James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-backed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the deaths of three people in a sweat lodge in 2009, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he led in the Arizona desert , died January 11, 2009. 3 in Henderson, Nevada. He was 67 years old.
His brother Jon Ray announced his death on social media. He did not say where in Henderson Mr. Ray died or cite a cause, but said the death was unexpected.
Ray was struggling to succeed as a motivational speaker when he appeared in “The Secret,” a 2006 documentary made by Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne. The “secret,” espoused by 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 a few months he was facing sellout crowds of hundreds, then thousands. In 2008 he published “Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want,” written with Linda Sivertsen, which made the New York Times best-seller list.
He was, Fortune magazine declared in 2008, “the next big thing in the highly competitive world of motivational gurus.”
Mr. Ray combined self-help and professional development with a hint of mysticism: a potent mix of Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey and Deepak Chopra. He was tall and charismatic, with a simple 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 $10,000 retreat near Sedona, Arizona. After a series of resistance 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 attendees in the past had raised questions about whether he or members of his staff had sufficient training to operate a sweat lodge.
However, no one was prepared for what happened on October 8, 2009. Mr. Ray crammed about 50 people into a temporary structure consisting of a round wooden frame covered by tarps, measuring about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet in the center. . He poured gallons of water onto the rocks heated by the fire, filling the cabin 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 spilled out; many people collapsed to the ground.
Someone called 911; one first responder 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 declared dead on arrival, while Liz Neumann died nine days later. Mr Ray was arrested shortly afterwards on suspicion of manslaughter.
The story became national news in a season of scandals; shared headlines with the “balloon 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 who was found guilty by an Italian court of the murder of her roommate. (His conviction was overturned in 2015.)
Mr. Ray’s trial took place in the spring of 2010 and ended with his conviction on three counts of manslaughter. The judge sentenced him to two years in prison.
James Arthur Ray was born November 22, 1957, in Honolulu, where his father, Gordon Ray, served 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 they lived in an office attached to his father’s church. But he also said his father’s skill as a minister inspired his later career.
“He was very charismatic,” Ray said in an interview for the CNN documentary “Enlighten Us: The Rise and Fall of James Arthur Ray” (2016), directed by Jenny Carchman. “He could really touch his congregation. It was my first wow.
Mr. Ray attended Tulsa Community College but left before finishing his degree. He went to work for AT&T, starting as a telemarketer and then moving 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 start a company called Quantum Consulting.
Motivational speaking is hard, often thankless work, with most professionals getting by in front of the lunch crowds in Holiday Inn conference rooms. For more than a decade, Mr. Ray did too, until Byrnes included him in “The Secret.”
By then he had moved beyond self-help talk 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 listen to him, often over the course of long days in vast conference rooms.
Those willing to pay even more were taken far beyond the convention center, on retreats that often involved intense physical and psychological exercises – leading to the “Spiritual Warrior.”
Along with his brother, Mr. Ray’s survivors include his wife, Bersabeh. Information on the other survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Ray was released from prison in 2013 and began speaking professionally again the following year.
He was candid in discussing the events of October 2009 with his audience. And he agreed to be interviewed at length by Ms. Carchman for “Enlighten Us.”
“I am responsible,” he said of the sweat lodge disaster.
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 had done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”