NXIVM Leader Keith Raniere Has Been Sentenced to 120 Years in Prison
Keith Raniere is at the center of 9-part HBO documentary The Vow.
Raniere co-founded the controversial NXIVM group alongside Nancy Salzman.
In June 2019, Raniere was found guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking, and was sentenced to 120 years in prison on October 27.
He's been called a cult leader. A high-priced executive coach. A pyramid schemer. A modern-day Svengali. A convicted felon. A daycare founder. Keith Raniere is many things—but easy to sum-up is not one of them.
Season 1 of HBO's The Vow documentary explored the many facets of Raniere, a man best known as the founder of NXIVM (pronounced NEX-ee-um). Like Raniere himself, NXIVM is a complicated behemoth of a topic, which grows more gnarled the deeper one goes.
As a result, the nine-episode documentary series The Vow proceeds like a trip down a rabbit hole that keeps getting darker. In episode one, Raniere is presented as an eccentric intellectual with a powerful orbit, and NXIVM as the "empowerment" group he created to coach professionals. In later, more menacing episodes, Raniere's serene disposition is revealed to be a mask for his manipulations; and NXIVM, the organization that stole lives. The Vow season 2 will be centered around the group's activities in Mexico, as well as the criminal trials of Raniere and NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman.
For years, Raniere lived in Albany, NY, where NXIVM's headquarters were based. After a stint in a Brooklyn, NY, federal jail, on October 27 U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis sentenced Raniere to 120 years in prison for his crimes.
Here's what you need to know about Raniere, 60, and where he is now.
In June of 2019, NXIVM founder Keith Raniere was convicted on 7 charges, including sex trafficking.
In 2019, Raniere was found guilty on seven charges, including two counts of sex trafficking, racketeering and forced labor conspiracy.
"This trial has revealed that Raniere, who portrayed himself as a savant and a genius, was in fact a massive manipulator, a con man and the crime boss of a cult-like organization involved in sex trafficking, child pornography, extortion, compelled abortions, branding, degradation and humiliation," Richard Donoghue, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, told reporters, per TIME. "Keith Raniere's crime spree has ended and his victims will finally see justice."
Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in October 2020.
Over a year after being found guilty, Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison on October 27. The sentence was delivered by U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who also presided over Raniere's trial. Judge Garaufis also sentenced high-ranking member and Seagram's heiress Clare Bronfman to 81 months in prison.
Nxivm founder and leader Keith Raniere sentenced to 120 years in prison.
— US Attorney EDNY (@EDNYnews) October 27, 2020
The hearing was hours long, due in large part to the dozen-plus impact statements read by Raniere's victims. India Oxenberg, who tells her story in the four-part Starz documentary Seduced, showed up in masks to tell the court—and Raniere—how his actions impacted their lives. Another woman was the girl that Raniere began having sex with and taking nude photos of when she was 15 and he was 45, allegations that led to his sexual exploitation of a child charge.
"While he hid our sexual relationship from others, he explained it to me by telling me that I was very mature for my age. And I know now that it was false—I was a child," her redacted victim impact statement read, via CNN. "He used my innocence to do whatever he wanted with me -- not just sexually but also psychologically."
Originally, Raniere was slated to be sentenced in September 2019, but the date was pushed back to 2020.
This summer, Raniere's followers threw dance parties outside of his prison.
According to the Times-Union, Raniere's followers had been gathering outside Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center, and holding nightly dance parties under the name "We Are As You." They wave signs in tribute to someone named "Kay Rose," allegedly a code name for Raniere (they share the same initials).
The party's official website provides an origin story that mentions Raniere directly: "On July 3, three friends visited the parking lot of Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn to wave to their friend Keith Raniere, who has been detained there since April 2018." The website says their mission has expanded to dance for everyone in the prison: "The movement is intended to honor the humanity of all the forgotten ones, starting with those behind bars."
Alongside Nancy Salzman, Raniere founded NXIVM in the '90s.
