Keith Raniere, the NXIVM leader who was sentenced in October to 120 years in prison for crimes including sex trafficking and racketeering, was ordered by a federal judge on Tuesday to pay more than $3.4 million to 21 victims. According to The New York Times, some of the money will go toward removing the mark of one of NXIVM’s most infamous rituals: the branding of Raniere’s initials onto women’s skin.
The branding took place within DOS, a NXIVM secret society that prosecutors have described as a sex ring. “Virtually all low-ranking members of DOS were victims of a conspiracy” that involved forced labor, the Brooklyn federal judge Nicholas Garaufis said during the restitution hearing, according to the Times. He added that DOS members were instructed to perform sexual acts by “higher-ranking members.” As the paper noted, DOS is an acronym for a Latin phrase translating roughly to “Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions.”
Garaufis said during the hearing that about 100 people had submitted requests for a total of around $33 million in restitution. His decision to grant the requests of 21 victims came amid a confrontation between him and one of Raniere’s lawyers, Marc Fernich. According to the New York Post, Fernich said he’d requested—and been denied—an hour-long delay to attend a longtime friend’s funeral. The tabloid reported that during the hearing, Garaufis and Fernich spent half an hour staring at each other in silence as the rest of the courtroom looked on. (Raniere, who is incarcerated at a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, appeared at the hearing virtually.)
Fernich told the Post that he’d asked for the delay on Sunday, after his friend and mentor died, and that Garaufis had responded with one word: “No.” When Fernich said during the hearing that Garaufis lacked “human decency,” the judge, according to the tabloid, grabbed a box of tissues, told a court clerk, “Give him this to go cry,” and threatened to have Fernich arrested unless he sat down.
As the Times noted, Raniere has claimed to have shunned material possessions, potentially complicating the restitution process. CNN reported that he said he hadn’t seen the government’s submission for the restitution hearing. “I don’t know who the victims are,” Raniere said. “I don’t know what they are asking.”
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