But you know, one of the things for people who may listen to this.

There’ll be a whole range of people. There are going to be a lot of people who think I’m horrible. There are gonna be some people who are , they don’t know what this is. And there gonna be probably be a very small group of people that think I’m good or like me.

I'm looking to get everyone to listen rationally if possible or as many people as possible because what’s going on here is a much bigger issue. You know one of the things with this is, I guess, if I were to say a little quote: It would be in our county, Hitler doesn’t stand a chance of surviving a false robbery charge.

In this case, and you know there are people who dislike me for all sorts of reasons, that probably a lot of them valid, most of the ones I’ve seen are not valid but there are certainly a lot of reasons someone could not like someone like me.

But.. as much as I might be disliked, when something is not valid under the law, that is something that is far more atrocious than whatever people might think of me. In my case, not only do I believe I am innocent and all the people that I’ve had analyze the case believe I am innocent, but the procedures done have been very bad.

For me in my life I have always tried to do good things and I always felt I rose to sort of a low level of doing good things, nothing medium or very high. You know you have the people, the Gandhis, the Martin Luther Kings, all those great people of the world, and you know, I’m nowhere near that in what I’ve been able to achieve… yet in this particular case I am given a spotlight that is far greater than my personhood and the question’s … what do you do?

I mean in this particular case it’s a grave injustice and there’s… I’m given this big spotlight and what we need to do is show the injustice. No matter what a person thinks of me.

And my hope is, you know, probably at the end of these podcasts and things along those lines, there’ll be people who really liked me before the podcast maybe wont like me after, and then there’ll be some people who really didn’t like before the podcast and maybe like me more, but what I do hope is there’ll be someone who really doesn’t like me but will stand with me in this injustice because this injustice affects far more than me and it affects even far more than the hundreds of thousands of people that are in prison or have been in prison. It affects every person. And before I got into this situation I had no idea. I was so backwards and ignorant and now I know a little more.

You know there’s a quote from a book, and it’s very interesting, it’s between Thomas More and Will Roper, the book’s called A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, or the literary piece I should say, and Thomas More says “ And go as he should if he were the Devil himself until he broke the law.” And Will Roper says, “so now you would give the devil the benefit of the law?” And Thomas More says, “Yes. What would you do? Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil?” That means just break down the laws and go after the Devil. And Roper says “Yes, I would cut down every law in England to do that.” And Thomas says, “Oh. And when the last law was down and the Devil turned around on you, where would you hide, Roper? All the laws being flat. This country is planted sick with laws from coast to coast, man’s laws, not God, and if you cut them down

[“This call is from a federal prison” interruption]

And you’re just a man to do it, do you really think you can stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes I would give the Devil the benefit of the law for my own safety’s sake.”

And in this country right now, the Devil doesn’t have the benefit of the law. And in many ways I am seen to be the Devil.

For this particular series of podcasts, I want to divide it into two sections.

One, we’ll have discussions about me being the Devil, all the bad things that people think and what I would say about them, and the other side is discussing the law and how it affects me and my conduct and what I have allegedly done. And in that case, we’re actually putting out a contest and we’re going to take 25,000 dollars and we’re going to go through charge by charge and the first person, if you will, who can show that my charge meets the elements of the charge, my conduct meets the elements of the charge, wins the 25,000 dollars and then for people who can write essays on why my conduct doesn’t fit the charge, we have 10,000 dollars of prizes for the top, I believe, it’s 3 essays, so we’re actually paying more than double for someone to find that somehow I meet the elements of these charges and I would invite anyone out there including lawyers, prosecutors, jurors, you know, the judge, my prosecutors, and if people need their name held anonymously, or.. anonymous, or if indeed the court has ordered that, we will hold the names anonymous to protect people, but… have them look at the charges.

This just happens to be a situation where out there in the media, really there’s no voice that says I’m good and says I’m nice, that likes me or that analyzes things from a different perspective than one of, what I will call hate. All of us, I think, have caught a real infection of hate. My hope is that, if you know.. analyze what my lawyers have always said or the way we presented information, we tried to do it honorably and without hate, but that’s been what’s been done on the other side, and we need to look at this. Lady Justice is supposed to be blind, she’s supposed to have a blindfold on and not have people like politicians and media whispering in her ears. Lady Justice being blind is the most important thing and we have to treat people that we love and we want to exonerate from charges the exact same way we treat people who we hate and we want to indict and we want to convict. So those that we want to convict get the same benefits as those that we would never convict but they’ve been charged.

