James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-backed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after three people died in 2009 at a sweat lodge, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he held in the Arizona desert, has died in January. 3 in Henderson, Nev. It was 67.
His brother, Jon Ray, announced the death on social media. He did not say where in Henderson Mr. Ray died or give a cause, but said the death was unexpected.
Mr. Ray was struggling to make it as a motivational speaker when he appeared in “The Secret,” a 2006 documentary made by Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne. The “secret,” advocated by Mr. Ray and others, was the idea that positive thinking can literally make the world change in your favor.
Things began to move quickly for Mr. Ray. He appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show, where she praised him. Within months he was standing in front of sold-out crowds of hundreds and then thousands. In 2008 he published Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want, written with Linda Sivertsen, which reached the New York Times best-seller list.
It was, as Fortune magazine declared in 2008, “the next big thing in the highly competitive world of motoring gurus.”
Mr. Ray combined self-help and professional development with a dollop of mysticism — a potent mix 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 a crowd.
He offered a hierarchy of courses, each more expensive than the last, culminating in “Spiritual Warrior,” a $10,000 retreat near Sedona, Ariz. After a series of endurance exercises, including prolonged fasting, participants spent hours in a sweat lodge where temperatures soared above 150 degrees.
Mr. Ray has presented “Spiritual Warrior” several times, and some past participants have raised questions about whether he or his staff members have sufficient training to run a sweat lodge.
However, no one was prepared for what happened on October 8, 2009. Mr. Ray gathered about 50 people in a temporary structure of a round wooden frame covered with tarps, about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet in the center. He poured gallons of water over fire-heated rocks, filling the lodge with hot steam.
Although he told participants they could leave at any time, many later said they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually the conditions inside became unbearable and the crowd flooded out. many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911. A first responder later said the scene looked like the scene 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 Neumann died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested a short time later on a charge of manslaughter.
The story became national news in an era of scandal. shared headlines with the “boloon boy” hoax, in which Colorado parents falsely claimed their son was trapped in a large helium balloon, and the trial of Amanda Knox, an American student convicted in an Italian court of murder her roommate. (Her conviction was overturned in 2015.)
The trial of Mr. Ray’s trial unfolded in the spring of 2010 and ended with his conviction on three counts of involuntary manslaughter. 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, Okla., where his father became a preacher and his mother, Joyce (Sott) Ray, ran the home.
Mr. Ray said the family was so poor they lived in an office attached to his father’s church. But he also said his father’s ability as a minister inspired his later career.
“He was very charismatic,” said Mr. Ray in an interview for the CNN documentary Enlighten Us: The Rise and Fall of James Arthur Ray (2016), directed by Jenny Cartsman. “He could really touch his church. It was my first wow.”
Mr. Ray attended Tulsa Community College but dropped out before finishing his degree. He went to work for AT&T, starting as a telemarketer and progressing into training and junior management.
Part of the company’s training program was based on the work of Mr. Covey, a professional development expert and speaker and author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). Mr. Ray decided he could do something similar and left AT&T to found a company called Quantum Consulting.
Motivational speaking is hard, often thankless work, with most practitioners making their way in front of lunchtime crowds in Holiday Inn conference rooms. For more than a decade, that was Mr. Ray, too – until Ms. Burns included him in “The Secret.”
By then he had moved beyond self-help talks to include New Age philosophy and mysticism. He spoke of lessons from a Peruvian shaman and a Hawaiian spirit guide. Audience members paid thousands of dollars to hear him, often for several days in huge auditoriums.
Those willing to pay even more were taken far beyond the convention center, to retreats that often included intense physical and psychological exercises – leading to the “Spiritual Warrior”.
Along with his brother, Mr. Ray is survived by his wife, Bersabeh; Information about other survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Ray was released from prison in 2013 and was speaking professionally again the following year.
He was the first to discuss the events of October 2009 with his audience. And he agreed to interview Ms. Cartsman at length for “Enlighten Us.”
“I am responsible,” he said of the destruction of the sweat-lodge.
At the end of the film, he added: “It had to happen, because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things I’ve done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”
