Critical Cult News – Fiji Cult Exiled, Salzman Released, Boy Scouts Abuse

Tonight on Critical Cult News we look at horrifying revelations about abuses in the Boy Scouts of America and a connection to the Mormon Church that cannot be ignored, but first a doomsday cult on the island of Fiji and the government’s efforts there to get rid of it, plus NXIVM co-leader Nancy Salzman was released from prison early. These stories and our analysis of the cultic influences tonight on Critical Cult News.

Good evening and welcome to Critical Cult News, the weekly news program where we offer not only facts and events, but analysis of the cultic or coercive elements contained in them. Because this is live to the general public, we are going to try something slightly different this week. After each story, I will pause and consider comments from you the viewers, or answer any questions I might be able to about the report. I will ask now that any questions or comments to me as the host be on the topic of the stories presented tonight and not drift off to other things. Then we will move on to the next story. For our first story tonight, we go to the South Pacific and the island nation of Fiji.

The situation? Last Wednesday, a police task force in Fiji arrested four members of a South Korean doomsday cult, deporting two and seeking the arrest of two others, but the group’s leader has denied a government minister’s claim he is “on the run.”

Here’s what happened: The Grace Road Church, which has been described as a “cult” by Fiji’s Home Affairs Minister Pio Tikoduadua, uprooted from South Korea and relocated to Fiji in 2014, convincing 400 of their followers the Pacific island nation was a sanctuary from an impending global famine and drought. Since that time, the Church built up a large business empire in Fiji. It runs the country’s largest chain of restaurants, owns vast swathes of farmland as well as supermarkets and petrol stations.

A government investigative report last year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Korea Centre for Investigative Journalism alleged the church received more than $5.6 million in loans from the state-backed Fiji Development Bank. Those allegations were dismissed by the attorney-general at the time, but Fiji’s then government opposition party promised to launch an inquiry into the church’s ties with the Fijian government if elected.

The Grace Road Church’s founder, Shin Ok-ju, was sentenced in 2019 to six years in prison in South Korea after being convicted of child abuse, false imprisonment and assault. Among the accusations against her were claims that she confiscated the passports of her group members and many were allegedly subjected to ritual beatings.

According to former member Seo-Yeon Lee, who fled the cult compound in 2014, “They beat you to a pulp.” As is so often the case with cult escapees, Ms. Lee was forced to leave her mother and 11 other members of her extended family who are still in the group.

Mr Tikoduadua said that seven members of the Grace Road Church have been wanted since 2018 by the South Korean government, and that the international crime policing organization, Interpol, had issued Red Notices for them. They include Grace Road’s senior director Kim Jung-yong (also known as Daniel Kim), who is the son of the group’s founder and is reported “at large” being sought by law enforcement officials. In his statement, Mr. Tikoduadua also said that in 2018, the seven individuals’ passports “were nullified by the Korean government in relation to charges laid by the South Korean government who has issued a warrant for their arrest”. They have now been declared “prohibited immigrants”, making their presence in Fiji unlawful. Among the four arrested so far were acting Grace Road president Lee Sung-jin.

However, despite having an arrest warrant issued on him, Mr. Kim spoke to media representatives, rejecting Mr Tikoduadua’s characterisation of his group as a cult and denying he was a fugitive on the run. Mr. Kim was quoted as saying, “I want to ask him: ‘What is the definition of a cult?’, adding his own definition was people who worshiped men and idols rather than God.

The South Korean embassy in Suva said it was not in a position to comment while the authorities in Fiji were still conducting investigations into the Grace Road case. Interpol does not comment on individual cases and the majority of Red Notices are not published publicly.

Fiji Airways declined to transport acting president Ms Lee and Ms Choi, after Grace Road Church’s lawyers obtained a court order blocking their deportation.

Mr. Kim stated: “Our lawyers have successfully obtained a court order [on Wednesday] night to forbid the removal of two members, and have since obtained an order forbidding the removal of the remaining members, including myself,” he said.

