What a mother.
That’s Lauren Salzman. A real mother.
This is our next in our series on Lauren Salzman. In this and the next few posts, we are going to learn a lot about the dynamic that led Lauren to be a captor for Daniella, the Mexican woman who was held prisoner in her room – in literal solitary confinement – for 700 days.
This is by far the supreme blemish on Lauren and in this post, we see how Keith set it up. He utilized Lauren’s desire for motherhood to make her do atrocious things. That kind of desire for motherhood is so abhorrent and hideous that one thinks that if they had a child, he or she would be a blight on the earth.
We also get some interesting background on Daniella and her family, a family madly devoted to Nxivm and Keith Raniere, led unhappily by their curiously unprotective parents. Three sisters, all of them seduced by Raniere, and a son – all caught in the web of Keith Raniere thanks to the lack of vigilance of the parents.
But let us keep in mind that without enablers like Lauren and Pam Cafritz – women who lied for him constantly and accepted his polyamory as quite natural – Raniere’s abuses could not have been accomplished.
In every abuse he ever did, he was never alone. He always had a female accomplice or two to help get the victim in place. And one of the greatest of these accomplices was Lauren Salzman.
AUSA Tanya Hajjar is examining Lauren. This is the trial of Keith Alan Raniere. The date is May 21, 2019.
Q Ms. Salzman, I now want to direct your attention to the early 2000s when you testified that you first met Camila and her sisters.
A Yes.
Q Can you describe NXIVM’s initial expansion into Mexico?
A Yes. I was involved in teaching a course in Michigan and Edgar Boone took that course, he was a Mexican man from Monterrey, and he had run a human potential school in Monterrey before prior to taking our course and said that if he liked the course he would want to close down his school and work with us and bring our course to Mexico, which he did.
Q And can you describe where you first met Daniella?
A I met Daniella in Monterrey, Mexico in 2001 and I taught an intensive down there at a museum, and she was one of the students in my — in my course.
Q Where in Mexico was that?
A It was in Monterrey.
Q And do you recall approximately when that was?
A It was sometime in 2001. I just can’t recall the specific date. It was after September.
Q How old was Daniella when you first met her?
A Seventeen or eighteen.
Q What were your first impressions of her?
A She was very bright and she, like, grasped the concepts that was teaching in the course very quickly comparatively to others, and most of the people — I think almost all of the team that I had taught or most of the people I had taught up to that point had been adults, so she took to it much faster and more enthusiastically than most of my students.
Q Did there come a time where Daniella’s parents proposed having Daniella stay or go to the community — to the NXIVM community?
A Yes.
Q Can you describe how that happened?
A … Her father called me and basically said that she was supposed to go to Switzerland to study abroad for a year but wanted to know if she could come to Albany to study with us instead.
Q What was her father’s first name?
A Hector.
Q And her mother?
A Adriana.
Q And the first names of her siblings?
A Marianna, Camila, and Adrian.
Q Was Marianna the oldest sibling?
A Marianna is the oldest, yes.
Q And Daniella was the second oldest?
A Yes.
Q And the third and fourth sibling, what orders were they?
A Adrian and then Camila was the youngest.
Q What happened after you spoke to Daniella’s father?
A Well, what he was proposing was something we had never had. There wasn’t a work study program for students in that way, so I brought the request — I told him I didn’t know that that would be possible, that I brought the request to Pam Cafritz to bring to Keith, and I heard back that that was something that they were willing to do and that Keith wanted to meet her.
Q How did Daniella arrive at the intensive in the first place? What was her introduction to NXIVM?
A Her parents enrolled her.
Q And her parents had attended intensives before that?
A Correct.
Q How many?
A At least one. I remember seeing them on two occasions, but it could have been that they took a five-day and came back for the second half, or they could have been repeating, but I saw her parents on a few occasions before I met her.
Q Were Daniella’s parents enthusiastic about NXIVM and ESP?
A Yes. Very.
Q Were her parents enthusiastic about Daniella moving to the community?
A Yes.
Q Did Daniella, in fact, come to live in the NXIVM community?
A Yes, she did.
Q How old was she at the time?
A Seventeen or eighteen.
