Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Child Molester Whose Sex Cult Taught Women Friendship

Episode Date: June 21, 2018

In Part Two of Episode 8, Robert is joined again by writer/comedian Anna Salinas (badcomixbyanna, John Baxte) and they continue to discuss Keith Raniere and his sex cult, 'NXIVM.' Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is again Behind the Bastards. We're doing part two of our series on Keith Reneary, creator of the Nexium Sex Cult, Child Molester, Judo Champion, and Humanitarian. My guest for part two, as with part one, is Anna Salinas. Hello. Part two-nist, comedian-ist, creative-erist. So thank you for joining me again, Anna.

Thank you, thank you for listing all my official titles. Creative-erist is the one that I'm most proud of. Yeah, I could tell that from the business cards. Yeah. So we're gonna get-are you excited to get back into talking about Keith Reneary? I am. I feel like we did all this like homework to get up to the juiciest part. Oh boy.

I mean, it's been juicy so far. It's been juicy, but well, it's crazy to say it's been tamed, because he's been molesting left and right. Free women, yes. So far, he's sexually assaulted three children. And he's built his cult. Yeah. But I want to know the crazy stuff it did.

Well, buckle up. Okay. By 2003, over 3,700 people had enrolled in Keith's seminars, including some famous-ish people. The co-founder of BET, a former U.S. surgeon general, the daughter of one Mexican president and the son of another. For whatever reason, a lot of success with the children of Mexican presidents. Keith Reneary was good at that.

The young female heirs to the Seagrams vodka fortune were also big fans of his work, as well as Stephen Cooper, the acting chief executive of Enron. Whoa. Yeah. Those are huge gets. There's some big gets in there, although 2003 is not the best year to have the CEO of Enron. No. To be fair, it's not.

It's not. But the son and daughter of a Mexican president. Two different Mexican presidents. Two different ones? Yeah. One of them is the daughter of Vincente Fox and the other, his name was Salinas. I'm not great at my mention. I think it's Carlos Salinas.

Carlos Salinas. I should know that because Salinas is my last name. I know Vincente Fox really well because he has probably the best name of any president. Fantastic name and a vocal antagonist of Trump. Yeah. He's definitely been a big boy. His daughter was in this cult. Yeah.

That's huge. Well, okay, so I want to be fair to the people who are members of this. When I say that these were enrolled in his seminars, this isn't the same as like being a Scientologist or in the Heaven's Gate. These people are spending a lot of money. They probably think Keith's great. They may have bought into some aspects of it, but they're not worshiping anything like they're paying into his money scheme.

So some of these people like the heirs to the Seagrams vodka fortune, this couple, these two sisters are definitely in the cult full on. I don't know if that's the case with all of these people. And in fact, I think for most of them, they just treated it like a professional development thing and they had money to burn. Right. They had money to burn. That's still so wild.

I mean, like he was normalized. Yeah. Yeah. And he didn't have, like you'll notice there's not huge numbers of people. I think maybe 17,000 people took his seminars at the max, but they're paying a lot of money. And yeah, yeah, and they're doing classes over and over again because that's something he insists is that like if you, you got to retake the classes a bunch of times to really get the maximum benefit out of it.

That does sound like UCB. That sounds uncomfortably similar to the upright citizens brigade approach to improv comedy. Well, what that's what that was co-created by was the lady on 30 Rock. Amy Poehler. Okay. So maybe we'll do an Amy Poehler episode. Oh God, I don't want to be responsible for throwing Amy Poehler under the bus. But if you find something.

The next time you see her, ask how she shakes hands and that'll tell you what you need to know about whether or not she's starting a cult. I will. If she puts out her right foot and then immediately makes a right angle with her thumb and that's as much as I remember. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's so much to keep track of with the handshake guidelines.

And a tilted wrist. Yeah. The wrist tilt, 100% about the wrist tilt. Yeah. But anyway, 2003, Keith Ranieri is doing great. That is the same year that a reporter from Forbes asked to interview him. He was delighted. Who wouldn't be, you know?

That's huge. Having Forbes, he was going to be on the cover of Forbes. That's a big get. That's the sort of thing he would make up. Yeah, that's the sort of thing he would lie about shamelessly. Yeah. Unfortunately for Keith and Nexia, the article that ran in October of 2003 titled Cult of Personality was not positive towards Keith and his program.

Forbes, unfortunately for Keith, were actual journalists and they did some actual journalism. And they found a number of fun things in Keith's past, including an ex-girlfriend who was in the process of suing him. She claims he had harassed her, disrupted her business, and manipulated her into giving up her 10-year-old son to the boy's father. This woman, Tony F. Natalie, told Forbes that she believed Ranieri brainwashed her, telling her that she had to give up her son to her son's father because she was put on earth to carry his baby.

And this was, quote, the baby who would alter the course of history. Now, Ranieri called this claim ridiculous and not rational, which it's certainly not rational, but I'm 100% sure he made this claim to her based on some stuff that's going to happen next. Oh, whoa. Spoiler alert. This is not the last time we're going to hear about Keith Ranieri trying to steal a baby. No, it really has been building in craziness because first he was like, well, what if I

have sex with kids? Children, yeah. Now it's like, or I could make my own or steal them. Make my own child who's going to alter the course of history. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. So, I mean, Forbes runs the story.

They sure do. And he refutes it. Does the company take a hit? No, no, no. So we're not even through everything that's in the story at this point. Oh. Forbes is being legitimate journalists, so they meet this woman and she has the story about Keith Ranieri trying to manipulate her into giving up her kids so she can have

another kid for him. And they go to Ranieri and they say, these are the allegations someone's making and he refutes it. So the author of the Forbes article did spend a lot of time talking to Keith. It's clear that Ranieri really played up the enigmatic guru portions of his personality while they were together. Here's a quote from the article that I think presents Keith the way that he was trying to present himself for this.

Okay. He has no driver's license, relying on friends for rides and walking up to 12 miles a day. He says he has no bank account and that he forgoes any salary from the 4 million a year coaching program he created. Bullshit. That's steaming. Bullshit. I consider everything payment for what I've done.

Though he co-owns a small home near Albany, New York with a female friend, he spends most nights at one or another of three friends' homes. He claims not to own a bed. I live, he says with a disarmingly warm smile, a somewhat church mouse type existence. I'm going to go ahead and call out this journalist for saying he had a disarmingly charming smile. See, I think that's probably fair. I mean, you saw a little bit of the video. We're going to watch some more later.

That's true. This is what he's good at. He's got a good voice. Yeah. And in fairness to the journalist, the journalist didn't just take this. Like, he dug up a shitload of dirt on Keith. That's true. That's true.

The writer was just pointing out, Keith's good at being charming. He's good. Yeah. But I don't believe that whole Jesus. I don't have money. I don't have a bed thing. He's really going for the Jesus-y vibe. Yeah, he is.

Yeah. Which is smart. If you're being accused of things, it's like, oh no. I'm misunderstood. I'm pure. Mm-hmm. So the Forbes article brought more insights into Keith Rainier's view of the world. It revealed that he believes most non-ESP people try to, quote, destroy each other, steal from

each other, down each other, and rejoice at another's demise. And so it is essential for the survival of humankind that as much money as possible be controlled by successful, ethical people like the folks trained in his seminars. Now the Forbes article may have been inspired by someone with an event data. One of the article's main anti-Nexium sources was a guy named Edgar Bronfman Sr., former head of the Seagrams Company and patriarch of the family fortune. Uh-huh. And so Bronfman's daughters wound up being the two big whales of Keith Rainier's con

man life, putting tens of millions of dollars into Keith's adventures. And these poor girls were definitely in the cult side of things. Ooh, that ugly stuff. Yeah. Like the, no, I don't know if he ever did anything untowards with them, but he for sure built them out of a fortune. And I wonder, so where did all that money go? Well, that's what we're about to get into.

