Attorneys for Keith Raniere said on Monday that the convicted Nxivm honcho should get a new trial in his racketeering case because two witnesses who testified against him allegedly lied on the stand.
In papers filed in Brooklyn federal court, Raniere’s attorneys alleges that the witnesses testified that they had no intention of being involved with a lawsuit against top Nxivm brass alleging that they swindled adherents out of their life savings and forced them into sexual slavery.
But two women who took the stand at Raniere’s trial last year, identified in court papers as Daniela and Nicole, are part of the 80-plaintiff lawsuit filed in January against Raniere and members of Nxivm’s “inner circle.”
“If the jury had known about the perjury, demonstrating the witnesses’ bias to testify against Raniere, their collusion with each other and their willingness to lie under oath, there is a significant chance that this would have undermined the credibility of these witnesses,” Raniere’s attorneys wrote in a motion for a new trial.
The defendants in the lawsuit include Seagrams booze heiresses Claire and Sara Bronfman, Lauren Salzman, Nancy Salzman, bookkeeper Nancy Russell and “Smallville” TV actress Allison Mack.
Some plaintiffs in the suit claim that there were recruited into DOS, a sex-slave ring within Nxvim in which women were forced to have sex with Raniere and get his initials branded on their bodies.
Other say that they were made to undergo phony psychological treatments that were nothing more than “pseudo-scientific hodgepodge of psychotherapeutic methods.”
Raniere is scheduled to be sentenced on April 16. He will receive a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence and could get up to life in prison.
The US Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the motion for a new trial. A lawyer representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Neil Glazer, the Philadelphia-based lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement to The Post said that the two witnesses who are the heart of Raniere attorney Marc Agnifilo’s motion initially did not intend to join the lawsuit — but changed their minds once they saw the “mountain of evidence” that come out against Raniere during the trial.
“Mr. Agnifilo’s melodramatic cries of foul play are nonsense, faulting intelligent women for waiting until they had complete information before deciding both whether to file a lawsuit and who to sue, Glazer said. “At trial, he asked the witnesses if they intended or were planning to file a lawsuit. They truthfully answered ‘no.