Actress Allison Mack, who was imprisoned for crimes she committed as a cult member, tells her story for the first time in a new podcast.
After Keith Raniere, who was a senior mentor and later founded the NXIVM cult and used it as a training ground for a harem of sex slaves, the name most associated with the group and its misdeeds is Allison Mack, the actress and former Smallville star who was Raniere’s right-hand woman.
As details about NXIVM’s inner workings emerged — after Raniere was arrested in 2018 for sex trafficking, extortion and other crimes — Mack was revealed as the group’s most prominent member, a symbol of its influence within a group of Hollywood hopefuls.
Mack herself never spoke about the group’s downfall, neither when she pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy charges in federal court, nor in any of the subsequent magazine articles, books and docuseries about NXIVM, nor after she was released from prison in 2023 after serving 21 months of a three-year sentence.
Mack breaks her silence on Allison After NXIVM, a new podcast from Campside Media and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The podcast, hosted by Natalie Robehmed, is based on extensive interviews with Mack and traces the actress’s descent from beloved concubine to loyal cult member and criminal. Over the course of seven episodes, Mack talks about how his Smallville costar Kristin Kreuk introduced him to NXIVM; of how she came under the yoke of Raniere (with whom she allegedly had sex every day for almost a year) and of her abusive relationships with younger members of NXIVM, whom she claims she wanted to train to improve themselves as people.
“I’ve done a lot of reporting on Hollywood stars, where you have to deal with their publicists, managers, agents and all that,” Robehmed said in an interview. “It wasn’t like that. There were no middlemen, no negotiations about what she would and wouldn’t say. She was willing to answer all the tough questions.”
When they embarked on the project, Robehmed and his producer and co-writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, founder of Campside, were faced with the challenge of fairly presenting the story of a professionally charming person who admitted serious wrongdoing and about whom many listeners were justifiably skeptical.
“Even some of our friends say, ‘I don’t trust her at all, but the podcast is good,'” Grigoriadis said with a biting laugh. “And others say, ‘I never thought I would empathize with Allison Mack, but I totally understand what she’s saying.’ Good.”
The opportunity to speak with Mack first came to Grigoriadis, who had interviewed both Mack and Raniere for a New York Times Magazine article about NXIVM published in 2018. (Grigoriadis is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.) At that point, in the spring of 2024, Mack had been out of prison for less than a year. Grigoriadis held a Zoom call with Mack and Stephen Belber — playwright and producer of Allison After NXIVM, who had encouraged Mack to tell her story — and pitched the idea for the series to Robehmed, a frequent writer and co-host of Infamous, a scandal news podcast.
Robehmed was immediately skeptical.
“I think I told Vanessa, ‘I’m not interested in being part of Allison Mack’s redemption story,'” Robehmed recalls. “The only version I knew of her was the one that had appeared in previous reports and documentaries: Allison Mack: The Villain.”
But at a dinner in Los Angeles with Mack and Belber, Robehmed found that the actress was introspective and remorseful and had no qualms about acknowledging the pain she had caused to women who were lower ranked than her in NXIVM. She urged some of them to seduce Raniere, send him nude photos and write her initials on her skin.
Mack told Robehmed that he has no intention of acting again – or participating in any media other than the podcast – and that he is studying social work. (Through a representative, he declined to comment for this article.) Last summer, Robehmed accompanied her to cover her own brand, NXIVM, with a tattoo.
In the podcast, Mack speaks openly about her guilt.
“I was aggressive and forceful in a way that was painful for people, made them feel like they had no choice, and was incredibly insulting and traumatic for them,” she says when Robehmed asks about her reputation as a particularly ruthless Raniere lieutenant. “All of these allegations are 100 percent true.”
Steven Hassan, a psychologist and expert in reversing cult indoctrination who has written about the NXIVM case but has not worked with Mack, said many of Raniere’s victims were manipulated through advanced hypnosis and social control.
“Humans adapt to their environment, our brains are made of plastic,” he said. “The mind can be hacked.”
Jessica Joan, an actress and former NXIVM member who claims Mack took advantage of her and tried to force her to send Raniere sexually explicit photos, said it will take more than an admission of wrongdoing to repair the harm he caused.
“I’m glad he realizes what he did was wrong, but where is the change?” said Joan, who chose not to listen to the series. “Aside from doing a podcast where she says things that make her look better, where is the solidarity and advocacy? How is she helping people who have suffered the same kind of oppression that she has inflicted on other people?”
Robehmed and Grigoriadis interviewed Mack together last December in two seven-hour sessions spanning two days at a hotel in Long Beach, California. They unraveled her story in chronological order (most of which was reflected in the podcast), starting with her work as a child actress who wanted to be happy and was quickly cast in the roles of the bubbly, talented “best friend” and the fact that she herself was a victim of sexual misconduct.
After learning about NXIVM from Kreuk, her co-star and West Village neighbor, Mack became an ardent convert, seduced by the organization’s promise to help its followers overcome their flaws and reach their full potential. She worked her way to the top of a secretive cult within the sexual assault group, where she served as one of Raniere’s personal “slaves” and became a “mistress” who cultivated her own “slaves.”
In the podcast, Mack says she believes Raniere — whom she and other NXIVM members described as “the smartest man in the world” — helped her overcome character flaws like vanity and selfishness and heal past sexual trauma. She claims Raniere lied to her about his activities with other women and that she only began to realize the truth when his trial revealed the extent of his crimes – including the sexual exploitation of a minor.
In the podcast, Robehmed asks Mack if he intentionally ignored the situation during his relationship with Raniere.
“Part of me certainly is,” she replies. “I consciously stopped myself from hearing things that would have made me uncomfortable.”
Lauren Salzman, daughter of NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman, who was at NXIVM for 20 years and had a similar rank to Mack, told Robehmed that she, too, remained a faithful believer until the trial.
“I saw how he psychologically manipulates people,” he says on the podcast, in his first interview since the trial. “And then I realized what he had done to me.”
Throughout the series, Robehmed Mack pushes parts of his story that seem convenient or implausible, such as his claim that he was unaware that the young women he trained to “seduce” Raniere were actually having sex with him, or that a post on his social media account in which he attempted to recruit actress Emma Watson was written by an assistant without his knowledge. (She says she doesn’t think “seduce” means sex and that she’s never really used social media.)
However, Mack’s version of events is never directly challenged, and both Robehmed and Grigoriadis said they were convinced after interviews that it was credible.
“We believe him,” Grigoriadis said, although he acknowledged that Mack “is human and there are probably some things he hasn’t told us.”
Robehmed said it was what Mack decided to share that convinced her.
“It would be ‘better’ for her image if she didn’t say some of the things she says on the podcast, if she were completely committed one way or another, rather than trying to deal with some of the more difficult parts of her story,” he said. “That made me trust her. She never gave me the feeling that she was trying to sell me a pre-written PR speech.”
Reggie Ugwu is a culture reporter for The Times.
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