James Arthur Ray, the Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the 2009 killings of three people at a sweat lodge, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he ran in the Arizona desert, died on January 20. 3 in Henderson, Nevada. He was 67 years old.
His brother, John Ray, announced his death on social media. He did not say where Mr Ray died in Henderson or give a cause, but said the death was unexpected.
Mr. Ray was struggling to find success as a motivational speaker when he appeared in The Secret, a 2006 documentary produced by Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne. The “secret” that Mr. Ray and others espoused was the idea that positive thinking could literally make the world turn in your favor.
Things started moving quickly for Mr. Ray. He appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show, where she praised him. Within months he was performing in front of sold-out crowds of hundreds, then thousands. In 2008, he published Harmonic Wealth: The Secret to Attracting the Life You Want, co-written with Linda Sivertsen, which reached the New York Times bestseller list.
He was, as Fortune magazine declared in 2008, “the next big thing in the hyper-competitive world of motivational gurus.”
Mr. Ray blended self-help and professional development with a touch of mysticism – a powerful combination of Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey and Deepak Chopra. He was tall and charismatic, with an easy smile and just the right amount of self-deprecation to win over the audience.
He offered a hierarchy of courses, each more expensive than the last, culminating in “Spiritual Warrior,” a ten-thousand-dollar resort near Sedona, Arizona. After a series of endurance exercises, including prolonged fasting, the participants spent hours in a sweat lodge, where temperatures were high. It rose above 150 degrees.
Mr. Ray has presented as a “spiritual warrior” several times, and some past participants have raised questions about whether he or his staff had adequate training to run a sweat lodge.
However, no one was prepared for what happened on October 8, 2009. Mr. Ray gathered about 50 people into a makeshift structure made of a circular wooden frame covered with fabric, about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet in the center. He poured gallons of water onto fire-heated rocks, filling the inn with hot steam.
Although he told participants they could leave at any time, many later said they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually, conditions inside became unbearable, and the crowd left; Many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911; One respondent later said the scene looked like the site of a mass suicide. Twenty-one people were taken to hospital.
Three of them died – James Shore and Kirby Brown were pronounced dead on arrival, while Liz Newman died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested shortly after for manslaughter.
The story became national news in a season of scandal. It shared headlines with the “balloon boy” hoax, in which parents in Colorado falsely claimed their son was trapped in a large helium balloon, and the trial of Amanda Knox, an American student who was convicted in an Italian court of murdering her roommate. (Her conviction was overturned in 2015.)
Mr. Ray’s trial began in the spring of 2010 and ended with his conviction on three counts of negligent homicide. The judge sentenced him to two years in prison.
James Arthur Ray was born on November 22, 1957, in Honolulu, where his father, Gordon Ray, was serving in the Navy. The family later moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father became a preacher and his mother, Joyce (Schott) Ray, ran the home.
Mr. Ray said the family was so poor that they lived in an office attached to his father’s church. But he also said that his father’s skill as a minister inspired his later career.
“He was very charismatic,” Mr. Ray said in an interview for the CNN documentary “Enlighten Us: The Rise and Fall of James Arthur Ray” (2016), directed by Jenny Karchman. “He can really touch his people. He was my first success.
Mr. Ray attended Tulsa Community College but left before finishing his degree. He went to work for AT&T, where he started as a telemarketer and moved into junior training and management.
Part of the company’s training program was based on the work of Mr. Covey, a professional development expert, speaker, and author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). Mr. Ray decided he could do something similar, and he left AT&T to found a company called Quantum Consulting.
Motivational speaking is a difficult, often thankless job, with most practitioners having to stand in front of lunch crowds in Holiday Inn conference halls. And for more than a decade, that was Mr. Ray too, until Ms. Burns included him in “The Secret.”
By then he had moved beyond talk of self-help to include New Age philosophy and mysticism. He spoke about lessons learned from a Peruvian shaman and a Hawaiian spiritual guide. Audience members paid thousands of dollars to hear him, often over several long days in spacious conference halls.
Those who were willing to pay more were taken beyond the convention center, on retreats that often included intense physical and psychological exercise—resulting in the “spiritual warrior.”
Mr. Ray’s survivors, besides his brother, include his wife, Bersabah. No information was immediately available about other survivors.
Mr. Ray was released from prison in 2013, and by the following year he was beginning to speak professionally again.
He has been frank in discussing the events of October 2009 with his fans. He agreed to do a lengthy interview with Ms. Carshman on “Enlighten Us.”
“I’m responsible,” he said of the sweat hut disaster.
“It had to happen,” he added at the end of the film, “because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things I did. Do I drink the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”