The former Smallville star, who played reporter Chloe Sullivan for 10 seasons, pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and racketeering acts of state law extortion and forced labor. She was originally charged with sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy and forced labor conspiracy, like Raniere.
She first attended a NXIVM seminar in Vancouver with her Smallville co-star Kristin Kreuk in 2006, a program billed as a “women’s movement” called Jness—and their high-profile presences had been planned for, because some of the organization’s top people (those closest to Raniere) flew in for the occasion. They put on a charm offensive for the newcomer and invited her to meet Raniere, who, they said, could help her acting career. Mack accepted, was flown to Albany via private jet, and stayed for weeks.
“A collective inspiring a community of strong, authentically empowered women to own themselves in a way that has never been seen or understood before?” she wrote in a since-deleted blog post. “It sounded like the perfect blend of what I was looking for! So I took the leap and enrolled in a weekend workshop and within the first few hours I knew I had found my people.”
Old tweets of Mack’s reaching out to Kelly Clarkson and Emma Watson, seemingly to pique their interest, surfaced after she was arrested. Beverley Mitchell has said that Mack once invited her to a Jness seminar.
“I was lost,” Mack said in Federal District Court in Brooklyn when she entered her plea on April 18, 2019. “Through it all, I believed Keith Raniere’s intentions were to help people. I was wrong.”
She admitted to selling DOS to potential recruits by describing it as a female-empowerment group, to making members hand over photos and information for blackmail purposes, and to obtaining “labor and services” from two women; she did not say that any women were coerced into having sex with Raniere.
Mack is facing as much as 20 years in prison when she’s sentenced in September; she’s free on a $5 million bond.
A former roommate who lived with Mack after she got involved with Raniere and NXIVM told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, “I don’t think she was thinking she was actually trafficking girls. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve punishment, but I think she had drunk enough Kool-Aid to really believe that these girls were going to save the world with his super-sperm.”