“Smallville” actress Allison Mack, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2021 for recruiting women into the s** cult NXIVM, recently disclosed in a 2017 interview that her primary reason for joining was to “become a great actress again.”
In a recent episode of Gabriel Sherman’s podcast “Infamous: Inside America’s Biggest Scandals,” journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis revisited her 2018 New York Times Magazine story about the cult, highlighting Mack’s revelations from the unearthed interview.
During the interview, Mack expressed her dissatisfaction with her acting career, stating, “I started to realize that I was spending time here kind of playing the part of an actress in New York, but feeling very, like, empty about it.
So, I moved to Albany to, like, fill that emptiness and, like, find the soul of myself again.”
Mack further revealed that she sought help from Keith Raniere, the founder of NXIVM, to regain her acting prowess because she felt like a fraud.
Raniere, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2020 for s** trafficking children, portrayed his s** cult as a self-help group to attract potential members.
One notable aspect of NXIVM was the branding of women, including Mack, with a symbol that seemingly incorporated both Mack and Raniere’s initials.
In the 2017 interview, Mack denied that the initials were intentionally included in the symbol and referred to the branded women as a “sorority.”
According to Mack, the purpose of the branding was for women to make a full-time commitment to each other’s personal growth and empowerment.
She explained, “It really is about women coming together and pledging to one another full-time commitment — to become our most powerful and embodied selves.
We achieve this by pushing on our biggest fears, by exposing our greatest vulnerabilities, by knowing that we would stand with each other no matter what.”
Mack also discussed the group’s focus on overcoming pain and likened the experiences they created for one another to those in a war-torn country.
Women in the group, known as “DOS” (Dominus Obsequious Sororium or “master over slave” in Latin), were required to restrict their caloric intake and engage in s**ual relations with Raniere.
Interestingly, Mack explicitly denied in the interview that she was recruiting women as Raniere’s “s** slaves,” which ultimately became one of the charges against her.
The docuseries “The Vow,” released in 2021, shed light on the experiences of both men and women who managed to escape NXIVM.
Many of them were recruited by Raniere or individuals close to him during times when they felt stagnant in their careers.
For anyone interested, new episodes of “Infamous: Inside America’s Biggest Scandals” are available every Thursday.
