Ex-Doctor Brandon Porter’s Letter of Support: ‘Keith Was a Mentor to Me. I Trusted His Judgment; He Was Very Good at Helping People’

Brandon Porter had his medical license revoked in New York for his role in NXIVM.

Former medical doctor Brandon Porter experienced the opposite of Executive Success in his life. His medical license was revoked after a hearing where it was determined that the human fright experiments he conducted – and his illegal suppression of poisoning outbreak at Vanguard Week 2016 – warranted the harsh outcome, depriving Porter of his living.

Somehow this has not deterred Porter from continuing his support for Keith Raniere who oversaw and approved the human fright experiments and colluded with Porter to keep the outbreak a secret from authorities.

Porter’s letter was written back on December 1, 2019, but he apparently continues to support Raniere since he has not sought to withdraw his letter.  Raniere is set to be sentenced on Oct. 27.

It is peculiar that at the time he wrote the letter to the judge, he had already lost his medical license [which occurred in April 2019] but continues to refer to himself as an MD in the letter.  It is also of interest that Porter does not mention the revocation of his license and that it was directly related to following the judgment of his mentor, Keith Raniere. For a time after he lost his ability to practice medicine, he worked as an insulation salesman, a position he lost because of reports about him in the Frank Report. He has since left the Albany area and returned to the Midwest where he grew up.

His letter is addressed to Judge Nicholas Garaufis,

I am writing to share information about Keith Raniere and NXIVM that was not represented in the press, nor his trial. I hope you consider this information when considering his sentence. I will give you a little background about me and the reasons I participated in NXIVM. The reason I want to share this information is that NXIVM has been described as a criminal organization. It was not a criminal organization. It was an organization that valued people and helped to serve as an example for a humanitarian organization.

Keith Raniere’s inspiration and ideas provided the foundation for this organization and its techniques provided significant benefit to many people.

I met Keith Raniere in the summer of 2001. I was in the midst of my MD/PhD training. At first, I was taken aback by the high accolades Keith was given in the small organization. As I gained more benefits from the trainings, I could see that people appreciated Keith relative to the amount of benefit his life’s work, Rational Inquiry, provided them. I had a few direct interactions with Keith during the second part of a 16-day intensive training. In my experience, he was kind, humble, thoughtful and helpful. I was impressed that he and Nancy Salzman could develop a process with deep philosophical grounding that a wide range of people could take in, enjoy, and benefit from.

Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman

I became a coach in ESP because I like to help people and I noticed that the Rational Inquiry tools helped people in ways I hadn’t thought possible. Depressed people were putting away their depression, anxious people were putting aside their anxieties, loving people were becoming even more loving. All of these wonderful results were simply cultivated through ESP’s consistent system of discussing morality, ethics, and what it means to be a human being. I was impressed and wanted to help others with the natural struggles that come with being human.

I came to know Keith more when I moved to Albany, NY in 2009 to work as a physician at a local hospital and to help set up ways to measure the effects of the NXIVM trainings. I played volleyball with Keith and the volleyball team once or twice a week. I had many opportunities to see him interact with a variety of people, including his close friends, ESP proctors, coaches, and students. He was always gracious and kind. He would give people undivided attention. People would seek his advice on a wide variety of topics and he readily acknowledged when he didn’t have the specific type of knowledge the person was seeking. His usual response to people seeking advice was to not give a definitive response. Instead, he helped people see different options so the individual could have the experience of evaluating their situation with their own values and making their own decisions on their own personally challenging topic.

Over my 17 years participating with Executive Success Programs and NXIVM, I got to know hundreds of coaches (including the professional coaches) and students. In my experience, these people were dedicated to helping other people realize the best version of themselves. We did this by helping people develop the tools necessary to build positive traits or put away negative traits. In the process of this, the NXIVM curriculum also helped us find the individualized positive reasons we did things so people could actively build their conscience around their most important values. Also, the curriculum helped people find immoral things we were doing so we could see the negative behaviors, acknowledge their effects, and fix the negative behaviors if we wanted to fix them. Many people feel bad about themselves because we fill our lives with doing the things we know, in our own judgement, to be bad. The curriculum helped us recognize these behaviors, develop a plan, and execute the plan to change these behaviors for the better. When people chose to address these behaviors, they felt truly liberated.

