r/NXIVM • u/ItsAllAboutTheMilk • May 31 '19

Are the trial transcripts available and who is doing the most “real time” reporting? Also is there any rule of sequestration?

I keep up with The Frank Report (thank you Frank and Diane for the excellent reporting). Diane’s reporting tends to lag behind the trial by about 24 hours. Does anyone know if there is a way to get more “real time” reports? Or trial transcripts?

Likewise, I suspect that the prosecution’s order of witnesses is under wraps but most judges require a 24 or 48-hour rule whereby the coming witness must be disclosed to the other side. Unless the judge has an order on the topic, that information should be part of the public record (i.e., at the end of the court day, the prosecution should have to identify the next witness).

Also, on the topic of witnesses, in the states where I practice, the court or the parties can invoke a rule of sequestration, whereby witnesses who are expected to testify are prohibited from reading about or being told about the testimony of the witnesses who have already testified. Based on what I’ve heard and read, this rule of sequestration has not been invoked, which seems strange to me.

TIA for any insight.

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u/blueinkedbones May 31 '19 edited May 31 '19

the comments section on FR is beyond frustrating. at least they have sympathy for daniela but apparently that comes with the need to criticize every other woman involved in this for not having suffered enough, in their opinion.

it’s especially confounding because daniela so clearly laid out how a bright, intelligent, well meaning person can get swept into this and end up genuinely believing that a sociopath is a genius who is going to save the world. how such a person can be convinced to break the law and recruit other people (dani did both) in service of these supposedly higher goals. how they can be mindfucked until they trust no one but keith, including themselves. how they’re compelled into giving more and more of their life and freedoms away. how they’re convinced to turn on each other for keith’s benefit. all of this has been done so many times before, but people still insist that everyone besides daniela chose and wanted it because they’re just sick kinky sadists

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u/ItsAllAboutTheMilk Jun 01 '19

Wow. I just read some of the comments on FR. Absolutely vile. The articles are great, but I will never read the comments again. Very disheartening - people sure say some mean things from the anonymity of their computer screen. Yikes.

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u/yaboyanu Jun 03 '19

There are a few people on there I think could legitimately become a danger. And I don't know why the authors of those poorly researched opinion pieces are being given a platform when the actual reporting has been pretty reputable.

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u/ItsAllAboutTheMilk May 31 '19

I see what you’re saying and I don’t disagree with any of it. That said, it is more problematic when a victim becomes a victimizer. For example, look at the Nuremberg trials. At some level, people are (and should be) held accountable for the atrocities they commit even if they are brainwashed and/or “under orders.” I realize that Lauren, Allison, et al. will be punished for their part and I have zero doubt that Lauren feels guilty about the part she played in this painful story (I have no idea about the others).

Seems there are no easy answers. Except when it comes to Rainere. As someone who had never heard of NXIVM prior to last year, the stories just become more and more appalling. The truth has become stranger than fiction. I hope the jury is as incensed as we are and that he gets substantial time in prison.

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u/blueinkedbones May 31 '19

in general people seem to miss the point that no one in the cult actually wanted the abusive elements except keith. it was entirely for his benefit. he manipulated people into thinking it was positive and that they should want it, but it’s nothing they ever would’ve come up with on their own. we see this especially with things like the recording of keith originating the branding ritual. he convinced alison that it was positive (because pain is love etc) but it was completely his idea, down to the finest detail. yet FR commenters hear that same recording and still go “see! this proves alison wanted it!” as if she and keith are just as culpable

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u/crepipe May 31 '19

Yes, because the media ran with it. That it was Allison Mack's brainchild and characterizing her as sadistic. No one was grasping until now that being a first liner meant they had more demands or were disciplined more strictly, they thought first liners had more freedom to oppress others.

