but leaving would not only mean losing my work visa, it meant being further financially crippled because of the supposed debt I owed. Salzman knew the leverage she had over me, and that returning to my home country of Mexico, which had seen an unprecedented rise in kidnappings and violent crime, would be a terrifying fate, particularly in light of my brother’s murder and youngest sister’s kidnapping, which were significant traumas in my life.

Salzman enacted these crimes against me out of her own volition and often without instruction from Raniere. She was unrepentant until the very end—benefiting from the fruits of my labor and never once admitting her responsibility in this entrapment. Even though she conned tens of thousands of us and destroyed hundreds of lives in the process, she remained loyal to Raniere until her own livelihood and freedom were threatened by the prosecution.

She was in it for herself from day one in an unrepentant pursuit of power—she wanted the money, the clout, the prestige, the connections to expand and further abuse her power. I believe her being the first to jump on the “plea deal bus” isn’t because she was contrite—she was saving her own skin. Even her recent letter of support for Lauren’s sentencing demonstrates her self-serving nature, where she spun a narrative to make it appear that she was responsible for Lauren’s choice to testify, thereby trying to benefit from her daughter’s good deeds.

As to Salzman’s abject disregard for the law, I strongly believe her recent court filings feign contrition, as she has and continues to violate the terms of her bail with an above-the-law attitude. Even with the onerous bail conditions imposed on her, Salzman sought to reach me through former Proctor Michel C. to intimidate me into not writing this statement.

Michel’s outreach happened in October 2020, just three days after the Court sentenced Raniere and I published my victim impact statement. At the beginning of the call, he asked to keep our conversation secret, then told me he was in direct contact with Salzman through his wife. He attempted to dissuade me from speaking out against Salzman, and when I resisted and questioned his motives, he became hostile and accusatory. I felt intimidated and, after the call, was deeply upset for days. This was witness intimidation, a federal crime that I have since reported to the FBI.

This wasn’t the first attempt to reach me, as just two days after her arrest, she called me using a former member and close acquaintance, Kirsten Ohlander’s phone knowing full well she was barred from communicating with me. She called to manipulate me into doing free work for her by “coaching” or “handling” then defendant Kathy Russell. I forcefully refused and that was the last time we ever spoke.

Having remained close friends with many ex-NXIVM members, whom I consider very reliable sources, I have also received the following reports of Salzman violating her bail conditions and defrauding others for profit, wherein she reportedly:

• Used a former coach to videobomb Michel C.’s wedding, attempting to contact high-ranking defectors, including executive board members there. Michel reportedly continues to communicate with and receive EMs and personal coaching from Salzman, claiming the Court gave her special permission to do so.

• Is providing EMs and personal coaching services for at least two prominent Mexican entrepreneurs, charging upwards of $300 per session. One of them is the husband of a former Mexico City proctor who is reportedly running her own coaching business there with Salzman’s help.

• Is making six figures coaching high-profile clients Sara Bronfman has procured for her.

Finally, I will speak briefly of Salzman’s abusive role as a coach and teacher. 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, and stood when she entered or exited a room. But as a teacher, she was brutal and punishing, often using public humiliation and verbal abuse to quash dissent. During my very first workshop, she compared me to Lucifer after I dared to question the performance of one of her coaches. She later gave me the derogatory nickname “Ivelah,” pronounced “evil-ah,” which, coming from the prefect, tainted the perception of my every action.

Further, Salzman was not only aware of, but actively supported Raniere’s manipulation and grooming of women for abusive sexual relationships. Her participation in this grooming involved blatant dishonesty and concealment of information to keep women in his harem—this is what defined her role as my “personal coach.”

I have previously shared with the Court that Raniere began a sexual relationship with me in October 2002, but I have not disclosed, for very personal reasons, that it began with him sexually assaulting me. The following morning, Salzman normalized the assault after she asked about my time with the vanguard, saying the traumatized state I was in was due to his “energy.” She insisted that I was lucky that he had singled me out.

She then lied to my face for years about Raniere’s conduct, knowing I would abandon the organization if I knew the truth of his relationships and children. She also concealed the crimes she and others committed, and told the inner circle and members of the executive board to lie to me. She often spread rumors and lies about me with the intent to discredit me. Her status as NXIVM’s biggest gossip was an open secret, she did this to many others. By her own admission in her recent letter to the Court, one of Raniere’s manipulative tactics was to play people against each other to keep them isolated and insecure, and Salzman was instrumental to this strategy.

Salzman is directly responsible for the damages she did to me in this capacity because she became my handler, the enforcer of punishment if you will, while Raniere shunned me for the better part of 11 years. In her testimony, Lauren said she was terrified of being shunned because she saw it happen to Daniela and me. Daniela’s own testimony shed light on my punishment and shunning, as well as the “ethical breach” entrapment and fraud enacted on me.

Salzman designed every single one of our coaching sessions to enforce my enslavement to her and Raniere under the guise there was a way “out of hell” if only I “healed my breach.” She was an active and equal partner to Raniere in this monstrous psychological manipulation. For instance, she required me to sign contract after contract to continue our coaching relationship, subjecting me to:

• Check in with her every day, sometimes multiple times per day.

• Adhere to a 400-500 calorie per day diet and burn off at least as many calories as I consumed through exercise each day.

• Drive to her home upon rising to weigh in—in my underwear—each morning so she could attest my weight.

• Complete all forced “confessions” or writing assignments about my supposed breaches that she demanded.

• Submit to all coaching sessions, EMs, etc. without objecting to anything she said or did. This included taking her punitive “feedback” without question or objection.

Salzman’s hold over me was as strategic as it was complex: I knew I was being oppressed and exploited—I felt it every single day. The abuse was evident in my body, I saw it reflected in every paycheck, in my self-esteem, in my loss of freedom and lower quality of life. But I couldn’t break free because every attempt to do so was met with an even stronger effort to deceive me and, when the lies failed, she and others used threats and sheer intimidation.

As I take a step back from all this madness, the most difficult question continues to be, “Why was I loyal to her and NXIVM for so long?” My short answer: Honest trust caught in an elaborate fraud—a fraud Salzman orchestrated and leveraged with coercive control.

I came to NXIVM because of “trust issues” after a long history of abuse, abandonment and loss in my family. I feared abuse and found it very difficult to trust people, especially romantic partners. Salzman promised me I could overcome this and so much more, then invoked my issues as “the problem” every time I attempted to disobey her or Raniere, reinforcing time and again that I could be free of such issues if I only “healed my breach” and followed their instructions.

While it is a huge relief to know Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman are behind bars, I find myself in a disadvantaged position in terms of personal reparations. I feel confident in saying that few victims saw or were subjected to the abuses I endured while in NXIVM, and even fewer for the duration of time that I did. I regret not having had the strength and wherewithal to bring my grievances forward at the time of the government’s investigation—my dire circumstances and the elaborate framework of NXIVM’s manipulation made it personally impossible. All I have left in my quest for justice is to provide my honest account of Salzman to the Court so it may consider it while determining an appropriate sentence for the full scope of her crimes.

Your Honor, Salzman’s continued deflection of responsibility by blaming Raniere, her violations of her bail, profiting from defrauding others with his teachings and her attempting to intimidate a witness indicate a complete lack of contrition. Her decades-long abuse of me and other victims, and her direct support of Raniere’s sexually predatory behavior demonstrate a horrendous lack of empathy and regard for others. Given this, I believe she is a danger to society and poses a serious risk of reoffending. 

While the crimes against me were not part of the criminal proceedings, I hope my statement will shed some light on Salzman’s true character and the broader system of abuses and crimes that took place under her leadership. I believe she stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Raniere as a criminal, a fraud and a self-serving sociopath.

I urge the Court to hold Nancy Salzman accountable for her actions and to stop her continued quest to defraud and profit from NXIVM’s methods of coercive control. Her recent actions are, at best, a most nefarious insult to her victims—they are to me.

Yours sincerely,

Ivy Nevares

Photo by Nadin Mario on Unsplash

My statement at Lauren Salzman's sentencing hearing

Your Honor,

Thank you again for allowing me to speak during these proceedings. Today’s statement is especially painful for me because the defendant was not only my peer and coach—she was my best friend for nearly 17 years.

