Yikes! And I thought that cults were only part of religious movements (though I am aware of a relationship between the founders of businesses and personal religious beliefs).

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/190881/how-strange-secretive-cult-company-waging-legal-war-against-journalists

From the article:

"IVM, based in Albany, is not your typical company. Founded in 1998 by Nancy Salzman and Keith Raniere as Executive Success Programs, the renamed NXIVM, according to its lawsuit, “conducts professional success training programs for executives and other individuals concerned with developing their skills and achieving their goals.” Its seminars “provide training in areas such as internal ethics, logical analysis and problem-solving skills, and are based primarily on a patent pending system, called Rational Inquiry.” A five-day course costs around $3,000; a 16-day course costs $7,500.

Some people have referred to NXIVM as “a cult” that revolves around Raniere, who seems to exert a Svengali-like hold on rich, attractive and powerful women. According to Andrews’s November 2010 Vanity Fair article, “The Heiresses and The Cult,” among the company’s fans are Pamela Cafritz, the daughter of wealthy Washington area developers; billionaire Richard Branson; and Sara and Clare Bronfman, two heirs of the Seagram fortune and the daughters of the late billionaire, Edgar Bronfman Sr. Their half-brother, Edgar Bronfman Jr., is the billionaire former CEO of the Warner Music Group. In an October 2003 cover story, Forbes quoted Bronfman Sr. describing NXIVM as “a cult” and said he was worried about his daughters’ “emotional and financial” investment in it. According to Andrews’ meticulous reporting in Vanity Fair, the Bronfman women’s involvement with NXIVM and Raniere began more than a decade ago and is plenty sordid. Since then, according to court documents in a separate case, the Bronfman sisters allegedly used some $150 million of their fortune to “cover Raniere’s failed bets in the commodities market” ($66 million), “to buy real estate in Los Angeles and around Albany” ($30 million), to purchase a 22-seat private jet ($11 million) and “millions more to support a barrage of lawsuits across the country against NXIVM’s enemies.”

Odato, a longtime political reporter for the Albany Times Union, began reporting on NXIVM in 2007 after he discovered that Joseph Bruno, then the majority leader of the New York State Senate, had received more than $30,000 in cash and another $34,000 of in-kind donations from the two Bronfman sisters, who, he soon found, were closely tied to the Albany-based NXIVM. In more than thirty-five articles about NXIVM and its leadership, Odato traced how the Bronfman sisters funneled a huge pile of cash to Raniere, among other revelations. In February 2012, Odato wrote a four-part series titled, “Secrets of NXIVM.” Observed Odato, “Keith Raniere, a multi-level marketing businessman turned self-improvement guru, has peddled himself as a spiritual being to followers, most of them women. A close-knit group of these women has tended to him, paid his bills and shuttled him around. Several have satisfied his sexual needs. And a few have left their families behind to wrap him in their affections.” While Odato noted that Raniere does not believe that NXIVM is “a cult,” he did cite one source comparing Raniere to David Koresh, the leader of the infamous Branch Davidian cult whose Waco, Texas compound went up in flames after a fifty-one-day standoff with federal agents in 1993, killing some seventy-five people, including more than a dozen children."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/24/2014 12:30PM by blindguy.

Follows the pattern.

"Women who have had sex with Keith Raniere say it was billed as a spiritual experience, a transfer of his godlike energy.

One said Raniere told her their union would make her see a blue light.

Another recalled him explaining a threesome would cure the pain of childhood molestation — that she could then start to view sex as just sex.

And in 1984, when a woman objected to 24-year-old Raniere having sex with her underage sister, the woman said Raniere explained her sister's soul was much older than her biological age. The girl was 15 or 16 at the time. But according to the man who came to view himself as an enlightened being, she was a Buddhist goddess meant to be with him."
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/In-Raniere-s-shadows-3341644.php

Elderberry:
Thanks for the second article.Mr. Raniere sure looks like another Joseph Smith wannabe. The biggest tragedy for me, though, is the girls who feel they need his services.

I suspect that Odato will not live to a ripe old age...

Cults require blind faith, money and control sex.

And who wouldn't want to buy these things????