I get a fair number of questions from readers and usually I try to answer them.
Here are some that came within the last day or so.
A reader asked:
Hi Frank, isn’t the person who made the comment wrong when they said that you, “just walked away”[from Nxivm]?
You couldn’t just walk away because you were named in that LA real estate lawsuit and were being interviewed by the press about NXIVM in 2010.
You also said you talked to [Albany Times Union reporter James] Odato for hours for his 2012 Times Union expose and even sent him documents.
Times Union reporter James Odato broke many of the stories of crime that Keith Raniere and Nxivm were engaged in, but law enforcement in the Albany area never even investigated let alone prosecuted Raniere and Nxivm for anything.
I’m curious to know, if you hadn’t been fired, at what point do you think you would have walked away from Raniere and his sex cult?
Besides DOS, what is the thing that if you had known about it or discovered it, would have caused you to quit working for the sex cult?
You said shortly after you started working for Raniere, you learned that he was lying about being a celibate monk and that he wasn’t just lying about being celibate but was sleeping with multiple students and board members. Do you regret not coming forward publicly with that information sooner? Even if you didn’t go public with that information, do you think if you had told Mack, Vicente, Edmondson that fact back in 2007, when they were still only a year or two into the cult, that they would have quit or do you think you would have ended up silenced like Synder, in prison like Tighe, or facing trumped-up criminal charges even earlier?
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My Answers
By Frank Parlato
Let’s take these questions one by one:
Isn’t the person who made the comment wrong when they said that you, “just walked away”? You couldn’t just walk away because you were named in that LA real estate lawsuit and were being interviewed by the press about NXIVM in 2010.
Right. I did not walk away from Nxivm. I was fired – right after I secured millions of dollars in assets for the Bronfmans. For several years afterward, I was involved in the lawsuit against Yuri Plyam, the original developer of the Los Angeles real estate deal, but it took up only a marginal amount of my time.
I initiated the lawsuit on behalf of the Bronfmans to gain control of the Los Angeles real estate and I won a preliminary injunction giving me possession and control of the properties on behalf of Precision Development.
It took three more years for the Bronfmans to prevail in Precision v. Plyam.
I was the architect of the original lawsuit in 2008. After winning the preliminary injunction in January 2008, I advised settlement with Plyam who seemed to be reasonable at the time. Keith Raniere rejected my idea. I was fired shortly after, quite likely because I was investigating what happened to some $65 million in Bronfman money supposedly invested in commodities.
I was fired unofficially in late February and officially in March 2008. The Precision v. Plyam lawsuit was concluded in 2011. Within 60 days of winning the lawsuit against Plyam in Los Angeles, Clare Bronfman went to the Western District of New York and filed a federal criminal complaint against me and then went to a grand jury and perjured herself to set me up for an indictment.
I did not find out about the grand jury until much later. In short, Raniere/Bronfman did not go after me until after they first used my good work to go after Plyam.
As soon as Raniere won the Plyam lawsuit, he ordered the Bronfmans to go after me. He tried to get Plyam criminally too, but in Los Angeles the feds weren’t interested. They had actual crimes they were working on.
The ironic part of the lawsuit against Plyam was that the Bronfman’s spent about $10 million in legal fees to win a $10.2 million judgment. But they did not get their $10 million back since they bankrupted Plyam by the time they won the judgment.
All they had was a paper judgment worth zero.
To this day, the Los Angeles properties have not been developed. Some were foreclosed. Some were sold at a loss. And on others sit partially built houses, with exposed and rusting foundations, that will one day have to be dug up and removed.
I recovered more than 30 choice parcels of land in Los Angeles County for the Bronfmans. They returned the favor by suing me and going after me criminally. I returned their favor by starting the Frank Report.
Just as Raniere destroyed the lives of his followers, he destroyed the project and, where he could, the properties themselves.
But the answer is “Yes, I could not just walk away”. Raniere obliged me to fight and I did.
The result is he is in prison and I am fighting to not go to prison on completely false charges. I will demonstrate in the future that the federal government can be completely wrong and yet because of their normally superior powers over the private citizen, they needn’t care about justice. Actions speak louder than words. Let me just say that a resounding acquittal is good for the legal system and will likely form a significant part of my upcoming documentary.
I’m curious to know, if you hadn’t been fired, at what point do you think you would have walked away from Raniere and his sex cult?
I didn’t know it was a sex cult at the time. I knew he had several women, but everyone I knew about was a consenting adult. I had no problem with it. I did not know about any underage girls. I would have quit if I knew that – and reported it to the authorities.
That was obviously kept very hidden.
If I knew he has doing physically ruinous things to women, possibly poisoning them or encouraging their suicides, I would have quit and reported it.
