Nancy Salzman is trying to re-write her story.
In the trailer for HBO's The Vow Part II, which further examines the downfall of the NXIVM cult and the legal proceedings of the group's co-founders Salzman and Keith Raniere, those inside NXIVM wrestle with their complicity in the group's actions—and why things aren't any less complicated now.
"Five years after Keith Raniere's arrest in Mexico, amid rumors of a secret sex sorority within his self-help company NXIVM," the network says, "The Vow Part II reveals the manifold ways that Raniere and a trusted inner circle of acolytes conspired to induct women into a female only sect called DOS, a name derived from a Latin acronym meaning 'Master of Obedient Women.'"
In October 2020, Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison. The following year, Salzman was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for racketeering in relation to her role in NXIVM and begin serving her sentence in February 2022.
"My whole company was destroyed," she says in the trailer, "and my whole life fell apart."
The Vow Part II interviewed Salzman before she checked into prison, and while she eventually admits, "Going into this, I thought Keith was innocent. I was wrong," it wasn't always so black-and-white for Salzman, even given the public reckoning.
"Seventeen thousand people got good results," she argues. "Where are they?"
One of the NXIVM members who is still standing by Raniere in the wake of the cult's destruction says in the trailer, "People think, ‘Anyone who's still around are just brainwashed bitches of Keith.' How insulting.'"
The series also features exclusive phone interviews with Raniere. Former NXIVM members Mark Vicente, Bonnie Piesse and Sarah Edmondson, who all appeared in Part I— which aired in 2020—participated in Part II.
The Vow Part II premieres Oct. 17 at 9 p.m. on HBO.