Here is an anonymous guest view – from one of our readers. It is a critique of Lauren Salzman’s Sentencing Memorandum and seems to be a pretty sound analysis, written by someone who appears to have considerable insight into NXIVM and its history.
A Review of Lauren Salzman’s Sentencing Memorandum
By Someone Who Knows
Unfortunately for Lauren Salzman, she is likely facing incarceration.
Unlike Allison Mack, her pre-sentencing presentation of herself and the facts surrounding her involvement is noticeably lacking in critical areas.
Significantly, she hasn’t individuated from her mother and obviously cannot appreciate or articulate their separateness nor the harm her mother caused separate and apart from herself. The whole thing reads like “My Mom and I are victims” and contradicts true contriteness in subtle ways, especially considering the high-end lifestyle Lauren and her mother lived for two decades where her mother was the president of the cult.
Starting a business with the financial support of your parents (plural), when one of those parents is your co-defendant and was found with $500K in cash stashed around the house, is not a good look with the Judge.
Nancy’s statement seems to contradict Lauren’s. Nancy takes the credit for Lauren’s cooperation with the government and says she (Nancy) agreed to cooperate first. That contradiction stood out to me very boldly.
Although a compassionate person may seek to empathize, rightly intended, with Lauren’s 20-year relationship with Keith Raniere, Lauren’s memorandum overall goes too far in this direction to the point of denial of responsibility.
Unlike Allison Mack’s, which struck just the right balance.
Noticeably absent is an acknowledgment of the money and power Lauren accumulated over all those years, while advocating for near slave wages and the financial destruction of others throughout her career. Till it all blew up in her face in a three-month period through DOS.
I recall reading on the Frank Report sometime this year that Lauren sold her $350K home and within her memorandum, she mentions owning two cars and two properties. There are a lot more judicious and repentant ways Lauren could have leveraged her accumulation of assets to support a more fulsome attempt at rehabilitation and making amends than she has evidenced. I just don’t see it.
Lauren’s attorneys have done her a disservice by not advising her better to make her case strongly, separate, and apart from her mother’s.
Lauren’s memorandum seems to absolve and excuse her mother’s acts as if they are co-victims rather than co-defendants. It would have been better for Lauren to leave her mother out of it. Instead, the undue influence of Nancy Salzman’s sophisticated powers of persuasion and indoctrination are felt throughout Lauren’s attempt to make a strong case for herself.
Nancy is clearly a continual danger to society and by association, Lauren may be perceived as such. It’s unfortunate for Lauren but not unexpected. Nancy was the wind beneath Keith Raniere’s wings for a long, long time and continues to maintain a strong influence in the former NXIVM community where I understand she still marshals considerable fees for coaching and EM’s.
Given Keith’s own tendencies for self-destruction, you’d have to have some considerable skills to partner with him in a successful business for twenty years.
Also absent is an acknowledgment from Lauren of her being the most influential and highest-rank person in NXIVM to join DOS, and how her enrollment may have emboldened Keith to dramatically up the recruitment requirements for DOS members already enrolled resulting in many more victims.
I seem to recall reading somewhere, from Sarah Edmondson maybe, that after Lauren’s DOS enrollment, the very small group grew exponentially in a short period. Going from a few dozen to over one hundred or one hundred and fifty women.
All in all, it’s hard to imagine all this will escape the judge’s attention, nor should it.
[…] Lauren was a tent pole of the NXIVM operation for 20 years to Nancy’s great benefit. Lauren was the #2 head trainer after only Nancy and the training fees were the sole legitimate source of revenue for Nancy. This hearkens back to a point in my original post, Guest View: Not Contrite — Lauren Salzman Likely Facing Incarceration […]
Why is Michelle Salzman not getting any public scrutiny? How did she escape the law?
What did she do?
Because I believe she is beautiful — and I told Frank not to write anything negative or I would never share my mother-in-law’s ricotta lasagna from Popolino recipe or her pistachio and cuttlefish with optional squid-ink finish dish. Her cuttlefish dish will make you ‘come’ in your pants! Kramer, if you’re still reading this [redacted]. Have a great day!
Allison sought to obtain an associate’s degree in psychology.”
