According to the Albany Times Union – a federal appeals court in Texas ordered NXIVM founder Keith Raniere to pay more than $444,000 in attorneys’ fees to AT&T and Microsoft.
Raniere claimed the companies stole his invention – teleconferencing and that he had patents.
A federal judge threw out the case last year, calling Raniere a liar and ordered Raniere to pay the companies’ legal fees. Raniere could not prove he owned the patents and lied like a Bronfman on the witness stand.
The appellate decision was handed down as Raniere remains in the custody of U.S. marshals in an unrelated criminal case in which he is charged with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor.
Will Raniere be able to use the money he had stashed in Pam Caftritz’s name?
She died in 2016 but he was using her account along with Mariana Fernandez and Rosa Laura Junco.
Raniere had been also using an American Express credit card and Cafritz’s bank account has $8 million in it.
It is likely that account is suspended. It is not known if the Feds have moved to seize the money.
Meantime he seems to still have the notorious perjurer Clare Bronfman backing him. Whether she will pay the $444,000 fine remains to be seen. The fact is there is not much the courts can do if he doesn’t pay it and frankly he has bigger issues than a money judgment being filed against him.
Chances are AT&T and Microsoft can survive without the money.
If it seems implausible that Raniere invented teleconferencing then mislaid the patent, you’re not alone. That’s evidently what the judge thought too.
Would love to read that judge’s ruling, hopefully it will be available soon, it sounds like pure comedy. Clearly he descended into every deeper grandiosity and delusional disorder, and one can only speculate what else this short, chubby, hairy, mediocre loser imagines he is the rightful owner and creator of, when in sane reality, he produced nothing whatsoever of any value to anyone, ever. The few ‘patents’ he managed to attempt to file were absurd incoherent nonsense, laughably half-assed doodlings that a child might make as they pretended to ‘invent’ Rube Goldberg devices of use to no one. A man-child with a disordered delusional brain such as this was then handed 65 million to blow on commodities investments? Real estate developments? Crackerjacks toys? MLM ponzi schemes are the kindergarten entry level of white collar cons, so in spite of his smashing failure in his co-op shopping club, something that clearly never occurred to anyone before, right, he and only he cracked the foolproof investment and gambling strategies that would make him a winner. A winner! Oh, but then the real world intruded and he was exposed as a loser, a grade-A top-notch first class loser. With the reverse Midas touch. One wonders what other hilarious lawsuits are floating around out there, who else has he sued over having been the true inventor of sliced bread, the micro-chip processor, the patent for a brain surgery technique that turns adult women into imbeciles, the starvation diet, the blackmail and extortion scheme for sex and money patent, the wheel(TM) perhaps. He invented the cure for cancer according to his longtime devoted ass-wiper Salzman, maybe he has sued the Mayo clinic for violating his patents, his doodles, his lies.