Sources tell Frank Report that Karen Unterreiner has turned against Keith Raniere and will likely be called as a witness for the prosecution in case of the US v. Raniere Et Al (Clare Bronfman and Kathy Russell are currently his co-defendants in the case).
With Nancy and Lauren Salzman and Allison Mack becoming witnesses for the prosecution, with numerous DOS slaves and other former members of Nxivm – a cast of Jane Does – preparing to testify against their former leader, it seems appropriate to mention that Karen Unterreiner is likely to be one of the star witnesses.
She was with Raniere for 40 years.
In 1975, Karen was an Honor Student from Enfield High in Manchester, Connecticut. Raniere met her when she moved to the RPI campus as a 17-year-old girl coming to college, her first time away from home, just after her father passed away.
She was his first harem woman.
Maybe the fact that Karen has flipped will suggest to Kathy Russell, who blundered into her present indictment and is still holding out – hoping against hope that her case will be dismissed – that she should make a plea deal.
After all, Karen Unterreiner was Kathy’s boss. If Kathy committed five crimes, Karen did 500.
Now, Karen will likely be testifying against her, saving her own skin. The trial begins on May 7. This time it’s for real. Karen flipped. She flipped long ago.
Karen was the always the smartest one in Nxivm., She may be smarter than Keith and when the feds came to town, that girl was not going to be a fool like Allison, Lauren, Nancy, and the hapless Kathy Russell.
When called to the grand jury, she was not going to play games like “Save the Vanguard” or “Run, Keith, Run” or Hide and Go Plead” – or like Kathy – invoke the 5th selectively like it was a game of musical chairs.
She spilled quick and fast. She got an honest attorney – not under Clare Bronfman’s control and now she is spared the inconvenience of handcuffs, ankle monitors, home arrest or facing judges and making allocutions or juries as a defendant.
Karen was always smart. She was one of the women who helped Raniere with his take-home IQ test – the one he used to establish – in the Guinness Book of Records [1989 Australian edition] that he was tied with two others for having the highest IQ in the world.
Of course, the test was bogus. Obviously no take home IQ test should ever be considered official – which is something Guinness figured out later – for they retired the category that year and never had “Highest IQ” as a category again.
On top of that, Keith cheated. He had his women take the test for him. Karen and Gina Hutchinson and a couple of other young women. They did the work on the IQ test. They took about a month to complete it, making sure they got answers right for Keith.
Even after he submitted the test, they found they had one answer wrong and Keith called the man who created the test and would confirm the results and asked him to correct one answer, which he did – which actually got Keith the tie for highest score.
He was almost not the smartest man in the world.
Gina died, and many women from that era left – smelling Keith’s evil, hating him and fearing him, but Karen Unterreiner stayed.
Consider, she came to Keith in the 1970s. Nancy Salzman came in 1998. Kathy Russell 2002. Allison Mack 2006. Clare Bronfman 2002.
Karen had them all beat. She was not only in his inner circle – she was in his inner-inner circle.
She, Pam Cafritz, Barbara Jeske, and Kristin Keeffe were inner-inner circle.
Not Allison or Nicki, not Nancy Salzman or Lauren. Or Clare or even Barbara Bouchey.
The real inner-inner circle – the ones who knew everything – were the women who were with Keith before he was Vanguard. Karen was first in and last to leave.
Keeffe ran away with her child in February 2014. She then turned on the monster, giving incredibly valuable evidence of his crimes to law enforcement and the public.
Jeske died of cancer in September 2014 – while under Raniere’s treatment – and left her estate to him.
Pam Cafritz died of cancer in November 2016 – also while under Raniere’s treatment – and left her estate to him.
That left only Unterreiner.
When Raniere fled to Mexico in Decemeber 2017 with Clare Bronfman, followed by Allison, Nicki Clyne, Lauren and joined by Loretta Garza, Mariana Fernandez and others, Karen – who had been relegated to old hag status – wasn’t going to stick around and wait for handcuffs.
She did what any smart woman would do – she flipped. She did not – after 40 long years with the monster – stick to him.
Of course, now, no one wants to stick to the monster. It is refreshing to see all this self-interest at play. Even Clare Bronfman, who has “seen so much good from Nxivm and from Keith”, is ready to flush her Vanguard down the toilet – if she needs to – to save herself.
You’ll see more of this at play soon enough.
But Karen was a lot smarter than these other women; smart in self-interest too.
Karen has a lot of information and will share it. I think Karen will serve best for the jury when she explains that Raniere was a long time, lifetime pedophile.
She knows about Raniere’s exploits with underage girls – going back to the 1970s. She knows because she aided and abetted him. She knows about Gina H. and Gina M. and Rachel and the other teen girls. She was living with Raniere as his girlfriend. She helped recruit teens and because they were too young to drive, she would drive them home to their parents after Raniere was done and it was their curfew.
How clever it was of Keith to have a kindly-looking woman take the teen girls home. This way the parents thought they were chaperoned by a fine adult woman and not leaving their children alone with the world’s smartest man.
This way there was no suspicion that Keith was fucking their teenage daughters.
Karen would pick them up and take them to the apartment she and Keith, then go to work (someone had to pay the bills) and Keith would have his teenage harem during the day.
Then Karen would come home from work. The girls would put their clothes back on and Karen would drive them home to their parents in time for their curfews.
Karen – next to Pam Cafrtiz – was the best pimp-woman a pervert ever had.
And a decade later, Karen was still living with Keith and Pam and Barb Jeske when Keith was raping 12-year-old Rhiannon.
