The Horny Holy Man

Keith Raniere duped followers that power and growth came through submission

- Vanessa Grigoriadis

Much fiction, from Pride and Prejudice to The Talented Mr. Ripley, focuses on the male con man— the lothario who engages with the aspirations of beautiful, intelligent, and often wealthy women, enticing them to relinquish their bodies and fortunes. Keith Raniere, the 58-year-old leader of Nxivm, a cult-like organization based for decades near Albany, New York, was one such man, though an unlikely Don Juan. He was a former IT guy who founded a pyramid-scheme like grocery business in the 1980s, then hawked vitamins, and, some 15 years later, transformed into the guru to heiresses, actresses, and general deep-pocketed enlightenment seekers. But the guru thing was merely instrumental, a means to an end. In secret, he was enacting a jaw-droppingly bizarre sex scheme for his own pleasure, intertwining themes of madness, pain, and love like a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

On June 19, Raniere was convicted of sex trafficking, among other charges, in the modern New York City courthouse where cartel lord El Chapo recently lost his case. Raniere has a ruddy face, with large blue eyes concealed by Coke-bottle glasses; though he used to be partial to casual clothes and athletic gear, in court, the collar of a white dress shirt poked above a monochromatic sweater.

The best way to describe Raniere is a nerd Charles Manson, though Raniere didn’t use acid to get people to believe (or instruct them to butcher victims); his flock was stone-cold sober, and his tricks mixed those of a pickup artist, like negging, with the vernacular of many a modern lifestyle business. Just as Manson capitalized on the imperfections of the free love movement, Raniere enticed women into believing he could take the 2010s empowerment smorgasbord—wellness, activism, feminism—to its highest, purest level. Those who followed him, he insisted, would become stronger, emotionally and physically, or, as some of them called themselves, “badass.”