Keith Alan Raniere is 59 years old today. This is his second birthday in federal custody. His first since he was convicted. He is awaiting sentencing and faces an absolute, minimum sentence of 15 years – for sex trafficking.
He was also convicted of racketeering, forced labor conspiracy, identity theft, wire fraud and more.
The judge has discretion to limit his sentence to 15 years – in which case, with time served and good behavior, Raniere could be out by his 70th birthday.
However, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis would have to feel extremely lenient toward Raniere and uniquely insular to public criticism to let the notorious sex cult leader, who branded female slaves with his initials on their pubic region, off with the bare minimum. It would seem hard to believe Raniere will get anything less than 20 years. The judge has discretion to sentence him to life.
Keith Raniere is likely to spend the best years of his life in prison, celebrating his birthdays quietly, if at all.
In the past, Raniere did not celebrate birthdays quietly.
Indeed, Raniere had ostentatious celebrations. More than half a million dollars were spent each year to give him the kind of party his followers felt he deserved.
Everyone would meet at Silver Bay, at the YMCA resort, a 550-acre campus, with beachfront on Lake George, in the Adirondack Mountains, and spend ta least 10 days celebrating him.
The cost to attend Vanguard Week was typically from $2,000- $5,000 depending on accommodations. That included bland vegetarian food and entre to the various classes and events held during his 10-day birthday week.
Raniere himself would typically show up for the first time on his birthday – in the evening – at an event held in his honor and accept gushing praises of followers and watch them perform various talent acts – sort of a Nxivm amateur hour.
Raniere would sometimes make a little speech.
As we learned from the trial, and from sources who spoke to Frank Report who were in attendance at various V-Weeks, Raniere was rather randy on his birthday, preferring to spend a vast portion of it in his birthday suit, alongside one or more slender slave women similarly attired.
But that is not terribly unique. He was rather randy the rest of the year too.
But up on the mountain with the fresh air, the starlit nights, the whispering pines, the frenzy of all the followers – sometimes as many as 500 people – all eager to see him – and with him able to choose which women he wanted to bed – and in what order – [almost like a dance card], he had the opportunity to enjoy the kind of birthday he felt he really deserved.
His text messages showed he loved to set up secret trysts to have sex in a cabin with some slender woman before heading out to another cabin to have sex with someone else.
Imagine. His birthdays were attended by 500 people, all paying thousands to be there, [most of them women]; he would show up when he wanted; his women ran the affair; his followers would compete by offering him extravagant gifts, vying for a minute of his attention, each of them thinking he possessed some special spiritual enlightenment that he could give them with a look, a word, a gesture.
And all he was thinking about was which of the women he was going to fuck.
He ate like a pig, slept like a log, fucked like a rabbit, and was treated like a rock star.
It was ironic too because as he stuffed his face with pizza with hot sauce and chocolate cake, his closest female followers were kept on near-starvation diets – sometimes 500 calories per day – for he liked his women slender. He said their fat disturbed his exalted spiritual vibration and made him physically ill.
He shamed many of them by making oinking noises when they opened the refrigerator.
His women were also sleep-deprived. He taught that women who needed more than 4 hours sleep per night were indulgent and not spiritually advanced enough to be near him.
Back in 2004, Vanguard’s birthday was only a single day.
His world was one of utter self-indulgence – not just on the 10 days of his birthday but every day of the year.
He was a man who lived totally for his own pleasure and had a small army of women who followed and served him. Many of those women knew about his proclivities and not only did they tolerate it, but they also encouraged it. They went out and fought to find him more women to encourage his fetishes. These included a master-slave relationship that was power-mad and completely self-destructive to women.
In short, he enjoyed, and his women suffered.
This was the model he set up – in the name of spiritual growth and self-improvement – and he was so good at it that women – sleep-deprived, food-deprived, hypnotized by long hours of indoctrination in his morning until evening classes, thought they were realizing their highest goals.
It worked so well that he had a run of more than 20 years as the Vanguard.
While he laughed at them all.
Starve them, abuse them. Steal their money. And fuck them until he went permantly soft.
It was tough. His whole world was built around sex and power and he lost the power to perform sex.
