OWNER JAILED FOR ROLE IN SEX TRAFFICKING CULT
Seagrams heiress Clare Bronfman who owns 80 per cent of Wakaya Island has been sentenced to six years and nine months in prison.
She was sentenced by an American federal judge in Brooklyn for crimes related to her role in NXIVM, saying she used her wealth as a “sword” to inspire fear and silence within Keith Raniere’s cult-like organisation.
Senior U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis gave Bronfman 21 more months in prison than prosecutors requested, and asked U.S. marshals to take the defendant into custody to begin her sentence.
The sentencing lasted nearly five hours in a cavernous second-floor courtroom in Brooklyn’s federal courthouse.
If Bronfman was surprised by the sentence, she wasn’t alone.
“When I heard him say 81 months, I was speechless,” former NXIVM member Barbara Bouchey said outside the courthouse.
The 41-year-old Bronfman, daughter of late Seagram’s tycoon Edgar Bronfman, sat between her attorneys, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and Duncan Levin, as 10 women, including Bouchey, laid bare the pain they said they experienced at the hands of Bronfman and Raniere, known in NXIVM as “Vanguard.” He faces life in prison at his sentencing on October 27.
The speakers included former friends and co-workers and ex-members of Raniere’s “master/ slave” group, Dominus Obsequious Sororium or DOS, in which some women were physically branded with his initials.
Bronfman “pretended to be my friend for a long time when I was just being manipulated to be groomed for Keith,” said one former DOS slave who described NXIVM as a “bogus and criminal organisation.”
Bronfman’s lawyers have said she had no knowledge of DOS until it was exposed in late 2017. Sullivan told the judge his client has “always been in the service of humanity,” adding, “When Clare sees someone suffering, she steps in.”