One of Keith Raniere’s supporters, businessman and Nxivm coach, Danny Trutmann, wrote a letter of support prior to sentencing, which he hoped might impress the judge. His was one of 56 letters in support of Raniere, contrasted by 92 victim impact statements filed with the court against the Vanguard.
As we know, the judge sentenced Raniere to 120 years in prison, though he could have sentenced him to as little as 15 years.
As we review the sentence and its aftermath – and we await the sentencing of Allison Mack, Nancy Salzman, Lauren Salzman and Kathy Russell – the statements of victims and supporters are of interest to many readers.
Below is the letter of Danny Trutmann to the Honorable Nicholas G. Garaufis, United States District Judge, Eastern District of New York.
***
Dated, October 9, 2020
Dear Your Honor,
My name is Danny Trutmann. I was born and raised in Guatemala. I am 46 years old and have lived in Miami since 1999. I have a beautiful relationship with a woman I met when I was 15 and I am the stepdad to her now teenage kids. Together with her, we built a business that currently employs more than 30 people.
I am writing this letter because I have a different experience of Keith and NXIVM than that which has been described and said of him in the media and during his trial. My experience of Keith is that he is caring, mindful, concerned for the wellbeing of others, and honorable.
Actually, one of the reasons why I am writing this letter is because to this day I have not heard or read anything dishonorable that Keith has said or written about any of the people that have spoken bad about him and/or lied about him.
I consider that he has conducted himself with honor and dignity throughout the entire trial process and media defamation. Very bad things have been said about him, and very bad things have been done and said about people he cares very deeply about.
What I know of Keith is that he created a program that helped thousands of people have a better experience of life and be able to achieve more of what they want. His technology helped people overcome lifelong fears and personal limitations. The program even helped people with Tourette’s manage their condition. His program helped me become a better person, leader, husband, stepfather, friend, son, and brother.
He created a beautiful program for children, a peaceful non-violent movement in Mexico, and an ethical media company, to name a few of the projects I know he was working on. All the good he has created has either being distorted or blocked from the general knowledge.
I read on the trial transcript of May 9th pg 511 Mr. Vicente describing ESP’s mission statement as a “lie”, as evil, as a veneer that covers horrible evil. This is simply not what I experienced, nor what I think many of the 17,000 people who took the program experienced.
Also, before turning against Keith, I heard Mr. Vicente say multiple times that he decided to marry his current wife after taking Mobius, one of the trainings Keith created, and that he was so grateful to Keith for creating the training.
It seems that some people have gone to great lengths to portray him as the worst person there is and suppress anyone with the desire to speak in favor of Keith.
Reading what has been said about Keith, both in the media and during his trial, I can understand why there is animosity towards him. Yet, there is another side to this story.
I took my first ESP training in 2009 and took many other trainings after that. Through these trainings, I learned tools that helped me grow my business, be more loving to my wife and her two kids, have a better relationship with my mother, father, and siblings, and, most importantly, reconnect with my dreams and passions.
Is Your Honor familiar with the poem “IF” by Rudyard Kipling?
I remember several years ago, during V-Week, this poem was read to describe Keith’s character. Today more than ever, I consider this poem to be most fitting to describe his person and character.
It is a beautiful poem and with your permission, I would like to share it with you, Your Honor.
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Keith has been able to keep his head when many have lost theirs and are blaming him for it. He has been lied about and has not dealt in the lies. He is being hated and not given into hating. The words he has spoken have been twisted and his life’s work has been stolen and destroyed.
I remember about 12 years ago, the first time I was at a forum where Keith was answering questions from the people present (forums were when we would gather and ask Keith questions.), I think Keith had been answering questions for two hours, when a little girl, I think about 8 years old ask him why he had created ESP. I do not remember what he said, what I remember though, was the way he spoke to the little girl.
He spoke to her as if she were the most important person in the room of more than 300 adults. He took her question, listened to her attentively, and then answered her in a way I had never seen someone speak to a child.
He spoke to her with so much respect and recognition one would think he was addressing the Queen of England. It is one of the most beautiful things I have seen and experienced in my life.