And we want to show what’s going on in the justice system. You know, a statistic that I heard that amazed me: there are people on Death Row, these are people that are waiting to be executed, and 1 out of 9 of them is supposedly innocent. Can you imagine that? In this country, 1 out of 9.. and if for such a serious charge, where people go and analyze the charge because someone’s life is on the line, if 1 out of 9 times we’re wrong, imagine lesser charges. Imagine more politically motivated things. My charge has come at a time when the climate is really not good. You know, you have Epsteins, you have Weinsteins, you have the MeToo movement, you have all these different things gone and a lot of it is legitimate. Women have been treated terribly in this country, and in the world, but in particular in this country by people of power, by people like me.

But that doesn’t mean that I did those things and that certainly doesn’t mean I’m guilty of these charges.

My name is Keith Raniere and I face life I prison for crimes that I didn’t commit and the question is why I am I doing this now? I want people who are listening to this to imagine the following. You are arrested and taken away and for almost a month after you’ve spoken to one attorney or so initially, you’re not allowed to speak to attorneys, you’re kept away from everyone you know, and then when you’re finally transferred to an end-facility you interface with attorneys but you’re not allowed to speak to anyone of your family, friends and in my case I have a seven-month old boy, for 16 months. And it is for many reasons not allowed.

And the reason why Id isn’t speak out then is literally I couldn’t, I shouldn’t. I didn’t get to have meetings with co-defendants. I didn’t get to have a whole bunch of different meetings and these are things that are caused in part by the prisons, in part by the court system, in part by almost strategic necessity. And then I go through trial and in trial, and again from my team’s perspective, from my perspective, this was not just an ordinary trial. This was a high-profile trial ridden with prejudice and with hate. And you go through six-and-a-half week s of this and the question is, why didn’t you present a defense? In my particular case and my particular charges, there’s something called RICO, which is racketeering.

And essentially what it says is my inner circle which are my friends are a crime organization and during this whole time what’s been going on is that the prosecution and government has been going to all different people and saying, You’re a potential target. You’re a target. You’re a this. You’re a that. And immediately of course, if someone comes to your house and tells you’re a target of the FBI, you go get a lawyer as any smart or rational person does. Now what’s a defense attorney going to tell you? Here you have an association with this group of people. This association is causing you this problems, especially if you’re innocent. Keep in mind, we are all innocent. And the people around us, the people in our community are all innocent. And so when an innocent person goes to a defense attorney, the defense attorney sees that that person’s association with a group is causing them this problem, they tell them “Look, don’t speak to those people. Those people might be innocent but for your best interest” so just think of this now. If you were a friend of mien and you were going to be a witness in my defense, would you really be able to go up there and take anything but the Fifth Amendment?>Because anything you do may endanger that you end up in this group of my friends, this inner circle So there’s no one to speak to.. for me. And after six-and-half weeks of prejudice, there was. Strategic decision by the legal team that I shouldn’t get up and speak against such prejudice because it would just be…

You know we have a position where we believe we have not just excellent appeal chances, extraordinary appeal chances. And you never know how appeals go because an appeal for example can say yes those were terrible injustices or terrible process problems but the result would have been the same anyway. And sometimes that’s the case. But in this case, the things that were allowed in trial, the things that went on seemed so adverse to us, what we want to do in this case is preserve my appeal rights as best as possible. And if you go up there and testify, it gives the prosecution, it gives the court, if gives a whole bunch of different factors the ability to make your appeal not as good, to either cover up for mistakes or create some sort of a justification and that’s the last thing we wanted to do. So, and I have a very experienced, wise team that said.. You know in this case, the prosecution hasn’t proven their case at all. There has been tremendous prejudice and hate. Yeah, the people hate you but juries sometimes can see through that sort of a thing. And it’s difficult. Instead of going and putting your community through further damage, possibly ruining your appeal rights, all this sort of a thing, let’s put it in the jury’s hands because the elements haven’t even been close to made. And the rest was history unfortunately, in not a good way. It’s hard to say what it’s like for a jury because we see all the things that go on in court around the jury. The jury has a very limited view, so sometimes it’s hard to realize what they know and they don’t know and your assumption is well… things look really bad but everyone knows this, everyone saw that, and maybe the jury didn’t quite see it that way and that’s what happens. And our particular jury.. you know.. was conservative in a number of ways.. They were against abortion, a lot of them, they were against not paying taxes. And I’m a person that has though this thing that have been brought up in trial even though, with all my charges whatever they are, abortion doesn’t really have much to do with it. And the whole thing about paying taxes or not paying taxes, the tax law is pretty interesting in the fact that there are several places that you are taxed for income and if it’s a particular place where you’re never going to be taxed or the income doesn’t matter in that way, the jury may not know. So there are a whole bunch of different things that factor into this. So why I am I speaking out now? This is almost my first opportunity.

