People call Keith Raniere a pedophile mainly because he had sexual relations with Camila, a Mexican girl, when she was 15. The conduct occurred in New York State, where the age of consent is 17.
Mexican prison gangs were out to hunt and harm him in prison because he raped a 15-year-old. In Mexico, the age of consent is 12.
Now let us hear from Peter Longworth on this topic and other topics that interest him, and will, no doubt, interest readers.
By Peter Longworth
Bangkok’s Good and Bad Points on Age of Consent
Bangkok’s article Raniere’s Rape of 15 Year Old Not a Crime in Most European Countries – But Raniere Gets 120 Years raises important but contentious issues.
Good Points
* Age specifications for consent can be arbitrary
Raniere would not be a pedophile in these [and other] countries, where the age of consent is 15 or lower:
France, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Iceland, Sweden, Portugal, Austria, Croatia, Czech, Costa Rica, Honduras, Uruguay, Thailand, China, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Japan, Philippines, and Mexico.
Reform
There is little doubt that the US prison system at both state and federal levels needs urgent reform.
Convictions and imprisonment of people who are close in age to the victim, where the relationship is not considered exploitative, may not serve either the interests of those involved or society at large.
The law can sometimes be a blunt instrument.
Not so good points
Raniere’s sentence was not solely based on Cami’s exploitation by a much older man with nefarious motives. Such aggravating factors would likely have placed him at the higher end of the sentencing spectrum, even in European courts.
Ghislaine Maxwell
I’m not convinced Ghislaine Maxwell would have fared better in European courts.
She was trafficking young girls on an industrial scale to a much older exploitative man, some as young as 14, over a prolonged period.
The corruption of so many innocents never goes down well with the media or public.
Ghislaine Maxwell invited teenage girls from low-income families to have a gander at the lifestyle she enjoyed. For little effort, on behalf of a beneficent gentlemen of her acquaintance, they might also be poolside.
Raniere’s Interminable Sentence
The length of Keith Raniere’s sentence is perhaps reflective of the considerable danger he poses to the public, and the very large number of lives he effectively ruined through indoctrination and exploitation.
That said, I would not oppose his release on humanitarian grounds when he’s close to death at an advanced age.
Clare Bronfman – What Did She Know?
Did Clare fall for Raniere’s shtick, or was she just as evil as him?
Was she a dumb-ass, or a fiendishly accomplished manipulator? Was she always looking for a Raniere type to do her bidding, or was she corralled by him into his own reckless ventures?
It’s really hard to come to definitive answers.
Even insiders will no doubt have their differing opinions.
You can also think as a continuum, with the truth somewhere in between.
However, there’s always going to be some kind of interaction between two people that impacts the direction of both of them.
Whatever the case, there is no doubt that, like the Dead-enders, her devotion to, and belief in Raniere bordered on the pathological.
MK10ART’s Clare Bronfman
What we can say with certainty is that the whole NXIVM operation required both Raniere and Bronfman. She bankrolled him and he called the shots.
He lost $66M dollars of hers and her sister’s money in commodities trading. That can’t have gone unnoticed. And yet the money continued to flow in.
Did NXIVM / ESP ever make profits?
Tax records seem to suggest otherwise. It’s anyone’s guess how much Clare knew about DOS, but surely she must have known something.
Perhaps it’s hyperbolic to claim they ruined the world: we all bear some responsibility for that. Their collective action did ruin many people’s worlds, though.
Like any major investor in a new company, she no doubt claimed to her friends that everything was going swimmingly until they ran into a bit of a branding issue.
By MK10 ART
DOS tried to make their mark and uniquely brand their company.
Keith and Toni and Sartre
Frank wrote, “Most of all, I imagine two men in cramped quarters with nothing to do day after day who can’t escape each other. There is nowhere to go.”
As Jean-Paul Sartre famously put it: L’enfer c’est les autres.
Toni Fly and Keith Raniere together in the SHU
[…] Kevin is responding to Peter Longworth’s Raniere No Paedo in Many Lands; Here in US He Is & Bronfman Knew Nothing? […]
I hope Clare apologizes to Frank.
