Allison Mack sentencing: Smallville star turned sex cult master branded initials onto young women
Former Smallville TV star Allison Mack has received a prison sentence by a US court for her role in the NXIVM sex cult. Allison Mack, a former Smallville actress and high-ranking member of the cult group NXIVM, has been sentenced to three years.
Mack must have three years of supervised release after serving her prison term and has to pay a $US20,000 ($A27,000) fine.
The group’s leader, Keith Raniere, was sentenced to 120 years in prison in October for racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
At her sentencing in Brooklyn federal court, Mack renounced the self-improvement guru.
“I made choices I will forever regret,” she said, telling the judge she was filled with “remorse and guilt.”
The New York Post reports that Mack, 38, asked US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis in Brooklyn to spare her prison time and instead sentence her to home confinement or probation.
“She cannot undo what has been done, and she will have to live with the regret for the rest of her life,” Mack’s lawyers said in a court filing last week. “But Ms. Mack still holds the potential to be valuable to society – as a family member, friend, helper to those in need, and cautionary tale.”
Seagram liquor company heiress Clare Bronfman was accused of using more than $100 million of her $2.6 billion estimated net worth to fund the group
It’s almost unbelievable, even by TV drama standards.
Mack won legions of young fans over the years playing Chloe Sullivan, the clever girl-next-door sidekick to a young Clark Kent, in the hit series Smallville.
Then the fresh-faced Teen Choice Award winner was introduced to the supposed self-help group NXIVM and its sadistic leader, Keith Raniere — transforming her from a hardworking television star to sex-cult recruiter.
Mack was one of Raniere’s top slave “masters” who branded women with his initials, starved and blackmailed them, and groomed them for sex with him.
How Mack went from star to federal indictment has baffled even those who knew her.
“It’s like someone telling you that your brother murdered someone,” former Smallville actor Michael Rosenbaum told the podcast This Past Weekend after Mack had been arrested for her crimes in 2018.
“You’re like, ‘No, he didn’t,’ ” Rosenbaum said. “[Mack] was just a great girl, great actress. … Ultimately, inadvertently, she got into something bigger than her.”
But Mack explained it to a judge this way: Like any good cult member, she was trying to belong to something bigger.
“I joined NXIVM first to find purpose,” the sobbing actress said at her plea hearing in April 2019. “I was lost, and I wanted to find a place, a community where I would feel comfortable.”
Before she tumbled into darkness, Mack had seemed to fill that personal void with her craft, which she had honed since childhood.
Born in Germany and raised in Long Beach, California, Mack appeared in print and commercial ads at age four and began studying at the Young Actors Space in Los Angeles by 7, according to her IMDB page.
She was 14 when she landed work as a guest star on 7th Heaven and, after that, with several other TV shows before joining the cast of Smallville in 2001 at age 18.
It was on the set of the Superman series that Mack made a connection that would alter her life forever.
She bonded with co-star Kristin Kreuk, who in 2006 brought her to a Vancouver hotel for a meeting with an NXIVM-linked group, the New York Times reported. Kreuk has since said she had no idea about the organization’s dark activities, much less took part in them.
At the meeting, Raniere’s right-hand woman, Nancy Salzman, took an interest in Mack and soon offered to fly her to meet the guru in Albany, NY.
Mack became engrossed in the reputed women’s empowerment group over the next few years, isolating herself from friends and eventually moving to Brooklyn when Smallville ended in 2011.
She bought a home in upstate New York’s Clifton Park, a hub for NXIVM and its members, who flocked to be closer to “Vanguard,” as Raniere called himself.