Mr Tikoduadua said the solicitor-general was now reviewing the court order, and that two women arrested had been released at the Grace Road farm in the town of Navua.

For our second story tonight we return to the United States and a surprising early release of a woman the world knows as Keith Raneire’s top deputy and partner-in-crime.

The situation? NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman has been released from prison and was transferred to a halfway house this last week.

Here’s what happened: As featured in the second season of the documentary series The Vow, Nancy Salzman was the nurse and Neurolinguistic Programming specialist who co-founded the NXIVM cult with Keith Raneire under the banner of Executive Success Programs in 1998. Non-religious in nature, NXIVM was built around personal empowerment concepts and provided a roadmap of seminars, workshops and educational materials which were supposed to help its members improve their self-discipline, awareness and effectiveness in life.

Salzman worked for the next two decades with Keith Raneire, serving as President and structuring NXIVM’s curriculum, writing its materials, starring in its videos, running its finances and, most important of all, directly manipulating and controlling its members. NXIVM expanded its operations from its headquarters in Colonie, New York, reaching as far as Europe, Mexico and Canada. Keith even met with the Dalai Lama at one point.

While Nancy held the title of President, internally she was known by the formal title Prefect. It was Raniere, known as Vanguard, who was the unquestioned leader of the group. Nancy acted as Raneire’s shield maiden, running interference whenever members became suspicious or ran afoul of Keith’s manipulations and abuses, including sexual abuse, blackmail and extortion. Nancy was Raniere’s chief enabler, even going so far as to support his claims that children are “perfectly happy” having sex with adults and that women experience “freedom” during rape.

Salzman even took a page (one of many actually) from Scientology when she instructed NXIVM members that anyone challenging Raniere or NXIVM, including family members and friends, were “suppressives” to be avoided. Former NXIVM insiders have described Salzman as Raniere’s enforcer but also a victim of his cruelty and manipulation. She was not involved in Raniere’s secret “master/slave” group, Dominus Obsequious Sororium (DOS), which ultimately led federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to charge Raniere.

Salzman admitted in court she doctored tapes that were evidence in a lawsuit NXIVM brought against cult expert Rick Ross and admitted she conspired to commit identity theft when she tried to obtain names and passwords of email accounts of NXIVM’s perceived enemies, information kept in files kept in the basement of her upscale Oregon Trail home.

In June 2019, jurors convicted Raniere on all counts of sex trafficking, forced labor conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and racketeering counts with underlying acts of extortion, identity theft and possession of child pornography. Raniere, who is 63, is now serving a 120-year prison sentence in Tucson, Arizona. While there remain a few loyal adherents to him even now, he has failed to gain traction on every appeal or effort to reduce or end his prison sentence.

In September 2021, Salzman was sentenced to prison for 3-1/2 years and fined $150,000 based on her earlier guilty plea to racketeering conspiracy. Salzman reported to federal prison in February 2022. Her release date had been listed as July 2, 2024. Her release comes after serving less than 2 years of that sentence. The 69-year old Salzman was placed at the Horizon Center in Albany on Sept. 7.

Court filings showed Salzman was scheduled to be released to a halfway house under the 2018 First Step Act, which allows federal inmates to request compassionate release after they exhaust administrative requests through the prison system.Salzman claimed through her lawyers that she suffered from medical conditions which require care that the Bureau of Prisons was refusing to give.She suffered two bouts with breast cancer in 2011 and 2018 and her lawyer told a judge earlier this year that in March a new medical exam had produced “worrisome findings.” He stated “Our client has been waiting for 16 and a half weeks with nothing done.”

Salzman’s daughter, Lauren, also pleaded guilty to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy charges. Because she served as a star witness for prosecutors, Lauren received five years of probation. Also pleading guilty were actress Allison Mack, who pleaded to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy and provided information for prosecutors; Seagrams heiress Clare Bronfman, who pleaded to conspiring to conceal and harbor undocumented immigrants for financial gain, and fraudulent use of identification; and NXIVM bookkeeper Kathy Russell, who pleaded to visa fraud.

