MK10ART’s painting of the Vanguard festering in his prison cell, awaiting his release on appeal.
Keith Raniere’s criminal defense attorney, Marc Agnifilo, told the New York Times he was confident that attorney Neil Glazer’s civil lawsuit against Nxivm and its leaders will ultimately help Raniere’s appeal.
The Times reports:
Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mr. Raniere, said the lawsuit would allow Mr. Raniere to argue that some former Nxivm members did not provide truthful testimony at his trial.
“As several of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit testified at trial that they were not planning on bringing a lawsuit, Keith’s chances on appeal just increased,” Mr. Agnifilo said in a statement.
During the trial of Raniere, Agnifilo cross examined Daniela, the Mexican woman who was confined to a room for 700 days, asking her repeatedly if she was going to be part of a civil lawsuit. She adamantly denied she was.
Agnifilo sounded incredulous when she repeatedly denied she was taking part in the Glazer civil suit. Agnifilo even pointed out that Glazer was in the courtroom at that moment, and was her attorney, as I recall.
DOS slaves Jaye and Nicole, and former Nxivm leader Mark Vicente also testified in the trial and are plaintiffs in the Glazer lawsuit.
How far this bit about victims denying they planned to be part of a lawsuit will go to persuade appellate judges in the Second Circuit to overturn the results of the trial is hard to say for certain.
It doesn’t seem likely
After a six-week trial, on June 19, 2019 the jury delivered its verdict in under four hours.
It convicted Raniere on all seven counts:
racketeering conspiracy
racketeering
forced labor conspiracy
wire fraud conspiracy
sex trafficking conspiracy
sex trafficking
attempted sex trafficking,
Raniere, 59, faces possible life imprisonment.
The jury also found that Raniere was guilty of perpetrating the following RICO predicate acts:
Conspiracy to Commit Identity Theft
Conspiracy to Unlawfully Possess Identification Document
Sexual Exploitation of a Child
Sexual Exploitation of a Child #2
Possession of Child Pornography
Conspiracy to Commit Identity Theft #2
Identity Theft #1
Identity Theft #2
Conspiracy to Alter Records for Use in an Official Proceeding
Conspiracy to Commit Identity Theft #3
Trafficking for Labor and Services
Document Servitude
Extortion
Sex Trafficking
Forced Labor
Conspiracy to Commit Identity Theft #4
Raniere is awaiting sentencing and the date is uncertain, but expected to be in March or April.
Will the fact that a couple of prosecution witnesses who may have misled the court, or possibly changed their minds after testifying, saying under oath that they were not part of the Glazer lawsuit change anything?
It seems unlikely, by itself.
Agnifilo will also almost certainly argue that Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis’ halting his cross examination of Lauren Salzman prevented him from exposing Lauren’s self-serving motives in her testimony against her former lover, mentor and de facto employer.
Salzman, 41, undammed a river of tears, as she wept for herself over how she had been cruelly deceived by Raniere and lost 20 years of her life.
The judge was moved and told Agnifilo, in front of the jury, to shut up and sit down.
Later, outside the presence of the jury, he told Agnifilo that Lauren was a broken woman and that he was, after all, a man (or did he say “human being”?) first, and a judge second.
In short, did he mean “before there were laws, there were women” and man’s need to protect them? Or would he have acted the same way if a man was blubbering on the stand?
Giving the judge the benefit of the doubt and that there was no inappropriate judicial chivalrous and/or chauvinistic impulse, regardless of gender, he nevertheless stopped the cross examination just at the point where Agnifilo arguably was making some headway toward impeachment of a witness in a trial where the defendant was facing a possible life sentence
Keith Raniere’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, outside the Brooklyn courtroom. [Photo by Dianne Lipson]
Is this enough for a successful appeal?
No doubt Agnifilo will have other arguments. Perhaps the cumulative value of evidence permitted by the judge to be introduced, like the endless details of Raniere’s sex life, might be included in the appeal.
We even learned of Keith’s declarations about his penis length and the taste of his semen, things that some readers might wish to forget.
Unsightly, hair raising image of a beast ahead
Readers have complained that seeing the picture below without advance warning was a form of abuse akin to the human fright experiments of Dr. Brandon Porter. Consequently Frank Report now issues a warning prior to showing it:
Jurors learned a lot about Keith Raniere’s sex-addicted life at the trial, as the little rascal sat before them in court looking a bit like Little Lord Fauntleroy.
The Vanguard
In the event of a successful appeal, Raniere is not likely to be freed. A successful appeal will likely lead to a new trial.
If there is a new trial, Raniere will not likely go free on bail. The trial judge heard several applications for bail and denied them on the grounds that he is a flight risk and potential menace to society.
During the trial there was ample evidence to confirm the judge’s decision to deny bail. There was evidence that the smartest man in the world unwisely fled the jurisdiction after he found out he was under FBI investigation, going off to hide in Mexico and using burner phones, running from one city to another when the FBI learned of his residence [Frank Report published his actual address in San Pedro Garza Garcia].
He won’t likely get bail even if he gets a new trial.
But appellate judges are practical too. This is a high profile case. Another trial will be costly and create a shitstorm of media scrutiny for the judges and the system alike and could, depending on their ruling, make Garaufis look foolish.
Judges don’t like to make fellow judges look foolish.
Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis presided over the trial of Keith Alan Raniere and will be sentencing him too.
There are emotions at play and considerations that possibly will trump due process, if in reality Raniere’s due process rights were violated.
Chief of which is that, after a full six weeks of trial, the jury nailed the lordly rascal in less than four hours and that included a leisurely farewell luncheon.
If there had been no free lunch, I am convinced that the jury would have convicted Raniere in no more than 14 minutes, the maximum time it took for the eager jurors to fill out their verdict forms with a string of check marks in the guilty boxes.
The jurors had decided long before the trial ended that this was the guiltiest mother fucker they had ever seen.
You could see it from their eyes, and their facial expressions, that they were just waiting to cook this goose. There was no debate, no discussion, no need to review any evidence. There was the verdict and there was lunch.
Whether Lauren Salzman’s testimony had been stopped, or not, or even if she had not testified, would have made no difference.
Whether Dani or others said they were going to try to make a fortune off the asshole, would not have made the slightest difference.
This punk was going down. He was toast somewhere around the first day of testimony and it only got worse.
A second trial will not change a thing.
He will get convicted by a jury just as quickly and the only real thing that will be deliberated by the jurors is what each one is having for lunch.
Goodbye Mr. Raniere.
