‘Allison After NXIVM’ Podcast Creators on Interviewing Sex Cult Survivor Lauren Salzman and Backlash Over ‘Platforming’ Allison Mack: ‘Nothing Was Off the Table’
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“Allison After NXIVM” — the podcast featuring “Smallville” star Allison Mack, who became both a perpetrator and victim within Keith Raniere’s NXIVM sex cult — concludes on Dec. 15 with the release of its seventh and final episode. The podcast, written and hosted by Natalie Robehmed, and produced by Campside Media’s Vanessa Grigoriadis for CBC’s “Uncover,” is Mack’s first time telling her story, even though there’s been rabid attention on NXVIM and Raniere for years. Mack went to federal prison for nearly two years for her crimes within NXIVM, and was released in July 2023.
Throughout “Allison After NXIVM,” Mack, 43, has recounted how she first became involved in the cult in 2006 in Vancouver through “Smallville” co-star Kristin Kreuk. After the show ended, having completely fallen under Raniere’s spell, Mack moved outside of Albany, New York, where she became a high-up member of NXIVM, and one of Raniere’s harem. She had coercive sex with him daily in 2015-2016, which she thought was part of her healing journey.
When Raniere suggested that women within the cult form a subgroup called DOS, in which they were “masters” and had “slaves,” and engaged in branding rituals and had ultra-restrictive calorie limits, Mack, by then brainwashed, embraced this idea, and became both an enthusiastic recruiter and a harsh taskmaster to her “slaves.” Raniere and other members of NXIVM, including Mack, were arrested in 2018, and the podcast also tells the story of his trial, which Grigoriadis covered. “Allison After NXIVM” also has the first-ever interview with Lauren Salzman, the daughter of NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman. Lauren Salzman testified against Raniere at his trial, and was sentenced in 2021 to time served and five years of probation, after having pleaded guilty.
After years of staying silent, Mack chose to tell her story in podcast form because, as Robehmed says simply in the first episode, “she loves podcasts, and because she’s no longer comfortable in front of cameras like she used to be.” “Allison After NXIVM” is regularly in Apple Podcast’s Top 15 in the true crime category, and in its Top 100 overall. The series feels like a throwback — a documentary true-crime project with a singular focus — to the earlier days of the medium, when in 2014 Sarah Koenig’s “Serial” exploded, and showed what podcasting could do. In an interview over Zoom last week along with Robehmed, Grigoriadis, one of the founders of Campside, says: “To me, this is what this medium is made for: a confession. A confession, and a window into somebody’s life that you never could have imagined, but feels like something you can suddenly relate to.”
Robehmed echoes that sentiment, saying, “I still think there is real value to longform storytelling writ large.” The serialized format that “Allison After NXIVM” uses — as opposed to the one-off, crime-of-the-week podcasts that largely dominate the charts today — especially suits the complexities of Mack’s story. “It’s so intimate, and allows you the breadth and width to explore the ambiguities, and take the listener along on a journey that you, frankly, as a writer you don’t get to,” Robehmed adds.
Read more https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/allison-after-nxivm-explained-allison-mack-podcast-nxivm-sex-cult-1236608465/
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