The heir to the Seagram liquor empire, Clare Bronfman, has been sentenced to six years and nine months in prison for her membership of the Nxivm sect, the murky pyramid-shaped organization that masquerades as a self-help group that has turned out to be a bizarre plot of dark business, money laundering and sexual slavery.
A conviction that comes after three years of suspicions and investigations and after
The New York Times
reported that there was a core of women within the organization who acted as sex slaves of the leader, Keith Raniere, who burned their initials on their pelvises and subjected them to punishment in addition to blackmailing them.
A sect in which Bronfman has been actively involved to the point that with her fortune she acquired an island in Fiji and made it available to Raniere and other workers of the organization as a refuge when the scandal began.
Bronfman's arrival at Nxivm - which is read Nexium - was prompted by his sister, Sara, who in 2002 attended one of the very expensive intensive
coaching
courses
offered by Executive Success Programs (the germ of NXIVM), an entity founded by Raniere in 1998, which had tentacles in 30 countries and whose talks were attended by more than 16,000 people, including wealthy heiresses, famous Hollywood actresses, graduates from elite universities and big businessmen.
Sara and Clare Bronfman were born to their father's third wife, tycoon Edgar M. Bronfman, a Canadian-American businessman who worked for the distilled spirits company Seagram, of which he eventually became president, treasurer and CEO. .
Both are 20 years younger than their brothers, who unlike them have university studies and reputable jobs.
According to
Vanity Fair
in 2010, after Edgar Bronfman and his third wife separated, the girls who were then seven and four years old were raised with their mother between Kenya and England.
At the beginning of the 2000s and when she came of age, Clare, who at the time was trying to succeed as an rider after competing in international competitions and opening her own stable to train horses, was persuaded by her sister to enter the group that, with its headquarters in Albany, New York, offered its members workshops to overcome psychological obstacles.
At first, Clare Bronfman showed little interest in joining Nxivm, but after several meetings with the leader Raniere, with whom she apparently fell in love, she ended up inside.
But she was not just another believer.
Her status and being the heir to a vast estate soon opened the doors to the organization's elite circle.
For more than a decade, the Bronfman sisters used their fortunes to fund Nxivm in a variety of ways.
According to
The New York Times
, Clare Bronfman became a real ATM for Raniere.
He contacted the Dalai Lama to visit Albany and made his
private
jet
available to the group
to transport the celebrities they were trying to recruit.
Court documents estimate that he spent at least 116 million dollars (98 million euros).
She financed the organization's lawsuits and obtained patents for Keith Raniere's inventions.
But Sara and Clare weren't the only ones in the Bronfman family who were involved at some point in the organization.
The liquor magnate Seagram himself attended some workshops in the early days of his daughters, although he quickly became an enemy of Nxivm, a group that he described as a "sect" and "head wash" in a
2003
Forbes
article
, ten years earlier. of his death.
Sara eventually married and had children, and her participation in the group declined.
But Clare and her fortune stayed true.
After Nxivm's secret practices were made public in 2017, Bronfman came to the defense of Keith Raniere, a 60-year-old former computer programmer who remains in jail awaiting trial accused of exercising psychological, financial and sexual control among his acolytes and whose sentence could reach life imprisonment.
"I've seen a lot of good things from our shows and from Keith himself," Bronfman wrote in his letter.
"It would be a tragedy to lose the transformative ideas and tools that continue to improve the lives of so many people."
Bronfman, 41, who has been in his luxurious Brooklyn apartment under house arrest since 2018 after posting $ 100 million (87 million euros) of bail, pleaded guilty in April last year to the conspiracy charges. and fraudulent use of identification.
Additionally, he admitted that he committed credit card fraud on behalf of the cult leader.
This Wednesday the judge of the federal court in Brooklyn, Nicholas G. Garaufis, also accused her of using her money to silence the victims and critics of the group.
"[Bronfamn] used her incredible wealth and tried to use her social status and connections not only to support the work of Nxivm, but also as a means to intimidate, threaten and get revenge on people who dared to challenge her dogma," said the. judge.
Beliefs that it is not known if Clare Bronfman will lose during her 81 months in prison or to which she will grasp harder than ever.