In my experience, the NXIVM coaches and students were not a group of bamboozled acolytes. NXIVM included a wide array of people, many trained in the highest echelon of universities. They were excited to explore important ideas including the natures of honor, noble actions, ethics, morality, love, responsibility, and conscience. The people of NXIVM were interested in figuring out how to build joy in their lives, even though life, in general, includes significant emotional pain. In my experience, it was an absolute joy to explore important philosophical ideas together and share in the process of self-discovery together. The foundation of the NXIVM community was a celebration of how, together, we each contribute to each person’s self-discovery process. This is an important point because the foundation of NXIVM wasn’t a celebration of Keith Raniere as a demigod, in the way the media and government portrayed. People appreciated Keith’s contribution to their lives relative to the amount of benefit he provided them. They appreciated the other people in NXIVM relative to the amount of benefit the other people provided them. In general, it was a group of people who appreciated each other, greatly. He designed the organization to be grateful for each person’s contribution to our lives. In my experience, the organization improved in its capacity to do this, each year.

The company Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman created, Executive Success Programs, was dedicated to helping people grow ethically and compassionately. People were able to use the company structure as a place to make their mistakes (at the expense of the company) in the process of discovering and developing the type of person they wanted to be. The company’s focus was upon helping people and upon building an ethical, humanitarian business. Keith helped inspire an environment where people could explore important philosophical questions in relationship to their own, personal moral convictions. The goal of the system was to help each person find their own beliefs (conclusions) that were inconsistent with their highest ideals, and then the person could make their own decision about these inconsistent beliefs. The process is both elegant and humanitarian because it doesn’t simply replace one’s beliefs with another person’s beliefs. The individual makes their own conclusions based upon their own, higher moral values. The unique curriculum helped thousands of people improve their lives and the lives of those around them. The ethics of the people in the company improved with time.

These principles; personal responsibility, ethical evaluation, building consistency in one’s beliefs, and doing what one determines is right (based upon one’s ethical evaluation of the situation) were common threads in all of Keith’s trainings I participated in. This included ESP, Ultima, SOP, JNESS Tracks, SOP Complete, Ethicist, The Source, and Exo-Eso. As a consequence of these trainings, I experienced improvements in my roles as a physician, father, husband, and friend. I gained greater capacity for empathy and compassion. I was better able to uphold my values in the context of stress. My love for the closest people in my life increased. My capacity to help people through difficult times increased. I saw similar, if not better, improvements in my friends who used Keith Raniere’s trainings in their own lives. I saw many people move towards a curiosity driven, scientifically minded, compassion-oriented process of interacting with others. In my experience, the positive changes in people were profound and specific to the person and what they wanted to improve upon.

The people in NXIVM were not perfect and acknowledged this. However, I saw people grow morally, over my years of participation, by putting away their anger, developing a compassionate perspective, and performing more loving actions. This was not an authoritarian system and sometimes people would misunderstand certain ideas and Keith’s next training compassionately addressed these misunderstandings and provided the opportunity for deeper understandings for important principles. In my experience, each new intensive helped cultivate an improved ethical, moral direction for the organization as a whole.

Keith was a mentor to me. I trusted his judgment when it came to helping people because he was very good at helping people. I saw him interact with hundreds of people. He is able to figure people out quickly and plant seeds that inspire curiosity and help people discover new understandings of themselves. I have met no other person with his skill in helping people in this way. These skills are not inborn. They were created over time and required significant insight into the nature of himself and humanity, in general. This is not something people can learn in books. He inspired people to make people the most important value in their lives. He inspired us to be willing to love and to take the difficult path of doing what is right. In my opinion, this is a particularly important philosophical decision, given our present society’s prevailing morality which is based upon materialism and comfort. Keith’s themes of personal responsibility, ethical evaluation, upholding people, constant improvement towards our personal goals, and building the capacity to do what is right in the context of conflict, are important themes and he was able to help many people feel confident in exploring and upholding these challenging values in their lives.

