Students at Hall High School piled into the auditorium to hear guest speaker Marc Elliot talk about overcoming his turrets at the end of last year. The next day the school was filled of chatter about Marc Elliot. There was no talk about his Inspiring speech, instead everyone was talking about his other passion. Through a simple Google search of Marc’s name many websites appeared linking Marc to the sex cult NXIVM, where he allegedly works as a high level sex cult recruiter. The question on everyone’s mind quickly became “How did a sex cult recruiter get into a high school?”

The NXIVM sex cult was founded by Keith Raniere also known as Vanguard. The cult is known for branding females, and keeping inappropriate images, messages, and videos as blackmail in case they try to leave. Marc Elliot is an alleged recruiter for the cult. The cult targets people with  mental illnesses like tourrets, anxiety, and depression, the cult convinces them into joining by saying they can heal the mental illness.

After Marc came to Hall, the school sent out an email to the school giving a vague description of what happened. The email ended up giving me more questions than answers. I sat down with Principle Dan Zittoun to try to find out as much as I could. One of my biggest question was was there a google search for his name. “No, no, we hadn’t done that. The realty was we took the understatement he was here before”, Mr. Zittoun said. How was the problem brought to your attention? “The problem was brought to our attention after the assembly, some students who had done some googling research on him. So it was really the students  who brought it up”. If you were a parent of a student at hall when this happened, how would you feel with hall bringing a sex cult recruiter into hall to speak to the whole school? “Don’t get me wrong, he shouldn’t have come into hall and we will take ownership of that”, Mr. Zittoun said.

In conclusion, the topic of Marc Elliot has been very quiet throughout Hall. The email became very hard to find. The school will take further measures to making sure a mistake like this doesn’t happen again. The fact remains: Marc Elliot came into Hall and no one stopped him. Was it preventable? Yes. Was it a mistake? Yes. Will it happen again? No.