Salzman is the second defendant to be released from prison. Mack was released in early July. Bronfman, who has remained staunchly loyal to Raniere, is expected to be released in June 2025. Though Nancy Salzman denies that she knew about DOS while co-running NXIVM, Raniere’s victims say his widespread abuse would have been impossible without her at the helm.

It’s a rare thing when we see a cult leader punished for his or her crimes. Often cults are either ignored entirely by law enforcement until they run their course or fall apart because of internal conflicts or the leader’s death. The exposure of Keith Raneire, Nancy Salzman and their abusive system of cultic abuse occurred mainly because of the convergence of the #MeToo movement with Keith’s particular form of sexual abuse against women. New York state prosecutors were made aware of Raniere’s financial crimes years before the federal government took action and they did absolutely nothing with the information.

Back in the 1980s, Raniere got started with multilevel marketing scheme Amway and founded his own MLM in the 1990s. Regulators finally caught up with him in 1996 and he got off with a slap-on-the-wrist fine he never even paid despite his own net worth of millions of dollars. The fact of the matter is our state and federal governments are woefully deficient in identifying and stopping serial criminals like Raniere and Salzman, who jump from one scam to the next, one scheme of abuse to the next. And this cyclic criminal activity is not dealt with anywhere near how severe street crimes are, despite the fact so-called white collar crime accounts for hundreds of billions in lost earnings and income every year.

If a cult leader can become safely ensconced behind a wall of lawyers and accountants, as we have seen all of the major destructive cult leaders do from Sun Myung Moon to Russel Nelson to David Miscavige, they are practically invincible and are allowed to get away with crimes as severe as extortion, labor and sex trafficking and even murder. Nancy Salzman lied to, abused and hurt people, knowingly and with premeditation, for decades. For her to not even serve out her full sentence of a measly 3-1/2 years is a slap in the face to every victim of NXIVM and every victim of cultic abuse. It communicates clearly to all of us that our systems don’t work because they do not mete out punishments that fit the crimes, especially when it comes to rich white people who statistics show clearly are routinely served better by our court and sentencing process than minorities. This built-in bias and the systemic problems that allow human predators like Nancy Salzman to carry out their sentences in relative luxury are simply unacceptable. This system must change.

For our final story tonight, we turn to the Boy Scouts of America and recent accusations that Mormon influence may have impeded measures that were meant to protect Scouts.

The situation? A Boy Scouts of America whistleblower says administrators blocked proposed child protection measures because they feared objections from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Here’s what happened: Michael Johnson, a former police detective and Youth Protection Director for the Boy Scouts of America from 2010 – 2020 has turned whistleblower and claimed that the Boy Scouts of America organization impeded or even stopped his efforts to protect young Scouts from sexual predation.

Johnson is featured in a new documentary called Scout’s Honor which premiered this last week on Netflix. “For 16 years,” he stated,”I did nothing but investigate child sexual abuse. So I’ve interviewed a lot of kids, varying ages, and interrogated a lot of perpetrators, talked to a lot of parents, been to a lot of crime scenes as well as worked on some things federally and nationally with two different administrations.”

In going to work for the Boy Scouts, Johnson said,”I thought I was going to work to keep kids safe in a major institution.” He wanted to implement “what I felt were very medium-level policies and content training upgrades for youth protection. I kept getting told that the Mormons may not like that, the Mormons don’t like that.”

A Scouts executive told him: “You need to understand something…The Mormons are sacrosanct.”

It soon became clear to Johnson that he was part of an organization that was more interested in the appearance of being a child-safe organization than actually doing the work necessary to be a child-safe organization. And that disparity between the Boy Scout brand and the reality became such a wide chasm of difference that Johnson could no longer go along with what the senior administration wanted him to do. This was especially true of Mormon influence in the BSA organization, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was the BSA’s largest single sponsor for decades, automatically enrolling Mormon boys as scouts when they turned 8, until 2019 when the church withdrew from the Boy Scouts and began its own youth program.