[One harem woman told me the worst of it was when he got semi-hard and all that would do is kind of poke around for a while and be painful. He blamed her for his being limp – saying she had gained three pounds and her fat disturbed his erection, she said.]
Over time, he was forced to perform with his magic tongue. And he invented a theory, he told the women [his slaves who were not allowed to be with any other man] that his tongue, applied to their vagina, would provide a special healing for them – a spiritual healing.
He also told the women that if he once ejaculated on them – especially on their face – that meant he owned them forever and that they could never sleep with another man the rest of their lives. [Or it would ruin their spiritual aspirations forever and might also destroy him which, in turn, would set back the world’s progress by 15,000 years].
He taught the women that their highest spiritual pleasure was to drink his semen or have his semen squirted on their body – and that this was a much higher, more subtle sexual pleasure than any mere orgasm they might have. The highest joy for a woman was to get him to have an orgasm.
And he had women believing this.
He had two dozen or more women convinced that they had to share his [limp] penis [because ‘you don’t own Keith’s penis’] and yet they all felt he owned their vaginas. That’s the blunt fact.
His semi-limp dick wold giz out some sperm on a woman’s face and eureka – she was the luckiest girl in the world.
Let’s face it, if it were not for the dumb women in this cult, this rascal would not have gotten anywhere.
He had his helpers. The able Nancy Salzman and her daughter, Lauren. The monstrous Pam Cafritz. The stupid Allison Mack. And Dawn Morrison, Mariana Fernandez, Loreta Garza, Rosa Laura Junco, Nicki Clyne, Daniela Padilla, Monica Duran, and a dozen others who served and waited on him.
And reinforced the madness.
And, of course, he had the Bronfman sisters. Those two imbecile sisters, heiresses of the Seagram’s fortune, that gave him all the trappings of enormous wealth.
It was part of his shtick that he was like a renunciate. A guy who needed little. He could sleep on a couch. Go without shoes. Not drive a car. Live humbly. Teach simply. [And fuck like a rabbit].
But he was an expensive renunciate with his $500,000 birthday parties, his multimillion-dollar lawsuits, his expensive ESP classes.
This year, however, his birthday won’t cost anyone a dime. He is in prison in Brooklyn, at the Metropolitan Detention Center. He is in the unit where convicts who are awaiting sentencing go.
They don’t celebrate birthdays in prison.
Overall, his health has declined. He gets no sunlight. He never sees the green leaves or smells the fresh air. He has been beaten in prison. Had his glasses stolen. He has had ringworm and head lice. He has been taunted with nicknames like Crybaby Jane – and Keith Manson.
He gets no respect from prisoners or guards. And most of all, he gets no women. Slender or otherwise.
No sex with women.
He once walked the grounds of Silver Bay and people rushed to see him to hear a pearl of wisdom drop from his blessed mouth.
Instead, the Mexican Federal Police came and hauled his ass off – from his hiding place in a closet.
Now, he is in prison. Likely to be there for the rest of his life. He may celebrate his last birthday in prison.
So what is his 59th birthday like?
He is busying himself with an appeal – a fruitless gesture – for his conviction will not likely be overturned. He is grey and worn and pale. Listless.
There is no one to worship him. And while he may have some hope that he will be granted a new trial and be acquitted with a fairer judge, by a more honest jury, if he is even half as smart as the average prisoner planning an appeal, he must know it is not going to work.
This rascal is going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He knows it unless he is truly stupid.
He is in a building now with bars and guards and no freedom. He had all the freedom in the world and deprived it of others. Now the tables have turned. The jury decided.
Yes, birthdays can be hard. This one is perhaps the hardest so far for Keith. Last year he had hopes he might be acquitted. This year he has hope for a successful appeal.
But even hope is death if it is entirely false.
By next year, that hope will be gone. By next August 26th, he will be at the prison where he will serve his sentence. There may be a yard for him to walk outdoors and see the sun again and a green leaf of a tree and clouds. Things deprived of him now.
Maybe, once he gets past the notion that he is ever going to get out, he will make friends in prison and live a quiet life and work and read and pass the years away uneventfully and grow old in prison.
And one day, he’ll die there and then be removed to be buried and perhaps forgotten. That may be his best hope – to be forgotten.