I can say with confidence that Keith helped me learn about responsibility, honor, commitment, character, love and how to help people experience joy in their lives even though life includes significant emotional pain. One of the ways I learned these traits was through first imitating Keith and then figuring out, through trial and error, how to best uphold these ideas in my own way. Over my 20 years of experience in NXIVM, I noticed that the people closest to Keith improved in in similar ways. Importantly, this included being more thoughtful and more compassionate with others.

All of Keith’s trainings were developed to help create experiences to help people examine and influence their own values so they could develop themselves into their ideal version of themselves. I didn’t know about DOS until people left the group and spoke out against Keith. Given the high stakes in this situation, I do not trust much of the information I have about DOS. However, I personally knew many of the women who were members and I respected them as people who were dedicated to helping other people. I witnessed each of these people help many others and I respected their opinions in this regard. As a consequence, I have left the hypothesis open that DOS was an experiential process with the purpose of helping people overcome specific issues. Obviously, this process went wrong at some point in the execution of the idea, perhaps even in the conception of the idea.

I do not have direct access to Keith’s motives for any of his actions. Indeed, I don’t have direct access to all of his actions, his personal struggles, and his effects in the world to help me understand him fully as a person. This is terribly frustrating to me when analyzing reports of his actions and his recent conviction. In my evaluation of Keith, I have wanted to gather all of the information I could about him. Given your solemn decision regarding the extent of his punishment, I imagine you feel similarly. Right now, based upon the information available to me, my 20 years of experience knowing Keith, and experiencing and observing the results of the trainings he created, I think he can still serve a benefit to our society. I hope you find the information I am sharing with you helpful in making your decision.

Sincerely,

Brandon B. Porter, M.D., Ph.D.

 

 

 

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Frank Parlato

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supremequeen9
supremequeen9
3 years ago

I couldn’t read this boring letter long enough to see if the fright experiments were mentioned. But I like that this creepy doctor referred to NXIVM as an “example” of a humanitarian organization because – was it actually one? Did NXIVM ever do anything on a large scale to help humanity, i.e.: donate money and/or time to a charity, cancer research, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, hurricane relief, the homeless, battered women (wait, they brought it on themselves), the poor, the hungry, hospitals, exploited/missing children, fire departments, police departments, small businesses, animals? Or did the humanitarianism only exist in the form of brow-beating, molesting, and abusing its followers? I guess the thinking was – we can’t change this world till we get all this makeup off all these women, and that’s going to take LOTS and LOTS of classes and V Weeks to accomplish.

THAT Bon
THAT Bon
3 years ago

Sad fool still drinking the Kool-Ade. This man through away a medical education and even a career selling insulation. I believe he has a family that will Likely suffer For the rest of their lives. This pathetic little man. I believe his wife was/is also involved in this nonsensical cult. I truly feel sorry for his poor children.

What career has he ended up in?

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago

A letter of recommendation from Dr. Mengele, I mean Porter should tack on a couple of years to Keith’s sentence if the Judge is the slightest bit informed.

Jamie Slater
Jamie Slater
3 years ago

Sir, your MD was revoked. Stop pretending you are still a doctor, you proved yourself to be a fool.

John 1
John 1
3 years ago
Reply to  Jamie Slater

His license to practice was revoked, but he retains his degree. He is still an MD.

Paul
Paul
3 years ago

I wonder if Porter submitted his letter inscribed onto a chocolate teapot. It would have been appropriate.

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago

Isn’t it illegal for someone to claim the title of a doctor when they aren’t one? LOL

NiceGuy
NiceGuy
3 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

Ask Dr. Phil or Dr. Laura. Neither are MDs

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago

Frank, let’s invite him over for some trail mix .

Nomin Jerabek
Nomin Jerabek
3 years ago

“Ethical and compassionate growth”

“Ethical, humanitarian business”

“Personal moral conviction”

“Own, higher moral value”

“I gained greater ability to empathy and compassion”

“He inspired us to be willing to love and to go the hard way in doing the right thing”

“This is a particularly important philosophical decision, given the prevailing morale of our current society, which is based on materialism and comfort”

“Keith helped me learn about responsibility, honor, commitment, character, love.”

