Senior member of NXIVM told FBI about blackmail and branding, got no response
timesunion.com
timesunion.com
If anyone is interested in this, HBO has a docuseries called "The Vow" out. It focuses on Edmonson's story, as well as on some other people she worked with to get the info out. The whole thing is absolutely nuts -- the rabbit hole just keeps going deeper.
Well, maybe the $1M he got for it also played a role.
The other funny thing about living in a cult, is you never realize you're living in a cult.
>Edmondson told the Times Union the FBI agent found the brandings disturbing, but said he did not see anything illegal about it — and said it “seemed like it was consensual.”
One could argue that Scientology similarly blackmails its members and compels them to make humiliating acts of submission and servitude, but one could also argue that it's consensual and not necessarily illegal. That was probably something like the FBI agent's thought process.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/14/20803950/jeffrey-ep...
Acosta said he had signed the non-prosecution agreement because he had been told to “back off” of Epstein: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he said, according to the White House official.
No idea if that is true, but the local paper reported on shady stuff and nothing happened. The Albany County DA was essentially implicated in helping the cult in various ways that has been documented in the press, so who knows. Albany is a weird, tightly connected place.
He was a creep that ran a process/self-improvement cult and started a harem inside it, but that's not really a crime. If it hadn't been part of a larger (consistent) pattern, what is law enforcement really supposed to do about women branding each other and sending each other material expressly labeled as blackmail? If I sign a contract with you that says that in order for me to (for example) lease a property to you, I require nude pictures, an embarrassing interview, and a physical brand on your body (weird), and that if you skip out on the rent I'm granted the right to release that material - is that a crime? Maybe - you can't sell yourself into slavery, but the definition of slavery is loose.
NXIVM was no worse than Scientology or Mormonism, which is to say it's horrible but protected, and its insularity hid stuff that was actually criminal but impossible to prosecute because everyone in the group would form a protective wall around the organization even if you made a bit of headway.
It's a lot easier and more rewarding to set some 80 I.Q. kid up as a terrorist. The public would have absolutely no interest in this if there wasn't sex involved (as Oxenberg and Edmondson remarked at least a couple of times on the TV series.) We don't prosecute financial institutions for financial crimes (or even resource the agencies responsible to even theoretically prosecute them.) There's no chance we're going to be going after tiny cults.
Maybe the CIA would have noticed them as they got a better foothold in Mexican elite circles and figured out a way to support them.
NXIVM is a cautionary tale for cults. The Guardian's Office/OSA in Scientology is not just decoration, it's crucial to build an internal intelligence service to keep an enterprise like that together. Raniere was just trying to improv the response to defectors and potential defectors rather than building a bureaucracy. Maybe get that done before the harem.
You mean other than the branding, right?
It made me realize why people actually get sucked into these things.
They send 15 officers to a Nascar driver's place because he decided to make a publicity stunt and say that a regular garage door noose was a hanging rope placed to scare him because of his skin color.
Enough is enough. This could be my or anyone else's children. Disband the FBI. Prosecute them. Treason.