After about three months working for Nxivm, my work shifted to California and I had only phone contact with Nxivm leaders. I was not hired to investigate Nxivm. I was hired to be a public relations consultant and later an all-around consultant.
I spent three months in Albany and about three months in California. Of the first three months, I spend about a month and a half at Clare’s horse farm, about 45 minutes out of Clifton Park, then a month and a half in Clifton Park. My primary contacts were Kristin Keeffe, Keith Raniere, Clare and Sara Bronfman, and Nancy Salzman. I did not get deep into the bowels of the cult.
In fact, I did not even think of it as a cult at the time. I met a number of women and men who were close to Raniere and the impression I got was they were happy and looked up to Keith as their teacher, mentor, guru.
The words “slave” or “master” were not used. They were not branding women then. I did not know that Keith imposed a rule on the women that he slept with that they could not have sex with anyone other than Keith. It was my impression at the time that he had several girlfriends, but I did not probe into his personal sex life.
I understood there were a number of attractive women who looked up to him and that he likely had intimate relations with them. That was their business, not mine.
At the time, the women all seemed pretty healthy to me. They were slender, but not emaciated. No one complained about being sleep-deprived. They seemed loyal to Keith and the organization. As a consultant, I did not see anything nefarious or illegal.
I did observe a lack of general competence in certain followers, but I did not attribute this to mind-confusing courses, hypnotic induction or gaslighting, but rather to the fact that very often people who seek a guru are weak-minded or confused. That is why they go to a teacher. I think if a teacher is good, he might be able to help them become able to think for themselves.
For me, the jury was out then as to whether Keith was a good teacher. He might have been able to help students get to the point where they do not need a teacher anymore. That was supposed to be the purpose of the Executive Success Programs. To get people to think for themselves and become successful.
I found out much later that that was never Raniere’s goal. He wanted permanent dependence. If I had known that then, I would have quit as a public relations person.
I might not have quit the real estate development project since that was for Clare and Sara Bronfman and I think they had the right to get their money back and make a profit, something which would have occurred if I had not been fired.
Clare and Sara Bronfman struck me as rather naive. Clare seemed smitten by Raniere, Sara seemed less smitten and a bit more balanced.
My work as a public relations consultant was not to glorify Nxivm or its teachings. It was to try to get them a fair hearing with media. My strategy was to make Nxivm more transparent, especially with the three reporters who were covering them in less than favorable light: James Odato {Times Union], Chet Harding [Albany Metroland], and Jeannie MacIntosh [NY Post].
I urged Keith to be interviewed and to open up a Nxivm class to allow reporters to attend. To show that this was not a secretive cult, as they were being accused of being, but a group that was well-intended.
Keith Raniere with Loreta Garza around 2007.
I do remember one suggestion I made to Keith to which he agreed. He had quite long hair and a beard which gave him a bit of a Charles Manson appearance and fed into the stereotype of his being a cult leader. I suggested he cut his hair and shave and he agreed he would do that, and put on shoes for interviews.
The media meetings never came off. I went to California, found suspicious activity going on there, sought to investigate the commodities losses, and was fired.
The rest is Keith and Nxivm history.
Besides DOS, what is the thing that if you had known about it or discovered it, would have caused you to quit working for the sex cult?
The child sex abuse. I met Camila when I was there. She was babysitting for Kristin Keeffe. I believe she was around 17 at the time. I saw her as an intelligent young lady. I had no idea she was sleeping with Keith. Neither did anyone else apparently.
I knew of no women who were under age 30 who were sleeping with Keith. Most of the women were around his age. In fact, some were older [Nancy Salzman and Kathy Russell]. I had no idea he had a proclivity for children.
I knew he had a propensity for lawsuits. At the time, he and Kristin explained the merits of the lawsuits – and bragged that they had top attorneys promoting the merits. I advised them to stop suing people because it was counterproductive.
The fact that they thought Toni Natalie was, for instance, a thief was their prerogative. They claimed to have ample evidence. I declined to assist them in their lawsuit against her because the amount she allegedly stole was less than the cost of recovery.
Prior to Nxivm, and during its earliest days, Toni Natalie [l] was part of Keith Raniere’s harem. She was later accused of absconding with about $50,000 of Nancy Salzman’s [right] money.
In the matter of Joe O’Hara, I determined that he did nothing wrong.
As for Rick Ross, I felt Keith was wrong to sue him over copyright infringement mainly because it would make my job as the organization’s public relations consultant harder. But I felt Keith had the right, if he felt strongly about it, to pursue a copyright infringement claim.