In Mormon-sponsored troops, scout leaders were typically selected from congregations as a church “calling,” or leadership role.

The Boy Scouts filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February of 2020 after several US states enacted laws allowing accusers to sue over decades-old abuse allegations. The Catholic Church, as a comparative, has stated in its own report in 2004 that more than 4,000 US Roman Catholic priests faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50 years in cases involving more than 10,000 children. The BSA scandal dwarfs those figures.

The BSA came to an agreement with a majority of claimants in February 2022 and that settlement was approved in bankruptcy court in September, with the support of 86% of abuse claimants and the Boy Scouts’ two largest insurers. However, appeals filed on behalf of more than 100 abuse survivors and some insurers delayed the settlement and postponed the organization’s planned exit from bankruptcy.

Now, under a revised $2.4 billion bankruptcy plan and settlement approved by the courts in March of 2023, the BSA began processing claims for more than 82,000 people who said they were abused in connection with scouting. Consultants report about 2,800 abuse claims filed in the bankruptcy have direct ties to the Mormon church. Another 4,900 are potentially linked to the church, according to a sex abuse claim valuation expert who testified in bankruptcy proceedings last year. This makes the Boy Scouts of America responsible for the largest sexual abuse settlement in US history, a precedent for large-scale tort litigation.

Individual abuse survivors will receive a wide range of payments from this depending on when and where the abuse occurred and the specifics of each individual’s case, so settlement ranges go from $3,500 to $2.7 million per person. Survivors in Texas, for example, aren’t eligible for as much as survivors in states like New York because Texas doesn’t have a Child Victims Act. And that is why we pay so much attention on this show to the laws and regulations around not only coercive control but also sexual assault and child protection. Cultic abuse directly affects far too many women and children and is often inflicted by the male members of these groups. Laws in most states are written in such a way or statutes of limitations imposed in such a way that justice has been literally impossible for most victims of child sexual assault.

The LDS church had agreed to contribute $250 million to the fund – but a judge last year rejected the agreement over legal conditions that would have protected the church from future lawsuits. Specifically, the contribution from the Mormon church specified that former Boy Scouts could not sue the church separately over incidents that occurred outside of Scouting activities. This legal maneuver was stopped by the judge, who said it was overreach. It was a transparent attempt by the Mormons to evade prosecution for whatever number of sexual assaults that were committed by local, state and national Mormon leaders on their own youth.

In explaining her decision, the judge cited a case where one Cub Scout leader abused children in both Scouting and church activities from 1968 to 1973. Just to cite how this might also work, if a church choir director abused a child in the choir or if a Mormon official abused a child in conducting one of their frequent private and unregulated interviews with Mormon minors about their sexual thoughts and activities, and then continued the abuse as the child’s Scout leader, the judge’s ruling would prevent the abuse in the choir or private meeting from being compensated from the BSA fund. Given the long history the Church has with the Boy Scouts of America, it is very likely that the number of claims made against the Mormon church are going to rise significantly over time as more states pass laws allowing such cases to be brought.

Michael Johnson told Vanity Fair about the BSA’s efforts to suppress media exposure of these abuses. “They tried to squash the story every time. This is an organization that holds themselves up as moral leaders, as people that are teaching your kids how to be leaders. And when they had to make a leadership decision themselves, the moral decision, they failed time and time again.”

Steve McGowan, who served as general counsel to BSA from 2013 to 2022, claims there were not systemic issues with the BSA, but that they were merely a reflection of the breakdown of morality and law in the larger society. He’s quoted in the documentary saying “Remember, the Boy Scouts of America did not abuse these kids. We had some bad people that got in.”

Of course, this ignores the unique position and framing that the Boy Scouts give to its troop leaders. Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger not only created Scout’s Honor but also 2012’s We are Legion about the hacktivist group Anonymous and 2014’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. His response to McGowan’s attempt to deflect blame away from the BSA refutes this effort: “Taking kids away from their parents, away from the safety of their communities and overnight camping trips with men – this is something that’s unique to the Boy Scouts.”

