Frank Parlato
A breathless, self-serious overture on a long redemption path.
The podcast is called Allison After NXIVM. Natalie Robehmed tells the story. Vanessa Grigoriadis helps her. CBC carries it. And Allison Mack is the subject and she does a lot of talking too.
Frank Report analyzed part of episode 1. Here’s the continuation of that analysis.
Allison’s Reset: The Origin Story
Allison begins:
“So I was born in Europe in northern Germany. My dad was an opera singer. He’s retired now, but he was singing in the opera houses over there…”
Gentle, cultured, almost quaint. The daughter of artists. She begins with romance and refinement: opera houses, Europe, creative parents. Then they move to California.
“My mom was from Southern California and I think was just homesick for her parents, for sunshine and beach.”
She adds a joke:
“Northern Germany doesn’t really have a lot of that.”
This is her chance to reset her image: beaches, opera, sunshine. A wholesome Southern California girl with artistic parents. The details are curated. Allison is the product of a wholesome, bohemian, nurturing environment.
Painted Childhood: The Making of Innocence
Natalie, the host, narrates in between Allison telling her story. Before we learn about branding and master/slave hierarchy, Natalie wants us to visualize sunlit living rooms and finger paints.
Natalie: “Allison moved back to Long Beach at two years old and was raised in an artistic household just a few miles from where we are now, with her musician dad and Montessori school mom.
“She had one older brother and later on, a much younger sister.”
Allison: “My brother is 16 months older than I am, but my brother is very shy and introverted.”
Outgoing sister, introverted brother. A simple childhood.
Allison: “When I was born, my brother would push me in front of him to talk on our behalf. I was very willing to be center of attention and he was very willing to let me be the center of attention.”
The subtext: I’ve always been a natural leader, always the one in front — it wasn’t sinister, it’s how I grew up.
Hollywood Destiny: A Bright Child Near the Lights
Natalie: “For a young girl who was willing to be the center of attention, there were a lot of opportunities in Hollywood. Just an hour or so away, Allison got into acting.”
This is destiny: The bright California child is drawn toward the lights. A sunny kid who liked performing grew up near Hollywood.
Allison adds a harmless, folksy anecdote:
Allison: “The first commercial I did was a German chocolate commercial, and they wouldn’t let me eat the chocolate. I had to spit the chocolate out after every take… I remember being like, that’s bunk.”
It’s cute. Allison is reintroducing herself as a cheerful commercial kid with a funny complaint about candy.
Natalie’s Chocolate Epic
Natalie cannot resist dramatizing this anecdote into a tiny epic of self-control and thwarted desire:
Natalie: “I can just picture Allison four years old, putting the chocolate in her mouth, chewing, wanting so badly to eat this delicious treat that every kid loves… then having someone yell ‘cut,’ and having to use all her willpower to spit it out over and over and over again. But she did it.”
The visualization is comically lush. Natalie “can just picture” it. It converts Allison’s childhood obedience into a moral fable: Look how disciplined she was, even as a child.
Allison: “I started going to acting class when I was five and I didn’t know how to read yet… My mom would read it to me and I would repeat it back.”
The portrait of a precocious, sweet, hardworking California kid with a dedicated mom. It’s disarming.
Born to Please: The Personality Defense
Natalie: “Allison liked performing, but it was more than that.”
Allison: “I was from birth, ‘I want you to be happy with me all the time.’ … ‘What do you want me to do? Okay, I’ll do that.’ I was that kind of constitution.”
This is the “I was wired to please people” defense—the gateway narrative for every subsequent decision in NXIVM. She’s not guilty, she’s compliant.
She wants to please.
Natalie: “For Allison, this behavior carried onto set where she gained a reputation as a director’s actor… someone who would do whatever the director wanted.”
Allison: “The whole value of me as a human being was around being an actor… I also conflated love with acting and being good.”
Competition, Infantilized
Natalie shifts into dramatic overstatement:
Natalie: “And her peers, the girls she should have been playing dress up and making mud pies with — they were competition.”
This is classic Natalie: choosing imagery (“mud pies”) that infantilizes Allison further. A childhood of stolen innocence, as though competitiveness — normal for child actors — was a tragedy.
Allison: “That’s what you do when you walk into an audition room… you look around at all the girls… and you’re pitted against each other constantly.”
