'Smallville' star Allison Mack joined sex cult to 'become a great actress again'
A new podcast has revealed that 'Smallville' actress Allison Mack first got involved in the cult NXIVM because she thought she could “become a great actress again" with the help of co-founder Keith Raniere. NXIVM is the name commonly used to describe the personality cult of Raniere.
“I moved to Albany (NXIVM headquarters) to fill that emptiness and find the soul of myself again, if that makes sense, as it had fizzled,” Mack said in a 2017 interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis. The interview was unearthed on Monday, December 26, on the journalist and Gabriel Sherman’s new podcast, 'Infamous: Inside America’s Biggest Scandals'. “I asked Keith if he would help me become a great actress again because I felt like I was a fraud," she said.
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Raniere, 62, and Nancy Salzman, 68, founded NXIVM in 1998, which was known to be a personal development company that offered "Executive Success Programs" and various self-improvement techniques. However, former members of the company later claimed they had been indoctrinated into a sick sex slave cult. They claimed that women were branded with Raniere's initials and even forced to have sex with him.
Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison in 2019, which was upheld by an appeals court earlier this month. The 40-year-old Mack, on the other hand, was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to participating in manipulating women into having sex with Raniere and becoming his sex slaves.
Speaking with Grigoriadis, Mack claimed she was innocent, saying Raniere was “not the head of a harem". She said, "I’m not recruiting young, nubile women to be his sex slaves … You know, it’s ‘The Crucible,’ it’s the McCarthy trials, it’s just like, throwing accusations and spreading like wildfire.”
Mack said some of her friends who were concered she was involved in a cult pressured her to leave the group. “I’m like, ‘Talk to me for a few minutes. Let me tell you what we’re doing,” she said. Her friends would tell her, "No you’re brainwashed, you’re sick."
“I just was like walking with myself and I was going like, ‘Am I crazy? Am I one of these awful people that you read about that does horrible things and thinks that she’s doing things for God?’ I had a lot of conversations with myself like that,” she added.
Mack, however, decided to stay with NXIVM. “Ultimately, I just sat down and I like looked at my life and I looked at my relationships and I looked at all of the things I had written journals that I had kept — things that I had done over the last few years. And it was so consistently good,” she said.
Grigoriadis also spoke to Raniere, who denied that women were branded with his initials. “You look at it compared to the Omega Psi fraternity, we had one of those branches on campus where I went to college,” he said. “African-American. They brand themselves with an Omega. Michael Jordan has a brand and the Omega. They brand these things to be very visible and they make it till they go puffy. And things like that."
“A group of 10 or 15 women in suburbia, their average age is like 40, getting together and deciding to have a little hip brand. If that were guys, it wouldn’t make news. The fact that it’s women and the fact that it makes news is reinforcing, unfortunately, a negative stereotype of women, I think," he added. Salzman was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in September 2021, for supporting Raniere.
The NXIVM episodes of 'Infamous' from Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment is set to drop on December 29.