While the BSA website states that youth protection training is required for all registered volunteers and all adult participants must give their social security number to the organization, Johnson stated clearly “that’s bullshit.”

According to the documentary, the Boy Scouts organization was created as a guiding tool for young boys in England in 1908 and cases of sexual abuse go all the way back to the very first Boy Scout camp where a doctor working there was fired for sexual misconduct. After the Scouts moved their main operations to the US, the Red Flag List – also known as the Ineligible Volunteer Files or Perversion Papers – was created as part of a system designed to quietly keep track of suspected predators within the organization. That data was kept confidential in the Scouts’ Texas headquarters, even as thousands of boys were being abused by their scoutmasters. The files were publicly released in 2012.

Journalist Patrick Boyle first publicized the Perversion Papers and in 1994 wrote a book about it. He’s quoted in this documentary in describing the inherent problem the BSA failed to deal with: “They essentially had a product defect that they were ignoring – that this organization was built in a way that molesters could get in, abuse kids, and get away with it.”

According to information presented in Scouts Honor, Troop 137 in New Orleans was exposed in the 1970s as a covert pedophile ring. In 1989, Thomas Hacker, who admitted to molesting hundreds of boys while serving as a scoutmaster, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. When asked why he had chosen the Boy Scouts as his hunting ground, Hacker allegedly replied, “Because they made it so easy.”

In response to an Axios story about Johnson’s claims, the BSA provided a written statement that reads, in part: “We cannot speak to the many instances of hearsay and personal opinions expressed by Michael Johnson. We are disappointed to hear Mr. Johnson’s characterization of the program he spearheaded and the concerns he raised, especially given his past public support for the robust measures the BSA instituted at his recommendation.”

Now sure enough, measures were being taken such as the Red Flag List and hiring Mr. Johnson, an experienced sex abuse investigator, for the role of Child Protection Director in 2010. However, were those actions enough to detect and stop the sexual predation of 82,000 boys and young men, or clean house of any predators who had somehow gotten past earlier safeguards? No, they clearly were not. Given the massive number of these incidents, one can only conclude this organization was not invested in solving this problem the way it needed to be solved. The avalanche of victims is all the proof one needs of that.Whether through incompetence, ignorance, stupidity or malice, the Boy Scouts of America let those children down. They bear the responsibility of that burden now whether they choose to acknowledge it or not.

Cult leaders, human traffickers and sexual predators all utilize coercive control techniques to isolate, manipulate and control their victims. The behavior dynamics of cults like Scientology and how sexual predators operate are the same, even if the language they use and the techniques they enact look or sound somewhat different. They are all designed to exploit vulnerable people in times of need. Children are no exception and are, in fact, the most vulnerable of our population. Michael Johnson believes a formal congressional investigation is required to delve into every sordid crack and crevice of the Boy Scouts activities for the last century and reveal everything they’ve been hiding all this time. Perhaps that’s true, but in the meantime regular people cannot just sit around and wait for the government to act.

It is incumbent upon every parent and every guardian and every adult who has anything to do with the care and education of children to watch their fellow adults closely. Predators don’t make themselves obvious. There is no special signal they use, no smell they carry and no special speech pattern that makes them stand out, and yet in hindsight almost everyone can identify that there were red flags in the predator’s behavior which were ignored. Without engaging in witch hunts or mob justice, it is possible to identify the warning signs of coercive control and predatory behavior, if you know what to look for and can be honest with yourself about what you see. An all-too-common refrain in so many child abuse cases is an after-the-fact “I should have seen it.” or “I should have known.” They’re right. They should have seen and they should have known. But it takes keeping our eyes open and not living in fear, but living with the recognition and awareness that this is a dangerous world with bad people in it who don’t care about your morality or your religious beliefs or their karma. They only care about satisfying their own desires and if that means hunting children, that’s what they will do. It is on us to protect our children. There simply isn’t anyone else who is going to do it for us.

And that is our final story for the evening. Thank you very much for watching.