The Trial of Keith Raniere:

Day 1, Part 3 — “My Island Home”

May 7, 2019 — United States Courthouse, Brooklyn, New York

This is the third installment covering Day 1 of the Keith Raniere federal trial. In Part 1, we covered the pretrial proceedings, anonymous jury, and ex parte juror contact. In Part 2, prosecutor Tanya Hajjar told the jury Raniere was a con man, a predator, and a crime boss. Now it was the defense’s turn.

MK10 Art's painting of Keith Raniere - Frank Report — Raniere by MK10ART

Marc Agnifilo had to find a way to keep twelve jurors from convicting his client.

mk10 art judge garaufis - Frank Report — Judge Garaufis

The judge asked how long the defense’s opening would take.

“Longer than the Government’s opening,” Agnifilo said. “Maybe 45 minutes. Maybe 50 minutes. I don’t know.”

“I certainly agree with one thing that my colleagues with the Government said,” he began. “You are going to hear the truth. That’s what this trial is all about.”

Then he went after Hajjar’s opening.

“What you’ve heard is you’ve heard a lot of conclusion. You’ve heard a lot of slogans. You’ve heard a lot about the names of certain crimes, but you haven’t really heard what you’re going to need to know to reach the truth. And this case is not about slogans or conclusions that are imposed on you.”

“I’m going to ask you, you need to crawl inside his skin and walk around in it,” he said, invoking Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. “From the jury box, you will walk through Keith Raniere’s life.”

NXIVM

Agnifilo told the jury they would hear from people who benefited from NXIVM’s teachings, and people who would describe Clifton Park as “idyllic,” “beautiful,” “serene.”

“They had barbecues and they played volleyball and they did all these things and I think people are going to say it was really fun,” he said. “That’s what they’re going to say: It was fun. I didn’t feel isolated. It was fun.”

“Seventeen thousand people took NXIVM courses,” Agnifilo said. “All sorts of successful people: CEOs, executives, actors, actresses, and they took them not because they were all bamboozled and fooled. They took them because they got something out of them.”

Control

“Every downhill skier who won a gold medal was controlled by some ski coach,” he said. “Every eighteen-year-old kid who comes from Biloxi, Mississippi or Hauppauge, Long Island who becomes a marine, is controlled by a drill instructor. The issue isn’t the control; the issue is the intention.”

“Always ask the why,” Agnifilo urged the jury. “What is happening? Why is he doing this?”

“What about personal responsibility? What role does one’s own personal responsibility have? As you’re listening to the evidence, sit here and think what about personal responsibility? What about saying hey, I don’t want to do that?”

The Naked Photographs

Agnifilo said the nude photographs were tools of personal growth.

“There’s nothing wrong with your body, there is nothing wrong with you, there’s nothing to be ashamed of and it should be celebrated. It’s not sexual.”

He asked the jurors to study the nude images carefully. “Look at the lighting,” he said. “There’s nothing that changes sort of the simple fact that this is just a body. That’s all it is; it’s not sexualized. It is just a body, a natural body in its natural state.”

DOS and Collateral

“DOS was created by Keith Raniere. No doubt about it.” He framed it as something benign — a women’s secret society modeled on traditions that men had enjoyed since the founding of the republic.

“Get a dollar bill, turn it over, look at the other side and there is a pyramid with an eye as homage to the Freemasons, who had a major role in the creation of this country,” he said. “All men. All men. Keith Raniere thought that women should have a secret society of their own.”

As for the collateral — the naked photographs, the confessions, the financial documents women handed over as insurance against leaving — Agnifilo compared it to a childhood oath.

“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” he said. “It’s a way of showing that I mean it.”

“You know how they say never say never? I’m saying never, it was never released. Not a single bit, not a single time.”

Daniella and the Room

“When we say she is in a room, when the Government points out the room isn’t locked, it’s because the room isn’t locked,” Agnifilo said. “She is basically in her family’s house in a bedroom with her family there.”

Daniella had broken Raniere’s rules. She started a relationship with another man. Raniere’s ground rules, Agnifilo explained, were: “If a woman wants to be with Keith Raniere, she can’t be with anybody else. You want to sign on to that, you’re in; you don’t want to sign on, you’re not. Ground rule number two, that rule doesn’t apply to Keith Raniere. He can be with multiple people.”

Agnifilo described hundreds of letters exchanged between Daniella and Raniere.

She wrote, “sometimes I do want to be here, I don’t want to be here. This is good for me, this is helping me, this is not helping me, this is driving me crazy” — and told the jury to read them and “reach your own conclusion as to whether she is a captive.”

Then he revealed a detail the government had left out: at one point, Daniella’s mother voluntarily entered her own bedroom. “For a period of time you have Dani in one bedroom, you have the mom in another bedroom, and they are both basically in the house. Unlocked doors, but in the house.”

The mother left to attend a funeral. Shortly afterward, Daniella decided to leave the room.

“When she wanted to leave the room, she left the room,” Agnifilo said. “Her father drove her to the border where she crossed over.”

The Schism

A DOS member named India gave an assignment to a woman named Jessica — an assignment to seduce Raniere, not to sleep with him. Jessica misunderstood. She refused. A man named Mark Vicente found out and, in Agnifilo’s words, “loses his mind.”

“He goes to India’s mother and does what I am going to describe as, ‘He pushes the mom button,'” Agnifilo said. “He goes to the mom and says, ‘Your daughter is in grave danger. This is really serious. You have to do something.'”

What followed was a family that split in two. The people on Vicente’s side of the ledger, Agnifilo told the jury, were the ones who would take the witness stand and describe their time in NXIVM as coercive and abusive.

“But you guys will have the e-mails,” he said. “You guys will have the text messages. You guys will go back in time before their perspectives changed and you will see the truth because this is the truth.”

“I Don’t Have to Defend Everything”

Raniere had multiple intimate partners over decades. “You’re absolutely entitled to the opinion, ‘I think it’s morally wrong for a man to have multiple intimate partners.’ And that’s your opinion.”

He had sex with all three sisters from Mexico. “You might say that’s terrible.”

Some of his partners got abortions. “You might say, I’m against abortion. Abortion is killing. Abortion is wrong.”

“I don’t have to defend everything,” Agnifilo said. “I don’t have to defend every part of this case. Parts of this case you’re going to find distasteful. Parts of this case you’re going to find are inconsistent with your own morality and that’s okay.”

“I’m going to defend his intentions to my last breath in this courtroom. I’m going to defend his good faith. I’m going to defend his good faith to my last breath in this courtroom.”

Dunkirk

Agnifilo closed with a historical analogy. He described the British retreat to Dunkirk in late May 1940 — the military disaster, the fear that England itself would fall, and Winston Churchill’s speech to Parliament on June 4, 1940.

“I will defend my island home in this courtroom and my island home is that man’s good faith,” he said. “My island home is that man’s good intentions. And I will fight with my every last breath until this trial is over, until all the evidence is in, until the shooting is done. And, at the end of all of that, the flag of freedom will be flying above my island home because I will have successfully defended it.”

“That is all I have for you at this point,” Agnifilo said. “Thank you.”

Judge Garaufis told the jury to stand and stretch.

Then the government prepared to call its first witness.