As Chloe Sullivan, Allison Mack was a huge part of Smallville. 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.
Ultimately, Mack ended up spending nearly two years in federal prison for her role in the sex cult, NXIVM. Now, she's telling her story in a seven-episode podcast, CBC's Uncover, "Allison After NXIVM," which premieres today.
The leader of the cult, Keith Raniere, is serving 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 masters tasked with recruiting sexual slaves, delivering them to Raniere (who often branded and sexually abused them).
In the first episode of the podcast, Mack admits to being willfully ignorant of much of what was happening in NXIVM, saying, "I purposely kept myself from hearing things that would’ve been uncomfortable for me."
Believing Raniere 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."
When it was revealed that Raniere had been exploiting underage girls—a year after Mack was first charged—the actress pleaded guilty to racketeering charges and turned on her former leader. She remembers thinking, "I don’t know how this is true, but I’m going to plead guilty, because I am guilty. And I do believe that’s true. And I’m going to trust that I’ll be in therapy for years after this, and figure out how this happened."
Mack goes into the ways Raniere entrapped, gaslit, and manipulated her, and reveals that she experienced sexual exploitation as a child both on and off set. When she told NXIVM's leader, he allegedly said he could help her with that by being "physically intimate" with the Smallville star.
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."
"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’m scared, I don’t want to do it,' the more I would say, 'You need to do it, and the longer you wait, the more consequences there will be.' The coercion started, and the pressure and the pressure and the pressure. And then it was like rape."
"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."
"People assume I’m this pervert," the actress adds. "But that’s not what happened, what it was for me. People can believe me, or people can think I’m full of shit and not listen. But I feel like I at least have to say it out loud for myself, once."
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 Frank Meeink, a former neo-Nazi who now lectures against radicalisation.