‘Sex, money, power’
That’s all NXIVM ‘crime boss’ cared about: U.S. att’y
The leader of the NXIVM “sex cult,” Keith Raniere, is a “con man,” “predator” and “crime boss” who used an idyllic setting as a stage to manipulate and prey on women, a federal prosecutor charged Monday.
In closing arguments in Raniere’s trial in Brooklyn Federal Court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Moira Penza said his foremost goals were “sex, money, power.”
“Even though his community members considered him a humanitarian, leader, mentor and guru, you saw him for what he was: a con man, a predator and a crime boss,” she told jurors, referring to the testimony of former members of the Albany-based group.
“The defendant tapped into a never-ending flow of women and money … he was the ruler of his universe,” Penza said, branding Raniere “a crime boss with no check of his limits.”
Raniere is accused of helping himself to women who were recruited for his sexual pleasure. He has pleaded not guilty, and said that his encounters with the alleged victims, some of whom were branded with his initials, were consensual.
Among the people in the packed courtroom were former NXIVM member India Oxenberg and her mother, actress Catherine Oxenberg. The former “Dynasty” star has written a book about her effort to save her daughter from the group.
The prosecutor called out Raniere and his top deputies for using, over a 15-year period, “tactics that destroyed their victims’ sense of self,” including turning “victims into victimizers.”
Penza cited a former member who was confined to one room from 2010 to 2012 and became Raniere’s sex slave, forced to “sexually perform on the defendant’s demand,” and ultimately spy on his enemies, including her older sister, who was in Raniere’s harem.
The prosecutor blasted away at child pornography of one member that Raniere kept on an external hard drive in his “executive library.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that [the girl] was under 18 when the naked pictures were taken,” Penza said, adding that another member of the secret “sex cult” once apologized to Raniere for “not doing enough to facilitate her own teenage daughter possibly becoming a successor.”
“The defendant did not create [the secret group known as] DOS to be a sisterhood … or a group of best buddies,” she said, adding that it was formed so Raniere could “have DOS slaves work for him and have sex with him.”
“Can there really be any doubt that DOS was just a way for the defendant to get what he wanted and for sex?” Penza asked the jury.
Defense attorney Marc Agnifilo rebutted accusations that Raniere headed a criminal organization and had sex with an underage NXIVM member.
The secret DOS subgroup “has nothing to do with making money,” and NXIVM was a “true business,” Agnifilo told the jury. And, he added, “Keith Raniere is not charged in any way shape [or] form with having sex” with a minor.
He said the member referenced by the prosecution as being confined to her room for two years was under her family’s supervision. “To ignore that [the family was there] and to say well Keith did it ... is to ignore a pretty big fact,” he said.