Yeah, the cult wouldn’t work if it were sex only. They have to have an outer cult that seems at least respectable on the surface to draw people in, and then prey on the most vulnerable.
It is a Scientology spinoff. It’s the same tactics. People who just start Scientology don’t wind up in the Sea Org. They bring you in deeper, and then blackmail you.
That, Mack’s physical condition, and her cries for help on Twitter are the reason I suspect she was a victim brought to the top. She said she’d done terrible things and hated it. That sounds not like a true believer, but someone being blackmailed to stick around by the horrible things.
If my assessment is correct, that is what I’m hoping will happen. They delayed on going after her until after they went after the top guy–maybe the goal is to get him. But it’s also possible he’s doing that to her.
As offensive as the whole sex slave trafficking crime is… not to trivialize that in any way… but as a sidebar, what about the crime done to language?
D.O.S. is supposedly “Dominus Obsequious Sororium,” and the supposed translation ‘master over the slave women’ is a corruption of Dog-Latin that not even Hogwarts would accept. “Obsequious” is not even Latin but English. “Sororium” is not a word in Latin either. If the phrase were put into correct Latin, it would be something like “Dominus Obsequiarum Sororum,” but then the translation would be ‘master of the complying sisters’. Actual Latin for ‘master over the slave women’ would be something like “Dominus Supra Servas.”
But nobody is going to care, because nobody studies Latin any more. I never accessed a Latin class in my life, but had to teach myself. My son took Latin in high school because of being a Harry Potter fan, but I suspect the discovery that Rowling was mostly doing it wrong must have put him off the whole subject. His class probably never got around to explaining that Dog-Latin was a thing in the Middle Ages for bored students to joke around with, and that Rowling was writing within that context. I doubt that the NXIVM creep even knew about Dog-Latin or how it was used.
I was kinda wondering about another aspect of this. According to CNN:
It sounds as though the forced labor is a separate charge from the sex trafficking. So what labor were people forced to perform? Did they have to stuff envelopes with the company newsletter, or were they ushers at their seminars; what sort of jobs did this cult have to do that weren’t sexual?
Frank Parlato at https://frankreport.com/ has been covering this saga for years now. If you want Details with a capital Deet, click to go down the rabbit hole.
(Ah, Larisa Oleynik…Wonder what she’s up to now. Oh…just found out on her Wikipedia page she had a stalker. I swear it wasn’t me. Hey, I watched the show as a kid in the 90s…it’s not like I’m 62.)
The guy has very broadly-central-European features, what the taxonomists who classify phenotypes (not “race”, just the varying combinations of facial characteristics) would describe as “Alpine/Med.” Med meaning “Mediterrenean.” It’s a look that is common with many people of French, German, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, ancestry, or some combination thereof. He looks kind of like Jared Leto. Ralph Macchio is another guy who has that basic look; Rachael Ray also has it. I also have it. We ‘Alpine’ types are often described as looking “youthful” and “cute”, but we have a tendency to get stocky with age. So be it.
Anyway, this guy is a shithead, his accomplices are shitheads, they’re all fucked up, and also, the Pope wears a funny hat.
Whenever I read things like this it really just reminds me of my own biases and cognitive failures. Specifically the halo effect. Why would I be more surprised that Allison Mack or Kristen Kreuk were involved in this than I would of random women I’ve never heard of? Because of my own assumptions about their mental health, intelligence, wealth, etc. Not because I knew anything about them, but because I assumed things about them. I never made all that many assumptions about Mack or Kreuk mostly because I never thought all that much about them, but I still had a bit of surprise when I read the headline, so clearly I had made the assumption that she wouldn’t get caught up in something like this.
I guess it’s just another lesson that we all have feet of clay.
Does this change how you feel? IMO, She’s an evil but pretty young thing playing the sympathy card in the court of public opinion, and you appear to have bought it hook, line and sinker.
Yeah, there are a number of extremely horrific male serial killers whose wives or girlfriends fully participated in that shit with them…I’m not even going to name the names here, some of it is straight up too horrific and disgusting for me to want to think about, let alone share with others. But there have been several in America, Canada, and the UK, absolutely demented and ghastly husband-and-wife serial killers/rapists/torturers, and the women have tried to play that card at trial. It worked for some, unfortunately.
I don’t know; Bob Crane’s murder was pretty high on the skeevometer.
I don’t know if it’s that we assume celebrities have some sort of immunity to this sort of thing. It’s rare for someone to become a famous actor, and rare for someone to be involved in an involuntary sex cult. When they happen to the same person it’s like some weird collision of improbabilities, like finding out that Hedy Lamarr invented cell phones.
Your halo effect assumption isn’t wrong. It looks like he was targeting “good girls”. Whereas a lot of these types will enslave girls with drugs, or target girls with low self esteem, he was targeting powerful, competent, clean living women, because he had that much charisma and brainwashing ability and those are obviously the most desirable women if you can get them. You don’t need to think less of them, so much as to realize they were probably naive and thought this was all just part of his motivational techniques. Although Kreuk insists she was gone before the really weird shit started.
I think part of it is that you don’t expect someone who has worked hard to have success in a notoriously difficult profession to be so unhinged. I think the assumption is that an actor who is able to land roles on a TV series must have her life together in order to succeed.
