Your Honor,

I am Ivy Nevares. Thank you for allowing me to speak freely about Keith Raniere.

I met him during my first ESP workshop in 2001. Although I was already indoctrinated, my instincts hadn’t been worn away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the coursework showed his fascination with criminal psychology—specifically swindling and sociopathy. He even created a worse class of sociopaths he called “suppressives,” and later “luciferians” for added drama.

He showed up for a Q&A at the end of the fifth day. I asked him during that first encounter, “You seem to know a lot about these suppressives. How do I know you’re not one of them?”

He smiled coyly and said, “Because they can’t build value—they can only destroy.”

I would have normally caught the black-and-white fallacy, were it not for the narrative that had been pushed on me by his adoring women, who were already grooming me then. Like thousands of others, I innocently believed him to be sincere.

Ten months and several workshops later, Raniere asked for a lifetime personal and professional commitment—I could be with no other man and work for no other person or company.

I knew something was off early on—he spoke too much and too highly of himself, and claimed to have mystical powers no one should question. I was too embarrassed to ask why he spoke of mysticism while publicly claiming to be a scientist.

One of his most preposterous claims was that he had to have sex constantly, lest his “spiritual energy” consume him to the point of death.

I would like to ask him, your Honor:

You’ve presumably gone 2.5 years without sex since your arrest. How is it you’re still alive?

Hm.

One of the cornerstones of Raniere’s model was that ethical civilization can only be achieved, and I quote, “through mutually-consented, honest trade.” But consent cannot exist alongside dishonesty. And that, right there, was the loophole he relentlessly exploited.

I consented to an intimate relationship with him, but I never consented to being lied to, manipulated or abused. I never consented to being held captive by a dependence-inducing system that he architected. I never consented to having his flying monkeys gaslight, exploit, harass, threaten and attack me around the clock under his direction, simply because I refused to comply.

I would like to address Raniere directly:

That fateful October, you weren’t asking for fidelity—you were asking for blind obedience. You weren’t offering a type of marriage—you were opening the door to countless unwritten contracts whose conditions became ever-moving targets, but whose penalties you and your women were quick to enforce.

You asked me what I wanted from you. I said, “To know true love.”

You instead subjected me to nearly 17 years of indentured servitude and your own perverted monstrosities.

Had I known all this going in, I would have never followed you.

The force of Raniere’s world rests on a flippant double-edged sword he wields to benefit those who shield and finance his criminal appetite and to cripple those who refused to do so. He shunned me for the better part of 11 years and ordered others to do the same, because I could not or would not meet his extreme demands.

A decade before DOS existed, Raniere was already tormenting me with the practices the women would later take on. One year, after I put myself through hell to weigh his desired 95 pounds, he shunned me because I ate a handful of pumpkin seeds, breaking my 400-calorie limit. That night, he said his leaving me hurt him more than it did me. He is a sadistic, pathological liar!

Raniere said, and I quote, “Things are most maneuverable when they’re most unstable.” That’s exactly how he managed to subject me and others to systemic abuses—he kept us sleep-deprived, blackmailed, exploited, traumatized and malnourished.

One year, I completed a 45-day fast to prove to him that I cared about our relationship “enough.” What was his response? That I wanted to break the fast because I was “weak” and had “no character,” so he ordered me to extend it an additional 10 days—and I did with the best of intentions. But it was never enough. Nothing ever was.

Many of us experienced PTSD from Raniere’s “readiness drills.” I found out where he came up with the idea during an SOP training: in a video, he said a person close to him had lost a brother to murder and that the body wasn’t discovered until 10 days after his death.

That was my brother, Fernando! How dare you desecrate my brother’s death as justification to torture countless women?!

I come from a Mexican family, and Raniere knew that having children is important to me, so he baited me with promises of his firstborn child, like he did others. I was very clear early on, I said: “If you father a child with someone else, I will not raise hell. I will not destroy you. I will simply slip away quietly.” He agreed to be truthful then. Instead, he instructed the other women in the inner circle to lie to my face about his children for years—even after he was arrested!

I’m relieved to know one of his youngest victims has finally denounced him. It makes me sick to think he was raping a child AND sleeping with her sisters when he was living with me, swearing he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else. These very acts alone demonstrate his crazed misogyny.

In February 2015, Kristen Keeffe, Raniere’s long-time ally, emailed me shortly after she defected with their son. She said Raniere was hoping I would commit suicide. When I sent him the email, he replied, and I quote, “Can you see she is not of right mind?”

I’ve spent several years contemplating Kristen’s accusation because I refused to believe it was true. Recently, I learned she said that on walks with Raniere, he asked gleefully, “Do you think Ivy’s gonna try to commit suicide?"

When we first met, Raniere was intensely curious about my cutting myself and having suicidal thoughts as a teenager. I shared with him that in my early twenties, I foolishly imagined that if my ideal partner left me, it would be best for me to leave this world.

He used the first six years of our relationship to become that ideal man. He lived with me, lavished me with gifts and attention, much to the displeasure of the other women. And one fine day, he began shunning me, while he flaunted other women in public and barred me from even walking on the same streets as them.

I will address him again:

You often cited the Ayn Rand quote, “A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.” Was my potential suicide your ultimate experiment?

I see now you exploited my dependence on a mate and suddenly marginalized me. Did you think that would drive me to commit suicide?

No matter the abuse, no matter the intensity of betrayal, I never came close to considering that option. The gift of your ultimate betrayal to me was realizing NO MAN is ever worth losing my life over. Much less a sick predator like you.

In our professional relationship, he violated every single work-related principle he preached—specifically, that work raises self-esteem only when it’s justly remunerated, otherwise it’s enslavement. Yet it wasn’t enslavement when it came to me. No one in the organization ever gave him as much time and results as I did, yet he and his lazy women claimed that I was the one who owed him.

Raniere was hiding in Mexico the day I found the courage to end our relationship. I asked Nancy Salzman to relay the break-up in person, but she lied to me and refused to do so three separate times. I want him to know I left him on January 15, 2018.

Alas, Raniere’s day of reckoning has finally come. This is my last message to him.

As a writer, you cautioned me to use my skill honorably and that, with a stroke of the pen, I could irrevocably affect the character of those I wrote about. Your own actions have rewritten your character. There is no damage I can do in this respect.

I do not speak as a jilted lover—on the contrary, I’m grateful my defiance created a distance between us. I don’t care that you had children with other women—I cared that you lied to me about it. And I’m not brainwashed—I’ve come to these conclusions myself after uncovering the myriad of lies you used to entrap me.

The last sympathy I felt for the man I fell in love with died with your lawyer’s sentencing memorandum. You have no remorse over what you’ve done. You blame your victims and direct your flying monkeys to create insults to legitimate social movements, as you try to fight your imaginary injustice. “We Are As You” and “Make Justice Blind” are platforms through which your co-conspirators like Nicki Clyne and Eduardo Asúnsolo commit professional and social suicide every day—they just don’t know it yet.

It is with a very careful stroke of my pen that I say and mean every word here: you are and forever will be remembered as the most dangerous predator of all.

May you live long enough in prison to know the hell you put me and others through.

Worth writing down

My statement at Keith Raniere’s sentencing hearing