Sex cult diva Allison Mack joined NXIVM to ‘become a great actress again’

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Former Smallville star turned sex cult queen Allison Mack revealed in a long-forgotten interview that she signed on to the sect to “become a great actress again.”

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The unearthed 2017 interview by Vanity Fair’s Vanessa Grigoriadis with the now-caged former small-screen sweetheart features the 40-year-old justifying her involvement with guru Keith Raniere’s group.

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“I moved to Albany (NXIVM headquarters) to fill that emptiness and find the soul of myself again, if that makes sense, as it had fizzled,” she said in the interview aired on the new podcast Infamous: Inside America’s Biggest Scandals.

“I asked Keith if he would help me become a great actress again because I felt like I was a fraud.”

Raniere, a charlatan with a penchant for skinny, often young women, established NXIVM with Nancy Salzman in 1998 as a personal development enterprise.

It would morph into something much more sinister and Mack, who would become Raniere’s second banana, was convicted of racketeering. Other high-profile members included the billionaire Bronfman sisters, Clare and Sara, and a roster of C-list actresses.

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NXIVM was successful for a time until former members came forward revealing that it was in reality a sex-slave cult. Female members were forced to have sex with Raniere the Svengali and some were even branded with his initials.

He was sentenced in 2019 to 120 years in prison. An appeals court upheld his lengthy sentence in early December.

In 2021, Mack was in the dock and sentenced to three years in prison. She pleaded guilty to allegations she had manipulated the women into becoming Raniere’s sex slaves.

But in the interview with Grigoriadis, Mack disputed that she was head of the guru’s harem.

“I’m not recruiting young, nubile women to be his sex slaves … You know, it’s ‘The Crucible,’ it’s the McCarthy trials, it’s just like, throwing accusations and spreading like wildfire,” she told the writer.

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Mack admitted that long-time friends were deeply concerned about her involvement with NXIVM. They wanted her to ditch Raniere and get out.

“I’m like, ‘Talk to me for a few minutes. Let me tell you what we’re doing,” she said, adding that friends told her “‘No you’re brainwashed, you’re sick.’”

“I just was like walking with myself and I was going like, ‘Am I crazy? Am I one of these awful people that you read about that does horrible things and thinks that she’s doing things for God?’ I had a lot of conversations with myself like that,” she said.

In the end, she stayed with NXIVM.

“Ultimately, I just sat down and I like looked at my life and I looked at my relationships and I looked at all of the things I had written journals that I had kept — things that I had done over the last few years. And it was so consistently good,” she said.

Rich girl Clare Bronfman was sentenced to more than six years behind bars.

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