One of the things of this podcast.. I have people that are listening to this, probably a lot of people dislike me or hate me or things like that. Then there are a whole bunch of people who don’t know me and are confusing by this. And there’s probably a very small group of people who feel I’m good and like me. But with all that range of people listening, it would be my hope that there would be an appeal to reason and what I would like to do is appeal to each of the groups to to just hear me out. To hear the reason behind this because there’s something here that is not… that is much bigger than me.. that is much bigger than this case. And it’s interesting , in a lot of cases, you have people where there’s tremendous prejudice against them. People who are of color in the United States, of different circumstances, have all sorts of prejudice. If this particular case, I have the spotlight because I am white… I am male…. I am educated… and I have crimes that … these alleged chimer are media-worthy. And in some ways, I am the exact candidate for prejudice because I’m white and one of the problems I have is because I’m not black. If I were black or if I were of color, or one of other things where people have tremendous prejudice, then there would be all sorts of rallying and support because in this country right now it is sad but those people need it and those types of people… and I am the most privileged class of all.. I mean how could you get more privileged than white.. male.. educated… of a reasonable background? But that is the exact reason why 1) I have this tremendous spotlight and 2) there’s no one to help.

What we’re looking for… in a way it’s the perfect or a very good thing to show prejudice because in my particular case, my life is made out to be much bigger than I am. And that can easily be shown. So I had come up with a thought, a little quote that says “In our country, Hitler doesn’t stand a chance of fighting a false robbery charge.” What does that mean? You know.. Hitler, and I’m just using Hitler as the person that is very very hated. Certainly I’m not of that magnitude but I am right now a hated person. And there are whole classes of people that are hated people. And our justice system THIS CALL IS FROM A FEDERAL PRISON our justice system is supposed to be blind meaning that whether … if you have someone you absolutely hate and someone you absolutely love, both of those people have the right to the same trial. You should treat the person you absolutely love and want to exonerate the exact same way you hate and want to convict. So Hitler.. most people feel Hitler has all of these crimes, all of these things, but if he is accused falsely of robbery, he is innocent… our justice system should let him free. That is the fundamental aspect of our justice system. So I’m a person that’s been tainted with all sorts of hate, in all sorts of ways, and I come before the justice system and this shows the problems of the justice system. IN particular, prosecutors are not people who you are against, prosecutors… [CALL CUT OFF]

I think one of the things that people don’t understand in the justice system is the prosecutor is not someone who is just an opponent of the defense. The prosecutor represents our whole civilization, represents literally our sovereign power, the power of our government, what the nature of our government is, and they’re not looking to win, or they’re not supposed to be looking to win. They are literally the pursuit of truth. They’re the force that within the middle of the trial, if they were to see the defendant is innocent, they should be the first one to say “Stop the trial. This defendant is innocent. We must go elsewhere” but it’s incredible to see how the prosecutors of modern day have transformed so much into making it about winning. There’s even.. in one of the books I've read, there’s a thing related to prosecutors relating to one division that I’m not going to say where, and they literally supposedly had a game where they would take someone like Mother Teresa and try to see what crimes they could indict her for. Making it about winning is the opposite, the absolute opposite of justice, and it measures our level of civilization. So one of the things that’s interesting to look at within my trial and even in the pre-trial stuff is how much the prosecutor did is about winning as opposed to justice. For example there’s a key piece of evidence we have and we have for example in one case we have a text stream from one of the major witnesses and this text stream was deleted, between this person and myself and they deleted it from their phone but it has a picture of them and all sorts of things relating to them and the prosecution desperately did everything they could not to get that in. If it’s the pursuit of truth, they should want it in, if it’s true. If it exists and it’s true, they should want it in. But that’s not at all what has happened, at least in my trial. And we’ll go through a lot of different examples of that.

