My victim impact statement addendum on Keith Raniere
/I’m publishing this the morning of Keith Raniere’s sentencing hearing. The Court will hear my testimony via a recorded message later today, which I will publish after the sentencing. For now, a brief preface followed by the addendum itself.
I submitted my first victim impact statement on Keith Raniere et al on Nov. 12, 2019. Such statements allow victims to relay their experiences of the defendants and their abuses to the Court. Knowing my first statement was delivered to Justice Garaufis brought me such peace. It was the first time I spoke out. I felt my voice was being heard when and where it mattered most.
My statement then dealt with five individuals in the NXIVM trial: Keith Raniere, Nancy Salzman, Clare Bronfman, Lauren Salzman and Kathy Russell. While I relayed my grievances against those individuals, I chose not to write about Allison Mack.
My doing so doesn’t mean Mack is innocent or that I’m shielding her in any way. The reason I didn’t submit a statement is that our relationship was always amicable—although deceptive on her part. She never displayed the abusive side of her personality with me. She looked up to me and, for whatever reason, never disrespected me. The worst thing she ever did was lie to my face about DOS and her involvement when I confronted her about it in late 2017.
I do not condone Mack’s criminal behavior or reported lack of contrition. My friends and even people I barely know suffered at her hand. It’s just not my story to tell.
Back to Raniere, whose time has come.
Today I will have said my final words to him in Court. But I neglected to include this: Raniere often referred to me as a flower denying its roots, citing my supposed “ethical breach” against him. I titled one of the chapters in our books after his accusation, believing him to hold the moral high ground. How foolish I was.
What “rootless flower” means is that Raniere single-handedly “made me” in terms of my skill, talents and position within NXIVM, and that I was at fault for denying him the recognition for my success and achievements by not complying with his extreme demands. His lawyers or remaining loyalists can relay this to him:
I am a flower, but you were NEVER my roots. You were the poison in my water.
As I’ve continued healing over the last two years, the process has armored me with greater awareness and insight. That whole “hindsight is 20/20” is for those who want to see the past for what it was, not for those who seek to revise it. In my case, the benefits of hindsight are strengthened by having years’ worth of archived information.
I am not yet ready to disclose a lot of the more personal, intimate details of my dealings with Raniere and NXIVM. However, I will disclose my addendum statement to Justice Garaufis. Not only because it is timely, but because it is right. It is an important step in releasing myself of the burden of secrecy and shame I’ve carried for so long.
The search for truth brought me to Raniere—egregious things followed. Now the painful truth must come forth.
“Severed” ©2008, Ivy Nevares. All rights reserved.
October 8, 2020
Hon. Nicholas G. Garaufis
Your Honor,
This letter may be one of the most important I ever write, for a person’s future hangs in the balance. It is not something I take lightly.
Before I met Keith Raniere in 2001, I had never been abused in an adult intimate relationship. I was loyal to him for nearly 17 years, despite how much he harmed me, directly and through his women. What buttressed that loyalty? Some acts of kindness on his part that led me to believe there was goodness in him. What kept me in that glass prison? Mostly lies and information he and others withheld from me to control me. The combination acted as powerful leverage that wore my instincts over time.
Even after he was arrested, I hoped with all of my heart to be right about him—not in the sense that he was innocent, but that the man I fell in love with was somewhere in there and that his arrest and imprisonment would guide him back to the light. When his followers started the so-called movement “We Are As You” this summer—the first of several recent efforts Raniere has directed to con the public into believing he was wrongly prosecuted and convicted—that perception of him began to change. I was sure he was behind it and felt personally insulted, not just as a victim but as a dancer.
The day I read the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum on Raniere was the day the last of my compassion for the person I thought I knew died. He takes pride in his total lack of remorse or consideration for his victims. He sees himself and his loyalists as victims, without any idea how their parading around for him as “activists” is affecting us all. He couldn’t just stop at the dance-protest farce but had to mount another one to mock the work prosecutors have done and to mock this very Court. And to top it all off, he made his victim’s suffering a contest worth a $30,000 prize, even though he knows full well there is not a shred of evidence to support his claims of innocence and persecution. How dare he?!
I am outraged by his arrogance, sociopathy and utter disregard for the law. I am outraged that he dare insinuate the Court is incompetent or corrupt. While I know the Court can see through NXIVM’s manipulation so clearly even it as it’s being perpetrated in the proceedings, as evidenced in Clare Bronfman’s sentencing, I wish to share some of my own experiences so the Court can fully appreciate how Raniere’s actions affected me and continue to impact me to this day.
