It's a weird case. If Raniere hadn't turned out to be a serial abuser/rapist of underage girls even outside of his cult, I doubt that they would have ever been arrested, and if they had been, they would have gotten off.
He was a creep that ran a process/self-improvement cult and started a harem inside it, but that's not really a crime. If it hadn't been part of a larger (consistent) pattern, what is law enforcement really supposed to do about women branding each other and sending each other material expressly labeled as blackmail? If I sign a contract with you that says that in order for me to (for example) lease a property to you, I require nude pictures, an embarrassing interview, and a physical brand on your body (weird), and that if you skip out on the rent I'm granted the right to release that material - is that a crime? Maybe - you can't sell yourself into slavery, but the definition of slavery is loose.
NXIVM was no worse than Scientology or Mormonism, which is to say it's horrible but protected, and its insularity hid stuff that was actually criminal but impossible to prosecute because everyone in the group would form a protective wall around the organization even if you made a bit of headway.
It's a lot easier and more rewarding to set some 80 I.Q. kid up as a terrorist. The public would have absolutely no interest in this if there wasn't sex involved (as Oxenberg and Edmondson remarked at least a couple of times on the TV series.) We don't prosecute financial institutions for financial crimes (or even resource the agencies responsible to even theoretically prosecute them.) There's no chance we're going to be going after tiny cults.
Maybe the CIA would have noticed them as they got a better foothold in Mexican elite circles and figured out a way to support them.
NXIVM is a cautionary tale for cults. The Guardian's Office/OSA in Scientology is not just decoration, it's crucial to build an internal intelligence service to keep an enterprise like that together. Raniere was just trying to improv the response to defectors and potential defectors rather than building a bureaucracy. Maybe get that done before the harem.
On the scale of things, branding is lower than being banned from communicating with your children for decades and only finding out they're dead weeks later. Frats brand people. I was in a band when I was a barely out of my teens and we all got the same tattoo.
He was a creep that ran a process/self-improvement cult and started a harem inside it, but that's not really a crime. If it hadn't been part of a larger (consistent) pattern, what is law enforcement really supposed to do about women branding each other and sending each other material expressly labeled as blackmail? If I sign a contract with you that says that in order for me to (for example) lease a property to you, I require nude pictures, an embarrassing interview, and a physical brand on your body (weird), and that if you skip out on the rent I'm granted the right to release that material - is that a crime? Maybe - you can't sell yourself into slavery, but the definition of slavery is loose.
NXIVM was no worse than Scientology or Mormonism, which is to say it's horrible but protected, and its insularity hid stuff that was actually criminal but impossible to prosecute because everyone in the group would form a protective wall around the organization even if you made a bit of headway.
It's a lot easier and more rewarding to set some 80 I.Q. kid up as a terrorist. The public would have absolutely no interest in this if there wasn't sex involved (as Oxenberg and Edmondson remarked at least a couple of times on the TV series.) We don't prosecute financial institutions for financial crimes (or even resource the agencies responsible to even theoretically prosecute them.) There's no chance we're going to be going after tiny cults.
Maybe the CIA would have noticed them as they got a better foothold in Mexican elite circles and figured out a way to support them.
NXIVM is a cautionary tale for cults. The Guardian's Office/OSA in Scientology is not just decoration, it's crucial to build an internal intelligence service to keep an enterprise like that together. Raniere was just trying to improv the response to defectors and potential defectors rather than building a bureaucracy. Maybe get that done before the harem.