American inspirational speaker, a teacher of A Course in Miracles. A compelling New York-Hollywood celebrity guru, she is the author of “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles,” published in March 1992. The two-volume books on the subject retail at $110 each. The book is alleged to be a modern-age biblical tract, or New Age Gospel, mysteriously dictated by an unidentified miracle voice that has mesmerized New Age followers since 1975. Sales soared to the top of the best-seller list in 1992 when Oprah Winfrey hyped the book on her TV show for four weeks and distributed a thousand copies. Her inspirational audio-tapes cover subjects that range from “Forgiving your parents” to “Death does not exist.”
Williamson claims that the material world is maya, that we are all the same and must concentrate on love and ignore our physical bodies. Though Jewish, she reads like a Christian religious tract. An ex-nightclub singer, married with one child, she was backed by $100,000 that came from David Geffen to found her two Centers for Living on the two coasts. Her charismatic lectures reach the rich and powerful, but she also sponsors the preparation and delivery of meals to 300 homebound persons with AIDS. She has raised millions for AIDS relief.
Off-camera or tape, she is reportedly a bad tempered, coarse-talking tyrant and control freak, referring to herself as the “bitch of God.” Former employees and associates charge that Williamson’s offstage displays of temper and unchecked ego, as well as a cruelly abrasive management style, tend to alienate her powerful allies and give credibility to her detractors.
Williamson became used to getting her own way as a kid in Houston, the youngest of three kids of Sam Williamson, a crusty political liberal and immigration lawyer, and his homemaker wife, Sophie Ann. She grew up with a liberal education and a strong spiritual drive. From the age of three, she informed her Mommy that she was talking to God. She also had a strong sense of the theatrical. After high school, she spent two years studying theater and philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, CA.
In 1973, Williamson moved to New York City to pursue a career as a cabaret singer. Working as a secretary, she began an affair with her boss, rock biographer Albert Goldman. When they broke up, she had a period of months of deep depression, crying and wondering what to do with her life.
Two years later she moved to San Francisco where, musician and boyfriend John Timothy recalls, she was avidly interested in Zen, meditation and the Ouija board. Her likes and dislikes were total and intense.
In 1979, she returned to Houston, where she ran a metaphysical bookshop. She married a businessman, briefly, and during the evenings, sang at a Houston nightclub. In 1983, jobless and with $1,000 to her name, she moved to Los Angeles, an appropriate venue for her interests and where the spiritual and the stage come together.
She began speaking to groups at the Philosophical Research Society, drawing much of her material from “A Course in Miracles,” an arcane religious tract that stresses love and forgiveness as the basis of spiritual life. In time, her lectures evolved into a trendy amalgam of Christianity, Buddhism, pop psychology and 12-step recovery wisdom. She was on target for the young, liberal urban professionals of her environment. Within a few years, her topics began to draw Hollywood.
Describing herself as an “unwed Jewish mother”, in 1990, she had a daughter, India Emmaline, whose father she refuses to identify or discuss.
In 2014, as an independent, Williamson ran unsuccessfully for the seat of California’s 33rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives elections in California. On January 29, 2019, she announced her campaign to seek the Democratic nomination for the 2020 United States presidential election.
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