“Master, Please Brand Me”
When I first met Sarah Edmondson, I had only a superficial understanding of her relationship with Lauren Salzman and why she might choose to formally bind that relationship with a “collateralized vow of obedience.”
Before DOS, Edmondson and Salzman had talked about a lifetime of closeness ahead of them. They looked forward to wearing matching tracksuits and leading self-help seminars together well into retirement.
So how was Salzman able to lie to her best friend? She lied about Raniere’s involvement in DOS and denied that his initials had been scarred into her flesh. And she used her deep knowledge of Edmondson’s inner life to manipulate her into compliance.
It wasn’t until Salzman testified at Raniere’s trial in 2019 that a whole new side of her story emerged. Back in early 2017, over only a few short weeks, she’d become the most prolific recruiter in DOS in part because she, too, had been lied to.
On New Year’s Eve, 2017, Salzman told Raniere that she was unhappy about his being surrounded by a new inner circle of women. After spending half her life near the center of his world, she’d found herself on the outside looking in. Raniere’s response was to tell her he wanted to re-establish their relationship and bring them closer again, Salzman testified. “He asked me what I was willing to do for my growth and for my commitment to him.”
“Anything,” Salzman replied. “I’m fully committed to my growth and fully committed to you.” She believed she was being evaluated for her fitness as a parent. She knew she was under a microscope because years earlier, in 2011, Raniere had challenged her eligibility as a mother when he accused her of “roughhousing” with another man at a volleyball game. Salzman had dropped all her commitments and written a ten-page “ethical breach plan” to regain her position on Raniere’s waiting list of would-be mothers. She single-mindedly pursued this outcome with Raniere, even as he slowly became more public about his relationship with Marianna.
Pam Cafritz died of cancer in October 2016, after which Raniere turned more of his attention to Marianna, who had recently become pregnant with his child. Marianna was not sworn to a life of obedience, and with Cafritz no longer around to facilitate abortions, she had more leverage than ever to start a family. Raniere knew Marianna was pregnant in early January but he kept this from Salzman, knowing it could wake her up from her dream of starting a family with him, which was what had kept her so closely bound. As her mentor in all areas of her life, including her medical decisions, Raniere knew that Salzman valued him and family above everything else.
Rosa Laura Junco, a wealthy proctor overseeing NXIVM’s “ethical media” projects, then approached Salzman about a very important secret. But first, Junco told her, she needed to submit collateral—something very damaging to her life and relationships—to hear what the secret was. Salzman testified that Junco’s invitation was significant, since she was the one who’d convinced her not to be discouraged by Raniere’s increasingly public relationship with Marianna a year earlier, reminding her that if she left NXIVM, she’d never get to be with him.
Salzman’s aspiration to have Raniere’s baby didn’t come up during the conversation with Junco, but she still linked Junco’s offer with the possibility of working through her issues and fulfilling that dream. She walked away from the meeting with her mind racing. It was only after Raniere approached her again, this time revealing that he’d created a secret “sorority,” that the pieces started falling into place.
Raniere asked her to become one of eight founding members of the women’s group, even though DOS had secretly been operating for well over a year already. He asked her to guess who the other founding members might be. “Once I knew Rosa Laura, I guessed the others,” Salzman testified. It was the same group of women, including Nicki Clyne and Allison Mack, that she’d admitted made her feel like an outsider on New Year’s Eve. After years of feeling neglected, Salzman was becoming an insider once again. She wrote a letter of support for Mack and Clyne’s marriage application—an arrangement that allowed Clyne, a Canadian, to stay in the country. Clyne posed for their wedding photos in the same black suit jacket she’d later wear to see Raniere in court.
RANIERE WAS SELECTIVE about what he told Salzman. He didn’t reveal the master–slave part, or that she’d need to submit more and more collateral until her life was “fully collateralized.” He made it sound like a women-led support group. “He told me that the sorority had started because of a personal struggle that Camila had surrounding a suicide attempt,” Salzman testified.
As collateral, Salzman provided an account of an actual crime involving not only herself but her parents and Raniere as well. She wrote that, at a volleyball game in the fall of 2002, a NXIVM student from Mexico had had a psychotic break and become agitated. Instead of taking the woman to hospital, Salzman and others drove her around, physically restrained her, and put Valium in scrambled eggs to make her sleep. Salzman had borrowed the meds from her mother, who got the prescription from her father. Raniere was the one who suggested that, rather than taking the woman to the emergency room, a drive might calm her down.
