By Shivani
Thanks to Frank Report for taking the effort to publish this series of exchanges between Keith Raniere and Cami.
How does one even begin to put these communications within the broad and crucial context that Raniere conditioned Cami for nearly a decade? Here she was 24 during these latest quoted excerpts.
Cami had been in his grip for nine years already, since he started having sex with her when she was 15. Provably.
Add to it that she is one of three sisters, and their Kool-Aid drinking parents allowed each one to be victimized by Raniere. For years. A real life soap opera horror movie sinking down right next to snuff film level. These parents paid a lot of money for their daughters to be treated this way, too.
The abortions, vagina poses, throw in a two year captivity for one daughter, getting branded, participating in various crimes – well you know, that stuff is expensive.
People thinking they’re buying self-help and instead getting sucked into the vortex of blood, guts, extortion, starvation, slavery, sexual abuse. And they were instructed to smile and be happy while falling apart on the inside. Enjoy it and get more recruits with your contagious enthusiasm.
Multiply this by the numerous women who individually had the same sort of relationshit with Raniere.
Raniere was the fucking Ford Pinto of relationshit. Clare has no taste at all. Nancy is like the human embodiment of a grinning hyena. In her sixties, yet. Oy veh to the Executive Success.
You’ve offered a banquet for analysis here. To quote Frank Zappa, Wowie-Zowie. Raniere is a guy who tells on himself every time he opens his mouth. It is obvious that he has no concept of how transparent he really is.
You can begin to envision the roots of his obsessions from how, specifically, he has chosen to manipulate others, word by word. You begin to see his craven and diseased neediness for what it is, as well as how he has applied his systematic overlay of craftiness to hide his real crap and to use it to get what he wanted.
He himself reveals what he has had to have for himself. It is like listening to a sex addict who also happens to be addicted to gambling because Raniere was compelled to keep overplaying his hand. You read his composition here, like being able to read music.
You read it note by note and then can hear the whole stack of pages at once. You really get to read Raniere’s inner cacophony.
It looks as though the time when he might have been cured (to some extent) had passed before he was even out of elementary school. In other words, Raniere’s primal, gaping personal fixations preceded the development of his abstract intellect. And so he was able to develop his intellect while he was already askew inside, say from about the age of eight or maybe seven. He went down the dark road early. Speculatively.
This is entirely different from the more commonly understood late adolescent forms of breakdown, regardless of their various pathologies. One of the key differences is that Raniere was able to function out of his own sociopathy. In a way, he built it himself. He could control it to some extent because, abstractly, it’s been all that he has ever known. Strangely enough, Ted Bundy operated similarly, by the way. He had some command of and used a huge mental and interpersonal facade to get what he wanted. He just moved a lot faster, having a different end in mind.
I respectfully disagree with this type of psychologizing. As far as I know, Keith Raniere may simply be a guy who takes advantage of people for his own benefit. He’s a scam artist and a liar– well, he’s got plenty of company there among the entirely sane. He got lucky with the Nxivm scam, mainly because the Bronfmans happened to drop into his lap. After two decades on easy street, Raniere’s luck ran out.
I see a lot of speculation about Raniere being a sociopath. Okay, maybe. Or, he’s just a fairly clever guy who has no problem taking people’s money. He sets himself up as a “life coach” and a guru, and he suckers some fools into believing him. He studies Scientology’s methods and copies them. Adds a smattering of Eastern religion mumbo-jumbo to some stock self improvement crap freely available at the local library. He’s got a knack for the soft sell-persuasive “I’m listening” manner that make fools believe he’s really interested in them and cares about them. So they throw money at him.
This is no different than what millions of successful and semi successful salesmen do every day. There’s nothing particularly pathological about it. He went after his enemies hard, it’s true. That’s pretty much the norm for a lot of businessmen. If they can sue the competition and ruin them and drive them out of business, they do so. Legal firms proudly talk of “going to war” and ‘taking no prisoners”, and they’re not kidding.
This is not to defend Keith Raniere. Far from it. I did a happy dance when he was found guilty on all counts. I don’t like the “sociopath” argument because if anything it EXCUSES his behavior. He’s not sick, he’s not abnormal, he doesn’t have a mental condition. If he does, how can he be held truly responsible? If he’s a sociopath he lacks normal empathy, he lacks conscience, so how can we expect him to show empathy and follow his conscience? If he’s a sociopath he doesn’t really understand why what he did is wrong. He doesn’t see other people as people like himself. He can’t be expected to, really.
