When I came across this story, it occurred to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve written about Dr. Joe Mercola, who was at one time frequently featured here. Indeed, although I’ve mentioned him a couple of times in the last three years, we at SBM haven’t really written an article that was primarily about him since Jann Bellamy noted three years ago that Mercola had teamed with longtime antivaxxer recently turned “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to sue Senator Elizabeth Warren for complaining that Amazon had been peddling health misinformation about COVID-19 and that Mercola and RFK Jr. were two of the key disinformation spreaders. For my part, I have been referring to Mercola as a “quack tycoon” since a news report in 2019 revealed his net worth to be north of $100 million from his businesses selling supplements, quackery, and “wellness,” yet more proof positive (if any more is needed) that quackery can be extremely lucrative. Unsurprisingly, having used a fraction of his income to support various antivaccine causes, in particular one of the oldest antivax organizations in the US, Barbara Loe Fisher‘s National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), during the pandemic, Mercola pivoted effortlessly to spreading misinformation first about COVID-19 and then, after the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 were introduced, against the vaccines.
Since the pandemic hit, there have been so many more antivaxxers, “wellness” influencers, quacks, and grifters who have seized the opportunity to rise to fame and infamy (and wealth), with at least two of them soon to be in charge of the CDC and the NIH, but Mercola kept chugging along as one of the “old school” antivaxxers who simply expanded his brand to include COVID-19 and COVID vaccines, the better to keep raking it in hand over fist; that is, until late 2023, when a very strange thing happened. Truth be told, I did write about this a year ago, just not here on SBM but instead on my not-so-super-secret other blog. It’s a story that in the last year has attracted virtually zero mainstream press coverage that I can find. Rather, it was first reported, oddly enough, on Natural Products Insider, a publication devoted to reporting the supplement industry in a generally friendly way, where a story by Rick Polito appeared in February 2024 entitled Dr. Mercola consulted with psychic before axing top executives and breathlessly claimed, “The CEO of Mercola and two other brand executives were terminated without warning last week, and video evidence suggests founder Dr. Joseph Mercola consulted with a psychic before making the move.” Later in 2024, it came out that, in addition to firing executives and becoming estranged from his sister, Mercola had ghosted his old friend Barbara Loe Fisher, the founder of NVIC whom I like to refer to as the grande dame of the antivax movement given that she has been active since the 1980s. More importantly, he had ceased his previously generous support to the NVIC, which had made up 40% of the group’s annual budget at the time Mercola ghosted Fisher.
I now have the full flavor of just how far gone Mercola is, which led me to wonder how such a seemingly savvy businessman could be taken in this way. This is especially pertinent, given that it turns out that Mercola’s wealth is far greater than previously reported, he has strong connections to our new HHS Secretary RFK Jr., and he has connections to Donald Trump. In other words, like RFK Jr. and other antivaxxers and quacks whom we had previously never been able to picture in positions of such power and influence, Mercola is now in a position to be more influential than ever from behind the scenes.
The Mercola tapes, also called the Bahlon tapes
Last week, Jonathan Jarry of the McGill Office for Science and Society posted an hour long YouTube video, The “psychic” behind the world’s richest anti-vaxxer, and, hoo-boy. To read about how far Joe Mercola has descended into woo is one thing. To see it is another. Basically, an inside informer sent Jarry “hours and hours” of video of Mercola’s Zoom calls with his “psychic advisor”; basically he watched it all so that you don’t have to:
You really should watch the entire video for yourself.
I’ve long written about a tendency among wellness influencers to become more and more radical, to embrace more and more bizarre pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, as time goes on. At one time, I attributed a large part of this phenomenon to audience capture, in which the influencer becomes the influenced (by the audience). My prototypical example is someone like Dr. Vinay Prasad, an academic oncologist who first dabbled in COVID-19 contrarian takes in 2020, only to find that there were great rewards in terms of praise by his audience for being “brave” and “original,” an elevated social media profile, and then later financial rewards, a snowballing process that led him to go further and further down the rabbit hole, to the point that in 2025 he now doesn’t see much wrong with RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement, falls for the antivax claim that the childhood vaccine schedule hasn’t been adequately tested, gaslights RFK Jr.’s role in worsening the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019, embraces the antivax message of “do not comply,” and calls for “randomized controlled clinical trials of the childhood vaccine schedule. Mercola seems different, though, at least in velocity of his fall. Remember, he got his start nearly 30 years ago in a seemingly innocuous way:
In 1997, as a way to share what he had found that would be “useful and helpful,” he started Mercola.com. It proved a hit. But because it didn’t charge for content or accept ads, it was also a money drain. In the first three years, Mercola estimates that he spent half a million dollars on the site. To keep it afloat, he says, “I had three options: to get paid subscribers; to sell information, which I didn’t want to do; or to sell products, which is what I wound up doing. . . . The purpose for selling items is to have a revenue stream so we can pay our staff to provide information to educate the public and make a difference and fund [our] initiatives.”
