Warning: Graphic descriptions of sexual abuse.
The first portion of The Vow, a docuseries from filmmaking couple Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (The Square), was a nine-hour exploration of NXIVM—the Upstate New York cult of personality founded by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman that, among other things, branded a number of women with Raniere’s initials and brainwashed them into becoming sex slaves to satisfy the diminutive deviant’s urges. The HBO doc was an excessively drawn-out affair, tracing the company’s roots from its 1998 founding (back when it was known as Executive Success Programs) through to the 2018 criminal charges of sex trafficking and forced labor. It also spent an inordinate amount of time on Raniere’s bizarre volleyball fetish.
Now comes The Vow Part II, Noujaim’s six-hour docusequel covering the trial of Raniere, Salzman, and their most committed of disciples, as well as the plight of the so-called “NXIVM 5,” a small group of cultists led by Battlestar Galactica actress Nicki Clyne who still swear allegiance to their “Vanguard” Raniere and hope to free him. For even the most cult-obsessed among us, it’s yet another exploitative effort that grants far too much space to the aforementioned Raniere defenders as well as Salzman, laundering her reputation despite the fact that she ran NXIVM with Raniere, granted him legitimacy, manipulated his victims into rationalizing his abuses, enrolled her young daughters in the cult, and allowed Raniere to initiate a sexual relationship with her daughter, Lauren, right after she’d graduated college.
