Rachel Hollis is a Fraudulent Example of Influencing-Gone-Wrong
A fantastic reminder that you can only take the advice from others with a grain of salt — especially if they profit from your struggles and pain.
We’ve seen a lot of influencer misconduct this year, and it’s starting to create a very concerning trend.
From Myka Stauffer quietly rehoming her adopted child who she had financially profited from through filming his autistic temper tantrums, to influencers being caught participating in a showmanship-style of fake activism during Black Lives Matter protests, people are becoming less and less tolerable of this flaky, deceitful influencer behavior.
And just like most influencers, this year has not been overly kind to Rachel Hollis, a mommy-blogger influencer who has built an empire of best-selling books, conferences and motivaltional speaking events.
I’ve written about Rachel Hollis before, but more so in the context of feeling completely duped by the façade that she shares online, vs. the real truth of who she is.
Her fall from grace the last few months has been very significant.
And we’re here to talk about it, not for entertainment purposes of tearing down another woman, but because we need to have a bigger conversation about holding influencers more accountable for their actions and what they say.
Their literal job is to influence others — that is a job with a lot of responsability that cannot be taken lightly.
The advice and words that influencers give are trusted by their followers. And those words have the potential to bring some real toxicity and damage to the lives of the people who look up to those same influencers.
Rachel Hollis is the poster child for this type of unethical and inappropriate behaviour.
And here’s why:
Scamming followers with her “perfect marriage” façade.
Now, I’m not here to cast judgment upon a married couple who have chosen to divorce. That’s not my place — I also don’t view divorce as something shameful and offensive.
As a married woman myself, I view divorce as a significant life trauma — how could it not be?
I would never judge another person for the choice to separate from their spouse because I recognize that not all relationships work out. That’s just the reality of life.
What I really have an issue with is when a married couple presents themselves as having the ‘perfect marriage’ (that’s literally their selling point: #MarriageGoals), and are selling their marriage advice for a profit, when there isn’t much truth behind it — it’s all just for show.
Which is exactly what has happened here with Rachel and Dave Hollis.
Marriage is not easy. There are ups and downs, different seasons, and it’s never sunshine and rainbows 100% of the time.
But it’s pretty bold to claim you’ve got this whole marriage thing figured out, to the point where you create an entire business around the premise of offering advice to other couples on one of the most complicated and dynamic relationships that can exist between two or more human beings.
You’d better have the credibility to back that sh*t up.
And guess what? Dave and Rachel Hollis simply didn’t have that credibility to begin with, and yet they still went down a dangerous road of offering ineffective marital advice.
If your own marriage advice isn’t working for you, don’t falsely package and sell it to millions of people as ‘successful’.
Like I said, marriage is not easy. It takes a lifelong commitment on both sides to make it work, and even then, people change and grow apart.
That’s just life — the unexpected happens all the time.
But there’s a BIG difference between:
- the normal bumps that can be expected within a marriage, and
- selling courses, retreats, conferences, etc. promising insights to offer the most successful, healthiest marriage possible when your own announcement of divorce expresses that you and your spouse have spent the last few years trying to salvage your broken marriage.
In a now modified Instagram post (following the backlash of his words, most likely), Dave Hollis’ original words read as:
“Our marriage has been a triumph in so many ways… and it has run its course. Despite still loving and deeply respecting each other as friends, co-parents and business partners, Rae and I decided that the best way to allow each of those to thrive in the future is to end our marriage while the option for a beautiful, unconventional new family, friendship and partnership still exists as a real and hope-filled option.
This is a decision we have wrestled for years and made with so much counsel, thought and prayer… keeping love for each other and our kids as the ultimate and only goal.”
Huh?
Interesting.
So, all the while during those years of deciding whether or not to end your marriage, you were still selling seats to your retreats and offering masterclasses on successful marriage and partnership?
That is false advertising, cut and dry. That is a scam. That is lying to people.
It was also really upsetting to run through the divorce announcement on Rachel Hollis’ Instagram and see so many comments from deeply betrayed women saying,
“So, all of the advice you gave me at the retreat was bogus?
“When do I get my money back? I’ve spent thousands on your marriage advice.”
“Why have you been lying to us all this time?”
“Is my marriage going to fail now, too?”
Here’s a direct sample from a follower that encompasses these sentiments:
Comment text:
“I’m confused why the last 3 years you were on the stage preaching for healthy marriages when you yourself were struggling and didn’t dare tell anyone you were struggling until it’s already over! How are you going to be a role model for those who don’t have a voice? Your platform feels inauthentic and deceitful.” — via savvyoverlanding, Instagram
Let’s look at this from a different direction: if an ‘expert’ in the stock market takes your money, and presented what appeared to be credible evidence of their expertise, but didn’t actually know anything about the stock market and lost you everything — that would be fraud, would it not?