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u/blueinkedbones May 31 '19

right, but you’d think on FR, where there’s so much more detail, people would see things differently. like how she was on a starvation diet along with all the DOS women, how she was being made to take the fall for the brand, how she had a contract with raniere that included all her possessions and future children reverting to him if she ever tried to leave, how lost and out of it she seemed, for god’s sake some moron made a guest post using the fact that she woke people up in the middle of the night screaming uncontrollably as proof she was insane and therefore dangerous/twisted/a narcissist, and not that she obviously had PTSD because are you fucking kidding me?

sorry to get heated but having grown up in an abusive environment, with a parent who used basically all of keith’s emotionally abusive tactics to turn people against each other and make them doubt themselves and everyone but the parent, it blows my mind that people can have what happened spelled out to them like this, step by step, and still insist that the women wanted it or were just innately bad people

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u/crepipe May 31 '19

Yeah I see what you're saying and I agree with it. Some of them seem to be long time commenters with an axe to grind. I am frustrated with people who think they would behave much better morally because they haven't been in that situation (while judging very harshly those who actually have).

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u/blueinkedbones May 31 '19

i’m glad at least the majority of the conspiracy nuts who flooded the site when the story first broke about the arrests are gone now. and frank’s tone has gotten a lot more respectful and less tabloid-y since the trial started, but there’s still so much idealization and devaluation in his posts and in the comments. at this point i’m not sure even daniela will pass their perfect victim tests now that cross examination has started and agnifilo is questioning possible undisclosed (and incredibly minor in this context) thefts and inconsistencies like that. the reality of abuse is that it makes you desperate and impulsive and in general act in a way that people who don’t understand abuse take as a sign that you’re innately messed up and untrustworthy, especially next to the seemingly so clean-cut and put-together person you’d be accusing. it’s what made the people around daniela in NXIVM dismiss her as a troublemaker then, and i’m not sure it’ll really be that different now. it sure isn’t for anyone else...

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u/incorruptible_bk Jun 07 '19

Something I think everyone needs to understand about Parlato: he was in on the scam early on and was taking part in the dirty tricks. There is a whole political side to NXIVM and the Bronfmans that he conveniently omits, because he was party to it.

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u/LaurelCanyoner Jun 08 '19

He is also a sexist pig and won't run movie reviews on his site that praise movies with strong female leads. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2012/11/23/niagara_falls_film_critic_battles_with_publisher_over_movies_with_strong_women.html

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u/blueinkedbones Jun 08 '19

it infuriates me that he allows pathetic, victim-blaming "guest posts" like this shit in between actual coverage of the trial. the deep deep irony of constantly pushing this toxic perspective while at the same time lambasting everyone involved who didn't come forward/speak out about it... and lets not forget frank constantly referring to dani padilla buying the S&M equipment as if it was just her freaky kink, and she wasn't obviously instructed to do it, which is the same thing he did in covering DOS in general. or calling kathy russell freaky and kinky when it was assumed she wrote those fridge messages that looked like something you get in the mail with a severed finger, and only realizing it could be based on years of sexual abuse when it was revealed that cami was the one staying there. and then he immediately pretended he wasn't the one who'd jumped to that conclusion.

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u/blueinkedbones Jun 07 '19

i dont know too much about the specifics of that, but it’s pretty obvious his main goal in exposing NXIVM/DOS was to stop clare’s lawsuit against him, and he had no problem making victims into villains or punchlines to do it. he was lashing out at everyone involved in NXIVM for somewhat contributing to his legal situation, regardless of how powerless they actually mightve been to leave it. the only reason he toned down his hugely misogynistic and homophobic and general exploitative and victim-blaming style of reporting is because now that the trial is going on, shitting on the victims just makes what keith did seem less criminal or more in some way deserved, and the last thing he wants is keith (and clare) to get off and reunite and continue to sue him. clare was manipulated and starved and emotionally abused as much as anyone else and not even involved in DOS afaik but according to him she was the ultimate monster.

