FR obtained transcripts of prison calls between Keith Raniere and Suneel Chakravorty. Many of the conversations are about their allegations of FBI tampering with evidence. Raniere thinks Daniela had a hand in the tampering. He suspects she may have provided the FBI with photos of her sister, Camila, and other women.
Most readers know of Daniela. She is one of three sisters Raniere had a sexual relationship with. The other two were Mariana and Camila.
Camila was Raniere’s undoing. A jury found he took explicit photos of her when she was 15. And he was dumb enough to keep them in his library inside a hard drive where the FBI found them.
Daniela testified. Camila did not. Daniela’s testimony went on for days, and she is fluent in English. Though Mexican, Daniela speaks English better than most Americans.
Daniela is most famous for “The Room,” as Raniere calls it. She told her story to FR in 2016. She repeated it in 2019 at the trial of Raniere.
She went into “The Room”, her bedroom, and stayed 22 months. She told me she did sneak out from time to time.
Sketch of Daniela
Timeline Wrong
The DOJ wrote a sentencing memorandum for the judge to consider.
The DOJ’s version is that Daniela went into her room because she had romantic feeling for Ben Myers. And Raniere was jealous. That’s not exactly how it happened, according to Daniela.
Daniela did not go into her room until more than three years after she kissed Ben and told Raniere. She kissed Ben in late 2006. She told Raniere that night. Raniere flipped out and ended up locking himself in the bathroom then running upstairs. When Daniela followed him, he threw her on a mattress and ran away.
Daniela stopped seeing Ben around mid-2007. She went into her room in March 2010.
During the three years between a kiss and the room, Raniere and Daniela did not meet. But he let her continue to work at 8 Hale in his library. She worked on his computers and books and digitizing his music.
Daniela testified she would call Keith Raniere first, and if he was not there, she would come to 8 Hale.
Daniela worked on Raniere’s video, music and book library. She downloaded his music onto his computers and backed them up to hard drives. Next to Raniere, Daniela spent more time at 8 Hale than any of Raniere’s inner circle.
Raniere and Daniela communicated by email. Daniela tells how Raniere asked about her relationship with Ben in “thousands” of emails. He asked again and again about every kiss, and what she wore and how she felt. Long after she stopped seeing Ben.
Daniela says she and Ben never went farther than making out. But Raniere kept pressing for details long after she stopped seeing Ben.
Ben Myers around the time he dared to kiss a pretty Mexican senorita.
Ben was one of the NXIVM IT experts. Daniela taught herself how to plant spyware on computers. She testified she knew how to find hidden files in computers, which she says she did on Raniere’s computer. Ben and Daniela had common interests.
It is nice to know they met at the NXIVM Star Trek club.
Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek never had the advantage of taking NXIVM courses.
Ben ended up marrying Michelle Salzman, daughter of the president of NXIVM.
From late 2006 until early 2010, Daniela worked at 8 Hale when Raniere was not there. One of the tasks Raniere assigned Daniela was to do book reports. Daniela had organized his library and knew every book in it.
While they were not meeting in person, Daniela continued to hack computers and surveil enemies for Raniere. She hacked her sister Mariana’s computer to get her Facebook password and give it to Raniere. She testified Raniere thought Mariana was cheating on him.
Daniela also hacked Edgar Bronfman’s emails and monitored them.
Raniere wanted Daniela to be faithful to him. He wanted that from all the women of his harem. He could have all the women he wanted, but they should be happy with only him. The idea is that a smart woman is happier with a fractional piece of a superior man like Raniere than 100 percent of a dull mediocrity like the rest of the males in the world.
Daniela told FR that she told Raniere that if he could have other women, she could have other men. That was her ethical breach.
Raniere says stealing computers and money and lying was her breach. Raniere proposed that Daniela should go to her room and figure out how to solve her ethical breach. She was not a teenager. She was 25.
It astonishes me that her entire family cooperated in his going to her room. Her sister Camila and brother Adrian acted as enforcers of this. Her father arranged for her food. And her mother, in an astonishing gesture, for a time, went into the room adjacent to Daniela to try to atone for Daniela’s sin. The idea was that maybe Daniela would heal her horrible breach if she saw her mother suffering too.
As I heard the story, her mother stayed in the room for several months but could not outlast her daughter. When a friend of hers died in Mexico she left the room and went to his funeral. She did not come back. Daniela stayed in the room and the rest of the family continued to bring her food.
Judge Nicholas Garaufis
The DOJ tells the Judge their View
The DOJ told Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis their version in 2020. He was about to sentence Raniere.
The DOJ wanted the judge to sentence Raniere to life in prison. That irascible and independent judge denied the DOJ’s request to give Raniere life. Instead, he sentenced him to only 120 years. Raniere is due for release on June 27, 2120 – a mere 98 years from today.
