Thread by @RobertGavinTU

In his victim impact statement yesterday, former #NXIVM member Mark Vicente told #KeithRaniere:

“Finding out the truth about you and your actual motives turned my world upside down. You broke goodness.”

(Vicente and wife Bonnie Piesse after Raniere verdict on June 19, 2019).

Vicente told Raniere, his one-time mentor: “You cracked the firmament of my belief in nobility and honor and righteousness. I do know how to repair it. I do not know if it can ever be made whole again. I fight everyday to try and recapture something that now feels lost.”

Vicente to Raniere: “This was not by accident on your part. When I was writing the film ‘Carbon Crimes,’ you wanted me to craft a female character of innocence and good will. Someone who worked for a leader she believed in with all her might.”

(Continued)....

“She then finds out he is in fact a very bad man with very bad intent, using everyones pursuit of goodness for his own ends. You described to me how it would break someone like that and how she would never be able to heal from it. She would never be able to find goodness again.”

Vicente told Raniere: “It would be forever poisoned. You knew exactly what you were doing to me and many others. The loss and the pain is incalculable. And the worst part… the truly sick part of this is that my trauma, the desolation of my psyche is your great joy.”

#NXVIM

Vicente told Raniere: “As the founder of the Society of Protectors, you told us constantly to MAN UP. To strip ourselves of everything to find our true self. You told us on a daily basis how in the worst circumstances we could find joy.”

“Remember how you quoted Albert Camus; ‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.’ And yet here you are suffering about how miserable you have been in prison without your comforts.”

Vicente told Raniere: “Your ideology was all false bravado. A boastful lie. You made us believe we were constantly failing a standard you are wholly incapable of meeting yourself.....”

(Continued)

“You just wanted to destabilize our psyches as much as possible so that in our growing psychosis you would be the savior, watching us get worse and worse,” Vicente told Raniere. “Like poisoning us and watching us die slowly. Our happiness wasting away. That is your true joy.”

Vicente told Raniere: “You could at least have the decency to admit what you wanted was so very primitive. How cruel to convince women that sex with you would heal their sexual abuse trauma.”

In one of the most memorable lines from #KeithRaniere sentencing, Vicente recalled Raniere’s plan in 2018 to have women in DOS engage in a “recommitment ceremony” in which they would perform oral sex on him.

Vicente told Raniere: “How childish and devious to use principle and honor as a cover for a teenage fantasy of getting a group blowjob from a group of women. How shallow ARE you?”

Vicente added: “Clearly your joy DOES come from the external world after all. You were just seeking infantile comfort. Turns out, contrary to your lawyers assertions, you DO need coercion to get sex.”

Vicente told Raniere: “You and your followers need to ask yourselves one important question. How did you Keith Alan Raniere cause this? Stop being a victim. Stop suffering. The world's reaction to your omnipotence did not cause your present circumstances. Your evil did…”

Vicente told Raniere: “You will never know true love. You have to calculate everything. Kindness, compassion, awe, morality, weeping at pure goodness.”

Vicente to Raniere: “While I will struggle for the rest of my life with what you have done to my mind and my soul… I can FEEL all those things you cannot. My morality is intrinsically mine. Your emptiness is your’s. Forever and ever.”

Vicente turned to the judge and said: “Your Honor, I spent 12 years studying this man. He has a belief that he is the next evolution of human-kind. Beyond worldly ethics and morality. Far superior to this court. He thinks he breathes the rarified air of an awakened genius..(more)

“But he is none of those things,” Vicente continued, referring to Raniere. “He is a malicious, petty, evil and dangerously vengeful sociopath who thrills at our pain, and yet barely a glimmer of that excitement is visible on his blank face and his dormant eyes.....

(Continued)

Vicente on Raniere to judge: “He has been a lascivious little toddler with too much power and ZERO accountability. He has stolen hundreds of years from all his victims and poisoned their existence… poisoned my existence… and he needs to be held accountable.”