You have eight pages. We're about to find out. Yeah. Well, ESP and Exxium's particular line of bullshit seemed tailor made to ensnare young, rich, naive people. Keith was a big IronRan fan, so his philosophy simultaneously elevated wealth to a virtue, while also letting people feel like they were saving the world. Just by being rich and buying into Keith's bullshit, ESP had a sash ranking system where

different colors and bands on your sash would signify if you were a coach or whatever. So there were like 60 total different types of sashes. And by going to the same class over and over again and going to multiple classes, you would get better sashes. So yeah. Again, similar to UCB. UCB is the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. They do a bunch of classes on improv and being funny people.

Yeah. Wait, are there sashes in UCB? We don't have sashes, but there's levels, 101, 201, 301, 401, Advanced Study, and then you get on a house team, which is like a sash, because you get to go in to shows for free. I'm on a team there, I spend a lot of time there, but man, if there were a checklist of is this a cult, they'd be checking off those boxes. We're at like seven out of 10. Yeah.

And there's a thin line between a successful business that relies on repeat customers and teaches things and a cult. Summer camp, I think. You're always going to use some of the same tactics. So they had these sashes that had a bunch of ranks, and this was like a reward people got for paying an enormous amount of money to take classes. And this is probably why the programs were so addictive to people like the Bronfman sisters. Here's a quote from Sarah Bronfman, one of the heirs to the Seagrams vodka fortune.

I don't know how much you know about my family, but coming from a family where I've never had to earn anything before in my life, it was a very, very moving experience for me to be awarded this yellow sash. It was the first thing that I had earned on just my merits. So Keith's making these young women who grew up super rich and for whom money isn't really a thing. They don't have a concept of money, but they want to feel like they've accomplished something. Yeah.

And he's giving them that opportunity. I mean, if there's anyone who is an heiress out there listening and they want to feel like they've earned something, feel free to Venmomi any amount of money. She has so many sashes for you. Yeah. I mean, filthy with sash. I'll make a sash. I'll get one on Etsy.

It will be hand embroidered. Yeah. Hey, it's smart. It's smart. The guy, I doubted his intelligence at the top of this. He is a deeply smart man who works in the art of total bullshit. Yeah. Of bilking people out of money.

That's his genius. But his scam wasn't just harmlessly ripping off rich families, Forbes interviewed former students who reported aspects of the training that sounded quite abusive. So to start off here, some background. One of the different types of classes that you had, the different courses was just called money. And in money, students were taught that every dollar spent represented a portion of effort. And that quote, Vanguard identified the concept of giving and taking with integrity.

Coaches were supposed to urge students to take each session several times at a cost of $7,000 each. Each dollar spent was seen as a representation of the effort they were putting into the class. In a core piece of the program, known as exploration of meaning, teachers are supposed to basically get into students' beliefs and backgrounds and look for emotional buttons. Students are encouraged to reveal negative habits or negative behaviors from their past, describe how, like, why they think they started doing that thing and then pledged to replace it.

Which both seems like it might be a reasonable thing, you know, you're getting to this thing you're trying to purge yourself of your negative behaviors, but also kind of gives them leverage on you. That's Scientology. That's Scientology. It's exactly the same thing they do where you would go in and you'd have the e-meter reading, you'd have to tell them things or you'd feel guilty. Yeah.

Isn't that what they say is going on with John Travolta? I mean, probably right. John Travolta's definitely killed a man. That's not a legal claim, allegedly definitely killed a man. Oh yeah, he has allegedly, without a shadow of a doubt, killed a human being. Allegedly. Allegedly. But without a shadow of a doubt.

But with no, not a doubt in my mind. No, I mean, they say there's secrets about like his sexuality and Tom Cruise's and that's how they keep them. I'm going to be so sad if we find out the truth and all it's been for this whole time is that he's gay. Yeah. And I'm like, dude, no one would have cared. Yeah, especially now.

We would have enjoyed Greece just as much. Yeah. Like, we're fine with it. No, I don't know. I wonder if it's more than that, though, too. Who knows? I mean, maybe he really likes it. It may just, because I feel like with the celebrities in Scientology, like Tom Cruise.

They treat them well. Exactly. Maybe there's no bilking going on there. Right. There's like two tracks in Scientology. There's the people that they like trap in rooms. I saw going clear, this is all very factual. No, but there's the people that they really milk for their money and then put into those

brutal conditions and every good cult needs also people who are genuinely having a good time to sell the cult. Yeah. Exactly. Or maybe a mixture of the two. Yeah. I think it takes both. Yeah.

Because even the people having a great time are being manipulated to some degree and may be abused. Yeah, and I think the Bronfman sisters are having a great time with this. Yeah. So, basically, you were supposed to spend a lot of time and money sitting around in a group telling a coach all the bad things you did. In 2003, a 35-year-old woman named Christian Snyder went missing after a nexium session in Alaska.

A note was found in her truck. It read, I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed, turned off. Please contact my parents. If you find me or this note, I am sorry I didn't know I was already dead. She's presumed dead. Oh my God. Yeah. Did they kill her?

I mean, I think she killed herself. I think she would, and we're going to get into some more of the abuse of shit because this is just like the top of the barrel where they're having you talk about all the bad things that you've done. There's seemed to have been things that happened during some of these training sessions that really fucked with some people's heads. So the Forbes article kicked off years of dogged coverage of Keith Ranieri's world. The Observer published an article a few years later calling out billionaire Richard Branson

as affiliated with nexium. No. Well, Branson spokesman was forced to deny he had anything to do with the group. Him using the Brontman sisters money had hired an island that he owned to host an event. Branson claims he only said, Yeah, well, I mean, these girls are putting a shitload of money into Keith Ranieri. I mean, millions. Tens of millions.

Tens of millions. We'll get into exactly how much in a little bit. Would I join a cult if they hired out an island? It'd be hard not. I would definitely go to their island party. I would go. And then. Oh, that's the creepiest place to be if it's a cult.

It is. On the island with these fucks? Yeah. But everything's free. It's Richard Branson's island, so it's probably a nice island. Yeah. He's so personable. He seems like he has good taste in islands.

Oh, yeah. He has a bathtub. Is that the end of the statement? Well, I realized I'm pulling this from like a VH1 lives of billionaires or whatever from like 2002, but he has a bathtub on an outdoor balcony overlooking the ocean. I thought at first you were just saying he has a bathtub and I thought really bad for you. He has a bathtub.

He has a bathtub. How many of us have shower bathtub combos at most? Not just a hose outside, he's got a bathtub. He fills it up and he sits. Like a rich man. Yeah. He stews in his well. Okay.

So yeah, in 2010 Vanity Fair published an article that expanded on allegations of mental abuse in ESP seminars, which helps to give a little bit more context to Christian Snyder's disappearance. Quote, today people describe Nexium therapy sessions in which they were convinced that they are reincarnated Nazis or responsible for 9-11. Looking back on her experience, Natalie says, Keith finds your vulnerabilities and then he prays on them. He broke them.

Yeah. Some of them at least. Yeah. He broke her. Yeah. I mean, that's what it seems like happens. Who knows? Maybe it was something else.

I mean, people that are Nazis probably doesn't help. And we all have that, I feel like. And responsible for 9-11? Yeah. Like, man, there are things I feel guilty about that if you tugged on that thread, you might be able to get me to think I am responsible for bad things. I mean, I've been blaming 9-11 on you for a while. Yeah.

And I'm getting a lot of negative tweets about it. People don't feel great about it. It's been a 9-11. I take responsibility for mine. Finally. Yes. Justice has been done. I'm sorry.

So I should probably point out here, this seems like an appropriate point to say that Gina, who you remember from earlier, the young lady, Keith started seeing when she was 16. She ran off to a Buddhist monastery and committed suicide at age 33 in 2002. So that's two deaths. We can link at least tentatively to Keith Ranieri. Of course, nothing that would legally implicate him, but two people he had a big influence on who wound up, you know. Yeah.

That sucks that there's not more you can do when it's such a clear link. Yeah. And this is the girl he claimed was like a Buddhist princess or goddess or something? Oh, no. She goes to a Buddhist monastery and kills herself. Oh, no. You're right. She was the Buddhist goddess.

