Frank Parlato
Nancy Salzman, the co-founder and former president of NXIVM, who spent two years in federal prison for racketeering conspiracy, has given her ‘first in-depth interview since being released from prison’ on a new podcast series called Mind Games.
The podcast, hosted by Alice Hines and Zoë Lescaze, launched January 20, 2026, and Salzman was the first guest.
Mind Games is focused on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)—a curious mind gaming blend of hypnosis, linguistics, manipulation, and psychology that, through Salzman, formed the foundation of NXIVM’s programs.
This may or may not be Salzman’s first interview since her release. In November 2025, Kate Casey released a two-part conversation with the former NXIVM Prefect on her Reality Life with Kate Casey podcast.
The Mind Games interview may have been conducted prior to that appearance, but released later, based on references to Salzman’s mother having died ‘three weeks’ before the interview.
The Interview Setting
The interview appears to have taken place in Clifton Park, once the headquarters of NXIVM, where many of its leaders once lived. Most moved there to be close to Raniere who was known in the community as Vanguard and Salzman, also known as Prefect. Since the arrest of Vanguard and Prefect in 2018 most moved away, Now only Salzman and her daughter Lauren Salzman are known to remain in town.
Raniere has moved—or rather was moved—first to Mexico asnd them Brooklyn, followed by a stay in Tucson and now resides in Butner FMC, where he serves what remains of his 120-year prison sentence. (He has 94 years, 5 months, 6 days remaining).
Nancy fared much better. She is back and after a short hiatus is apparently ready to get back into life coaching.
Host Alice Hines describes the scene:
“I’m here in a suburban townhouse outside of Albany, New York with Nancy. We’re sitting on a comfy couch in her upstairs office, surrounded by books about Buddhism and neuroscience. I was expecting the Nancy Salzman I’d seen on HBO—pantsuits, corporate charisma—but today she’s dressed casually and feels more like a mom hosting a soccer team. She’s prepared an entire lunch spread for us and seems really happy to have company. Her hairless cat keeps jumping on my lap.”
Salzman’s View of Media Coverage
Salzman explained her motivation for participating in the interview:
“I thought doing this interview would be good because the media that happened when my company fell apart was so inaccurate. I’ve always wanted people to know who I was, what I was involved in, and why I did the work that I did, because it was overshadowed all by the media craziness.”
I like the spin. NXIVM didn’t commit crimes; it “fell apart” due to inaccurate media coverage.
The hosts note:
“Nancy pled guilty to some charges related to her work in NXIVM, but she’s consistently maintained that she was also a victim of the group, and she says she was unaware of its most infamous crimes like branding and sex trafficking.”
Salzman Remains Proud of Her Work
When asked whether she still takes pride in the programs she created at NXIVM, Salzman said:
“Yes, I’m absolutely proud of it. I’m not proud of how everything ended up.”
She has pride in the “programs” she created, regret only for “how everything ended up.” Things “ended up” badly, by accident, through Raniere’s badness, none of which were her fault and of which she claims she was unaware of.
She says NXIVM was good for people; only the ending was unfortunate. This spin allows Salzman to separate her NLP curriculum—which she apparently hopes to restart —from NXIVM and Raniere.
Her hosts and she herself, as one of the most famous NLP teachers and practitioners, were more interested in talking about NLP.
She explained her use of NLP as a nurse:
“I didn’t want to use drugs (on patients in chronic pain). I wanted to do something non-traditional, and my ex-husband was a physician, and he introduced me to the whole idea of hypnosis for chronic pain and biofeedback… I thought the language patterns in NLP were brilliant. NLP said that you could break down any behavior and teach it to somebody else. So I started learning to break down behaviors and look for different things that I had never looked for before.”
On Her Time in Prison
Salzman described her incarceration:
“I will tell you that the judge sentenced me to go to a camp like Martha Stewart, and that’s what I thought was going to happen. And they sent me to a maximum security female prison and it was a nightmare… I was terrified because they were really mean. They were very mean. I had no rights, like you have no rights when you’re there, and whatever they want to do with you, they’re going to do with you.”
Salzman says she used NLP to survive:
“About a month in, I said to myself, what is wrong with you? You have all of these tools; use them. And I put myself in a good state. And I said, you see, you know how to do this. It is inexcusable for you to stay in the state because you are making yourself miserable. You don’t know when you’re leaving, you don’t know how long you have to be here, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But you have control of your state. Use it.”
The spin is clear: If NLP can get me through federal prison, imagine what it can do for you if I teach you.
This is the concept that built NXIVM—the enlightened teacher who transcends ordinary limitations through superior mental ‘technology.’
Richard Bandler, NLP’s Co-Founder
Salzman says she trained with Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP, who was once tried for murder (he was acquitted). Her impressions:
“I was a little horrified by him at first. If I’m going to be honest, you know that I have deep respect for him. I just told you he helped me tremendously. I think he’s a genius, but I was a little shocked at how unprofessional he was. He would just show up in like his clothes often looked like he had been sleeping in them for three or four nights before he showed up in them.”
Salzman told a story where Bandler persuaded her to let him drive her car:
“I had watched him drink … more than ten martinis. And he wanted to go someplace, and I had just gotten a brand new car, and he asked me if we could go in my car, and I said yes, and he convinced me to let him drive… I don’t know how he did that.”
She was manipulated by a charismatic figure, Bandler, whom she let drive her around drunk on alcohol. (The hosts note that Bandler denies this story.) Salzman let another charismatic man—short, cross-eyed, with square feet, and drunk with power—drive her around for 20 years.
