Damon Brink, a former NXIVM member, wrote on his new website, Let’s Not Be Frank, that ‘Frank Has Brought a Lot of Hatred Into the World’
I am Frank – the foil, the person not to be, of his new website.
I never met Damon Brink, but I have spoken to his wife, Sally, also a former NXIVM member. She has a less nostalgic fondness for NXIVM than her husband.
According to his website, Brink feels I have hurt him by what I have published about him.
“I have been experiencing the effects of Frank’s pixels, and they have not been good.’
Sally Had Different Experience
Damon’s wife Sally was one of the architects of NXIVM’s demise. She provided valuable information about its business practices to the prosecutors of Keith Raniere, Clare Bronfman, et al.
She also wrote a story for Frank Report in May 2021: Sally’s Shocking Story of How She Was Almost Destroyed By NXIVM High Rank and How Dr. Danielle Roberts Helped Save Her Life.
She spoke at Clare Bronfman’s sentencing: Cancer Survivor, Sally Brink’s Statement at Clare Bronfman Sentencing: ‘You’ve Caused so Much Destruction in so Many Lives.’
Sally Brink
A New York Times story report of the N XIVM lawsuit brought by dozens of former NXIVM members against 11 leaders of NXIVM, including Raniere and the Bronfman sisters, Clare and Sara, wrote, Sally Brink, “was fighting to escape [NXIVM]. The worst moment came in 2017; she said, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Nxivm associates told her that she had given herself the disease to get her husband’s attention. Instead of spending the money she had raised online for treatment, they urged her to make the ethical decision to die, she added.”
While Sally has dropped out of the NXIVM lawsuit, she has not issued any statement as to why.
Damon Lost a Job Because of Frank Report or NXIVM
In Dec. 2020, the Vermont publication Seven Days wrote an article about Damon: ‘Maybe I’m Brainwashed’: How the NXIVM Cult Followed Damon Brink to Vermont.
The story is about how Brink lost a state government contract job in Vermont because of his known connection to NXIVM:
“Since leaving the Albany area with his family in 2018, Brink has sought to establish himself as a mentor and coach in north-central Vermont. He serves as president of Stowe Youth Baseball and Lamoille County Little League. He founded an indoor batting cage center called Go Baseball and is a DJ for Top Hat Entertainment. In August 2019, he was hired to run an afterschool program at Everyone Equals Morristown Community Center or E=MC2. There, he helped secure a contract with the state Department for Children and Families to host supervised visits between non-custodial parents and their children.
“Earlier this month, however, a community member brought Brink’s past to the department’s attention. ‘We became aware of a connection between Mr. Brink and NXIVM,’ said DCF general counsel Jennifer Myka.
“Last Thursday, the department gave notice that it was exercising its right to cancel the $8,200 contract for no cause. Myka declined to say whether the decision was prompted by the tip.”
Damon Brink starts a new website that is decidedly not the Frank Report.
People probably discovered Damon’s connection to NXIVM because they did an online search, and Frank Report’s stories came up.
In the Seven Days story, I was interviewed:
“Frank Parlato, a former NXIVM employee who became one of its chief critics, has mercilessly mocked Brink as a dupe on his blog, the Frank Report, which has for years documented the organization’s alleged misdeeds. But even Parlato argues that Brink’s association with NXIVM should not cost him his career.
“‘I do not think Damon Brink is a threat to any children whatsoever. Just the opposite. I think he’s probably a good kind of role model for kids,’ Parlato said in an interview. ‘He might be brainwashed about Keith. He might be blind to Keith’s scenario. But he’s no threat to children.'”
I bring this up in part because Damon says I bring hatred, and the Seven Days story says I “mercilessly mocked” him.
Brink refers to his first appearance on Frank Report – back in Sept. 2017 – as “Jesus fuck, it sucked. Brutal.”
Was it brutal?
Brink made his debut on FR before Raniere was arrested before the NY Times came out before the criminal investigation began.
In the summer of 2017, I was the only one writing about Raniere, trying to get people interested in what I was sure were his high crimes and misdemeanors.
My story was about Damon’s short video for the Society of Protectors. The story was: Bullshit Detector goes off during Damon Brink’s video about Raniere.
The tone was a little sarcastic. I posted a picture of a bullshit detector, a device that has not been invented yet, but I believe Keith Raniere filed for the patent.
However, he could never bring it to market, for much like how radar detectors went off when Raniere drove in a car, preventing him from driving, the bullshit detector went off whenever he spoke.
But is mocking hating? Maybe it is.
.
MK10ART: Frank Parlato and Keith Raniere – I was after Raniere for years, just as he had been after me. Tit for tat with compound interest.
Let us revisit the video and hear what Damon says in his pitch for men to come to a Society of Protectors weekend retreat to be taught great truths formulated by Keith Raniere.
Keith Raniere
Damon Brink said in the video:
For those of you that don’t know, our founder, Keith Raniere, has built more than 1000 millionaires in his life. He has built multi-million dollar businesses in a short amount of time and, at one point, was making more than $100,000 per hour coaching the highest level business executives in the world.
This advertisement for SOP is a prime example of how Raniere’s followers mythologized him, uncritically advancing claims that people with critical thinking skills – something NXIVM was supposed to teach – would not believe for a moment.