Oh, no. It's real fucked up. This is so bad because that must have been such a loaded statement for him to say she's a Buddhist goddess. And then she goes after she's been totally broken down to a Buddhist monastery. He was doing something very dark to her. He was, yeah. In somehow combination with whatever version of Buddhism he was selling her.

I have read so much about Keith Ranieri at this point and I suspect at most I've got about 30% of the fucked up stuff he did, like, because most of it's no one's ever found out about. Right. It's in these poor dead girls' heads. Yeah. They don't want to say anything about it. That's such a sad ending to that.

Yeah. Oh, no. So that 2010 Vanity Fair article, the heiresses and the cult gave the first full accounting of just how heavily Keith Ranieri had milked the Brothman family. So if you bought Seagrams vodka. You were supporting that. You were supporting Keith Ranieri. I did.

Oh, God. I bought a case of Seagrams vodka once. I didn't buy it. I stole it. Oh, well, no, then you hurt Keith Ranieri. I hurt him. You were on the right side of history. It was already purchased.

It was at like a music festival the morning after. It was a very backwards music festival and there were all these cases of Seagrams and we just took one. Yeah. So we drank Seagrams for a while. That makes you the hero of this story. Yeah. Yeah, I'm the hero.

I'm reconciling. Yeah. I never feel bad about stealing vodka from a music festival. Oh, yeah. That's one of my very few rules. They were rich in it. Yeah. Always steal liquor from music festivals.

Yeah. They can take it. They charge you an arm and a leg. Yeah, for sure. It's fair. Anyway, here's a quote from the Vanity Fair article. According to legal filings and public documents in the last six years as much as 150 million was taken out of the Brothman's trusts and bank accounts, including 66 million allegedly

used to cover Keith Ranieri's failed bets in the commodities market, 30 million to buy real estate in Los Angeles and around Albany, 11 million for a 22-seat, two-engine Canadair CL 600 jet, and millions more to support a barrage of lawsuits across the country against Nexium's enemies. We're going to get into, after some ads, the story of how Keith Ranieri used Seagrams vodka money to back his second attempt to raise a perfect child. But first, here are the good people who support our show with products and or services. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told

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a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about how Keith Ranieri stole like $150 million from the heirs to the secrets

vodka fortune. And he used a chunk of that money to back his second attempt at raising a perfect child who would change the course of human history. Man, I got so many questions. That's so much money. I understand that if you have that much money, you're renting an island. Yeah, you rent yourself some islands for sure. But what was their facility like?

It was in LA, right? They had a number of facilities, I think. Right. And I think a lot of this real estate was like essentially just bets. Because that was like the thing that Keith Ranieri lost $66 million betting on the commodities market. Oh, yeah. I think it's important to him that everyone know he's super smart.

Yeah. And so like he was trying to prove that he could make a shitload of money if he just got a nest egg from these rich girls who could turn it into more. Yes. He was deeply mismanaging it. Because he's not very smart at this stuff. No. He's only smart at manipulating rich girls.

Which he's a genius at. He is a genius at it. Because $150 million. That is a successful con. Yeah. That's an A-list con. And they had a plane. They bought a plane.

He was living a rich life. He super was. How could he say he didn't own a bed? Because he probably didn't. There was probably nothing in his name. That's part of how you keep the fucking heat off of you. It's all the company. It's all the company.

Keith Ranieri is a poor church mouse type man who is just dedicated to thinking about learning. Yeah. What a saint. We're going to talk about the second child he tried to steal from. Oh no. So Johar, a former nexium consultant, wrote to the New York Attorney General to allege that Bronfman Money had paid for the care of a boy named Galen who was a mysterious

three-year-old being raised to Keith's specifications. Now no one seemed to know Galen's real name. The story among nexium was that his mother had died and his father had given the infant to the care of one of Ranieri's long-term followers. Keith Ranieri apparently decided to make the boy his heir and in accordance to his theories on child development, the boy was fed a raw diet, isolated from other children, and cared for by a team of five nannies who each spoke to him in a different language. Oh no.

Oh no. No, no. Is this kid okay? He's not with Keith anymore. I don't know if he's okay. I don't know if you outlive that. Yeah. He was three, so you got to hope he can.

So Frank Parlato, if you remember Frank from the Frank Report. Of course I remember Frank. Good old Frank. Good old Frank. Also wrote an article for the Niagara Falls Reporter where he claimed to know that Galen was actually just the child of Keith Ranieri and a woman named Christine Keith who was the long-term follower who was caring for the kid. According to Frank, the adoption story was necessary because, number one, it added like

a layer of mystique that this child's real parents died and Keith took him under his wing, but also because Keith's followers believed him to be celibate. Oh. Yeah. So do you believe that it was his real son? I don't know. I have no way to figure that out. That's a very journalistic response.

Yeah. Now, I am not a journalist. I'm going to go ahead and make some wild speculative claims. Roll with it. I think he was having all kinds of sex. I think he definitely gave birth to this son, but I also bet there was a lot of like group sex going on and mixing of partners because that happens in cults. So like maybe it wasn't even his son is probably unclear.

But see, I don't think that, and we'll get into this a little bit. I definitely, there was a lot of group sex going on. I don't think Keith was letting any other men be involved in the group sex. Oh. This isn't like one of those cults where everybody's got free love. That's a good point. Yeah. Yes.

This is that kind of cult. This is a quote from Frank Parlato, who again was a member of Nexium for like a year or two. Quote, some of his inner circle knew he wasn't celibate because they'd had sexual relations with him. They knew he wasn't celibate and they believed he would when the time was ripe have a special child with a chosen woman who he had preordained would be the mother of a child who would carry on Ranieri's work to save the world.

Frank alleges that, you know, Keith getting this woman pregnant was an accident and she wasn't someone he viewed as special enough to be his Mary Magdalene, or no, not Magdalene. What's the Mary that had Jesus? Virgin Mary. That's the Mary. Yeah. Frank of the Frank report says that he didn't want to get this woman pregnant and so he just told her to lie and say the real mother was someone else who died.

Quote from Frank, Ranieri immediately required Keith to lie about her maternity. He helped her hide her pregnancy and being thin, she hardly showed for months. When her pregnancy became visible, he told people she was severely ill and could not be seen. Again, Frank parlados a guy with a real grudge against Keith Ranieri and next to him. I also believe 100% of that. I believe 100% of that. It gels with everything else we know about him.

The more we hear about Frank, the more we hear from the Frank report, the more I like this guy. You're a fan of the Frank report. Yeah, I'm a fan. He also stole a million dollars maybe from the Bronfman sisters, they sued him over it. It's hard to say what happened. There's so much to dig in here. Yeah, but do you blame them?

I didn't get into that that much. No, and I don't. It seems like they were just giving away money. You know, these girls are giving it away, they've got tens of thousands of, I'm just saying numbers. They've got enough. He may have been innocent of this. I really have no idea what happened.

I didn't look into the case. I'm still pro-Frank. Frank, if you're out there, tweet at me. Let me know your side of the million dollar story. You can read his site on the Frank report. There are literally hundreds of articles. On that plain text website? No, no, this isn't the plain text.

That was the weird IQ website. I had to do a lot of strange digging for this. Frank's website looks like a website that an individual person would make to settle a grudge, but it is just articles about Nexium and Keith Ranieri and the Bronfmans. Yeah, it's like he copied a real looking website. It's something else. Put the name Frank in there. It's something else.

But I don't think he's lying about this. This seems completely in line with everything else about Keith Ranieri, including the fact this woman he got pregnant was normally dangerously thin. Which we'll get. Yeah. He likes that. He really likes that. Eventually, Keith left the cult and took her son with her, so we will never know how

well Keith Ranieri's remarkable child-ruining strategies actually worked. I hope nothing but the best for that poor kid. Wow. Yeah. That kid has scars. I hope his mom got him out early enough that maybe he doesn't have that bad. Yeah, especially the mom left, so she probably kind of- Woke up?

Yeah. I don't want to say woke up because I'm like, am I victim-blaming? But I'm not. She got out. She escaped. I'm not. I don't want to be blaming her any other women in this story, except for maybe Alice and Mack.