The success of the site gave a significant boost to his practice, Mercola says: “I had people flying in from all over the world. It always puzzled me: when people came in, I wouldn’t tell them anything different than I had written on the site. They could have just as easily looked it up for free. But they had to hear it from me.” (Mercola stopped practicing medicine six years ago to focus on the website.)
As I noted at the time, this was a very seductive trap. Bandwidth at that time was a lot more expensive than it is now; so Mercola needed a lot of money to keep it going. If you, as Mercola did, you start selling products to support an “informational” website, it becomes very easy for the website to evolve into a marketing arm whose purpose gradually becomes less and less to inform and more and more to sell product. The two functions feed off of each other, and that’s exactly what appears to have happened to Mercola’s website over the next several years. In the process, Mercola became incredibly wealthy. By the 2010s, his profile had become high enough in the “natural health” world to garner him appearances on The Dr. Oz Show. However, falling for a psychic medium this way just seems…next level. Let me show you what I mean. Before I discuss Jarry’s video report, let me go back a year and discuss how I first learned of Mercola’s increasing infatuation with a “psychic” who claimed to channel an ancient being called Bahlon.
To do this, let’s revisit Polito’s first report:
Top executives at Mercola, the brand founded by controversial Covid anti-vax figure Dr. Joseph Mercola, were terminated last week without notice, and evidence has surfaced that the doctor is taking direction from a man who claims to channel the voice of an “ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the causal plane.”
An email that appears to be written by Mercola and shared with a reporter for this story also includes language suggesting the firings were related to the executives’ religious beliefs. Mercola did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Oooh. Do tell! Let’s hear more:
In hours of video discovered online, Mercola converses with a man going by the name Kai Clay who speaks as though he is the voice of the entity, referred to as “Bahlon.” Clay, with his eyes closed as if in trance, talks with Mercola about his business and spiritual matters in a rambling conversation that the doctor claims will be the basis of a series of books he plans to publish. In a video of Mercola that was shared with the brand’s employees Feb. 12, the doctor described a 12-book series as “a new beginning for the company” and declared that “my new goal is to reach billions, literally billions, around the world with a new paradigm of how to increase joy in their life.”
The Feb. 12 video came five days after three top executives — CEO Steve Rye; Chief Business Officer Ryan Boland; and Chief Editor Janet Selvig, Mercola’s sister — received termination letters signed by a Laura Berry, who had not worked at the company before but claimed in the letter she was the new Mercola CEO. In the Feb. 12 video, Mercola announced he will visit the offices on Feb. 14 with “my new CEO who’s a brilliant, unbelievable woman who’s going to take us to the next level,” but offers no name. He also promises a “surprise guest” who will be the company’s chief operating officer.
I must admit, the only thing that surprised me at the time about this report is that Mercola apparently hadn’t recognized the profit potential of embracing psychic mediums and more general “self-help” woo much sooner, given his long history of embracing “wellness” as a mantle under which he could peddle his supplements and antivax quackery. Of course, having amassed since the late 1990s a net worth in the low nine digit range, maybe he just didn’t feel the need.
The story goes on to describe how figuring out who Kai Clay is was not straightforward. Clay was running a website—of course!—under Bahlon.com. Certain pages of the website appear to be no longer online, but thanks to the almighty Wayback Machine at Archive.org, I can tell you that the website touted Bahlon and offering memberships in his “Light Circle” for the low, low price of $99/month or $999/year. Why should you pony up for one of these memberships? Come on, just see what Bahlon can do for you:
Ever hear of Trance Channeling? Or how about Light Language?
