Nicki Clyne has made the glad tidings known: Keith Raniere speaks. Yes he does, He speaks and it’s on a website dedicated to his speech. It is called, happily enough, Raniere Speaks.
She asks auditors to “Decide for yourself.”
From the website:
Since he was arrested in March 2018, Keith Raniere has been in federal prison. Denied bail despite no evidence of being a flight risk or a danger to society, Mr. Raniere spent the 15 months leading up to his trial in harsh conditions and unable to speak to any of his co-defendants, family, or loved ones.
He did not speak at his trial nor present a defense.
After he was convicted on all counts in July 2019, he was permitted to make phone calls, where he began sharing details of his case and his experience in prison over a recorded line, with a trusted friend. For the first time ever, these phone calls are being released to the public in a series of podcasts, starting with these 10 recordings.
Keith was sentenced to 120 years and currently resides at a penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, yet he maintains his innocence. Listen to find out why. https://www.ranierespeaks.com/
Podcast
Is Keith truly the monster he is made out to be? Or has his true identity been erased and replaced with a hateful narrative? Decide for yourself whether he deserves to serve 120 years in prison, or if he is a victim of “Eracism,” and serving the sentence of a fabricated identity.
Listen to Keith’s calls from prison made from Dec. 11 to Dec. 19, 2019.
Introduction
Why Didn’t I Speak Before?
Expanding on the Hitler Quote
Prosecutors and Winning
On Prejudice
The Forced Labor
Truth, Lies, and Exaggeration
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
More on the Bail
Tip of the Iceberg
Some anonymous people on Reddit are not happy about Nicki posting links to these tapes. They are hellbent on suppressing free speech. But how are we to learn the whole truth of what happened in NXIVM if we cannot hear from Raniere? To me it is repugnant to suppress speech.
Let us hear his voice. Let us present an excerpted version of the 10 transcripts of his first series of podcasts.
By Keith Raniere .
There are people who dislike me for all sorts of reasons… most… are not valid but there are certainly a lot of reasons someone could not like someone like me….
In my case, not only do I believe I am innocent and all the people that I’ve had analyze the case believe I am innocent, but the procedures done have been very bad….
I have always tried to do good things…. I’m given this big spotlight and what we need to do is show the injustice. No matter what a person thinks of me…. For this particular series of podcasts, I want to divide it into two sections.
One, we’ll have discussions about me being the Devil, all the bad things that people think and what I would say about them, and the other side is discussing the law and how it affects me and my conduct and what I have allegedly done….
Lady Justice is supposed to be blind… and not have people like politicians and media whispering in her ears. Lady Justice being blind is the most important thing and we have to treat people that we love and we want to exonerate from charges the exact same way we treat people who we hate and we want to indict and we want to convict. So those that we want to convict get the same benefits as those that we would never convict but they’ve been charged….
My name is Keith Raniere and I face life in prison for crimes that I didn’t commit…. I want people who are listening to… imagine the following. You are arrested and taken away and for almost a month after you’ve spoken to one attorney or so initially, you’re not allowed to speak to attorneys, you’re kept away from everyone you know, and then when you’re finally transferred to an end-facility you interface with attorneys but you’re not allowed to speak to anyone of your family, friends and in my case I have a seven-month old boy, for 16 months….
I didn’t get to have meetings with co-defendants…. these are things that are caused in part by the prisons, in part by the court system, in part by almost strategic necessity. And then I go through trial… This was a high-profile trial ridden with prejudice and with hate. And you go through six-and-a-half week s of this and the question is, why didn’t you present a defense? In my particular case… there’s something called RICO, which is racketeering.
And essentially what it says is my inner circle, which are my friends, are a crime organization and… what’s been going on is that the prosecution… has been going to all different people and saying, ‘You’re a potential target. You’re a target.’…. if someone comes to your house and tells you’re a target of the FBI, you go get a lawyer…
Now what’s a defense attorney going to tell you? “Here you have an association with this group of people. This association is causing you this problems, especially if you’re innocent.” Keep in mind, we are all innocent…. so when an innocent person goes to a defense attorney, the defense attorney sees that that person’s association with a group is causing them this problem, they tell them “Look, don’t speak to those people. Those people might be innocent but for your best interest”….
If you were a friend of mine and you were going to be a witness in my defense, would you really be able to go up there and take anything but the Fifth Amendment? Because anything you do may endanger that you end up in this group of my friends, this inner circle So there’s no one to speak to…. After six-and-half weeks of prejudice, there was a strategic decision by the legal team that I shouldn’t get up and speak against such prejudice….
We have… extraordinary appeal chances…. in this case, the things that were allowed in trial, the things that went on seemed so adverse to us, what we want to do in this case is preserve my appeal rights…. And if you go up there and testify, it gives the prosecution, it gives the court… the ability to make your appeal not as good, to either cover up for mistakes or create some sort of a justification and that’s the last thing we wanted to do….