“This included a more thoughtful and compassionate one towards others.”

“This is terribly disheartening to me when I analyze reports of his actions.”

He talks about morality, empathy, higher philosophical values, love, ethical humanitarian business. He who killed others unethically, immorally, menially, without empathy, with a false business policy. The comfortable materialistic social morale perfectly fits Raniere’s selfishness and comfort when she used dozens of her slaves like rags. The sad thing is that in addition to the body, it crippled souls, causing permanent injuries.

Responsibility, honor, commitment, character, love… He got rid of the people who were no longer in his best interest in an unscrupulous way. He’s equally guilty of character assassination. And let’s not mention compassion.

Natashka
Natashka
3 years ago

Frank, do you know anything about this “foundation”? A foundation for the persecuted NXIVM community.

https://youtu.be/ZnhUhZsshPE

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago
Reply to  Frank Parlato

Interesting how Ivy got hold of it, spy or playing both sides of the street? LOL

Nice Guy
Nice Guy
3 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

I’m loving all the drama and…intrigue!

It’s like a Lifetime Movie.

Nice Guy
Nice Guy
3 years ago
Reply to  Frank Parlato

The video is gone now. Thanks for ruining my day by removing the video, Ivy.

Mauricio Ricardo Urtaza Reyes
Mauricio Ricardo Urtaza Reyes
3 years ago

Porter should be in jail. Another example of how justice and American Justice is just a joke. “Someone finally let me show snuff videos to the innocent” gross man. Another Mengele.

Sigh...
Sigh...
3 years ago

It would be nice to read about the latest goings on with the NXIVM cult on other platforms, without noticing Sultan Of Six bashing the blog that broke the story.

[redacted – I don’t link to gross lies by anonymous cowards]

JRule31/SultanOfSix:

“Today, he seems to be going with “investigative journalist.” And it looks like he finally deleted the lines about The Frank Report being “one of the Internet’s best destinations” for “true, unfiltered, hard-hitting journalism.” [Spoke too soon] Perhaps he finally realized what a ridiculous fool that made him look like when he constantly posts as “articles,” comments that are full of inaccuracies, wild assumptions, and unfounded accusations from some of his deranged readers and mentally ill stalker types, alongside his own slapdash writings”.

Sultan Of Six is full of hatred for Frank Parlato, all because Frank called out Kristin Kreuk. His masturbatory lust competes with his hatred.

“constantly posts as “articles,” comments that are full of inaccuracies, wild assumptions, and unfounded accusations from some of his deranged readers and mentally ill stalker types”.

Says two decade Kristin Kreuk stalker Sultan Of Six.

https://artvoice.com/2019/03/16/kristin-kreuk-defender-sultan-of-six-posts-threatening-photos-on-twitter/

Stop
Stop
3 years ago
Reply to  Sigh...

If you feel so strongly about this no mark, why do you keep substantially broadening his platform by bringing it here? Makes no sense. No one is interested, Just you, and a very very few others.

SparkPug
SparkPug
3 years ago

Both Doctors ….. blah blah blah ….. For smart people, they are really dumb. How could these people get caught up in this mess?
Just throwing it out there into the cosmic void.

NCGirl
NCGirl
3 years ago

People don’t just put depression or anxiety aside. Those are physiological and chemical responses to stimuli. They might learn tools that help them cope, but depression and anxiety aren’t magically put aside as if a child were putting aside a toy which was no longer pleasing. People often require multiple strategies to manage depression and anxiety, including exercise, diet, medication, as well as self regulation.

The fact that he had already lost his license and yet still presented himself as a medical doctor is telling. He lost that license due to actions he undertook at Keith’s behest, yet here he is, still praising Keith while no longer able to practice in a field that he spent years learning. Both he and Dr. Danielle failed to obtain informed consent for the violence they performed on unwitting individuals. He literally forced women to watch horrific violence that they did not agree to watch. Who put those film clips together? What kind of deranged psyche thought this was a suitable experiment? Surely as a student, he learned about the Milgram experiments, and the repercussions they had in terms of how experiments are conducted.

