Dear Frank, You told Alex who Keith Raniere is. What I need to know is what he actually did. My professor Steven Hassan says the BITE model explains it. What did he do to people? I kind of dig the dude though my professor says both you and Raniere are brainwashers— Gus Montenegro

Gus (above)

Dear Gus;

Keith Raniere launched NXIVM in 1998 as a personal-development program that would help students improve their lives. He attracted professionals, politicians, and celebrities, such as Smallville actress Allison Mack. He called himself “Vanguard.”

He operated a secret subgroup: DOS, or Dominus Obsequious Sororum — Latin for “master over slave women.” Inside the group, women were branded with his initials.

There were 105 women and one man, Raniere.

Raniere formed Executive Success Programs in the Albany, N.Y., suburb of Colonie in 1998 with Nancy Salzman, a nurse. They called the program NXIVM and said it was a training program designed to help members achieve their full potential. The workshops cost between $2,000 and $10,000. An estimated 18,000 took courses, and about 75 percent were women.

The Bronfman sisters — heirs to the Seagram’s liquor fortune — became his financial backers. Clare and Sara Bronfman invested about $150 million into his endeavors, about $50 million of it in lawsuits and to procure indictments against his enemies. He had developed a mathematically perfect system to make huge profits in the commodities market. The Bronfmans invested $65.6 million into his commodities trading. He lost their money. 

Real Estate Manna

He then advised them that they would make it back by investing another $26 million in a unique real estate venture in Los Angeles County that turned out to have an absconding partner. 

From prison, Raniere described Clare as a “philanthropist” who “takes the responsibility of her inherited wealth very seriously.”

At the time of her arrest, Nancy Salzman had $500,000 in cash in shoeboxes in her house. It is believed to be a fraction of what she had hidden with relatives and elsewhere.

Four of the four women who lived with Raniere the longest had cancer. Two of them died. Pamela Cafritz had served as his chief recruiter for years. When she developed cancer, Raniere treated her with his tech rather than conventional medicine. She died in 2016. 

Cancer

She left him her estate worth about $7 million. Barbara Jeske died after Raniere told her that her brain cancer was really carpal tunnel syndrome. He arranged for her to revise her will in his favor shortly before her death. She left him about $2 million.

Karen had bladder cancer, and her hair test suggests she may have been poisoned slowly over the years.

Inside DOS, Raniere required female members to provide information that could be used as blackmail against them if they left. Women were branded with a cauterizing pen — the symbol bore Raniere’s initials. They all took nude photos for Raniere to keep.

To help women lose excess adipose tissue, Raniere placed them on 500-calorie diets. Raniere said fat disturbed his higher spiritual vibrations.

DOS women were given tasks to help keep them keep awake through the night. Those who sought the indolence of sleep were known to be “self-indulgent” or a “princess.”

Raniere filed a patent in 2004 for the Raniere Sleep Guidance System, which monitors brainwaves, controls oxygen levels in the room, delivers electric shocks, pipes in subliminal voice suggestions, and adjusts the angle of the bed while you sleep.

Camila — the youngest of three Mexican sisters, all of whom Raniere had sexual relationships with simultaneously — began sex with him when she was 15. He was 45. He commemorated the date as their anniversary and took nude photographs to mark the occasion. 

He required her to report her weight to him daily and set a target of 100 pounds for her 5-foot-5-inch frame. When she developed an eating disorder, she insulted him by asking for outside professional help. 

He said, “First, you should lose the weight.” 

In April 2015, Camila slashed her wrists in the bathtub of her apartment. Raniere found her with blood running down her arms. He told her, “Do you know how disastrous it could have been for me if you had killed yourself?” 

He determined she should not go to a hospital. People might ask questions. Instead, he sent photographs of her wounds to Nancy Salzman to assess. Salzman, a nurse, said she would almost certainly live if she did not try to commit suicide again.

Raniere, in his late fifties, told his first-line DOS slave-women that he needed a “virgin successor.” None of them was a virgin.

He desired someone close to him who could channel his spirit, even after his death. They began recruiting underage virgins from Mexico, including from a girls’ school run by a DOS member. His followers believed this was a mystical energy they didn’t fully understand.

A Room

Daniela, one of Camila’s older sisters, was also in a sexual relationship with Raniere. When Daniela kissed another man, she confessed to Raniere. He declared it an “ethical breach.” 

His remedy: she would go to her bedroom and think about what she had done. She was 25. Her family cooperated. Her father brought food. Her mother moved into the adjacent room to help atone for her. 

Lauren Salzman served as the guardian of ethics, threatening to deport Daniela to Mexico without identity documents if Daniela left the room. 

Daniela stayed in her room for 22 months. She wrote hundreds of letters to Raniere. She considered suicide. She finally walked out without his permission in early 2012. Her father drove her to the Mexican border, dropped her off with $100, and speedily returned to be with his Vanguard.

Raniere felt that the room incident was overblown by prosecutors. He said Daniela was being stubborn. She could have left the room at any time if she had merely completed a book report he had assigned her and promised to never kiss another man (other than him) the rest of her life. 

As proof of her stubbornness, she stayed in the room for 22 months, and when she left, she still had not completed her book assignment.

My Boy

He also had a son, Galen, whom at first he denied paternity of and did not appear on the birth certificate. He told his followers the boy was a foundling whose mother had died in childbirth and whose father was unknown. Though he told his followers the boy was not his, he was noble enough to ask Clare Bronfman to financially support him and his mother on a budget at or near the poverty level. 

Later, when the mother left him, taking the son he had denied, he cut off all financial support. Judge Garaufis noted at sentencing that Raniere — while spending tens of millions of Bronfman dollars on commodities trading — had never sent his son a dollar in child support.

By the way kid, you look a bit like Raniere.

ARTVOICE ART