Your honor, my experience of Keith is that he is a good man, and there is another side to the way the media and the people against Keith are portraying him. As unconventional and controversial his personal life may be, I do not believe that he has had bad intent in his actions.
Thank you for your time and consideration in reading my letter and I hope you consider it positively when
evaluating Keith’s future.
Respectfully
Danny Trutmann
END OF TRUTMANN LETTER
***
Frank Parlato Comments:
Danny says Keith “created a beautiful program for children.” He is referring to Rainbow Cultural Garden, which some have described as a controversial children’s experiment. A few words on that might have been appropriate and how he knows it’s beautiful.
Raniere’s “ethical media company,” is The Knife.” What impact, if any, did it have on the world or its ethics and how does it relate to the coverage Raniere receive in the [unethical] media, if Danny knows.
Danny included in his letter the poem, “If,” for the judge to read. It might be slightly presumptuous insofar as it assumes the judge may not be intimately familiar with Kipling’s If, one of the quintessential poems of the English language, and probably required reading when the judge was young.
At least the judge learned one new fact, though I do not see how it helped Raniere: That the poem was recited as a tribute to Raniere at Vanguard Week – an extended birthday celebration which was one long, 10-day tribute to him.
The poem was not recited, it seems, to inspire his followers to mirror the conduct described in the poem but rather for them to see it in Vanguard.
The judge might have seen, for he is a man of great perspicacity and knows this case extraordinarily well, that the reciting of the poem says more about Raniere’s desire for adulation than anything else. The judge already concluded that Raniere is not the man described in the poem.
Another weakness in the letter, and other letters from supporters, is the elevating of inconsequential things to a form of rare and exquisite behavior. Again and again, we read in letters of his followers an imputed greatness in things an objective observer would see as commonplace.
Keith plays a lot of amateur volleyball with followers and Danny tells us he permits questions of foul balls to be judged by a consensus of the players.
Though he is so busy and important, he stops to ask Edgar Boone about his brother’s problem, and this is mentioned as if it was an act of great love and care. Nowhere does it say he solved the brother’s problem. [The brother got drunk one night and killed some people in his automobile. He then fled Mexico and was caught in Chicago when Mexican police, in cooperation with US authorities, followed his father to the son and brought the son back to stand trial.]
So Keith doesn’t drink alcohol or eat meat? So what? Or he talks to an eight-year-old girl as if she were someone special in front of a crowd of 300 of his followers. These things do not rise to any form of greatness, or suggest innocence of any of the charges, or that he should be granted leniency.
I would have liked hearing details from Danny. How did the Nxivm tools work? How did it improve his career and family? If you want to prove Raniere is good but misunderstood, show us see how he improved things. Don’t just say he did, show us how he did it.
Danny shows us nothing about Raniere that could not be attributed to Raniere’s motive of wanting money and adulation. Danny paid for courses and paid to attend Vanguard Week.
Give us something to make us say “Gee wiz” instead of “So what?,” when you talk about his not cheating at volleyball, or how he gave Jim Del Negro a simple exercise to alleviate pain in his foot and it happened to work.
Frank Parlato 
Janine Morrison 
J.J. O'Hara 
Richard Luthmann 
Marie White 
Paul Serran
Please leave a comment: Your opinion is important to us!
Great read. I don’t think it possible to brainwash that many company owners and successful people. There is more unseen and that is exciting.
We can only hope his life has been destroyed and he can no longer prey on innocent women
“He created a beautiful program for children…”
The Rainbow Cultural Garden schools were not just an illegal and uncontrolled experiment on small children. These schools went against all the evidence of proper language acquisition and its importance for future intellectual development.
In 1987 I got a master’s degree for a study of science classroom language. I recorded hundreds of hours of classroom discourse and spent thousands of hours transcribing it, including every “um” and “er…”. I surveyed all the existing literature on classroom language at the time (there was amazingly little, especially actual classroom studies). I studied all the literature on language and language learning — from Sausurre, one of the founders of modern linguistics, through to Piaget, Chomsky and the like. I was forced to wade through Foucault, Derrida and Lacan etc., a total pile of crap in my book, useless for classroom investigation. To my great surprise, and putting me totally at odds with my thesis supervisor, I found that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with his concept of “language games” actually provided me with the most useful analytical tools.
