From Tom Leonard
THE invitation sent by a vivacious actress well-known to TV audiences must have sounded tempting. In it, pretty, blonde Allison Mack — star of the Superman TV series Smallville — encouraged other celebrities to join an allwomen self-help and mentoring group.
Playing on the feminist values of stars including Emma Watson and singer Kelly Clarkson, 35- year- old Mack was wildly enthusiastic about a ‘human development and women’s movement’ that had done so much for her own personal growth.
‘As a fellow actress, I can relate so well to your vision and what you want to see in the world,’ Mack gushed in a tweet to Emma Watson.
Neither the Harry Potter star nor Clarkson took up the offer — so were spared what could have been a deeply unpleasant experience.
As is now being laid bare in a New York court case that is transfixing America, Allison Mack was allegedly the chief recruiter for a sex slave cult. Far from gathering for earnest debates on female empowerment, members were allegedly expected not only to have sex with their female ‘masters’ and a male ‘grandmaster’, but even to help brand each other with their leader’s initials in a horrific act of mutilation.
In an era of the #MeToo movement and a fierce backlash against predatory men, the idea that attractive young women — including well-known actresses, models and billionaire heiresses — could willingly become sexual chattels has stunned America.
Allison Mack has been charged with sex trafficking. She is on $5 million (£3.7 m) bail and under house arrest.
Prosecutors say Mack was the second-incommand of a sorority dubbed DOS (derived from a Latin phrase and loosely translated to ‘Master of the Obedient Female Companions’), which existed within a self-help group called Nxivm. The latter — pronounced Nexium — was set up 15 years ago by a charismatic selfimprovement guru named Keith Raniere and was operated, say prosecutors, as a means to subjugate women.
Raniere, 57, has also been charged with sex trafficking after he was arrested in Mexico. He is currently behind bars, awaiting trial. He and Mack — who played Superman Clark Kent’s sidekick kick Chloe Sullivan on the long-running ng television series Smallville, shown in the UK on Channel 4 — deny the charges.
According to the FBI, Raniere’s followers call him The Vanguard. He not only rakes in their money but also commands their sexual devotion. Court papers say he ‘maintained a rotating group of 15 to 20 women’ who ‘are not permitted to have sexual relationships with anyone but Raniere’.
They say Nxivm teaches ‘the need for men to have multiple sexual partners and the need for women to be monogamous’.
His sinister group includes the daughter of Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg, and the ultra-wealthy stepdaughters of British actor Nigel Havers. The latter, Clare and Sara Bronfman (whose mother, Georgiana, is the daughter of an Essex pub owner and former wife of one of America’s richest men) are the heirs of the Seagrams drinks fortune.
They have reportedly given more than $150 million (£110 million) to Raniere, allowing Nxivm on one occasion to hire Sir Richard Branson’s Caribbean island for a tenday retreat, buy a private jet and even its own island in Fiji.
The sisters’ late father, Edgar Bronfman Snr, who died in 2013, once took Nxivm self-improvement classes but later condemned it as ‘a cult’.
Clare Bronfman, 39, a former showjumper who is now reportedly running Nxivm, insists neither she nor Raniere have done anything wrong.
She says he is ‘ dedicated to the betterment of the lives of others’. Although she says she is not a member of the sorority, she claims it has ‘truly benefited the lives of its members’.
Many of the women who joined it, however, vehemently beg to differ.
In court testimony and in interviews, they have described being sucked into a brutal and oppressive regime run by the pudgy, 5ft 5in Raniere, who used to sport a Jesus beard and John Lennon spectacles, until he cleaned up his image.
RANIEREis few people’s idea of a sex god. He is, however, fiercely intelligent, and has even been able to convince some of his fawning devotees that he doesn’t drive because his intellectual energy sets off radar detectors. He is severely cross-eyed, too, which former Nxivm publicist Frank Parlato tells me, gives him a ‘hypnotic stare’.
A former girlfriend, Toni Natalie, once described Raniere in federal court as ‘a compulsive gambler, a sex addict with bizarre desires and needs, and a con man who specialises in Ponzi schemes’.
Certainly, his chequered history goes back decades. The only child of a ballroom dance teacher, prior to setting up Nxivm — which has claimed a total of 16,000 members — Raniere founded a discount group buying club that he shut down after 23 states and two federal agencies launched investigations into allegations that it was a pyramid scheme.
In the late 1990s, he set himself up as a professional and personal development guru, providing New Age self-improvement coaching costing up to $1,000 (£750) a day.
The DOS sisterhood said to have been under his control — which he started early last year and which New York prosecutors now describe as an ‘organised criminal group’ — had a structure that let ‘slaves’ become ‘masters’ if they recruited six new slaves. Prosecutors say recruiters often targeted women facing personal difficulties. Initially, there would be no mention of ‘ slaves’ or ‘masters’, but new members would be warned that the pain and hardship they would face was essential in toughening them up.
They were told that together they would constitute a sort of female version of the Freemasons, dedicated to improving the world.
When they joined, slaves were told to hand over compromising material such as sexually explicit photos or reveal damning stories (true or untrue) that would be made public if ever they were disloyal to the sisterhood. Some signed over all their assets.
Slaves would only learn there was a man in charge of the organisation when they were deeply involved in the group.
By then, they would have been subjected to a grim health regime designed to give them the rake-thin physique that Raniere found attractive.
Many would be forced to run up to 40 miles a week, take ice- cold showers and go on virtual starvation diets, in some cases consuming just 500 calories a day.
Each woman had to carry a special ‘slave phone’ on which they had to reply within 60 seconds to a message from their female ‘master’.
Former members say that sleep deprivation — brought on by being called by phone at all hours with their ‘ master’s’ demands — further exhausted them and served to make them more malleable.
As well as performing chores, they would be required to have sex with Raniere. In one vile email revealed in court papers, he is said to have messaged one of his slaves urging her to recruit another woman.
‘I think it would be good for you to own a f*** toy slave for me, that you could groom, and use as a tool, to pleasure me,’ he told her. One ex-