In our study of Nxivm as a greater study of people and their roles in cult, we came across some interesting video of Allison Mack she made over a period of 4 years – from 2013 [pre-DOS] to 2017 – when she was in DOS, helping recruit women into slavery by taking blackmail materiel from them and getting them branded on their pubic region.
Here are some of her promotional videos for Jness.
Thanks to Marie White, we have the transcripts.
What’s it like working for Jness?
Working for Jness I think is the most gratifying thing I have ever done.
It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done because it consists of working with a group of people in a way that is totally interdependent, meaning we’re all working together and no one is ever punished and no one is ever told that they’re wrong or that they’re bad.
The most important thing in working on Jness is the relationships in Jness and I’m not used to that. I’m used to the objective being met. I’m used to like strict hard fast deadlines and lots of fear and punishment if I don’t get it right.
And in working for Jness there isn’t any of that, so it comes purely from a place of self-motivation and self-direction and that is really difficult, but I would say that working for Jness is the most satisfying and most purposeful thing I’ve ever done. Watching the women that are involved in Jness completely transform and evolve in a way that is so pure it’s such a privilege and really literally seeing people’s lives’ path completely turn 180 degrees where in one moment they really felt like this is all they had and this is all that they could do and all of the sudden they come through Jness and they start working with us and in our community.
It’s like a whole other life is born out of their new experience of themselves and that’s an incredibly satisfying and gratifying thing to do. I think it’s challenging because I think Jness is an organization that looks to all participants to be 100% responsible for themselves and their lives. So it makes it hard to blame people for the mistakes that are made when you’re always looking at your own responsibilities and participation in the situation.
But that’s just hard for my ego and my pride. I think if the whole world operated in that way we would have a much more joyful and a much more efficient existence. The amount of time we spend blaming one another is a little ridiculous so working for Jness is grounding and satisfying humbling and wonderful.
If happiness was the national currency, what kind of work would make you rich?
Allison Mack: This next question is awesome. It’s if happiness was the national currency what would make you rich? And I think the answer to that question is bringing together the people that I love the most in order to have a good experience somewhere doing something.
I love like putting together dinner parties. I love going traveling to the people. I love organizing spaces and experiences with the people that I care for the most that cultivate good relationships and it’s interesting because it’s kind of what I do with the Jness, the women’s organization that I work with.
We use these tools and these structures in order to organize situations and circumstances for women to come together and create incredible relationships.
So I guess I am kind of doing that and then on top of that performing. like I love to perform. Like, like can you tell? And I get to do that for a living and I get to do that for money and both things I do. So that’s pretty awesome. Hey this question is great!
So when I first came into Jness I had just come out of a relationship and I was feeling very scared and lost and confused.
Like oh my gosh am I going to be single forever?
Am I ever going to be able to have a relationship? What’s wrong with me? Like blah! All this stuff and ah very shortly into the program I started to recognize and experience that what I was looking for was not about a relationship. What I was looking for was about an experience of myself, in my life. And once I understand how to have that experience of myself in my life for me, I can then have the relationship I want, or not.
But I’m okay in either circumstance. And going through my life and going forward into my life in this place, with that recognition, I feel like the possibilities are endless. And I feel like I have no fear in shooting for what I want. Ideally there is no reason to settle because anyway I look at it I’m going to be good. That’s awesome.
So before Jness I had tons of people around me all the time. I’ve always been a people person. People used to come visit me at my house and say they were going to ‘Camp Allison’ because like it was always a party everywhere I went.
It was a party um but I felt very lonely and I didn’t understand why. That didn’t make sense to me. And I imagined the idea of like finding the most wonderful husband and then feeling intimate. You know finding that one best friend and then feeling like at ease in my relationships at least with just one person.
I was looking for one person. And I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get that. You know I was so good with people. I was so good with people in a living room but I was so bad at intimacy. The format that the Jness tracks offers with the men and the women and then this consolidated very intense structure where you are just diving into yourself and understanding how you relate to other people, helped me to reveal all of these areas of insecurity. Areas of just really basic confusion or lack of attention.
Like things that I had never thought about or looked at in myself.
The Jness tracks helped me open up and see, so that I could start to build a relationship with me and start to be honest with me and then practice being honest with all the people in the tracks with me. And then that expanded out and out and out and out into the rest of my life and now I have the most beautiful friendships with people that go so far beyond more than anything that I could have imagined.
And I have the most awesome experience with my family. And I can say, with total truth, that I look at men now and I’m not trying to find a future husband and that is very freeing. (giggling).
End of Allison Mack transcript
A few comments are in order.
Allison said that “no one is ever punished” or “told that they’re wrong or that they’re bad” in Jness and it may be true. But the direct offshoot of Jness, DOS, was punishing. It included paddling, being locked in dungeons, and doing midnight planks in the cold.
Something evolved out of Jness that became insanely punishing.
Allison Mack became harem manager for Keith Raniere.
Allison said, “Watching the women that are involved in Jness completely transform and evolve in a way that is so pure …. lives… completely turn 180 degrees… and all of a sudden they come through Jness and they start working with us and in our community.”
Yes, many women were transformed from happy to ghouls for Raniere, including Allison. They went on sleep-deprivation schedules, and calorie restriction that prompted starvation mode in their bodies. And many of them got morphed into the Nxivm/ DOS community and suffered terrible consequences.
Jness was the soft version of DOS, meant to be a recruitment tool for Raniere to find “fuck toys.” DOS was its natural outgrowth.
Allison was a leader of both.
Allison said, “Jness is an organization that looks to all participants to be 100% responsible for themselves and their lives.”
