Truth vs. the cult
For hours Tuesday, victims of Keith Raniere paraded before Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis through the large ceremonial courtroom, telling of how the man about to be put away—called “Vanguard” or “Grandmaster” within his criminal sex cult NXIVM—coerced, tortured, starved, raped and stole from them. When they were done, Garaufis gave Vanguard 120 years in prison for extortion, racketeering, sex trafficking, identity theft, child pornography, forced labor and wire fraud.
Assuming the sentence holds, the Grandmaster will be out in 2140, when he’s 180 years old.
He’s the villain here. The story also has its heroes: defectors from the cult and journalists, chief among them Jim Odato, who put the sordid narrative together in the pages of The Albany Times Union.
For the better part of two decades, NXIVM, based in suburban Albany, New York, had Hollywood actresses and heiresses funding Raniere’s supposed self-help enterprise. It was a curiosity, and a glamorous one, that has generated several TV series.
Then Odato and his colleagues got on the case. In 2012, The Times Union ran a series of stories exposing the secretive, and vindictive, NXIVM and Raniere.
Of course, the truth was a threat, so the cult then went after the newspaper and reporter and went after them hard, seeking criminal charges, and most of all seeking silence.
From the moment the first expose appeared, law enforcement authorities should have dug into NXIVM and Raniere. If they had, and ended the conspiracy then, many future victims could have been spared. They did not.
Instead, with shades of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, the intimidation worked. Over the years, Raniere grew bolder and branched into new areas of crime. Even to this day, some of his remaining followers cling to the aura the felon fabricated.
Odato’s articles are still worth reading. If only they had been acted on.
ASupreme Court remade by President Donald Trump, one that now includes Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, will have one vast if invisible cheering section: citizens unfortunate enough to get caught up in the federal regulatory maze that dictates when private property can or cannot be used according to the rulings of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the Service) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps).
For the previous 30-some years, federal regulators could, under routine circumstances, forbid a private citizen with full legal title to his or her land to do anything with it—to mow its grass, fell its timber, or plant and harvest it for food. To defy the Service’s or the Corps’ orders is to risk jail time under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) or massive fines under the Clean Water Act (CWA).
Dig around in the records of any city or township visited by an ESA declaration that such-and-such “subspecies” is “endangered” or “threatened”—say, the Stephens’ kangaroo rat, the California gnatcatcher, the San Diego fairy shrimp, to name a few—and you will find libraries full of “impact studies” and dusty applications for “take permits” begging the Service for permission to allow productive activity on a citizen’s private property.
You’ll also find broken dreams and scuttled businesses.
Occasionally, one landowner, usually assisted