NXIVM was marketed as a self-help and self-improvement organization. Most participants were recruited through Executive Success Programs (ESP), which ran $10,000, five-day-long retreats full of lectures and "intense emotional probing," per Forbes. The group's ultimate goal was to help a participant "rewire their emotional selves," as the New York Times put it. NXIVM claimed it could cure all—including neurological disorders like Tourette's Syndrome.
ESP operated as a hierarchy, encouraging participants to ascend the ranks, designated by different-colored scarves worn during the workshops. According to the "stripe path," Raniere (called Vanguard by his followers) wore a white sash; Nancy Salzman, NXIVM's co-founder (called Prefect), wore a golf sash. Ascending the ranks was a financial investment: The courses required cost thousands of dollar each.
The group amassed a high-profile clientele. A few of the individuals mentioned in The Vow are Dynasty's Catherine Oxenberg and her daughter, India, who would become involved; Grace Park and Nicki Clyne of Battlestar Galactica, Emiliano Salinas, son of the former president of Mexico—and, most notoriously, Smallville's Allison Mack.
In The Vow, whistleblower Mark Vincente explains Raniere's motivations in recruiting influential people. "We have to reach the people who 'run the motor of the world,' to use Ayn Rand's term," Vincente recalled Raniere saying.
Raniere has been described as a "stereotypical cult leader."
In 2003, Forbes ran an article on Raniere that questioned ESP's validity as an organization. The article connected Raniere's new, buzzy group and his past multilevel marketing schemes, like one called Consumer's Buyline, for which he was sued.
Seagram's heir Edgar Bronfman Sr., whose daughters funded NXIVM with their $150 million trust fund, told Forbes his own misgivings: “I think it’s a cult." (In 2019, his daughter, Clare Bronfman, pled guilty to her NXIVM-related charges). A 2006 article in the Albany Times-Union said NXIVM's activities were akin to "brainwashing."
Later, Bronfman would be proven right. “Keith Raniere is the stereotypical cult leader," cult expert Cathleen Mann, who followed NXIVM for 15 years, told Off the Hook in 2019, after he was convicted. Mann cited the main components of a cult: A self-appointed leader; influential tactics; and deceptive recruiting—meaning that a member may recruit new members before knowing what the group really is. NXIVM had all three.
A former NXIVM member describes the slow erosion of intuition that occurred over time, thanks to NXIVM's psychological manipulations. “They get you to not trust your own decision-making process. They tell you that you need them to make decisions. You start to doubt everything," one of the plaintiffs in a suit against NXIVM told the New York Times.
The Vow explores Keith Raniere's time presiding over a sex cult called DOS alongside Allison Mack.
If you've previously heard of NXIVM, chances are, you heard of the stories that came out of this one specific sector of the group, called DOS, which Raniere ran alongside Smallville's Allison Mack. Some of the most gruesome stories associated with NXIVM originated from DOS: Branding with Raniere and Mack's initials. Extreme calorie counting. Women, groomed for sexual relationships with Raniere.
Later episodes of The Vow unpack what happened in DOS–and what happened to people who joined. Ironically, DOS was founded under the pretenses of being a "women's empowerment group," though the opposite took place.
The name stood for "Dominus Obsequious Sororium," and also for "Dominant Over Submissive." Like the rest of NXIVM, DOS functioned as a pyramid scheme—but one of "masters" and "slaves," who had to follow their masters' orders. In order to join, women had to give up collateral of some sort, from personal secrets to nude photos.
In a story for the New York Times, Vanessa Grigoriades described the relationship between people up the DOS hierarchy. “Masters would dictate an act of ‘self-denial,’ like cold showers or rousing yourself from bed at 4 a.m. and standing stock still for a time. Slaves were told to do ‘acts of care’ for masters, perhaps bringing them coffee. Slaves might be told to abstain from orgasms, ostensibly to heal their negative sexual patterns. Mack said that this was ‘about devotion’ and ‘like any spiritual practice or religion.’ I thought about free will—did she believe in that? She said, ‘You’re dedicating your life one way or another.'"
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