When I first joined ESP, Pamela Cafritz—one of Keith Raniere’s chief enablers—was excited that I was joining the harem because I would be Lauren Salzman’s friend and companion, given our age and intellectual compatibility. Ms. Salzman was smart, funny, kind and a seeming pioneer of the noble enterprise I too had just embarked on. It didn’t take long for me to love her, much less for her to earn my trust.

She became my coach shortly after I moved to Albany in 2002—not by choice, but because I began putting up a resistance against Raniere and his lifestyle. She described her role as the inner circle’s “therapist”—a role she secretly told me she resented. That meant she constantly did EMs with Raniere’s women—especially the rebellious ones—condoning and furthering the physical, emotional and psychological abuses.

Looking back at our friendship, Ms. Salzman’s role was to keep me under control, to manage me. She was a hostage negotiator of sorts, and my goodwill and willingness to continue working for the company were the hostages.

She ended our coaching relationship around 2006 because of my insubordination to Raniere’s and the inner circle’s sick demands. She shunned me for about three years after this, punishing me for her inability to control me. To this day, I don’t know why she apologized and resumed our friendship. It’s possible she saw that her punishment eventually fueled my desire to defect.

Once we resumed our friendship, Ms. Salzman was again called in as the last resort to contain me. When all other tactics failed—mostly others’ verbal and psychological abuse, exploitation and threats—she was brought in to “reason” with me. But her reasoning skills and appeal to my emotions were all gaslighting, manipulation and lies—tactics in what Raniere called “strong thought control” or “intellectual might-is-right.” Unfortunately, she mostly succeeded until the very end.

I have previously made the Court aware that Karen Unterreiner, Raniere’s longest-standing intimate relationship and a NXIVM leader, has since apologized to me for her role in keeping me from leaving. The event in question happened on the cusp of Raniere’s full-blown abuse of me in 2006.

Karen, the number three EM practitioner in the company, was tasked to talk me out of leaving just days before the company’s annual retreat at Silver Bay. By then, Raniere was already shunning me and further curtailing my personal freedoms, and Karen manipulated me into staying after a 5- or 6-hour long conversation in a Clifton Park parking lot one night.

I share this with the Court because that was Ms. Salzman’s primary role when all other means of control failed. But unlike Karen, Ms. Salzman never apologized.

She did not verbally abuse me as her mother did, which kept my trust in her somewhat intact. In hindsight, she groomed me to feel safe in the presence of a predator and his vicious pack.

Ms. Salzman could have stopped my forced labor, which I had rebelled against for years and years, yet she did nothing. In the very least she could have spoken out on my behalf—she knew how valuable I was to the entire network of companies under Raniere. On the contrary, she used her position and skills to try to force me to accept my exploitation and to do so with a smile.

A clear example is when she “graced” me with being my mentor during the last NXIVM workshop I took, ironically called “The Ethicist.” She made a clear point that she was deliberately taking time away from her busy schedule and prodigious responsibilities to help me.

The point of contention then was her mother’s absolute abuse of me as an employee, which I intend to detail in the near future. All of the EMs, sourcings and mentoring sessions revolved around my fight to end the exploitation—a fight that was met with objections at every possible point and angle.

And on the last day of the eight-day intensive training, Ms. Salzman didn’t show.

Instead, she sent me a text message, entrusting me to my other two supposed mentors—DOS members and Raniere loyalists Rosa Laura Junco and Sahajo Haertel (I had no idea DOS existed at the time). Ms. Salzman said she wasn’t willing to invest more of her precious time on someone who simply refused to grow.

Never have I been prouder—in hindsight of course—of my unwillingness to “grow.”

Your Honor, as I share this statement, I cannot help but flash between the abuses I’ve related and the times I treasured with the defendant—our stimulating conversations on mutual topics of interest, the heartfelt laughter we often shared and events where she stood by my side when I felt all was lost, such as the week she spent with me at the hospital in Mexico City when my father was dying. 

I understand Ms. Salzman was the prosecution’s star witness and that she played a key role in bringing Raniere to justice. I also understand that because of this, she may serve a light sentence or perhaps no sentence at all. When I weigh the damage she did to me and others, I desire neither of those outcomes, but I earnestly respect the Court’s decision, whatever it may be.

All that is left is for me to address her one last time:

I trusted you above anyone else. You knew my weaknesses—my deepest fears and insecurities. You knew about my past trauma.

You knew my intent was not duplicitous or malicious. You knew me as I was, as I continue to be—yet you allowed so much damage, so much trauma and committed a great deal yourself.

You called yourself my best friend, you were a fellow woman, yet you did what you did. And you let Raniere and the others do what they did, even after I repeatedly begged you for help.

I imagine you’ve been living in fear since Raniere’s arrest. You knew it—we all knew it was a matter of time before you were arrested. I imagine today you’re especially terrified.

Reflect on that experience, on that fear—on that incessant stimulation to your nervous system, which can easily override the mind and emotions. Reflect on that feeling of powerlessness—of being trapped, with no way out and no light at the end of the tunnel. Think back on the nights you’ve lost sleep because of this, the nightmares you’ve had and the part of you that can’t help but think where you would be, had you only chosen differently.

That is the torture you subjected me to for too long. While you enjoyed power, clout and a lavish lifestyle, that was my daily experience while I was in Albany.

Pam wrote me this George Elliot quote on a birthday card once:

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

All I wanted was to do something meaningful in the world. In you, all I wanted was a best friend.

Lauren, of all the pain you’ve caused me, the greatest is my broken heart.

Photo by Ivana Djudic on Unsplash

My statement at Keith Raniere’s sentencing hearing

Photo by Zuriel Galindo on Unsplash

Your Honor,

I am Ivy Nevares. Thank you for allowing me to speak freely about Keith Raniere.

I met him during my first ESP workshop in 2001. Although I was already indoctrinated, my instincts hadn’t been worn away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the coursework showed his fascination with criminal psychology—specifically swindling and sociopathy. He even created a worse class of sociopaths he called “suppressives,” and later “luciferians” for added drama.

He showed up for a Q&A at the end of the fifth day. I asked him during that first encounter, “You seem to know a lot about these suppressives. How do I know you’re not one of them?”

He smiled coyly and said, “Because they can’t build value—they can only destroy.”

I would have normally caught the black-and-white fallacy, were it not for the narrative that had been pushed on me by his adoring women, who were already grooming me then. Like thousands of others, I innocently believed him to be sincere.

Ten months and several workshops later, Raniere asked for a lifetime personal and professional commitment—I could be with no other man and work for no other person or company.

I knew something was off early on—he spoke too much and too highly of himself, and claimed to have mystical powers no one should question. I was too embarrassed to ask why he spoke of mysticism while publicly claiming to be a scientist.

One of his most preposterous claims was that he had to have sex constantly, lest his “spiritual energy” consume him to the point of death.

I would like to ask him, your Honor:

You’ve presumably gone 2.5 years without sex since your arrest. How is it you’re still alive?

Hm.

One of the cornerstones of Raniere’s model was that ethical civilization can only be achieved, and I quote, “through mutually-consented, honest trade.” But consent cannot exist alongside dishonesty. And that, right there, was the loophole he relentlessly exploited.

I consented to an intimate relationship with him, but I never consented to being lied to, manipulated or abused. I never consented to being held captive by a dependence-inducing system that he architected. I never consented to having his flying monkeys gaslight, exploit, harass, threaten and attack me around the clock under his direction, simply because I refused to comply.

I would like to address Raniere directly:

That fateful October, you weren’t asking for fidelity—you were asking for blind obedience. You weren’t offering a type of marriage—you were opening the door to countless unwritten contracts whose conditions became ever-moving targets, but whose penalties you and your women were quick to enforce.

You asked me what I wanted from you. I said, “To know true love.”

You instead subjected me to nearly 17 years of indentured servitude and your own perverted monstrosities.

Had I known all this going in, I would have never followed you.

The force of Raniere’s world rests on a flippant double-edged sword he wields to benefit those who shield and finance his criminal appetite and to cripple those who refused to do so. He shunned me for the better part of 11 years and ordered others to do the same, because I could not or would not meet his extreme demands.

