Mack pleads guilty
EX-TV actress admits using threats to force women into slave club founded by NXIVM leader Raniere
Former television actress Allison Mack pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy charges in Brooklyn on Monday as part of the ongoing federal prosecution of the NXIVM organization’s leaders.
Mack, 36, became the third of six defendants in the case to plead guilty. Lauren Salzman, 42, and her mother, NXIVM president and co-founder Nancy Salzman, 64, both pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges last month.
The remaining defendants are NXIVM co-founder Keith Raniere, known within the organization as “Vanguard”; Clare Bronfman, the organization’s operations director and an heiress of the Seagram’s liquor empire; and Kathy Russell, a longtime bookkeeper for NXIVM.
In pleading guilty to the racketeering count, Mack admitted to two criminal acts: state law extortion and forced labor. Mack admitted using threats to force women to join a secret slavemaster club founded by Raniere, and also to forcing a woman — identified in court papers as Jane Doe 6 — to perform “labor” under threat of force and physical restraint.
Mack — an actress who is best known for her role in the
television series “Smallville,” which ended in 2015 — sobbed in court on Monday as she gave a detailed admission and acknowledged taking part in what she knew was
criminal activity, according to courtroom observers. She is scheduled to be sentenced in September and is facing the prospect of spending up to several years in prison.
It’s unclear whether Bronfman or Russell is also engaged in plea negotiations. Raniere’s
attorney, Marc A. Agnifilo, wrote a letter to the court on Sunday requesting that, if any of his client’s remaining co-defendants are planning to plead guilty, they should be barred from sitting at the defense table as jury selection began on Monday afternoon.
“It would be clearly prejudicial to Mr. Raniere or any defendant going to trial to have the jury know that another codefendant introduced as a trial participant has in fact pleaded guilty between jury selection and opening statements,” Agnifilo wrote. “It would be even more prejudicial to have a co-defendant introduced to the jury as a trial participant and later have that same person appear as a government witness.”
Raniere and Mack were arrested in March 2018. In July, federal agents in Albany arrested the Salzmans and Russell. Bronfman was taken into custody that same day by federal agents in New York City.
Nancy Salzman, a close confidante of Raniere’s, was the first of the defendants to break her allegiance to Raniere and plead guilty.
The guilty pleas mark the unraveling of a closeknit and ultra-secretive organization that Raniere had built over the past 20 years, amassing thousands of followers in “executive success” training programs that prosecutors have cast as no more than a “cult-like” pyramid scheme, according to court filings.
The government last month unsealed a superseding indictment against Raniere and his remaining co-defendants that added seven charges, including some leveled at Raniere for his alleged sexual exploitation of an underage girl. Those charges elevated the severity of the case for Raniere, who would face a minimum of 15 years in prison if convicted on those counts.
Last week, several criminal counts against Raniere were dropped by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, which is part of the Eastern District of New York, because the alleged crimes took place in the Capital Region, which is part of the Northern District of New York. Federal prosecutors in Albany are reviewing the charges.
Some of the federal criminal charges center on a secret club within NX- IVM that Raniere founded and claimed was a private women’s organization to help its members improve their lives. Instead, prosecutors said, women were lured into the club, known as “Dominus Obsequious Sororium,” which means “Master Over the Slave Women.” Many did not know that Raniere was the group’s “grand master.”
Mack had a pivotal role in that club, prosecutors said, and allegedly helped gather “collateral” from the women who joined. If they tried to leave, they were threatened that their collateral — sometimes damaging information about family members or close-up photographs of their genitalia — would be released. Some of the women were allegedly branded with Raniere’s initials and coerced to have sex with him.
Raniere and Mack both were charged with multiple counts of sex trafficking, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor.
Mack had allegedly made some of the women pose for nude photographs that she would forward to Raniere. She also delivered some of the women to Raniere for sexual encounters, and at least one alleged victim described the sex as unwanted.
“Allison Mack recruited women to join what was purported to be a female mentorship group that was, in fact, created and led by Keith Raniere,” U.S. Attorney Richard P. Donoghue of Brooklyn said in a statement last year. “The victims were then exploited, both sexually and for their labor, to the defendants’ benefit.”
According to people familiar with NXIVM, Mack joined the organization about a decade ago, around the same time several other young actresses were pulled into its ranks — a list that included Nicki Clyne, Grace Park and Kristin Kreuk, who recruited Mack. Kreuk left NXIVM several years ago, before the slave-sex club was allegedly formed by Raniere, and later denounced the organization.
Mack was with Raniere at a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, when he was taken into custody on March 25, 2018, by Mexican federal police officers, who deported Raniere at the request of U.S. law enforcement authorities.
NXIVM has been described by experts as a cult. Raniere, in statements posted on NXIVM’S website two years ago, characterized the slavemaster group as a consenting, private “sorority” and said that he and the corporation had no role in it.
Opening statements in the criminal trial are scheduled to take place April 29 in Brooklyn. Raniere has pleaded not guilty to the charges and remains in custody at a federal detention facility in Brooklyn without bond. The other defendants have all been released on conditions that include home confinement.
The new indictment honed the government’s case and includes charges of extortion, sex trafficking, harboring of aliens for financial gain, forced labor, various conspiracy charges and wire fraud.