Q At some point, did her siblings join her?
A They did, yes. Marianna first and then the other two.
Q And where did her family live within the NXIVM community?
A They had an apartment in Cohoes, which is a town, like, just one or two towns over from where the rest of us lived in Clifton Park.
Q Did she eventually move?
A They did. They eventually moved to Clifton Park into Knox Woods, the development where a number of us were living at the time.
Q How old were Adrian and Camila at the time that they moved to the community?
A I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think Camila was maybe 14 and Adrian 16.
Q Did Adrian have a nickname?
A Fluffy.
Q Were they in high school?
A Yes. I believe they were in high school. I think originally they enrolled in Cohoes High School. I’m not sure if they transferred or not. I think Adrian graduated and Cami didn’t.
Q Did Camila stay in high school, as far as you knew?
A I don’t think she stayed in high school, no.
Q What was your understanding of what Daniella was to be doing in the NXIVM community?
A Initially what I thought she was going to be doing was coming to do, like, an internship with us or similar to, like, what her work — her study abroad would be, that she would come and study with NXIVM instead, so I thought that she would become a coach and study the ESP curriculum, similar to the way everybody else did but maybe in a more condensed or expedited version — like, version of it, so that she would have, like, full-time school like she would have had abroad.
Q Is that what happened?
A No.
Q What happened?
A I’m not sure exactly what happened, but she started spending a lot of time with Keith and working with him.
Q Working with him how?
A She was doing research for him and helping him by reading books on a variety of different subjects and summarizing them — like, distilling them down to the most relevant or valuable aspects of the books to save him the time of having to read the whole book to get what the information was out of it.
Q So she distilled the concepts in the book to a more – to an easier format or something?
A That’s what I understood she was doing.
Q Was this for the defendant, these reports of these books?
A Yes. She was helping him, was my understanding, in doing research for him.
Q What kind of subjects were these books on?
A I don’t know all of the subjects. I remember one in particular, she was doing research on cryogenics because she had learned some interesting things about it that she shared with me, but I know, like, she — at one point she was doing calculus problems — I don’t know if she was doing that on her own or for him, I know she later did that on her own — but I think there were a variety of different subjects that she was studying.
Q And the output, the thing she was creating, was that so that the defendant didn’t have to read the book?
A Yes. And that he could use the information for whatever he was working on.
Q Did she spend time with the defendant, as you observed her?
A Yes. I observed that she was spending time, and it seemed like she was spending more time than I had observed because there was a familiarity and comfortability that I didn’t know when it happened.
Q Can you describe that?
A Yeah. I mean, in the early days of, like, when I first met Keith and he was living at 3 Flintlock, I experienced it to be more of like an open-door policy where people were always coming and going there was a lot — we spent a lot of group time together; and around the time that Dani came and Marianna, I think there were other things surrounding it, but it became less and less like that, and Dani started hanging around a lot and it became — or — I started seeing her when I would go over to Flintlock to see Keith, she would be there, and it became clear to me that they were spending a lot of time together. She started to lose weight and wear more revealing clothing. I remember she was wearing, like, a lot of miniskirts and things like that, so I started to assume they were — they were or at some point they would have a relationship.
Q What was Marianna doing at this time?
A I’m not sure exactly about the time frame of everything, but Marianna, when I met her, wanted to be a professional tennis player and Pam befriended her and the two of them were spending a lot of time together doing athletic stuff, and I think Keith was advising them or coaching them on how to coach Marianna to improve her tennis.
Q And this was Pamela Cafritz?
A Yes.
Q What about Adrian? What was he doing within the community?
A Adrian went to high school at first, and then at some point he went to live with Mark Vicente and some other men in the community — Ben Myers and Jim Del Negro — but he was studying to be part of Mark’s video team so he was learning filming and video editing.
Q And what about Camila?
A Camila came to work in the Rainbow program, which was the multicultural children’s educational program and she was a Spanish teacher there.
Q Daniella and her siblings, did you have an understanding — were they Mexican nationals?
A That was — yes.
Q Did you have an understanding of their visa status within the United States?