He will be 160. After he gets out, he will serve five years probation with many conditions for supervised release. For instance, the terms of his probation forbid contact with Daniela when he gets out or Suneel. Since that is almost a century from now, FR will take it up that story later. In about 80 years when it is more timely. Daniela and the Room are timely, as she will soon figure in a new Rule 33 motion Raniere plans to file.
Moira Penza [l] and Tanya Hajjar at a press conference announcing the conviction of Keith Raniere.
The DOJ’s version of ‘The Room’
The DOJ wrote:
After Daniela developed romantic feelings for another man, Raniere told Daniela’s parents that Daniela had committed an “ethical breach.”
Raniere ordered that Daniela be confined to a room in her parents’ home without human contact. At Raniere’s instruction, Lauren Salzman threatened Daniela if she left the room, she would be sent to Mexico without any identification documents.
Daniela was confined to the room for nearly two years, during which she went months without human contact. Family members left meals for Daniela outside her door. Daniela was denied prompt medical care and slept on a foam pad on the floor.
During this time, Daniela wrote hundreds of letters to Raniere with various proposals to “heal” her purported “ethical breach.” Daniela believed that if she stopped writing, she would be sent to Mexico without money or her identification documents.
Lauren Salzman reported to Raniere regarding Daniela’s “progress,” but Raniere frequently told Salzman that Daniela was “game-playing” and manipulating Salzman and needed to stay in the room longer.
Raniere forbade Salzman from telling Daniela anything or giving her any information “about what was going on, on the outside with anybody.”
At one point, when Daniela cut off her hair, Raniere instructed Lauren Salzman to tell Daniela that Daniela would have to stay in the room until her hair grew back.
Over time, Daniela’s psychological health deteriorated: Daniela testified, “Sometimes I would beg: ‘Please let me know. I don’t know why, just—just let me out.’ Nobody cared. My family didn’t. Nobody cared. So, it was also—it was also knowing that nobody wanted me. I’m in a world where nobody cares that I’m losing my life. . . . it was clearly never gonna end.”
In approximately February 2012, after considering suicide, Daniela left the room.
Daniela was then driven to Mexico at Raniere’s direction and was told that unless she completed book reports for Raniere, she would not receive her birth certificate. Daniela ultimately obtained a copy of her birth certificate with the assistance of an attorney working for a human rights commission.
The Raniere Version
Keith Raniere
Here is what Raniere told Chakravorty from prison.
Then there is… the infamous room.
Here is a woman that if, if you listen to the news, a woman that was confined to a room against her will, although she pled and pled to get out and was in the room for 22 months.
Well, a little bit of background with respect to this woman. This woman was someone who within her family and within her community in the past, from the time she was young, had many, many problems. I won’t go into them here. It’s maybe not even my place to talk about them.
There was a point in her life that she turned 12 or 13. She had so many problems. From what I understand, she didn’t want to go to school, didn’t want to relate with people, and would lock herself in her room, apparently, sometimes for weeks at a time.
What happened with this woman? The truth is she was in a room in her parents’ house with her family taking care of her. The room was unlocked. She was able to leave anytime she wanted, if she wanted to leave, and rejoin the [NXIVM] community.
I think her visa had run out at that point. She would have to either go back to Mexico or she had to explain to people how she was going to stop from all the stealing and the other things that she was doing.
She also had to finish a book report. She had a number of different book reports she was supposed to do and she was seen as being very prideful about it and no matter what, she would do anything, you know, say anything, but never just sit down and simply finish the book report.
The library
The initial hope was she would go into her room. The room would be unlocked. She gets whatever sort of food she wanted. Her family is taking care of her, all this sort of a thing.
And that she would really think about, “Okay, I’ve done enough of this pattern. I’ve done enough of the stealing. I’ve stolen from people. I’ve stolen from NXIVM. I’ve stolen from the stores. I’ve stolen sometimes, you know, $5,000 of cash.”
Things like that.
“How am I going to stop? How am I going to conduct myself? And will I get this one book report done that they’ve been trying to have me do for a year, and I keep on making excuses and doing all sorts of things?”
The hope was that she would be in there a day, maybe a weekend and then produce the report, produce this plan.
But it became a battle of wills and she stayed in the room for 22 months. She was sneaking out at night doing all sorts of things like that.
She ended up stealing computers and all sorts of stuff. But this was someone who threw like what would be a massive sort of a tantrum and it became a battle of wills and finally she just decided, “Okay, I want to leave.”
And when she wanted to leave, her father drove her to the border and arranged for one of his employees to pick her up on the other side of the border when she crossed and that was it. So this is her family, this is her dad. Her dad was there doing this.
Keith Raniere in his library at 8 Hale Dr.