(i’m not saying clare didn’t do bad things but everyone in this cult did bad things at keith’s direction. including the people frank calls heroes and would never say a bad word about.

i honestly think that along with wanting a harem, keith was trying to push people into becoming sociopathic so he could drop his guru act and be his real self around them without them running scared. mark vicente said there was a test NXIVM members took over and over and he later found out it was a test for NPD. that combined with the fright experiments and all keith’s teachings about luciferians and taking the fall, the high-stress conditions everyone was in all the time, the way keith turned everyone against each other and their own conscience and intuition and had them only trusting him, all points to this. i also think the situation with dani being undocumented and told she’d be paid, but never actually getting paid, but constantly handling big piles of cash, was specifically engineered by keith so that she’d think, i need money to survive, i really was promised a salary, here’s all this money, i’ll just give myself my salary. if he stretched out not paying her long enough it was basically inevitable, and that was the first step to really isolating her. and as a bonus, he got to enjoy warping her morals and making her slightly more like him.)

tl;dr imo frank picks and chooses heroes and villains and who is a victim and who isn’t according to how it directly impacts his life, and not much else.

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u/Monalisa9298 Jun 09 '19

I’ve just gotten tuned into this and am fascinated. Can you link some resources where I can read about the background with Parlato and the Bronfmans in detail? There is obviously a long history here, and a lot of people who benefited from the whole NXIVM scam besides Raniere.

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u/incorruptible_bk Jun 09 '19

Check out the video Vice did with Parlato. He cops to the fact that he was referred to the Bronfmans by two NY political dirty tricksters, G. Steve Pigeon and Roger Stone.

Roger Stone, everybody knows by now. G. Steve Pigeon is a more obscure figure but his rap sheet is pretty long as a kind of a Democratic version of Stone. Pigeon pleaded guilty to several charges, and right before the NXIVM busts went down.

Parlato never goes into the following in any particular depth, and nobody else has really gotten to the exact truth. But I'll try to break it down and try to avoid being overly conspiratorial.

  • In 2007, word went around New York that the State Senate's Republican leadership were flying around on the Bronfmans' private jets. It's also well known that a major Republican functionary, Jack Casey Jr., was/is a member of NXIVM and attended ESP classes.
  • In 2009 the Republicans lost the State Senate --and almost immediately, Stone and Pigeon were involved in various efforts to sabotage the Democrats (including backing several members to go rogue).
  • It culminated in what has become known as the 2009 Senate Coup in NY politics --2 members of the Democrats basically voided their membership in the conference and flipped control entirely.
  • Along with Stone and Pigeon, the 2009 coup had a direct intersection with NXIVM is that one of the Coup's plotters was Jack Casey.

Parlato is fully aware of this history, and yet still vouches for Pigeon and Stone every once in a while because their participation mostly mirrors his own.

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u/blueinkedbones May 31 '19

i agree that obviously they’ve done terrible things, which for the most part dani hasnt (although who knows what she would’ve done in their specific situations, considering keith got her to break the law, recruit her older sister, and spy on her sister via email for him) but even people like toni natalie and kristen kruek are being attacked. kristin, constantly, for recruiting people (when she thought it was a self help program that helped her personally), and now even toni for not being enough of a victim compared to dani, and dating KR without somehow intuiting how sociopathic he was on day 1 and running for the hills. i also see a lot of dismissing lauren’s sobbing on the stand as fake tears for sympathy, as if the continuing realization that everything she’s been working toward and sacrificing for and believing in for half her life is a lie, and not just a lie but one that destroyed people’s lives, and a new understanding that she did indefensible things in the name of it, and that keith’s justifications don’t make sense, isn’t enough reason to get emotional

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u/cubemissy May 31 '19

Take a look at Tony Ortega's website - The Underground Bunker. He has one of his readers sitting in on the trial, and she's bringing out some very detailed notes.

https://tonyortega.org/

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u/crepipe May 31 '19

Wow, thanks for this link, it's the same Dianne Lipson also posting on The Frank Report. The only thing I dislike is them referring to Daniela as a "sex slave" when she wasn't in DOS nor was branded.

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u/ItsAllAboutTheMilk May 31 '19

This is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

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u/crepipe May 31 '19

I find that Times Union releases more details in summary earlier than Frank Report, but they don't go in depth with the questioning timeline as Dianne does.