Vanguard on his 56th birthday
Keith Alan Raniere is 59 years old today. This is his second birthday in federal custody. His first since he was convicted. He is awaiting sentencing and faces an absolute, minimum sentence of 15 years – for sex trafficking.
He was also convicted of racketeering, forced labor conspiracy, identity theft, wire fraud and more.
The judge has discretion to limit his sentence to 15 years – in which case, with time served and good behavior, Raniere could be out by his 70th birthday.
However, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis would have to feel extremely lenient toward Raniere and uniquely insular to public criticism to let the notorious sex cult leader, who branded female slaves with his initials on their pubic region, off with the bare minimum. It would seem hard to believe Raniere will get anything less than 20 years. The judge has discretion to sentence him to life.
Keith Raniere is likely to spend the best years of his life in prison, celebrating his birthdays quietly, if at all.
A slide from V-Week – from his thankful students.
In the past, Raniere did not celebrate birthdays quietly.
Indeed, Raniere had ostentatious celebrations. More than half a million dollars were spent each year to give him the kind of party his followers felt he deserved.
Everyone would meet at Silver Bay, at the YMCA resort, a 550-acre campus, with beachfront on Lake George, in the Adirondack Mountains, and spend ta least 10 days celebrating him.
The cost to attend Vanguard Week was typically from $2,000- $5,000 depending on accommodations. That included bland vegetarian food and entre to the various classes and events held during his 10-day birthday week.
Followers would gather in the Silver Bay dining hall to eat scanty vegetarian fare. Vanguard would usually dine sumptuously in his private quarters.
Raniere himself would typically show up for the first time on his birthday – in the evening – at an event held in his honor and accept gushing praises of followers and watch them perform various talent acts – sort of a Nxivm amateur hour.
Vanguard with his followers enjoy a talent show on his birthday.
Raniere would sometimes make a little speech.
As we learned from the trial, and from sources who spoke to Frank Report who were in attendance at various V-Weeks, Raniere was rather randy on his birthday, preferring to spend a vast portion of it in his birthday suit, alongside one or more slender slave women similarly attired.
But that is not terribly unique. He was rather randy the rest of the year too.
But up on the mountain with the fresh air, the starlit nights, the whispering pines, the frenzy of all the followers – sometimes as many as 500 people – all eager to see him – and with him able to choose which women he wanted to bed – and in what order – [almost like a dance card], he had the opportunity to enjoy the kind of birthday he felt he really deserved.
Silver Bay.
Vanguard was seen at the ‘Bayview’ cabin on more than one occasion.
His text messages showed he loved to set up secret trysts to have sex in a cabin with some slender woman before heading out to another cabin to have sex with someone else.
Imagine. His birthdays were attended by 500 people, all paying thousands to be there, [most of them women]; he would show up when he wanted; his women ran the affair; his followers would compete by offering him extravagant gifts, vying for a minute of his attention, each of them thinking he possessed some special spiritual enlightenment that he could give them with a look, a word, a gesture.
And all he was thinking about was which of the women he was going to fuck.
He ate like a pig, slept like a log, fucked like a rabbit, and was treated like a rock star.
It was ironic too because as he stuffed his face with pizza with hot sauce and chocolate cake, his closest female followers were kept on near-starvation diets – sometimes 500 calories per day – for he liked his women slender. He said their fat disturbed his exalted spiritual vibration and made him physically ill.
He shamed many of them by making oinking noises when they opened the refrigerator.
His women were also sleep-deprived. He taught that women who needed more than 4 hours sleep per night were indulgent and not spiritually advanced enough to be near him.
Back in 2004, Vanguard’s birthday was only a single day.
His world was one of utter self-indulgence – not just on the 10 days of his birthday but every day of the year.
He was a man who lived totally for his own pleasure and had a small army of women who followed and served him. Many of those women knew about his proclivities and not only did they tolerate it, but they also encouraged it. They went out and fought to find him more women to encourage his fetishes. These included a master-slave relationship that was power-mad and completely self-destructive to women.
In short, he enjoyed, and his women suffered.
This was the model he set up – in the name of spiritual growth and self-improvement – and he was so good at it that women – sleep-deprived, food-deprived, hypnotized by long hours of indoctrination in his morning until evening classes, thought they were realizing their highest goals.
It worked so well that he had a run of more than 20 years as the Vanguard.
While he laughed at them all.
Starve them, abuse them. Steal their money. And fuck them until he went permantly soft.
Keith Raniere went a little soft in the [little] head – around 2008.
It must have been a terrible thing for the Vanguard when he got erectile dysfunction back around 2008. He was only 48 years old. But he lost it. Maybe it was too much sex. Or some malady. Maybe some venereal disease, but he lost it. All these women and he could not fuck one of them properly.
It was tough. His whole world was built around sex and power and he lost the power to perform sex.
[One harem woman told me the worst of it was when he got semi-hard and all that would do is kind of poke around for a while and be painful. He blamed her for his being limp – saying she had gained three pounds and her fat disturbed his erection, she said.]