A Initially, I didn’t, but during this time, there were — we had started teaching classes in Mexico and a lot of Mexicans were coming to the United States and taking a lot of courses with us, and so I started to learn that there’s a certain amount of time that the Mexicans had to spend in Mexico to be able to qualify for their visa, so they were allowed to come to the States but only for a certain amount of time and there were restrictions.
So all the Mexicans that I was interacting with besides these — Daniella and her siblings — were having Visa constraints that I didn’t see them having, they never went back; and so I started asking Keith, like, ‘What’s going on with their visas?’, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s being taken care of.’
And then I went and asked Pam about it and Pam said, “Well, they are getting visas through the father’s, it’s coming,” so I thought that they were doing that or in the process of doing that.
Q Did you later learn anything about Daniella’s status in the United States?
A Yeah. There was some sort of incident where Marianna was upset about something and I was called and asked to help and I think Karen Unterreiner was involved and Karen called Daniella over to speak to Monkey [Marianna’s nickname] — to speak to Marianna, and Marianna basically was saying, ‘I don’t want to talk to any of you,’ and threatened that she was going to call the police if Dani didn’t leave, and she did end up calling the police but hanging up. And I can’t remember if they called back or they came, but we ended up having to deal with the fact that she had made the call, but I learned that the reason that call was threatening was because it put — Daniella was not legitimately there; she was — her status was illegal.
Q Did you become aware at some point that Daniella had made a land border crossing?
A Yes, I did. There was a party that I attended at my mom’s old house at 7 Grandhill Road in the early 2000s — I can’t quite recall the date, but at the party, I was there, my mom, Keith, Kristin Keeffe, Kathy Russell, Daniella, and there were others, I just can’t quite recall who, but Kristin Keeffe shared that she and Kathy had brought Dani into the U.S. through a border — a Canadian border — the Canadian border.
Q Between approximately 2004 and 2006, did Daniella do work for the defendant?
A I think so. Along the lines of what I was saying – what I was sharing.
Q And did there come a time where the defendant stopped speaking to Daniella?
A Yes. Somewhere between 2008 and 2010. I’m not exactly sure when — the exact time.
Q And can you explain what happened?
A He told me that they had had a fight, she had come into 3 Flintlock — so into his house without being invited, just walked in — and he closed himself in the bathroom and they were, I guess, arguing or something through the door and that at one point he had given her — she wanted to know something and he said to her: ‘If I tell you this information, I’m never going to speak to you again. Do you want to know this?’ And she insisted that yes, she did want to know this and so he wasn’t speaking to her.
Q At some point, were you approached about meeting with Daniella to coach her in some way?
A Yes. A few separate times. Closer to 2008, Karen had asked me if I would help her to meet with her —
Q Who is Karen?
A Karen Unterreiner. — and so I had had a few meetings with her in those years; and then again later Karen approached me as well, closer to 2010, to help her again; and then Keith approached me finally to help her.
Q Did you learn anything about Daniella’s relationship with the defendant?
A I did. So closer to 2008, I recall two times that she came over to my house and was upset and communicated that she was asking Keith whether they would have a relationship in the future and he wouldn’t give her an answer about it and he wanted her to go work that out with somebody else, and that she had asked him if he felt good with her sexually and that he had told her no, and she asked him, did he feel good with anybody sexually and he had told her yes, and so she was –this was upsetting to her.
***
Q Ms. Salzman, how old was Daniella when she told you about her relationship with the defendant, approximately?
A She was in her 20s. I’m not sure, 22, 24.
Q And when she told you these things about her relationship, was that prior to when the defendant approached you about a plan regarding Daniella?
A Yes.
Q And what did Daniella tell you … about her relationship with the defendant?
A … That Keith had wanted her and [her sister] Marianna to both take a nap with him, and she — this was upsetting, and I had understood that — it to be, like, a naked nap, was how I interpreted it.
Q Did you understand, then, there to have been some sexual interaction with Daniella and the defendant at this time?
A Yes.
Q After that point, did the defendant approach you with a plan regarding Daniella?
A Yes, he did.
Q Okay. And what was the plan as to Daniella?
