Evolving Standards of Cult Perceptions

A new story in the New York Times offers an overview and a behind-the-scenes look at a new seven-episode podcast featuring Allison Mack, Keith Raniere’s second-in-command in the NXIVM cult. Raniere, you’ll recall, received a 120-year prison sentence for his horrific crimes, which included sexual enslavement and fraud.

Mack has recently completed 21 months of a three-year sentence, which she started while still in thrall to Raniere and the cult. What is striking about the article is how nuanced the writing (and the interview with the podcaster, Natalie Robehmed) are regarding Mack as a person whose perspective is worth investigating:

“I think what I told Vanessa was, ‘I have no interest in being a part of Allison Mack’s redemption arc,’” Robehmed recalled. “The only version I knew of her was the one who’d appeared in previous coverage and documentaries — Allison Mack: The Villain.”

But at a dinner in Los Angeles with Mack and Belber, Robehmed found the actress to be introspective and remorseful, unguarded when it came to acknowledging the pain she had caused women below her rank in NXIVM, some of whom she pushed to seduce Raniere, send him nude photos and brand his initials on their flesh.

Mack told Robehmed she had no intention to return to acting — or to participate in any media apart from the podcast — and was pursuing a degree in social work. (Through a representative, she declined to comment for this article.) Last summer, Robehmed accompanied her to get her own NXIVM brand covered by a tattoo.

In the podcast, Mack is blunt about her guilt.

“I was aggressive and forceful in ways that were painful for people, and did make people feel like they had no choice, and was incredibly abusive for people, traumatic for people,” she says, when asked by Robehmed about her reputation as a particularly ruthless lieutenant of Raniere’s. “One hundred percent, all those allegations are true.”

That Mack is sincere and apologetic about her part in the cult does not, of course, ameliorate her guilt or the severity of the crimes she committed. But we have the benefit of examining her story in 2025, when we already have a fairly sophisticated understanding of cults, brainwashing, and mind control. This was not the case during the Manson family trials; as I explain in Yesterday’s Monsters, in 1971, when the trials took place, the kind of mind control that characterizes cults was something that was attributed, culturally, to communist countries and their psychological abuse of American POWs (e.g., the Manchurian Candidate). It was only in 1973-1974 that parents of the many people swept into cults in the late 1960s and early 1970s prompted the California legislature to hold hearings about the phenomenon. I talk a bit about all that in this post (and, of course, in the book). I don’t think that the Manson women–who were teenagers and adolescents at the time of the murders–would have gotten off scot-free, even today. But I do think that the nuanced perspectives that we see in the Mack case would have made a difference, if not in the initial sentencing, then certainly on parole.