Allison Mack reflects on her early days with NXIVM, a self-help group that has since been characterized as a sex cult by former members. Two years after her release from prison, the Smallville alum shares insight into how she got involved in the group, detailing how she learned about it through her costar Kristin Kreuk.
"We went to Syria and Turkey together, we went to Mongolia together, we went to Paris, and we had so much fun," Allison recalls of her friendship with Kristin on the first episode of the Allison After NXIVM podcast, released on November 10th. "We went to Paris multiple times together and just shopped and saw art and sat on the top of the Pompidou and had rosé and lived this kind of dream."
It was their friendship, coupled with a stint as roommates in New York's West Village in the mid-2000s, that allowed them to be vulnerable about an "unsatisfied" feeling they had in their lives. "I was like, 'I feel this odd emptiness, and it feels so wrong given the nature of my life,'" Allison recounts telling Kristin. "And she was like, 'Yeah, me too.'"
It was this "weird ennui" that later led Kristin to try out a few classes with the new self-help organization NXIVM while they were in Vancouver filming Smallville. "It's the science of joy. It's the most amazing thing,'" Allison recalls Kristin saying. "It's made everything so much better in my life. You've got to do this.'"
Allison added, "It was all she could talk about. She was super excited about it." Kristin also raved about NXIVM's founder Keith Raniere and co-founder Nancy Salzman and invited Allison to join for a retreat. "They're doing a weekend and I think you should do it. I think you'd really like it,'" Allison remembers the Murder in a Small Town star noting. "And I was like, 'OK, if you think I should do it and I'll like it, I'll do it.'"
In 2018, Allison was arrested as part of an FBI investigation into the organization. She pleaded guilty in 2019 to racketeering conspiracy and racketeering acts of state law extortion and forced labor after admitting to blackmailing two women into performing services in NXIVM by threatening to release damaging information about them. She later served two years of her three-year prison sentence and was released in July 2023.
Kristin, on the other hand, previously said she was only involved in what she understood to be "a self-help/personal growth course that helped me handle my previous shyness" and left the organization around 2013. "The accusations that I was in the 'inner circle' or recruited women as 'sex slaves' are blatantly false," she shared in a 2018 statement on social media. "During my time, I never experienced any illegal or nefarious activity." The Beauty and the Beast alum emphasized that she was "horrified and disgusted" by accounts of what took place within NXIVM and praised the "brave women who have come forward to share their stories."
For his part, in 2020, Keith was sentenced to serve 120 years in prison after being found guilty of sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy, attempted sex trafficking, racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and forced labor conspiracy. He is currently serving out his sentence in a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. Nancy Salzman pleaded guilty in 2019 to charges of conspiracy racketeering and was sentenced in 2021 to 42 months in prison. She was released in March 2024.
