Defense: Raniere is innocent; women can brand themselves like men do

A Brooklyn federal judge has set October 1st as the trial date for Keith Raniere and Allison Mack trial date. The two are charged for their involvement in the alleged sex-trafficking cult NXIVM.

Defense: “(Raniere) believes in his innocence and I’m impressed with his stamina. He has no reason to plead guilty.”

“There are groups of men who brand themselves. When women choose to brand themselves, they become victims?” Keith Raniere’s attorneys speaking outside of federal court right now regarding charges.

Attorneys for NXIVM leader Keith Raniere, speaking about the organization being an alleged sex cult: “It’s a slogan, it’s a label that the government is attaching to conduct to make it nefarious. Women joined of their own volition.”

Raniere’s Defense Team: women joined on their “own volition” and “for their “own reasons.”

Keith Raniere (L) and Allison Mack (R) have been charged with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor.

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Frank Parlato

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  • These lawyers are what gives the law profession a bad name. An honest.defense is one thing,.lying about a group of women who have been tortured by Raniere and Mack makes these lawyers scrum of the earth. Winning by Lying is not justice. Pig’s these men are.

  • They are all stupid women. There’s just no excuse for their behavior. Grown ass women wanting to belong to something. Weak women.

  • The real threat of DOX /blackmail for expressing ‘defiance’ when being held down for the branding is not the same as going to a tattoo parlor and telling the guy to ink Allison’s/Keith’s logo on your butt

  • Except for a tiny sect of ultrareligious men in India, I find no examples where branding is NOT used as punishment. The most common usage of branding throughout human history is marking ownership of slaves, same as is done with cattle.

    So a handful of crazy men on the other side of the world brand themselves in a religious initiation ceremony… and that means that DOS slaves aren’t victims?? That’s some kool-aid.

  • I hope this lawyer has a daughter and that his daughter gets abused by monsters like the ones he represents. I would love to see what he would say then……

  • This is a trend that I do not like, but women argue that they have the right to control their own bodies.
    Increasingly younger women are getting tattoos.
    And women’s tattoos are getting increasingly larger.
    Surveys of women 35 and younger indicate that 47% of these women have tattoos.
    While these tattoos are often quite small, some are very extensive.
    Many young women sport so-called “tramp stamps” on their lower backs which advertise that these women are “open for business.”
    And there are also reports that some women are deliberately getting branded.

    At what point should the government intervene in the private decisions of grown women on what to do with their bodies?
    People have to take some responsibility for what they do with their lives.

    If their is a problem with the NXIVM branding, it is that the women in charge of the branding did not fully inform the women getting the brands what the process would involve.

    Here is a story in the Huffington Post discussing this trend towards women permanently marking their bodies.
    The Secret Lives Of Tattooed Women
    The tattoo parlor was a man’s world. But that’s finally changing.
    By Claire Fallon
    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-secret-lives-of-tattooed-women_us_55ba784de4b0d4f33a01fb25

    • Nobody’s asking for your opinion on women’s rights to THEIR OWN BODIES. The reality is these women were lied to and what ultimately would happen to them (branding) was misrepresented by cult members like Allison Mack and Lauren Salzman. This has nothing to do with choosing to be tattooed. Scarification is totally different than what the women were apparently led to believe would happen.

  • I actually despise Mack & Kruek more than Raniere. Women who lead other women to the pig are as low as it gets.

    • Just those two eh? What about the Salzmans and the Bronfman gals? Without them, NXVIM might have been just another Consumers Buyline taken down long ago by the authorities with no vast sums of money to buy them off. Or is it just actresses you despise? Then what about the BSG gals Clyne and Park, the terminator gal Loken, how about Catherine and CC-2 herself, India Oxenberg, how about the actresses who were part of the infamous The Source — Bonnie Piesse, Alicia Novak, Maja Milkovitch, Rebecca Davis, Ana Risoul, Nik Isbell, Jennifer Kobelt — then there’s some others Frank either doesn’t know about or hasn’t fixated on yet, and, of course, the one who ran the Vancouver center and talked about how great she was at recruiting her actor friends for 12 years, Sarah Edmondson

      • I guess what makes the actresses worse than the other women is that their fame is used to entice new recruits.

        And Mack definitely used her fame to try to bring Kelly Clarkson and Emma Watson into the cult.

        No one would join NXIVM based on the Salzmans and the Bronfmans.

    • Kristin had nothing to do with DOS. She also had nothing to do with the Source like these other actresses.

      The extent to which she brought people in was for the self-help courses. What they did from that point on is on themselves. There were a number of people who were supposedly “brainwashed” but who left this group quickly enough. Kristin left way back in 2012, supposedly when she found out about Raniere’s history with teen girls. I believe Mark Vicente did so when the love for his wife was demeaned or somehow used against him (in relation to the branding). And Mark Hildreth and Maja Milkovitch quickly left when they found out about the branding. Others who were appalled by the branding left just as quickly as well.

      Yes, Kristin shares some responsibility in lending her name to this group but that’s about it. She had no intent of recruiting for the sexual slavery of a man and would never have done so if she knew. With the events as they are today, it turns out this group wasted more of her and other people’s time and sullied her name more than it really ever helped her.

    • Thats because your jealous of their fame. ( nice try shadowstate posting under another name )

  • I see that the trial is schedule for both defendants. Does this meant that the two have adopted a coordinated defense? Or are her attorneys playing cards close and still working on a plea deal???

  • Classic victim shaming. Welp, why did the victims have Keith’s initials burned near their vaginas? And does the evidence show VanGrifter ordered the ritual scarification?

    Allison’s words are chilling … THINK OF YOUR MASTER.

    Nuts. Gonna be a an interesting trial!

  • I hope this strategy doesn’t work as well for that law firm as it did when they blamed the hotel maid who was raped by Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn.

About the Author

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist.

His work has been cited in hundreds of news outlets, like The New York Times, The Daily Mail, VICE News, CBS News, Fox News, New York Post, New York Daily News, Oxygen, Rolling Stone, People Magazine, The Sun, The Times of London, CBS Inside Edition, among many others in all five continents.

His work to expose and take down NXIVM is featured in books like “Captive” by Catherine Oxenberg, “Scarred” by Sarah Edmonson, “The Program” by Toni Natalie, and “NXIVM. La Secta Que Sedujo al Poder en México” by Juan Alberto Vasquez.

Parlato has been prominently featured on HBO’s docuseries “The Vow” and was the lead investigator and coordinating producer for Investigation Discovery’s “The Lost Women of NXIVM.” He also appeared in "Branded and Brainwashed: Inside NXIVM, and was credited in the Starz docuseries "Seduced" for saving 'slave' women from being branded and escaping the sex-slave cult known as DOS.

Additionally, Parlato’s coverage of the group OneTaste, starting in 2018, helped spark an FBI investigation, which led to indictments of two of its leaders in 2023.

Parlato appeared on the Nancy Grace Show, Beyond the Headlines with Gretchen Carlson, Dr. Oz, American Greed, Dateline NBC, and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, where Parlato conducted the first-ever interview with Keith Raniere after his arrest. This was ironic, as many credit Parlato as one of the primary architects of his arrest and the cratering of the cult he founded.

Parlato is a consulting producer and appears in TNT's The Heiress and the Sex Cult, which premieres on May 22, 2022.

IMDb — Frank Parlato

Contact Frank with tips or for help.
Phone / Text: (305) 783-7083
Email: frankparlato@gmail.com

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