Much of the research involved observing second-language speakers, so I made a special study of the influence of “mother tongue” language development and second-language learning.
I haven’t checked to see what the current orthodoxy says, but I can tell you that there was one and only one research finding that was of any relevance at the time. This finding was clear across the board. The more secure a child was in their mother tongue, the better was all their future learning, and all their future language development, including learning foreign languages. And everything I have seen since then confirms this finding. In general, a strong foundation in the mother tongue is the basis for all learning.
The idea that you teach a child in a different language every day — each different to the mother tongue — is one of the most stupid and abusive practices I’ve ever heard of in early education. I am 100% certain that every single child that went through this program will show clear signs of cognitive damage and language deficiency. How Raniere was able to get away with this appalling experiment on children is quite beyond me, and it really shows the power of cult thinking.
Get this straight: I believe deeply in freedom in education, that people should be able to teach their children as they wish, as long as the basic laws of the land are not broken, in terms of abuse, child labor, coercion, etc. Rainbow Cultural Gardens provide a really clear test case, because there were multiple laws broken by this cult, including human trafficking, sexual grooming and rape of children, and savage mental torture and confinement of young victims.
When a school acts directly against the most basic tenet of learning — sound grasp of the mother tongue — there should be a very loud alarm bell that rings somewhere. How were these schools able to get away with this abuse?
Let me tell you: it’s not easy to keep a school going. The fact that RCGs were able to carry on as they did, shows me that there were other hands at work behind the scenes, other agendas at play. I am certain that Keith Raniere could not himself have managed such a school unaided for one day.
Just for comparison, take a look at this video from the Ramtha cult’s now defunct school, Phoenix Rising. It all sounds slick and wholesome, but you’ll find the Ramtha exercises — including blundering around a field blindfolded looking for “your” card, and doing blindfold archery — feature strongly, from about 1:25 into the video. This is also abusive crap, in my view, but my real point here is that this school went bankrupt, despite the De Beers diamond heiress Rebecca Oppenheimer donating $170,000 a pop to keep it going. Even with this kind of support, the school couldn’t survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR9zOldqod0
How were the Rainbow Cultural Gardens able to carry on for so long? Was this part of a trafficking scheme, where the kids and “teachers” were all being brainwashed? There are still huge questions in my mind about this exercise, and there should be a proper investigation by the educational authorities in each country that hosted these schools.
But to call this a “beautiful program for children” is seriously deranged, if you know anything about education. These people are living in a world of total delusion.
His life’s work was cobbled together from every self help book at Barnes and Noble. His work was not stolen. His work was far from original. The kind of stuff he was charging thousands of dollars for was available on a book shelf at a book store or library, without the sleep deprivation, starvation or emotional abuse. Bonus: self help books don’t require you to be sexually abused by the smelly, hairy founder of a cult.
Curious how you know that about his work. I’m interested in reviewing it to see. I spoke to someone who claimed the material was incredible and that she was never abused. I don’t know what the truth is though.
To everybody:
Watch episode 4 of Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult.
It’s the best episode of both Seduced or The Vow.
I was wondering how India skipped any criminals charges.
India turned over Alison Mack’s copies of her conversations with Keith and much of the collateral.
India got her get-out-of-jail-free card…And Allison Mack lost any chance of immunity to prosecution.
Of course, India only came up with the disks conveniently after her attorney met with the DOJ and FBI.
If I ever get in trouble I hope I have India’s defense attorney. The attorney did I god damn good job. Better than Attorney Geragos or Marc Agnifilo.
The Mack disks, India took from Allison’s belonging, 6 months after India obtained/purloined the disks, she chose to view them. So believable.
India’s version of events sounds at first blush as credible as the State police of New York finding child pornography on John Tighe’s alleged computer months after it was seized by law enforcement.