So, maybe next year his birthday will be better. Once he realizes who and what he is – a convict in for the long haul.
Maybe one day he will repent a little. He may find a place in his heart for regret for the people who came under this thrall in his heyday who he used and hurt.
He might learn, if he is wise, that there is a law that gives and takes away. A law that cannot be broken.
Then he will realize that he crafted his present and future. He will be a prisoner without hope.
It is customary to wish people a happy birthday, but not all birthdays are happy.
Some are mournful and reflective.
But the facts are what they are: The master is now a slave; the food-deprived is now he – and he must sleep on a ratty bunk, with fluorescent lights on 24-7.
He has all the time in the world to think about what he has done when he ran amok among more decent and tender ones and called himself The Vanguard.
Happy birthday, Keith.
Deprived of his Narcissistic Supply he’ll be barely functioning. His current state is who he is without victims to drain the life from. He is very truly an empty vessel. There is no hope for him. No redemption. No healing. No realisation. No learning. No reform. No future. Not even regret. That is where he put himself.
Justice has been done.
Except for at least two people he had killed.
Who did Raniere have killed?
Don’t answer this anyone. Without a conviction, do not answer this.
Raniere stated on camera, in the company of multiple witnesses: “I’ve had people killed because of my beliefs;
He is therefore, a murderer in the same sense, as Charles Manson.
Manson served a life sentence for murder on the basis that “He’d had people killed.”
I’ll just leave it at that for now.
His life up until his arrest was a long, continuous orgy of self-gratification and aggrandization. How very trite and empty. While in prison he won’t reflect on what he could have done differently, but rather on “when he had it made.”
I, for one, don’t think a life of meaningless, perverted sex, unchecked excesses and shocking cruelty, all aimed at satisfying one’s desires, is anything to be proud of. What exactly did you accomplish for the world, Keith? For your associates and acquaintances? For those who actually loved you?
Happy Birthday, Keith.
Well said.
“The Poynter Institute for Media Studies published an article about the Times Union and other local media’s years-long reporting on NXIVM before allegations about abuses by the organization’s leaders drew national attention and a subsequent federal convictions.”
https://www.poynter.org/the-sex-cult-next-door/
https://youtu.be/8cEZjSp0ZSQ This song says it all.
Keith Raniere thought people were ”things,” mere objects to be used for whatever purpose he saw fit.
Here is word from the wise which I doubt that he will ever understand.
“Our search for such [moral] principles can start with . . . the unconditional imperative to acknowledge every person as a person. If we ask for the contents given by this absolute, we find, first, something negative—the command not to treat a person as a thing. This seems little, but it is much. It is the core of the principle of justice.”
– Paul Tillich
Wonder if Clare Bear Bronfman got him a new cell phone for his birthday?
Now to be referred to as the Bear-V Phone.
If one looks really close at the midnight sky over the MDC, they could catch a glimpse of “the brand” shining from KARs Bear-V Phone.
A message to Clare. More money in my gang’s commissary accounts.
V-Week always seemed very phony and overly aggrandized Keith. I never went. But for those who did, didn’t it feel wrong? Someone who actually was enlightened wouldn’t want that much attention on himself. And the fact that Keith just went and fucked all day (something I know based on what numerous people told me) should have been a sign that this event happened for all the wrong reasons.
“Keith just went and fucked all day (something I know based on what numerous people told me)”
Did Keith f*** the same women he did in NY or did other women “volunteer?” That a big difference.
I read here about a pretty fancy Prefect birthday party. An Empress Nancy thing. SLICK Nancy from nowhere is, oh! La la, the toast of the town. Ostentatious in a different way. Did I not hear that Prefect wanted Lauren to be the “Queen of Mexico’?
And dear, poor Nancy *never* understood the need to “bow down” to Cash Clare. No clue!
Because without a doubt, dear Prefect, the cashmere atheleisure EM-er, only wated to promote “the mission” and etc.
Can anyone tell me about this “mission” bs?
This is a great story, as usual.
Whatever his fate, I wonder if anyone has changed.
I wonder if his worshippers still worship him, and I bet they do.
I wonder if they feel a longing.
And I bet they do.