Oh, I want to blame her hard. Yeah. I just don't want to know everything she did. Yeah. This woman just seems like she got caught in for a while, and then she woke up and got her kid the hell out of there, which is the responsible thing to do. That is. So, good on you, Ms. Keith.

Or Kefi. It's K-E-E-F-F-E, which is- I've never seen that last name before, so I'm just going to say Keith. Keith. Now, in spite of the mixed press coverage Nexium received, it was a big financial success and Keith made millions, mostly from grifting his wealthiest adherents. He wasn't the kind of man to sit on his laurels, though. Over the years, a number of different spin-off groups joined Nexium's executive success programs.

The nearest and dearest to Keith's heart, and his other parts, was the woman's group, Janess. J-N-E-S-S. Usually all caps. So what is Janess, exactly? I can see that question on your face, Anna. Yeah. It sounds like a birth control pill. It does sound like a birth control pill.

Like Trinessa. Janess. Janess. It stops the babies real fast. That's how all birth control commercials do sound. Tell us about Janess. Yeah. Let's talk about Janess.

Well, you know what, I'll let Janess themselves explain what they are. Are you ready for this? Yeah. Our Janess is our highly personal version of being a woman. It is an affirmation of our independent life journey with its lessons, tragedies, and magnificence. No two women are the same. Each of us has a unique, powerful self-secret formed from our experiences in life. No one set of words can quite quantify us, and no collection of rules can categorize

us. Janess, in general, is the personal work of empowered women in this world. You got a clear idea of what Janess is? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, really? Because that seems like nonsense to me. It's nonsense, but I can sort of imagine them writing that up.

You know what I mean? They're all sort of gathering round. They've ordered food, probably Italian food. That seems right. Parabas, and they're like, oh, yeah, we uplift each other. I feel guilty making fun of this women's group. I don't think any woman wrote any word of that statement. I think this is all Keith Ranieri.

But I don't know. We'll see. We'll get into this. Oh, I have so many questions. That's my fear. I really have no idea. Oh, it's his trademark vague style. And there's some other stuff that makes me think.

Maybe he had some input from some ladies on this, but he definitely exercised a strong editorial hand, I think, because Keith Ranieri is a control freak. Yeah, that's true. I was going to say, well, who knows? Maybe he had some right-hand women speaking like him, imitating his voice, but no. Well, the Janess website gives the whole story of how Janess was conceived of and founded. And I would be doing you, Anna, and the whole internet of the service if I didn't read this story in its entirety.

Take a moment to think about some of the most meaningful needs of society from your perspective. Is one of those needs world hunger, or possibly more pressing is the issue of abuse of power in government, or maybe even more important is a war in a foreign country? Or you might focus upon difficulties closer to home, such as the lack of community in your community, or possibly some type of social prejudice, or for some, just the simple lack of caring amongst friends and neighbors is most disturbing. There are many, many other equally important challenges in the world, but what is a primary concern is which issues are more important to you directly, personally.

On a spring day in 2006, in a car, driving down the highway, this was the topic of discussion amongst three dearest friends, Pam, Mariana, and Keith. Keith offered an expertise in educational methodology, along with a body of knowledge relating to the human dynamic. The most essential thing for Pam and Mariana was their struggles as women in a world where women's values are distorted. Over the next few days, the initial codification for a new method of gender transformation, genese, was born from the loving intent of three people who desired to create something

meaningful together to make the world a better place. Wow. Wow, indeed. The beginning sounds like a Miss America pageant answer. Because it's like, if you asked someone who hasn't read the news ever in their life, what are problems in the world, you'd be like, there's war in places, government bad, people not talking, it's just so fake, people not close. There's actual wars you could drop, there's actual problems in the world that you could

be specific about to make this seem a little bit less like a moon man wrote it. I think that Keith fancies himself a bit of a poet. I think he thinks he has a writerly literary touch to his work. Why else would he paint such a vivid picture like on a spring day? In a car, driving down the highway. I really saw it. I saw the scene unfolding. I felt like I was there.

I felt like I was one of these two generically named women being enchanted by his new methodology of generality. What I love is that the creation of this woman's group, what the two women bring to the table is their struggles as women and what Keith says he brings to the table is knowledge. Yeah, there's one thing he's good at and it's mansplaining. He is the embodiment of it. He is, but what did this group do? Let me mansplain that for you.

It's not mansplaining if I'm inviting it. I know. Well, do I? I do you? I don't know. I didn't even know myself until I said that. I don't know. I just felt really guilty after this paragraph that I'm about to read another six pages.

So I bet you're probably still curious as to what exactly Janess does. It feels very foreboding. Yeah. Well, I think what Janess is, is Keith believing he invented the concept of women having friends. So I'm going to quote to you again from the website, Janess friendships at the foundation of this movement. Women start their journey with Janess by attending an introductory weekend. The weekend is two and a half days packed full of powerful and engaging curriculum.

At the close of the weekend, your weekend facilitator will guide women in the process of joining or creating a new friendship. So. At the end of my seminar, you will make friends. You'll know how to have friends. Wow. Yeah. You know, I get it.

He spent his career up until this point pitting women against each other to some degree. It sounds like isolating them and brainwashing them and having sex with them. When they were children. So yeah, he's probably like, you know what, now it's time for me to allow them to be friends. And Janess had a lot of powerful positive impacts on a lot of women, which I know because there are testimonials on the Janess website, like this one from Marissa Zaragoza. Since I was little, I remember my goal was to be like my father. He is an engineer.

So when the time came to pick a profession, that path was natural to me. Where I was graduating on electrical engineering on a class where only 8% were women. I learned to work with men and among men, always competing to demonstrate my abilities and earn their approval. Years passed. I decided to get married and create a family. I understood that those developed abilities were not enough for my new role as a mother. I decided to disguise my incapacity, covering it up with my professional success and depriving

myself of enjoying the first years of my two children. When I met Janess, I started a journey to make amends with myself, with the sensible and motherly woman within me. I stopped trying to run away from myself and built the strength to face my fears, evaluate and surrender to my true passion, which is having kids and not a career. A woman didn't write that. No. I think Keith Ranieri wrote basically all of this.

Yes, definitely. That sounds like Keith Ranieri pretending to be a woman in Mexico. This feels relevant to Handmaid's Tale. Oh yeah. I think he was trying to create a Handmaid's Tale, right? Because in his worldview, everyone has amazing potential and should be fabulously wealthy, but also women's main calling is to have children. Well, we're about to get into that right now.

So in the actual sessions themselves, Ranieri posited some pretty radical theories on gender. He believes men are unable to enjoy the world with as much depth and complexity as women, but men know the difference between right and wrong. Women lead rich lives, but they're prone to tantrums and using bad behavior to get what they want. According to Keith, men are naturally polyamorous while women are naturally monogamous. If you're keeping track, that's just polygamy. Wow.

Man, I was giving him so much credit, he's such a bad person, but I was truly giving him credit. I was like, at least he's still hanging on to this pseudo-intellectualism. But he, ah, come on. That's why I don't think anyone else at the orgies that was a man was getting involved. Oh, they definitely were their men, but there were men in the group. There were other men, and there was a men's group. I don't even talk about the men's group in this because there was just so much shit to

talk about. There was a men's group. He was bilking men out of money, but it doesn't seem like it was nearly as abusive to the men as it was to the women. Oh no. Wow. Well, I can't say I disagree with him. I mean, I know that I myself am prone to emotional outbursts and tantrums, and all the men in

my life are steady hands of guidance. If there's one thing the last couple of years have taught us, it's that men always know the difference between right and wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I would say the last year. That's really the message of this podcast too, is that men know the difference between right and wrong.

And women need help. And women need help. Yeah. Women need to be polygamist, but don't call it that. But only if you're a man. No, men are polyamorous. Right. Everyone be polygamist.

But women aren't. Yeah. All right. We have to break for some ads. When we get back though, we're finally going to get Alice and Mack, Smallville star, into the mix here. I know. I know.

It took a while, right? It really did. But now it feels so earned. Yeah. Now we're ready to get into that. All that and more after we talk about products which are available for purchase. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup?

Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you

find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. When I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. The podcast is back. Everyone's okay.

It's been an emotional roller coaster. It's caused me to question my own potential involvement in cults. But one thing I can say for certain, I am so excited to hear what Allison Mack did. So Allison Mack, Smallville actress, presumably actress on other things, but everyone just says the lady from Smallville. I'm tempted to say no real other credits. I have no idea. She was definitely on Smallville, though.

She was such a big character on Smallville, but then she never did anything else, and now we know why. Well, she started attending next EM sessions in 2007 once her career hit a plateau. Keith apparently took an interest in her. She begged him to, quote, make me a great actress again. Okay. Okay, Allison. I don't know if I'd say she was ever great.

Fuck the standout on Smallville was Amy Adams. I don't know who Amy Adams is either. Oh my gosh, really? I'm super pot culture ignorant. She is a rival. Oh, that's a great movie. Yeah. Is she the scientist lady?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, she's really good. She's phenomenal. And she was on an episode of Smallville and played this crazy, monstrous person who desperately wanted to lose weight, so she drank something or something or it was an accident. And then she started losing weight, but had an insatiable appetite that eventually causes her to eat people.

Oh. I do want to set the record straight. Okay. Allison Mack has had other credits. Unfortunately, quite a few good ones. She was on Wilfred. Oh shit, that's a great show. Yeah.

The following, another good show. Other things I don't know. She's been in a lot of stuff. She's had a solid career. Yeah. She was on her way, for sure. She was on her way. So she joins Nexium, gets really involved with Nexium.

She wound up helping to start a subcult within Genes called Dominus Obsequius Cerorium, or DOS, which I think means master over submissives and master in Latin, Dominus in Latin is like a masculine, the masculine version of that word, Domino would be the feminine. Yeah. At this point, they're not trying to fight the creepiness. They're wholeheartedly embracing it. Bring in some Latin. Yeah.

Allison Mack has, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Let's cut straight to the point. Has anything good ever come from the Latin language? No. Moving on. So this little subcult, DOS, has anything good ever come from DOS?

No. The band DOS? Okay. Fair. One good thing, but not the computer thing. I don't know what you're talking about, so no. I don't even really know what I'm talking about. So this subcult eventually consisted of around 150 women who were sort of the elite ladycult

members of Nexium. The New York Times revealed how it all worked in an interview with Mack, quote, the woman who invited you to the group was your master, Mack said, tucking in her blue socked feet under her, or the representation of your conscience, your higher self, your most ideal. Masters would help slaves count calories to save them from the trap of emotional eating according to other women in the group. Again, Keith Ranieri, there's always a big focus on women being thin. Oh no.

Yeah. There's so much wrong with this. Yeah. Masters would dictate an act of self-denial, like cold showers or rousing yourself from bed at 4 a.m. and standing stock still for a time. Slaves were told to do acts of care for masters, perhaps bringing them coffee. Slaves might be told to abstain from orgasms, ostensibly to heal their negative sexual patterns.

Mack said that this was about devotion and like any spiritual practice or religion. I thought about free will. Did she believe in that? She said, you're dedicating your life one way or another. So, Alice and Mack. Why did they have to- Why did it have to go to orgasm denial? I don't know.

They already have the creepy Latin name. Now, they're like, let's just call it slaves and masters, and wow, this is so bad. Yeah. It's gotten really bad real fast. I mean, it's been bad the whole time, actually. Is this what R. Kelly's sex call was like? Are you guys going to do him? I mean, I should at some point.

I have not done any research into that. She had a sex call. I've read like one article about it. Yeah. I mean, if this is what a sex call is like. This is definitely a sex call to this point, for sure. Yeah. Also, abstain from orgasm, I feel like that is such a small piece of whatever was going

on in that situation. Yeah. That's not the only creepy orgasm-based rule. If there's one creepy orgasm-based rule in a cult, there's a lot of them. I feel like that's a cult rule. Yeah. Yeah. It's a subcategory.

It sprawls out. Yeah. There was like a fucking list. Yeah. Yeah. Extreme weight loss was encouraged within DOS, especially for the women Ranieri fancied. Here's the AP. Quote, investigators said Ranieri preferred exceptionally thin women, so slaves had to

stick to very low-calorie diets and document every food they ate. As punishment for not following orders, women were forced to attend classes where they were forced to wear fake cow udders over their breasts while people called them derogatory names or threatened with being put in cages. Oh my God. This is around the same time he's also hooking women's heads up to brain scanners and showing them video of women being cut apart, stuff like that. Whoa.

Yeah. It's real messed up. Now, Ranieri only acknowledged having sexual relationships with two members of DOS or DOS or whatever. This is like he acknowledged in the New York Times, like he did this mea culpa like, yeah, I've been bad. You know, it was like, it was not like really bad. It was just like I couldn't control myself and they cared about me so much.

Right. So I just, nobody's perfect. Oh, he doesn't think he's done anything wrong. Is he a sociopath? He might be. Usually, I'm really hesitant to call people associate. I don't know. Because it's a, right.

It's a, but it's a real thing and. He certainly, that would be a thing to check on if you were a psychiatrist working on Keith Ranieri. He certainly, there's some warning signs here. Yeah. Or maybe just a narcissist. Definitely a narcissist. Yeah.

To accept no responsibility like that, but the cowwaters. Yeah. The cowwaters, like that's. So the women were in a state of starvation. Yeah. So already a deeply altered state and then being fed those images. Yeah. They had lost their minds.

Yeah. In interviews with other members of the, of DOS, the New York Times reported that, quote, promising to seduce Ranieri, which was apparently the way he preferred to be approached sexually rather than putting himself on the line was also one of the ways some women later said they were told to show commitment to the sisterhood. So at some point, the women of DOS started branding each other with hot metal pokers, possibly in the shape of Keith Ranieri's initials. The branding sessions would last 30 to 45 minutes and were apparently as painful as

you would imagine a 45 minute branding session would be. What do you do for 45 minutes? You're in horrible pain. Like my understanding of branding as it relates to livestock is it's like poke. I've never branded cattle. Neither have I, but I don't know if it's fast and real. Thought about it. You think a lot about that?

Yeah. I think a lot about it. No. I mean, I'm a vegetarian. I've thought about things we do to animals and branding always seemed weird. It doesn't seem like a nice thing. I think they usually like do a chip now anyway. Oh, dude, that sounds too much worse.

Really? I don't know. I think the cows prefer the chip. Yeah, that's true. That's true. They prefer not being eaten probably. Who knows? Yeah.

I don't though. I don't eat them. But who knows? Yeah. So 45 minutes of having a fucking hot metal poker shoved into your skin until it burns you horribly. There's pictures in the New York Times article of one of these women's brands. It definitely looks like it's Keith Ranieri's initials.

What else would it be? What are they claiming? I don't know. I haven't heard a direct claim for what the branding symbolically was supposed to be. At that point, it's like, why are you even denying it? Yeah. I mean, Alice in Mac says that she came up with it because basically she thought a tattoo wasn't enough of a commitment, which- Oh, I'm looking at the image.

Hold on. And it's a big brand. Again, the pictures are online. You can look at them. These are not like a tiny, it's not like getting a little bitty tattoo or whatever. This is a substantial thing to have done to you. That's deeply painful. Yeah.

Agonizing. Wow. So. Ugh. Alice in Mac, again, says that she came up with the idea herself. Here's another quote from the New York Times article. It was a scary experience, like any real rite of passage, but some of them kitted around through it, even if they cried when they were getting the brand, even if they wore surgical

masks to help them with breathing and the smell of burning flesh, even if the brand was much larger than they were told it would be and looked like an ancient hieroglyph. Even if they were in a state of sheer terror, they were still able to transcend the fear and cry out to one another. Badass warrior bitches, let's get strong together. Whoa. Yeah. It's like they're using pop feminists.