I have a very experienced, wise team that said…. the prosecution hasn’t proven their case…. There has been tremendous prejudice and hate…. the people hate you but juries sometimes can see through that sort of a thing…. Instead of… putting your community through further damage, possibly ruining your appeal rights… let’s put it in the jury’s hands because the elements haven’t even been close to made. And the rest was history, unfortunately in not a good way….
So why I am I speaking out now? This is almost my first opportunity….
In this particular case, I have the spotlight because I am white… I am male…. I am educated… and I have crimes that … are media-worthy…. I am the exact candidate for prejudice because I’m white and one of the problems I have is because I’m not black. If I were black or if I were of color, or one of other things where people have tremendous prejudice, then there would be all sorts of rallying and support because in this country right now it is sad, but those people need it and those types of people… and I am the most privileged class of all.. I mean how could you get more privileged than white.. male.. educated… of a reasonable background? But that is the exact reason why 1) I have this tremendous spotlight and 2) there’s no one to help…. my life is made out to be much bigger than I am…
I had come up with … a little quote that says “In our country, Hitler doesn’t stand a chance of fighting a false robbery charge.” What does that mean?… I’m just using Hitler as the person that is very very hated.
Certainly I’m not of that magnitude but I am right now a hated person. And there are whole classes of people that are hated people. And our justice system… is supposed to be blind meaning that whether … if you have someone you absolutely hate and someone you absolutely love, both … have the right to the same trial….
So Hitler.. if he is accused falsely of robbery, he is innocent… our justice system should let him free. That is the fundamental aspect of our justice system. So I’m a person that’s been tainted with all sorts of hate, in all sorts of ways, and I come before the justice system and this shows the problems of the justice system.
I think one of the things that people don’t understand… is the prosecutor is not someone who is just an opponent of the defense. The prosecutor represents our whole civilization, represents literally our sovereign power, the power of our government, what the nature of our government is, and… they’re not supposed to be looking to win.
They are literally the pursuit of truth. They’re the force that within the middle of the trial, if they were to see the defendant is innocent, they should be the first one to say “Stop the trial. This defendant is innocent. We must go elsewhere,”
But it’s incredible to see how the prosecutors of modern day have transformed so much into making it about winning… In one of the books I’ve read, there’s a thing related to prosecutors… where… they literally supposedly had a game where they would take someone like Mother Teresa and try to see what crimes they could indict her for. Making it about winning is the opposite… of justice…
So one of the things that’s interesting to look at… is how much the prosecutor did is about winning as opposed to justice. For example there’s a key piece of evidence we have…. we have a text stream from one of the major witnesses and this text stream was deleted between this person and myself and they deleted it from their phone but it has a picture of them and all sorts of things relating to them and the prosecution desperately did everything they could not to get that in. If it’s the pursuit of truth, they should want it in, if it’s true…. But that’s not at all what has happened…
I am white, I am male, I am educated and if I weren’t those things, I would probably be in a far worse position. I might be facing the death sentence… If I were African-American I might be not only facing the death sentence but with no media coverage… no one would ever hear of me. I’d be completely swept under the rug.
I have the opposite advantage, I have this incredible media coverage but I’m in relatively a good place compared to many others, but my position can really show the prejudice of… the justice system….
There has to be some defining event and my hope is that my media is exaggerated enough and big enough and I am innocent enough… to… being a turning point… I find myself in this absurd situation which is all of these incredible things being said…
Pam Cafritz was my life partner of 30 years, and she died of cancer November 2016. She was a prominent community leader and she founded an international women’s organized named JNESS. She was also the beloved friend and mentor to literally thousands of people. The community, including the sorority sisters from the community, was helping to put together a memorial service for her.
One person in the community who was also in the now infamous sorority was Nicole. Nicole told me she would do anything to help. She was the person to whom I had coached, helped negotiate a better job and better job conditions and had given access to as much cash as she needed to pay for things like rent, courses and travel. Unbeknownst to me she had worked five to six hours to transcribe a video of my deceased partner for the the memorial. The prosecution is calling this forced labor. If Nicole believes she should’ve been paid she could’ve just taken money from the cash that had been made available to her. This forced labor charge in the minimum doesn’t meet the knowingness or coercion elements of the crime.
Considering the very sad circumstances surrounding the charge, it’s cruel to charge it and insulting to all the victims who have actually experienced the raw ugliness of forced labor. On a common sense level, with so many sisters from the sorority and people from just the community doing these exact same things out of love for Pam, the community and Nicole derived a lot of benefits from that community and doing these things for other things like friendship, it strains credibility that Nicole alone was subject to forced labor somehow. It’s also difficult to believe that Nicole didn’t do these things simply out of friendship or out of love for Pam or even human care, as she claimed at the time….