The EU is decades behind the U.S. Child brides are legal in Sweden. They change the law to appease Syrian refugees. Some cases, men in their 40’s had wives under 10 years old. EU has a culture of pedophilia and child molestation. We should NOT be using their Caligvla-esque perversions as an example. Pedophilia is an epidemic in the U.S. The Democrat Party is pushing as far as they can to be legal in al 50 states.
The legal age of consent in Sweden is 15, just 1 year less than in most US states (34). Individuals aged 14 or younger in Sweden are not legally able to consent to sexual activity, and such activity may result in prosecution for statutory rape. You say the EU has a culture of pedophilia and child molestation, but you also say pedophilia is an epidemic in the U.S. Perhaps you could clarify which of them has a greater pedophile problem and give your reasons?
You’re both missing the point.
The issue is about humane prison policies, not encouraging or discouraging pedophilia.per se.
What you seem to have missed is that even when people are convicted for statutory rape or sex crimes in Sweden (as well as most Euro countries) the actual TIME SERVED IN PRISON is absolutely minuscule compared to America —- because of their generous parole system.
They are more humane in Sweden (and all of Europe) than we are here in America.
We haven’t yet learned that extending prison sentences (to inhumane lengths) does not reduce the impulse which causes such activity, nor does it contribute to acting as a deterrent.
Just like sentencing people to decades in prison for drug possession or drug dealing has NOT reduced the impulse to deal or use drugs, nor has it improved the drug epidemic.
Our punishments for murder also don’t serve as any more of a ‘deterrent’.
Why not?
Because most people who commit murder do so out of irrational passion or intense hatred (which overwhelms their sense of logic).
Nobody says to themselves “Well, the penalty for murder just got jacked up from 15 years to 60 years, so, based on that fact alone, I’ll give my spouse a free pass on their recent infidelity”.
Instead… They simply go crazy when they find out about their spouse’s infidelity or the business partner who’s been cheating them out of tons of money —- at which point they lose control of themselves and (sometimes) act on those primal impulses, without any thought to the penalty for being caught.
Sure, they know that getting caught means many years in prison —- so they do whatever they can to avoid getting caught. But, the actual length of the potential prison sentence is not something that impacts their emotional/irrational decisions.
Having the strongest penalties for crimes (among all CIVILIZED countries) hasn’t reduced our crime rate to any serious degree.
Our prison policies are based more on ‘revenge’ than rehabilitation or deterrent. Europe is better in this regard.
‘Humane’???? You mean SOFT policies! You gotta give these creeps what they deserve!! They fucked up lives so they oughta get their lives fucked up, That’s JUSTICE!!! You sound like one of those libtards
Easy dots to connect here. Pilgrim is calling Bangcock a FANATICAL Democrat. Maybe Pilgrim is right. Is Bangcock a closet liberal? Is Bangcock too SCARED to answer Pilgrim’s accusation? Or is Bangcock too busy hopping from Green14 to Green14?
Hello my good friend. 🙂
Actually, I’m still wondering how you spent so much time around Lauren in your younger years, but always failed to seal the deal and get into her panties. lol.
Hmm. I think you need to reread my answer to you. Sorry bro.
I have it on good authority NutJob scored some fellow NX’er pu-tang while a member of Nxivm.
“A temporary Muslim marriage permit is available when two impassioned people of opposite genders can pay a cleric to marry them temporarily and enjoy what is promised as Allah-condoned sex.
Temporary marriages can be for a few weeks or hours.”
This is called “muta” and it is NOT practiced by the vast majority of Moslems. It is a Shia practice and is considered to be forbidden by the Sunnis.
If it makes everyone feel better, pretend that Raniere was a football coach for a winning program, and that he rammed a bunch of 10 and 11-year-old boys instead of a 15-year-old girl.
That way, we can take our masks off and ask who’s going to coach the game on Saturday, and demand that the man’s statue not be removed, and point out all of the good he did for students in the community, as if helping a middle linebacker with his calculus class makes up for a longtime assistant sticking it in the rear ends of elementary and middle school kids, across state lines, over a period of two decades.
Know why Raniere wasn’t arrested in the 80s and early 90s for touching lesser known girls from upstate NY? Because adult men sleeping with underage girls was a common, accepted part of the culture back then. I’m not defending it. It’s disgusting, but that’s how it was. Pointing out that slavery was once a thing isn’t an endorsement of it either. But pretending it never happened isn’t doing anyone any favors.