Nicely played [India’s] defense attorney. You did a commendable job.
No one at this point has made any statements about the validity of the material found on those drives, as video and audio recordings in his own words helped to convict him and others.
It IS believable. Someone being deprogrammed, going through the early stages of acceptance and PTSD, wouldn’t be able to face much of what happened, let alone conspire and create that level of deception.
It’s not like she was recording herself as she was leaving the group like others before her. If that’s the standard, its a very low bar.
Re Seduced Documentary & Frank:
Frank’s contribution to the dossier is given no mention. It’s kind of disgusting Catherine Oxenberg took sole credit for the criminal dossier.
It’s not important….As it is rude.
If we watched it being created and handed to her in The Vow, and she explains just so in that series, is she really claiming it?
No one goes to prison for 120 years for things that were said about them. Even (according to this guy) “lies”. That’s not how courts work. So… Get over it. Anyone can tell their experience of someone. Hey! Look! This guy just did in his letter. Does a different experience make yours a “lie”? And yet another dude who has an arrogant blind spot. He thinks a man behaves the same with a woman he wants to have sex with as the man behaves with him. He thinks he can look into a man’s heart and know how that man will behave in each and every personal or business interaction. Including those that he is not privy to. Impossible. No one can do such a thing. Not even Vanguard. Ted Bundy was the nicest guy. Right up until he whacked you with his fake cast, raped you, and beat you to death. Which he never did to a man. Many people had quite positive experiences with him. Life is complex. A doctor can save a life and molest a patient. And your experience of him has no bearing on either act. Or the truth of them.
Very good FP comments below the letter. That is exactly right.
Those still conned by this group seem to think just because someone has done some goods things (and KR probably did help some people) is not evidence he has not done other bad things. The fact this person even thinks it wise to mention KR applying his clearly brilliant skills at manipulation/NLP on a little girl when KR was accused of an early sexual encounter with a 13-year-old, the other underage sex stuff AND the fact he seemed to want his many women plenty of whom I thought we knew he provably lied to (so much for him being whiter than white) very thin, which can indicate he wants them to have the body of a girl before puberty.
Picking that he was kind to a small girl is not a great choice of example.
As FP says, these people think things KR did were special. Yet I know lots of people who are kind to little children – indeed, I hope we all are. KR might have convinced all his followers they were broken and wicked and only he could cure them but, in fact, when they started they were probably more moral and nicer than he ever was.
Ketih is a very good con man. An excellent chalatan. He accomplishes this by being an all time great liar. His driving force is that he is a psychopath and he wants to destroy people and destroy value.
To Danny – do you really think that the Rainbow idea was good for the child? The first time I was told about this idea of Keith, I knew it would cause harm to the developing child. Keith knew this as well, but he knew it could be dressed up as good.
Mark Vicente finally saw the light. Keith gave glimpses of the light constantly. If you gave Keith some truth serum, he’d think we were all stupid for falling this hard for his evil con.
No, he isn’t. I saw through him pretty much right away. As long as you deal with him directly, you can see through his false persona and grandiose bullshit. That’s why he always stayed away initially. If you get manipulated by the mind-bending “tech” and trapped in his environment of flying monkeys, only then does his con gain any potency.
My experience was not dissimilar to yours. I’m looking at his body of work.
You and I are either good at spotting cons, lucky, or both. I consider myself more lucky than anything. If I had been a hot chick, who knows if I’d be flapping around Knox Woods with a litter of Avatar babies…
You are looking at his body of work? How can I find it to be reviewed? I’m very curious.
Thank you for saying that. I would have turned heel on sight, and yet all these people have just boggled my mind in their rejection of this instinct.
Tell me, he strikes me as a bit of a mouth breather. Please confirm this.
So, he thinks all these people are making up the same lie? Who does that benefit!? Yeah, he was nice to an 8-year-old girl bc he was probably grooming her !
I guess it’s ironic then in the sense that what goes around comes around, since he twists words, he’s stolen ideas, materials, money, etc., and he’s destroyed the lives of others.