This was the most damaging thing Salzman could think of, but Junco wouldn’t accept it as collateral. “She told me that she rejected it because it would be a conflict of interest for Keith to release the collateral, because he would be implicated in the collateral,” Salzman testified. “I needed to submit something that wouldn’t hurt him so he would be sure to feel good releasing it, if I ever break my vow.”
Junco suggested that Salzman submit naked photos, which she eventually agreed to do. Salzman testified that she was comforted by the fact that Junco had submitted similar photos as part of her own collateral. Salzman put the photos on a USB drive and gave them to Junco. That’s when she found out she would be Raniere’s slave.
“She explained the concept that he would be my master and I would be his slave, and the idea that having a master in your life is to help you learn to become a master in your own life,” Salzman testified. Raniere taught that everyone was a slave to impulses—to eat, to have sex. But this was an opportunity to serve something bigger, something rooted in Salzman’s highest values and principles, as defined by NXIVM.
JUNCO THEN TOLD Salzman about the branding. “The idea of the brand was to memorialize on our body our promise to ourselves that we made this lifetime commitment to our growth and our master,” Salzman recalled at Raniere’s trial. NXIVM defined greatness in the context of overcoming great adversity. Receiving the brand would test Salzman’s readiness to face pain in pursuit of her goals.
“I was very familiar with the concept,” Salzman testified. “I was very enrolled in that idea of doing hard things to become somebody who would do hard things when it was most important.”
Junco showed Salzman her own scar. It was a kind of monogram, with a K, A, and R representing Raniere’s initials. Salzman was more than ready to do the hard thing for Raniere. She “collateralized” everything she owned—her investments, her two homes, her two cars, all her art, and signed letters resigning from all her positions if she ever broke her vow.
Like a few of the other “founding” slaves, Junco and Allison Mack had received their brands months earlier from a professional body modification artist. But now, after one of Mack’s slaves had been trained to use the cauterizing pen, Raniere wanted to change the atmosphere of the initiation. The day before Salzman was branded, Raniere and Mack went on a walk and discussed how future branding ceremonies would be carried out. A recording of their chat would later become evidence at Raniere’s trial.
Raniere suggested “a certain ritualization” for each of the seven lines of the brand. “Maybe each of the strokes has something that’s said with them, and maybe repeated after the stroke is done,” he said. He asked what rituals would be most meaningful and encouraging of surrender, and suggested that recording the branding on video from different angles would provide another layer of “collateral.” This became an important detail at his trial two years later.
“Probably should be a more vulnerable position,” Raniere continued. “Legs spread straight, feet being held to the side of the table, hands probably above the head, almost like tied down like a sacrificial whatever.”
After a pause, he added, “And the person should ask to be branded.”
“Okay,” Mack replied.
“Should say, ‘Please brand me, it would be my honor,’ or something like that. ‘An honor I want to wear for the rest of my life,’ ” Raniere said. “And they should probably say that before they’re held down, so it doesn’t seem like they’re being coerced.”
This became the script for Lauren Salzman’s branding ceremony the next day.
ON JANUARY 10, 2017, Salzman arrived at Allison Mack’s house and was asked to take a naked photo. She lay on a massage table and helped place a stencil on her bikini line. NXIVM senior proctor Loreta Garza recorded the procedure as Salzman’s other new “sisters” surrounded her, holding her limbs in place as if she were a human sacrifice.
“Master, please brand me, it would be an honor,” Salzman said. She braced for the most painful moments of her life.
The ceremony fell on the same day as a memorial for Pam Cafritz. Salzman thought it was strange to see Raniere talking with giddy excitement about this new sorority in the wake of Cafritz’s recent death. According to Salzman, DOS seemed crafted to fill the gap left in the absence of Cafritz, who’d functioned as a kind of procurer for Raniere. “Pam facilitated all Keith’s objectives, whatever Keith wanted in many of his personal relationships,” she testified. “Especially my relationship with Keith was facilitated by Pam.” Salzman hadn’t realized it yet, but she and the other slaves were already filling Cafritz’s shoes.
FIVE DAYS AFTER submitting her collateral, Salzman flew to Vancouver to tell Sarah Edmondson about the sorority. She wanted more than anything to prove to Raniere that she was loyal and capable. She also wanted to prove to herself that she believed in DOS and could make it transformative.