A So this was later, like, in two thousand — closer to 2010. He called me on the phone and said that there was a project and I should only take it if I really wanted it, and he told me that there were various problems with Daniella; that she had been — among other things, she had been stealing from the family — she wasn’t working, didn’t do the work that she had committed to do, she had said that she was going to lose weight but instead she had gained 40 pounds, and that she was stealing from the family – stealing food and locking the family out of the house, these various things — and so what he proposed was that Dani be given an ultimatum that she go in her room with no distractions and come up with a plan for how to fix this or — and that — or be sent back to Mexico.
Q These issues the defendant raised to you, those were things that he communicated to you?
A Yes.
Q And when the defendant approached you about this project, as you described it, was this after he had stopped speaking to her for some period of time?
A Yes.
Q As you understood it, if Daniella didn’t stay in the room, she would be sent back to Mexico.
A Yes. That if she didn’t meet the conditions of satisfaction to come out of the room and came out of the room, she would be sent back to Mexico.
Q Did you understand what the conditions of satisfaction were, as you put it?
A I understood that it was a plan that — to rectify what she had done, but when I asked specifically, like, what her breach was, Keith told me she knew what she did, she knew what it was.
Q When you say “breach,” do you mean an ethical breach, like the concept you talked about before?
A Yes.
Q Did the defendant acknowledge a relationship with Daniella?
A No. We never discussed it.
Q Did you want to participate in this project?
A I told him, no, I didn’t want to take the project, but I asked him, ‘Why do you think that I should take the project?’
Q What did he say?
A And he said that, ‘Someday you might have a child’ — which, in my mind, was ‘someday we might have a child,’ because that was the whole plan that we were going to have children, and at the time also I was working in Mexico and kidnapping was a thing. Like, we knew a number of people who had been kidnapped or knew family members who were kidnapped, so he said, ‘Someday you might have a child and somebody may call you on the phone and say to you, “I have your child,” like, basically “I kidnaped your child and I’m going to kill them if you don’t give me a million dollars” and you’re not going to know what to do, so you can learn to work with that personality now or you can deal with it then.’
Q In the context of what he was telling you, who was the personality that he was describing?
A Daniella, that Daniella is this type of personality that’s manipulative to this degree and has, like, a sociopathology, and you can learn to work with that now or you may someday be in a situation where you are not going to be a good mom to our kid basically.
Q Did you believe him?
A Yes, I did.
Q What happened after that conversation —
A And especially at that time, too, it was — I thought that Keith understood everything about people’s psychodynamics; if Keith observed something and I couldn’t see it, it was because I didn’t understand and needed to learn something.
Q So you have a different perspective now?
A Well, I didn’t observe directly the things that he was describing from Daniella, and I don’t think that the things that were listed — that she didn’t complete book reports; that she gained weight instead of losing it; and that she was stealing food from her family when she was completely dependent on her family and an illegal alien in a country where she couldn’t legitimately work — raise to the level of going back to Mexico if she doesn’t address them.
***
We see an interesting story here and the pattern for Raniere is always the same.
The parents wanted their children to do a work-study program in Albany to learn more about Raniere’s amazing teachings. Lauren went to Pam, Keith’s greatest pimp. There are three young girls? How delightful. Yes, we will do it. Keith wanted to know all about the girls.
They move her up, under Pam and Keith’s tender supervision. Keith has sex with one after the other. Gets all three of them pregnant. The youngest one, he can’t even wait for her to come of age. He starts with her when she is 15 or possibly younger.
And when Lauren learns that the beast wanted to have two of the sisters, Marianna and Daniella, take a naked nap with him, [and that got both sisters upset,] there was one person who was not upset. No, it did not unsettle Lauren.
Lauren is always willing to comply, to go along, to support. Whether it is naked naps with sisters and a hairy beast or even the imprisonment of one of these young women, who had come there when they were in their teens.
Nothing fazed Lauren, no duplicity, no act of cruelty, no inhuman acts by the monster himself, nothing thwarted Lauren’s resolve.
All it ever took for Keith was to dangle motherhood in front of her. She did not want, at first, to do this dreadful thing to Daniella, Lauren claims. But Keith dazzled her – he tells her that if she were ever to become a mother, she would need to understand sociopaths like Daniella in case their child was ever kidnapped by a sociopath like Daniella.
