Crime Alert, hourly update. Breaking Crime News Now. I'm Drew Nelson. Alice and Max speaks out for the first time since her release from prison. It was a humid June morning in 2021 when Max sat in the backseat of a car headed to her Brooklyn, New York courthouse, wearing a black dress that she had bought just for the occasion. That day, the Smallville actress faced sentencing for her role

in Nexium, NXIVM. The so-called self-help empire turned sex cult run by Keith Reneery.

Once known for playing the sharp and loyal Smallville character, Chloe Sullivan, Mack, was now

branded a criminal. Victims called her a monster in court. The judge called her

an essential accomplice. On the new CBC podcast, Allison after Nexium, Max said, quote, I don't

see myself as innocent. I think that I capitalized on the things I had. And so the success I had as an

actor, I think I did capitalize on that. Yeah. And it was a power

tool that I had to get people to do what I wanted. Now 43, Mack had served nearly two years of a

three-year federal sentence before being released in 2023. She has since remarried, begun a

master's in social work, and for the first time is confronting

the contradictions of being both a victim and a victimizer.

Mack grew up in Long Beach, California, the daughter of an opera singer and a Montessori

teacher.

She began acting before she could read.

By her late teens, she was living on her own in Los Angeles, starring in network TV shows.

When Smallville began filming in Vancouver in 2001, she was just 19, earning $40,000 a week,

and suddenly surrounded by fame and pressure that she didn't understand. In the podcast's first

episode, Mack recalls how her co-star Kristen Crook helped lead her into what would become the most destructive decision of her life.

According to Mac, Crook began taking Nexium's so-called executive success programs while they filmed in Vancouver and later urged her to try it.

Crook has long denied any wrongdoing, saying in 2018, she left Nexium years before the

crimes came to light and had minimal contact afterward.

She said she was, quote, horrified and disgusted by what emerged about DOS, that's the

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