After a decade on the TV drama Smallville—and years of cable news and documentary stories about her abusive role in the destructive cult NXIVM—Allison Mack doesn’t want to be on camera anymore. Instead, she’s telling her own story for the first time through a podcast.
Mack was released from federal prison in July 2023 after serving nearly two years for her role in NXIVM. A year later, she reached out to Vanity Fair’s Vanessa Grigoriadis, to whom Mack had spoken back in 2017, before the arrest of NXIVM leader Keith Raniere. (In that initial interview, Mack claimed the branding ceremony was her idea, but a recorded conversation between Mack and Raniere introduced in court revealed that Raniere had masterminded the ritual.)
Grigoriadis asked her longtime and award-winning podcast partner Natalie Robehmed to pursue a series about Mack, but Robehmed was reluctant. “My gut instinct was, No, I’m not really interested in being a tool in Allison Mack’s redemption arc,” Robehmed explains in an interview. Still, she agreed to a dinner, where she found Mack—now in her early 40s—“surprisingly down to earth” and candid about her crimes.
“That was compelling to me,” says Robehmed, “her willingness to grapple with the wrong she’s done.” Still, she says, it took a long time to earn Mack’s trust. Once she did, there was nothing Mack wasn’t willing to discuss on the record; Robehmed believes Mack was honest throughout their conversations. Robehmed and Grigoriadis’s seven-episode, limited-series podcast from CBC’s Uncover, Allison After NXIVM, premieres today.
NXIVM was led by Keith Raniere, who’s currently serving a 120-year sentence for sex trafficking, racketeering, fraud, and other crimes. It was essentially a self-improvement cult that promised its members success in life and business by helping them overcome blocks on their pathway to growth. By the time of his arrest in March 2018, NXIVM boasted a number of sub-programs and seminars dedicated to various self-help goals—including a secret sex-abuse group called DOS that masqueraded as a radical feminist experiment. Raniere sat atop a pyramid-tiered structure with several so-called slaves beneath him, one of whom was Mack, who had first engaged with NXIVM in 2006.
These women were so-called masters to other recruited “slaves” beneath them—who were each “masters” with their own “slaves,” and on and on. All were expected at some point to engage in sexual behavior with Raniere, though only the top tier of women knew he had actually started DOS. These top “masters” also knew that the branding ceremony central to initiation into DOS had largely been Raniere’s idea—and that the brand cauterized onto members’ hips was a symbol concealing his initials. Under the guise of helping women overcome sexual trauma and grow toward liberation, Mack recruited and delivered women for Raniere to abuse.