Salzman would put her powers of persuasion to work and bring in more slaves faster than all seven of the other “founding” masters. “I think I have good capacity to enroll other people in my ideas,” Salzman explained in her testimony. “I had the least experience and the least objections at the time.”
Ten days after Salzman submitted her collateral, Raniere told her that Marianna was pregnant. He’d known for three months but had waited until after Salzman had put her whole life on the line in a vow to never disobey him. It was a personal betrayal, but it was also a betrayal of the ethics Raniere taught, according to Salzman.
“He got me to stay because he thought I would leave if Marianna was pregnant,” Salzman testified. “He stole from me and himself the ability to know if I would have stayed no matter what, without being in a 100 percent collateralized vow.”
Salzman learned that Mack and Daniella Padilla, another first-line DOS recruiter, both believed they would raise Keith’s babies, too. Mack was particularly excited about having new sister wives, which left Salzman feeling alienated and confused. “I was like, number one, I’ve had sister wives for twenty years; number two…it’s been something that’s been incredibly difficult for me,” Salzman testified. “This was just a lot to learn.”
Out of self-preservation, Salzman had to turn off the part of her brain that was hurting and questioning. Bound by collateral that made every moment an emergency situation, she didn’t have time to second-guess herself. Not with her job, home, and family on the line. “I stuffed it, I compartmentalized it, and 100 percent went full force forward with my conviction that DOS was not bad, that it was a growth program, that it was amazing, that this was for women and for me to get through my issues,” Salzman told the court. Later, she would discover that Allison Mack and Nicki Clyne were giving “seduction” assignments to their slaves—ordering them to seduce Raniere, take a photo, and enjoy it.
When initiating the group of women she’d recruited into DOS, including Sarah Edmondson, Salzman did a lot of work to soften the strangeness of it all. She wasn’t allowed to reveal Raniere’s involvement anyway, so she presented the best version of what she thought a women’s group building discipline and character could be. She lit candles, made dinner arrangements, and broke the evening up into small, escalating reveals. She led each of the five women to different rooms in her house, timing their arrivals so that they wouldn’t see each other until the ceremony was underway. She asked them to take their clothes off and put on a blindfold before they were led into the living room together. Sitting cross-legged in a circle on the floor, they all took off their blindfolds at once.
“Guys, get over it—get over your body issues,” Salzman told them. “We’re a sisterhood, relax.”
Then they all got dressed.
IT WASN’T UNTIL later, at Allison Mack’s house, that the brand stencil came out and the clothes came off again. Salzman said the brand represented the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. Each woman was held down on a massage table and video recorded. Nudity was easier the second time around, but there was no avoiding the blinding pain of the cauterizing pen. Some of the women thrashed and squealed and asked for a cloth to bite down on.
It takes a twisted imagination to come up with such a scenario, but its basic premise has been studied by scientist Stanley Milgram. His obedience experiments of the 1960s found that most study participants were willing to cause harm to another person despite their own conscience if doing so was presented as mandatory by an authority figure. Instead of branding, the Milgram experiments instructed participants to read out memory tests to an unseen student and administer what they thought were electric shocks of increasing voltage when the student answered incorrectly. (In reality, no student was electrocuted.) The study’s findings suggest that more than half of us are capable of inflicting traumatizing, potentially lethal pain if we believe we don’t have a choice.
Sarah Edmondson told me that the trauma actually bonded the women together. There were fart jokes, yogic breathing lessons, and words of gentle encouragement. Edmondson disassociated, which oddly earned her praise. “She did her yoga breathing,” Salzman testified. “She handled it, comparatively, much better than the other girls did and I was very proud of her at the time.”
After Edmondson spotted the text on Salzman’s phone from “KAR,” her first guess was Karen Unterreiner, but she did consider that it could have come from Raniere. She thought Raniere might even be proud of how well she’d done. Days after the painful ceremony, Edmondson wanted the brand to be a good thing—it was hers and she’d survived it. According to the research kept in Raniere’s library, severe initiation rituals actually increase the commitment of new members. It took time and soul-searching for her to realize that she’d never freely given consent.
Lauren Salzman testified, “At the time I thought it was consensual and they wanted to do it, but even if they didn’t, I was their master and I told them to.”