A decade before DOS existed, Raniere was already tormenting me with the practices the women would later take on. One year, after I put myself through hell to weigh his desired 95 pounds, he shunned me because I ate a handful of pumpkin seeds, breaking my 400-calorie limit. That night, he said his leaving me hurt him more than it did me. He is a sadistic, pathological liar!

Raniere said, and I quote, “Things are most maneuverable when they’re most unstable.” That’s exactly how he managed to subject me and others to systemic abuses—he kept us sleep-deprived, blackmailed, exploited, traumatized and malnourished.

One year, I completed a 45-day fast to prove to him that I cared about our relationship “enough.” What was his response? That I wanted to break the fast because I was “weak” and had “no character,” so he ordered me to extend it an additional 10 days—and I did with the best of intentions. But it was never enough. Nothing ever was.

Many of us experienced PTSD from Raniere’s “readiness drills.” I found out where he came up with the idea during an SOP training: in a video, he said a person close to him had lost a brother to murder and that the body wasn’t discovered until 10 days after his death.

That was my brother, Fernando! How dare you desecrate my brother’s death as justification to torture countless women?!

I come from a Mexican family, and Raniere knew that having children is important to me, so he baited me with promises of his firstborn child, like he did others. I was very clear early on, I said: “If you father a child with someone else, I will not raise hell. I will not destroy you. I will simply slip away quietly.” He agreed to be truthful then. Instead, he instructed the other women in the inner circle to lie to my face about his children for years—even after he was arrested!

I’m relieved to know one of his youngest victims has finally denounced him. It makes me sick to think he was raping a child AND sleeping with her sisters when he was living with me, swearing he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else. These very acts alone demonstrate his crazed misogyny.

In February 2015, Kristen Keeffe, Raniere’s long-time ally, emailed me shortly after she defected with their son. She said Raniere was hoping I would commit suicide. When I sent him the email, he replied, and I quote, “Can you see she is not of right mind?”

I’ve spent several years contemplating Kristen’s accusation because I refused to believe it was true. Recently, I learned she said that on walks with Raniere, he asked gleefully, “Do you think Ivy’s gonna try to commit suicide?"

When we first met, Raniere was intensely curious about my cutting myself and having suicidal thoughts as a teenager. I shared with him that in my early twenties, I foolishly imagined that if my ideal partner left me, it would be best for me to leave this world.

He used the first six years of our relationship to become that ideal man. He lived with me, lavished me with gifts and attention, much to the displeasure of the other women. And one fine day, he began shunning me, while he flaunted other women in public and barred me from even walking on the same streets as them.

I will address him again:

You often cited the Ayn Rand quote, “A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.” Was my potential suicide your ultimate experiment?

I see now you exploited my dependence on a mate and suddenly marginalized me. Did you think that would drive me to commit suicide?

No matter the abuse, no matter the intensity of betrayal, I never came close to considering that option. The gift of your ultimate betrayal to me was realizing NO MAN is ever worth losing my life over. Much less a sick predator like you.

In our professional relationship, he violated every single work-related principle he preached—specifically, that work raises self-esteem only when it’s justly remunerated, otherwise it’s enslavement. Yet it wasn’t enslavement when it came to me. No one in the organization ever gave him as much time and results as I did, yet he and his lazy women claimed that I was the one who owed him.

Raniere was hiding in Mexico the day I found the courage to end our relationship. I asked Nancy Salzman to relay the break-up in person, but she lied to me and refused to do so three separate times. I want him to know I left him on January 15, 2018.

Alas, Raniere’s day of reckoning has finally come. This is my last message to him.

As a writer, you cautioned me to use my skill honorably and that, with a stroke of the pen, I could irrevocably affect the character of those I wrote about. Your own actions have rewritten your character. There is no damage I can do in this respect.

I do not speak as a jilted lover—on the contrary, I’m grateful my defiance created a distance between us. I don’t care that you had children with other women—I cared that you lied to me about it. And I’m not brainwashed—I’ve come to these conclusions myself after uncovering the myriad of lies you used to entrap me.

The last sympathy I felt for the man I fell in love with died with your lawyer’s sentencing memorandum. You have no remorse over what you’ve done. You blame your victims and direct your flying monkeys to create insults to legitimate social movements, as you try to fight your imaginary injustice. “We Are As You” and “Make Justice Blind” are platforms through which your co-conspirators like Nicki Clyne and Eduardo Asúnsolo commit professional and social suicide every day—they just don’t know it yet.

It is with a very careful stroke of my pen that I say and mean every word here: you are and forever will be remembered as the most dangerous predator of all.

May you live long enough in prison to know the hell you put me and others through.

My victim impact statement addendum on Keith Raniere

I’m publishing this the morning of Keith Raniere’s sentencing hearing. The Court will hear my testimony via a recorded message later today, which I will publish after the sentencing. For now, a brief preface followed by the addendum itself.

---

I submitted my first victim impact statement on Keith Raniere et al on Nov. 12, 2019. Such statements allow victims to relay their experiences of the defendants and their abuses to the Court. Knowing my first statement was delivered to Justice Garaufis brought me such peace. It was the first time I spoke out. I felt my voice was being heard when and where it mattered most. 

My statement then dealt with five individuals in the NXIVM trial: Keith Raniere, Nancy Salzman, Clare Bronfman, Lauren Salzman and Kathy Russell. While I relayed my grievances against those individuals, I chose not to write about Allison Mack.

My doing so doesn’t mean Mack is innocent or that I’m shielding her in any way. The reason I didn’t submit a statement is that our relationship was always amicable—although deceptive on her part. She never displayed the abusive side of her personality with me. She looked up to me and, for whatever reason, never disrespected me. The worst thing she ever did was lie to my face about DOS and her involvement when I confronted her about it in late 2017.

I do not condone Mack’s criminal behavior or reported lack of contrition. My friends and even people I barely know suffered at her hand. It’s just not my story to tell.

Back to Raniere, whose time has come. 

Today I will have said my final words to him in Court. But I neglected to include this: Raniere often referred to me as a flower denying its roots, citing my supposed “ethical breach” against him. I titled one of the chapters in our books after his accusation, believing him to hold the moral high ground. How foolish I was. 

What “rootless flower” means is that Raniere single-handedly “made me” in terms of my skill, talents and position within NXIVM, and that I was at fault for denying him the recognition for my success and achievements by not complying with his extreme demands. His lawyers or remaining loyalists can relay this to him: 

I am a flower, but you were NEVER my roots. You were the poison in my water.

As I’ve continued healing over the last two years, the process has armored me with greater awareness and insight. That whole “hindsight is 20/20” is for those who want to see the past for what it was, not for those who seek to revise it. In my case, the benefits of hindsight are strengthened by having years’ worth of archived information.

I am not yet ready to disclose a lot of the more personal, intimate details of my dealings with Raniere and NXIVM. However, I will disclose my addendum statement to Justice Garaufis. Not only because it is timely, but because it is right. It is an important step in releasing myself of the burden of secrecy and shame I’ve carried for so long. 

The search for truth brought me to Raniere—egregious things followed. Now the painful truth must come forth.

“Severed” ©2008, Ivy Nevares. All rights reserved.

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October 8, 2020

Hon. Nicholas G. Garaufis

 
Your Honor,

This letter may be one of the most important I ever write, for a person’s future hangs in the balance. It is not something I take lightly.

Before I met Keith Raniere in 2001, I had never been abused in an adult intimate relationship. I was loyal to him for nearly 17 years, despite how much he harmed me, directly and through his women. What buttressed that loyalty? Some acts of kindness on his part that led me to believe there was goodness in him. What kept me in that glass prison? Mostly lies and information he and others withheld from me to control me. The combination acted as powerful leverage that wore my instincts over time.

Even after he was arrested, I hoped with all of my heart to be right about him—not in the sense that he was innocent, but that the man I fell in love with was somewhere in there and that his arrest and imprisonment would guide him back to the light. When his followers started the so-called movement “We Are As You” this summer—the first of several recent efforts Raniere has directed to con the public into believing he was wrongly prosecuted and convicted—that perception of him began to change. I was sure he was behind it and felt personally insulted, not just as a victim but as a dancer.