Complete nonsense is accepted as divine prescience.
And Lauren got the message. If she did not go along [she did not even know what Daniella’s breach was], Keith would withdraw, as he had done before, the hope for her having children with him.
Ah, idiotic Lauren, what monstrosities would she not commit in order to have a child with Raniere? What a monstrous child it might have been too. In most worlds, motherhood is thought to be unselfish, but Lauren’s desire for motherhood was so criminally and egregiously selfish, that she makes an eloquent argument for mandatory sterilization of the criminally insane.
She would smother the hopes of so many people, branding, blackmailing, deceiving, and even imprisoning them for the one false dream of having a baby with a monster.
By all manner of deductive reasoning, Lauren is a monster herself.
And the final, cruel laugh was on her. Raniere had his child, not with her, but with the older sister of the woman they imprisoned.
And Daniela came back to be part of the case that helped imprison Raniere and quite shortly will imprison Lauren Salzman.
Frank Parlato 
Janine Morrison 
J.J. O'Hara 
Richard Luthmann 
Marie White 
Paul Serran
Please leave a comment: Your opinion is important to us!
As I’ve noted before, I’ve read that there is more of a culture of cults in Mexico – which makes sense given the country’s religious background, infused with pre-Columbian beliefs overlaid with a culty sort of Catholicism. I see more signs here, such as with Dani’s family, and also in other recent stories and comments, that NXIVM must have taken somewhat differently in Mexico, which resulted in members with a more religious allegiance, and a particular fervor to the following in that country.
So Salzman was manipulated by a sociopath, into doing something evil that she believed was justified because it was supposed to teach her about dealing with sociopathic manipulators. Her cluelessness seems to know no bounds.
And, once again, I’m reminded of Voltaire: “Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities”
Re Dani’s plight & Lauren Salzman
After mulling it over, I think the information contained within this article is some of the most disturbing information we have learned involving Keith Raniere and Lauren Salzman’s willingness to inflict pain and suffering on another human being.
Salzman’s actions deserve a solid 3-5 years in prison.
…..And again if she was a man, none of her apologists would be defending her.
BTW: Frank’s commentary at the end is tame compared to what I was thinking after I read the court transcript.
The more I read, the more bizarre the story gets. And, it becomes obvious to me why the jury returned a verdict so fast.
This guy is a manipulating scumbag. Unbelievably so. And how he got away with it for so long is something else. Someone had to see it.
Here’s something interesting:
“if Keith observed something and I couldn’t see it, it was because I didn’t understand and needed to learn something.”
That sounds like orders he gave her. A brainwashing so she would never second guess him.
No, she didn’t need to learn anything. She needed to trust her instincts as to danger. But I’m guessing those instincts most of us have were stripped to the core.
Absolutely shocking.
My opinion based upon facts I am reading from the testimony.
This also brings of a victim of gaslighting, lead to doubt her own instincts. A common arrow for narcissists.
Dead on – that’s why it was so important that he be acknowledged as “smartest in the world”. How could you argue with him when he was always smarter than you, knew more, saw more, could understand more. It was his ticket to having his minions doubt themselves and put all their faith in him and his teachings.
Whatever his IQ is (and it sure isn’t 240), it’s just a flipping number. It says nothing about his morals or his psychopathology or his empathy or his humanity. Just a malevolent, manipulative fraud hiding behind a number.
Absolutely L. And the bowing and interaction that left her wanting. I never met KAR, but I would guess he gave half-assed responses to everyday interactions, to make his victims needy, never getting full responses or his full attention; he left them dangling and wanting, until their frustration built and built, and they were competing for his attention.
He gaslighted Lauren. Or someone did.
I don’t know her, either–but it leaves me asking if KAR was the first narcissist in her life.
I could care less what his IQ is. That is a dangerous person.
My opinion.
Quite possible on the exposure to narcissists. If you are raised by a narcissist parent (Nancy perhaps), you run the risk of normalizing that behavior. Narcissistic abuse becomes your standard so you’re more vulnerable to it – you can’t see it coming as something dangerous and abusive.
