Category: NXIVM

Ex-NXIVM trainer: Students are prey

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.

Ex-NXIVM student: ‘I think it’s a cult’

Keith Raniere, NXIVM 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.

Tyke, 3, raised as shady guru’s ‘son’

Keith Raniere, NXIVM A motherless, 3-year-old boy is living in near-isolation at an upstate “cult” compound — as the heir of the group’s shady svengali, who feeds off the Seagram’s booze fortune, sources told The New York Post.

He was brought to Keith Raniere — the controversial leader of the Albany-based “behavior modification” group NXIVM that counts two Seagram heiresses among its devotees — by a longtime member who claimed that she was given guardianship when the child’s mother died, sources said.

Charges against ex-Nxivm adviser dropped

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.

NXIVM’s vexing effect on believers

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.