The day I read the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum on Raniere was the day the last of my compassion for the person I thought I knew died. He takes pride in his total lack of remorse or consideration for his victims. He sees himself and his loyalists as victims, without any idea how their parading around for him as “activists” is affecting us all. He couldn’t just stop at the dance-protest farce but had to mount another one to mock the work prosecutors have done and to mock this very Court. And to top it all off, he made his victim’s suffering a contest worth a $30,000 prize, even though he knows full well there is not a shred of evidence to support his claims of innocence and persecution. How dare he?!

I am outraged by his arrogance, sociopathy and utter disregard for the law. I am outraged that he dare insinuate the Court is incompetent or corrupt. While I know the Court can see through NXIVM’s manipulation so clearly even it as it’s being perpetrated in the proceedings, as evidenced in Clare Bronfman’s sentencing, I wish to share some of my own experiences so the Court can fully appreciate how Raniere’s actions affected me and continue to impact me to this day.

Raniere stole nearly 17 years of my life and labor. He took credit for the work I did and the skills I built during his nearly 11-year absence in our relationship, as he shunned me for an “ethical breach” I supposedly committed against him. Initially, the “breach” was raising questions about Raniere’s conduct and promiscuity, then it morphed into my gaining weight, then it became something no one could define. A solution is impossible if a problem cannot be defined. Through these imaginary infractions, Raniere directed most of the community to shun me, making me a pariah until I figured out the impossible task of remedying the “breach.”

An ever-moving target, these “ethical breaches” kept me in a perpetual state of indebtedness and, as hard as I tried, no remedy was ever enough. Raniere and his women used “breaches” to enforce and justify their crimes and abuses. I was not alone in this, but I am the person he penalized and marginalized the longest in NXIVM’s history.

I have physical proof of this. Although I didn’t have a positive body image, I did enjoy my thick, brunette hair, which I loved to wear long since I was 13. As with everything I loved in my life, he turned it into a weapon: he made an example of me within the community by publicly humiliating me after insisting I could not cut my hair until I healed my “breach.” Because I still believed him—and believed in him—I let my hair grow more than a foot beyond my height, which is 5’ 3”. I did this to get back in his good graces, as I became ashamed of the locks I once cherished. His women also used his hair length mandates as leverage over me.

Raniere lied to me consistently and deprived me of information he and his women knew would have caused me to leave. He shunned, chastised, humiliated, penalized, defamed and swindled me and, when he was too busy abusing others, he instructed his women to subject me to the same abuses. My principal tormentors were Nancy Salzman, Lauren Salzman and the late Pamela Cafritz. Clare Bronfman and Kathy Russell were instrumental in my labor exploitation. There are others too, some still parading around New York City, others comfortably hiding in Mexico.

The ire I feel towards them quietly rages inside, yet it has been the very thing that guides my voice as I have come forward and provided statements to the Court, against all of my ingrained fears of prejudice, abuse and retaliation. This opportunity to share my story has finally liberated me from the deteriorating burden of the secrecy I swore to Raniere on October 10, 2002. Writing this very statement and reliving the nightmare has been so emotionally excruciating that I have had to walk away from it multiple times for five consecutive days.

I had a very troubled past before I went to ESP. I come from a broken home: my brother was a drug addict, my father an alcoholic, and when I was 14, I had a hand in raising my two younger sisters after my father abandoned the family overnight and my mother assumed his role as provider. My brother was killed when he was 20 and I, 19. By the time I was 20, I was clinically depressed and plagued with nightmares that would cause me to wake up screaming—sometimes waking up my college roommates.

I tried everything I could to get better: therapy, yoga, acupuncture, self-help books—the list goes on. I am a sensitive and empathic woman who feels others’ pain as her own and cares deeply. For whatever reason, I cannot just shut it off—empathy has been a burden to bear. Part of Raniere’s method is to delve deeply into the inner lives of those close to him, mining their psyches for information that can be weaponized. He and his women used my sensitivity against me to serve his purposes.

When I first met Raniere, he was exceedingly interested in two things about my youth of which I am not proud: cutting myself and suicidal thoughts—adolescent ways to numb out or escape the emotional pain with self-inflicted pain or fantasies.

He was fascinated by one of my scars, which I made during a bloodletting when I was 16. I have come to believe he took the idea for DOS’ branding from my scars and that particular experience. He used this and other knowledge against me for years, turning my deepest pain and traumas into tools to keep me under his control, convincing me everything was my fault, rendering me too fearful to speak out or walk away. I accepted his abuse as the necessary means to transform myself into someone worthy of his love—my greatest error.

I was so deeply under his spell that I could not see it as abuse at the time, and it is incredibly painful now to reflect on these events and see the many ways he intentionally amplified my earlier traumas simply because that served his depraved purposes. His efforts to control me knew NO bounds: he controlled my livelihood, career, body, sex, interactions with men, friendships, comings and goings, sleep, emotions—especially my beliefs and perceptions.

Raniere lived with me from 2003 to 2006 and swore fidelity to me. The court record shows he was also bedding three sisters at the time, including 15-year-old Camila! Knowing I was sleeping with him when he was abusing a child and performing incest with her sisters fills me with utter disgust! That I was biologically connected to those very acts because Raniere refused to bathe for over two years is absolutely repugnant!! I am amazed I never contracted an STD.

Raniere used everything at his disposal against me, even my most important family relationships. In June 2008, I received a call from one of my relatives in Mexico, informing me my father was dying—mesenteric thrombosis had left him with only a few feet of his small intestine. I flew there intending to say goodbye to one of the most beloved people in my life. He knew how important my father was to me and positioned himself as savior.

He mobilized NXIVM’s Mexico City community to help—as a result, my father was transferred to a better hospital, where he was treated by a preeminent gastroenterologist. After two unsuccessful surgeries, the doctors concluded all that could be done was to perform a third and final surgery to remove necrotized tissue to make him slightly more comfortable until he passed away.

After hours in the waiting room, the surgeon came out to meet me, head hanging low, shaking. I braced for the worst: “In all my years of practice, I have never seen this. His tissue has healed! I think we’ve just witnessed a miracle.” Whether it was a miracle is debatable, yet Raniere was quick to take credit for it and I believed him, which instilled in me an immense debt of gratitude.

My father passed away a few months later. But for the longest time, on nearly every occasion that I would suffer some abuse by Raniere and his women, that very experience would come to mind, challenging my instinctual perception that I was being tormented. He and his women would hold it over my head when I threatened to leave NXIVM. I believed them when they told me it was impossible for a man who could perform such miracles to be ill-intended or do anyone harm.

Nor was the abuse strictly psychological. I suffered physically as well. I am at least a year away from full repair—and that doesn’t account for the psychological baggage when it comes to diet and exercise. I did severe damage to my metabolism by adhering to Raniere’s ludicrous 400-500 calories-per-day regimens coupled with a surplus of exercise. No matter how hard I pushed, the results were always short-lived and, to everyone’s surprise, I put on weight over the years.

In 2008, he threatened to shun me during our “anniversary” with the following email. The communication shows his desire to control my subconscious after I had an erotic dream about a faceless person. He implied I was “unfaithful” to him and that I needed to control my subconscious. As I read his email, I questioned the obvious, “Isn’t that the point of having a subconscious, to know unrestrained, unpredictable freedom?” I didn’t have the strength then to question his mystical claims that stood in stark contrast against his public persona as a “scientist.”

From: “Flintlock” <kunterre@nycap.rr.com>

Subject: Re: details

Date: October 6, 2008 at 3:27:16 AM EDT

To: “Ivy Nevares” <ivy@nxivm.com>

I want you to know I love you. I want the best for us and act toward you in a way to optimze [sic] that. I had planned to surprise you on our anniversary for I had hoped you would make this possible for me by losing weight etc. I do believe your habits are more important than “us.” We are nothing if you do not earn your way out of this ethical dilemma. At this point, I do not know your weight and you have not written to me as you promissed [sic]: obsessively. Even if you drank only water and walked many miles a day, I do not know if you can create the ethical permission for us to be together on our anniversary. I do not know what to do. Only you can create this, but it has to be more important in every moment than anything and I still [sic] there are no guarantees.