For all the talk of ethics, it’s clear these two doctors, Brandon Porter and Danielle Roberts, can no longer see how to practice medicine in a safe, ethical, beneficent fashion. Keith absolutely blinded them to their duties as healthcare providers. I can’t see that either of them will have any future in medicine anywhere. I hope they never work in healthcare again, in any fashion. They would be a danger to any people that they cared for. They are incapable of providing safe, appropriate care. Their actions and words have shown that.

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago
Reply to  NCGirl

Mark Vicente said he was given footage from Mexico. Previously, it’s been said they came from Salinas. I’m sure Frank and others know the answer. Where did the snuff and gang rape footage come from?

NFW
NFW
3 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

‘Where did the snuff and gang rape footage come from?’ Yes, who edited it? Did Porter and Raniere take on that repetitive and time-consuming job of producing footage precise and powerful enough to get the predicted result? Where is the literature review for the research carried out? Who authored it? Peer review?

Who passed? We already know something about those who ‘failed’.

Or did they just download a bunch of terror from the dark-net and make it up as they went along..the banality of evil and all that.

Nice Guy
Nice Guy
3 years ago

Hi Brandon,

—Keith was a mentor to me. I trusted his judgment when it came to helping people because he was very good at helping people.

Brandon, you trusted Keith and his judgment and he helped you lose your medical license and career.

You are the epitome of delusional.

L
L
3 years ago

“They appreciated the other people in NXIVM relative to the amount of benefit the other people provided them.”

WTF – yep, KR was training them all to be narcissistic psychopaths. My advice to ex-Doctor Porter is to shake his brain loose and try to apply some self-reflection and critical thinking on his NXIVM experiences. Now he better appreciate me a whole lot for providing all that beneficial advice. This group keeps talking about their humanity when really they were transforming themselves into transactional automatons.

Shivani
Shivani
3 years ago

What a measured, merciful way to describe the omissions in Porter’s letter about Raniere. His letter’s content is referred to as “peculiar.”

It’s peculiar that Porter forgot to tell the Judge about the assignments, undertaken by him like a frigging undertaker to the living. The assignments Porter carried out and the scuttlebutt he concealed, as Raniere’s personally designated Dr. Josef Mengele.

Porter followed an anthropomorphic, dreamworld non-diagnosis of his very own egoistic foolishness. Back to Ohio. I see his weasel tail kowtowing in the haze. Boo hoo hoo. Piled high and deep.

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago
Reply to  Shivani

I thought it was Iowa, not ohio. LOL

shadowstate1958
3 years ago

Here is a story Dr. Brandon Porter failed to mention about NXIVM.
It must have slipped his mind.

How Dr. Porter and Allison Mack worked to recruit a teenage girl to the sex slaver cult of NXIVM
https://frankreport.com/2018/05/19/how-dr-porter-and-allison-mack-worked-to-recruit-a-teenage-girl-to-the-sex-slaver-cult-of-nxvm/

Jane Smith
Jane Smith
3 years ago

Thanks, I just read that link. The wise mother was not prepared to waste $10k for a short acting course for her 17-year-old miles from home.

Angel of Death
Angel of Death
3 years ago

I just cannot believe I read this. Here is a summary, in historical context:

1) Hitler was a mentor to me
2) I trusted his judgment
3) He was very good at helping people (mostly Aryans and himself)

Sincerely,
Dr. Josef Mengele

Dianne Lipson
Dianne Lipson
3 years ago
Reply to  Angel of Death

Don’t forget, Hitler was a helluva dancer, and he was butch.

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.” Parlato was also 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 premiered on May 22, 2022. Most recently, he consulted and appeared on Tubi's "Branded and Brainwashed: Inside NXIVM," which aired January, 2023.

IMDb — Frank Parlato

Contact Frank with tips or for help.
Phone / Text: (305) 783-7083
Email: frankreport76@gmail.com

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