The heir to the Seagram spirits empire, Canadian Clare Bronfman, was sentenced Wednesday to 81 months in prison - over six years - after pleading guilty to the sex trafficking scandal of the Nxivm sect, during a Brooklyn federal court hearing.
Read also: Scandal of the Nxivm sect: Clare Bronfman tried in a case of sex slaves
The sentence is heavy, especially as the prosecutors were asking for five years of imprisonment for this 41-year-old heiress.
She had pleaded guilty in 2019 to credit card fraud and to having hidden an underground individual on behalf of the Nxivm organization created by Keith Raniere, found guilty in June 2019 of having maintained for several years a harem of 15 to 20 sex slaves.
Prosecutors argued that Clare Bronfman had given him irreplaceable financial support with her fortune estimated at $ 210 million.
"There is little doubt that Raniere could not have committed the crimes for which he was convicted without powerful allies like Ms. Bronfman,"
they said in a document before the hearing.
The defense hoped it would save him jail, asking for three years on parole.
According to her lawyers, while Clare Bronfman pleaded guilty to bank card fraud and hiding an underground person to support Nxivm, she was unaware of the sexual abuse committed by Keith Raniere, perpetrated through an organization parallel to Nxivm,
"DOS"
, which included
"masters"
and
"slaves".
To believe them, she only knew the good side of the organization, based in Albany, New York, namely its training that promotes personal development: which had allowed this woman, badly in her skin , to overcome their anxieties.
Of the six people charged in this scandal, revealed in March 2018, Clare Bronfman is the first to know his sentence.
Keith Raniere, who has always said his sex was consensual, is expected to be sentenced on October 27.
The other four have pleaded guilty, including actress Allison Mack, from the series "Smallville", who was found guilty in April 2019 of two counts of extortion and criminal conspiracy.
The Nxivm affair has already been adapted twice for the screen: a docu-series, "The Vow" ("The Vow", on HBO), which emphasizes the non-sexual side of the organization, and a film by Lisa Robinson, “Escaping the Nxivm Cult” (2019), around the testimony of a mother who tried to get her daughter out of the organization.