I remember Allison’s mother writing how thirsty Allison is for knowledge.
Here is some knowledge about Psychology.
The father of modern Psychology is regarded as Sigmund Freud.
Freud had a grandson who was named Clement Freud.
Clement Freud was a broadcaster for the BBC and a member of the British Parliament.
After Clement Freud died in 2009 women began making allegations of child sexual abuse against him.
“In 2016, seven years after his death, three women made public allegations of child sexual abuse and rape by Freud, which led to police investigations.”
Child molestation allegations
In June 2016, allegations were made in Exposure: Abused and Betrayed – A Life Sentence, an ITV documentary broadcast on 15 June, that Freud was a paedophile in the late 1940s and the 1970s.[27][28] Two women, who did not know each other, spoke publicly for the first time about how Freud preyed upon them when they were still children and into young adulthood.[29] Sylvia Woosley contacted the ITV news team — the same team that exposed Jimmy Savile — to tell them she had been abused for many years by Freud, from the age of 10 in the 1950s to when she left his home aged 19. The second woman, who remained anonymous, said that Freud groomed her from the age of 11 in 1971, abused her at 14, and violently raped her at 18, by which time Freud had become a Liberal MP, sharing an office with fellow MP Cyril Smith, a prolific abuser of children who was first accused of abuse in the 1960s, but was never prosecuted
On the day of the documentary broadcast, Clement Freud’s widow, Jill Freud, issued an apology to both women. She accepted the claims and issued a statement of sympathy for his victims, saying: “I sincerely hope they will now have some peace.”[5][30]
A third woman, Vicky Hayes, has alleged that she was assaulted and raped by Freud when she was aged 17. Hayes said Freud had no right to his reputation as a “pillar of society” and ought to be posthumously stripped of his knighthood.[31] It also emerged that Operation Yewtree had been passed Freud’s name in 2012 when two alleged victims made accusations to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).[32]
Scotland Yard was examining the details of the allegations and detectives were said to be looking into the possibility that Freud had associated with other alleged abusers at the time of the claims.[33] Allegations have also been made of predatory behaviour towards female students during his time as Rector of the University of Dundee in the 1970s.[34] Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, who was a student at Dundee University in the late 1970s, described an incident when Freud asked the president of the students’ union to pimp for him and select a woman to entertain him.[31]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Freud
Isn’t that something?
Allison Mack worked for the pedophile Keith Raniere and now she is studying a field that was founded by
Sigmund Freud who was the grandfather of a notorious British pedophile.
What a coincidence.
ITV investigation: MP Sir Clement Freud accused of child abuse
Lauren’s memorandum is pretty good at showing how sorry she is but not so good at what she’s sorry for and why. These points are killer and show some pretty poor judgement in her filing.
My Mom and I are victims equally.
Getting money from Nancy to finance a business.
Including a statement from Nancy that takes credit for Lauren’s cooperation.
Failing to acknowledge the money and power she accumulated in her job.
I might have missed this but I didn’t see anything about attempts to make amends.
Times Uniom
NXIVM
Ex-NXIVM president Salzman: I didn’t protect daughter from ‘likely’ psychopath Raniere
Says she failed to shield Lauren Salzman from “a sex-crazed power hungry man taking advantage of damaged people”
Robert Gavin, July 26, 2021, Updated: July 26, 2021 1:07 p.m.
https://www.timesunion.com/nxivm/article/Ex-NXIVM-president-Nancy-Salzman-says-Raniere-16339960.php
Nancy damaged a lot of people.
K. R. C.
If Nancy is coaching and using ESP/Nxivm tech – I thought the cult lost that intellectual property?
Who owns it now? The government? Can they ding Nancy with a licensing fee or something? (I’m thinking restitution in suits against the company) How does all that work now?
Nxivm was so protective and litigious of the tech and all – it would be kinda funny if Nancy got sued for using it now.
Thanks!
I’m not sure if Nancy is using any of the NXIVM/ESP “tech” for the private counselling she’s been doing of late. Nor do I know what, if anything, the government has done – or plans to do – with all that tech.
