To the surprise of no one...
Tony Robbins is a scam artist, abuser, and horrible person. The first paper I wrote when I returned to graduate school three years ago was about Robbins, and how his technique is influenced by New Thought Religion. I watched the documentary I am Not Your Guru, which was fascinating because it was made at the request of Robbins yet the film made him look worse.
Also, he has a 3x3 deep pool of freezing water that he drops into every morning. That is comic book villain behavior.
Anyways, Buzzfeed makes up for its destruction of internet by releasing this special report, alleging abusive, manipulative behavior and sexual harassment. Color me surprised.
Also, this part in the movie is one of the roughest things I’ve seen on film:
In the documentary, Robbins said staff kept a keen eye on people in the audience with serious mental health issues. In one scene, a young woman told Robbins she was sexually abused while growing up in a Christian cult. Robbins’ response was to instruct her to pick three men, all strangers, out of the crowd to serve as “uncles” to watch over her for the next “10 years.” Later, he acknowledged that he had never “dealt with this issue or anything like this before, obviously.” Citing her book about the experience, Robbins’ lawyers said that the woman’s “breakthrough and transformation speaks for itself.”
I’ll save you from posting my paper, because it’s me writing an academic paper for the first time in twelve years, but his positioning himself as a savior is obvious.
The rhetoric that the body is the sight of transformation, the first aspect of New Thought, is abundant in the film and is the basis for most conversations Robbins has with the audience and in interviews. Early in the seminar, he tells the audience, “You are going to make a change. Not the way I tell you to, I will not fix you because you are not broken. For some people it took ten years to make a change, but it happened in a moment but it took ten years to get to that moment.” The implication is that this moment will place during the six days of the seminar. That is the product people have paid for, so they believe it will happen, making them more likely to conclude that it has happened by the end of the seminar. Select interviews on the film confirm this, with many proclaiming how their lives have been changed. “You are here to break the pattern of who you are,” Robbins instructs.
Someone who charges your $6K to sit in a room for twelve hours a day is not your savior.