Another thing with respect to these podcasts which is really important is I think we’re going to have different segments. We’ll have segments for example, you know I’m disliked for a whole lot of reasons, we can go through Q &A and different things like that but I’d also like to do some potentially face-to-face. So having some of the people who really dislike me come face-to-face and dialogue with me. Ideally not with hate. This isn’t a time to mock, or to make fun of, it’s to try to get to the truth. We want to transform this.. right now it is a monologue of hate and we want to turn it into a conversation about truth. And that’s what this whole podcast is, taking a monologue of hate and turning into a conversation of truth. If people hate me that’s fine, maybe even they have valid reasons. But let’s talk about it rationally. Not with mockery, not with revenge, not with trying to make fun of, those sort of things.

You know... there’s another… one of the themes in line with the fact that I am of this privileged class. There are many people throughout the world and many people in the United States who are far worse off than I am, especially because of my class. I am white, I am male, I am educated and if I weren’t those things, I would probably be in a far worse position. I might be facing the death sentence or something and because, for example, if I were African-American I might be not only facing the death sentence but with no media coverage and no one would ever hear of me, I’d be completely swept under the rug. So I have the opposite advantage, I have this incredible media coverage but I’m in relatively a good place compared to many others, but my position can really show the prejudice of so many people and show the prejudice of the justice system. And it’s interesting, even since I’ve been in here but over the years, the justice system has gone in a certain direction and it keeps on progressing that way, progressing that way,, it is good that they have things like the First Step Act where they’re trying to stop that progression, but if we don’t do something more definitive, more dramatic, not just change the laws a little or whatever, but really examine [THIS CALL IS FROM A FEDERAL PRISON] as I was saying, really re-examine our justice system with respect to our new technology and our new media and all the different things that our out there, we are going to just continue down a really not good road. And really the buck has to stop somewhere. There has to be some defining event and my hope is that my media is exaggerated enough and big enough and I am innocent enough in comparison.. to me maybe being a turning point for the whole thing. Because I find myself in this absurd situation which is all of these incredible things being said and there’s.. once there’s somethings that seem to be far-reaching are said and then propagated and propagated and they sit around there for a few weeks and a few months, then they do something even more reaching and that makes it sound like the original things that were said were true. SO you know if I say to you, for example, I say oh you know you’re some sort of a criminal, and you’re not a criminal at all, and then I’m saying this and most people are saying that they’re maybe a criminal and maybe they’re not, and then I say oh, he’s mass murderer and I start trying to show you’re a mass murderer, it almost because assumed that you were a criminal. The question is taken away if you were a criminal. It becomes now that you’re a criminal, are you a mass murderer? So every time they increase the level of .. I’ll call it level of absurdity of what’s said about me, it makes the other levels, almost like levels of layers of sediment at the bottom of a river, it packs them down and solidifies them and makes them truth when they’re not. And it’s come to the point that what is said is dramatically different than what is true.

Pam Cafritz was my life partner of thirty years, and she died of cancer November 2016. She was a prominent community leader and she founded an international women's organized named JNESS. She was also the beloved friend and mentor to literally thousands of people. The community, including the sorority sisters from the community, was helping to put together a memorial service for her. One person in the community who was also in the now infamous sorority was Nicole. Nicole told me she would do anything to help. She was the person to whom I had coached, helped negotiate better job and better job conditions and had given access to as much cash as she needed to pay for things like rent, courses and travel. Unbeknownst to me she had worked five to six hours to transcribe a video of my deceased partner for the the memorial. The prosecution is calling this forced labor. If Nicole believes she should’ve been paid she could’ve just taken money from the cash that had been made available to her. This forced labor charge in the minimum doesn’t meet the knowingness or coercion elements of the crime.

