NXIVM Leader Keith Raniere Had a Son 7 Months Before His Arrest

If you’ve been watching The Vow or reading about NXIVM, you know all about the accusations about the treatment of children within the organization. But does NXIVM leader Keith Raniere have children himself?

According to the Daily Mail, Raniere — who is serving a 120-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2019 of racketeering, sex trafficking, and other offenses — has at least two children. And that info comes straight from court documents Raniere and his legal team filed after his 2018 arrest.

Keith Raniere has a teenage son who reportedly went into hiding. In 2014, a lawyer for a woman named Kristin M. Keeffe said that Keeffe was in hiding amid a custody dispute with Raniere over her son, Gaelyn, as the Times Union reported at the time.

The newspaper also reported that Keeffe, then 44, had spent “more than half her life associated with Raniere” and lived with him for years in a housing complex in Halfmoon, N.Y. And when she became a mother around eight years before the Times Union report, she moved into a unit two doors away from Raniere’s.

At some point, though, the relationship between Raniere and Keeffe went south. “I have completely left NXIVM and New York,” Keeffe allegedly wrote to a lawyer for the Cult Education Institute, an organization that was involved in a legal battle with NXIVM at the time. “The state police arranged a series of safe houses for me to stay in with Gaelyn, and they moved us out of the Northeast. I have full sole legal custody of Gaelyn. Keith was experimenting on him. I had to get Gaelyn away.”

In 2020, investigative journalist Frank Parlato — who covered NXIVM on his blog Frank Report — told Oxygen.com that Keeffe and her son, who was then 13, were “doing well” and living in the Northeast. “They’re still somewhat in hiding because of Raniere’s dangerous attributes,” Parlato added.

Court documents the Daily Mail obtained in 2018 revealed that Raniere also had an infant son at the time who was living with his mother in Mexico. The child was 7 months old when Raniere was arrested, and the boy’s mother is a woman named Mariana Fernandez. Raniere also said that he had an older child who was 11 at the time — presumably Gaelyn — with whom he did not have contact.

In the documents, Raniere’s legal team mentioned his infant son in reference to a proposal for the NXIVM leader’s bail arrangement. “[Raniere] would have access to a computer and telephone, but the computer would lack internet access and would be used only to review materials related to this case, and the telephone would be used only to make and receive calls to and from phone numbers agreed to by the Government, including those of his counsel and the mother of his child,” the document read.

NXIVM documentary The Vow Part II airs Monday nights at 9 p.m. on HBO and streams on HBO Max.