The leader of a New York “self-help” group that promised to enable humanity to “rise to its noble possibility” was found guilty of sex trafficking, racketeering and creating child sexual abuse images yesterday after a six-week trial in Brooklyn.
Keith Raniere, the head of an organisation called Nxivm, was accused of operating a secret society within the group which furnished him with “sex slaves”, one of whom was still a child. He faces the possibility of life in prison when he is sentenced in September.
Raniere, 58, listened closely as the jury pronounced him guilty on all counts, but showed no visible reaction.
Prosecutors said that he founded Nxivm in 1998, describing it in a mission statement that mixed pseudo-science and corporate jargon as a self-help group that offered “executive success courses”.
Devotees included a television actress, Allison Mack, 36, and Clare Bronfman, 40, an heiress to the Seagram whisky fortune, who provided financing. It established centres all over North America and some 16,000 people were said to have passed through, paying $5,000 for a week-long course. Mack, Bronfman and three other senior members of the group pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges before Raniere’s trial began.
Raniere had graduated with low marks from a New York polytechnic and had previously been accused by state prosecutors of running a pyramid scheme; the case was settled and the company closed. Among his followers, the “Nxians”, he was known as Vanguard and was held up as one of the most accomplished men to have walked the earth.
His genius had been recognised, apparently, by Guinness World Records, and he had mastered mathematics, judo and science. Raniere’s IQ was so great, in fact, that he was considered a threat to the government. One former Nxian told the court that his followers thought that he held powers to heal and to direct the weather.
Prosecutors offered a different story. Nxivm trapped its followers in debt, while encouraging them to take more courses, they said. Raniere claimed to be empowering women, while ordering them on to extremely restrictive diets. At the heart of Nxivm, in 2015, Raniere established a secret sorority called DOS, in which senior female members of the group recruited other women to serve as their “slaves”. Those slaves then recruited their own slaves.
The initiation rite for slaves involved being branded without anaesthetic on the hip. A British woman in her late twenties named Sylvie told the court that as a new slave she had been made to draft a letter to her parents declaring herself a prostitute, which would be released if she failed to follow orders.
Women were told that this secret sorority was a tool of empowerment: many were apparently unaware that at the top of the pyramid of female slaves and masters was a man, Raniere himself. Their duties as slaves had included buying groceries and running errands, Sylvie said. But soon Sylvie, who was married, was required to seduce Raniere: a thought that disgusted her, she said. She told the court she had been ordered to send him nude photographs and eventually to lie naked “on a big bed with dirty white sheets” while Raniere photographed her and then performed oral sex on her.
DOS was an acronym for “Dominus Obsequious Sororium” – the Latin, which was incorrect, was meant to mean Master over the Slave Women. Prosecutors described it as a system “to serve up a steady stream of sex partners for [Raniere]”, including a 15-year-old girl. Mark Lesko, an assistant US attorney, called it “a pornography machine, pumping out photos of nude women”.
One victim had been confined in a room for nearly two years on Raniere’s orders for showing interest in another man, prosecutors said.
Marc Agnifilo, Raniere’s lawyer, had sought to argue that all his victims had acted consensually. His client had the best intentions, he said at the start of the trial. “This is something these people signed up for.”
While strict, controlling regimes could be bad, he added, “control can also make Marines, control can make gold medal winners”. In a closing statement to the jury this week, he argued that “we don’t convict people in this country for being repulsive and offensive. Disgusting lifestyles aren’t criminal.”
The jury took less than five hours to find Raniere guilty on all charges.
