Although Allison Mack's custody includes not using the Internet, she was identified as a student at Berkeley in September 2020, which generated online outrage from her classmates. Mack apparently enrolled in multiple courses such as "Gender, Sex, and Power" and "The History and Practice of Human Rights."
Old tweets of Allison Mack have been resurfaced, indicating she attempted to recruit Emma Watson, Kelly Clarkson and writers known for their feminist work to what she described as a "human development and women's movement".
One of the main interviewees (and sources of footage) in this documentary series is Mark Vicente. It is mentioned early on that Vicente codirected a 2004 movie called What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (often known as What the Bleep for short). What goes unmentioned in The Vow is the fact that although What the Bleep purported to be a scientifically accurate documentary about theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, one of its talking-head experts, J. Z. Knight, was not a scientist but the head of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (RSE)--a New Age spiritual sect often characterized as a cult--and a self-proclaimed "channeler" of an entity she claimed was a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha. Furthermore, many sources (for example, John Gorenfeld's September 2004 Salon article and Alison Willmore's October 2020 New York magazine article) state that What the Bleep's three directors, William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente, were at the time also followers of Knight and RSE. There is no acknowledgment in The Vow that NXIVM was not Vicente's first time adhering to the precepts of a group that many experts characterize as a cult.
Although it's claimed in the beginning Keith Raniere graduated from RPI at 16 as a triple-major, he actually graduated at 22 in 1982 with a GPA of 2.26.
According to Sarah Edmondson, the filmmakers had told the publicity team not to use the word "sex cult" while promoting this series. "They didn't want to sensationalize the content, or traumatize the victims any further."