The Four Color Media Monitor

The Smallville TV show may be remembered in its latter years for the producers dumbing it all down for the sake of partisan politics, but now, it'll also be remembered for casting 2 actresses who apparently worked with a horrifying cult in Mexico that was employing sex trafficking and repellent branding tactics (H/T: Dangerous):

As beautiful young co-stars in the long-running, Superman-prequel TV series “Smallville,” their biggest problem was dealing with their odd young pal, Clark Kent.

Then Kristin Kreuk and Allison Mack signed up for an upstate seminar run by self-help guru Keith Raniere, and they met a real-life super villain.

Raniere was arrested while on the lam in his $10,000-a-week Mexican villa this week, charged by federal prosecutors with running a violent sex-slave cult called NXIVM (pronounced nexium).

Brunette Kreuk, who portrayed the young ­Superman’s love interest, Lana Lang, signed up, but got out before female acolytes began getting forcibly branded with cauterizing pens.

“Kreuk had come first, sometime around late 2005, early 2006,” said Frank Parlato, who first broke the story, in June, of women being forcibly branded as part of the ­NXIVM “sorority.”

“Kreuk brought in Allison” soon afterward, said Parlato, who worked as the group’s publicist in 2007 and 2008.

Mack played Clark Kent’s starry-eyed blond pursuer, Chloe Sullivan.

“Lana” and “Chloe” went from starring in the popular, sugar sweet CW series to starring as ­Raniere’s top sex-slave recruiters, said Parlato.

“Allison was used, as was Kristen, as a lure to bring in other women because of their celebrity status,” he said.

Kreuk severed ties with the group in 2012, soon ­after the Albany Times Union wrote of allegations that Raniere had sex with underage girls.

But Mack stayed on and, according to Parlato, helped come up with the idea of sizzling the “brand” into initiates’ skin, near their groins, as they were held down. About 2-by-2-inches, the mark combined Raniere’s initials, KR, with Mack’s, AM.

This is absolutely chilling, and makes Mack a monster. Politics or no politics in Smallville, this latest news about the co-stars is going to cast a long shadow over the series, and some TV channels will probably drop it from their rerun schedules, since Mack's activities could become PR kryptonite. Bad as the series became by the time it concluded its 2001-2011 run, it's still terrible this had to happen, and one of the actresses, if not the other, has tainted it further.

Labels: dc comics, misogyny and racism, politics, Superman, violence