I don’t want Raniere to be given that kind of excuse. Not without proof. So in the absence of expert testimony from trained professionals who have conducted lengthy examinations of the man, I’m going to assume Raniere is not a mental case. He’s just a selfish asshole, a criminal who committed his crimes to advantage himself. He’s no monster, he’s nothing exceptional, he’s simply a guy with no morals who ran a grift thinking he was smart enough to get away with it. Scam artists like him are a dime a dozen.
Well you hit the nail on the here.
Just a comment from me:
He used his followers as a wall, to keep the real world at bay, because to the real world, he’s a dangerous lunatic.
Shivani,
Excellent synopsis of Vanguard’s psychological profile.
I am in total agreement with everything you so astutely outlined.
I would love to know what Keith Raniere’s childhood friends and extended family would say about him.
*****
One of his high school friends said of Raniere, “he was just fellow geek there was nothing remarkable about him”, (Paraphrasing).
It always seems to me that there is this dichotomy…..
……. between the experiences various people have with same psychopaths/ sociopaths early on. All of the early people experience two separate personas from the same flawed individual.
Later as you mentioned the psychopath eventually presents a more polished affable single persona.
What do you think about the high school friends description?
Frank published on Frankreport a while back.
Do you think Raniere had polished his act?
Thanks for sharing Shivani!
Hands, down, one of the best articles published here. Thank you! And I do think you meant to type “relationshit”.
What is a “relationship” to one like Raniere? Relationships involve give and take and usually mutual concern and affection. IMO, he doesn’t know what a relationship is.
I agree wholeheartedly that Raniere doesn’t have relationships, but it is very likely HE thinks that he does. That is one of the strangest things about coping with someone like him. You keep trying to evaluate whether the person believes his own delusions or is using dramatic behavior to manufacture those delusions. And almost always it is a unique and complex combination of both.
He could probably regale us for hours about all of his unique and wonderful relationships. And it is starkly obvious that he caught many people in his net. I would guess that he really doesn’t know any better. He is stuck inside the belly of the beast, after all, and can only see through that viewpoint. A “crazy” person rarely notices that he or she is functioning from within a state of imbalance. Over and over again, Raniere has done harm while pretending to do good. Eventually he hardly even needed to pick his own victims, since his pimp mamas were all conditioned to hunt new flesh for him.
You can see that people who he wanted to have in his orbit were possessions to him rather than fellow human beings. His drama buttons, to a huge extent, were set off whenever someone failed to “honor” his need for dominant ownership of others. And he couldn’t stand to be left by anyone; another big trigger. Yet he would habitually, willingly and happily inflict pain and suffering upon others, all in the name of offering them some kind of enlightened, growth -producing relationship with the Great One. And that’s the opposite of what most want to develop in any relationship. Definitively, Raniere was always selling relationshit (with a side of crazy glue.)
“….numerous women who individually had the same sort of relationshit with Raniere.” Now I’m no rocket scientist, but I do know that the /t/ and the /p/ are not even located near each other on the keyboard.
You understand it was meant as a joke, right?
I think we’ve all used that old Anglo Saxon word.
The smiling for pictures while being miserable inside is the MLM “fake it ’till you make it” routine that Raniere learned while in Amway. I’ll also add in the extreme state of exhaustion to the list of issues because of little sleep from the “alert” exercises and other mental torture efforts. Fortunately the DOJ presented it well and the jury didn’t buy Raniere’s sob story.
It’s not just “like” a sex addict who is also addicted to gambling, Raniere was literally both. There is a picture of him lying in bed with a “How to Gamble” book and he gambled away $60 million worth of Bronfman money on commoditiy futures and probably had a lot to do with the spectactular real estate losses in Los Angeles that Frank pulled out of the fire then got sued for helping out.
Also, Bundy operated alone. Raniere had the help of several evil women along the way.
Nice analysis.
There are reports that Raniere was a gambler, as well. The people at the top of scams often have that sort of mentality, continually believing that if they just stay in the game or even double down, somehow they will finally come out ahead, be able to make things right and avoid getting busted.
For instance, Dani’s testimony made reference to day trading – which is, or is much like, gambling, if only because the vast majority of people who try it end up net losers (research suggests about 80% fail to come out ahead in the long run). One thing I’m curious about, is whether Raniere lost all of any profits that NXIVM might have generated, just as he blew the Bronfmans’ money – I’m not convinced that there was necessarily much money left over after all of NXIVM’s expenses (including the commissions that its pyramid system paid), but if there was that might have been where it went.
Raniere gambled other people’s money not his own, e.g. the Bronfman nincompoops and Bouchey. He likely stashed unreported income and unpaid commissions elsewhere.