On another note relating to this: in thought I am far more “faithful” to you than you to me. For example, I have never dreamt of having sex with another woman. Up until recently you said the people with whom you had sex in your dreams were faceless and genital-less or with my genitals. This is no longer the case and I see it as an additional problem. It is a problem because of things you said and thought about my genitals amongst other things from the begining [sic] of our relationship due (I believe) to fear of dependency. I think you are obsessed in this area. If so, it is important you be obsessed with me/mine. Your dreams indicate otherwise.

I want to help you and us with all my heart. My condition has gotten very bad where I hide it from Nancy and Pam. I can't go on much longer. If you are to break this cycle, you must adopt a zero-tolerance, immediate policy with yourself. The moment you read this you must start, not tomorrow. You cannot use any excuse for any transgression. One single trangression [sic]--one single lazyness [sic] of writing or anything--and you have started down the slippery slope. You need to obsessively incorporate all I have written here: miss not one word. I cannot tell you anymore [sic]; it is all up to you. You need to prove us to yourself and to me. You must live all of your past commitments, ideas of commitments, thoughts of commitments and anything else you can imagine: there are no limits; no idea, concept or practice is too much. This is a start. I do not know if it will be enough but this fact must not discourage you.

Please do this. Make this right.

I love you.

“I can't go on much longer.” How on Earth was I to respond to that?!

For the following five days, I put myself on 500 calories of maple-syrup sweetened lemonade (the “Master Cleanse”), laxatives and saltwater purges. I walked 4 miles to the gym, worked out for an hour, sat in the sauna for an hour and walked 4 miles back home—this doesn’t include my teaching dance classes 1-2 hours a day. I lost 10 pounds in five days to spend our anniversary together, shortly before he shunned me again, because when I began eating, it caused an inflammatory response and my body stored the energy as fat.

After I left Albany in 2018, I read a book from Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist who precisely outlined why Raniere’s regimens wrought hormonal havoc on me—no wonder I couldn’t lose weight! But during all that time, he and his women blamed me:

You serve fear as your master. Satiation is your “other lover.” You’re not committed, much less committed to reality. You’re lazy, irresponsible, unprincipled. You care more about your body feelings than anything else. You don’t care enough about Keith!

I can still hear their voices and it brings me to tears. I’ve never had a positive body image, even though people have found me pretty or attractive, but I never felt ashamed about my body until I met Raniere, and I still feel ashamed.

I believe that and other torments made me a testing ground for what would later become DOS. He subjected all his women to diets, but because I am petite, I was the first he subjected to the 400-500 calorie diet. He demanded I write him “obsessively” throughout the day even though he rarely if ever responded. To prove I was loyal to him, he demanded other collateral and nudes, even if it meant producing it in other people’s homes. He also filmed us having sex multiple times and withheld the tapes from me.

In 2007, he put me in charge of the Ultima project, shortly after his first child was born. I understand now it was the ultimate hook to keep me in Albany: my only condition in our relationship, which I made crystal clear in the beginning, was that he not have a child with anyone else before we had ours. (I cannot convey how fortunate I am that I was careful enough to never conceive!) He instructed his women and the community to lie to me about both his children.

Ultima was designed to enhance human expression, so it aligned perfectly with my values—I am a writer, editor and dancer. In my opinion, it was one of the least destructive programs, and I poured my heart and soul into writing and teaching the curriculum.

I stopped teaching the original curriculum around 2009 because I couldn’t move the program forward as Raniere was aggressively shunning me. When he restarted Ultima in 2014, he also launched several offshoots, among them the media analysis company The Knife and the pseudo-health-and-wellness project Exo-Eso.

To get back in his good graces, I had to lose about 20 pounds in record time, which I did. The conditions of my return were these: I would earn nothing from the six or more hours I would teach each week, nor would I be compensated for teaching the Fiji workshops, even though they grossed $80,000 and $200,000 respectively. I accepted this in part because it was deeply ingrained in the community that if someone had breached, they could not deliver sufficient value to entitle them to compensation. Nancy Salzman told me that working without pay was an appropriate consequence of my supposed breach and that Raniere was infinitely generous by asking me back.

After being marginalized for so many years, I was grateful for the opportunity to teach again and rejoin my friends with my head held half-way high—because I could never forget my long absences from the community and the questions they raised. As was the case every time he stopped shunning me, I didn’t realize the only reason he did so was to keep me in indentured servitude. As soon as my work sufficed, he and others would resume my marginalization.

By 2014, he had elevated Marianna as the number one woman in the inner circle. She had no education, accomplishments, skills or career, and held one of the lowest ranks within ESP. Her extraordinary arrogance centered around the belief that servicing Raniere sexually was equivalent to a job qualification that earned her the highest status throughout NXIVM. Which, apparently, was the case in his twisted mind.

It was difficult for me to interact with her even as her teacher, and not just because of her arrogance: He demanded nothing of her, yet he and his women gave her everything. He demanded everything of me, yet he and his women gave me nothing—on the contrary, they stole from me everything that mattered: my self-esteem, self-worth, physical and emotional health, the value of my labor and precious, precious years.

Marianna decided to ditch a number of Ultima classes and not respond to every effort I made to catch her up. I treated her the same way anyone was supposed to be treated who fell behind: kicking her out of the program. But Raniere pushed back, demanding I take time out of my life to bring her into good standing. For the first time in my relationship with him, I said “no.”

He became furious—I could see it in his eyes. He tried the usual gaslighting, but for the first time, I remained adamant in my denial, believing she was the very last to deserve special treatment, given her childish behavior. Raniere then flipped the argument on its side:

Do you remember when I made YOU the favorite? Do you remember how much that angered all the other women? Do you remember how much they HATED you? Do you remember how you felt being on top? Do you remember how they felt being on the very bottom?

I swear I didn’t know where he was going with this.

Well, NOW you know what it feels like!

I don’t know if that was the first time spite shone in his eyes or if that was the first time I was able to see it. I was paralyzed, gutted to my very core. Instinctively, I started walking away from him, heart slaughtered.

As he saw me walk away, he threatened to give Ultima to Danielle Roberts, whom he considered incompetent and a terrible teacher. I succumbed and did not leave.

I cannot tell the Court how many times I’ve run that scenario in my mind, hearing the voice inside me screaming in desperation, “GET OUT! LEAVE HIM!!” It haunts me still.

For all of this, it gets darker yet. Perhaps the most sinister thing he ever attempted was to push me towards committing suicide. He was always curious about my suicidal thoughts as an adolescent, which I now understand are not uncommon. In February 2015, Kristin Keefe wrote me, warning that Raniere was a sociopath who wanted me to die by my own hand. Again, that fight for the belief in his goodness made me invalidate her message and, despite her warning, I stayed in NXIVM for an additional three and a half years.

I have recently learned more details from Kristin’s conversations with Raniere that are deeply disturbing. I’ve learned he gleefully questioned not only if but when I would commit suicide, once I learned of the information he was withholding from me. Worse still, he expressed his wish that I would be the first to fall in a cascade of suicide dominos, followed by Barbara Bouchey and other women he was oppressing.

I would set those anecdotes aside, were it not for this: As NXIVM’s communications specialist, I worked with Raniere and Nancy Salzman to write and edit the vast majority of the curriculum. I believe “Rational Inquiry” can be classified in three ways: innocuous, a double-edged sword and sociopathic.

Raniere had a fascination with criminal psychology—specifically swindling, narcissism, psychopathy, sociopathy, and a supposed condition worse than sociopathy that he called “luciferianism.” In one class, he described seven levels of sociopathy. The highest level was the most sadistic and depraved—characterizing the type of sociopath who is exquisitely overcome with Schadenfreude as his very subjects are tortured by his own hand. He called this module, “The Best Game in Town.”

The second question I ever asked Raniere was, “You seem to know a lot about sociopaths. How do we know you’re not one of them?” He giggled and responded, “Because sociopaths can’t build value. I do.” This happened on day five of my first ESP workshop in 2001.

It wasn’t until I read transcripts of Raniere’s calls from jail last month that I fully realized that part of the curriculum was entirely autobiographical in nature. He is the very predator he so specifically described, and believes he’s winning the biggest game of all.

