Marianne Williamson, Self-Help Guru, Is Reportedly a Boss from Hell

Former aides are speaking out about Williamson's alleged abusiveness and fleeing the campaign of the woman who once said she'd "harness love" to defeat Trump.

By Kylie Cheung | June 1, 2023 | 3:35pm

Politics

Marianne Williamson, Self-Help Guru, Is Reportedly a Boss from Hell

When spiritual self-help guru Marianne Williamson announced her second presidential bid in March, Politico immediately published interviews with staffers from her 2020 presidential campaign who railed against her abusiveness and incompetence as a boss back then. And on Thursday, the Daily Beast published a new round of eyebrow-raising interviews with staffers who worked on Williamson’s current campaign that track very closely with the previous allegations against the quirky, long-shot Democratic candidate who once said she would simply “harness love” to defeat Donald Trump.

Former aides confirmed to the outlet that at least 10 staffers—roughly half of Williamson’s staff of about two dozen—have already left the campaign in the last three months since her launch, and one said the list of abusive behaviors from her is so upsetting that “yelling is almost the least fatal for her.”

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In Politico’s report on Williamson’s 2020 campaign, a former aide told the outlet that she was prone to “foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage.” Other 2020 aides recounted stories of Williamson having temper tantrums so concerning that hotel employees performed wellness checks, and on one occasion, pounding on a car door so hard that she was taken to urgent care. Insights shared by former 2024 campaign staffers closely reflect all of this, citing the candidate’s anger issues, her tendency toward “meltdowns,” and her direct incitement of a cutthroat workplace culture, instructing more senior staffers to “chew out” junior aides and “overstep, step on toes.”

“We all read that Politico story, and it seems like she hasn’t learned anything,” one of the former 2024 staffers told the Daily Beast. “I can’t say that I’ve seen her throw anything, but she demeans her staff in front of other people. It is not private; it is public.”

In April, Williamson accidentally tweeted and then quickly deleted what was clearly meant to be an email to a staffer in which she instructs the staffer, Jason (her former deputy campaign manager, Jason Call), to forward her all emailed ideas sent to the campaign: “I don’t need a gate keeper. I can interpret what I want, for myself,” she wrote. Former staffers told the Daily Beast the arguably comical gaffe reflects both the condescending tone that Williamson uses when communicating with her staff, as well as her technological ineptitude. Williamson, her aides told the outlet, refuses to use Slack to communicate with her staffers and clearly struggles to communicate via email, too, hence the tweeted message to Call, who is no longer working on the campaign.

“I’ve worked in dozens of high-pressure campaigns.Never have I experienced this kind of a tinderbox,” one former staffer told the Daily Beast. Another bemoaned how small donors are “giving their hard-earned money to something that’s not real,” and yet another characterized Williamson’s campaign as “a vanity campaign” with “no real plan” for the Democratic primary.

The allegations about Williamson’s mistreatment of staffers are in striking contrast with her beloved public persona as a spiritual, almost toxically positive influencer. Williamson’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Jezebel, nor did it comment for the Daily Beast’s reporting.

Some may reflexively paint descriptions of Williamson’s “meltdowns” and “rage” as inherently sexist, similar to how complaints against Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) toxicity and mistreatment of staffers were spun as people simply being uncomfortable with a Girlboss-type. “I push people. That is true. But my point is, I have high expectations for myself, I have high expectation for the people that work for me, and I have high expectations for this country,” Klobuchar said at the time in her own defense.

To be clear, treating staffers like shit is bad when a man does it and equally bad when a woman does it, regardless of how many healing crystals she owns or how much harder she has to work to be taken seriously in politics.