Toward the end of the first season of The Vow, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer’s HBO show about NXIVM, Keith Raniere decides that a movie that the group has made about violence in Mexico needs to be reshot. The reason? He thinks his long hair makes him look like a cult leader, and might deter Mexicans from listening to his ideas about peace in their country. He gets a fancy feathered cut, à la Michael Douglas in Wall Street, then we watch as he delivers the film’s supposedly off-the-cuff monologues in exactly the same words, cadence, and hand gestures. It’s eerie, and it makes Raniere look like a psychopath.

More than anything else, Raniere’s sentencing hearing today in the court of a Brooklyn judge hangs on this question. Judge Nicholas Garaufis made his repulsion with Raniere and his flock abundantly clear during the trial as the charges against him ticked up (Raniere was found guilty of racketeering, sex trafficking, conspiracy, forced labor, identity theft, sexual exploitation of a child, and possession of child pornography).

Certainly the charges against him were voluminous, though it is important to note that the “sex slave ring” Raniere ran out of an Albany suburb was so literal that calling it “sex trafficking” misses the way in which it was also an outrageously silly and weird scam. Raniere convinced eight female followers, most notably actress Allison Mack, that they should recruit other female followers to be their “slaves” (bring them matcha lattes; respond quickly to their texts; and, of course, receive the infamous brand of his initials on their pubic regions). These “first-line” slaves had to keep secret that Raniere himself was directing actions as the head of the “slave pyramid.” And though few women were coerced into sex with Raniere, 25 women received the brand, most of whom did not know the symbol they would now have emblazoned on their skin for life was a K.R., for Raniere’s initials. They thought the symbol was some New Age hoo-ha about the elements.

Does this behavior require life imprisonment? I venture it does not, though it is a heinous moral affront. And combined with Raniere’s other charged crimes—the most notable of which involve photographing a 15-year-old girl naked; and, hideously, issuing a dictat that the sister of that 15-year-old needed to stay in her bedroom until she apologized for spurning him (she remained for nearly two years)—a picture of the man comes into view. He is an unrepentant sex addict who is consumed by a need to control others. And indeed his control over some of his earlier girlfriends in the 1990s (whom he did not expressly require to become “slaves”) was much of the same bent.

But still, is Raniere a Jim Jones–level psychopath? Does this man whom Twitter has been endlessly ridiculing for his love of volleyball and headbands deserve life in prison, meaning more time than Harvey Weinstein? Locking someone up without the sliver of a promise of freedom before death is the strongest punishment our society has, short of the death penalty in some states. The devotion that some of his followers still profess for him, even in light of prosecutors’ devastating facts, would seem evidence that he is not, along with the time that he spent over the years coaching and lecturing. The explanation that these followers are simply brainwashed is hard to fathom, given that he has been locked up for years now. They have been trying to prove prosecutorial misconduct in Raniere’s case, hoping to save him from rotting inside, and while they will fail in this effort, I do not doubt some of their affidavits that they were fearful about testifying during the trial on Raniere’s behalf, scared that they too would be charged. (Raniere, for his part, has launched a podcast hewing to the medium’s dramatic tenets; in the trailer, he says, “What’s out there in the media is untrue, and what we will reveal is even crazier.”)

Their evidence that the government sanded down some edges of their story to make sure he wasn’t released on bail when he was arrested years ago is also persuasive.

So is Raniere simply a mentally ill sex addict, a Chauncey Gardiner who gathered power because others saw what they wanted to see in him? Or is he a monster who is incapable of empathy and has a deep need to hurt women—and would he, indeed, have hurt women if he was allowed to continue leading NXIVM? At his trial, evidence was presented that various BDSM tools and a cage had been ordered, big enough for a human being; the inference was that eventually some “slaves” would be kept in that cage until they did his bidding.

My view of Raniere was influenced primarily by a piece of video that doesn’t appear on The Vow. I’m referring to ex-NXIVM member Sarah Edmondson’s “branding ceremony,” as the process of receiving the brand was called. The video was not published by American news sites; it appeared and disappeared on the Spanish-speaking web, but it directly contradicted what Allison Mack had said about getting the brand—how it was a beautiful bonding moment, with women sitting on sheepskin rugs, naked, with candles around them. (At the trial, evidence came out that Raniere was not present at the ceremonies, but videos of them were later sent to him digitally, for his enjoyment.)

What I watched online was not what Mack described. Edmondson was lying supine on a flat surface, like a very skinny slab of meat, under bright lights. Some of the women, I can’t recall who, were wearing shower caps. A doctor was using a cauterizing pen to burn her flesh. None of this looked silly. None of this looked sexy. It did look like something Jeffrey Dahmer would enjoy. And as much as I would like to say that I believe that every human being who does not murder another human being should have some chance of redemption in the carceral system, watching that video makes it hard for me to believe that Raniere, if let out of prison, would not give his aberrant tendencies free reign.

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