Raniere continues to victimize those of us who left NXIVM and even the few marionettes whose strings he continues to pull, directing them to twerk in the streets of Brooklyn to entertain his fellow inmates, to mass at the U.S. Attorney’s Office demanding prosecutors sign some “affidavit,” and now parading as “activists” offering monetary rewards for evidence they claim to already possess yet say they will only release to the media at some undefined point in the future.

May I note the absurdity of this? Raniere publicly condemned NXIVM’s defectors’ taking their grievances to the media, rather than the justice system—until now, when the chips are down for him. A modern-day Nero, he sits in his cell, joyfully fiddling away while his very subjects follow his instruction and publicly debase themselves in ways their lives and careers will never recover from when (or if) they awaken from their chimeras.

The very day the jury convicted Raniere was the day I decided to get help. NXIVM long taught that psychology, psychiatry and any other sanctioned mental health approach were little more than money pits, and that “the tech” was the only effective tool. On that day, I threw that indoctrination out the window, seeing I could not shake the anxiety and nightmares that plagued me every day, and that I had to trust those sciences instead.

Having received a diagnosis of PTSD for the prolonged trauma of my years in Raniere’s orbit, I am finally on a path to healing—not from some “ethical breach,” but from the nearly two decades I was tormented by him and his female lieutenants.

In NXIVM, I developed a work ethic forged in the fire of forced labor, yet I had no self-confidence and little self-esteem. Still believing their narrative of my failings, I thought I completely lacked the required ability to make it in corporate America if I ever defected. I overcame that, and I am thriving in a rewarding position, but I still live in fear that my association with NXIVM might cost me my job. I have consulted with my company’s HR and legal departments in an effort to make sure my history won’t get me fired. I still don’t know if it will, but I feel compelled to say my piece, to speak my truth and to wrest from him and his cohorts every last bit of power over my life.

Raniere and his loyalists may write me off as a case of “hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.” Your Honor, I was not scorned—I was lied to, abused, exploited and tortured. The prime of my early adulthood and all the opportunities it held were stolen from me. My belief in myself was beaten down 24/7 at Raniere’s and his women’s hands.

I thought I was in a consensual relationship with Raniere, but I never consented to being lied to, controlled, exploited or abused. I didn’t ask for it—I didn’t deserve it. I entered into that relationship with a hopeful and open heart, and walked away nearly broken in every respect.

I believe Raniere deserves to live the rest of his days in prison and forever be deprived of his cohorts’ money and connections, not just for my sake and safety, but for those he continues to abuse. As the Court has witnessed, his predatory appetite is unmatched, even as he begins to wither away in prison. He is nothing without their money or connections.

Please disable his and his cohorts’ resources any way you can. Our safety and mental health depend on it.

Thank you, your Honor, for your time, consideration and strength in compassion.

With deep respect and admiration,

Ivy Nevares

My statement at Clare Bronfman’s sentencing hearing

Your Honor, 

My name is Ivy Nevares. Thank you for providing a space for me to share the statement I’ve prepared for Clare Bronfman’s sentencing hearing. 

Clare came to ESP at the height of her privilege, but sorely lacking as a woman in her early twenties—uneducated, socially inept, insecure and practically friendless. When I met her, she was timid but she was kind. No one would ever guess she was an heiress to the Seagram fortune—not by the way she looked or interacted with others.

Like many of us, Keith Raniere exploited her vulnerabilities. Yet, because of her wealth, he took her for a much longer ride, giving her an unearned position, illegitimate status and inclusion in a select group she so desperately craved, but hardly deserved. She never earned the power she was given—not by title, skill or performance. And in return, she used her power to abuse others, especially those of us in Raniere’s “inner circle.”

I would like to address Clare directly for a few moments.

Clare, after all the evidence, after countess victims whom you considered among friends—how can you remain loyal to your Vanguard? No matter how hard you try, you cannot be principled if the person you follow is a sociopath and a convicted criminal.

Your Honor, when Raniere raised Clare to power in 2009, she began using her position to exploit me through indentured servitude. As soon as Clare supplanted Nancy Salzman as NXIVM’s de facto decision maker in the executive board, Clare lowered my pay, removed what insignificant privileges the company afforded me and raised my rent—all punishments for my supposed “ethical breach” against Raniere. In truth, she punished me for disobeying him. Salzman would later tell me Clare did these things of her own volition.

Twice she caused me to go into financial debt. Together with Raniere, Salzman and Kathy Russell, she subjected me to forced labor as soon as she was given the chance. She also participated in the myriad of lies told to me to keep me from defecting.

My starting salary with ESP was $36,000 a year—this was back in 2002. By the time I stopped working for the company in early 2017, I never earned more than $48,000 a year. I was NXIVM’s hardest-working employee, always filling two or more roles at once and sometimes working up to 20 hours a day. Yet I was provided no benefits, no health insurance, no 401K, no worker’s comp—nothing. The only so-called benefit was a $5 credit per hour worked that could only apply towards ESP’s curriculum.

Instead of recognizing Raniere’s and others’ abuses against me and righting them, Clare enacted her own with exceptional cruelty: She had me teach two intensive trainings at her Fiji resort where students paid $20,000 each, yet she didn’t pay me a cent for the work I performed. I had to pay over $5,000 out of pocket to even be able to teach the second training because she refused to pay for my travel and immigration expenses. This happened after she threatened to have another person teach the curriculum that had taken me years to write and develop. It’s important to note she leveraged the entire situation before I was fully recovered from an emergency shoulder surgery that I, of course, paid for out of pocket.

This is how she treated NXIVM’s most loyal workers: demanding, underpaying or not paying at all. But when it came time to put down hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for lawsuits and PR firms, Clare would do so without a second thought.

One of the cruelest and most reckless things she ever did was hiring me to care for a woman who I later learned had suffered a psychotic break during a Jness training that Clare was attending at the time. She also tasked the now-former doctor Brandon Porter to care for her. She, Raniere and Salzman were frightened that if the woman was taken to a hospital, it would implicate the company in wrongdoing—and that was not the first case.

I took 12-hour night shifts for a week to care for this woman. I still remember running across a field after she suddenly took off in the middle of the night. I thrashed through two feet of snow, screaming into the phone as I asked Salzman what to do, horrified at the possibility she might kill herself and others by running into traffic.

Clare risked Porter losing his medical license by not taking her to a hospital. She risked this woman’s life by not allowing her to be cared for by trained professionals. She risked my life by putting me in an impossible situation, knowing I needed the money.

While payment for these services is the most trivial point by comparison, it demonstrates her callousness and punitive nature: she paid me the going rate for babysitting a child: $12 an hour.

I protested then, citing my measly $17-an-hour wage as a minimum standard, but she refused to pay the difference because of my so-called “ethical breach.”

Your Honor, Clare could have led the company towards just rule, she had the power and she had chance—she could have done so much good.

Instead, she and her sister Sara became Raniere’s primary enablers. I am not alone in my belief that without their money, he could have never harmed as many people as he did.

Clare claims she did not bankroll Raniere or his organizations, that she did not know what he was doing behind the scenes and that she bears no responsibility in what he did. Again, I would like to address her.

Clare, you gave millions of dollars to him. Even if you never asked what he did with it, you’re still responsible for exponentially amplifying his abuses. You were and are the propellant to his unyielding fire.

Not knowing doesn’t relieve us of responsibility, remember that? So why do you refuse to see your part in all these damages?

In addition to exploiting many of us and facilitating Raniere’s trafficking of women, she has crippled countless others through vindictive litigiousness. She even sacrificed her relationship with her beloved father. I ask Clare:

Would he be proud of you knowing that you’re going to prison for following the very monster he was trying to protect you from?

I would like the Court to know I see no indication that Clare has any remorse about what she’s done—not her guilty plea, not her funding Raniere’s defense and cohorts, not her letter to the Court nor her recent filings claiming she has been unjustly targeted because of her wealth.

 If I may, again, address her. 

Clare, you are being held accountable for your crimes. Sylvie wasn’t your only victim. I am one of them, as are a number of women whom I spoke with and heard their direct account of how you exploited them until the government forced you to stop.

The fact that you want to persuade the Court and the public to think otherwise demonstrates you have no remorse whatsoever over what you’ve done, over what you are still doing and over what you will continue to do if you keep supporting and funding Raniere.

