On Friday afternoon, Bronfman, 40, is expected to plead guilty in a Brooklyn federal court to charges arising from a complaint filed last year against her and several other followers of Nxivm’s leader, Keith Raniere, according to a court docket.
Another member of the group, Kathy Russell, 61, is also expected to plead guilty Friday, the docket shows.
The charges to which Bronfman and Russell will plead guilty have yet to be disclosed. But their decisions will leave Raniere standing alone at the Nxivm trial, which is scheduled for next month. In recent weeks, three of his other co-defendants, including actress Allison Mack, have pleaded guilty to various charges.
The group, based near Albany, billed itself as a self-help organization, offering workshops that promised self-fulfillment. But it had a darker side. Some women were recruited into a secret order within Nxivm (pronounced NEX-ee-um), branded with Raniere’s initials and coerced into to having sex with him, prosecutors have said.
Federal authorities began investigating the organization after The New York Times published an article in late 2017 detailing the inner workings of the secret sorority within Nxivm.
The women had to provide personal secrets as “collateral” to join the sorority and were warned that damaging or embarrassing information would be made public if they disclosed the sorority’s existence.
Since then, federal officials have filed wide-ranging charges against Raniere and other leaders and officials of Nxivm, saying they took part in a racketeering enterprise. They are accused of a variety of crimes, including conspiracy to commit identity theft, money laundering, sex trafficking, extortion and possession of child pornography.
In March, Raniere was additionally charged with having a sexual relationship with two underage girls, including one who was said to be 15 when the abuse began.
Bronfman is the youngest daughter of Edgar Bronfman, former chairman of Seagram Co., who died in 2013. She had been one of Raniere’s most passionate followers.
A former champion equestrian, she joined Nxivm in the early 2000s and eventually became his legal enforcer, filing and financing lawsuits against his enemies, both real and perceived.
She was accused of identify theft to access other people’s computers; of money laundering to abet the entry of an immigrant without legal permission into the United States; and of improperly paying the credit card of Raniere’s deceased girlfriend so he could continue to use it after her death.
Russell was the group’s bookkeeper for more than a decade and was indicted on two counts of racketeering conspiracy in July.
Raniere has denied all the charges against him. “We are going to trial,” his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said. “We don’t believe Ms. Russell and Ms. Bronfman should have been charged, and we are happy they’re out of the case.”
Court papers have described Nxivm as a rigorously hierarchical organization in which Raniere, who was known as “Vanguard,” demanded obedience from followers. High-ranking members who answered to Raniere could be equally demanding of those below them.
In March, a co-founder of the group, Nancy Salzman, known as “Prefect,” pleaded guilty. Salzman, a former psychiatric nurse who founded Nxivm in the 1990s with Raniere, was charged with identity theft and altering records to influence the outcome of a lawsuit against the organization.
This month, Mack, an actress who had appeared on the television show “Smallville,” also pleaded guilty to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy charges.
Prosecutors described Mack as “a first-line master” in the group’s secret sorority, known as DOS, an acronym for a Latin phrase that roughly translates to “Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions.”
Prosecutors said that group was organized into circles of female “slaves,” who were led by “masters,” and was meant to groom sexual partners for Raniere. The women in DOS, prosecutors said, were required to give their recruiter, or “master,” naked photographs or other compromising material.
When Mack was arrested last year, officials said she had recruited women as “slaves” and had required them to have sex with Raniere.
But during her guilty plea, Mack did not say whether women were blackmailed into engaging in sexual acts with the group’s leader. She only acknowledged obtaining “labor and services” from two anonymous women cited in the indictment.
As part of a criminal complaint, an FBI agent said Raniere had a “rotating group of 15 to 20 women” with whom he maintained sexual relations. Those women were allowed to have sex only with him, the agent added.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.