Nxivm Leader Rips Prosecutors in Request for $10m Bail

By Priscilla DeGregory and Lia Eustachewich
New York Post
June 6, 2018

https://nypost.com/2018/06/06/nxivm-leader-rips-prosecutors-in-request-for-10m-bail/

Keith Raniere

Lawyers for accused Nxivm sex cult leader Keith Raniere asked that he be sprung from jail on $10 million bond — all while ripping prosecutors as the “morality police” for filing sex-trafficking charges against him.

In new court papers, Raniere’s team of five lawyers argue that he’s neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community and should be released from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

He’s been held without bail since his arrest in April.

Raniere is accused of luring women through an offshoot of his self-help group Nxivm — pronounced “Nexium” — and blackmailing them into becoming his sex slaves.

Raniere and former “Smallville” actress Allison Mack — Raniere’s high-ranking “slave” who allegedly helped recruit women to a Nxivm side group called DOS — would brand their initials on their victims, prosecutors say.

Raniere’s attorneys, led by Marc Agnifilo, have maintained everything was consensual.

“By condemning DOS as a criminal enterprise and the teachings of Keith Raniere as fraudulent and criminal, the Department of Justice has made itself the morality police,” his attorneys wrote in papers filed Tuesday.

“The federal Government apparently does not approve of the way hundreds of women are searching for happiness, fulfillment and meaning in their lives and is now seeking to incarcerate a number of them as well as Raniere, whose ideas inspired this group.”

The defense wants Raniere released on the hefty bond and proposed that he also be subjected to stringent conditions, including home detention with GPS tracking and two guards watching him round-the-clock, the Brooklyn federal court documents say.

His lawyers also asked that he be able to leave home for doctor’s appointments, meetings with his lawyers and court dates while escorted by a security detail.

Their 28-page motion celebrates the 57-year-old self-styled philosopher as “an ethicist” who’s been “recognized by no less than the Dalai Lama.”

Raniere’s teaching methods helped people overcome Tourette syndrome, as well as spur a “successful peace movement in Mexico to curb drug cartel violence,” the filings claim.

Raniere’s lawyers argue in court papers that women willingly joined DOS “because they were genuinely interested in being part of a sisterhood of strong, independent women and in the benefits provided by a union of this type.”

Prosecutors have said there’s no set of bail conditions they’d consent to.

Mack is free after posting $5 million bond.

She and Raniere are due back in court June 13.