The Trial of Keith Raniere:

Day 1, Part 4 — Sylvie Takes the Stand

May 7, 2019 — United States Courthouse, Brooklyn, New York

After Marc Agnifilo sat down, prosecutor Moira Penza called the government’s first witness.

“The Government calls the witness who will be identified as Sylvie.”

No last name. That restriction was already in place. The jury heard it. Sylvie was sworn in. Penza began.

England, horses, pony club, a childhood she described as “enchanted.”

She left school at sixteen to show jump. A bad accident shook her confidence. A friend told her Clare Bronfman had an opening at her horse farm in upstate New York.

Her father printed out material about NXIVM before she left. He told her it looked like a cult. She barely read it. She was eighteen.

She arrived in October 2005 on a tourist visa waiver, knowing she would be paid, knowing that wasn’t legal.

The Mission Statement

Within weeks, Bronfman paid for Sylvie to take NXIVM’s five-day Level 1 intensive. Penza showed her Government Exhibit 1008.

Q: Can you read the first callout from the Mission Statement?

A: “There are no ultimate victims; therefore, I will not choose to be a victim.”

Q: Can you explain what that concept was?

A: I feel like this was something that was taught a lot — that there’s really no such thing as victims, and anything that happens to you is created by you. I must have recited it hundreds and hundreds of times. It was also interwoven into different classes in different ways.

Each session opened the same way: the full Mission Statement in unison, a group circle with arms around each other — we are committed to our success — a clapping sequence, then: Thank you, Vanguard; thank you, Prefect; thank you, Proctors.

Judge Garaufis leaned in from the bench.

THE COURT: When you did this, was Vanguard in the room?

THE WITNESS: Rarely.

THE COURT: So you thanked him in absentia most of the time?

THE WITNESS: Yes. The vast majority of the time.

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Six Hours a Day

Years passed. Bronfman quit riding and Sylvie’s path collapsed. She cycled through visa attempts — tourist, investor, student. She moved to London, worked at Goldman Sachs, ran with a club called Serpentine.

Then Raniere told her she could be an elite runner. She quit Goldman’s, quit the Serpentine Club, and came back to the USA.

The training program he gave her was two paces on the treadmill. She was to run as long as she could at each pace.

Q: Was there ever a discussion about how long you had gone and whether that was enough?

A: Every time that I did it I needed to report my times and the point was to be increasing, but I never reached a point where it was enough. So it never was, like, Oh, you’ve run long enough. That never happened. So it was basically a failure every time, and always looking at where did you fail. I felt like I was being told it was an emotional issue most of the time because I was getting EMs on why I stopped when I stopped.

Q: How much were you training?

A: I took it verbatim that triathletes train six hours a day, so I started training six hours a day, minimum. Cardio. Running, the bike, the pool, the cross-trainer.

Q: And how would those results get reported?

A: I sent my training schedule and my results every day to Keith and to Clare.

She got sick. An abscess. She was, her doctor told her, on the verge of sepsis.

Penza showed her Government Exhibit 1409 — an email chain. Clare Bronfman had written back after Sylvie described weeks of pain:

Hi, Sylv. Keith has suggested to continue exercising so long as it does not hurt.

Q: At that point, had you been telling the defendant and Clare Bronfman that you were indeed in pain?

A: Yeah. Yes.

Q: And then is this your response?

A: Yes. I said: Doesn’t hurt, LOL, it’s been hurting for weeks, but yes, okay.

Exhibit 1411 was Clare’s response after Sylvie sent a longer email questioning whether elite athletics was what she truly wanted — whether she wanted a family, relationships, a different life.

Sylvie read it aloud:

Dear Sylvie, I felt sad in reading this email, as it seems to me from your language and your weight and your eating patterns you’ve slipped back into the robot Sylvie perspective.

Q: What did you understand from this email?

A: I felt like this was a quite common response from her and that I had somehow let her down, and if I was to quit being an athlete, that it was me going back in the robot perspective — like saying that I wanted a family was me being a robot. I just felt backed into a corner. These kind of things wore me down over time and I became more and more apathetic about what I should be doing with my life.

DOS

In October 2015, a woman named Monica Duran approached Sylvie during a Jness session. Duran had become close to Sylvie years earlier when Sylvie was severely anorexic — Clare had put Duran in charge of monitoring her meals, cooking for her, taking her out. Sylvie trusted her.

Duran said she had something for Sylvie. Something special. Nothing to do with NXIVM or ESP. It was free. But to hear what it was, Sylvie would need to provide collateral.

Q: Had you heard the term “collateral” before?

A: Yeah. I’m pretty sure it was introduced in Jness or The Ethicist. It wasn’t a new thing.

Q: Can you explain what your understanding of collateral was?

A: It was like something — the way I remember it being taught was, say if I had agreed to cut your lawn, I could give you the keys to my house and say if I don’t cut your lawn, then you have my house. So it’s used to make you do the thing you said you were going to do.