Nicole out of hundreds of people, many of whom were sorority sisters, doing exactly the same things, but out of love and care for the saddest of human tragedies… the loss of a loved one, with ample cash at her disposal, decided to call this whole thing forced labor. To me this is sickening….
Take someone simple like Clare. Clare is worth a lot of money. But Clare is someone who has no previous history and in her portion of the case, the charges against her, there’s no violence at all, there’s no drugs at all, there’s no sex at all. It’s things relating maybe to immigration, stuff like that, you know. And the monies that are involved in her case, some people in here have tens of millions of dollars of fraud, the stuff with her visa stuff or whatever not even a hundred thousand dollars…
I would ask someone what do you think her bail would be? And people guess 500,000, 800,000 even something that’s a million. That it’s 100,000,000 dollars… bail… and not only that, an ankle bracelet and not only that, she can’t speak to people, she has … in-house arrest; she has some time… she can leave, monitored or whatever, but she can’t go anywhere. She can’t go out to clubs. She can’t speak to friends, girlfriends, ex-wives for example that Harvey Weinstein can. I haven’t spoken to her in like 21 months now… she pled… and she’s facing 22 to 27 months and… it’s not like she’s facing 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and yet… 100,000,000 dollars. An ankle bracelet. And house arrest where she can’t speak to people, even her family….
it helps illustrate the exaggeration, how they want to make this is a big big bad thing, and we are, literally, a bunch of simple people that live a suburban lifestyle and they’re making it into a horror picture…
Clare Bronfman was freed on $100 million bail.
It’s my firm belief that if even the people who are my skeptics were standing alongside me when I made each decision that I have in my life…, they would really understand… I put a lot of mindfulness into then, but they are decisions that are understandable. They are not impulsive….
I am what I am and you get what you get when you speak to me and you hear me. And you know it doesn’t vary. But the fact that again this exaggeration almost demands that there be constructed a Mr. Hyde, demands that there be constructed this alternate life that is, I would say, not only exaggerated but crazy….
… I spoke about the bail. And there’s Clare’s bail and you know I compared it to… Harvey Weinstein’s bail for a million dollars and… he was out on the town… One time he didn’t wear his bracelet… My co-defendants, who all I believe had to wear bracelets, except for one, their bails were like 5 million dollars and even 10 million dollars and these are people that aren’t particularly wealthy.
And the one that, this one woman who is a co-defendant who lives a very modest life and doesn’t have much money at all, lives in an apartment that costs $1,000 a month, her bail was a quarter of a million dollars. So what has happened is, you have this incredible exaggeration of the case, and it’s an interplay between the prosecution making these exaggerated claims and the media making these exaggerated things and there’s this bigger than life thing and then it comes to court and these bails are assigned that are bigger than life too!…
When it comes time for me to ask for bail they went as far as to say… he’ll first put down 10 million dollars of bail, he’ll be in home confinement with bracelet and… he won’t leave and won’t speak to anyone else will be vetted by the past person who was the head of the secret service and… he will have two armed guards guarding him 24/7 with a supervisor and they still wouldn’t let me have bail.
Think of that, how all this exaggeration from the media and the prosecution is then codified in effect into an accepted thing, that the court says well of course we’re going to give them these incredible bails, they must be horrible criminals.
The moral of this, to some degree is, you take some very simple average people, people who are vegetarians, people, who believe in non-violence, we’ve never had any weapons, we don’t do any drugs … and make them into massive criminals… such a bad criminal we can’t even tell you how bad he is… and then it gets codified, it gets believed, by these massive bail amounts….
I feel that I’ve been granted this incredible opportunity… this incredible exposure that is wrongful and it is so wrongful when it is revealed it is something that will demonstrate injustice… there’s so much media coverage and exaggeration… and so much untruth in the justice system with the prosecution with the way it was handled through the courts….
So my case, as crazy as it sounds,… people have to understand, I’m just the tip of the iceberg. There are people that are so far worse off than I am. There are people on death row, apparently hours before being executed that are completely innocent….
Some people might say “oh my goodness well, you know, that’s the problem you know of course we get rid of a lot of bad criminals, every once in awhile we get rid of an innocent person, we kill an innocent person.” That is supposed to be unacceptable to justice and especially, it’s not done by any error that couldn’t be prevented.
All of these errors could be prevented but what you have is political agenda, media agenda, and you have a deep type of prejudice that enters into the process that doesn’t need to be there.
So what you have is… prosecutors that are seeking to win but… a prosecutor is supposed to uphold the defendant as much as the people who are the victims, meaning that if a defendant is innocent, they’re supposed to seek the truth, not just try to win at all costs.
And what we will show in my case is the “win” attitude, the “win at all costs” attitude, even keep information away from the jury that the prosecution knows is true and seeks truth and shows truth and they don’t want the jury to see it because they might lose and that is one of the most horrible things that can happen…. And has happened.