Poor old Rudyard, spinning in his grave.
I recited it for my 6th grade graduation in the 70s. I imagine one student was selected to read it every year for decades in schools across the country. It holds nostalgic fond meaning for me, it sickens me that it was used to apply to Keith.
Apparently, the author of the letter has missed quite a bit of evidence, like the texts where Raniere refers to women as ‘fuck toys,’ for instance. And I think the judge well understands that Raniere strategically kept his ugly side – and acts – from the majority of his (paying) followers.
It would also be typical that the humanitarian efforts were the work of, or even the idea of, others, motivated by a mix of the idealism of members, and cynical calculation of propaganda value – with Raniere just taking the credit. Where’s the evidence of any significant personal involvement and effort on his part?
Frank, you highlight a classic problem with these sorts of testimonials, when it comes to attempts to describe and credit benefits the individual believes they experienced, they are either amorphous or they cite things that can happen in peoples’ lives from all manner of causes or just as a matter of course.
Yes, and I suppose it was just for sentencing with the idea being we will show this was a good person even if found guilty, etc. – but as none of them seem to accept KR’s guilty verdict, their letters were never going to be much use.
Do you have more information on the “fuck toys” texts? I don’t see the problem with that if it is consensual and I definitely don’t believe that people’s sexuality should be used against them.
My God, mentioning how he spoke to an 8-year-old girl in a way he’s never heard someone address a child before. Chilling and a reminder of how he would treat minors. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think it was Rhiannon who said while she was still a child he hugged her and then proceeded to teach her how to hug like an adult. He is vile. These followers seem very naive if they thought such content would be seen in a positive light.
How is treating the young girl with respect chilling? I had a friend who said that she loved to watch the movie To Kill a Mockingbird because of how Atticus talks to his kids – with respect. She hadn’t seen that before because she wasn’t treated with respect.
What’s described in the letter is not chilling or inappropriate.
I wonder if Rudyard Kipling would, if he were still alive, write a poem about Raniere keeping his head between Bubba’s thighs? LOL
Danny Trutman-
What an excellent and poignant letter!!!
You cut/pasted a poem, how eloquent. Your college essay must have been a prosaic masterpiece of verbosity.
I don’t know bunk about Kipling. To be honest, I could never get into poetry. It’s too pretentious and self-indulgent.
I would like to share my very special list with you in regards to Keith Raniere. Below is a list crafted and constructed with unparalleled attention to detail.
Please enjoy!
My list of things Keith Raniere will never do again or at least for the next 120 years:
1. Eat an anchovy pizza
2. Play volleyball
3. Sit in a hot-tub
4. Open a refrigerator
5. Wear normal clothes
6. Drink beer, wine, or spring water
7. Read books that are not missing pages
8. Watching a movie that’s rated R
9. Eating cake
10. Swim in a pool, lake, or the ocean
11. Get a tan at the beach
12. Hug Nicki Clyne
13. Celebrate Vanguard Week
14. Sleep with 100s of naked women
15. Play the piano
16. No more rock or classical music
17. Lay on a couch
18. Sit in a lounge chair
19. Be able to control the temperature via a thermostat.
20. Get a blow from someone other than a man
21. Put his bare feet down on a warm
rug or carpet. Now his feet will only know cold hard concrete.
22. Choosing what to eat and when
23. Walking a mile, a 1/2 mile, a 1/4 mile, or even 100 yards outside in a straight line
24. Having a Ménage à Trois
25. Having hundreds of morons listen to him as he pontificates aloud spewing word-salad
It hit me hard, while making up the list, Keith’s new life will suck tremendously.
Please everyone feel free to add to the list!
Frank-
I forgot to mention what an exceptional piece you have written. I could heap on or pour more praise but then your cup would runneth over.
Yup. Frank’s comments at the end were spot on.
Niceguy – I am saddened by your lack of interest in poetry. I must introduce you to the limerick, the best sort of poem for sarcasm and mockery, as in:
Vanguard used to have girls by the dozen;
Snapped his fingers and they’d all be buzzin’
to bring him some sweets,
or be sexual treats.