Over time, he was forced to perform with his magic tongue. And he invented a theory, he told the women [his slaves who were not allowed to be with any other man] that his tongue, applied to their vagina, would provide a special healing for them – a spiritual healing.
He also told the women that if he once ejaculated on them – especially on their face – that meant he owned them forever and that they could never sleep with another man the rest of their lives. [Or it would ruin their spiritual aspirations forever and might also destroy him which, in turn, would set back the world’s progress by 15,000 years].
He taught the women that their highest spiritual pleasure was to drink his semen or have his semen squirted on their body – and that this was a much higher, more subtle sexual pleasure than any mere orgasm they might have. The highest joy for a woman was to get him to have an orgasm.
And he had women believing this.
He had two dozen or more women convinced that they had to share his [limp] penis [because ‘you don’t own Keith’s penis’] and yet they all felt he owned their vaginas. That’s the blunt fact.
His semi-limp dick wold giz out some sperm on a woman’s face and eureka – she was the luckiest girl in the world.
Let’s face it, if it were not for the dumb women in this cult, this rascal would not have gotten anywhere.
He had his helpers. The able Nancy Salzman and her daughter, Lauren. The monstrous Pam Cafritz. The stupid Allison Mack. And Dawn Morrison, Mariana Fernandez, Loreta Garza, Rosa Laura Junco, Nicki Clyne, Daniela Padilla, Monica Duran, and a dozen others who served and waited on him.
And reinforced the madness.
And, of course, he had the Bronfman sisters. Those two imbecile sisters, heiresses of the Seagram’s fortune, that gave him all the trappings of enormous wealth.
It was part of his shtick that he was like a renunciate. A guy who needed little. He could sleep on a couch. Go without shoes. Not drive a car. Live humbly. Teach simply. [And fuck like a rabbit].
But he was an expensive renunciate with his $500,000 birthday parties, his multimillion-dollar lawsuits, his expensive ESP classes.
This year, however, his birthday won’t cost anyone a dime. He is in prison in Brooklyn, at the Metropolitan Detention Center. He is in the unit where convicts who are awaiting sentencing go.
They don’t celebrate birthdays in prison.
Overall, his health has declined. He gets no sunlight. He never sees the green leaves or smells the fresh air. He has been beaten in prison. Had his glasses stolen. He has had ringworm and head lice. He has been taunted with nicknames like Crybaby Jane – and Keith Manson.
He gets no respect from prisoners or guards. And most of all, he gets no women. Slender or otherwise.
No sex with women.
He once walked the grounds of Silver Bay and people rushed to see him to hear a pearl of wisdom drop from his blessed mouth.
A group ceremony involving the first line slaves and their master [in the center] the wondrous Keith Alan Raniere was planned.
Just before he was arrested, he had planned for eight mouths – the mouths of his first line DOS slaves – to give him a group blow job.
Instead, the Mexican Federal Police came and hauled his ass off – from his hiding place in a closet.
Now, he is in prison. Likely to be there for the rest of his life. He may celebrate his last birthday in prison.
So what is his 59th birthday like?
He is busying himself with an appeal – a fruitless gesture – for his conviction will not likely be overturned. He is grey and worn and pale. Listless.
There is no one to worship him. And while he may have some hope that he will be granted a new trial and be acquitted with a fairer judge, by a more honest jury, if he is even half as smart as the average prisoner planning an appeal, he must know it is not going to work.
This rascal is going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He knows it unless he is truly stupid.
He is in a building now with bars and guards and no freedom. He had all the freedom in the world and deprived it of others. Now the tables have turned. The jury decided.
Yes, birthdays can be hard. This one is perhaps the hardest so far for Keith. Last year he had hopes he might be acquitted. This year he has hope for a successful appeal.
But even hope is death if it is entirely false.
By next year, that hope will be gone. By next August 26th, he will be at the prison where he will serve his sentence. There may be a yard for him to walk outdoors and see the sun again and a green leaf of a tree and clouds. Things deprived of him now.
Maybe, once he gets past the notion that he is ever going to get out, he will make friends in prison and live a quiet life and work and read and pass the years away uneventfully and grow old in prison.
And one day, he’ll die there and then be removed to be buried and perhaps forgotten. That may be his best hope – to be forgotten.
So, maybe next year his birthday will be better. Once he realizes who and what he is – a convict in for the long haul.
Maybe one day he will repent a little. He may find a place in his heart for regret for the people who came under this thrall in his heyday who he used and hurt.
He might learn, if he is wise, that there is a law that gives and takes away. A law that cannot be broken.
Then he will realize that he crafted his present and future. He will be a prisoner without hope.
It is customary to wish people a happy birthday, but not all birthdays are happy.
Some are mournful and reflective.
But the facts are what they are: The master is now a slave; the food-deprived is now he – and he must sleep on a ratty bunk, with fluorescent lights on 24-7.
He has all the time in the world to think about what he has done when he ran amok among more decent and tender ones and called himself The Vanguard.
Happy birthday, Keith.
