Photo: Getty
She was working under an assumed name.
By Rebekah Kuschmider — Written on Nov 26, 2019
It's been five months since a jury in New York found NXIVM cult founder Keith Raniere guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking. But even though he has been in jail since his 2018 arrest, his influence lives on among his closest followers, at least the ones who aren't under arrest.
1. What is NXIVM?
Keith Raniere started NXIVM in 1989. The organization was designed originally as a self-help entity focused on professional development via "executive success seminars," but former members allege that the group is actually a cult led by Raniere. NXIVM uses a trademarked method called "Rational Inquiry" to help adherents achieve their goals (for the reported cost of up to $7,500 for an intensive, multi-day workshop). The group had almost unlimited funding thanks to the devotion of billionaire Seagram's heiresses Sara and Clare Bronfman. Their money allowed the group to deflect negative attention through defamation suits against critics for many years. But things took a turn in 2017 when Sara Edmonson and others revealed that there was a group of women within NXIVM who were called "slaves" who were coerced into sexual activity with Raniere under threat of blackmail.
2. Who are Keith and Allison?
Keith Raniere, who has claimed to be the smartest, most ethical person in the world, founded NXIVM after his previous venture, Consumers Buyline, was shut down under suspicion of being a pyramid scheme. He and his business partner Nancy Salzman created the Executive Success Program (ESP) course structure that made up the backbone of NXIVM. The classes were billed as a self-help program, but it was pretty obvious that Keith was using it as a grooming program to coerce women into sexual relationships with them. He had multiple charges of inappropriate sexual activity in his past, including charges of sexually assaulting an underage neighbor.
Allison Mack is an actress who starred in the series "Smallville" and got involved in NXIVM through ESP. Soon she was one of Keith's closest confidants and the two of them developed a kind of cult within a cult called DOS, which stood for "Dominus Obsequious Sororium," a Latin phrase that roughly translates to "Master over Slave Women." Allison was one of the women at the top of this program and she recruited other women to be "slaves" who had to follow her bidding. The "slaves" were required to provide collateral — damaging information such as naked photos of themselves that could be released if they stepped out of line. In turn, these women were expected to recruit their own "slaves." According to the New York Times, these women were then asked to provide more and more potential blackmail material to their masters and to do things such as having sexual contact with Raniere if they didn't want the material released. The participants were branded with a mark that contained Raniere's initials as a way of showing their dedication.
3. Who is Nicki Clyne?
Nicki is an actress from Vancouver, Canada. She started working in television around 2000 and did a number of roles in TV movies and appearances on different series. She was cast as a recurring character on "Battlestar Galactica" in 2004 and stayed with the series until 2008. After that, she did one voice role in 2010 and then, apparently didn't work as an actress again until 2018.
Nicki Clyne is a NXIVM member.
4. Nicki married Allison
In 2018, after Mack was arrested, it came out that she and Clyne had gotten married in 2017. Blogger and former NXIVM publicist Frank Parlato said Clyne had been in NXIVM for 12 years and she had married Mack in order to get a U.S. visa. There are also claims that Raniere encouraged Clyne to quit her work on "Battlestar Galactica" and she asked producers to release her from her contract in 2008. She then moved to New York to be closer to Raniere. But, because she was Canadian, Clyne could not remain in the U.S. indefinitely without the visa she had working on the TV show, so she and Mack got married to allow her to stay. Parlato also alleges that Clyne was one of Mack's DOS slaves.
5. The downfall of Keith Raniere
NXIVM and DOS came crashing down thanks to two former members of the cult. Sarah Edmonson went to the New York Times to expose the sex slave ring of DOS in 2017. At the same time, actress Catherine Oxenberg was working with law enforcement and private investigators to expose Keith and get her daughter extracted from DOS, as she detailed in her book Captive: A Mother's Crusade To Save Her Daughter From A Terrifying Cult. The result was that both Allison and Keith were arrested for sex trafficking and racketeering in 2018. Keith was convicted at trial earlier this year. Allison pleaded guilty to her crimes. Both are awaiting formal sentencing.
6. Nicki goes to Brooklyn
Nicki escaped legal charges and has been allegedly working in a cafe in Brooklyn — where Raniere has been in jail since his arrest — under the name Nicki Lee. Frank Parlato posted on his website that she was there and once the rumors made their way to employees of the bar, they did some Google image searching and discovered that photos of Clyne and the person they knew were a match. After making the connection, employees said some of Clyne's behavior made more sense once it was put in context with NXIVM and DOS. They claimed that she would often meet with groups of women in the restaurant, the kind of women Raniere might have recruited into the cult.
“Nicki would constantly be meeting with beautiful young women at the bar,” one employee said. “Employees at first always assumed these meetings seemed professional. But she’d be meeting with groups from one to 15 conventionally beautiful women.” Employees were also perplexed by the way Clyne would spend entire shifts off in a corner with her laptop. They didn't know what she was doing and she took pains to keep her activities hidden from people around her.
7. Is she in NXIVM now?
NXIVM is allegedly still up and running under the leadership of Clare Bronfman. And it seems like Nicki may still be involved somehow. Back in May, Radar reported that Clyne was spotted in Albany and Ranieri's old neighborhood.
“Nicki Clyne is driving around in a white BMW picking up girls on Flintock Lane where she once lived with Allison. It’s crazy because there seems to still be a lot of NXIVM women getting together around here and they aren’t hiding.”
Despite all the reporting that claims she is still connected with NXIVM, Clyne denies it. Radar called her at work to ask if it was true that she was still in NXIVM and she replied: "It is not accurate.”
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. Her work has been seen at Ravishly, Babble, Scary Mommy, The Mid, Redbook online, and The Broad Side. She is the creator of the blog Stay at Home Pundit and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.