Considering the very sad circumstances surrounding the charge, it’s cruel to charge it and insulting to all the victims who have actually experienced the raw ugliness of forced labor. On a common sense level, with so many sisters from the sorority and people from just the community doing these exact same things out of love for Pam, the community and Nicole derived a lot of benefits from that community and doing these things for other things like friendship, it strains credibility that Nicole alone was subject to forced labor somehow. It’s also difficult to believe that Nicole didn’t do these things simply out of friendship or out of love for Pam or even human care, as she claimed at the time.

Of additional note, Sylvie who was also a witness for the prosecution and a prosecution’s victim did many of these same things and more, yet she didn’t claim forced labor. Nicole out of hundreds of people, many of whom were sorority sisters, doing exactly the same things, but out of love and care for the saddest of human tragedies, the saddest of human tragedies in this case, the loss of a loved one, with ample cash at her disposal decided to call this whole thing forced labor. To me this is sickening.

One subject is the nature of this whole thing. Of course you say truth, and lies and exaggerations... you know because yeah there’s a little bit of truth and there’s a whole lot of things that really aren’t true. And then, everything is taken is whipped up into a foam that is extraordinarily exaggerated and there’s a specific thing that illustrates this pretty nicely.

You know.. you look at the range of what bail is supposed to be. The Supreme Court, I believe said something like someone should be able to put down a million dollars of bail or less and be able to get out. So the range in theory would be 0 to a million dollars. Of course you have someone like a Harvey Weinstein who is accused of all sorts of things and that is a very high media case and he had the million dollar thing. And they’re trying to up it because he.. you know.. allegedly violated his conditions of bail and things like that.

But you like at, in my case, take someone simple like Clare. Clare is worth a lot of money. But Clare is someone who has no previous history and in her portion of the case, the charges against her, there’s no violence at all, there’s no drugs at all, there’s no sex at all. It’s things relating maybe to immigration, stuff like that, you know. And the monies that are involved in her case, some people in here have tens of millions of dollars of fraud, the stuff with her visa stuff or whatever not even a hundred thousand dollars I think.

And you wonder what a person’s bail conditions like that are, again, the Harvey Weinstein’s of the world get a million dollars and he has an ankle bracelet but he goes to clubs, goes all over the place…. Clare’s bail, and normally I would ask someone what do you think her bail would be.

And people guess 500,000, 800,000 even something that’s a million, that it’s 100,000,000 dollars… bail… and not only that, an ankle bracelet and not only that, she can’t speak to people, she has total.. it’s like in-house arrest, she has some time that I think she can leave, monitored or whatever, but she can't go anywhere. She can’t go out to clubs. She can’t speak to friends, girlfriends, ex-wives for example that Harvey Weinstein can. I haven’t spoken to her in like twenty-one months now or more. So you look at what’s our case.. and she pled… and she’s facing 22 to 27 months and that’s the range of what she pled to and you know it’s not like she’s facing 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and yet… 100,000,000 dollars. An ankle bracelet. And house arrest where she can’t speak to people, even her family and things like that, from what I understand.

So that was one of the subjects to.. it helps illustrate the exaggeration, how they want to make this is a big big bad thing, and we are, literally, a bunch of simple people that live a suburban lifestyle and they’re making it into a horror picture. So you know, that’s one subject that I that I think is important.

The other subject that I think a lot of people would like to know.. It’s my firm belief that if even the people who are my skeptics were standing alongside me when I made each decision that I have in my life, especially the recent ones that are more controversial, they would really understand and I don’t think if they would agree with all of them, although they might because I put a lot of mindfulness into then, but they are decisions that are understandable. They are not impulsive. You know one of the things that they’ll show with either a Weinstein or an Epstein that they were terrible in their life and I know some people who know some of those people and you know the people say oh yeah this person was really bad.

You know the reports about me are not that I’m bad but that there must be a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you know. And you know.. Who’s the Mr. Hyde? There must be a horrible person lurking behind the shadows because look you know the guy seems very even-tempered and very consistent and nice. The people seem to say he’s nice except there’s this dark side…

And honestly, there really isn’t it. I am what I am and you get what you get when you peak to me and you hear me. And you know it doesn’t vary. But the fact that again this exaggeration almost demands that there be constructed a Mr. Hyde, demands that there be constructed this alternate life that is, I would say, not only exaggerated but crazy.

So that’s a different subject.

