NXIVM: MLM, cult, or both?

[Lambkin]

Nice long article on NXIVM.
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article ... 880885.php

In a Saratoga County townhouse complex, a man who wears a Jesus beard and seeks to patent his philosophies keeps a cluster of adoring women at his side. He has drawn more than 10,000 people to his mission of ethical living. But some disciples say he has delivered a much darker reality.

Keith Raniere, a multilevel-marketing businessman turned self-improvement guru, has peddled himself as a spiritual being to followers, most of them women. A close-knit group of these women has tended to him, paid his bills and shuttled him around. Several have satisfied his sexual needs. And a few have left their families behind to wrap him in their affections.

Claiming one of the world's highest IQs and holding three degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Raniere has evolved over the past two decades

from the fresh-faced founder of Consumers' Buyline Inc., a buying club business investigated for being a pyramid scheme, into the 51-year-old intellectual commander of NXIVM, a Colonie-based company promising followers from Canada to Mexico it can "help transform and, ultimately, be an expression of the noble civilization of humans."

At least one cult expert said Raniere directs one of the most extreme cults he has ever studied and has likened Raniere to David Koresh, who most Americans link with images of a burning cult compound packed with women and children. Raniere has denied that NXIVM is a cult

Other experts believe there is sufficient evidence for the New York Attorney General to investigate whether NXIVM — thought to have multimillion-dollar revenues — is an illegal multilevel-marketing business.

[JamesVincent]

I think this has been mentioned here and there but all things considered I thought we should update the actual thread.

NEW YORK (AP) - Disgraced self-improvement guru Keith Raniere, whose NXIVM followers included millionaires and Hollywood actors, was sentenced to 120 years on Tuesday for turning some adherents into sex slaves branded with his initials.

https://www.fox6now.com/news/keith-rani ... -in-prison

[JamesVincent]

Former TV actress Allison Mack was sentenced on Wednesday to three years in prison after pleading guilty to charges she manipulated women into becoming sex slaves within the NXIVM organization.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/a ... slave-case

Now I understand that she had already served 3 or so years on house arrest prior to sentencing but the federal guidelines for this case were somewhere around 14-17 years. Can a judge actually cut off that much time from sentencing?

[JohnPCapitalist]

Now I understand that she had already served 3 or so years on house arrest prior to sentencing but the federal guidelines for this case were somewhere around 14-17 years. Can a judge actually cut off that much time from sentencing?

Yes. I'm working from memory here, but here's what I recall: Judges in the US now have fairly broad discretion to depart from guidelines. For a long time, there have been sentencing guidelines calculated via a complicated (but publicly disclosed) formula by an independent government office.

In the past, a sentence within the guidelines was mandatory, driven by an attempt to ensure that sentences were fair among different ethnic groups. Unsurprisingly, white drug defendants tended to get far more lenient sentences than non-white ones. Later, a Supreme Court decision allowed judges more discretion in going with the guidelines or not. If a sentence is within the guidelines, it's not appealable; it's only appealable if it's above the calculated range.

In Mack's case, the judge weighed the severity of the crime against the cooperation that Mack gave to the government, her disavowal of Raniere, and her apparently genuine contrition towards those she victimized. When you consider that the judge sentenced Clare Bronfman, the heiress who funded a lot of Raniere's attacks on perceived enemies, to 8 years, it seemed reasonable to suspect that the sentence for Mack would be less.

Each side can appeal the Pre-Sentencing Report, which calculates the range, and can comment on it. The prosecution explicitly consented to a sentence below the range, so they weren't out for blood, though they didn't say what they wanted.