Raniere stole nearly 17 years of my life and labor. He took credit for the work I did and the skills I built during his nearly 11-year absence in our relationship, as he shunned me for an “ethical breach” I supposedly committed against him. Initially, the “breach” was raising questions about Raniere’s conduct and promiscuity, then it morphed into my gaining weight, then it became something no one could define. A solution is impossible if a problem cannot be defined. Through these imaginary infractions, Raniere directed most of the community to shun me, making me a pariah until I figured out the impossible task of remedying the “breach.”
An ever-moving target, these “ethical breaches” kept me in a perpetual state of indebtedness and, as hard as I tried, no remedy was ever enough. Raniere and his women used “breaches” to enforce and justify their crimes and abuses. I was not alone in this, but I am the person he penalized and marginalized the longest in NXIVM’s history.
I have physical proof of this. Although I didn’t have a positive body image, I did enjoy my thick, brunette hair, which I loved to wear long since I was 13. As with everything I loved in my life, he turned it into a weapon: he made an example of me within the community by publicly humiliating me after insisting I could not cut my hair until I healed my “breach.” Because I still believed him—and believed in him—I let my hair grow more than a foot beyond my height, which is 5’ 3”. I did this to get back in his good graces, as I became ashamed of the locks I once cherished. His women also used his hair length mandates as leverage over me.
Raniere lied to me consistently and deprived me of information he and his women knew would have caused me to leave. He shunned, chastised, humiliated, penalized, defamed and swindled me and, when he was too busy abusing others, he instructed his women to subject me to the same abuses. My principal tormentors were Nancy Salzman, Lauren Salzman and the late Pamela Cafritz. Clare Bronfman and Kathy Russell were instrumental in my labor exploitation. There are others too, some still parading around New York City, others comfortably hiding in Mexico.
The ire I feel towards them quietly rages inside, yet it has been the very thing that guides my voice as I have come forward and provided statements to the Court, against all of my ingrained fears of prejudice, abuse and retaliation. This opportunity to share my story has finally liberated me from the deteriorating burden of the secrecy I swore to Raniere on October 10, 2002. Writing this very statement and reliving the nightmare has been so emotionally excruciating that I have had to walk away from it multiple times for five consecutive days.
I had a very troubled past before I went to ESP. I come from a broken home: my brother was a drug addict, my father an alcoholic, and when I was 14, I had a hand in raising my two younger sisters after my father abandoned the family overnight and my mother assumed his role as provider. My brother was killed when he was 20 and I, 19. By the time I was 20, I was clinically depressed and plagued with nightmares that would cause me to wake up screaming—sometimes waking up my college roommates.
I tried everything I could to get better: therapy, yoga, acupuncture, self-help books—the list goes on. I am a sensitive and empathic woman who feels others’ pain as her own and cares deeply. For whatever reason, I cannot just shut it off—empathy has been a burden to bear. Part of Raniere’s method is to delve deeply into the inner lives of those close to him, mining their psyches for information that can be weaponized. He and his women used my sensitivity against me to serve his purposes.
When I first met Raniere, he was exceedingly interested in two things about my youth of which I am not proud: cutting myself and suicidal thoughts—adolescent ways to numb out or escape the emotional pain with self-inflicted pain or fantasies.
He was fascinated by one of my scars, which I made during a bloodletting when I was 16. I have come to believe he took the idea for DOS’ branding from my scars and that particular experience. He used this and other knowledge against me for years, turning my deepest pain and traumas into tools to keep me under his control, convincing me everything was my fault, rendering me too fearful to speak out or walk away. I accepted his abuse as the necessary means to transform myself into someone worthy of his love—my greatest error.
I was so deeply under his spell that I could not see it as abuse at the time, and it is incredibly painful now to reflect on these events and see the many ways he intentionally amplified my earlier traumas simply because that served his depraved purposes. His efforts to control me knew NO bounds: he controlled my livelihood, career, body, sex, interactions with men, friendships, comings and goings, sleep, emotions—especially my beliefs and perceptions.
Raniere lived with me from 2003 to 2006 and swore fidelity to me. The court record shows he was also bedding three sisters at the time, including 15-year-old Camila! Knowing I was sleeping with him when he was abusing a child and performing incest with her sisters fills me with utter disgust! That I was biologically connected to those very acts because Raniere refused to bathe for over two years is absolutely repugnant!! I am amazed I never contracted an STD.
Raniere used everything at his disposal against me, even my most important family relationships. In June 2008, I received a call from one of my relatives in Mexico, informing me my father was dying—mesenteric thrombosis had left him with only a few feet of his small intestine. I flew there intending to say goodbye to one of the most beloved people in my life. He knew how important my father was to me and positioned himself as savior.