One of the things I spoke about, I spoke about the bail. And there’s Clare’s bails and you know I compared it to for example Harvey Weinstein’s bail for a million dollars and they’re looking to up it because he was out on the town, I don’t know how many, tens of times, where he was out of range of his bracelet. One time he didn’t wear his bracelet or something like that. I mean it sounded crazy to me. My co-defendants, who all I believe had to wear bracelets, except for one, their bails were like 5 million dollars and even 10 million dollars and these are people that aren’t particularly wealthy. And the one that, this one woman who is a co-defendant who lives a very modest life and doesn’t have much money at all, lives in an apartment that costs $1,000 a month, her bail was a quarter of a million dollars. So what has happened is, you have this incredible exaggeration of the case, and it’s an inter-play between the prosecution making these exaggerated claims and the media making these exaggerated things and there’s this bigger than life thing and then it comes to court and these bails are assigned that are bigger than life too!

I mean incredible bails, and then you know when it comes time for me to ask for bail they went as far as to say okay… he can go and he will be in.. he’ll first put down 10 million dollars of bail, he’ll be in home confinement with bracelet and the place where’ he’s going to be, the apartment where he won’t leave and won’t speak to anyone else will be vetted by the past person who was the head of the secret service and there will be.. he will have two guards, armed guards guarding him 24/7 with a supervisor and they still wouldn’t let me have bail.

Think of that, how all this exaggeration from the media and the prosecution is then codified in effect into an accepted thing, that the court says well of course we’re going to give them these incredible bails, they must be horrible criminals.

The moral of this, to some degree is, you take some very simple average people, people who are vegetarians, people, who believe in non-violence, we’ve never had any weapons, we don’t do any drugs, that sort of a thing, and make them into massive criminals, make them into some sort of criminal that you know you don’t even say how bad a criminal they are, you say he’s such a bad criminal we can’t even tell you how bad he is, and that makes it sometimes even worse and then it gets codified, it gets believed by these massive bail amounts.

What we have is people who are absolutely not criminals, absolutely good people, simple people, non-violent people but they have been cast into roles as big, horrible criminals and they end up being treated as such for the rest of time and that’s what’s been going so. So it’s you know one of the things I felt necessary to say.

But you know one of the other things, what we have here I believe and I’m a person that, as I said, I don’t feel that I’m worthy of this, but I feel that I’ve ben granted this incredible opportunity, is there is this incredible exposure that Is wrongful and it is so wrongful when it is revealed it is something that will demonstrate injustice, you know, and there’s so much media coverage and exaggeration beyond what is, and so much untruth, and so much untruth in the justice system with the prosecution, with the way it was handled through the courts. All those different things. And all the things that things have been desiring to show, the people who can’t get the publicity, can’t get the media coverage, the people who are swept under the rug, all the sorts of the things that were done to them are to some degree are illustrated by my situation, you know. My mother always said I cried because I had no shoes, and then I met the man who had no feet. I certainly have feet, I even have shoes.

So my case, as crazy as it sounds, and when you reveal it will be even more crazy, people have to understand I’m just the tip of the iceberg. There are people that are so far worse off than I am. There are people on death row, apparently hours before being executed that are completely innocent. ,Can you imagine that? Being taken by your government because of either the color of your skin or some other prejudice and taken away when you are absolutely, completely innocent and set up to be killed. And that is the opposite of what our justice system is founded on.

Some people might say oh my goodness well, you know, that’s the problem you know of course we get rid of a lot of bad criminals , every once in. Awhile we get rid of an innocent person, we kill an innocent person. That is supposed to be unacceptable to justice and especially, it’s not done by any error that couldn’t be prevented. All of these errors could be prevented but what you have is political agenda, media agenda, and you have a deep type of prejudice that enters into the process that doesn’t need to be there. So what you have is you have prosecutors that are seeking to win but that’s not the prosecutor’s job. A prosecutor is supposed to uphold the defendant as much as the people who are the victims, meaning that if a defendant is innocent, they’re supposed to seek the truth, not just try to win at all costs. And what we will show in my case is the “win” attitude, the “win at all costs” attitude, even keep information away from the jury that the prosecution knows is true and seeks truth and shows truth and they don’t want the jury to see it because they might lose and that is one of the most horrible things that can happen…. And has happened.