As Chloe Sullivan, Allison\u00a0Mack was a huge part of\u00a0Smallville. While it’s unlikely that she’d have gone on to do much more than the odd TV role, the actress would have surely been popular on the convention scene among fans of the long-running Superman series.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Mack ended up spending\u00a0nearly two years in\u00a0federal prison for her role in the sex cult,\u00a0NXIVM. Now, she’s telling her story in a seven-episode podcast, CBC’s Uncover, “Allison After NXIVM,” which premieres today.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The leader of the cult,\u00a0Keith Raniere, is\u00a0serving a 120-year sentence for sex trafficking, racketeering, fraud, and other crimes. Billed as a self-improvement group, the reality was far more sinister. Mack was one of his\u00a0masters tasked with recruiting sexual slaves, delivering them to\u00a0Raniere (who often branded and sexually abused them).<\/p>\n
In the first episode of the podcast, Mack admits to being willfully ignorant of much of what was happening in\u00a0NXIVM, saying, “I purposely kept myself from hearing things that would\u2019ve been uncomfortable for me.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Believing\u00a0Raniere was manipulating and grooming her, as he was the other women in the cult, she explains, “If I recognised that Keith was manipulating all of us, and that this was a strategy for his own perversion, I had to acknowledge what I had chosen and that I had hurt people.”<\/p>\n
When it was revealed that\u00a0Raniere had been exploiting underage girls\u2014a year after Mack was first charged\u2014the actress pleaded\u00a0guilty to racketeering charges and turned on her former leader. She remembers thinking, “I don\u2019t know how this is true, but I\u2019m going to plead guilty, because I am guilty. And I do believe that\u2019s true. And I\u2019m going to trust that I\u2019ll be in therapy for years after this, and figure out how this happened.”<\/p>\n
Mack goes into the ways\u00a0Raniere\u00a0entrapped, gaslit, and manipulated her, and reveals that she\u00a0experienced sexual exploitation as a child both on and off set. When she told\u00a0NXIVM’s leader, he allegedly said he could help her with that by being “physically intimate” with the Smallville star.<\/p>\n
Despite offering plenty of insights (or excuses) for her actions, Mack admits to victimising other women, and freely describes herself as “emotionally aggressive” and “callous.”<\/p>\n
“I was the go-between between him and this person,” she says of one of Raniere’s victims. “It was my job to relay what to do with him for her growth. The more she said, ‘I\u2019m scared, I don\u2019t want to do it,’\u00a0the more I would say, ‘You need to do it, and the longer you wait, the more consequences there will be.’\u00a0The coercion started, and the pressure and the pressure and the pressure.\u00a0And then it was like rape.”<\/p>\n
“Yes, I was excited by the power that I felt having these young, beautiful women look to me and listen to me,” Mack continues. “And yes, the sexuality of it was exciting.”<\/p>\n
“People assume I\u2019m this pervert,” the actress adds. “But that\u2019s not what happened, what it was for me.\u00a0People can believe me, or people can think I\u2019m full of shit and not listen. But I feel like I at least have to say it out loud for myself, once.”<\/p>\n
While Mack’s acting career is over, she’s been pursuing a master’s in social work since being released from prison. She’s also married\u00a0Frank Meeink, a\u00a0former neo-Nazi who now lectures against radicalisation.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Chloe Sullivan, Allison\u00a0Mack was a huge part of\u00a0Smallville. While it’s unlikely that she’d have gone on to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[149788,88,149789],"class_list":["post-283492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-allison-mack","tag-entertainment","tag-smallville"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}