Category: NXIVM

In court papers filed Friday, a former high ranking officer of NXIVM depicts the cultlike group as a self-help and ethics school that is secretly a place for its leader to explore opportunities for sex and gambling money, the Albany Times Union reports.

Susan Dones, a trainer who ran the Colonie-based company’s former Tacoma, Wash., center, told a bankruptcy court last week that Keith A. Raniere, the creator of the teachings used in NXIVM’s self-improvement courses, may have motives beyond the education of human potential.

Dones said NXIVM presents Raniere “as the most honest, ethical, Nobel (sic), man who had the answers to mankind’s problems” yet his training sessions are “used as a venue to stalk their students … who might fit into Raniere’s profile of sexual conquest and who might be willing to ‘give’ Raniere money to feed his gambling problem.”

The NXIVM business, also known as Executive Success Programs, treats Raniere, 50, of Clifton Park as its intellectual guru.

During most of her 25 months as a student of self-improvement programs run by the Colonie-based NXIVM organization, Becca Friedman felt like she was in a dream, but, she said, it became a dreadful nightmare.

Her story, she said, may be useful to people proposing to join or already studying at NXIVM, something she would not recommend.

Mike Huckabee is being backed by a bizarre group that has been denounced as a cult, The Post has learned.

Criminal charges have been dropped against a former top adviser to the Colonie-based Nxivm company who was accused of bilking a foundation affiliated with the “human potential” group for thousands of dollars, a spokesman for the District Attorney confirmed Saturday.

In published accounts, ex-members and mental-health professionals call NXIVM a “cult-like” group that uses sensory deprivation, “brainwashing” and other mind-bending tactics – sometimes to the point of psychological breakdowns.

A purported pyramid-scheme operator who was run out of Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor has reinvented himself as the head of an upstate group accused of being a “cult” – and his devotees have pumped thousands into Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential run.

A former adviser for the Colonie-based company was indicted Friday on charges he bilked thousands of dollars from a foundation affiliated with the human development group.