Salzman attributed Bandler’s manipulative power to an NLP technique called ‘anchoring’:
“He anchored you to his voice. That’s what he was doing. When he was doing that, he would get you in a certain state, and then when he would use that voice again, you would go back into that state.”
Can NLP Be Used for Harm?
When asked whether NLP could be used for manipulation, Salzman gave an old analogy:
“A knife in the hands of a surgeon is an amazing tool. A knife in the hands of a murderer is a weapon. I believe because I’ve worked with behavior change so much, and even when people want to change sometimes it’s hard. I believe that for the most part, you have to have very bad intent to try to figure out ways of using these things negatively. But is it possible? I’m not going to say it’s impossible, because you know, you can anchor in fear states in people easily.”
This is the woman who led NXIVM with Raniere. She now waxes philosophical about whether NLP could theoretically be misused.
“You have to have very bad intent,” she says, as if she’s never met anyone like that. As if she didn’t spend two decades beside Keith Raniere. As if she didn’t conduct thousands of “Exploration of Meaning” sessions that former members say were used to break down their resistance and bind them tighter to a man now serving 120 years. As she did not lie ten thousand times to cover or do Raniere’s manipulative bidding.
She knows it’s possible. She did it.
No, Nancy Salzman isn’t really wondering whether NLP can be weaponized. She’s hoping listeners won’t notice that she already answered that question with her life’s work.
The NXIVM Parallels
“Anchoring”—the technique Salzman says Bandler used on her to get her to hand over her car keys after watching him drink ten martinis—is similar to what former NXIVM members described experiencing in Salzman’s “Exploration of Meaning” sessions.
“State control”—which Salzman demonstrates by toggling between grief over her mother’s death and composed interview mode—was a core NXIVM teaching. Members were told they had control over their emotional reactions, and that negative feelings were a failing, not a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions. This framework was used to suppress members’ natural alarm responses to exploitation.
When Salzman says “you can anchor in fear states in people easily,” she’s describing what was central to NXIVM’s operation: creating compliance through psychological conditioning. The “collateral” system in DOS—where women provided damaging material about themselves that could be released if they disobeyed—was a fear anchor.
When Salzman uses the surgeon-versus-murderer analogy to explain that NLP is a neutral tool, one has to ask: in whose hands was it at NXIVM? It was in the hands of people who used it to surveil critics, alter evidence, and—as victims testified—create “the environment for abuse.”
A Demonstration of ‘State Control’
During the interview, Salzman discussed her mother, who had died three weeks before. The exchange illustrated what NLP practitioners call ‘state control’—the ability to shift emotional states at will:
“I’m still using them. My mother just died. I could just sit here and cry with you. I’m so sad, but that’s not what we’re here to do, so I’m not going to and you don’t have to see that.”
Hines observed:
“Part of me did feel like I was watching a talented actor. It was kind of whiplash—her swing from anguish to then calmly referencing her mother’s death, and these emotions were also visible in her face and voice, so it would just instantly shift.”
Co-host Zoë Lescaze raised a question:
“Are we sure she was actually losing control of her emotions? Didn’t she just tell us she can be wildly happy in prison? Could she also make herself cry on cue?”
A Personal Demonstration
In a bizarre moment, the pregnant host Alice Hines allowed Salzman to conduct a hypnobirthing session with her during the interview. Salzman later created a personalized hypnosis tape for Hines.
Hines reported: “I listened to this tape regularly as I prepared to give birth, although I will admit I transcribed it first to make sure there wasn’t anything creepy or subliminal messages.” When asked if it worked, Hines replied, “I think it kind of did.”
The Court Record
In March 2019, Salzman was the first of the six defendants to break from Raniere. She pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy. At her plea hearing, she told Senior U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis: “I am pleading guilty because I am, in fact, guilty.”
Salzman admitted to conspiring to commit identity theft by attempting to obtain names and passwords of email accounts belonging to ‘enemies’ of NXIVM—including journalists, judges, and cult experts.
She also admitted to conspiring to alter videotape evidence in a federal lawsuit against cult expert Rick Ross. When FBI agents searched Salzman’s home on Oregon Trail in 2018, they recovered a box containing private banking information of many individuals (including me) perceived to be critics of NXIVM. The laugh on them was that the private detectives they hired faked the banking info.
The FBI also seized more than $515,000 in cash found stashed throughout the house. That sum is probably a tiny fraction of what the Prefect has tucked away elsewhere.
In September 2021, Judge Nicholas Garaufis sentenced Salzman to 42 months in federal prison and ordered her to pay a $150,000 fine. She also forfeited several real estate properties, the seized cash, and a Steinway grand piano, which her Vanguard would come over to play the Moonlight Sonata, quite possibly the only song he knew (other than Chopsticks), though he claimed to be a concert-level pianist.
Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis stated at her sentencing: “In her misguided loyalty and blind allegiance to Keith Raniere, the defendant engaged in a racketeering conspiracy designed to intimidate NXIVM’s detractors and that inflicted harm on NXIVM’s members.”
Salzman reported to the Federal Correctional Institution, Hazelton, in West Virginia, on February 21, 2022. She was released to a halfway house in September 2023 and completed her sentence in March 2024.
About the Podcast
Mind Games is a series that examines NLP. The hosts describe themselves as ‘professional skeptics’ who are also ‘into some pretty weird shit’—they met at a ‘shamanic sound meditation.’ The series will also feature interviews with Tony Robbins and Richard Bandler. Mind Games is on iHeartRadio.
Throughout the 40-minute episode, Salzman never utters Keith Raniere’s name.
MK10Art’s paintings of Nancy:
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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