A little more than two weeks ago, I clicked on the website of self-help guru James Arthur Ray and saw that tickets to his next “Harmonic Wealth” weekend, planned for April 12-13, were being heavily discounted for a price of $197, down from a regular price of $697. I had not thought of Ray for years, but for some reason he popped into my mind. As a Fortune writer back in 2008, I had profiled him as an up-and-coming star in the burgeoning self-help industry—“The Man Who Would be Robbins, Covey and Chopra” (a nod to industry goliaths Tony Robbins, Steven Covey, and Deepak Chopra). As it happened, a few days after I started following him again on social media, a new post appeared: “With extreme disbelief and unfathomable pain,” it announced that James Ray had died, “suddenly and unexpectedly.” He was 67, and the cause was not disclosed.
A few brief obituaries followed focused on Ray’s main claim to infamy—as a convicted felon. The year after my article had appeared in Fortune, his story took a tragic turn when three of his clients died and 18 more were hospitalized after participating in a sweat lodge ceremony led by him at a retreat in Arizona. Ray was found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide, serving nearly two years in state prison before being released in July 2013. I had last seen him in person in 2016, when he was out of prison and trying to rehabilitate himself and salvage his career. It appeared that Ray had doggedly kept at it until his death, though he had added the descriptors “minister” and “philosopher” to his bio, and had married a woman, Bersabeh, and they produced podcasts as a duo. I couldn’t help note that the upcoming Harmonic Wealth weekend had been safely planned as a Zoom event (“in the comfort of your own home”).
