By Village Dianne
With additional information from a story published in the New York Post]
Mark Vicente testified for the entire day today and we still have not seen his cross examination. He will continue tomorrow on direct examination.
The highlight of the afternoon, however, was a video of Keith Raniere.
Before we get to that, a few things Vicente testified about:
In Mexico, Nxivm had wealthy people from prestigious families, from the upper echelons of society. This was in contrast to members in the USA. Emiliano Salinas was in Keith’s trusted group. Vicente said he wasn’t aware if Keith ever went to Mexico.
Vicente finally realized that Nxivm was not promoting people’s dreams. Instead, they were quashing people’s dreams.
He was concerned that Keith was treated like a god. He was concerned about the almost religious nature of devotion to him.
During V-Week 2016, there was a project that required them to find Keith every night. And the penance was to stand still for one hour if they hadn’t found him. One night, Keith didn’t show up. Vicente walked around and shined his flashlight in different places. He shined the flashlight into a cabin where he saw Keith and a woman in bed with their legs intertwined. Vicente didn’t say anything, he just walked back. He was deeply disturbed by this.
in November 2016, Pam Cafrtiz died. He didn’t know why her death was kept a secret.
January 20, 2017. Vicente’s wife resigned from Nxivm. She said the organization was built on coercion, fear, obligation and rules.
Vicente did not leave with his wife. He wanted to stick it out. He thought Keith was a shining light and that the problems were really with other people and Keith was blameless.
Sarah Edmondson and her husband [Anthony Ames] wanted to buy a house in Clifton Park. Vicente advised them not to since people who moved there didn’t do well.
The upper rank were supposed to have wisdom and maturity, but instead, they were extremely rule bound.
Keith characterized cult expert Rick Ross as an enemy. Keith told Vicente that Ross was being paid huge sums of money [to attack Nxivm]. Keith told Vicente that Ross was responsible for the tragedy at Waco.
Now we come to the video.
The sex lair of Keith Raniere’s – something he called his “Executive Library” – was the location of a 2012 film that was shown in court. Adrian appears to have videoed this.
The film shows the sex lair with books, a table, a bed suspended over a hot tub and white-boards with supposed mathematical equations and a sketch of a toaster. An unsolved Rubik’s cube sits on Raniere’s desk, according to the New York Post.
There were lots of books on science, philosophy, computers, many other subjects. Mariana and Pam Cafritz were in the video.
The Library [or sex lair] is at 8 Hale Dr. in Knox Woods in Clifton Park. Raniere used it for years as his bachelor pad. Federal agents raided the town home a day after Raniere was arrested in late March 2018. They found child pornography — nude photos of then-15-year-old Camilia on a hard drive there.
“It’s a man-den office,” Vicente said.
According to the Post, the video starts out with Raniere admitting he hasn’t read many books in the library – and then making crude comments as he looks through wedding photographs in a photo album of two of Raniere’s followers. Keith designed their wedding vows.
“Did you notice in one of the crowd shots the woman isn’t wearing panties?” Raniere asks the group gathered in the study for the film.
He calls women “piggies” and says, “To tease a woman about her odor, to say she’s a fish-hole, it’s official, she’s a fish-hole,” Raniere said to the camera.
Raniere jokes about people “fucking” sheep and goats.
He answers a phone call in a chair saying, “Lick me.”
Raniere belches and gives the finger to the camera.
At one point, Raniere lays down in the middle of the room, but did not take off his glasses.
“If I take my glasses off, I get sleepy or horny,” Raniere says.
“He told me he did lots of things lying down,” Vicente testified.
As the camera pans around the center, a hard drive is seen on a shelf to the right of the seating area. I believe the prosecution wanted to show that the hard drive was in plain sight. They showed this hard drive on a shelf, and made a big deal out of it.
The showing of the video was very time consuming. They had to go to this specific spot in the video and then this other spot. It made the afternoon’s testimony shorter, with less actual testimony from Vicente.
Vicente testified that Keith was very particular about where things should be in the library. He didn’t want anything relocated. He didn’t want any item to have a change of location. If anything was taken, it must be put back where it was.
It was mentioned that Mariana had a nickname “Monkey” and that everyone used this nickname for her.
I don’t know if the nickname “Monkey” for Mariana had a sexual connotation; maybe that’s why they brought it up.
