Allison Mack Did Not Understand Why NXIVM 'Slaves' Found Branding Their Flesh Painful: 'It's Fine'

On the podcast "Allison After NXIVM," Allison Mack, 43, is talking about her time in NXIVM — specifically D.O.S., which was a female subsect within the larger cult that included a branding ceremony
The women would have a symbol burned into the skin just above their pelvis with a cauterizing pen, a 20-minute process performed without numbing cream or pain medication
Mack went back to teaching class right after getting branded, and said on the podcast: "When other women would say, like ‘that's really painful’ or whatever, I was like ‘what do you mean?’"
Allison Mack is speaking out about her time in NXIVM in the new podcast series Allison After NXIVM — where she details a branding ceremony women were forced to undergo as part of the sex cult.

The women would arrive at the home with little knowledge of what was about to happen before being asked to strip naked. They were then held down by the other women present as a cauterizing pen was used to permanently sear a symbol above their pelvis.

It is a process that would take approximately 20 minutes, and was done without the aid of pain medication or numbing cream, she said, admitting that she couldn't comprehend at the time why some women were complaining.

"When other women would say, like ‘that's really painful’ or whatever, I was like ‘what do you mean?’ Like, ‘it's fine.’  It's just what you did. It was just like another day,’" Mack said, likening the ritual to being in a sorority.

Mack said her response was a result of the survival skills she had developed at the time, recounting her own branding by way of example.

As Mack tells it, she showed up at a house on her lunch break, got branded and immediately went back to teaching an intensive she had been doing that day

"My body was like shaking in shock, you know, like obviously my body was still trembling, but I was so good at like cutting that off and just focusing on what I was doing," Mack said. "I'm just not going to feel this right now. I'm just going to dissociate completely and be somewhere different. I don't know when or where I developed that survival mechanism."

She later added: "The callousness by which I handled that and handled myself in that is the same callousness that I had with the other girls."

Mack also revealed that the brand, which she previously took credit for creating, does not contain her initials. This contradicts previous claims that the brand was an amalgram of hers and cult leader Keith Raniere's initials.

One of the many women who had the symbol burned onto their bodies included the cult's initial whistleblower, Sarah Edmondson, who claimed in her book Scarred that she had been told it was meant to represent the four elements and only later realized it was a combination of "K.R." and "A.M."

Edmondson and the other women who were branded were all members of a secret, female-only subsect of NXIVM called D.O.S. — a name Raniere came up with and a Latin acronym for the phrase "Dominus Obsequious Sororium," which loosely translates to Master of the Obedient Female Companions.

It was Allison's involvement and actions while in D.O.S. — where she served as second-in-command to Raniere — that led to federal prosecutors filing charges against her and a judge sentencing her to  three years in prison after she pleaded guilty to racketeering charges.

She would serve two years of that sentence before being released on parole.

In D.O.S.,  Mack was known as a master and she recruited other women in NXIVM to be her slaves, like Edmondson. These women would be ordered to complete any tasks or requests Mack and other masters made of them, and for years they did just that.

This included being asked to seduce and have sex with Raniere, take graphic photos of their genitalia and provide collateral to their master. That collateral would have to be a damning piece of information which was used to bind these women to the group for fear that the information they provided would be made public.

Raniere claimed to have no involvement with D.O.S., and the new podcast series includes audio of an interview he did with journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis for an article that came out in The New York Times prior to his arrest.

In that interview with Grigoriadis, who is also one of the producers of the podcast, he said that he did not have any role with the group and also, like Mack, said the symbol the women were branded with did not contain his initials.

That first claim is debunked, however, by audio Mack recorded on a walk with Raniere in which he helped her create the ceremony that would accompany the branding.

"And the person should ask to be branded," Raniere told Mack.

He later added: "She should say, 'Please brand me. It would be an honor.' Or something like that. 'An honor I want to wear for the rest of my life.'"

In October 2020, a judge sentenced Raniere to 120 years in prison after he was convicted of racketeering and sex offenses. He was also ordered to pay a fine of $1.75 million.

In 2021, a federal judge ordered him to pay an additional $3.46 million in restitution to his victims.

Mack, an actress best known for playing Clark Kent's sidekick Chloe Logan for 10 seasons on the Warner Bros. series Smallville, said she has been working to rebuild her life and started attending college prior to her sentencing.