Meet Bahlon, an ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane and master trance channel Kai Clay.
The messages shared during their packed group events are always uplifting, are often staggeringly predictive, filled with the Divine healing energy of Universal love, hope and healing. Known as the “psychic’s psychic” because so many light workers turn to Bahlon when they need help themselves.
This experience is known to activate clarity, highly attuned precise action to take, spiritual development, incredible synchronicity, and provide life-changing beneficial impacts. Bahlon, through Kai, offers guidance so precise and uplifting, your audience will want to join in every week (and MANY do!).
No spiritual or prior expertise is necessary!
Imagine my relief. Elsewhere, it appears that Clay’s daughter is quite involved in the family business:
And now sometimes when available, his 10 year-old daughter Sera joins with Bahlon to share full conversations in Light Language (and interpret these in English for all) followed by Light Language meditations so powerful many say they can “feel it in the bones of every past life, present and future life.”
“Light language”? Interpreted into English? How convenient.
Here’s a taste of “Bahlon’s” supposed “wisdom”:
Deep Thoughts, indeed.
But who is Kai Clay? According to the story, LinkedIn profiles for Clay and a man named Christopher Johnson both feature photos of the same man that appear to have been taken at the same time and match photos of the man identified as Clay at bahlon.com. Clay claims to have been the owner of “Spiritual Mind” since 1999 but lists no other employment, although he does list skills including “Spiritual Coaching” and “Spiritual Gifts.” In a revelation that should surprise exactly no one, the story also notes that the promotional information on bahlon.com “appears misleading,” pointing to headline on the site referring to LA Weekly labeling Bahlon as “the psychic’s psychic.” However, a Google search only found what appears to be a promotional piece on laweekly.com and not an article from the publication. As far as the website itself goes, though in particular I like a FAQ in which the question “How can Kai do this?” is answered, “The both simple and complex answer is because, ‘Kai trusts Kai.’”
I can’t help repeating my reaction at the time: Very, very deep, ma-an. Kind of like Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. (Elsewhere in the article, Clay is quoted as telling Mercola things like, “All you’re doing is returning to that which is you in the first place.” Again, totally deep, ma-an.) You can also book psychic readings for a fee, because of course you can, and, if you’re really motivated, you can become an affiliate and receive a 20% commission on every referral and sale from your website, because, again, of course you can! It’s a wonder that Mercola hadn’t figured out this grift himself, instead of becoming the mark. Indeed, I find it most ironic that the grifter has become the grifted.
Jarry’s video starts with a truly bizarre clip of what appears to be a Zoom conversation with Clay, supposedly channeling Bahlon, in which Mercola expresses a desire to kill all the veterinarians on earth and “destroy the veterinary industry,” urging people to “march with weapons on these creatures,” and predicting that 70-80 million people might follow him to protect their pets. Making this and other clips more bizarre is how Mercola appears shrouded in darkness except for his face, which is often at the bottom of the screen and not entirely on camera. Sometimes he is a disembodied head, and other times he appears to be naked, or at least shirtless. (Thankfully, nothing lower than his shoulders is seen in any of the featured videos.) It also doesn’t take long for Jarry to describe how, under the influence of “Clay”/”Bahlon,” Mercola has become convinced that he is the “new Jesus,” as reported by Polito a year ago based on an interview with Mercola’s sister Janet Selvig (former Chief Editor of Mercola’s website):
In a Feb. 10 telephone interview, Selvig described the situation with her brother as evolving after she began noticing odd language in his emails in late 2023. She later learned Mercola had been consulting with Kai Clay as Bahlon for several months. Clay and the doctor were both advertised as speakers at an event on Nov. 19, 2023, at Sacred Space Miami. Clay is described as a “Master Trance Channel” on bahlon.com, where he offers readings. An affiliate program described on the site promises payment to followers who bring him more reading clients. Promotional postings on other sites claim he has worked with celebrities and “helps CEOs and entrepreneurs create competitive business strategies,” but no names are shared.
Selvig said she confronted her brother about the odd behavior on Jan. 31 after seeing hours of videos of his trance channeling sessions with Bahlon. “I just felt immediately that he was being taken advantage of,” Selvig said.
