Actor Allison Mack reveals role in Nxivm sex cult in new podcast: ‘I was abusive’
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The Smallville actor Allison Mack says she was once riveted by the influence she wielded through her role in the Nxivm sex cult – though it eventually sent her to federal prison, and she now realizes it was “abusive”.
“I was excited by the power that I felt having these young, beautiful women look to me and listen to me,” Mack, 43, maintains in a new podcast series titled Allison After Nxivm, which contains her first public remarks since her release from prison about two years ago. “And – yes – the sexuality of it was exciting.”
Mack offered that recollection after pleading guilty in 2021 to charges that she manipulated women to serve Nxivm’s leader, Keith Raniere, who was ultimately convicted of sex-trafficking crimes. She was released from a federal prison near San Francisco in 2023 while Raniere was sentenced to 120 years behind bars.
The seven-episode Allison After Nxivm, produced by CBC’s Uncover, in part recounts how Mack went from joining the cast of the popular Superman show Smallville in 2001 to recruiting women into Nxivm by leaning on the celebrity that her work afforded her.
Mack on the podcast said she was introduced to Nxivm by her Smallville co-star Kristin Kreuk – and then was invited to meet Raniere, the head of the organization that billed itself as a self-improvement group in upstate New York.
Raniere eventually convinced Mack that being “physically intimate with him” could aid her in grappling with the fallout of childhood sexual exploitation to which she had been subjected, she said on the podcast. She explains how she effectively was indoctrinated into getting other women to join Nxim, where they were brainwashed, branded with Raniere’s initials and forced to have sex with him.
Read more https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/12/allison-mack-nxivm-sex-cult-podcast
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/12/allison-mack-nxivm-sex-cult-podcast.
