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The Cult Is Dead (For Now)
1
The Cult Is Dead (For Now)
After The New York Times first reported on the branding ceremonies and authorities started to look a little deeper into NXIVM’s activities, Raniere did what any innocent man would do: He ditched his phone, moved to heavily encrypted emails, and escaped to Mexico. There he soon got into a high-speed pursuit with local police, which sadly didn’t end with him wrapping his frontal lobe around a lamppost.
He was arrested, extradited back to the U.S., and is now awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, and conspiracy to commit forced labor. His recent plea for $10 million bail was denied, because the judge for some reason thought a rich cult leader who fled the country before the cops even knocked on his door posed a flight risk.
As for Mack, she was arrested two weeks later — after she returned from Mexico, where she had also fled. She’s facing the same charges as Raniere, but was allowed to bail herself out for $5 million. That’s a lot of Smallville royalties down the drain.
Allison Mack/Instagram
NXIVM, meanwhile, is dead. In a statement released on their website in June, the last holdouts declared that they were “suspending all NXIVM/ESP […] events until further notice.” We guess they might still be holding out hope that Mack actually knows Superman.
But while the cult is dead, their bullshit propaganda lives on. In May, in the middle of a meltdown over some bad press (or as he calls it, “press”), Elon Musk retweeted an article by a website called The Knife (formerly The Knife Of Aristotle) which defended his dumb Twitter ramblings. People were quick to point out that this “news” site was run by, you guessed it, everyone’s least favorite sex cult. Musk quickly deleted the tweet, but then still praised NXIVM for their quality journalism — i.e. they were too busy sexually assaulting and burning women to write about how Teslas suck.
The Knife isn’t the only NXIVM publication that’s still online, either. There’s also a yoga website called Exo/Eso, a website for actors called The Source, and Society Of Protectors, a website for “men defending the honor of men.” Yoga fans, actors, MRAs, and Elon Musk — we don’t know what NXIVM’s endgame is, but they’ve built one hell of an annoying cult here.
Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing history that you should definitely subscribe to.
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For more, check out 5 People Who Started Religions Just To Get Laid and The Cult My Parents Forced Me Into Was A Hippie Sex Scam.
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