Any half-decent-looking dude with a half-decent IQ could set up a sex slave cult and convince two dozen desperate young actresses into the flock. Six months of effort tops. Three months if you have a selfie of yourself in front of a Santa Barbara ranch Airbnb. Struggling actresses are what you call a target-rich environment. Like shooting vapid fish in a teeny tiny barrel. Scientology is headquartered in Hollywood for a reason and it’s not the easy access to party drugs. Though that’s not a bad kicker.
Longtime multi-level marketing fail Keith Raniere set one up called NXIVM. Raniere was a fairly intelligent, but incredibly weird fella who spent his life in and out of organizations like Amway and the conventions of lost souls and snake-oil salesmen they attract. It’s a bottom feeder milieu where everybody tries to cover their lack of accomplishment with neatly pressed poly-blend suits from Walmart. Raniere provided executive coaching services. Executive coaching or life coaching as a profession is a big fat semaphore red flag you’re dealing with a person with abysmal credit scores. You may as well say tarot card reader or water diviner. At least those con artists provide you tea and the scent of vanilla.
Why don’t people run from overt losers like Raniere? One semester of psychology, which is the most a healthy person ought to take, will tell you because they want it to be real so badly. They need it to be real. Fill that hole with something. Literally often. Certain types need a Svengali to take the wheel. And those certain types are heavily represented among the young actress and socialites hanging out with actresses demographic. Daddy issues don’t begin to describe the broken clocks spinning backward in their forebrains.
To legitimize his lure, Raniere hooked in Allison Mack. She was a known TV actress quantity from her role on Smallville. A woman with legit IMDb credits broken enough to be a perfect outreach lieutenant. Mack could give the “oh, man, the breakthroughs and opportunities in Hollywood that have come to me since taking Keith’s workshops have been amazing” teaser. And that’s what she did.
So, they came. Struggling actress and lost rich girl alike, including Canadian corporate heiress Clare Bronfman, who both helped fund the outfit and also had sex with an assistant to the Dalai Lama to help curry cult favor with the Dalai himself. That’s such a weird thing to write. Even weirder that it’s completely true. The Dalai Lama anointed Keith Raniere’s outfit. This world is smaller and more incestual than you think. Modern cults and ancient religions separated by the thinnest of lines.
The women lured in by the promise of finding a roadmap to success in their own lives, soon found themselves bereft of all worldly possessions, being sexually exploited and blackmailed, literally being branded on the pubes, and forced to work long hours while being fed half rations. Cult standards all. Or a typical factory day in China. It’s unclear if Raniere believed he was a real guru or was self-aware he was a huckster rapist of gullibly sad women. Mack believed him to be the real deal. So she leaped in to play the role of NVIXM’s Pennywise, luring hapless victims down the storm drain. You’ll float too, intermediate level Meisner acting student.
Eventually, the New York Times and the law caught up to NXIVM rumors. Raniere, and Mack, and others who participated in cult leadership were arrested and indicted. Raniere ended up getting 120 years on a ton of forced labor and sexual assault charges. It’s rumored he murdered a bunch of his mysteriously deceased former girlfriends and female MLM partners, though he’s never been convicted on that front.
Mack got her turn this week. Three years. She cried many buckets leading up to the sentencing phase of her trial. If you’ve got tears in you, your sexual assault sentencing phase would be the time to let loose. Mack insisted on how sorry she was and that her role in NXIVM was the biggest mistake of her life. Unless she did something before worse than luring vulnerable women into a sadistic sex cult and slave labor camp, that sounds like a statement she can support. Makes you kind of wish Hitler would’ve stood trial and declared that the Holocaust was right up there in his Top 10 missteps in life. Though I suppose he would’ve never said that. Mack has fewer core convictions.
“I am sorry to those of you that I brought into Nxivm. I am sorry I ever exposed you to the nefarious and emotionally abusive schemes of a twisted man. I am sorry that I encouraged you to use your resources to participate in something that was ultimately so ugly.”
— Allison Mack, blaming her horrible decisions on a man, because, why not?
Mack went to the trouble of personally apologizing to all the women she conned into having the company logo burned into their nethers. Mack’s mea culpa was perhaps the gravest test ever of the truism that women melt for apologies. Usually, it’s I’m so sorry I forgot our anniversary. But on occasion it is, I’m sorry I tricked you into being enslaved and raped. There’s no Hallmark card for that occasion, it has to come from the heart. Already several victims have forgiven Mack publicly. It’s odd how women assume one other are easy victims of men and therefore not really culpable for their poor decisions and then call that entire process female empowerment. We are all so helpless and weak. Empowerment!
Mack ended up getting three years. She was listed as a supportive witness in the Feds work building a case against Raniere which served to mitigate her sentence. Also, she’s a weak woman, so convincing other women to skip meals and have sex with Keith if they wanted to be healed or arranging ways to blackmail them so they couldn’t leave was merely her being a victim of the patriarchal systems in the West. Don’t even get me started on the East.
You could measure your age in rings of news cycles covering identical cult cases like NVIXM. Every couple of years, like clockwork, the next one. Human evolution takes millennia. Meanwhile 2.5 billion people have joined Facebook in 12 years. The predators will always be one step ahead of the prey. If it were the other way around, all life would cease to exist. I know, mind blown.
Bye for now, Allison Mack. I am certain you will do well in prison.