In our last face-to-face before I left Albany in 2018, I asked Clare point-blank: “Clare, you’ve spent your entire time and resources defending Raniere. Are you willing to spend the rest of your life defending him?”

Not a moment had passed before she turned and said, “Absolutely.”

When I read her last court filing, where her lawyers adamantly urge the Court to prohibit other victims from speaking at this hearing, I took it as the statement of a woman who refuses, at all costs, to see and hear the extent of the damage she has done. 

Your Honor, all of Raniere’s organizations prey upon well-intentioned people, baiting them with promises of success and nobility. He hasn’t stopped. He will not stop. 

Clare’s money will simply amplify the harm Raniere and she can do together. For this reason, I not only consider her a menace to me and her other perceived enemies, but to society at large.

I would like to address Clare one final time.

Raniere often said the most sacred and valuable thing we have in the world is time because it is the one thing that can never be replaced.

Clare, I hope during the years you sit in prison, you reflect on this: your minutes, hours and days are only a fraction of what you, Raniere and his women stole from me.

On my former connection to Keith Raniere and NXIVM

I’m publishing this statement on the eve of the first sentencing hearing in the federal case against Keith Raniere and NXIVM. I’ve remained silent about my former connection to him and his organizations for numerous reasons—the most important being my personal healing and protecting the life I have fought hard to build since I defected. 

As I prepare to speak at the hearings, beginning with Clare Bronfman’s tomorrow, it’s clear the time has come for me to establish my position publicly. 

In December 2001, I took a 16-day introductory workshop with Executive Success Programs, Inc. (ESP) at the behest of a now-former friend from college, Farouk Rojas. The company touted itself as a human potential school that sought to further ethics in the world. I and thousands of others flocked to its headquarters in Albany, New York with the understanding that its unique “technology” (Raniere would later call it a “talk therapy”) could radically improve our lives and the lives of others. I became a coach the following spring and began editing the course materials as a barter to take more advanced trainings.

ESP rebranded itself as NXIVM Corporation in 2002 and would later spawn dozens of spin-offs (ESP remained NXIVM’s main “educational” branch until 2018). Each new organization was pitched as a one-of-a-kind noble endeavor that would solve one or more societal problems—violence, gender issues, negligent parenting and the lack of journalistic ethics, among a myriad of other global issues. The workshops sold ranged from $300 to $20,000 a person—the first one I took cost $6,000 back in 2001.

By the time Raniere showed a personal interest in me, I was heavily indoctrinated into NXIVM’s culture and dogma, and had already been groomed by his women. They said his time was worth upwards of $100,000 per hour and that spending but a minute in his company was life-changing.

It was life-changing, just not the way I expected.

After just 10 days of personal contact, I began an intimate relationship with him in October 2002, when he asked me to commit to him personally and professionally for life.

There I was: an idealistic 25-year-old woman, advocating for free expression and human rights with PEN, the world’s first NGO. There he was: “the world’s smartest, most ethical man” asking me, of all people, to spend the rest of my life with him.

© 2020, ivy nevares. All rights reserved.

Little did I know, he was a 42-year-old manipulative narcissist and sexual predator.

I moved from Brooklyn to Albany two months later to work as the company’s communication specialist and the only writer with whom Raniere published. In keeping with my vow, I went on to work exclusively for him and his companies for nearly 17 years. Sixteen years, eight months and six days, to be exact.

Cults abuse people through a highly deceptive, complex, invasive and drawn-out process of manipulation. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to characterize a victim as having been “stupid” for falling prey. Yet to truly understand how and why these abuses happen, one must consider the dynamic process by which people are victimized by manipulative sociopaths such as Raniere. 

In my case, NXIVM’s psychological warfare began before I ever stepped inside the door—it started with an hour-long enrollment call from that former friend. By the time the first five days of the workshop were over, I was taught that people are either “parasites” or “producers,” that there are no such things as “cults,” that I’m responsible for literally everything in the world now and in the past, and that “there are no ultimate victims.” Victimhood, according to Raniere, is a choice. 

That last assertion is perhaps the most dangerous because removing victimhood from the human construct of justice automatically legitimizes criminal conduct. It’s curious that Raniere now considers himself the ultimate victim of the U.S. justice system—as do his cohorts.

Although NXIVM was not religious, there were whispers that Raniere, known as “Vanguard” to the organization, was someone akin to a messiah-type figure. Many intelligent people I met in those early days revered him so that I naturally questioned my resistance to these ideas—precisely the intended impact of the initial workshop. 

People joined ESP for many, many different reasons. What drove me were personal insecurities and roadblocks to the next phase in my life: trusting a partner enough to start a family. There were, of course, lots of nutty things in that workshop, but there were also benefits: I overcame several limiting beliefs that had haunted me since childhood. I began taking back my territory, my very self-esteem. Although this, too, is common to manipulative, coercive control groups: if there were no positive aspects to the teachings and practices, nobody would stick around for long.

What I didn’t realize was the initial workshop was a gateway to systemic conditioning that would slowly erode my instincts and defenses, opening me up to brutal psychological, emotional and physical abuse. 

As is the case with many victims, it took me a very long time to recognize I was being abused—that I did not ask for it, I did not deserve it, I did not consent and that I was not alone in experiencing these things. Even once I began to recognize that I was being abused, the feeling of shame I experienced kept me stuck in the situation for quite some time.

I finally found the courage to leave Albany three months after Raniere’s scandalous arrest and extradition from my home country in March 2018. It took another two months to rip out the last claws still digging into my mind, which prevented my seeing the full picture and my place in it. As I removed the last one, the blindfold finally fell away and, in its absence, grew pure rage. 

The cycle of awareness and ire finally erupted while reading the first chapter of “Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships.” I owe the authors, Dr. Janja Lalich and Madeleine Landau Tobias, a sincere debt of gratitude for their work.

That fateful day in August 2018, I realized that I had been part of a cult. (If the term offends anyone’s vernacular, replace “cult” with “high-demand group” or simply “abusive relationship,” because that’s what they are—cults can get a little weirder sometimes). Realizing I was in a cult was humiliating, but the worst was realizing the people I had trusted with my life had betrayed me in the most sinister way.

The irony is unmatched: I joined NXIVM to work on my trust issues, yet their treachery nearly eroded my trust in humanity. “Nearly” because I’ve since opened up to friends from my past and friends who also defected. Their kindness and solidarity have helped restore my belief that people can care for and protect one another.

In June 2019, after the jury deliberated for only four hours, Raniere was convicted of seven federal crimes, including fraud, racketeering, forced labor and one count each of sex trafficking of women and children. The jury unanimously decided that he committed each of the fourteen enumerated criminal acts underlying his racketeering charge. Two of those criminal “predicate acts” involved Raniere producing and possessing child pornography.

Many of the charges relate to a female secret society he created in 2015 known as DOS or The Vow. DOS baited women with the promise of conquering their fears, personal limitations and historical dependence on men. No other women’s “movement” in history offered quite the full package: self-reliance, success, freedom from subservience, and, to sweeten the deal, spiritual enlightenment.

I never took part in DOS, although I had my share of the denigrating practices more than 10 years before DOS was born, thanks to Raniere’s unyielding demands. I did participate briefly in the equally misogynistic female and male precursors to DOS: Jness and SOP or “Society of Protectors.” However, I largely avoided the workshops because I would feel worse about myself every single time I attended. 

DOS recruited over 100 innocent women in the U.S., Mexico and Canada under false pretenses—precisely Raniere’s M.O. The leaders concealed the fact that he led DOS, and they gathered “collateral” consisting of highly embarrassing and even incriminating materials the group used to blackmail women into submission.

What is even more shocking is Raniere continues to lead DOS from prison, as well as its male counterpart. While SOP is alive and well, I hear some of its members have gone underground to form and find recruits for a male-version of DOS. Worst still is the strong hold he continues to have over his most ardent followers, especially those in New York City and the ones still hiding in Mexico, fearing prosecution.

Keith and his first line of sex slaves—specifically Allison Mack, Lauren Salzman, Nicki Clyne, Rosa Laura Junco, Loreta Garza, Daniela Padilla and Monica Duran—all abused new recruits and lied to them about the supposed symbol that was to be cauterized on their pelvis. It wasn’t a symbol, but rather a pathetic drawing of Raniere’s initials. Danielle Roberts, who may well lose her medical license in New York for her involvement, branded numerous women while lying to them about the symbol’s true meaning. She also continues to stand firmly behind her actions. 