Now he’s sitting alone – stuck in prison.
While he “helped all to conquer their fears”
he’ll be sitting in prison for years
cuz the Judge said “what rot!”
when he read through the lot
of Keith’s sycophants’ nonsense and tears.
The sing song cadence might not work well for NLP and hypnotism, but it sure is useful for that playground “nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyaaaahhhh, nyah’ spirit. Limericks are ideal for schadenfreude.
I love it! I dare niceguy to come up with one. Limericks are much better when composed by others for my entertainment.
L,
Thank you for making me question myself.
I do have to make one concession. I greatly enjoy song lyrics. Song lyrics are, of course, poems encapsulated in music. So I do confess to enjoying one form of poetry.
😉
He will never again stand on a stage.
Never again be able to meet or invite a Dalai Lama.
Never again hold a remote control or a cell phone in his hand.
Never again feel ashamed because a young girl makes fun of his limpness.
Never again have one of his ladies secretly cheat on his chunky ass.
Never again get to make fun of his followers because they did what he told them to do.
Never again rape an underaged teen.
Never again get to ruin another life.
Challenge accepted Sir Nut Job.
I need sometime to work.
Some time
“Keith has been able to keep his head when many have lost theirs and are blaming him for it.”
– That’s not what years of testimony (and email/text exchanges) from the women who left him or somehow, in his eyes, crossed him have shown.
“He has been lied about and has not dealt in the lies.”
– Proof of isolating, gaslighting and shunning women in the community that he no longer needed (supported with proof of email/text exchanges).
“He is being hated and not given into hating.”
– Malicious prosecution/litigation x Dozens of lawsuits
“The words he has spoken have been twisted and his life’s work has been stolen and destroyed.”
– still unclear in this letter what contribution of KR’s, if any, would somehow nullify or negate the seriousness of his multiple convictions.
Also, the overuse of the words ‘honorable’, ‘ethical’, etc. in these letters are really losing their meaning! With each new letter the supporter sounds less and less intelligent, authentic or…honest.
Yes, I wonder if it’s part of their weird training using those words so much and beautiful – going on about his wonderful marriage – it just seems a bit strange and is not relevant to KR that this man thinks he has a good marriage.
Sorry if this was asked already. Are the transcripts of the trial released anywhere?
No, they are not published anywhere as far as I know. They total more than 6,000 pages.
Thank you, Frank.
If you want to spend mad cash you can get them printed, but who wants to flush money down the toilet.
Several days worth of transcripts can be read and downloaded at the courtlistener.com site https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6374665/united-states-v-raniere/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc
Just look for the ones that say NOTICE OF FILING OF OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT such as below
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6374665/883/united-states-v-raniere/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6374665/882/united-states-v-raniere/
No cost?
I stand corrected
Oh no, here I go down the dark rabbit hole. I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you.
In the UK, when we pay for a full transcript service with daily copies of the transcripts sent each night to the lawyers (which is probably a service used in this case), they are not public record but have been paid for by the lawyers on one side or the other or both usually in civil cases and are subject to contractual terms – not sure about the US but it is probably similar.
Separately, we also have some hearings recorded and you can pay companies to type them up – for fees.
My wife sometimes needs to get a transcript. It is expensive for what amounts to a copy of typed print.
The UK
You still sticking with the whole “I have a wife and she’s an attorney” schtick?
jk. Well, half jk…
It’s timely and relevant to the conversation, my dear Nut Job.
I am answering the commenter’s question and validating/qualifying statement.
I do not believe stating my wife is an attorney is braggadocios, we are not in Guam 🇬🇺. 😉
Have a nice day and write yourself a lovely haiku.
At first, I thought you had mistakenly posted Jim Del Negro’s letter again. I wonder who composed the form letter they all filled out. And whether they were each assigned a “special event” to differentiate them – i.e. Jimmy you talk about the men’s conference and plantar fasciitis, Danny, you get “If” and 8-year-old girls.
