Allison Mack Did Not Understand Why NXIVM ‘Slaves’ Found Branding Their Flesh Painful: ‘It’s Fine’
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Allison Mack is speaking out about her time in NXIVM in the new podcast series Allison After NXIVM — where she details a branding ceremony women were forced to undergo as part of the sex cult.
The women would arrive at the home with little knowledge of what was about to happen before being asked to strip naked. They were then held down by the other women present as a cauterizing pen was used to permanently sear a symbol above their pelvis.
It is a process that would take approximately 20 minutes, and was done without the aid of pain medication or numbing cream, she said, admitting that she couldn’t comprehend at the time why some women were complaining.
“When other women would say, like ‘that’s really painful’ or whatever, I was like ‘what do you mean?’ Like, ‘it’s fine.’ It’s just what you did. It was just like another day,’” Mack said, likening the ritual to being in a sorority.
Mack said her response was a result of the survival skills she had developed at the time, recounting her own branding by way of example.
As Mack tells it, she showed up at a house on her lunch break, got branded and immediately went back to teaching an intensive she had been doing that day
“My body was like shaking in shock, you know, like obviously my body was still trembling, but I was so good at like cutting that off and just focusing on what I was doing,” Mack said. “I’m just not going to feel this right now. I’m just going to dissociate completely and be somewhere different. I don’t know when or where I developed that survival mechanism.”
She later added: “The callousness by which I handled that and handled myself in that is the same callousness that I had with the other girls.”
Mack also revealed that the brand, which she previously took credit for creating, does not contain her initials. This contradicts previous claims that the brand was an amalgram of hers and cult leader Keith Raniere’s initials.
One of the many women who had the symbol burned onto their bodies included the cult’s initial whistleblower, Sarah Edmondson, who claimed in her book Scarred that she had been told it was meant to represent the four elements and only later realized it was a combination of “K.R.” and “A.M.”
Read more https://people.com/allison-mack-nxivm-slaves-branding-interview-podcast-keith-raniere-11850040
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