This is a guest view by a person using the handle, “TG, Independent Film Maker, Forgotten Ones” and is in response to the article, The Man Who Wants to Get Keith Raniere Out of Jail: Eduardo Asunsolo. I like the respectful tone of the questions.
By TG, Independent Film Maker, Forgotten Ones
Dear Ed;
You raise some valid points:
* The trial was subject to very emotional testimony and media reports of a “sex cult” and “sex trafficking” omitted the details of the situations. The sex trafficking Keith Alan Raniere was charged with was not a conventional, monetary exchange and only happened once.
* The things that hit the media (branding, child sexual abuse) were not the crimes that KAR was charged with committing.
* Prejudice is present within the judicial system and, most importantly, through public monitoring, direct feedback and participation, people have the power to change that.
However, you seem to want to blame the media (Frank Report, New York Times) for the problems KAR has had. However, this removes Nxivm and Keith from any accountability. Furthermore, the FR and NYT articles could not have taken hold unless there was some significant truth to them.
From my experience of you, you are intelligent and seek to be a responsible and socially committed human. However, it seems hard for you to address the horrors that Keith, Clare Bronfman and Nxivm promoted. Sure, some women benefited from DOS, but many women were coerced. They were put in a bait-and-switch situation They were lied to. They were told KAR had nothing to do with DOS and then they were given assignments to sexually seduce him!
Texts prove that Keith asked for DOS “fuck toys”. How come you don’t find that problematic? Why are you not able to believe these women? Don’t you see this was not an isolated case, rather indicative of pathological narcissistic behavior?
Furthermore, didn’t Nancy or someone tell you Keith was celibate when you first took the initial 5-day seminar?
How does it feel to be lied to? Isn’t it totally untruthful and scandalous to set Keith up as a noble saint who sacrifices earthly pleasure for the good of humanity – and then find out he spends half the night fucking all the board members and inner circle of Nxivm, along with a continuous pipeline of new recruits?
It’s great that you had a positive experience with him athletically and intellectually; but what about everyone else that was abused? What about all the women he promised to have an avatar child with? What about the woman who testified he fucked her when she was 15 and all the other underage women whose claims were never taken seriously by authorities? How do feel that Clare Bronfman funded an army of lawyers to sue all Nxivm dissenters into submission?
Your response seems to be “No one can make anyone do anything they don’t really want to do” – and “No one can be manipulated”. These are truisms that protect you, Keith and Nxivm from being accountable. People trusted Keith and that trust was gained by a continuous stream of lies promoted by Nancy and Keith’s inner circle: “Keith is the smartest man in the world”; “Keith is celibate”; “Keith developed all the ideas in Nxivm all by himself”; “Edgar Bronfman was out to get Keith”; “The media was out to get Keith”; “Everyone (Natalie, Bouchey, Dones, Keeffe, etc.) lied, stole and deserved being sued to death or imprisoned”.
Ed, the reality is lonely, insecure people were manipulated through a slow boil of lies and false claims by a smiling group of Keith’s female followers. The reality is many people were harmed by the false claims and it led to abusive, criminal, sexual and financial behavior. Money laundering was real. Where did that $520K in Nancy’s attic come from?
The problem with Keith is he is not accountable for his own behavior; he lied to women and abused them; when people abandoned him, he had them shunned, sued and attacked. When others made this public, he attacked them and paid political consultants and a vast array of lawyers to have them censored.
When you do not see the dangers Keith caused, you risk repeating these dangers yourself. When you allow Keith to not be held accountable, you allow yourself to not be accountable. You, in fact, create a morality where no abuser can be held accountable for their crimes because after-all, “the victims chose to be victims”. You blame the victim. So, where does it all stop, Ed?
Where does one find justice if a sex abuser cannot be stopped because “women choose to be victims”?
Ed, you are a smart guy. Why don’t you hold Keith accountable for the lies, abuses, and the ultimate destruction of your community? What do you get out of not holding Keith accountable?
Keith destroyed his own future and you, Danielle Roberts and Nicki Clyne are destroying your own by not acknowledging the damage he created.
Was this your post, Eduardo?
https://twitter.com/Jenny_Clardy/status/1329244929743269890?s=20
I think it’s a waste of time trying to convince a sycophant such as Asunsolo. He thinks he is not brainwashed but it is possible for certain types of people to be manipulated and they don’t realize it. Derren Brown did a psychological experiment to show this in one of his TV series. Asunsolo is likely not even a truth seeker – which means it will take him a long time to realize the truth (possibly many years, see below).
In the meantime, the claims he and his group make should be attacked. Mr. Parlato, are you ready to post my comment about the timestamps of the files that were supposedly tampered with?
[ I don’t think I made a mistake in my analysis, and in case you overlooked it: I sent an email with a link to a page with additional information that should further clarify to readers what I wrote in my original post about the analysis published by the Nxivm5 from their ‘expert’. ]
To understand what goes on, you don’t need to know anything about cults, just about how people can be influenced, and how narcissists (even psychopathic narcissists) behave to make people think that they are ‘great’.
Example: I see a lot of parallels between the case of Raniere and Billy Mitchell, who got notoriety in the “King of Kong” (it is a docudrama, some stuff was edited to imply certain things that are not correct), which is about high scores of the classic arcade game “Donkey Kong”. When I watched it, I felt “This guy is a psychopath”. On the other hand, people who knew him personally usually told how he was positive, friendly, did things for charity, etc. – and they said Mitchell was portrayed as the villain in the film, but I saw the unfriendly jokes and facial expression that shows what he is actually like.