Raniere looked for that in women. Something in their past that made them more susceptible. And then he used it as a weapon against them.
This cult is so lucky with all the mind games they played. Lucky they didn’t screw someone up to the point of them opening fire in a NXIVM Intensive and committing mass murder. I guess it shows they knew what they were doing with their mind fuckery and that the only deaths they pushed people to were people taking their own lives.
How come nobody is talking about Betancourt and the horrors he did in the cult? I see his Twitter normal. https://twitter.com/alexbetancourtl
About what year was that?
“A He told me that they had had a fight, she had come into 3 Flintlock — so into his house without being invited, just walked in — and he closed himself in the bathroom and they were, I guess, arguing or something through the door and that at one point he had given her — she wanted to know something and he said to her: ‘If I tell you this information, I’m never going to speak to you again. Do you want to know this?’ And she insisted that yes, she did want to know this and so he wasn’t speaking to her.” I wonder what the information was? Who was with Raniere and/or what he was doing when she walked in?
I have not finished reading this. Some points that stand out . I thought Daniela in her testimony said that Lauren invited her to come to Albany not that her dad proposed it.
Considering the dad was more submissive (based on everyone’s testimony) I don’t see him taking initiative and offering his daughter to go to the USA. Maybe Lauren was Seeking since early 2000, young virgins for Rainere and hence why she invited Daniela to Albany ?
I think it is a lie that the dad started everything. How ironic the victims Lauren brought in , beat her and won Rainerr’s seed baby . Karma is a bitch Lauren …
OMG that Loca Mexican Chica has a knife and is about to cut off my Bolas!!!
Doesn’t she know I am the East Coast Judo Champion?
Doesn’t she know I am the world’s third smartest man?!
Here!
I will hide in the bathroom under the bathroom sink!
Lauren, Help Me!
Nancy, Help Me!
Pam, Help Me!
Clare, Help Me!
Sara, Help Me!
Allison, Help Me!
Nicki, Help Me!
How will I ever sire the Avatar Baby without my Bolas?
A Satire!
Dani must be a very tough and resilient person.
Solitary confinement has been known to completely break people.
“In most worlds, motherhood is thought to be unselfish, but Lauren’s desire for motherhood was so criminally and egregiously selfish, that she makes an eloquent argument for mandatory sterilization of the criminally insane.” I would change the last word from “insane” to “cruel.”
Anonymous, politics is cult-like on both sides.
Regarding cult-like on both sides:
Liberalism and conservatism are two sides of the same coin, idealism. Idealisms are simply dogmatic beliefs misconstrued as eternal truths. Political ideology is just a matter of perspective and opinion.
No man made philosophical construct has any basis in reality within the context of the natural world or time and space.
Political ideologies are no different than philosophy; they are philosophies.
Good luck trying to get either side understand that!
This election year you get to choose between the fascist and the communist. Yeah!!!
In the US, we have the particularly schizophrenic situation where the so-called liberals are, by formal definitions, socially liberal but economically conservative; and the nominal conservatives are the reverse, socially conservative but economically liberal. Thus, there are various old sayings about how one wants to control how you spend your money, and the other how you spend your sexual energy.
In other countries there are sometimes, but not always, political axes where the main allegiances and parties are consistently liberal or conservative both socially and economically.
It’s strange-bedfellows all around in oddly varying ways.
I concur.
We can all pretty much agree on nine of the Ten Commandments, but that’s it.
Atheists always have a problem with that one commandment.
“the US, we have the particularly schizophrenic situation where the so-called liberals are, by formal definitions, socially liberal but economically conservative; and the nominal conservatives are the reverse, socially conservative but economically liberal.”
It’s a weird phenomena all around.
“Keith hid in this bathroom from Dani.”
The brave child molester Keith Raniere hid in a bathroom from a 22 year old woman.
LOL
Perhaps Raniere was already practicing hiding in the bathroom for the day when Mexican Federales would be after him with machine guns.
Keith Raniere is like Jeffrey Epstein in that without his female accomplices he is much less dangerous.
——————————————
Raniere liked to brag that he is the world’s third smartest man.
If so then what is he doing having a young woman read books for him and then condense and regurgitate the contents so that he can understand them?
