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Keith Raniere, the leader of a secret self-help fellowship that included business women, millionaires and Hollywood actresses, was sentenced today by the US court to 120 years in prison for turning several women into sex slaves.
The sentence was handed down by District Judge Nicholas Garaufis in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, more than a year after Keith Raniere was charged in June 2019 with sex trafficking, forced labor and other crimes. The prosecution had requested life imprisonment, while defense lawyers for the leader of the NXIVM brotherhood had requested a 15-year prison sentence.
Before reading the sentence, defense attorneys told the judge that Raniere, 60, did not show any remorse and did not regret his “conduct or choices.”
This phrase is the culmination of several years of revelations about this scholarship, which charged thousands of dollars for self-awareness and self-help courses to members who were invited to the sect’s headquarters near Albany in New York and to branches in Mexico and Canada. .
Members of the cult included successful businesswomen, heiresses to millionaire fortunes, and Hollywood actresses who were willing to endure humiliation and swear obedience to Keith Raniere as part of their teachings. They became his sex slaves and tried to convince other women to do the same. During an initiation ceremony, women who entered the sect were cold-bloodedly marked as cattle with the initials of Keith Raniere.
Raniere was arrested on March 27 at a luxury villa in Mexico, from where he fled last year after The New York Times revealed stories of women who had managed to leave the sect, which is estimated to have raised about 16. Thousand people.
That same day, Raniere was transferred from Mexico to the US state of Texas and brought before a court in New York on April 13.
In 2015, Raniere formed a secret society within the Nxivm organization, called DOS, a Latin acronym for “I love obedient companions,” in which I was the only man and the leader, while Allison Mack, from the Smallville series , was “one of the women on the first level of the pyramid, immediately after.”
The DOS group operated with the categories of “masters” and “slaves”, and the latter were expected to recruit new women, who would be at the base of the pyramid and who could take advantage of those at a higher level.
“Mack and other DOS ‘masters’ recruited ‘slaves’ telling them they were joining an all-women organization that would empower them and eradicate the alleged weaknesses that Nxivm said were common among women,” the prosecutor said.
Furthermore, as a precondition for joining the cult, women were required to provide certain guarantees of commitment, including “highly damaging” information about friends and family, nude photographs, and rights to their belongings.
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