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Yesterday Nicole recounted torrid details of her first sexual encounter with NXIVM founder Keith Raniere. Her parents attended the trial. Her mother, looked to the ceiling, tears streaming down her face. Her father rubbed her knee. Story w/ @ColinRMoynihan nyti.ms/2Xyxfgu
Nicole said she wouldn’t have joined The Vow if she’d known that Keith Raniere was in the group. “Well, it’s a women’s empowerment group, so if a man was running the whole thing, it wouldn’t have made since. I wouldn’t have been interested.”
“I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland facing down the Rabbit Hole,” Nicole emailed Allison Mack in March 2016. “I’m filled with this intense anxiety that everything is happening to quickly, aware that I’m losing hold of my life, losing my ability to chose and think for myself.”
On April 16, 2016, Allison Mack encouraged Nicole to reach out by email to NXIVM founder, Keith Raniere, who she had never met, adding in a Facebook message: “How do you get the attention of the smartest man in the world??”
Nicole compared experiencing the abuse within NXIVM to a frog, who, when put in cold water with boiling water poured slowly after, stays in the pot and boils to death. Plus, there was mixed messaging. Once, Keith Raniere told Nicole: “he didn’t like to hurt anyone or anything.”
To help the jury differentiate between what was really happening in NXIVM’s sex cult and the confused mind-state of victims, a psychologist explained that to determine consent, you must look at the controlled aspects of a relationship and decide if sex would happen without them.
“When you use the phrase ‘unwanted sexual contact,’ do you have a definition for that?” one of Keith Raniere’s attorneys asked a forensic psychologist this week. “It’s ‘unwanted,’ so by virtue of me saying ‘unwanted’ it is coercive,” she responded.
Keith Raniere once asked Nicole: “What was the worst thing he could ask me to do?” Originally, she’d thought of “something sexual.” But she told him: “The worst thing for me to do would be to hurt someone in my family, or to hurt myself, or to hurt someone else.”
“It all the sudden makes something sexual not that bad because by comparison it’s not that bad: something sexual only hurts me,” Nicole told the NXIVM jury through tears, continuing: “Something sexual was what I was most afraid of, and all the sudden it’s not.”
Once, Nicole asked Raniere why he called them slaves. “He said he could have called it anything: ‘One, Two,’ ‘Red, Blue,’ but he wanted to call is ‘Master/ Slave,’ because it pushed our pride.”
“One of the last things he said to me was: ‘Will I ever see you again?’” Nicole said of leaving NXIVM and Raniere’s sex cult. “And I said, ‘Probably not.’” She resumes her third day of testimony Monday.
P.S.: While the NXIVM trial has shown Raniere to be emphatic that he could have many women. The court record suggests he has erectile dysfunction.