We should celebrate his Un-Birthday , because there are 364 un-birthdays.
Another lesson to be learned from the Keith Raniere story – in addition to the standard “what goes around comes around” and “pride comes before the fall” – is the extent to the depths of self-inflicted human stupidity, not only from his followers, but the King Fake himself.
These were people who fooled themselves anywhere from several years to over two decades for a conman with the King Fake even fooling himself.
You’re an asshole, Frank, for letting that dickweed Claviger purposely delete virtually every comment I made over the last 4 days — even though none of them were mean spirited.
It’s clear he had moderating duties in your absence.
But he’s woefully incapable of doing anything but waiting a year to approve only the shortest and simplest of comments.
Claviger is known for not allowing comments by people like me.
Apparently he even deleted Niceguy’s comments.
Anyway, FUCK YOU Frank.
Claviger is a loser and he’s incapable of allowing free speech.
He really needs to perform Seppuku IMO cuz I doubt anybody would miss that cocksucker.
His articles are also nearly worthless.
LOL.
I should have known that Mr. Claviger was still the person moderating here.
BTW, the Seppuku comment was said as sarcasm (just in case you’re too stupid to realize that). 🙂
Hopefully Frank will come back soon so he can dismiss you from moderating duties, cuz you suck at it bro. 🙂
You’ve let this blog slide into the shitter IMO. Few articles published. Few comments approved. Plus, you take forever to even approve simple comments.
Not sure why Frank would want a dipshit like yourself moderating here. 🙂
I bid you a nice day, Mr. Claviger. 🙂
B—-
“B” – Baby don’t be hating on Klaviger! Dude got drunk on power. The power of being an internet weblog editor is great. Only a few people can handle it.
2 comments on V-week.
On the group pic of hundreds of attendees…a quick glance found no blacks. There are probably many hispanics, but V-week kinda looks like a gathering of a klan. Alike in color and alike in mind.
Also, Frank wrote: “with Keith able to choose which women he wanted to bed – and in what order.” Lots of comments here have said V-week was a kind of sex orgy…but was it? Did regular Nx-ers get loose and bed-hop amongst themselves?
Did Frank’s quote imply that Keith could choose from most women attendees….even those outside his normal harem? If not, then Keith’s sex activities at V-week were the same as his usual Albany actions.
NXIVM had a token black woman, Michelle something. I’m not aware of Hispanics being involved in the KKK. It was a one-person sex orgy, for Raniere.
It is just so ridiculous in a way. Like any other pos figurehead, Keith (boob) Raniere had sycophants
who encouraged others to debase themselves. The worst pyramid scheme imaginable.
Yeah. Nancy had no motives. And Clare was debased for her own good.
Nan loves her wine, tho
“a quick glance found no blacks.:
The only black in NXIVM I can name is Michelle Hatchette.
That said, among the membership of NXIVM, I don’t find a lot of anti-black sentiment.
Raniere appealed to Nicki Clyne by saying that she is the reincarnation of Harriet Tubman.
The gang mainly appealed to well-to-do white women with too much money and too much time on their hands and too little common sense.
NXIVM was popular with Hispanics and accepted Asians.
Yeah and Nikki probably thinks the underground railroad is a real railroad .
What about Michelle? She is black. Don’t kill us off before the movie starts! Also, wasn’t V week where he ravished KK?
You might be thinking of Hildreth’s other ex. who Frank wrote all about Raniere ejaculating on her https://frankreport.com/2017/09/10/why-mark-hildreth-left-vanguard/
“Vanguard ejaculated on her – which he teaches is his mark of ownership of a woman.”
So SOP student Hildreth must have learned from Vanguard how to mark his ownership of Kristin.
Or is it less fun to own than to rent by the day?
If KK wasn’t his special birthday present—then V week was nothing but sex with the same harem women that he ravished the other 51 weeks…booooooorrrriiiiiing
According to what Oxenberg wrote in her book about V-week: “Not this year [2013], but in the years to come, I would hear that the self-proclaimed tantric sex master started bed-hopping and humping naked all over the forest, and V-week apparently devolved into an orgiastic melee. A free-for-all.”