The eight-year-old girl story is kinda horrifying – already setting up the girl children for easy pickings later.
So anyone wanna hazard a guess? I’ll toss Nicki Clyne’s name into the hat as the potential architect of the “Save our Vanguard” form letter.
Yeah, I wanted to vomit on the letter writer.
Vanguard was totally getting ready to groom the young girl. Nauseating to say the least.
That’s because the volleyball and plantar fasciitis are Frank’s comments from Del Negro’s story, not this one. LOL
L, I had the same thought – I wonder if there was some sort of coordinated effort to produce these letters.
But it could also just be that dedicated followers are familiar with a certain patter used for testimonials within the group, such as would have been presented at V Week.
Though I haven’t heard of a mechanism quite like this in NXIVM, in Scientology everyone is required to provide a “success story” after every course, which is actually a deviously clever mechanism to force them to frame their experience and supposed results in a positive way, and enforce collective ignorance by making everyone else think that people are getting wonderful things out of the group and its ‘tech’ (a term NXIVM copied). Thus all the “success stories” from scientologists, sometimes posted to social media or on critical websites, have a similar mix of vague conceptual generalities, plus specifics that are likely just false attribution of things that would have happened in peoples’ lives regardless. If anyone knows of anything comparable that went on in NXIVM, please chip in.
After a two or three-day seminar was over that he taught, they asked for testimonials. A specific question I remember was: “How much monetary value was this seminar worth?” Most gave a huge number and I did not. I even went higher than I truly believed due to not wanting to look negative.
Nut,
I wish you shared more of your tidbits and factoids.
I have similar thoughts reading these, L. They all seem to have been individually assigned to address various charges and/or accusations (facts) that Keith prioritized in his prison calls and as they have been reported in the media, indeed mostly here on FR.
What saddens me most is how these NXIAN slaves/slave masters are still willing to be used against their own interests to further Keith and Nancy’s.
If their (Bronfman paid) attorneys — not the DOJ as they claim — did advise or dissuade them from testifying, it probably, obviously in some cases, WAS/IS in their best interests.
Doesn’t Nicki realize (“Is there anybody in there?”), for instance, that at any moment she might be arrested and deported on hard evidence she perpetrated immigration fraud? Not to mention her luck in having evaded other possible charges under RICO alone, if not found to have participated directly in those crimes herself? Same for all of them — and if there’s any doubt the RICO standards should not apply each and every one of them just read these ADMISSIONS taking full personal responsibility, denying any “victim” status, exonerating Keith, Nancy ET AL from any influence on them or claim to victimhood themselves — despite the apparent high “exchange value” in that choice.
Observe what heinous crimes they’re trying to justify, nearly admitting to culpability in, blame each other for, while oblivious to their own, on-going victimization and their true abusers.
Yes, it’s all scripted, cast, rehearsed — these statements read like audition “sides” for a horror movie. That’s what Keith, Nancy ET AL have done off the same basic script over and over again for decades.
We chulas like me, L, Nancy Durkin and some hombres like Nutjob commenting on here saw some of the earliest drafts of the same horrific story. Spoiler alert: It does not end well for the characters in the roles most of you persist in.
I pity them all, deeply.
Good observation!!!
I totally missed it.
I realized that Keith’s supporters talk about what a great man he is and how he wanted to change the world for good, yet I have never read about anything he did outside of Nxivm for the good of the world. Hard to believe that he cared about anyone or anything that wasn’t paying him.
Funny how only men thought he was great. I see a repeat here, he didn’t’t want to @#$% them. He only wanted slender attractive women. The men who followed only helped to legitimize him.
And if the men were a threat, he’d chase them off. Or, in poor Emi’s case, he turned him gay.
I agree and a lot of the video looks like my son’s when teenagers are at their worst – very late to bed, sleeping all morning, eating lots of pizza, not doing well much and when they can get away with it, trying to get everyone else to clear up after them [ they are not like this now]… even down to his scruffy look and awful uncut hair and beard; as if he froze in teenage mode including taking money from others – Bronfmans rather than parents here…..