Teachers in my school had sex with the students all the time. No one said a word, and if you questioned why Becky from science class got an A on her assignment despite having not submitted one, you were the one treated like the nuisance, not the 40-something year old who just scored some anal from a girl whose body was still developing and wasn’t even old enough for a work or driving permit.
Am I a bad person for pointing out that this is how it was 30-years-ago, even though I think it’s awful? You tell me. Is Keith a bad guy for doing what half the teachers in the country were doing at the time? If he did it, yes. But so are the other adults who did the same things, and so are the police and school administrators and parents who looked the other way.
But what doesn’t help things is us revising history, telling ourselves that these things never used to happen, and that when they did, we were always outraged and fought for charges to be pressed. Nothing on earth could be further from the truth. The adults in authority positions either looked the other way, encouraged it, or were doing it themselves.
No one in West Palm in an authority position knew that multiple girls were giving massages to the richest man in town for close to a decade? Bullshit.
Look up a program called Quest that was active in the 1980s in Vancouver, BC. It was an outdoor retreat program that students could join in place of gym class. They received preferential treatment to the non Quest students, and over 80% of participants were girls. Every coach was a man. The coaches were exempt from all school policies, and did whatever they wanted. And the girls found the authority and power of these men attractive. I won’t spoil what happened, but I think the story tells itself…
The conspiracy theories about GBD being a gateway for Keith to sleep with 14-year-olds was the reality of the Quest program. No celebrity endorsements needed, not when every school and parent was in support of it.
And 30-35 years after the program was dissolved, all of the school administrators in BC get to play revisionist historian and virtue signal about the evils of grown men taking underage girls camping using school resources, for school credit, when those same administrators were the ones who approved, supported and defended the program in the first place. The girls who were addicted to the power and authority that these men yielded, who never once filed a police report or made an allegation in 30 years, became hapless victims in need of justice once the stories started coming out. And on and on we go.
You want to stop adults from having inappropriate relationships with kids? Good. You can start by telling the people who you know are involved in this stuff to cut it out. You can start by asking why your attractive daughter who is as dumb as a pile of bricks gets better grades than your less attractive daughter who studies, does her homework, and knows the material. You can demand that female supervisors and chaperones accompany students on class trips, and that if there is an overnight stay, that the adults be in a separate location from the students.
But that would require actual parenting, and actual effort, and it’s just so much easier to point fingers and play the victim and act like you had no idea what was going on the whole time, despite being a witness to it, and in some cases, participating in it.
So, Nicki, to summarize: you think that Keith’s behavior, if it ever happened, can be excused because pretty much everyone was either looking the other way, encouraging it or doing it themselves? There’s no doubt cultural mores have changed a bit since the 80s, and that the pendulum has swung so far the other way that LGBTQ+ folks and liberals in general are equated with pedophiles by the loony right.
Where you argument falls flat on its face is:
1. Most people have always strongly disapproved of such practices, and were unaware of the extent of the problem then.
2. It takes time for lawmakers to enact legislation to address such problems and for law enforcement to put in place training and resources.
3. Just because other disgusting people were doing the same, don’t make it right for Raniere to do it. It’s like saying “he’s an evil bastard, but that’s OK because there are other evil bastards too, so he’s not really that evil.
Sorry, Nicki, but moral relativism, like everything else, has its limits.
The girls you claim “were addicted to the power and authority that these men yielded” were more likely terrified by filing a complaint because they wouldn’t be believed and the perpetrators would then exact their revenge. Society was not aware of the problem and was in denial. It’s exactly the same in today’s society when it comes to rape. Your argument that “actual parenting” is wanting is a little rich coming from someone who’s never been a parent.
Finally one person gets it!
Kevin please stop [redacted] your own [redacted].
Clare is as evil at Keith. She’s arrogant, entitled and vindictive as hell.
She was cruel to her own father on his deathbed. They’ll be no recognition of wrong doing from Clare. Those cookies are baked. And Clare has no problem with Clare.
The dead Enders await her and Clare abs her fortune will go on to live and support Nicki Clyne, hatchett, Marc Elliot…
Raniere was also with a 13 year old girl years prior- correct?
Twelve or 13 years old — her name is Rhiannon.