Moira Penza
speaker
110 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Moira Penza’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
what you're going to say is, this isn't necessarily somebody who I think should be charged for a crime or there may be other reasons why you don't want to charge them with a crime, but they themselves might say, or through their lawyers, I'm not going to testify because what you want me to say is going to incriminate me.
And so in that situation, the government makes a calculus that you don't want to prosecute the person, but it is also worth, having them testify. And you always want to be doing that when it is helping you get the person who is significantly more culpable. And here, there's clearly no dispute that the defendant, Mr. Combs, was the head of this organization.
So the government is going to make certain decisions to make sure that they can hold him responsible.
I think that's totally fair. And I think that's the way that the system should work. I think that prosecutorial discretion is a very important part of the system. And certainly there can be cases where for a variety of reasons, maybe because somebody was such a victim him or herself that you choose not to prosecute them.
So I think that there are a lot of similarities in the cases in that you have an individual who within his community is very high powered. Now, of course, far more people know Sean Combs than knew Keith Raniere at the time that I prosecuted him. But they were both men who have significant influences in the spheres in which they operated. And
The way that I charged the NXIVM case was recognizing that the crimes that Keith Raniere committed, he was able to commit over such a long period of time and with so many victims because he did have the involvement of other people and because he was part of this organization where A lot of individuals were benefiting financially, emotionally from being with him.
They aggrandized him and were willing to participate in the victimization of other people on his behalf. In the Naxium case, for the sex trafficking piece, there were a number of different ways in which we proved the elements. But Basically, what we were saying was that women were collateralized. So there were women who thought they were joining a female empowerment group.
And as part of joining that, they were forced to hand over women. nude pictures, damning information about themselves, either true or false. Once they had handed over that information, only later, once that blackmail material was already obtained, did they learn that part of this organization was requiring them to have sex with Keith Raniere?
So that was the coercion that you see in terms of the sex trafficking charges that we have there. And then in terms of the racketeering charges, again, we had other individuals who were helping groom women, and who were involved in other crimes for Keith Raniere, including covering up different pieces of it. In terms of showing that the victims were under the coercive control of the defendant...
Again, there were a lot of similarities. So the women in my case were controlled in every aspect of their life. And their whole lives had really become this person, this organization. Their careers, they were really separated from people who could really serve as sounding boards for what was going on. One difference that we do have is the level of alleged physical violence in the Sean Combs case.
In the Naxiom case, there was a little bit of that. And of course, the sex crimes themselves are inherently violent. But this sort of brutal physical violence is something that we didn't have in my case, but that you do have in this case and that I think is very powerful evidence for the prosecutors.
Mark and Tenny were the team in the NXIVM case, so I know them well. Ms. Garagos did not have as much of a stand-up role during the NXIVM trial. I certainly think she's a talented lawyer. And I do think optically it was...
a good decision on the part of the defense team to have a young woman who was a contemporary of the prosecution team standing up and showing that she was on the defendant's side and advocating for the defendant. So I think to Mark and Tenny's credit, I don't think they're necessarily following the same playbook that I saw in their defense of Keith Raniere.
And I think that reflects, you know, probably their own evolution in how to defend these cases. But also, I think likely, I think Mr. Combs is maybe more willing to allow them to take certain approaches like... accepting responsibility for being a bad boyfriend for domestic abuse.
So I think right now, where I think we're going to see closing arguments go is really a bookend of what we saw in opening. I think we're going to see the defense say, We've heard a lot of stuff you might not like, jury, but it's not the crimes that the government has charged.
And I think in that respect, it will be a little bit more matter of fact than we might have seen in the NXIVM case, where I think Mark...
made more of an effort to try and paint Keith Raniere as actually a good man with good intentions, as opposed to here where I think they realize it will be a more effective strategy to admit that Mr. Combs is a deeply flawed individual and just try and get the jury to stay focused on the narrow issue of, are these crimes actually proven?
So I think in both cases, Dr. Hughes's testimony is being used very similarly. I think the NXIVM case is actually the first case in which Dr. Hughes testified, and she's now testified quite a bit on behalf of the government and on behalf of victims of abuse and sex trafficking.
The reality is that victims of sex crimes, victims of domestic abuse often behave in ways that may seem counterintuitive to a lay person, to a jury. We often see victims writing text messages talking about how much they love their abuser. We see them going back, having consensual sex after they've been raped.
And that sort of behavior can sometimes, for somebody who's not familiar with the psychology of it, seem like it goes against the credibility of the victim. In reality, those behaviors are very common. I've seen it in... every sex crimes case that I was involved in. And, you know, now as somebody who comments on these sorts of cases, it's something that you see in basically every case.
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