NXIVM Leader Keith Raniere Guilty Of All Counts In Sex-Cult Case

Jon Campbell, Albany Bureau

In this audio recording played during Keith Raniere’s 2019 trial, he and actor Allison Mack discuss branding women in DOS, a slave-master group tied to NXIVM. Jon Campbell, Albany Bureau.

ALBANY – NXIVM leader Keith Raniere, who surreptitiously led a secret master-slave group whose members were sexually exploited and branded with his initials on their pubic area, was convicted Wednesday of seven felonies in Brooklyn federal court.

A federal jury returned its verdict around 2 p.m. after less than five hours of deliberation.

The verdict followed a wild six-week trial where jurors heard explicit testimony about Raniere’s graphic sexual exploits and how he manipulated the many followers of NXIVM, a purported self-help group based in the Albany area.

For more than two decades, Raniere, who grew up in Suffern, Rockland County, portrayed himself as an all-knowing guru who was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the smartest men in the world.

But prosecutors said Raniere, 58, was a fraud. They painted him as a conniving, jealous con man who methodically groomed his followers for sex and was nearly kicked out of college after struggling to keep up his grades.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for New York’s Eastern District said Raniere was convicted of all charges, including forced labor conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, sex trafficking and racketeering charges, which included underlying acts of child pornography possession, identity theft and child sexual exploitation, among others.

“His crimes, and the crimes of his co-conspirators, ruined marriages, careers, fortunes and lives,” U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said in a statement.

“The evidence proved that Raniere was truly a modern-day Svengali.”

Raniere’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said he plans to appeal.

“Keith maintains his innocence. It’s a very sad day for him,” Agnifilo said, according to the Associated Press. “I think he’s not surprised, but he maintains that he didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

Critics long called NXIVM a cult

U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue spoke to reporters outside the Brooklyn courthouse June 19, 2019, after the conviction on all counts of Keith Raniere, who led a sex cult called NXIVM in the Albany area. United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

Raniere founded NXIVM in the late 1990s after shutting down his previous business, Consumers Buyline Inc., which had been investigated by several state attorneys general as a pyramid scheme.

NXIVM, which was based in Colonie, Albany County, was billed as a self-help organization. People paid thousands of dollars to take classes based on Raniere’s curriculum, but the group quickly and repeatedly faced accusations that it was a cult whose members were manipulated into lionizing Raniere.

The organization built up a series of influential followers, including Clare Bronfman, a wealthy heiress to the Seagram’s liquor fortune who bankrolled many of Raniere’s efforts and lawsuits against detractors.

More recently, Raniere secretly founded DOS, a women’s group whose members were known as “slaves” who had to follow orders from their “masters.” Most members didn’t know Raniere was the top “master.”

“Slaves” had to give up damaging collateral — naked photographs, false confessions — in order to join the group, which was billed by leaders, including actress Allison Mack, as an empowerment organization but was used by Raniere to further his sexual interests.

Throughout the lengthy trial, prosecutors detailed how Raniere possessed sexually explicit photographs of one of his followers, who was 15 years old at the time, and how he kept a woman imprisoned in her own home for nearly two years for showing interest in another man.

Jurors heard from a one-time “slave” who was forced to strip naked and wear a blindfold while another woman was told to perform a sex act on her as Raniere watched. The sex act was videotaped.

“Slaves” were told their collateral could be released if they didn’t perform the acts ordered by their “master.”

Some of the “slaves” were also told to strip naked for an initiation ceremony, where they were branded on their pelvis with a hot cauterizing iron. The brand was a logo that contained the initials of Raniere and Mack, who was a top-level “master.”

Mack, 36, who was best known for her role as Chloe Sullivan on the CW’s Smallville, pleaded guilty in April to two racketeering felonies. She is due for sentencing in September.

Also pleading guilty for their roles in the criminal enterprise were Bronfman, NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman and her daughter, Lauren Salzman, who was a high-ranking NXIVM official.

After the verdict was announced, women who had been victimized by Raniere — some of whom had attended the trial in its entirety — spoke to the media outside the courthouse, thanking the jury for its decision.

Among them were Catherine Oxenberg, the former Dynasty star whose daughter, India, was a member of DOS, and Toni Natalie, a Rochester-area woman whom Raniere harassed with lengthy, expensive lawsuits and legal threats after their eight-year relationship ended in 1999.

Oxenberg and Natalie called themselves “bookends.”

Natalie was one of the first people to speak out publicly against Raniere and accuse NXIVM of being a cult, while Oxenberg’s decision to speak out in The New York Times in 2017 helped spur the federal investigation that ultimately brought him down.

“She started this, and I finished it,” Oxenberg said.

Natalie, who was painted as NXIVM’s foremost enemy by Raniere and his inner circle, said that after she and Raniere broke up, he told her she would be “dead or in jail” the next time he saw her.

“Well, I’m alive and he’s in jail and it looks like for the rest of his life,” Natalie told reporters. “The good guys won today.”

Natalie, who attended the entire trial and detailed her story in the Democrat and Chronicle before Raniere was indicted last year, spent years locked in litigation with Raniere and his followers, who challenged her bankruptcy, fought for years-old patents from an old business and forced her to spend thousands and thousands of dollars in legal fees.

On Wednesday, Natalie wore a black-and-white striped shirt to wait for the jury’s verdict.

She called it her “jail shirt.”

“I wore this so he knew what he would be looking at for the rest of his life,” Natalie said.

JCAMPBELL1@Gannett.com