Unmasking The Seduction And Control That Led Allison Mack From Hollywood Sweetheart To Enforcer In NXIVM’s Brutal Cult

Allison Mack’s enlightenment did not come in a classroom, a seminar, or a self-help retreat. It came on a gym floor in Albany, well after midnight, in the harshness of bright fluorescent lights and the squeak of sneakers on polished wood. She had arrived by private plane, cross-legged on a carpeted aisle, next to women she considered “amazing powerful” mentors. A few hours later, a BMW SUV pulled up to the bleachers to escort her to the strangest meeting of her life…a bizarre midnight volleyball game where the man the world called the smartest human being on the planet stood in kneepads, cutoff shorts, and a headband.

She walked into that gym expecting nothing more than polite introductions. Instead, as Keith Raniere approached, the ground seemed to give way beneath her feet. “He said, ‘It’s nice to meet you. Do you have a question for me?’” she would later recall. “I said, ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to prepare a question.’” That cut through her like accusation. The actress who had spent her life doing anything and everything to please other people suddenly felt undone, as if she had bombed a test she hadn’t known she was taking.

Back in the BMW, still shaken, she tried to ask why she was expected to come up with questions in the first place. “He’s like the smartest man in the world,” she was told. “Usually when people meet the smartest man in the world, they may have questions.” That did it. “Then I do have a question,” she said, demanding to return to the gym, even though it was now 3 a.m.

Inside, she tried again. “I said, ‘I thought of a question,’” Mack would later recall. Raniere made her wait an hour, to finish the volleyball game. But as he settled down beside her, the entire room descended to the floor around them. Cameras rolled because, as someone said, “we film everything Keith says because he’s so brilliant.” Mack asked, *What is art? * Raniere’s response felt to her like a revelation. “No one had ever turned anything around … the idea that what I was seeing outside … was a reflection of me inside was like blew my mind.” She felt “discombobulated,” “disoriented,” as if “the ground was shifting.”

Years later, that same need to please would find Mack in a much more sinister room. Gone were the bright courts and the thump of volleyball. In its place: a quiet house, a massage table, and low lights. “In a quiet house, one woman lays on a massage table,” the host narrates. “The smell of singed human flesh is in the air.” Women were being branded above the hipbone with a cautery pen, the fine point of burning metal pressed into skin until it “sizzles.” These women were her “slaves,” the enslaved people of a modern-day cult. They were bound by oaths of loyalty, believing that they were joining a secret sisterhood.

The initials were those of the same man who had sat next to her on that gym bench, while a roomful of devotees formed a circle around them. Mack stood nearby, instructing, encouraging, and repeating the cycle she had once submitted to herself, as a twenty-year-old, when she let a boyfriend carve an initial into her chest after he said, “If you loved me, you would do this.”

Inside NXIVM, Mack would later insist, she had believed she was helping. She believed she was guiding women toward the enlightenment that she herself had once pursued. Yet the moment she began to brand her slaves, the line between devotion and destruction snapped. Victims would later stand in court and shake with rage as they accused Mack of destroying lives, of being a monster. Mack sat “stone faced” through it all, she said, thinking only of her mother and brother behind her. “I don’t see myself as innocent,” she later admitted.