They sure are. Jargon to validate the most degrading dehumanizing practice. We're badasses because we're going to get this man's initials branded on to wear crotches. 2018. 2017, I think, is when this is happening. Okay. 2017. So now that paragraph right there makes me think back to a quote in those Nexium packets

from 2003, where Keith Ranieri wrote that complaining about pain or expressing hunger were both examples of parasitic behavior. His specific example of a parasitic statement was the sentence, I know I promised, but I had no idea how hard or painful this was going to be. Yeah. What's interesting is Allison Mack was seemingly like a crazy person who, by serendipity, came into contact with this already insane group and then was able to enact her craziness through it.

But is there more to the story? There's no definitive answer on that. It is possible that Allison Mack just was a loony person who had her looniness opened up by this. I don't think she came up with a branding idea. I think she's dedicated to Keith Ranieri and he told her to say that it was her idea. I feel like it's the kind of thing Keith Ranieri would do. She's drinking the Kool-Aid.

She has chugged the Kool-Aid. She's butt-jugging the Kool-Aid at this point. She's saying it through a tube. But I don't think she came up with this idea. When you look at the pictures and stuff of her most recently being led into court, like her lawyers are holding her up. She can barely walk. She's so scared.

She's culpable to an extent because she helped do some bad things here. But I also think she's more of a victim of Keith Ranieri than anything else. That's my thinking. I may be being too charitable here. That's interesting because all this time I had been sort of thinking, ugh, it really goes to show you that women can be horrible cruel people too. She definitely did some horrible things because I think she was active in this. But yeah, I can see how she was brainwashed by him, especially actresses are already

so primed to be obsessed about their weight in a way that's already, I think, making them kind of insane. Maybe all women to some extent. Especially living in L.A., I get some of that. I'm a fucking dude. It's crazy. The images we receive coupled with the messages, I can see her being a victim to him. She's definitely both a victim and a perpetrator.

Yeah. Well, what's going to happen to her? We don't know. We are now into the stuff that Keith Ranieri is most famous for, the stuff that the most recent New York Times articles talked about. Keith and Allison Mack have both been charged with sex trafficking. Oh, right. Yeah.

Yeah. This is the headline that made its way to me. This is the headline that made its way to you. But before everything fell apart, before the New York Times articles, Keith Ranieri used Allison's legit actresshood to help him produce ads for his seminars. Here's one she put together for ESP in 2014. Oh, no. When I first came to ESP, I had on the surface something that seemed to be like the perfect

life for a pretty good life, like superficially, materialistically, I was very successful. I had the job. I had the dog. I had the boyfriend. I had the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the clothes, everything that I thought I needed in order to be okay. And yet I couldn't stand to be with my family for more than two hours at a time. And the idea of being honest with even my best friend was something that was so far outside

the realm of possibility that I just kind of thought you always lived your life in authentically. And when I came to ESP and I started to do the work in the Coles Lab, do the work in the classes, I started to transform in a way that I never expected. Like I literally didn't know that you could spend time with someone and not be nervous. I literally didn't know that it was possible to have a week with your family where you didn't feel like leaving. I just thought that that wasn't really possible. I thought it happened in the movies.

And now that's my life. That's my reality. I have an experience of my family that is nothing but joy. And it's astounding. So that's her ad for executive success programs. And I tell you, when you read it on paper, it sounds so crazy. Especially if I read it to you. Yeah, and so evil.

But she too, like seasoned actress that she is. She's good. You feel it. Yeah. I mean, and she's making it feel relatable. But to know that that is the woman who was leading branding sessions, even if it wasn't her idea. Oh, my God.

People are wearing masks because the stench of burning human flesh is so thick in the air. She willingly gave those details. I mean, I don't think she gave the details. I think it was other women who had been branded who talked about how awful it was. But she willingly admitted to the New York Times that that was my idea because I thought it was more badass than a tattoo. Man, that's crazy.

It's wild. But the biggest mind fuck of all of this is going this deep into it. I don't know. I'm starting to empathize a little bit with her. And I don't like how comfortably close I am to understanding how these people did these things. But that's where you... It makes me feel close.

I think it's important to get there, though. That's my whole motivation with this show, with any of these episodes, is to try to get you a little closer to something fucked up that somebody did, just so you can understand how these things happen. Yeah. Because then maybe you're a little... I don't know. That's my optimistic view.

You read the headline and it's like, that's crazy. That's fake. Yeah, it's crazy. Only crazy people would get involved. And it's like, well, no, Alice and Mack, it's hard to get a regular role on a big TV show in Hollywood. That's an achievement. She had a career.

She is a smart person who set her mind to a goal and accomplished things and also bought into this weird cult and maybe had them start branding women. And it made sense to her at the time. And especially seeing her talk just now, how she was saying, oh, I can connect with my family now. I don't have that social anxiety. There's a part of me that's like, okay, I can see how in a really fucked up way, if you impose great suffering on people with this guise of pop feminism, there's some level

on which they feel bonded and are so broken that they don't maybe feel certain anxieties anymore, but I kind of get it. Yeah. She also put together a number of other video interviews for Janess. And this is an awkward segue, but I had to make it somehow. They all consist of Keith Ranieri and Alice and Mack sitting at a table and talking to each other. I think these videos are fascinating both for the looks on Alice's face, which sadly

won't transmit over the podcast, so you can look at the video online. We'll post it on BehindTheBastards.com. But they're most interesting for the insights they give as to how Keith Ranieri works, as to how he's sort of, you can kind of see how he ensnares people on a one-on-one level. Here's him talking about gender in a 26-minute long video called Beyond Age or Gender, Human First. We're not going to play out 26 minutes. I was thinking there's a push right now, just culturally, similar to the creativity

push. It feels like a lot of people are talking about, writing books about, and doing things, studies on this idea of the need for more female strength in the world. We have the elections happening with Hillary Clinton as being a candidate, and everybody's like, women need to take more leadership roles and things like that. I was just wondering what your take was on that, given that your perspective is more humanist. I'm going to give you a short thing.

You're using a lot of male language. Male things to describe this, and that's disrespectful to women. Now, should women be in leadership roles? I think women are in certain types of leadership roles, unfortunately. It is controlled a lot by men. Can women rise to be fuller in the world and in the principles that they experience in bringing that wisdom, their unique upbringing, and even the cultural poison that they have to transform the world, absolutely, they have to become aware of it, and they have to have

that desire, and they have to struggle. It's going to be a big struggle, and it's a type of struggle, because they have to struggle against the type of oppression, a type of box that they've been placed in by men, if you will. It's not just men now. It's men that were formed by literature, that were formed by men, that was formed by literature, that was formed by men, that was formed by the jungle, and sort of that. Men need to change in a different way, but both sexes have to become more self-aware

and understand outside of gender, outside of sex, they're as human, and there are things that are transcendent as human. I'll say this, if you saw that clip, or listened to it, without any context, even if you weren't half-listening, if you were listening, and I see you, but I mean me, I might go along with it. I mean, he is using the language of contemporary gender thought in a very vague and sort of wishy-washy way, I suppose, and that alone is kind of chilling. It makes me think about so many of the conversations I've had that sounded like that.

The only place where it slips in there for me, where he's not making a good impression of like a super woke intellectual dude, is when he chastises her for being disrespectful to women, that's like the part where it's like, wait, what the fuck? But then he immediately moves on to talking about how we all have toxicity in us, because of the literature we're raised on and stuff, and it's like. But I've heard men talk like that, and not always in a way that is enraging. It is true that we have gendered language, and cutting to her, smiling very pleasantly, like deeply taking it in, sort of, though it did bump me, there was a part of me that

was like, well, but she gets it. She doesn't feel like she's being mansplained, it was chilling. It is chilling. There are so many of these videos out there. I've watched an uncomfortable amount of them that make this podcast. There's a part of me that almost wants to just run that one to completion, but obviously that would be really boring on a podcast. They are cheesy and uncomfortable, and also oddly compelling, and hard to watch past a

certain point. I'm only going to play a clip from one more, because I think it really emphasizes the culty nature of Keith's crazy empire. We've been talking a lot about what makes something a cult. One of the really critical things to make something a cult is developing your own language. Scientology does this a lot. You know, SP, suppressive person, you know, you've got your OT levels and whatnot. But you know, other, you can talk about like weird snake handling Christian cults within

parts of the United States do this too. Every cult does this, where they try to create different terms for things than the majority of society uses, because cults are all that isolation, they're all about separating you from everybody else. So if you can create a different sort of vocabulary for your cult, then you can isolate people very effectively without them even knowing that that's what you're doing. Which is something that social groups do. Yeah, absolutely.