Sounds to me that Raniere is the world’s third dumbest man.
Raniere is not only dumb but he is too lazy to read a book for himself.
“A. She was doing research for him and helping him by reading books on a variety of different subjects and summarizing them — like, distilling them down to the most relevant or valuable aspects of the books to save him the time of having to read the whole book to get what the information was out of it.”
“Q So she distilled the concepts in the book to a more – to an easier format or something?”
“A That’s what I understood she was doing.”
“Q Was this for the defendant, these reports of these books?”
“A Yes. She was helping him, was my understanding, in doing research for him.”
As for Lauren Salzman if she wanted a baby so badly why didn’t she try for artificial insemination or adoption.
Either one of those options is more dignified than sleeping with a stupid slug like Keith Raniere.
I was 18 or 19 when he hid in a bathroom from me threatening to commit suicide with a safety razor if I didn’t do what he wanted. Must be one of his signature moves. Not very creative if he keeps going back to the old standbys.
Hard to know at what point Lauren went from victim to perpetrator. Even with testifying against him, nothing can give Dani back that piece of her life that was stolen with Lauren’s help. Seems a couple of years taken from Lauren’s life in prison is appropriate.
I’m sorry you had to go through such an ordeal.
Raniere, who is evil and manipulative, used people’s innate goodness against them.
Don’t be sorry for me – it’s long gone and done. If I share details, it’s just to corroborate others’ experiences. He’s been playing these same mental mind games on people for a long, long time. In the end, you realize it’s not personal – he literally tries to destroy everyone in his path. He’s where he needs to be, removed from society so no one has to be exposed to his toxicity again.
L., thanks for contributing your experience. It helps a lot to understand and put things in perspective, particularly in this case to know that Raniere was just playing out longstanding patterns.
We see time and again that he resorted to behaviors, and was driven by dysfunctions, that went back to his college days if not his teen years. And yet somehow he managed to convince his harem and inner circle that they were the ones who were “disintegrated,” and he was just because he was spiritually sensitive that he engaged in virtually hysterical dramatizations, or was fixated on having sex with women who looked like (or were) teenage girls.
Well said. I really appreciate all of your sharing.
What did Raniere want you to do? At least he “graduated” threatening to kill himself to not talking to her.
To come out of the bathroom? He demanded I count out loud – I couldn’t quite summon up enough cognitive dissonance. It was a safety razor – you could give yourself a nice shaving nick but that’s about it. I didn’t count; he eventually came out; no blood was spilled. Think he might have had one of his “fainting spells” after that because I had “stressed” him out so much. It’s laughable now – at the time, I was pretty young and pretty scared he was actually going to hurt himself because of me.
What triggered the hide in the bathroom and make threats technique? I don’t remember. It may have been the incident where I contacted an old girlfriend of his for info about him. He didn’t want me to read the letter she sent me in response (cause he really didn’t want all his lies exposed). I read it; he flipped; he forced me to write a rebuttal to everything she said.
Someday I’ll maybe write this all out – black comedy. You gotta be able to laugh at all the stupid things you do in your life. He was a major stupid on my part. Older and wiser…
We all do stupid things, you’re not alone. Probably the most stupid thing I do is respond to nutjobs on this website. LOL
Scott is a shining light on Frank Report. I relish his thoughtful and caring commentary.
Scott,
-—What did think Raniere want you to do?
Gee, Scott, I wonder…
Wonder no more, the answer has arrived. And you wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years. It may take the same amount of time for you to figure out how the coefficient of friction works. LOL
Salzman didn’t want just any baby, she wanted Raniere’s baby. In her mind, it was not only the most dignified thing to do, it was the only thing that she thought about.
Scott-
Here you go retard:
Coefficient for retards just click and scroll down. You are such a lobotomy case.
http://www.physics4kids.com/files/motion_friction.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=coefficient%20of%20friction%20sandpaper%20on%20wood
Since you already messed up people’s vs peoples’; if you have any questions please let me know.
Please remember toilet paper is not a plaything.
