Today marks the 10th month that Keith Alan Raniere, 58, has been in federal custody. All those months, Keith has been in one jail or another. Or in handcuffs traveling to and from court. And in court.
He has had dozens of strip searches – where guards insert their gloved fingers up his rectum and search under his gonads – to make sure he is not carrying contraband.
He is living in a cell where the lights are on 24/7. He eats garbage food. He was been beaten. Had his glasses stolen. Been humiliated. Cried like a baby- even earned the nickname Crybaby Jane by his fellow prisoners.
Most of the time, more than nine months, he has been in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, an inhuman prison – with a medieval glint to it – that rivals third world prisons – and not unlike in some respects the Mexican prisons he had hoped to lure his female enemies into.
At MDC, they don;t get to see daylight. They can’t go outdoors. They are cold in summer and too hot in winter – since they never shut the air conditioners or the heat off. It’s a living hell and might well be remembered in the chamber of horrors that humankind imposed on other humans in this savage time we live in.
And yes he came a long way. In 2016, he celebrated Vanguard Week – the 10 day celebration of his nativity – for which he shows up for five days – with about 400 people, most of whom paid more than $2,000 to attend the event.
He was at his peak, having introduced a new form of slavery for his followers – a thing called DOS – devised by the man who always wanted his women to be slaves. It featured branding them on their pubic region with his initials and collecting material on them that could be used against them if they disobeyed or told the secrets of their slavery.
Those were glorious days. People hung on his every word. Women stood in line to see him and get a whisper of wisdom from his precious fount of knowledge. Though he had lost much of his virility, he still found pleasure in women – subjugated women, women who he could control and coerce into providing for him – enervated man that he was – with some sexual pleasures – – fuck toys he called them – slaves that were designated to please him and that he could force into being enjoyed and who pretended to enjoy his sloppy administrations.
Time after time I heard women tell me he had a foul body odor. Some said it was the smell on his face of other women. Some said it was poor hygiene. Some were prepared to dismiss it because after all he was the smartest man in the world.
He had run this silly con on people for decades. He once crooked up an unauthorized and little respected take home IQ test, got help passing it – which was of course cheating – and then did a study which he also cheated on – which showed how rare his intelligence was based on the IQ test he cheated on. It was bullshit from top to bottom, but somehow – with the aid of several accomplices who also stood to gain, he persuaded the editors of Guinness Book of Records to include his name [along with two others] in the category of highest IQ for one year, in one edition, the Australian edition. The editors learned a lesson from this and did not include Raniere in the English or American editions. They discovered it was bunk, a fraud, and they retired the entire category of highest IQ never un-retiring it.
In short, he built his reputation on a fraud. And he lived upon fraud.
Fraud and abusing women.
But the tide turned in 2017.
In May 2017, Catherine Oxenberg was informed by Bonnie Piesse that her daughter India was branded by Raniere. Bonnie had quit the group and persuaded in time her husband Mark Vicente to leave also. I think she found some solace in the Frank Report, maybe it even helped her realize what a cad Keith Raniere was – and she was good friends with India – who she saw as headed for a precipice of disaster.
She told Catherine and for some reason or other Catherine chose to call me – publisher of the Frank Report and surprise me with the news that Keith Raniere, on top of the other madness he was offering his followers, was now branding women and collecting material for their possible blackmail.
I wrote the first story about it on June 5, 2017, exposing to the public for the first time Keith’s dirty little secret – called DOS.
It created a sensation in Nxivm – and not a favorable one at that. Hundreds quit the group. The New York Times took an interest and four months later they published a story on it that aroused the FBI’s interest.
In between the publishing on the Frank Report of the branding, and the subsequent Times story, the ranks of Nxivm thinned. From almost 400 at V-Week in 2016, the troops dwindled to about 150. It was a sad and lonely Vanguard Week 2017.
Things got worse in the fall and Raniere fearing arrest secretly fled to Mexico with Clare Bronfman and Mariana Fernandez and his baby boy Kemar, born in August 2017 in Albany.
He split and I found him, One of my sources down there sent me a photo of the Vanguard walking with Jimena Garza. I broke the news he was in Mexico and the FBI was down there shortly thereafter.
But Raniere split and quietly went to Puerto Vallarta. They spent more than a month looking for him. Thanks to Nicki Clyne and her Instagram photos I learned she was in Puerto Vallarta and naturally I assumed he was with her.
He was, along with Allison Mack, Clare Bronfman, Loreta Garza and Lauren Salzman. They were living in a luxury ocean front villa, that cost some $10,000 per week.
I published this fact and a month or so later, the lad was arrested and deported to the US. I was leaked a video of the arrest scene and a picture of a weepy Raniere sitting in back of the Mexican police car.
I would never have devoted the interest or the time in Keith Raniere, but for his desire to destroy me. A few years earlier I had uncovered that Clare Bronfman and her sister Sara were involved in a real estate deal in Los Angeles, managed by Keith Raniere that seemed to be running amok.
At the time I suspected their partner. Later I came to conclude that Raniere was overseeing the loss of their money, either though incompetence or deception or both. He had blown through more than $100 million of their money.
But there was something in the man that would not let him forget me. He sent Clare Bronfman to file false criminal charges against me with the FBI which led to my being indicted.
The war was on. I had to show that those who accused me were not honest actors. I started writing about them. I wrote hundreds of stories. I got the attention of numerous Nxivm members. At least one very special person took an interest – Bonnie Piesse. She told Catherine, who then called me.
Kipling said, “The sins ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one!” Ten months in prison today Vanguard, congratulations and Viva Executive Success!
Won’t you, good readers, send him a card wishing him well. Send correspondence to Metropolitan Detention Center, P.O. Box 329002, Brooklyn NY 11232. You must address it to both his name – Keith Alan Raniere AKA Vanguard and his register number: 57005-177.
The post The world of Keith Raniere, now and then: 10 months in jail for the Vanguard today! appeared first on Artvoice.