He mobilized NXIVM’s Mexico City community to help—as a result, my father was transferred to a better hospital, where he was treated by a preeminent gastroenterologist. After two unsuccessful surgeries, the doctors concluded all that could be done was to perform a third and final surgery to remove necrotized tissue to make him slightly more comfortable until he passed away.
After hours in the waiting room, the surgeon came out to meet me, head hanging low, shaking. I braced for the worst: “In all my years of practice, I have never seen this. His tissue has healed! I think we’ve just witnessed a miracle.” Whether it was a miracle is debatable, yet Raniere was quick to take credit for it and I believed him, which instilled in me an immense debt of gratitude.
My father passed away a few months later. But for the longest time, on nearly every occasion that I would suffer some abuse by Raniere and his women, that very experience would come to mind, challenging my instinctual perception that I was being tormented. He and his women would hold it over my head when I threatened to leave NXIVM. I believed them when they told me it was impossible for a man who could perform such miracles to be ill-intended or do anyone harm.
Nor was the abuse strictly psychological. I suffered physically as well. I am at least a year away from full repair—and that doesn’t account for the psychological baggage when it comes to diet and exercise. I did severe damage to my metabolism by adhering to Raniere’s ludicrous 400-500 calories-per-day regimens coupled with a surplus of exercise. No matter how hard I pushed, the results were always short-lived and, to everyone’s surprise, I put on weight over the years.
In 2008, he threatened to shun me during our “anniversary” with the following email. The communication shows his desire to control my subconscious after I had an erotic dream about a faceless person. He implied I was “unfaithful” to him and that I needed to control my subconscious. As I read his email, I questioned the obvious, “Isn’t that the point of having a subconscious, to know unrestrained, unpredictable freedom?” I didn’t have the strength then to question his mystical claims that stood in stark contrast against his public persona as a “scientist.”
From: “Flintlock” <kunterre@nycap.rr.com>
Subject: Re: details
Date: October 6, 2008 at 3:27:16 AM EDT
To: “Ivy Nevares” <ivy@nxivm.com>
I want you to know I love you. I want the best for us and act toward you in a way to optimze [sic] that. I had planned to surprise you on our anniversary for I had hoped you would make this possible for me by losing weight etc. I do believe your habits are more important than “us.” We are nothing if you do not earn your way out of this ethical dilemma. At this point, I do not know your weight and you have not written to me as you promissed [sic]: obsessively. Even if you drank only water and walked many miles a day, I do not know if you can create the ethical permission for us to be together on our anniversary. I do not know what to do. Only you can create this, but it has to be more important in every moment than anything and I still [sic] there are no guarantees.
On another note relating to this: in thought I am far more “faithful” to you than you to me. For example, I have never dreamt of having sex with another woman. Up until recently you said the people with whom you had sex in your dreams were faceless and genital-less or with my genitals. This is no longer the case and I see it as an additional problem. It is a problem because of things you said and thought about my genitals amongst other things from the begining [sic] of our relationship due (I believe) to fear of dependency. I think you are obsessed in this area. If so, it is important you be obsessed with me/mine. Your dreams indicate otherwise.
I want to help you and us with all my heart. My condition has gotten very bad where I hide it from Nancy and Pam. I can't go on much longer. If you are to break this cycle, you must adopt a zero-tolerance, immediate policy with yourself. The moment you read this you must start, not tomorrow. You cannot use any excuse for any transgression. One single trangression [sic]--one single lazyness [sic] of writing or anything--and you have started down the slippery slope. You need to obsessively incorporate all I have written here: miss not one word. I cannot tell you anymore [sic]; it is all up to you. You need to prove us to yourself and to me. You must live all of your past commitments, ideas of commitments, thoughts of commitments and anything else you can imagine: there are no limits; no idea, concept or practice is too much. This is a start. I do not know if it will be enough but this fact must not discourage you.
Please do this. Make this right.
I love you.
“I can't go on much longer.” How on Earth was I to respond to that?!
For the following five days, I put myself on 500 calories of maple-syrup sweetened lemonade (the “Master Cleanse”), laxatives and saltwater purges. I walked 4 miles to the gym, worked out for an hour, sat in the sauna for an hour and walked 4 miles back home—this doesn’t include my teaching dance classes 1-2 hours a day. I lost 10 pounds in five days to spend our anniversary together, shortly before he shunned me again, because when I began eating, it caused an inflammatory response and my body stored the energy as fat.