Allison, however, when she said this, was clearly not 100 percent responsible for her own life. She belonged to Raniere and unless you think a slave is responsible for her life, the women of DOS were not responsible. They surrendered responsibility to their master. This is more of Raniere’s tricks. Whatever he taught, he meant the opposite.
He spoke of women being 100 percent responsible as his teachings for Jness when really he intended to take control of them. How much Allison understood is open to debate. I suspect she believed in what she was saying in her videos – maybe only because Raniere told her to believe it – and thought, in part, that she was trying to do good for other women and the world.
The other part of her, like Lauren Salzman, was out to curry favor with Keith. Trying to be number one, at or near the top of the harem. To be his favorite.
It seems the fundamental flaw with harems is that women in it constantly vie for the top position. In Lauren and Allison’s case, they were willing to do some pretty selfish things to be number one. Some illegal things too.
Raniere was good at giving them false hope that they could be number one and punishing them to make them behave better, more obediently.
Allison, as much as anyone, was willing to do almost anything to please Keith. She did not start out this way, but she got there over time. She became his slave. And she lost everything in consequence of this decision to surrender to him.
Before: Allison Mack before going on the diet prescribed by her mentor Keith Raniere.
Allison said, “I love to perform. Like, like can you tell? And I get to do that for a living and I get to do that for money and both things I do.”
Sadly, Allison lost her acting career to dedicate herself to being Raniere’s cling-on. She quit her starring role in a hit TV show to be closer to Raniere and gradually lost all personal control of her life. After a while, she had to ask Raniere’s permission to appear on film or TV. Soon enough, she was not appearing at all.
Allison said, “And I have the most awesome experience with my family.”
Pathetically, this is the same family she betrayed for Keith by giving collateral, described by the FBI as:
(1) a letter regarding Mack’s mother and father that would “destroy their character”
(2) a contract that transferred custody of any children birthed by Mack to Raniere, if Mack broke her commitment to Raniere
(3) a contract that transferred ownership of Mack’s home if the commitment to Raniere was broken. [the feds have that now.]
(4) a letter addressed to social services alleging abuse to Mack ‘s nephews.
Jonathan and Mindy Mack, Allison’s parents.
Lastly, Allison speaks of her relationships with men. “Am I going to be single forever? Am I ever going to be able to have a relationship? What’s wrong with me?”
She came to learn, she says, through Raniere’s grand teachings that “What I was looking for was about an experience of myself, in my life. And once I understand how to have that experience of myself in my life for me, I can then have the relationship I want, or not. But I’m okay in either circumstance. And going through my life and going forward into my life in this place, with that recognition, I feel like the possibilities are endless. And I feel like I have no fear in shooting for what I want. Ideally there is no reason to settle because anyway I look at it I’m going to be good.”
And what she wanted was the Beast of Clifton Park. The ideal man in her eyes.
“And I can say, with total truth,” she said, “that I look at men now and I’m not trying to find a future husband and that is very freeing. (giggling).”
That’s true. She found her man and was not allowed to be with any other man. She would have 1/20th of a man, be one of 20 women sharing one man, who she believed had a great message for the world.
Judging Allison Mack
When I consider the sad story of Allison Mack, I see part sincerity, part insanity, and part greed.
She wanted to build a better world, no doubt. That is something she found was not so easy to do.
Her insanity led her to the Grotesque One and in her desire to have him more than others, she committed foul deeds and gross crimes for which she will likely go to prison.
Her great sin, in my mind, is weakness. She had beauty yes, Charisma, yes. Charm and gregariousness. But a weak mind. Not that she is stupid. She isn’t.
She just did not have a strong will and not enough self-respect, in my opinion.
If she had found a decent man, pliable Allison Mack might be free today, looking forward to the future in peace, contentment, and security. Maybe she should have married a minister. A minister would have been good for they are sure they are right and that’s what Allison needed, a man who is sure he is right and knows what’s best for her.
She clearly wasn’t born to be a teacher of women, except perhaps in the negative, as a cautionary tale. Like mothers tell your children, not to do what Allison has done.
Still, the more I study this case, the more I have come to believe that punishment is not what Allison and most of the others in Nxivm need. They need help, a chance to heal, a chance to undo what they have done.
I could see Allison in the future giving interviews, lectures, writing a book perhaps, making a documentary, trying to explain what happened to her so that it does not happen to others. That is the best future I can wish for her. She does not have to live in shame all her life. She might win the public’s forgiveness one day.
Nobody died. Some people suffered greatly, but – absent proof that she was part of Raniere’s recruitment of underage girls – there was no grave crime she committed. At the end of the day, adult women chose to do insane things.
It is insane to give collateral – even if you didn’t know Raniere was secretly in charge. Come on, giving graphic nude photos of yourself to Allison or Lauren, or anyone, and making confessions against your family or even agreeing to go into a room for 700 days. This is insane.
The lines are blurred between victims and perpetrators. Maybe everyone is a victim to a degree except Raniere.
But there is no blurring that the women were mentally unhinged – including Allison. Did Raniere, perhaps with Nancy Salzman’s hypnotherapy techniques, and Clare Bronfman’s money, do this to them?
Or were they predisposed to be unbalanced?
In my mind, there is little doubt that Allison was unstable, at least from shortly after the time that Nancy, Clare and Keith got their hooks into her. For this reason, absent some proof of greater crimes than joining a stupid and scary sorority and tricking some unfortunate and mainly unstable women to join, I lean towards leniency for Allison and hope that the court sees to it that she gets some mental help so that she never repeats this worst of all her performances.
