‘Smallville’ Actress Claims That She Joined a Sex Cult To Kick-Start Her Career

“Smallville” actress Allison Mack said she first joined the notorious sex cult NXIVM because she believed the organization’s co-founder could help her to reinvigorate her career.

Mack initially made the comments during a 2017 interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis — but they resurfaced in a Monday podcast, “Infamous: Inside America’s Biggest Scandals,” It featured Gabriel Sherman and Grigoriadis.

“I moved to Albany to fill that emptiness and find the soul of myself again, if that makes sense, as it had fizzled,” Mack spoke of Mack’s move to NXIVM headquarters. She went on to explain that she had even asked the cult’s co-founder Keith Raniere whether he could help her to reinvent her career.

“I asked Keith if he would help me become a great actress again because I felt like I was a fraud,” She spoke.

Initially billed as a self-help group, NXIVM was created in 1998 by Raniere, 62, and Nancy Salzman, 68 — but things began to go south when former members began to tell stories about being branded with Raniere’s initials and about younger female members being recruited and forced to sleep with him.

Mack denied that all in the 2017 interview. She told Grigoriadis she had never helped Raniere to recruit new partners and that she believed that, despite warnings by friends that NXIVM was a deranged cult, that she was making the right decisions.

“I’m not recruiting young, nubile women to be his sex slaves,” Mack claimed that people were making baseless allegations. “You know, it’s ‘The Crucible,’ it’s the McCarthy trials, it’s just like, throwing accusations and spreading like wildfire.”

Mack stated that Mack had become concerned for her by her friends’ concern. Although she occasionally questioned her own judgement, she continued to push back.

“I’m like, ‘Talk to me for a few minutes. Let me tell you what we’re doing,’” She said that she was not convinced by her friends’ statements. “‘No, you’re brainwashed, you’re sick.’”

“I just was like walking with myself and I was going like, ‘Am I crazy? Am I one of these awful people that you read about that does horrible things and thinks that she’s doing things for God?’ I had a lot of conversations with myself like that,” Mack revealed.

The actress pleaded guilty in 2019 to charges saying that she did, in fact, assist in manipulating women into becoming Raniere’s sex slaves. She was sentenced for three years in prison. Raniere was sentenced in 2019 to 120 years — and lost his most recent appeal Early December