More trouble for Nxivm leader Keith Raniere emerged yesterday as jury selection began in a trial that will feature him as the sole defendant now that the others, including Smallville actress Allison Mack, have pleaded guilty.
Raniere is accused of running a racketeering enterprise with his self-help group in what amounted to a sex slavery operation. And now the government wants to present evidence about Raniere’s interest in young girls.
Raniere has not been charged in regards to the testimony of a woman identified in court papers only as “Jane Doe X,” but the government wants her to testify in the trial anyway.
Jane Doe X is an adult now, but her testimony will be that she was subjected to sexual abuse by Raniere, “including his repeated sexual intercourse with her when she was twelve or thirteen years old.”
Prosecutors argue that they can bring her testimony in because her experience is very like another woman, referred to as “Jane Doe 2,” whose allegations of child molestation are part of the charges that face Raniere.
They tell Judge Nicholas Garaufis they can have Jane Doe X testify to the older allegations because a court “may admit evidence that the defendant committed any other child molestation.”
They will be building a case that Raniere “has a sexual interest in [teenage girls]” as part of the racketeering enterprise that was Nxivm.
“The defendant’s abuse of Jane Doe X and Jane Doe 2 occurred when both victims were around the same age, and Jane Doe X and Jane Doe 2 both had parents who trusted the defendant and left them unsupervised to be tutored and mentored by the defendant and cared for by women in the defendant’s ‘inner circle’.”
Raniere’s attorney Marc Agnifilo told the New York Post that his client denies the allegations.
“These are allegations that were made and investigated and discounted 20 years ago,” he told the Post yesterday. “We don’t think they should play any role at the trial.”
The Post also reported that Agnifilo, during jury selection yesterday, said that actress Allison Mack might end up testifying in the trial.
Now that would be a spectacle.
——————–
Posted by Tony Ortega on April 23, 2019 at 12:00
E-mail tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.
Tony Ortega is a journalist who was formerly the editor of The Village Voice. He’s written about Scientology since 1995, and in May 2015 released a book about Scientology’s harassment of Paulette Cooper titled ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely,’ and more recently a compilation of his stories, ‘Battlefield Scientology.’ He continues to monitor breaking developments in the Scientology world, as well as other subjects at The Underground Bunker. You can reach him by sending him a message at tonyo94 AT gmail.com (Drop him a line if you’d like to get an e-mail whenever a new story is posted.)
