That depends on what they say! No matter what they the early originators of NLP may or may not have done / been involved with, their choices as individuals should be separated from their research, to quote one of the NLP presuppositions "you are not your behaviour"!

Also, no matter what the originators did or did not do, the second generation of NLP advocates did much to undo some of that early bad press e.g. Tony Robins. Hopefully third generation practitioners such as myself "model" themselves on the second generation rather than some of the early actions of the first generation.