Chet Hardin is a curious character. He claims to be a journalist. He seems to like to attack me anonymously.
His sanctimonious self-righteousness is crowd-pleasing.
Before we get into his baggage, let us analyze how this investigative reporter holds the high and mighty ground over despicable me.
He wrote the book Toni Natalie told him to write and put his name in embarrassingly small print below hers.
It is not surprising Chet got such tiny credit. He was just a paid stenographer.
Chet is a damn good stenographer.
Chet loves to criticize me, acting sanctimoniously. How high and righteous he is. He loves to be anonymous on Reddit. You’d think this high and holier-than-thou virtue signaler was genuinely incorruptible.
But he put his name on Toni Natalie’s book.
Victim Toni Natalie wrote a book
She spun yarns, and the investigative journalist, the incorruptible Hardin, took them down without fact-checking.
Of course, he could not challenge his mistress, who paid him and kept him in her house in Rochester and Brooklyn during the trial of Raniere.
Hardin was down and out. Toni told others how Chet got fired from his last job. We will expound on that later.
Unlike them, I never claimed I got into the attack on NXIVM for incorruptible reasons. I was after Raniere and Bronfman because they went after me.
Heartbreak and a Sweater
The “sweater in the dryer” story is why Toni said she broke up with Keith in her book. But one of Toni’s high school friends told Frank Report that Toni told the same sweater story about another boyfriend before she met Raniere.
In her book, The Program: Inside the Mind of Keith Raniere and the Rise and Fall of Nxivm, Toni assures us the sweater story really happened with Keith.
Toni also writes she gave up her son Michael because of Keith. Let’s examine what Toni and her gullible stenographer, the incorruptible Hardin, write in the book:
The situation was not safe— not for me, and certainly not for Michael. Above all, I was going to protect my son. I could not risk anything bad happening to him. It broke my heart, but I sent him back to Rochester to stay with Rusty… where the escalating situation with Keith was less likely to harm him. It was supposed to be temporary. I figured he’d be back in a month or two, at worst.
But Michael never moved back. He stayed with Rusty until he graduated from high school.
That I allowed myself to be separated from my child, far and away the most important person in my life, shows just how afraid I was of Keith Raniere.
Toni gave up her son to protect him from Keith, but she did not leave Keith.
Some mothers would have given up their boyfriend.
Rusty DeCook, Toni’s former husband and the boy’s father, told Frank Report that Michael asked to live with him when he was eight.
Michael had lived with Toni and Keith in Albany for two and a half years. While there, Toni put Michael on a low calorie-diet. She would weigh the boy daily. There were punishments if he violated his diet.
Michael recalls being punished by Toni when he sneaked cookies and ate them in the basement. The cookies were meant for Keith – which made it doubly serious.
When the boy visited his father those first two years, the first thing he did was eat, and the first thing Toni did when she called was to command Michael to step on a scale and report his weight.
Toni would chastise Rusty for letting the growing boy eat anything he liked.
Keith Raniere [l], Michael DeCook [m], and Toni Natalie [r]. The two on the outside ensured the one in the middle did not overeat.
Toni claims, and stenographer Chet dutifully wrote, that she was with Keith for eight years. However, her son Michael was with Toni and Keith for less than three years.
He went home to dad during summer vacations. Finally, at the end of third grade, the boy had enough of Toni and Keith – and asked his dad to let him live there.
Toni agreed.
Toni remained with Keith for five years afterward.
In her book, Toni wrote:
The situation was not safe— not for me, and certainly not for Michael. Above all, I was going to protect my son… It broke my heart, but I sent him back to Rochester, to stay with Rusty… It was supposed to be temporary…
But Michael never moved back….
That I allowed myself to be separated from my child, far and away the most important person in my life, shows just how afraid I was of Keith Raniere.”
If Keith was so terrifying, Toni could have left him. If she wanted to be with her son, she might have found a way.
Toni wrote in her book that Keith “would rape me as my son lay asleep in the next room…. I had to spend the night barricaded in a closet, rolled in a fetal ball on a bunch of pillows, to avoid his relentless assault.”
While with Keith, Toni ran a health food store with a restaurant. She employed Scott Foley, who she wrote had a “nice ass.”
She started having an affair with Scott, a married man. Finally, she persuaded Scott, who is ten years younger, to leave his wife and daughter, and they took off with Scott to Marathon, Florida, in a recreational vehicle.
Scott left his kids behind, and Toni?
Did she stop by Rochester and pick up her son?
No, Toni left with Scott and Michael remained with his father.
In another part of her book, Toni explained that it was not because she was raped or because she gave up her son that caused the breakup with Keith.
It was a sweater.
She wrote:
We finally broke up because of a sweater. This was in early April of 1999. It may well have been on April Fool’s Day.
When I left for work that morning, Keith was still in bed. He’d been up late the night before doing God knows what (or whom). Just before I left, I put a load of laundry in the washing machine. I called him at lunch.
“‘Can you please rotate the laundry?’
He reacted like I was speaking Greek. ‘Rotate the laundry?’
“‘Take the clothes out of the washing machine, put them in the dryer, throw in a few dryer sheets, turn the dryer on.’
“‘Okay.’
“‘One thing: my sweater is in the wash, the black wool one. You can’t put that in the dryer or it will shrink.’
He consented to help me, which was miracle enough, and I hung up the phone. When I got home, the clothes had made it into the dryer. All of them, including my black wool sweater, which was now too small for my dog to wear.
“‘Keith,’ I said, holding up the shrunken garment. ‘What the hell?’
He looked up from his dog-eared copy of Dianetics. ‘What?’
‘Why did you put my sweater in the dryer?’
‘You told me to.’
‘No, Keith. No, I didn’t.’
And the Little Prince lost his shit. He cornered me in the laundry room, screaming, spit flying from the corners of his mouth, like a rabid dog. ‘You are wrong, Toni. As usual. You don’t know what you said. I’m the Smartest Man in the World! I have a 240 IQ! Do you really think that you ‘re right, and I’m wrong? Tell me you’re wrong. Do it. Tell me you’re wrong.’
‘No.’
‘Say it.’
‘No.’
‘Say you’re wrong.’
‘Fuck you.’
For a minute I thought he was going to hit me, but he fought off that impulse. Instead, he stormed out of the house, like a hurricane veering back out to sea.
He didn’t come back. Instead, he sent Kristin and Pam to the house, to entice me to apologize and beg for reinstatement. I refused. After about four days, I came home from work to find that most of his stuff had been removed from the house.
Good, I thought. I told my mom. I told my brother. They were delighted. We’d broken up, like a normal couple.
She told Keith, “fuck you”?
Even stenographer Chet should have realized Toni wasn’t that afraid of Keith.
She sent her son packing. She allowed Keith to rape her and hid in a closet. But it wasn’t until a sweater got shrunk that she stood her ground.
Toni’s high school friend, who had heard the sweater story before, said when Toni told her how she broke up with another boyfriend over putting her sweater in the dryer, it was a red sweater, not a black sweater – like in Toni’s story about Keith.
I hope Chet can answer this. Did Toni break up with two different boyfriends because each of them didn’t preserve her wool sweaters, one ruining a red and Keith ruining the black sweater?
Like rape or losing a child, ruining a perfectly good sweater is nothing to take lightly.
Somebody, please post this link on Reddit. There is more to the story of the incorruptible Hardin and his boss and mistress, Toni Natalie.
Stay tuned, pals and gals, we have a spate of stories ahead.
Viva Executive Success!
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