Alleged sex cult trial witness: 'It's a fraud, it's a lie'

A former high-ranking member who turned on the Albany-based alleged sex cult NXIVM described the self-help group as a sophisticated “trap” that trained adherents to mistrust themselves and rely instead on leader Keith Raniere for their “moral compass” in testimony in Brooklyn federal court on Thursday.

“If anyone had any issues, it was pointed back at you,” filmmaker and NXIVM dissident Mark Vicente told jurors at Raniere’s sex-trafficking and conspiracy trial. “You had to work with people to resolve your problem. If you spoke out, it was an indication of a problem you had.”

In a riveting inside look at NXIVM and its leader on his second day of testimony, Vicente described Raniere — known as “Vanguard” — as a man who claimed his massive IQ had made him a target of a global conspiracy, used “skull caps” with wires to chart the brain waves of students taking classes, and secretly set up surveillance cameras at members’ homes.

When he was asked to read Raniere’s 12-step “Mission Statement,” Vicente said he had recited it with other members 500 to 1,000 times at NXIVM classes and events — ending each time with the chant “Thank you Vanguard” — and then grabbed a handkerchief as he cried on the stand.

“It’s a fraud, it’s a lie,” he said. “It’s a well-intentioned veneer that covers horrible evil. It’s been used to harm a great many people.”

Raniere, 58, is charged with promoting NXIVM — also called ESP, or Executive Success Programs — as a series of classes for self-improvement and happiness, but turning it into a racketeering enterprise that manipulated members and ultimately coerced women into being sexual “slaves” for him.

The trial began Tuesday with testimony from a former British equestrian who eventually joined a secret “master-slave” group and followed orders to “seduce” Raniere. Prosecutors’ challenge is to show that persuading a sophisticated clientele — Vicente was a successful filmmaker — to freely participate was a crime.

Vicente, a former executive board member who provided information on NXIVM in news reports when he left after 12 years in 2017, described the rituals and tactics the group’s 60-plus companies used to market its pricy self-help courses to an estimated 17,000 students.

The core idea, he said, was that most people were “reactive,” driven by flawed instincts, and they needed NXIVM’s courses to gain happiness by thinking more deeply and ethically about what they were doing. “It in essence played with our moral compass,” Vicente said.

They used a judo-like ranked system of colored sashes to encourage adherents to take more courses — called the “stripe path” — and market them to others, while collecting intimate questionnaires and psychological profiles at every step and encouraging belief in Raniere’s brilliance.

Members celebrated the leader’s birthday every August with near-mandatory attendance at a “V-week” bash in the Adirondacks, Vicente said, and there were “rumblings” that he had “powers” over weather, an “energy” that affected computers, and might know a “path to enlightenment through sexuality.”

“It was a little bit like you were seeing some kind of god,” Vicente said.

Raniere, he said, claimed his first multilevel marketing company — in which members make money by recruiting new members — was ruined by state attorneys general when he refused to pay associates of Bill Clinton, and he was now a target because NXIVM’s philosophy threatened the global establishment.

“He had to be careful … because he was being watched all the time,” Vicente said, “and this conspiracy went to the highest level.”

His own work, Vicente said, ranged from tampering with a videotape that had been subpoenaed in a lawsuit at Raniere’s instigation, to brainstorming film ideas with Raniere. They included a climate-change debunker to be called “Carbon Crimes,” and discrediting “cult” charges against NXIVM by paying a family $1 million to be filmed behaving like a cult, and then exposing it as a fake.

Raniere’s projects, Vicente said, also included attaching “skull caps” with wires to the heads of some students taking NXIVM courses to record brain waves for “scientific research,” and installing street cameras linked to computer modems at members’ homes for a private communications system.

Vicente said he now believes it was nothing of the sort. “My understanding is it was surveillance on us,” he said. “Members of the community.”

The trial resumes on Monday.