After I left Albany in 2018, I read a book from Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist who precisely outlined why Raniere’s regimens wrought hormonal havoc on me—no wonder I couldn’t lose weight! But during all that time, he and his women blamed me:
You serve fear as your master. Satiation is your “other lover.” You’re not committed, much less committed to reality. You’re lazy, irresponsible, unprincipled. You care more about your body feelings than anything else. You don’t care enough about Keith!
I can still hear their voices and it brings me to tears. I’ve never had a positive body image, even though people have found me pretty or attractive, but I never felt ashamed about my body until I met Raniere, and I still feel ashamed.
I believe that and other torments made me a testing ground for what would later become DOS. He subjected all his women to diets, but because I am petite, I was the first he subjected to the 400-500 calorie diet. He demanded I write him “obsessively” throughout the day even though he rarely if ever responded. To prove I was loyal to him, he demanded other collateral and nudes, even if it meant producing it in other people’s homes. He also filmed us having sex multiple times and withheld the tapes from me.
In 2007, he put me in charge of the Ultima project, shortly after his first child was born. I understand now it was the ultimate hook to keep me in Albany: my only condition in our relationship, which I made crystal clear in the beginning, was that he not have a child with anyone else before we had ours. (I cannot convey how fortunate I am that I was careful enough to never conceive!) He instructed his women and the community to lie to me about both his children.
Ultima was designed to enhance human expression, so it aligned perfectly with my values—I am a writer, editor and dancer. In my opinion, it was one of the least destructive programs, and I poured my heart and soul into writing and teaching the curriculum.
I stopped teaching the original curriculum around 2009 because I couldn’t move the program forward as Raniere was aggressively shunning me. When he restarted Ultima in 2014, he also launched several offshoots, among them the media analysis company The Knife and the pseudo-health-and-wellness project Exo-Eso.
To get back in his good graces, I had to lose about 20 pounds in record time, which I did. The conditions of my return were these: I would earn nothing from the six or more hours I would teach each week, nor would I be compensated for teaching the Fiji workshops, even though they grossed $80,000 and $200,000 respectively. I accepted this in part because it was deeply ingrained in the community that if someone had breached, they could not deliver sufficient value to entitle them to compensation. Nancy Salzman told me that working without pay was an appropriate consequence of my supposed breach and that Raniere was infinitely generous by asking me back.
After being marginalized for so many years, I was grateful for the opportunity to teach again and rejoin my friends with my head held half-way high—because I could never forget my long absences from the community and the questions they raised. As was the case every time he stopped shunning me, I didn’t realize the only reason he did so was to keep me in indentured servitude. As soon as my work sufficed, he and others would resume my marginalization.
By 2014, he had elevated Marianna as the number one woman in the inner circle. She had no education, accomplishments, skills or career, and held one of the lowest ranks within ESP. Her extraordinary arrogance centered around the belief that servicing Raniere sexually was equivalent to a job qualification that earned her the highest status throughout NXIVM. Which, apparently, was the case in his twisted mind.
It was difficult for me to interact with her even as her teacher, and not just because of her arrogance: He demanded nothing of her, yet he and his women gave her everything. He demanded everything of me, yet he and his women gave me nothing—on the contrary, they stole from me everything that mattered: my self-esteem, self-worth, physical and emotional health, the value of my labor and precious, precious years.
Marianna decided to ditch a number of Ultima classes and not respond to every effort I made to catch her up. I treated her the same way anyone was supposed to be treated who fell behind: kicking her out of the program. But Raniere pushed back, demanding I take time out of my life to bring her into good standing. For the first time in my relationship with him, I said “no.”
He became furious—I could see it in his eyes. He tried the usual gaslighting, but for the first time, I remained adamant in my denial, believing she was the very last to deserve special treatment, given her childish behavior. Raniere then flipped the argument on its side:
Do you remember when I made YOU the favorite? Do you remember how much that angered all the other women? Do you remember how much they HATED you? Do you remember how you felt being on top? Do you remember how they felt being on the very bottom?
I swear I didn’t know where he was going with this.
Well, NOW you know what it feels like!
I don’t know if that was the first time spite shone in his eyes or if that was the first time I was able to see it. I was paralyzed, gutted to my very core. Instinctively, I started walking away from him, heart slaughtered.
As he saw me walk away, he threatened to give Ultima to Danielle Roberts, whom he considered incompetent and a terrible teacher. I succumbed and did not leave.
I cannot tell the Court how many times I’ve run that scenario in my mind, hearing the voice inside me screaming in desperation, “GET OUT! LEAVE HIM!!” It haunts me still.