Which makes the line feel so fine. It does, because you do this with your friends. You have inside jokes and terms that would be nonsense to anybody else, but mean something to you. All of the stuff, like there's none of the cult making techniques at their most basic level are inherently toxic. They're successful in helping to make a cult, because they're all things that people do normally.

Right. You know, there's a lot, I used to talk about the similarities between UCB. If you talk to anyone, honestly, who was in a combat unit in the military, they will talk about a lot of culty kind of behavior and different terms that people, and like, because whenever you're isolated with a group of people, whether it's a friend group or you're all studying to be at improv or you're in battle together, you develop certain bonds and you become isolated from the rest of society to a certain extent. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's normal. That's what families are too. Cults utilize these as weapons in order to take people's free will away, in a sense. And I think this clip, what's interesting to me about it, it's called journeying through the stages of development, and it's nonsense. The conversation they're having is nonsense, because the terms that they are using don't mean the same thing to them that they do to us. Oh, so like stages of development, I assume, to them has some slightly more specific meaning?

You know, no, because they're talking about, I'll just play, that'll be the easiest way to get across when I'm trying to say here. I've been thinking a lot about just the concept of like compulsion. Like something is good, something is nice, something is pleasant, something is... Loss of self through the body and the emotions, yes. Yeah, yeah. And I just, I'm curious about that, because it seems like... Something that's a reverence issue.

It is, it's a reverence curriculum. That's interesting, we're born as bodies and emotions and not much cognitive facility. People don't realize that there's even something called a mind of other. There's a whole progression of our self-awareness. You ask a young child... He starts talking about stages of development. He dropped some actual educational psychology after that point, but that early thing where they're talking about, it's a reverence issue and loss of the body through like, that's

all nonsense. It's nonsense, but yeah, you can really feel that they have these constructed meanings behind them. Like how she's searching for the word compulsion. That's in their course. Curriculum, exactly. And he responds with the definition from the curriculum and she says, oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. I'm sure at this point, some of you are pulling out your credit cards to go book an ESP training seminar because this is some compelling shit. And I mean, I get it. I listen to some self-help stuff. I think Ted Radio Hour feels like a self-help hour.

It's all compelling. And I think that the toxic parts of this happens, number one, when it's centered around one person. Absolutely. So, you know, UCB may have some culty aspects to it, but Amy Poehler isn't asking you to give her money directly and follow her guidelines on life and dress the way that she dresses and believe the things that she believes. You're right.

That is, and it is a company that is taking all of this money, which I think unsettles some people. Yeah. UCB does this. But what truly makes this a cult and not just a hack self-help group is all the dark stuff. That's a big part of it. Is it maladaptive?

Is it hurting people? Yeah. So, spoiler alert, executive success programs is no longer hosting seminars. Oh, no. They're not taking... Yeah, they've got it. If you go to their website, I'm going to show you what their website looks like, because it's as pretentious as everything else Keith Reneary's ever made in his life.

I love... The first thing on the website is a picture of Albert Einstein in a quote. It sure is. We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Hey, that's him. He's trying to tell you that everything you know is wrong. We'll have a picture from the website up on our website, which is not a cult website. Although if you want to pay me $7,000, I will talk to you for a week.

Okay. Absolutely. So, that's an offer on the table. If I were the heir to the Seagram's fortune, who knows? Yeah. If you look me up, I will not charge $150 million, $10 million. You know what? I'll give you all the sashes.

Man, I wonder what their life is right now. They're probably still super rich and fine. Yeah, right? I'm sure they're okay. They're fine. Yeah. They're not the people... I don't know.

Hopefully they weren't physically or sexually abused if they were, then I feel terrible about this. But I think they're still rich and okay. Yeah. I think they got out. The injustice of the world. Yeah. They kind of just...

Hopefully they're wiser now. They will not fall for a cult again. So the New York Times published their first article on Keith Ranieri and Nexium in October. This led to a federal investigation. Mr. Ranieri fled to Mexico, ditched his cell phone, and only communicated to his followers through encrypted messaging apps. He was arrested in late March in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, because encrypted messaging apps aren't as encrypted or secure as people pretend they are, which Paul Manafort also learned

recently. Oh. Yeah. Another great guy. Yeah. Don't commit crimes and assume that your encrypted messaging act will protect you. So this is so messed up. But a part of me was kind of hoping that he was still in Mexico, and this was still ongoing.

Why? No, that I could get in there, you know? Oh, and learn how to reverence issue, conceptualize in self-matrix? Get into the vigilante justice side. Oh. Like throw pipe bombs at him. Yeah. Yeah.

Get out there. Let's go. Yeah. But he's been caught? I'll find one of these guys who hasn't been caught, and we can go blow up someone's car. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably fine.

But he was caught, so he's in process right now, I assume. Yeah. So Allison Mack was arrested a few weeks later. She was released on $5 million bail. Last I checked, which was like Wednesday when I was finishing writing this, he is still in jail. U.S. Attorney Richard Donahue, when they were both arrested, stated, as alleged in the indictment, Allison Mack recruited women to join what was purported to be a female mentorship group

that was in fact created and led by Keith Ranieri. The victims were exploited both sexually and for their labor to the defendant's benefit, which seems like an accurate statement. Yeah. The most accurate statement of anything that's come out. So far, of all the quotes I've read, Ranieri does not appear to have taken to prison well. On June 6th, 2018, the day I finished writing this, Keith's lawyers asked the court to allow him to pay $10 million bond to be released.

He even agreed to live under armed security until his court date in October. As far as I know, he hasn't been released, although maybe something happened in the last day or so, but you should check up on that. I think he's still in jail and hopefully they don't let him pay $10 million bond. Wow. He'll leave. He left once. Yeah, exactly.

He's definitely a flight risk. Yeah. He's referred to the U.S. Justice Department as the, quote, morality police. They accused them of wrongly implicating Ranieri in sex trafficking. They said their client, who was being held without bond since his arrest three months ago, is an accomplished ethicist who is not a danger and should be released from custody. So I don't trust anyone who calls themselves an accomplished ethicist. Ethicist, humanitarian, judo champion, okay?

Yeah. You will, judo champion, I'll believe, I'll just think very little of them. Yeah. So that should be the end of what I have to say about Keith Ranieri, but there's so much more. And again, I didn't even talk about the men's groups. There's other, there's so much shit going on here, but there is one more thing I have to talk about.

You remember earlier in the episode how I talked about Elon Musk being taken in by that weird website called The Knife? Yeah, I know. Well, let's start talking about, there's no more about Elon Musk here. Oh, thank God. I mean, this podcast isn't about attacking Elon Musk. I can't protect him anymore. No, he's not one of the bad people in this thing.

So fake news became a buzzword in 2016. Obviously, it's been a thing for as long as there's been news, what with the Spanish-American war. But, you know, it became a buzzword after the election. And in 2017, Nexium launched a pretentiously named website called The Knife of Aristotle. Oh, come on, the Knife of Aristotle. The Knife of fucking Aristotle. Their initial ad campaign just said, subscribe to The Knife of Aristotle and see what it

is. Which, fuck you. On May 30th, 2017, recently unemployed journalist Brock Wilber published an article in Paste Magazine called, The Knife of Aristotle isn't just a fake, fake news site, it's a cult. Brock and his wife found a job opportunity at a legitimate journalism job opportunity site. And it took them to a website called ethicalmedia.org. Journalists were being recruited on it to a team that would evaluate news articles based

on an objective system of measurement, which was, of course, proprietary. Brock sent them an inquiry, and they responded right away, offering him $3,000 to $5,000 per month to let him work remotely. But there was a catch, quote. We use a proprietary methodology to carry out our writing and analysis process. Our writers are required to have a working knowledge of our rating system and standards. In order to learn this, they attend five weeks of advanced training in communication, logic, and ethics.