About 2 years ago, it was also shown that he is a liar who created fake performances via an emulator, and his behaviour towards people in interviews during and after this process to find the truth, shows exactly what he is like. The positive experiences that people have come from him being a narcissist who wants to be idolized and seen as ‘the greatest’ and thus he spends time and effort on making people think that. The whole story is very long and only interesting if you’re interested in old-style computer games and the technology involved in the evolution of computers and emulators, but I will point to a segment of a video with 4 people, 3 of whom initially supported Mitchell and thought the issues brought up were fake and that it was a witch hunt by people going after Mitchell because they didn’t like him:
One of them was simply interested in analyzing the facts and from knowing Mitchell’s friends tried to defend him, 2 others didn’t believe the accusations of fake performances or had a conspiracy theory to explain the criticism, but in the end, they all found out the truth. One of them took a long time to realize the truth, almost 2 years, still believing up to then that someone may have altered evidence until there was evidence that showed that to be impossible…
One of the persons who was a friend of Mitchell says at ca. 1:45:00 :
“It’s unbelievable, I don’t get it, how there are certain people, now, a few people, who are so loyal to Bill, It’s like, I know they are smart enough to understand what the facts and the truth are of this situation. I don’t get it. They must think they are getting something out of it”
Well, a combination of factors (including that many people disregard negative stories about their friends) may lead them to disregard evidence in both cases…
I did get your email and when we get back to the topic of possible evidence tampering, your contribution is going to be posted. It is so complex to laymen, however, I think it is going to need some preface.
I am trying hard to have compassion for the ones holding on and still following Keith but they make it really really difficult with their actions and not facing the truth. I do feel sorry for them and all the wasted years and now this fruitless fight. I feel exhausted for them.
Beautiful write-up/response, TG. You have elegantly expressed and highlighted the ‘crack in the plate’ as we said in ESP/NXIVM trainings. On one side of the crack, there is Keith, the intelligent, caring, philosophical founder of the curriculum by which so many people achieved additional joy, happiness and success in their lives (I’m one of them). On the other side, is the Keith who lied, manipulated and mislead for “I don’t know what, deep psychological motivation”. It has been a sad and long road to accepting the reality of all the events uncovered. In my opinion, there’s just too much ‘consistent’ data to deny the integrity of it. I finally feel resolved.
I was preparing to write something similar in response to Jim Del Negro’s letter to the judge, Thanks for saving me time in organizing my thoughts and writing it out. 🙂
~LTR
There is profound contradiction in Keith’s behavior. Healthy people resolve their contradictions by 1) being honest about their shortcomings and 2) being accountable for them. Being accountable requires making amends to those that have been harmed and resolving to stop acting in the harmful manner.
The sad thing for Keith and his followers is that Keith has not been honest or accountable.
To be true to yourself and the universe, one must make themselves vulnerable — to themselves, to others, to their God.
Echoing everything the author laid out for you, Ed. Btw: how are you funding the start ups ? Wouldn’t you be better served going back to your previous profession rather than continuing to work for Keith and Clare in yet another exercise of insanity by way of these ‘startups’ ?
He’s a failed actor, and is aging out, so no he can’t go back to that. This, like Nicki Clyne and Marc Elliot’s careers, are all they have now.
Eduardo does not have answers for these basic questions.
Keith lied exactly in the ways he used against other people. Because, after all, “the victims chose a victim.” He blames the victim. So where does it all stop, Ed?
Where can you find justice if sexual abusers cannot be stopped because “women become victims”. The sad thing is, the system could have worked like this. The lines of the victim – and the rapists – have been blurred because you can’t really hold some people to account in a world so manipulated when they themselves are “doing an order.
wow. I met an independent film maker named TJ from NYC. Where are you from TJ. ? Is that you????
Hey, Mex Lady,
My handle is TG, not TJ so I’m sure it’s not me.
Best to you!
Very good points. KR did nothing to protect people who came to depend on the cult. Eg a working spouse will often set up a pension arrangement for their non working spouse or make sure they have some educational qualifications in case things go wrong. KR seemed to do the opposite of that and hence was bad and he justified it by manipulating women in ways which ultimately were not good for them and in fact made many of them not independent at all as they lost their earning capacity.
Well written and all good points.
Unfortunately it seems that either he is still brainwashed, stupid or simply taking advantage of his disgraced guru´s life sentence to gain fame and fortune. Perhaps he thinks some big studio might be interested in making a series of his story? Or a big publishing company in buying rights to his book? Be it as it may, the poor fella is just wasting his time and damaging his name and reputation for a hideous criminal that will not give him a dime for it.
Hope he gets his act together and goes back to looking after the wife and kid or kids he said he so much wanted. These kind of people are the ultimate victims and they dont even know it.
Smart Guy? I think he is a imbécil . And packs morals.or ethics in the luciferian cult lenguage. I have write a lott in.the comments about the fucked Up shit that Nxivm did, like another pedophilia tendencys, which Raniere defended on video. The mind porouse of the brand, the links with satanism. Etc what about the misoginy of jness? Why any.of those fucking stupid points makes a difference?.the world is not black and White of someone is inoccent from.some things It dosnt mean that they are not luciferian pedophiles sadist posible Killers . Quién is a fucked Up magazine just for putting the interview of these blind asshole that tries to salvagely save one of the must fucked Up cult.leaders of.all.time ( well in themainstream at least, Gilles de Rais , Hillary Clinton etc )