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.

Worth writing down

My statement at Nancy Salzman's sentencing