So, how is this situation any different?
Again, just to be very clear — there’s nothing wrong with having bumps in a marriage — that’s natural and expected, including for the Hollis’.
But if you admit your marriage was falling apart for years, how could you feel okay continuing to offer ‘healthy’ marital advice based on your own experiences throughout those years of spousal crisis?
Claiming “this worked for us, you should try it too” loses all validity when it didn’t actually work for you.
Of course, the struggles in her marriage were her own business, and she has a right to that privacy.
But for f*ck sake, don’t be selling faulty advice to people who trust your words when your own relationship is barely salvagable.
That is irresponsible, unethical, and plain out lying to people who really trusted them and their credibility.
It’s very sad to see a marriage disintegrate like this.
But it’s very shameful as well to have watched this couple profiting for years when they knew there was no truth or validity behind the advice they were giving.
It was all for show, so that they could fraudulently make money off of people.
Profiting from tragedy?
In the last few months, Rachel Hollis in particular has really come under fire for a lot of missteps and mistakes.
For example, she was caught recently plagiarizing the work of famous motivational speakers and authors (again)— most notably she plagiarized Maya Angelou on Instagram a few months ago.
Then, Rachel and Dave Hollis announced their divorce on social media. And that was met with a lot of upset and backlash because of the reasons that were outlined further above.
You’d think that from a PR perspective, Rachel Hollis would really think things through and not make any big choices too quickly, too rash or do anything that could be viewed in a bad light.
As a trained PR practitioner, that’s what I would have advised for her to do.
The heat was on her, and all she had to do was not f*ck it up.
But alas.
Instead, a month after announcing her divorce to Dave, she announced the release of her newest book, “Didn’t See That Coming”.
The irony of this title alone is something we can all have a chuckle over, and here’s why:
As if releasing a book so shortly after her divorce announcement wasn’t bad enough, the topic of the book is dealing with and recovering from trauma and tragedy in one’s life. And her divorce from Dave is also included in that book — she made that point very, very clear in her Instagram post.
So, not only is she publishing a book a month after her divorce about recovering from her divorce, she’s not fooling any followers by thinking they’re all too stupid to do some simple math.
It takes far more than 1 month to write a book. It takes far more than 1 month to get that book edited. It takes far more than 1 month to be reviewed and accepted by the publisher. It takes more than a month to write a damn book.
But here is Rachel Hollis writing about tragedy, and promising that she is going to offer profound and life-changing advice to her readers on how to recover and heal from the trauma of a divorce.
The divorce, which mind you, she’d only been existing in for one month at that point.
So, that leaves us with only two options, and neither of them are very flattering to Rachel Hollis’ image:
- She had been writing and pre-planning for this content long before officially announcing their divorce. All the while that she was giving advice on how to have a successful marriage, on the side she was writing about the pain and trauma of a failed marriage. Or,
- She went back and added portions to a book that she’d already drafted to then include her advice and experience with the recovery process of divorce — when, again, she only had one month of experience with.
The second option received a lot of backlash from users in the comment section, understandably.
Particularly divorced women of many years who were well-accustomed with the healing journey Rachel Hollis is claiming to have expert insights on. These users stated it was wildly inappropriate for Hollis to be giving advice on something that she had absolutely no credible experience in.
There were users trying to reason with her.
Year 1 post-divorce looks a hell of a lot different from year 3 or 6, and for her to be giving advice on navigating divorce with a spouse as well as offering advice on co-parenting as divorced parents, with no real, actual experience under her belt, is incredibly irresponsible and potentially very harmful and damaging.
Comment text:
“As someone who also lost a brother in a very tragic way as a young teen, and a divorcee… no. No thank you. Your toxic positivity could do so much harm to someone going through grief. Please, if you need help in these areas see a professional. I honestly backed you after your divorce because shit happens and your personal life is none of my business… but really this is just too convenient and as others said… “icky.”
Final word.
You just can’t help but feel like so much of the messages that have come from Rachel Hollis have been lies.
They’ve been a front for financial gain.
I really can’t stress enough how incredibly irresponsible and unethical it is for her to be giving advice on things that she is, frankly, failing at.
People look up to Rachel Hollis. And as they say, with great power comes great responsibility.
Rachel Hollis has the opportunity to strongly influence people in positive ways, but she also has the capability to wreak havoc and destruction in people’s lives if she doesn’t actually know what the f*ck she’s talking about.
And frankly? From the looks of it, she really doesn’t know what the f*ck she’s talking about.
And by continuing to do so, she is a willing participant in actively feeding toxicity and misinformation into the lives of others.
And for what? A fat paycheck. Is that really worth destroying the lives of other people, Rachel?
I hope one day your answer to that question is a resounding “no”.
As for now, I’ll call it as I see it.
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