Too bad you didn’t read the kiddy physics lesson before you made your stupid coefficient of friction comment. LOL
I didn’t mess up anything, I cited a source that states one is correct in one instance and the other in another instance. LOL
Please remember to make your toilet paper last twice as long by using both sides of the toilet paper. That used to be a Pollock joke until it became politically incorrect, but it’s okay to use as a Texas Aggie joke, or a stupid idiot joke, the latter applies to you. LOL
“They’ve just refused to entertain any ideas that go against their leader,” said Janja Lalich, a sociology professor at California State University, Chico, who studies cults and extremist groups. “That kind of closed-mindedness is just so typical of cult members.”
“They’re afraid to get on his bad side,” said Lalich of Republican senators. “That very much parallels what we see in cults where people are terrified of, you know, being caught out in any kind of expression of doubt or mistrust of the leader.”
What do you think Frank? Do you agree with Lalich? Didn’t you use her in your ID thing as your expert? Once Raniere managed to overcome the TU article and got his enemies thrown in jail or silenced with the help of the Bronfman’s and the fear of retaliation, he was emboldened and created DOS. Now that Trump has escaped, do you see him escalating into even worse behavior as Raniere? Here’s more from the article”
“Cult members experience cognitive dissonance when presented with facts that contradict their beliefs, said Lalich. If Republican senators believe that Trump is good for America, they will work hard to ignore information that would shatter their worldview.
“They’ll shut out whatever’s happening in reality,” she said, “to keep themselves safe within this little cocoon that they’ve built around themselves.”
It’s common for members to use outright lies and mental gymnastics to protect their leader, and themselves. The mentality is that the “end justifies the means,” according to Daniel Shaw, a psychotherapist who specializes in cults. For Republicans, that means keeping Trump in power at all costs.
“Scientology operates in the same way,” he said. “Members are immediately dispersed to deny any wrongdoing and to make false claims.” They create alternate realities to discredit any narrative that attacks a leader.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trumps-acquittal-proves-the-gop-senate-acts-like-a-cult_n_5e3dcf51c5b6f1f57f10f626
Kind of like the way voters in California keep voting for Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi while their state and cities slide into third world status.
Paul Joseph Watson – “San Francisco is a Sh*thole”
Couldn’t you say the same thing about Democrats? the very same thing and give examples?
Rick Ross recently published an article on his website in which he argues that the “Trump is a cult leader and his voters are brainwashed” idea is ludicrous. Whatever one thinks of Trump, he is not a running a high-demand, destructive cult ala Hubbard, Jim Jones, or Raniere.
Today I had to deal with someone suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
“Shadow, what will we do after Trump was not removed from office?”
“In nine months there will be an election and you can vote against him then.”
“But Shadow, what if he is reelected?”
“That’s called Democracy. People won’t always vote the way you want.”
Because Trump has power, he has large devoted base, he controls the Dept of Justice and his fellow GOP politicians obey him because they fear for their jobs. Oh, again, Trump has power.
Does the Democrat cult have any of those things?
For all of Trump’s power, has he shut down one newspaper, magazine, website or broadcasting station because it criticized him?
Has Trump thrown any of his critics in prison?
Has Trump murdered any of his critics?
Has Trump canceled any elections?
Are media outlets still routinely criticizing Trump on a daily basis?
Are books attacking Trump printed all of the time?
Are courts issuing injunctions against Trump and his policies all of the time
Spare me the “Trump is Hitler” histrionics.
If you don’t like Trump, you will get to vote against him in November.
Actually Putin has done everything you have mentioned along with China’s “president”.
Holding someone captive is kidnapping and a crime. If Lauren was a man, would you feel so sympathetic? (Rhetorical question).
Lauren Salzman would have committed murder for Keith Raniere.
I feel sympathy for her. No one is above the law.
OMG
So Pelosi, Shumer, Mr Potato man and his bobblehead congressional partner are the first line like DOS to Hillary. And AOC and her gang 2nd level slaves? Who marry their brothers to get VISA’s. Or wait tables in a gentleman club as “Sandy” prior to getting elected. And please don’t throw a fit in a bathroom, just tear up a speech on live TV right behind the speaker.
Please get a brain. And this is about enslaving people, child abuse, and theft! Not politics !!!’