What I find truly amazing is that anyone would go to Nancy for any type of counselling. In addition to all the illegal things she did while she was involved with NXIVM/ESP, there’s the simple reality that Nancy has no formal education or training in counselling.
I don’t understand Nancy. She was/is an expert in NLP (or so we have been told). So did keith use it against her and brainwash her with it, and wouldn’t she have recognized it happening to her? Or maybe she’s just completely full of shit and deserves nearly as much of the blame as keith. She cries victim, but was she? Was it her own expertise that did her in?
Maybe someone can explain to me the difference between whatever keith came up with (copied), and what Nancy was an expert in??? I don’t fucking get it.
Nancy was completely complicit. You are confused because she lies and she is cunning and manipulative. Nancy’s brand of evil is powerful.
Curious what one does with one’s self in the 72 hours leading up to a sentencing like this? If it were me, I’d be in a constant panic attack and unable to sleep or function. I’d literally be hanging on by the thinnest of threads. Must be a truly horrible feeling
Wonder what all the victims felt while being abused and taken advantage of for 20 years.
Nancy Salzman is still coaching!?!?!? She needs to be locked up for good, though she will no doubt continue her “coaching” in the pen.
Frank, do you dare unmask this?
Sadhguru: the fashion guru and his sect of the 21st century https://www.infocatolica.com/blog/infories.php/2007230655-sadhguru-el-guru-de-moda-y-su
I would be interested in this — I like to investigate Indian gurus. And have done so in the past.
Her personal hygiene alone should land her in the chair.
Snorlax –
These comments about her hygiene do not go unnoticed. A very small.part of me wants to know more. But the much, much larger part of me doesn’t. And is a little scared. It does help to complete the overall unpleasant mental image. So… Thanks?
Ha ha ha
Unlike Allison, who sought to integrate into her Non-NXIVM family
A Picture is worth a thousand words!
Who is the white haired woman in this photo?
It looks a lot like Mindy Mack!
jnessonline
Together… #jness
https://www.instagram.com/p/BLlbWDDjBcV/
These are good points but I think they cut the other way. She’s the only major defendant who was indoctrinated into the system by her mother, who successfully indoctrinated many people who were not her children. Imagine how much more effective that pitch was on her own daughter. This decreases Lauren’s culpability as compared to any other defendant.
Some of these other concerns . . . well, they set an unrealistic standard that I don’t think the Judge shares. You don’t have to be the first person out the door of the conspiracy to show contrition. Just because you took some convincing doesn’t mean you aren’t genuine. Alison’s family and friends helped talk sense in to her about NVIVM (she says). Apparently, so did Lauren’s. As it happens, some of Lauren’s family and friends were also neck-deep in the conspiracy. I don’t think the Judge cares about that. He cares about the repentance. He had four days of testimony to judge her sincerity. If he found her sincere after that, nothing in this memo is going to matter.
Repentance and rehabilitation are two very different things. Clearly, Lauren is sorry, but the lengths she’s gone to sanitize her mother’s conduct weighs against rehabilitation. As does her unwillingness or inability to separate from Nancy in more meaningful ways. I think the Judge will weigh Lauren’s rehabilitation efforts very seriously and may see, as do I, that Lauren is still neck-deep in a toxic relationship with Nancy. Lauren might be better off spending a year or two in jail completely separate from Nancy’s influence in order for her healing to truly transpire.
Lauren’s personal statement has a lot of “We”. Nancy was a sophisticated psychotherapist and a top corporate consultant in her mid-40s when she partnered with Keith Raniere. She was “The Prefect” after all and revered. That should not be considered lightly. Lauren was a 21-year-old English major who’d never had a job before.
It’s clear Nancy is continuing to gaslight Lauren and that will contribute greatly to Lauren’s state of mental duress. A reread of Nancy’s letter on Lauren’s behalf speaks to a degree of infantilizing of Lauren that is disturbing. If I didn’t know of Lauren prior, I would think she was a young teenager. Also discussed is Lauren’s caring for both her mother during her cancer illness and Nancy’s parents. Normally, I’d see this as commendable but knowing what I do about the Salzman family, their finances, and the present legal case I do not. Nancy’s parents are considerably well off and her sister is very, very wealthy with several children. How is the parents’ care falling on Lauren’s shoulders? Similarly, Nancy’s other daughter and her husband, as well as Nancy’s considerable assets (cash and real estate), are more than enough to facilitate whatever support Nancy needs through her illness. Leaning on Lauren to fill the role of caretaker, at this time in Lauren’s life seems deeply selfish and controlling.
Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture of the Salzman family dynamic, I see a pattern. Nancy comes first, even even if she has to sacrifice her daughter to get what she wants. Or worse, convince her daughter to sacrifice herself.
Lauren was a tent pole of the NXIVM operation for 20 years to Nancy’s great benefit. Lauren was the #2 head trainer after only Nancy and the training fees were the sole legitimate source of revenue for Nancy. This hearkens back to a point in my original post. The Salzmans’ desire for money and power was significant.
Nancy could have cooperated and testified. She could have provided extensive evidence to the prosecution about her and NXIVM’s financial crimes in exchange for a non-prosecution agreement for Lauren. It’s impossible to know now whether the government would have accepted that or not but it seems likely. Nancy could have fallen on her sword to help her daughter and she chose not to. Instead, she convinced Lauren to do that. It’s obvious Lauren has no perspective on this whatsoever. If she can’t assess Nancy’s responsibility, culpability, full rehabilitation will be difficult.
I think the Judge is sophisticated and will act compassionately toward Lauren. A casual observer might not see jail time as compassionate, but Lauren is a unique defendant. It’s not every day you have a cult leader’s daughter before you and that daughter is still quite involved in her mother’s day-to-day, under her thumb, and being persuaded to rationalize everything her mother did.
One of the things that I think both Allison and Lauren should have addressed in their sentencing memorandum is how they’re going to pay taxes on all the financial assistance they received by having Clare Bronfman pay their legal fees (The same is also true for Keith, Nancy and Kathy).
I guess maybe they’re not worried about being hit with charges for income tax evasion because it would most likely have to be federal agents in the NDNY who would have to initiate those charges. And we all know that no federal agent in the NDNY has never even investigated any of NXIVM/ESP’s criminal activities, let alone brought charges against anyone for being involved in those activities.
That’s an interesting question. Any prosecution would need to start with a referral from IRS (They have their own prosecuting arm but it’s only used for big dollar or very complex matters). These cases are very rarely brought by the service and would be very bad optics in this instance, so I wouldn’t be concerned if I were these defendants.
If I recall correctly, the initial pot of money set aside for legal fees was $15 million. And I would estimate that post-conviction, Keith has probably spent another $5 million.
I doubt the IRS Office in Albany has handled many cases bigger than that.
Can a media outlet or citizen place an inquiry regarding this tax matter you’ve brought to the public attention?
It seems very motivating when there is a record for the world to see. Makes any plausible deniability harder for the agency involved.
Even though we all hate taxes – people hate cheaters too.
It would probably take a front-page story in the Times Union to get anyone’s attention. And remember: even after the Times Union ran a multi-part series that detailed many of the illegal activities of NXIVM/ESP and Keith, no federal law enforcement official opened up any type of investigation.
Sometimes you need to think outside the box. Contact your favourite neighbours and let them know what bad things go on in the US and they will happily put their propraganda hats on and tell their people about it in the news. It will then trickle back down the upper echelons of your own government…
https://dprkorea.un.org/en/contact-us
The media have only a fraction of their former importance. What can a regional newspaper do in a hick town like Albany? Apparently not much.
Google map the address I linked to!
Nancy’s statement seems to contradict Lauren’s. Nancy takes the credit for Lauren’s cooperation with the government and says she (Nancy) agreed to cooperate first. That contradiction stood out to me very boldly.
Yeah, to me too. Would like to hear Frank’s take on it.
There was also confusion about when Lauren had knowledge of Raniere’s initials and idea for the brand. In one section, it makes out that Lauren found out post-indictment. In another, it seems to say she knowingly lied about it to DOS recruits. That’s two very different scenarios.
Good! Let her learn a trade such as license plate making like the rest of the NXIVM trash! Appears an Orange Jumpsuit will bring out some color in her pasty white complexion.