Duran told her the collateral needed to be something ruinous. Something that would make even her family look at her differently. She came back with two ideas that weren’t strong enough. Duran gave her more specific guidance.

Q: What did she suggest?

A: She said, like, why don’t you say that you want to be a prostitute or that you are a prostitute. She gave me more specific ideas. And she suggested I write it in a letter to my parents, put it in a stamped addressed envelope, so all she would have to do is send it if I ever broke the collateral.

Q: Is that what you ultimately provided?

A: Yeah. I wrote a letter about being a prostitute and made it really detailed and very reflecting badly on me. Addressed to my parents.

Then Duran asked for photographs. She had set up a camera in her spare bedroom.

Q: What happened when you went upstairs?

A: She asked me for it to be a full frontal naked photo.

Q: And did she tell you anything about what would happen to the picture?

A: She said she was going to put it in a safe. She said she wasn’t going to look at it. She tried to minimize my feelings — no one’s going to look at it, like, it’s no big deal.

Q: So did you take the pictures?

A: Yes. On her camera. And gave her her camera back.

Q: After you gave her the pictures, what did she tell you?

A: She told me what the special project was. She called it the Master/Slave project. She told me she would be my master and I would be her slave.

Duran told her she would be given assignments designed to push through her fears. She would need to perform “acts of care” — anticipating Duran’s needs, making her life easier. She would need to respond to readiness drills on her phone at all hours, with no exceptions. There was no going dark.

Q: What times of day would you receive readiness drills?

A: Often like 3 in the morning. All times of day or night. If you were late in readiness, you had to do something called a penance.

Q: What was your understanding of penances?

A: You do something that’s physically painful to motivate you to do better next time.

The Assignment

Two weeks in, Duran called her in person.

Q: What did she say?

A: She told me that my assignment was to seduce Keith.

Q: How did you feel when she said that?

A: I almost laughed in shock. Like, What do you mean, seduce him? And she went on to explain. And I was like, Oh, God, this is not what I want to do. But my understanding was it was an assignment from my master and I didn’t have a choice. So I was freaked out basically.

Q: When you say you didn’t have a choice, what do you mean?

A: I thought I didn’t have a choice. She was my master and I needed to do whatever she said, and I had given her this collateral. My understanding was that I had to do what my master said or my collateral would be released.

Sylvie sent Raniere a WhatsApp message. Something about his glasses looking hot. He responded that she would have to do better than that.

Q: What did you think when he said that?

A: I thought, it seems like he knows what I’m supposed to be doing. I was hoping maybe he didn’t know this was from Monica. And so I thought that was weird.

Over the course of an evening, he prompted her for photographs. She sent one of her face. He told her to be more vulnerable. More vulnerable. More vulnerable.

Q: How explicit did the pictures get?

A: In the end, they were literally photos of my vagina. With not my face. Nothing.

Q: Were those suggested by the defendant?

A: Yeah. At times, he gave me actual poses that would be good to do.

Q: Did you want to send those pictures to him?

A: No. I thought it was part of my assignment. I had to do it.

Q: What was the impact on your life?

A: I was spending all this time in the bathroom trying to get — I don’t know if you’d call it a good picture. It was a freaky thing I had to do in secret. Obviously, I lived with John, my husband. It was really affecting my psyche, having this weird side assignment that seemed to have turned quite dark. I was very anxious and cagey.

It ended when her father found the deleted photos through a shared iCloud account and messaged her. She stopped sending them. Duran told her she should have asked Keith’s permission first. So she did.

A: He said I could stop sending the photos, and the next thing would be in person.

At that point, it was nearly five o’clock. Judge Garaufis suspended for the evening.

The Mistrial Motion

After the jury left, Agnifilo rose.

He had objected before trial to the government’s practice of using first names only for witnesses it deemed victims while allowing full names for everyone else. Now, after a day in which Penza had managed the naming protocol on the fly — you can use her last name, you can’t use her last name — he moved for a mistrial.

“The jury is now set with a very clear signal that in the Court’s view, certain people are victims of crimes and in the Court’s view, some people are not,” he said. “There’s been no factually specific finding made as to any specific person. I don’t have a vote in this. No one asked me.”

Penza answered that the prejudice could be cured by instruction, and that Agnifilo had sat through most of the day without objecting. She acknowledged the process needed to improve and offered to submit a written list overnight, establishing which names could be used in full.

Garaufis sided with her on the remedy.

“I think it would be useful and appropriate for us to have a better approach to this,” he said. He ordered the government to submit a written protocol by nine o’clock the next morning.

He denied the mistrial.

Next: Day 2

Se also:

The Trial of Keith Raniere: Day 1, Part 1 — ‘Please Stand, Mr. Raniere’

Raniere Trial: Day 1 PT 2 — ‘He Was a Con Man’

Raniere Trial #3: Fighting to the Last Breath