Opinion: Raniere is not evil; he is a frightened child
Niagara Reporter-
A reader asked me if I despised Keith Raniere.
No, of course I don’t.
Candidly – and it is just my opinion – I have come to see Raniere as a tormented soul.
Asked to share my opinion, it is this (and I hope the reader will not be offended by the purely opinionated aspect of this post):
One should feel sympathy for Keith Raniere for the terror that must haunt him.
He is frightened, and, with Bronfman millions at his disposal, he tries to buy away his fears – sometime with unbelievable cruelty (Barbara Bouchey, Toni Natalie) – at other times with immature foolishness (The Dalai Lama, suing Rick Ross) and sometimes with either dishonest or incredibly stupid intentions (commodities, real estate scams, loss of $http://southbuffalonews.com00 million).
With the Bronfmans, plus his group of women devotee/sex partners – women who are essentially good but slavishly devoted, and blind to his immaturity – he has the opportunity to (mis)lead them into a lot of evil.
Hopefully, they will not be criminally charged.
How frightened Raniere must be that he sues old lovers, attacks those he once trusted, denies his own son, frightened the mother into hiding, locked the defiant in rooms for years, deceives his followers about his sexual affairs, loses millions of others’ money, has to hide behind a cloak of secrecy, all the while maintaining he is some sort of divinity.
It’s laughable to an outsider, of course; people mostly laugh at Keith Raniere.
But men and women of sympathetic natures will feel sorrow for this sadly pathetic creature.
And for the many women whose lives he has shaped into caricatures of what they might have been. Women who have lost years of their lives who will one day wake up (as others have done) and marvel at how they misspent their youth following a madman. One can only feel sorrow.
We should have mercy for Keith Raniere. And for the women who follow him.
He is afraid.
He hides in shadows. Using women to shield him.
Some whom he has hurt have ascribed this to pure evil.
I do not.
He is frightened, as all bullies are.
He is evil because he can be – thanks to the Bronfman millions.
(How grotesquely immature the Bronfmans are).
His immaturity overshadows his desire for being good or evil.
All of his machinations – leading to a terrible record – and a trail of tears for many – have nothing to do with good or evil.
He lives in a world of pretense.
Pretending to be a guru, he found he could fleece women out of millions and bed the best looking of them.
He takes advantage of woman’s desire for spirituality and love of genius.
The inability to discern genius from goodness. Or lust from love is the hallmark of his dominance over their mental processes.
I suspect he would be willing to be good or bad, the worst there is, whatever it takes, for the child inside him to get the worship he craves.
Worship him and he will be a good boy.
Believe it.
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For those who doubt Raniere has a track record of causing pain and discord consider reading the following links:
