How could the sweet, successful actress Allison Mack be turned into a perpetrator, an accomplice to a cult leader’s sexual abuse? I have followed the tragic and painful story of the NXVIM cult through documentaries and podcasts. It was a group that outwardly was about personal development as behind the scenes, a group that was increasingly derailed with psychological and sexual abuse. The group is best known for the part known as DOS. A group to “empower women”, but where one of the rituals to be performed was to be branded with what later turned out to be the leader’s initials. Another part of the development/healing consisted of “seducing” the leader sexually. The leader, Keith Raniere, was eventually sentenced to 120 years in prison. Several people in high-ranking positions were sentenced to several years in prison. One of them was actress Alison Mac, best known for her role in Smallville.
Being both victim and perpetrator
It’s important not to get caught up in bizarre details on the surface, which can get in the way of a deeper understanding of how a leader can build a group where people not only lose themselves, their inner compass, their ability to defend themselves, but where they also harm others in the process. I have written an article for ICSA Today, where I address the different roles of being a high-ranking role model, and the scapegoat. Sometimes it is the same person who gets different roles at different times. You can be both a victim and a perpetrator (Understanding the Golden Child and Evil Child in Cult Recovery).
In the podcast Alison after NXVIM, we get to hear her story for the first time about what it’s like to be both a victim and a perpetrator and try to take responsibility for your actions. When I saw how the leader got his claws into her in an episode from the documentary series The Vow, I see a textbook example of how a leader and his assistants create a framework for what appears to be a first spontaneous meeting, but where he knows exactly what he is doing in every detail to get her on the hook and then reel her in. It’s heartbreaking.
Manipulation down to the smallest detail
My more than 30 years of experience with cults tells me that every detail of how the first meeting with the leader was not as random as those from outside may seem. Cults don’t leave things to chance. Their ends are too important, and they live with the ethic that the ends justify the means. Careful planning is carried out in detail. Allison is vulnerable when she expresses that she feels emptiness despite all her successes. Her friend invites her to a lecture with the second-highest leader. Afterwards, Allison meets the lecturer, who offers her a seat on the private jet on which she will go to Albany, where the Supreme Leader lives. I don’t think it was a coincidemustat Allison “happens to get a seat” on the plane, that she has to wait in a house alone until night so she gets tired, confused without information, that only then does she get an “audience” with the leader during a break during his nightly sports; that he asks her if she has a question for him, which she was not told she would prepare and makes her embarrassed and even more vulnerable; That she then has to wait another hour and then ask her question to what she has been told is “the world’s smartest man”, that everyone then gathers in a circle and films “him” to capture all his wisdom. One might think that he cannot foresee her question, but I think he has received reports in advance about her in detail from her friend. An actress who has grown up in a superficial and demanding world, who has been taught to please, who asks him what art is, tells him something about her and her situation and what she needs to hear. She is so moved when he makes an exposition about it coming from within. She is aware that her job is about pleasing and being good. She is moved to tears. Now she is ready for him to present the bait: The leader should seem a little unconcerned when he then mentions that they have a course. She asks him if he can give her EM (their alternative therapy) and he plays elusive and gets up kindly and continues to play sports. She swallowed the bait. It is heartbreaking to see and for me unfortunately just another clear example of how many meetings and situations look like. Manipulation, which makes you think you have chosen yourself.
Going from victim to perpetrator
Now imagine that things continue in the same manipulative way for several years, and Allison breaks down physically and mentally. She must also be seriously underweight as part of a discipline, but that’s really because the leader Keith is turned on by thin women.
The special thing about NXVM is that an extreme amount has been documented in real time, when it was thought that all the leader said was so much wisdom that needed to be saved and spread. If you watch both the documentaries and listen to the podcast, you get a picture of how Allison herself becomes a victim of the leader and is sexually exploited. It is staged and framed by the leader as healing sexual problems. Slowly she is then made to “help others” to develop as women and heal sexually. There is a recording when he instructs her on how the women should be branded in a ritual, but where part of the ritual should be that they should ask for it, before they are then restrained, so that it does not feel “coerced”. Another manipulative detail. When they ask for it, they no longer have access to their critical thinking and the ability to say no. It will be there that Allison also becomes their abuser – when she will become a master to other slaves. She believes that the resistance she feels at the different stages is exactly what she needs to master to “develop”. Her body was already screaming no when she moved to Albany, when she was going to have sex with the leader and so on. In fact, this is how you are manipulated into dismantling your own defenses that try to shout no.
What I encounter in my therapeutic work with former members from different cults is the process of not only getting out of the group, but becoming free from the influence that one has been exposed to in the group, the thoughts and feelings that have been manipulated, to find oneself, one’s identity, one’s self-esteem and one’s trust in oneself and others. One of many things can be to work against the guilt that comes when you break rules you think are completely wrong. In the Cult, you have replaced your inner compass with obedience. Another part is to work with the fear of being judged by people who do not have knowledge of how skilled manipulators know exactly how to put their claws into us when we are open and vulnerable.
It is a process of becoming free mentally and emotionally from a cult
When Alison is arrested, she is still so loyal to the leader that her lawyers scratch their heads and wonder how they can help her. The prosecution tries to get her to help them put the leader in jail by giving her information. She describes it so well that every bit of information becomes like a cutting av chip in her, but it’s only when she learns that the leader has had sex with minors that everything falls apart for her, and she can see clearly again. I think it reminds me of the Knutby cult in Sweden. The so-called nanny, Sara, finally finds out that the person who wrote the text messages which instructed her to kill two people was not from God but from but from her beloved pastor Helge. That’s when she was able to see him in a new light. This is not entirely unusual. If you watch the series The Vow, you get to follow other defectors and high-ranking people in their journey to leave the group.
When Alison pleaded guilty, she still only understood it on one level. At the same time, she understood that it would take a long time to understand what has happened and heal. We get to follow her through her prison time and afterwards in how difficult it is to start over, but it still ends hopefully with her finding meaning in helping others and finding people who can understand her.
Listen to CBC True Crime, Alison after NXVIM
For further in-depth reading, read my article for ICSA Today: Understanding the Golden Child and Evil Child in Cult Recovery
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