Yes, Allison was conditioned for NXIVM before NXIVM even existed, and Natalie follows the breadcrumb trail:
Natalie: “And the competition Allison experienced at auditions, she felt it at home too.”
The Safe Confession
Another segue: Allison was shaped even as a child by forces beyond her control. Then comes Allison’s confession:
Allison: “My sister was born when I was nine and a half… I was the center of the universe… then my sister was born and I was like, who is this taking my spot? I was angry and jealous… And those feelings contradicted the perception I had in the world where people looked at me and said I was such a nice girl.”
This is Allison being calculatedly honest. She offers a “dark” childhood confession; safe, soft, relatable: sibling jealousy. She presents it as her early split between appearance (“nice girl”) and unseen feelings (“darkness”), a split the podcast later connects to her life in NXIVM.
Natalie depicts Allison as a dreamy, wounded, overburdened child.
Allison provides a curated vulnerability that makes her seem honest but harmless. A girl shaped by competition, pressure, and emotional confusion. No, Allison didn’t fall into NXIVM, not if you listen to episode 1. She was sculpted for it.
And maybe, therefore, she shouldn’t be blamed.
More to follow:
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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Why is it so hard to come forward and tell the truth even if it’s ugly?
What so terrible about saying: “I was self centered, mean, cruel and did horrible things that hurt other people. I deserved the punishment I got and I’m shamed of my behavior”.
Dude, maybe cut her some slack?
In The Vow, season 2 episode 3, Nancy Salzman talks to Diane Benscoter, about cults and how to find a way out of them. Benscoter recommends to think of one’s life “in three identities”:
– before the cult, when something seemed to be lacking
– cult experience, intoxication, “I found this great thing”, camraderie, community
– cult world crumbles, “who am I now?”
And that’s precisely how you can read this introductory part. As an attempt to recover the better parts of the first identity while also trying to find answers for what went wrong.
Of course, you can also be entirely cynical about it, from the get-go. Myself though, I fail to see how that approach would be particularly helpful.
This interview may be the most ass kissing softball question interview I ever heard in my life.
And good for Allison for reminding everyone, what a narcissistic cunt is.
Question: How does one correctly rank the following persons by number of times they have engaged in homosexual acts (voluntary or involuntary)?
1) Allison Mack
2) Richard Luthmann
3) Allen “Alonzo” Stanfield
4) Bangcock
5) Chris Ambrose
6) Nice Guy
7) “Jersey Style” David Weigel
8) Patriot God
Easy!
1) Patriot God
2) Richard Luthmann
3) Chris Ambrose
4) Allen “Alonzo” Stanfield
5) “Jersey Style” David Weigel
6) Nice Guy
7) Bangcock
8) Allison Mack
Curiously Scott Amway Johnson is not on the list.
His wife left him when she found out he sucked more [redacted] then a [redacted] bus driver.
Frank-
The breakdown of the Mack interview is excellent.
I love how Allison Mack never said she felt bad for the victims. But we should all feel bad for her.
It’s nauseatingly self serving. Mack isn’t a narcissist or anything.
I listened to the all seven episodes. She presents herself as a seeker and a pleaser, and someone who was harsh on herself and then admittedly took some satisfaction in projecting that onto others, but all, she thought, in service of self-improvement. Keith twisted all of that to his own advantage, just like he did with everyone else. She fell for the gaslighting. Just like everyone else.
Yep. I’d encourage everyone else to listen to all of the Allison and Nancy pods.
Brilliant analysis! I had to go back and re-listen to the episode bc I missed all of this the first time. I hope you do more on this manipulative podcast series!
As you read the beginning of the first episode, you realize that each section is constructed for a single purpose: to mitigate and minimize any guilt or responsibility Allison herself bears until it is nonexistent. Ultimately, Allison is portrayed as innocent, merely an accidental victim of unfortunate circumstances for which she is not to blame.
Many people who only listen to the podcast, rather than reading the text, may be so emotionally distracted that they do not realize how they are being manipulated. Telling Allison’s story differently would create a different perception for the listener. The jury’s verdict against Allison and Judge Garaufis’ reasoning for the verdict make clear what she is responsible for. These are factual and correct. The podcast will probably try to create an opposite perception.