Keith Raniere Net Worth: Spiritual Leader Accused Of Child Pornography

New charges of child porn were revealed in case against the self-styled spiritual leader of a New York-based self-help organization, just hours after the co-founder of the group pleaded guilty to a charge of racketeering conspiracy.

Keith Raniere, the spiritual leader of the Albany-based group NXIVM, was accused of child pornography and having sexual relations with two minors. The new charges were added to the existing case, which included allegations of female “slaves” who were forced to have his initials branded into their flesh.

According to the court papers, Raniere engaged in relationships with two underage girls, one of whom was only 15 years old at the time. The court was shown the images of the girl, “constituting child pornography, that were created and possessed by Raniere and electronic communications between the victim and Raniere reflecting their sexual relationship and indicating that it began when she was 15 years old,” prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn said.

The accusations against Raniere came hours after the group’s co-founder Nancy Salzman pleaded guilty to a charge of racketeering conspiracy. She admitted to committing racketeering offenses, which included stealing identities of some critics of the group, hacking into their email accounts from 2003 to 2005, and conspiring to make videotapes that showed her teaching NXIVM’s lessons. She also made efforts to spy on perceived enemies who sought to expose the group as a cross between a pyramid scheme and a cult.

Raniere and Salzman founded the organization in 1998. It was mostly a secretive cult that made news in 2017 after a New York Times report that had several women accusing the founders of blackmail and being forced into having sex with Raniere. Since the late 1990s, the group had almost 16,000 people enroll in the courses offered by it. The courses were designed to bring greater self-fulfillment by eliminating psychological and emotional barriers. Several members took some of the workshops but others were deeply drawn into the group, and gave up careers, friends and families in order to move to the Albany area where the group was located, reports had said.

Since the company began in the late 1990s, they have made profits through their courses and, as of 2018, Raniere’s net worth was $2.5 million. He is a business executive and under the pretext of his company running successful programs, he allegedly indulged in illegal activities.

The indictment against Raniere accused him of inducing a minor twice to “engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing one or more visual descriptions of such conduct” in 2005. He was arrested in 2018 in Mexico and is currently being held without bail in Brooklyn for sex-trafficking charges. Raniere has his trial scheduled next month and the indictment is expected to shed light on the allegations that a master-slave society within the group brainwashed women into having unwanted sex with him and as a part of the initiation ceremony, have them brand his initials on their skin.

According to Salzman’s NXIVM bio, she was a consultant to the New York state and major corporations “until she met Keith Raniere and discovered an approach to personal growth that yielded powerful and permanent results.”

Raniere was earlier accused of sex trafficking, forced labor, wire fraud conspiracy, human trafficking and other counts. The other people charged in the case are Salzman’s daughter and Seagram liquor fortune heiress Clare Bronfman, and television actress Allison Mack.