The first week of the training is focused on personal development and ethics. Our analysts get to deeply explore their belief systems and gain an understanding of the human mechanisms of perception that influence our communication and culture. So five weeks of training was required to get this job. In New York, it was not paid, the training. Brock kept looking into the group and found out that they seemed to have a weird right-wing bias and evaluated news sites using an unclear rubric. They had a staff page and many of the people on it seemed questionably real.

Of course, Brock Wilbur elected not to go. He wrote an article about it instead and delved into a bird's-eye view of the Keith Reneary story. He notes in a post-grip that the Knife of Aristotle removed their staff page after his article. The staff stuff on there sounds exactly like the GNS. It does. How's it going to say?

Yeah. Like one of the journalists talks about how I went to school in Mexico and worked for Mexican magazines. You know, Mexican magazines. Mexican magazines. That's how you talk about your professional career. I worked in American magazines. Keith had something going on with Mexico.

He really did. He really likes Mexico and seems to be good at getting the children of Mexican presidents to give him money. Yeah. I guess he was rich by that point. I will say he is definitely the world's number one authority on getting children of Mexican presidents to pay him several thousand dollars. Yes.

As far as I'm aware of. And that is a credential he can list on his website. Absolutely. It's specific credentials. It is. If I saw that, I'd be like, that's something. I too would like to grift the children of Mexican politicians. Oh yeah.

They're not innocent. Sure. Yeah. Politicians. Yeah. Yeah. So Brock Wilber's article went relatively viral and did some damage to the Knife of Aristotle's reputation.

But if you think Keith Ranieri is the kind of man who would give up on a good scam opportunity just because a journalist caught him, you don't know Keith Ranieri. The Knife of Aristotle continued, instead billing itself as a scholarship opportunity rather than a job. Egyptian-American author Yahya Lababidi was browsing a journalism job board one day when he came across a posting for an ethical media scholarship. They claimed to be a media watchdog working to revolutionize the way we read news. Winners would receive full admission to their training seminar and cash prizes of ten thousand,

three thousand, or one thousand dollars. Yahya applied and arranged a Skype interview with a journalist to work for this watchdog. The guy claimed that, quote, we want the news to read more like science, less like fiction. A few days after that, Yahya received a letter awarding him a three thousand dollar scholarship as long as he met the work requirement, with 18 hours per week for a minimum of one year. Of course this guy was a journalist too, and he did some digging and quickly discovered the Keith Ranieri connection. Yahya didn't take the scholarship.

But the Knife of Aristotle is still active today. They've rebranded, of course, and now call themselves just the Knife. They look pretty legitimate if you just skim them. Like I can't blame Elon Musk for running across an article and not thinking too much about it. I can. Okay. I probably could too.

I'm number one Elon Musk apologist. I'm judged out. I'm judged out right now. You wouldn't believe the Knife. No. No, but I've been working in journalism for years, so I would be like, this is a news site I've never heard of. Oh, yeah.

How are they saying the New York Times is 37% reliable? Yeah. What is their rubric? And you look into it and stuff. If you're having a fight with the New York Times. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

Maybe you don't. You'd let it go? Yeah. You'd throw for following a dumb news site, but like, you know. Yeah. It's understandable. He's yet another person who fell for Keith Reneary's bullshit. So the Knife should be shut down.

The Knife is still operating right now. You can find their rankings on articles using their supposedly scientific system today. I found no direct references to Keith Reneary on the site, but I did find one indirect reference. So there is a series that the site does called With Prejudice, where they rehabilitate unfairly maligned thinkers like Google engineer James DeMore or New York Times columns editor Barry Weiss. The series stars Jyns Eric Gould, who is their editor-in-chief. The best way I could describe Jyns Eric Gould is discount Ben Shapiro.

And Ben Shapiro himself is discount Ben Shapiro. So you're really getting a, yeah, Jyns Eric Gould, who also appears to be the main force behind the website. The series With Prejudice though was not originally called that. It used to be called Blacklisted, but someone complained. And there is a note on that section of the site that says, this series was previously titled Blacklisted. We received feedback from our primary advisor that the name was inappropriately spun and

failed to include additional perspectives. You can decide for yourself if this primary advisor exercising minute control over the Knife's operation is Keith Reneary. I'm going to say yes. Their Patreon currently has 104 backers. Wow. That's more than mine does. Yeah.

But they got a lot of money behind them. That's true. Yeah. Wow. So that's everything. I'm exhausted now. I'm too. I do see it.

I see the board with the pictures and the red thread now. Good. That was my whole goal here. I apologize if some of this was confusing. There's so much to keep track of this fucking story. But that is almost everything about Keith Reneary that I thought was relevant. I hope bad things happen to him when he's in prison. Yeah.

I hope bad things happen to him. Not necessarily when he's in prison. I would be fine if just a rock fell out of the sky and hit him. Yeah. That would be okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be fine with that.

But it's crazy to think too. Like he's touched so much. Yes. So who has totally internalized his crazy way of thinking and will continue it? I mean, I suppose like without the charismatic leader, I don't know how much you have. I don't think Nexium's got much of a future, but there will be another Keith Reneary. Maybe it'll be someone who took some of his classes and does it a little better and a little bigger.

Maybe it'll just be some other random guy or lady. Or lady. Or lady with an IQ of 240 and a judo championship when she was 11. Yeah. Could be. Yeah. It would be nice for one of these creepy cult leaders to be a lady soon. Well, Alice, we got close.

Alison Mack is as close as we've ever gotten, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And she's breaking barriers. She is. We didn't get a lady president, but we got a lady co-cult leader. Yeah. Kind of.

And the best part of it is that she cited Hillary Clinton in her like, yeah, women rock. Hashtag girl power. Yeah. Yeah. Interview. Bad ass bitches, you know, do stuff. Man, this makes me so disenchanted with pop feminism. The way we talk about feminism now, like, yeah, bad bitches.

We got this. Yeah. Girls stick together. Gender is a construct. It's not real. Yeah. That's how I feel. Well.

That's how it feels too. Yeah. I mean, my big thing, like always be scared of slogans. Yeah. If somebody tells you you're a warrior a bunch of times, they're probably lying to you to get you to do something fucked up. Yeah. If somebody tells you you're a badass and you're not doing anything badass or the thing

that you're doing is just letting someone hurt you, then get the fuck out. Be afraid of catchy slogans that make you feel cool, because when people try to make you feel cool, they're trying to get you to do something. Definitely. And to realize that these kinds of people are not as obvious as we think from the outside. Man, I feel bad for bringing UCB into this. Yeah, I don't think UCB is an actual cult. You guys are fine.

Yeah. You do great shows. Unless. That's sketch with the ass pennies. Classic. Yeah. Unless we find out that Alice in Mac was secretly the force behind all comedy theaters. That's entirely possible.

Yeah. No one's disproved it. I do want to say that while you shouldn't trust anyone who calls you a badass, I think you are all badasses for listening to my show. So please download it and buy products that we advertise. This has been great and deeply unsettling. Good. That's what we shoot for here.

Yeah. You want to plug your things? Yeah. I'm Anna, and I am on Instagram. I make a web comic about things that make me sad, but also cheese. It's called Bad Comics with an X by Anna with two Ns. And I'm also Bad Comics by Anna on Twitter, tweet at me. I'm currently in a feud with my nemesis and also boyfriend, Edgar Monplazier.

I'm always looking for support because I drag him on Twitter a lot, so feel free to support me. Excellent. And I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay, two letters. I don't currently have any enemies, but if you would like to be my enemy, I am auditioning them. I've got a book called A Brief History of Ice you can find it on Amazon.

I also show up on the gamefully employed podcast network stuff, so check them out. Now you can find behind the bastards online at behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Twitter at at bastards pod. Our Twitter also does not have an enemy, so you're welcome to do that too. This has been behind the bastards. We're back every Tuesday, and we will do that next Tuesday with yet another bastard. So check us out. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse look like a lot of goods. We are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole? My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become

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