Yet hundreds of men joined SOP, intelligent men, bought hook and line the stinker.
Message to Damon
Damon, you said in your post Perpetual Shift that the first FR story about you concerned a video you “shot for friends and members of SOP trying to recruit them up to Albany for an SOP weekend. I made a poor choice making that video for sure, and it will stay with me forever. Now I’m good with it.”
Let us honestly consider this video you published. You made three claims about Raniere.
Claim 1: Keith Raniere built more than 1,000 millionaires in his life
Claim 2. He has built multi-million dollar businesses in a short amount of time
Claim 3. He was making more than $100,000 per hour coaching the highest level business executives in the world
You were crediting Keith as the reason more than 1,000 people became millionaires. Did you take Keith’s or someone else’s, maybe Nancy Salzman’s word? Did you verify this? How many millionaires did you speak to who credited Keith with making them rich?
Did Keith build you into a millionaire? Was your net worth higher or lower when you said this on video than when you first met Raniere?
I know of no one who became a millionaire because of Keith – except perhaps Nancy. I can name several who lost millions – Allison Mack, Barbara Bouchey, Michael Sutton, the Bronfman sisters. And I can name dozens who thought they would make a million but got poorer. Many left successful careers.
Did you leave a successful career, Damon, to go to Albany to work full-time for NXIVM
As for the companies be built? What are their names? He built Consumer’s Buyline into a million-dollar business, and it fell apart.
Keith Raniere built a meteoric business – which fell as fast as it rose.
“As an entrepreneur, Keith Raniere transformed a five-person organization into a corporation of nearly 400,000 in a mere two years. His company, Consumers’ Buyline, Inc., was responsible for an estimated one billion dollars in product and service sales in its second full year of business and was featured on the American Spotlight A millionaire at the age of thirty, Keith Raniere was worth $50 million only two years later.”
What was not disclosed on the bio is that CBI was under state investigation and lawsuits by Attorneys General in several states by its third year, ultimately closing the company down.
Some 25 years later, Raniere claimed on a federal affidavit that he had zero assets and zero income at the time of his arrest.
Lastly, I find it hard to believe Raniere had any high-level executive – that is, a person who made their own money – and had top employment in business and finance –and not inherited it – to pay $100,000 per hour for coaching from him.
The only two people I can think of who might have paid $100,000 per hour were the Bronfman sisters, who, according to Raniere’s prosecutors, lost more than $100 million investing in Raniere.
They were not high-level executives; they were lambs to be shorn.
I Am Not Mocking You
When I published that story of your video, I wanted to show readers the gullible world of NXIVM, how you and others believed the preposterous whoppers Keith told about himself.
From being a judo champion, playing concert level piano at age 12, tying the record for the 100-yard dash, making the rain fall on someone when he was out walking, and not a drop fell on himself– on and on it went.
I was trying to reveal the absurdity of what you said in that video.
A Final Word
Of course, I had a plan to discredit people who tried to imprison me, Raniere and Bronfman.
Anyone who stood by them, spreading their lies, empowering them, was adversarial. I was out to ruin NXIVM for self-serving purposes.
MK10ART Clare Bronfman and Keith Raniere are both behind bars.
Clare Bronfman filed a criminal complaint against me on bogus charges. I doubt she would have done it had Keith not given her the green light.
So, in turn, I worked hard to get these two imprisoned.
While you were out bragging about how great Raniere is while he was trying to put me in prison.
If I could hate, I would hate you and Raniere. But I only gently mocked you for your faith in a criminal and your gullibility.
To paraphrase Diogenes, “it is not that I hate, it is only that my heart is different from yours.”
I cannot support guys like Raniere, who hate. I do not have the heart to let swindlers swindle and fools promote them.
You are still spending precious moments of life lusting for the glamor days, with maudlin nostalgia, looking back at NXIVM village with a lens of tinted rose. You complain you’ve “been experiencing the effects of Frank’s pixels, and they have not been good.”
But would you care to consider that the effects you are experiencing are because of Raniere?
You say I “brought a lot of hatred into the world.” I submit Raniere brought a lot of hatred in the world, and, in the past, you supported his lies. Maybe you still are supporting his lies.
Still, Damon, I wish you well, as I always do. I hope you keep writing and signing your name to what you write. I cannot respect a man or woman who cannot put their name behind their words and deeds yet spew cowardly attack or seek to hurt others – while keeping anonymous.
That kind of hate is the hallmark of the sniveling coward. But, I consider all hate to be just another name for cowardice.
If we were not afraid, we would not hate. We would wish them well. We might have to defeat someone but not hate them.
I never hated Raniere or Bronfman, not once, not ever. I felt sorry for them, for they meddled with me, and I knew to stop them because of their arrogance and mental illness, I would have to ruin them to stop their meddling with me.
And because of gullible followers like you who blindly follow rascals without applying your ethics, your conscience, instead of theirs to your words and deeds, I had to ruin NXIVM.
I wish Raniere well and you too. If I knew Raniere could change and be a compassionate human instead of a brute and a thief, I would welcome him tomorrow to my table. But he cannot change, I think. At least not now, and he is where he belongs – in prison.
For you, Damon, your life is before you. Good luck, and I hope you recognize one day that exposing evil is not hate; it might even be close to the opposite.