For all of this, it gets darker yet. Perhaps the most sinister thing he ever attempted was to push me towards committing suicide. He was always curious about my suicidal thoughts as an adolescent, which I now understand are not uncommon. In February 2015, Kristin Keefe wrote me, warning that Raniere was a sociopath who wanted me to die by my own hand. Again, that fight for the belief in his goodness made me invalidate her message and, despite her warning, I stayed in NXIVM for an additional three and a half years.
I have recently learned more details from Kristin’s conversations with Raniere that are deeply disturbing. I’ve learned he gleefully questioned not only if but when I would commit suicide, once I learned of the information he was withholding from me. Worse still, he expressed his wish that I would be the first to fall in a cascade of suicide dominos, followed by Barbara Bouchey and other women he was oppressing.
I would set those anecdotes aside, were it not for this: As NXIVM’s communications specialist, I worked with Raniere and Nancy Salzman to write and edit the vast majority of the curriculum. I believe “Rational Inquiry” can be classified in three ways: innocuous, a double-edged sword and sociopathic.
Raniere had a fascination with criminal psychology—specifically swindling, narcissism, psychopathy, sociopathy, and a supposed condition worse than sociopathy that he called “luciferianism.” In one class, he described seven levels of sociopathy. The highest level was the most sadistic and depraved—characterizing the type of sociopath who is exquisitely overcome with Schadenfreude as his very subjects are tortured by his own hand. He called this module, “The Best Game in Town.”
The second question I ever asked Raniere was, “You seem to know a lot about sociopaths. How do we know you’re not one of them?” He giggled and responded, “Because sociopaths can’t build value. I do.” This happened on day five of my first ESP workshop in 2001.
It wasn’t until I read transcripts of Raniere’s calls from jail last month that I fully realized that part of the curriculum was entirely autobiographical in nature. He is the very predator he so specifically described, and believes he’s winning the biggest game of all.
Raniere continues to victimize those of us who left NXIVM and even the few marionettes whose strings he continues to pull, directing them to twerk in the streets of Brooklyn to entertain his fellow inmates, to mass at the U.S. Attorney’s Office demanding prosecutors sign some “affidavit,” and now parading as “activists” offering monetary rewards for evidence they claim to already possess yet say they will only release to the media at some undefined point in the future.
May I note the absurdity of this? Raniere publicly condemned NXIVM’s defectors’ taking their grievances to the media, rather than the justice system—until now, when the chips are down for him. A modern-day Nero, he sits in his cell, joyfully fiddling away while his very subjects follow his instruction and publicly debase themselves in ways their lives and careers will never recover from when (or if) they awaken from their chimeras.
The very day the jury convicted Raniere was the day I decided to get help. NXIVM long taught that psychology, psychiatry and any other sanctioned mental health approach were little more than money pits, and that “the tech” was the only effective tool. On that day, I threw that indoctrination out the window, seeing I could not shake the anxiety and nightmares that plagued me every day, and that I had to trust those sciences instead.
Having received a diagnosis of PTSD for the prolonged trauma of my years in Raniere’s orbit, I am finally on a path to healing—not from some “ethical breach,” but from the nearly two decades I was tormented by him and his female lieutenants.
In NXIVM, I developed a work ethic forged in the fire of forced labor, yet I had no self-confidence and little self-esteem. Still believing their narrative of my failings, I thought I completely lacked the required ability to make it in corporate America if I ever defected. I overcame that, and I am thriving in a rewarding position, but I still live in fear that my association with NXIVM might cost me my job. I have consulted with my company’s HR and legal departments in an effort to make sure my history won’t get me fired. I still don’t know if it will, but I feel compelled to say my piece, to speak my truth and to wrest from him and his cohorts every last bit of power over my life.
Raniere and his loyalists may write me off as a case of “hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.” Your Honor, I was not scorned—I was lied to, abused, exploited and tortured. The prime of my early adulthood and all the opportunities it held were stolen from me. My belief in myself was beaten down 24/7 at Raniere’s and his women’s hands.
I thought I was in a consensual relationship with Raniere, but I never consented to being lied to, controlled, exploited or abused. I didn’t ask for it—I didn’t deserve it. I entered into that relationship with a hopeful and open heart, and walked away nearly broken in every respect.
I believe Raniere deserves to live the rest of his days in prison and forever be deprived of his cohorts’ money and connections, not just for my sake and safety, but for those he continues to abuse. As the Court has witnessed, his predatory appetite is unmatched, even as he begins to wither away in prison. He is nothing without their money or connections.
Please disable his and his cohorts’ resources any way you can. Our safety and mental health depend on it.
Thank you, your Honor, for your time, consideration and strength in compassion.
With deep respect and admiration,
Ivy Nevares