A while ago someone claiming to be a member humorously complained about NXIVM being incorrectly referred to as sex cult as he/she said they never got any sex when they were a member. And if all this sex was going on and they weren’t getting any, then they felt even worse about themselves.
Good point, NXIVM was not very diverse and drew mostly from some limited demographics. It appears the hispanics were mostly from Mexico, not from the US, and those were mostly from the upper-class who are largely the light-skinned descendants of Europeans – tellingly, with a lot of surnames like Boone, Batancourt and Levy.
There is the one person of African descent we’ve seen, the DOS slave Michele Hatchette. Just that one I can think of.
High control groups and cults in the US tend to have pretty limited draws like that. In the case of groups like NXIVM with pseudo-intellectual alternative ideologies, it tends to be people from average backgrounds with high aspirations, and middling educational achievement – almost none with advanced degrees or from demanding technical professions.
Also, as ESP morphed into NXIVM, they also stopped attracting actual executives and successful people to their courses, as they had at first.
“It tends to be people from average backgrounds with high aspirations, and middling educational achievement – almost none with advanced degrees or from demanding technical professions.”
Maybe many of the Mexican and American members were more of the idle rich types, but then there were members like Dr. Roberts and Dr. Porter and if what Frank wrote about some of the DOS women was correct, then among them is/was a Program Manager, Partner Relationships at STEMCELL Technologies – and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia; a medical engineer; and another who “went to law school at UCLA and studied political science at UC Berkeley.”
Here’s a list of some of the men who have been mentioned on here if you care to track down their educational backgrounds and/ or business success:
– Michel Chernitzky
– Edgar Boone
– Omar Boone
– Luis Montes Gutierrez
– Juan Lopez de Silanes Blanco
– James J. Del Negro
– Brian S. Elliot
– Cedric F. Celi
– Marc B. Elliot
– Lucas Roberts
– Eduardo Asunsolo Ramirez
– Jens E. Gould
– David Garza Perez
– Jorge Fregoso
– Jack Levy
– Luis C. Lozano
– Gabriel Delgado Ayau
– Kamaraj Kalyanasundaram
– Juan Luis Lopez Fons
– Farouk Rojas
– Eduardo Achar
– Enrique Martin Moreno
– Jorge Luis Bárcenas Méndez
– Hector Cortes Del Valle
– Roy Yen
– Patricio Gorozpe Huerdo
– Arturo García Torres
– Julio Manuel Alvarez
– Rafael Gutierrez Serrano
– Chris S. Pearson-Smith
– Danny Trutmann
– Sean H. Craney
– Justin R. Elliot
– Geoffrey A. Goldberg
– Evan L. Horowitz
– Arturo Caro Islas
– Scott Star
Your specific list only has one with non-medical post-secondary education, and one apparently possibly doing something very technical – “medical engineer” is pretty general, so it’s hard to tell; that still goes to the point that highly educated people are rare in these sorts of groups. General practitioners like Porter and Roberts are the least trained of all medical doctors, and in my experience somewhat prone to getting involved in pseudo-science – I’ve never seen anyone in the most rigorous and research-oriented specialties, like neurology or brain science, getting involved in a group like this.
If there was anyone particularly successful in that long list, it’s up to you to identify them. NXIVM initially attracted some high-level people and even recognizable names in government and industry, but that seems to have ended with the Forbes expose’ in 2003 – professionals at that level know to perform due diligence before getting involved with a group, and there was no one of such stature left after ESP started its really culty evolution into NXIVM. Typically the relatively successful people in such groups are those working in businesses where sales and marketing are key, and the sort of characteristics cultivated like assertiveness, self-promotion and even ruthlessness are advantageous.
Raniere’s inner circle in particular was, characteristically, composed of those with college education or just high school – and Clare Bronfman, not even that.
What would be an appropriate Vanguard Week present for the women who fawned over Raniere for years?
In the old days I would have given them free visits to an STD clinic.
Since those days are gone never to return, I would give those NXIVM women some common sense.
As for Raniere, as bad as his situation is, he is guaranteed free food and housing for the rest of his life.
That is a better deal than millions of Americans receive.
…and all the sex his mouth and ass can handle.
Note to Raniere and his top followers:
Remember there are no victims.