Two major cases in the news this week.

California couple David and Louise Turpin have been sentenced to life (eligible to apply for parole after 25 years, pigs will fly before they get parole) for torturing 12 of their 13 children. (#13 was a toddler, too young to be tortured yet).

A couple of quotes from the NYTimes article about the sentencing:

During the hearing on Friday, the children revealed some disturbing details of their captivity. One of the daughters said that the children had been shackled because their parents were afraid they were consuming too much sugar and caffeine. But her parents continued buying bottles of soda, she said, because if their father did not have it, he might fall asleep while driving and get into an accident.

Some of the children described their household as a religious place where they believed what was happening to them was God’s will. One of them quoted a Bible verse about trusting in God.
.....
Another daughter said her parents decided on home schooling because people criticized them for having so many children. “It worked out good at first,” especially after they moved from Texas to California, she said.


That's worse than some of the stories reported here recently, but I would say the difference is in intensity of abuse, not kind of abuse. Makes me wonder if religion screwed people up, or if it just supplied a framework for their basic screwed-uppedness to express itself.


The other case is the religious sexual abuse/harassment case against people participating in Nxivm. Keith Raniere has been charged with, well, acting like JS, more or less. He had a cult-like quasi-religious group, with an inner secret group of women who were coerced to have sex with him.

The last two women who were charged in the case have entered guilty pleas, so that Mr Raniere will be the only one who actually goes to trial.

From the article:

Clare Bronfman, an heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune, was among the most high-profile members of a cultlike organization in which some women were branded and compelled to have sex with the leader. Her wealth helped finance the group, known as Nxivm.
....
Based near Albany, Nxivm billed itself as a self-help organization, offering workshops that promised self-fulfillment. But it had a dark side. Some women were recruited into a secret order within the group, branded on the pelvis with a symbol containing Mr. Raniere’s initials, and coerced into having sex with him, prosecutors said.

Federal authorities began investigating the organization after The New York Times published an article in late 2017 detailing how women had to provide personal secrets as “collateral” to join Mr. Raniere’s secret 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 Mr. Raniere and other leaders and officials of Nxivm. An indictment unsealed last year accused Mr. Raniere and his followers of taking part in a racketeering enterprise that was involved in identity theft, money laundering, sex trafficking and extortion, among other things.

In March, Mr. Raniere was additionally charged with having a sexual relationship with two underage girls, including one who was said to be 15 years old when the abuse began.

Ms. Bronfman is the youngest daughter of Edgar Bronfman, the former chairman of Seagram Company who died in 2013. She had been one of Mr. 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.
...

Ms Bronfman will likely be sentenced to 27 months in prison, and a $6 million fine.

I find this fascinating because I might have a very peripheral connection to the Bronfman family. Samuel Bronfman fled the Jewish pogroms in Bessarabia, Russia around 1900, moving to Saskatchewan, near Regina, which is close to Williston, ND. There is a ghost town near Williston and the Canadian border, that was once a smuggling portal for whiskey from Canada into the US during Prohibition. The story I heard, but which wikipedia neither refutes nor confirms, was that the Bronfmans got their start in Canada running whiskey. They had been tobacco farmers in Bessarabia, but discovered tobacco can't grow in Saskatchewan!

Anyway, the family moved to Brandon, Manitoba briefly. It was local lore in East Grand Forks, MN, that they ran whiskey down the Red River of the North, from Winnipeg to East Grand Forks, to Whitey's Wonder Bar, which was right next to the river, and had a tunnel in the basement that went out to the riverbank.

When I lived in the area, East Grand Forks was still a party town, because ND had a university just across the river, but the drinking age in MN at the time was still 18. The Joke was "if Minnesota is your idea of a party place, then where you live must be really boring!" <cue rimshot>

In 1924, the family moved to Montreal and bought the Seagrams distilling enterprise. They then ran whiskey to the east coast of the US through the tiny French islands of St Pierre and Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland. BTW, Newfoundland was not yet part of Canada in the 1920s. St Pierre and Miquelon are still French islands.

After Prohibition, Seagrams/Bronfmans paid a fine to the US to settle whiskey running charges, and went on to make a fortune from Seagrams and affiliated brands.

Edgar took over the business from Samuel, and Edgar Jr took over from Edgar. Edgar Jr became CEO of Warner Music Group, which made him a very big wheel in the music industry. He recently left WMG and is a technology venture capitalist. The family (I believe) has sold their interest in Seagrams.

Clare, who just pleaded guilty in the Nxivm case, is his half sister.

Anyway, long way from bootlegging whiskey 99 years ago. And it is nice to see these semi-religious nutcases come a cropper.

Pardon my digression. I used to hang out at Whitey's, which still had the original Wonderbar from the 1920s. The Bronfmans are part of local lore and legend.

For a real eye-opener about the dark side of religion's representatives, see the newspaper "Freethought Today" published each month by the Freedom From Religion Foundation has two full pages in each issue listing hundreds of such horrors perpetrated by priests, preachers, and Sunday school teachers. Every month. Hundreds. They call it their "Black Collar Crimes" pages.

I found that religion was well indoctrinated into the children that even with the horrible treatment of their parents they said in court that they love their mom and dad and forgive them.

Why publicly say you forgive them. Let them earn that forgiveness or decline to say if they did or didn't for a time anyway. They are so well into their faith that love must mean something else to them but because the treatment over that last 6 years or more was NOT any type of LOVE I've ever known.

I'm going to say that within a short time of their parents in prison, they will have manipulated their kids (judge removed any restraining orders) into showing how much Prison has changed them, how sorry the fell, blah blah blah, and will have the kids writing letters to the courts begging that the parents get out early.

A very sad court day in deed other than the parents will serve at least 25 years (if that). I predict they won't make it out of prison alive.

Book deal or tv mini series in the near future or too soon?
Maybe earn millions in distro rights OR it could just be a magnifying glass and lawsuit from the parents who will say they are being left out of the deal. Argue they are entitled to some profits because without them there would be no story.

The whole avoiding trial was focused on so victims wouldn't have to re-hash their horrible lives and how the parents treated them. yet, during the statement, one of the sons just casually as if it was stroll in park mention being chained up and in cages at times.

So odd and emotionless.