ALBANY — A federal judge in New Jersey delivered an unwelcome birthday present to NXIVM leader Keith Raniere on Monday: an order demanding the organization pay more than $1.3 million to an investigative firm it hired to dig up dirt on a cult expert.
Senior U.S. District Judge Katharine S. Hayden ruled in favor of Interfor, a New York-based company that NXIVM recruited in 2004 to — among other tasks — investigate Rick Ross, leader of the Cult Education Institute, who NXIVM had sued the previous year.
The judge, who presided over a 2017 non-jury trial on the matter, ordered NXIVM to pay $1,360,157 to Interfor, which is headed by Juval Aviv, a former Israeli intelligence officer. The figure includes legal fees and other costs.
The ruling fell on the 59th birthday of Raniere, known as “Vanguard,” who was convicted on all charges — including racketeering, sex trafficking and forced labor — at the end of a nearly two-month trial this spring in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.
On Monday, the judge noted that before Aviv’s firm agreed to work for NXIVM, he required the purported self-improvement group to adhere to a contractual indemnity clause requiring it to immediately bear financial responsibility for Interfor in the event of “any claim, lawsuit, obligation, action, cause of action or cost or expense, of any amount and nature whatsoever be incurred by or imposed upon Interfor.”
Initially, NXIVM had kept to the agreement. When Ross countersued NXIVM and Interfor, NXIVM retained a New York City-area law firm, Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman, to represent the investigations company. NXIVM paid $165,619 to comply with the agreement.
But in 2007, NXIVM lawyer Paul Yesawich notified the law firm that NXIVM would no longer comply with the agreement, arguing that Interfor’s work “went beyond what the parties intended would be done, and beyond what NXIVM authorized Interfor to do,” the judge said.
The judge disagreed, ruling that NXIVM initially hired Interfor to probe the 2003 disappearance of former NXIVM student Kristin Marie Snyder, whom police believe intentionally capsized her kayak in Alaska and died at age 35.