The bottom line is that the worst thing I saw was the litigation efforts. At the time, I gave Keith credit for being able to make his own judgments about how he wanted to conduct his legal affairs. He had top attorneys and made good arguments over the merits of the cases.
You said shortly after you started working for Raniere, you learned that he was lying about being a celibate monk and that he wasn’t just lying about being celibate but was sleeping with multiple students and board members. Do you regret not coming forward publicly with that information sooner?
That is not correct. I didn’t know at the time I worked as a consultant that Keith and/or the women he was sleeping with were telling students he was a celibate monk. I learned that much later. I knew early on that he was not celibate but I never heard him or anyone claim that he was.
So no, I don’t regret not coming forward. There was nothing to come forward about.
Do you think if you had told Mack, Vicente, Edmondson that fact back in 2007, when they were still only a year or two into the cult, that they would have quit or do you think you would have ended up silenced like Synder, in prison like Tighe, or facing trumped-up criminal charges even earlier?
If I had information then about Raniere which I had later and had I told it to his followers like Mack, Vicente and Edmondson, I think Keith would have gone after me sooner. I might have disappeared like Snyder, but more likely I would have been attacked with trumped-up criminal charges sooner.
I doubt Mack, Edmondson or Vicente would have believed me at the time if I had known and told them things against Raniere.
Allison Mack followed Keith Raniere for several years before joining him in his bed and hot tub.
I was an outside consultant. I would have had to have some pretty solid evidence of wrongdoing. Even so, they all read the Times Union stories and stayed. They read the 2010 stories about how Raniere lost $65 million in commodities, and they stayed. They read the 2012 Times Union stories about Raniere’s alleged pedophilia and they stayed.
The reason they stayed is that they did not believe the stories were true. They did not believe them because Raniere and his inner circle women told them that they were lies. It is the nature of cults that followers believe the leader over outside sources.
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Now for a few more questions from other readers:
From Peaches
Would you get in trouble if you mentioned Slyvie’s last name?
No, I would not get in trouble if I mentioned Sylvie’s last name. I am withholding her name to protect her privacy. She did get out of Nxivm and she helped in the prosecution of the villainous Raniere. That’s more than Cami did. If it were up to Cami, she’d engineer a jailbreak tomorrow.
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From Mexican Lady
Sylvie recruited more slaves than Camilla. Why does Frank Report post Camilla’s picture but not Sylvie’s? Recruiting people into an organization you know is fraud is bad. It seems a double standard on Camilla who is a victim, like Sylvie, in my opinion.
You raise an interesting point. Both were victims and both were to some degree perpetrators. The one difference is that Sylvie is out of Nxivm. She not only is out, she stepped forward and worked to take down Raniere, exposing herself to public shame, etc. by being a witness. That gives her credit in my book.
Camila, on the other hand, not only did nothing to take down Raniere, but tried her best to defend him and continued to work for Nxivm and its gruesome child experiment Rainbow Cultural Garden – even after Raniere’s arrest and trial.
As far as being equal victims/villains, Cami was far more. Don’t forget Cami was out actively seeking virgins for Keith.
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An Anonymous Reader [in response to Mexican Lady]:
Sylvie is a White Lady, [Cami is Mexican] by now you should have picked up on the white supremacy sympathies of this site.
My differing coverage of Sylvie and Cami has nothing to do with “white supremacy.” I think if you read the Frank Report carefully, you will find that most of my targets are “white”: e.g., Keith Raniere, Nancy Salzman, Lauren Salzman, Allison Mack, Nicki Clyne, etc. etc. etc.
Ninety-five percent of the expose targets are “white” because “whites” did most of the crimes in Nxivm.
However, down in Mexico, there were some villains and they get their fair share of criticism – the Boone brothers, the Garza sisters, Mariana Fernandez, Emiliano Salinas, and Alex Betancourt to name the most prominent.
If you want to know the main reason why Cami is still fair game in my mind: She is still in Nxivm, while Sylvie is out.
When Cami quits [for her own good], I will stop posting her picture. It has nothing to do with being white.
Yes, Cami was a victim, but when she came of age, she became a perpetrator of Raniere’s cruel goals. She actively sought out virgins for him to deflower.
If Sylvie were to rejoin Nxivm, I would publish her picture and first and last name.
I met both Cami and Sylvie in 2007, and they both looked to have pretty similar skin color to me.
Of course, there are people who will object to that statement of my non-differentiation between peoples of England [Sylvie] and Mexico [Cami] in terms of race. They are probably the same kind of people who say I am not white because my ancestors were Sicilian.
I am OK with that by the way.
I don’t think of myself as white or non-white and I don’t like to answer forms that ask my race.
And I don’t really like responding to ignoramuses who want to make race an issue on this website.