Karen can testify to that – just in case anyone is thinking Keith will try to claim he was not a longstanding pedophile. Or that Jane Doe #2 – the 15-year-old Mexican girl – whose nude pictures were found on his computer – was just an anomaly.
By the way, it was Karen who groomed Jane Doe #2 when she was just 14 and mentored her, assuring her that her underage sex with Keith was actually women’s empowerment.
In addition to knowing about his pedophilia, Karen knows about finances too.
Karen oversaw the double and triple sets of books. Maybe she is the only one who knows – really knows – how much money Nxivm made. And how much was hidden, how much was smuggled.
And don’t forget Karen was one of the owners of Consumer’s Buyline that got shut down for being an illegal pyramid scheme. She knows the history of the monster.
In 1996, Raniere, Karen and Pam signed a Consent Order with the New York Attorney General. State officials accused Raniere of operating an illegal “chain distributor scheme.” Raniere, Cafritz and Unterreiner agreed to be permanently barred from “promoting, offering or granting participation in a chain distribution scheme.”
After Consumers Buyline, Karen went to work for Nxivm. On the old ESP website, we learn of Karen’s important roles.
http://www.executivesuccessprograms.com/team/karen-unterreiner/
“Karen Unterreiner has been a key figure of Executive Success Programs’ leadership since she joined the company in 1998. She quickly became one of the top practitioners of ESP’s proprietary Exploration of Meaning
technology. She is currently one of our top three head trainers and facilitates the company’s coveted advanced-level trainings. She has been a proud member of the Executive Board since 2001 and she is also the head of ESP’s Humanities Board, where she strives to further her commitment to building community, humanitarianism and ethics.
“Karen brings a wealth of experience as an actuary, CFO and computer programmer into her role with ESP. She graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1981 with a degree in Mathematics of Operations Research and Statistics. Following that, she held a position at Aetna Life and Casualty as an actuary until 1985. She received her fellowship in the Society of Actuaries in 1987 while working at Milliman and Robertson, Consulting Actuaries.
“She later expanded into corporate finance and in 1990 assumed the role of Chief Financial Officer at Consumers’ Buyline, Inc., a successful wholesale buying club. During which time, she delved into the field of information technology and began an IT consulting practice. Her attention to detail, expansive intellectual capacity and desire to inspire joy in people’s lives makes her an invaluable asset to the company and its Executive Board.”
And she did a hell of lot more than what she put on her modest bio.
Karen had a hand in scrubbing the computers to deceive the courts in the Rick Ross case. And she may the only one who can tell authorities – and a jury – what all the secret codes mean on the Nxivm books showing who paid by cash (when they were listed as getting scholarships) and where the cash went.
Karen spent the last two decades with Nxivm. And two decades before that with the monster in various capacities.
At Nxivm, her responsibilities were IT, finance, and teaching. She took care of NXIVM money. She helped groom little girls.
And Karen proved her worth to Keith, working hand-in-hand with Steve Ose and Ben Myers to change data on NXIVM’s servers regarding the money trail in the company and evidence in NXIVM’s computer trespass case.
And when Raniere started his Coalition of Ethicists, Karen, a true ethicist, had plenty to say:
“I joined the Ethicist development group to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to make ethical decisions. My experience has gone far beyond that. The Ethicist program has been the most challenging and the most transformative work I have done in my many years with ESP. It has been a study of me, how I make even the tiniest of decisions, and how I can shift those decisions to be more in line with the person I want to be. Even transforming seemingly small, simple decisions have made a big difference in my life. From avoiding hitting the snooze button to speaking up when I think things are not right, the work we are doing has produced significant changes in how I choose.”
Long before Nancy and Lauren decided to ethically turn on Raniere – brought as they were to it only after they were facing prison – Karen – the smartest of them all – decided “Hey, why should I bother to get indicted and go through a living hell. At 58 years old, prison won’t suit me. I’ll cooperate with the feds and avoid the inconvenience.”
She’s gone to the other side, and rather than take the fall, she is helping to stop the man who stole her life away while sparing herself any legal punishment.
Unlike Nancy, Allison, and Lauren, she was not forced to turn on the man with handcuffs and the threat of spending years in a cage. She figured it out quick – quicker than Raniere.
She realized as soon as the FBI came a-calling that his goose, Nxivm’s goose, everyone’s goose was cooked. Except for hers.
If she has her way, it will appear as if she never knew Keith Raniere.
Karen’s Facebook makes no mention of her years with Nxivm. She lists as her employment Con Carino LLC.
Yeah, she was the smartest.
For Kathy and Allison, Lauren, Nancy, and even the imbecilic bully, Clare Bronfman – they will be lumped forever with the monster – and one of his longtime monster enablers Karen will likely be in court telling about all the little girls he tricked and raped and how she covered up for him – and how Kathy and Clare and likely Allison knew too.
And though she was the first one in, the longest in his harem, and stayed right until the collapse – she still lives at 3 Flintlock Lane – the townhouse she bought with Raniere in the late 1980s – she was wise enough to get out fast.
And now, if she helps the prosecution bury Keith Raniere, does that expiate all the years of coverup and co-conspiracy with him?
These are matters far beyond man-made laws.
As far as the law is concerned, she seems quite safe.
While others were branded, she slipped under the table.
Karen Unterreiner had a most important role in running Raniere’s MLM and tax evasion and sex trafficking scheme that included Nancy and Lauren Salzman, Allison Mack, Kathy Russell, Clare Bronfman, and Keith Raniere.
And Karen is the only one who will escape punishment it seems.
Pretty smart.