DOS was an inevitable escalation in the twisted world of Raniere, but as much as it garnered the most media attention, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. He’s been playing this depraved game for decades, and the abuses I and other female victims suffered served only his amusement. Sadly, he did not work alone.

Similar to Jeffrey Epstein’s Ghislaine Maxwell, some of Raniere’s women blackmailed, exploited and procured young women to satisfy his pathological need for power and control—particularly the late Pamela Cafritz, who was the first to groom me and normalize his abhorrent proclivities. To me, Cafritz was the most monstrous of the lot. Not only because of what she did to me until her dying days but because she procured women and girls for Raniere with absolutely no remorse.

It’s taken tremendous personal effort and a strong support network to get back on my feet after so many years of unyielding trauma. I considered remaining silent, but this summer, to top all things COVID and, for lack of a better word, 2020, Raniere’s loyalists—led by Nicki Clyne, Michele Hatchette, Suneel Chakravorty, Marc Elliot and Eduardo Asunsolo—did the unthinkable: they started a so-called “movement” called “We Are As You” (a.k.a. The Forgotten Ones) outside his prison in Brooklyn.

More on that nonsense later. The point is when I saw this farce of a social justice initiative, I could no longer stand by and do nothing, so I took to Twitter. And just three days ago, they launched yet another front—I’m guessing the first one didn’t work out. This one’s called “Make Justice Blind” and the same brainwashed gang is taking up a fight with the federal government now—good luck with that.

It’s time for a formal statement—secrecy is the sociopath’s creed.

Through this, I take the first step in transforming from a highly private person to potentially something else. This is the beginning of my social emancipation from NXIVM.

With this statement, I also begin taking back control of my narrative, which has been told inaccurately or outright falsely by some dubious media outlets, and opportunistic journalists and bloggers. I also plan to publish the statements I make at the sentencing hearings here.

I hope Raniere and his co-defendants get the sentences they deserve so they experience, first-hand, what it’s like to lose precious, irreplaceable time.

Although in their case, it is well deserved. 

More to come.

Photo by Jake Colling on Unsplash

Secrets, secrets are no fun

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

I had a rich conversation with one of my aunts who, even before beginning her lifelong career as a psychologist, was an astute student of human behavior. We were discussing the burden secrets create on one's psychology and mental health. Lies are a type of secret too, and when one vows to keep a secret, all efforts—be it conscious or unconscious—are directed to protect it.

There are good secrets, of course, that serve a higher purpose. For instance, protecting someone's privacy, when whatever is behind the privacy doesn’t violate others’ rights. Protecting those secrets is also a burden, except they become easier to carry knowing the reward is serving a noble principle. This distinction, unfortunately, is a line that conmen and the like blur to enslave unsuspecting victims into protecting their secrets and lies.

Secrets born of abuse, dishonesty or some sort of pathology have devastating consequences for the secret holder—they wear away at the psyche, at our very spirit. When a secret is held by a family, a close group or community, the effects are further compounded.

There’s a myriad of films, books and other mediums that tell the same story. The first that comes to mind, just because I only watched it this summer, is the 2013 film starring Neve Campbell, “An Amish Murder.’

- - - SPOILER ALERT - - -

In the film, Neve's Amish character is sexually assaulted by a member of her community. She kills him in self-defense, and the family buries the evidence. She later leaves the community and becomes an officer of the law to prevent similar abuses from happening to other women. The secret tears through her family and community, creating fear, doubt and divisions, even as they all try to protect the victim of a violent crime.

- - - END OF SPOILER - - -

I'm not sure if the children's rhyme stems from an adage, but it's no surprise that it ends in "Secrets, secrets hurt someone."

Secrets that suppress the truth or worse, shield victimizers as a means to spare victims further suffering, have devastating effects for all secret keepers. A family, with the best of intentions, can take on secrets to protect their loved one from the shame and stigma of falling prey to a predator, only to find the burden is one all must carry until the truth sets them free.

I see you, Isaias

Alright, I don't see you quite yet. It's the calm before the storm, but as a new Floridian, I'm half excited and half nervous. Let's hope the first half outweighs the other.

I've been in Florida for a couple of years but I missed hurricane Dorian once it changed course. That said, I was part of a group of volunteers deployed to Freeport, Grand Bahama to provide humanitarian relief—an experience I will never forget. The devastation our Bahamian neighbors experienced was beyond gut-wrenching. And now Isaias is right on them.

As Dorian loomed last year, I freaked out, so much so that I think I exhausted my freak-out reserves. Yet that somehow served me well. I've taken all the precautions I did last year and am ready for Isaias. If I've failed to prepare as a newbie, I'll write about it after the storm. It's an odd trial-and-error type of learning, and the stakes are high, depending on the weather.

Funny—emails, tweets and alerts keep coming in about the storm, as the view outside my window is a midsummer's night dream.

I guess that's the difference between fear and caution. The first is a primitive and necessary response—it armors you up, but if you suspend reason, the consequences can be catastrophic. Caution, on the other hand, has the same benefits of fear in a physiological sense (the alertness and armoring up), but reason masters the primitive responses so as to persevere. I opt for caution, although my life has conditioned me to obey fear.

No more.

It’s ironic my first full-on hurricane should start with an "I."

Isaias, hello—pleased to meet you. I'm just grateful they didn't name you Ivy, or else I would flee to safer ground. Thank goodness I have my sense of humor to keep me company. Speaking of which…

Photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash

To the broken and brokenhearted

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

For various, mostly mistaken reasons, I shut a lot of people I love out of my life. I thought that while I was away, they wouldn't think about me. Out of sight, out of mind—you know how that goes.

Thing is, they never left my mind.

It wasn't until after I got back in touch with them that I realized I never left theirs. They were worried, watching from afar, trying to help, but not knowing how.

Sarah, Keni, Pao, Royer, Liliana, Zaydunga, Nora, Manolo: gracias por ayudarme a recobrar partes de mi corazon que hasta poco pensé estaban perdidas.

Is there no journalistic integrity anymore?

No, not that much, kinda proportionately not ever, but especially less now with the younger crowd.

Like many women, I've been following stories in the media exposing abuses against women. The most harrowing accounts are about women abusing other women—sometimes girls—such as Jeffery Epstein's "madam" Ghislaine Maxwell procuring their victims, many of them, tragically, underage.

Today I came across a female journalist who had a choice while publishing a story: she could protect the victim and her privacy, or she could out her against her will, exposing the victim to further trauma in a societal context.

The reporter subjugated the victim's privacy in the name of "serving the truth and her readers."

Just when you hope a female journalist will protect a victim—a fellow woman—it all implodes.

I'm beyond disappointed, but hardly surprised. This happens every day.

A journalist's job is to sell a story. I get it. It is their way of life, and I respect that.

I have no respect for journalists who are willing to throw their sources under the bus just to sell a story—especially the sources and victims they seemingly attempt to protect.

No journalistic integrity there.

None whatsoever.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Of hotdogs and quarantine

Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash

As parts of society have devolved further into conspiracy theories and such, perhaps the greatest gift of quarantine, for me, has been reconnecting with the people closest to my heart. My best friend from college is front and center, but more on that angel later.

Another best friend has been a beacon through some of my darkest moments—ever patient, kind, thoughtful, never expecting anything in return, always buffering my pain with his tremendous artistry and sense of humor.

Tonight, I stopped by a gas station that was closed due to COVID-19 guidelines. The lights were still on, but when I pulled on the door, I figured I just missed the mark. I peered inside, finding no movement, except something small out of the corner of my eye. I texted him once I was back in the car.

– There is nothing sadder than a lonely, old, forgotten hotdog going round and round on that Ferris-wheel of a grill after the gas station has closed. (Pause) OK, there are sadder things. But still.

– You are as that hot dog. (Pause) As are we all.

Here’s to my friend and all of us lonely hotdogs out there.

Fret not, we will soon be warmly swaddled between two buns.

Stay safe. Wear a mask.

P.S. Love to Noam Chomsky, my hotdog in dog heaven.