The confrontation did not go well. Selvig said her brother was very dismissive of her concerns and defended his work with Clay. “He thinks the book is going to save the world,” Selvig said. “He believes that he’s [Mercola] a god and he’s been reincarnated. And he even referred to himself as the new Jesus.”
Whoa! Mercola now thinks he’s a reincarnated god, the “new Jesus”? It’s almost as though too much wealth, worship, and sycophancy will lead people like him to start to entertain delusions of grandeur, rather like Elon Musk. Also, if one thinks one is a god, then one can’t tolerate competing gods:
On Feb. 2, Selvig was shown an email sent to a coworker from Mercola’s address announcing the doctor’s intention to fire Selvig, Rye, Boland and a fourth executive. The email offered the CEO spot to a different Mercola team member who later turned down the position. The email went on to explain “reasons for the mutiny,” describing the Catholic church as a “global cabal” that controls “50% of the world’s worth” and “created all the pain that most people experience.”
The email added that Rye, Boland, Selvig and the fourth executive have “strong commitments to the Catholic church.” “The group I am now working with is committed to liberating their wealth and control back to the people and give them back their freedom. I hope you will join me in this noble anti crusade against them,” the email reads.
This all sounded very cult-like to me when I first read Polito’s report, including the common cult technique of separating from friends and family members who won’t get on board. (Also, WTF is an “anticrusade”?) For example, Mercola’s sister relates:
Selvig said she is worried Mercola is being isolated and manipulated. When she spoke to him after she saw the Feb. 2 letter discussing her termination and denouncing Catholicism, he dismissed her concerns. “He said, ‘Well, I could see how you would think that, but I’m fine. And I’m going to save the world with this. I don’t know what’s taking you so long to get on board and edit [the book]. I hear your concerns, but I am not going to debate you.’”
According to Selvig, Mercola exhorted her to “join this noble crusade.”
She did not sign on.
“I said, ‘I love you,’” she recalled. “And that was the end of that call.”
Cults demand that their members separate themselves from even family members who aren’t cult members and especially from any who try to undermine their belief in the cult leader. Kiera Butler over at Mother Jones also picked up on this story and reported that even Mercola’s longtime girlfriend, business partner, and fellow supplement hawker, antivaxxer, and conspiracy theorist was worried:
Interestingly, a year later, Elizabeth is outraged that Jarry published some of these videos, and naturally she can’t help but claim that Bill Gates must be behind it all and that it must be a ploy to distract from the declassification of the remaining classified federal government files on the John F. Kennedy assassination:
She even recently got into a conversation involving Elon Musk in which she defended Mercola:
Of course, Dr. Mercola was never a surgeon. To my knowledge he never trained in surgery, completed a surgical residency, or obtained board certification in a surgical specialty. Rather, he is a DO who completed a residency in family medicine, but he has not, to my knowledge, ever practiced surgery. In fairness, I wouldn’t call him a fake doctor, as he did graduate from an accredited DO program, finish a family practice residency, and maintain a medical license. He is a real doctor unfortunately, but he is, in my opinion, a quack.
The bizarre current beliefs of Joseph Mercola
So what about these videos? Jarry goes on to explain that, because he had planned on using his conversations with Bahlon as a basis for his book series that would save the world, Mercola recorded all his Zoom calls with Clay. More than that, he included two bots that used AI to transcribe the conversations and generate summaries of these sessions. Now here’s the hilarious thing. Mercola stored his videos on Fireflies, which provides one of the bots, as well as storage, a platform that turned out to be not as secure as one would like. However, Mercola was also careless. When he sent a link to a specific clip from a conversation to his employees, it turns out that the link that he sent gave the employees access to the entire video, much in the same way that you can send a timestamped link to a YouTube video but the recipient will still have access to the entire video. As Jarry explains, if you have the link, you can view the entire video, no password required, just a free account on Fireflies. A whistleblower in one of Mercola’s businesses gave Jarry access to the videos, and, as a result, Jarry got to view over 50 hours of this stuff so that you don’t have to.
Depressingly, we also learn that Mercola’s net worth is way more than $100 million. It’s over $300 million now. At this rate, he could well be a billionaire in a few years. We also know that Mercola’s been a longtime friend and supporter of RFK Jr.; so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that RFK Jr. could offer him a position at HHS overseeing…something. I once heard speculation that RFK Jr. would try to persuade President Trump to nominate Mercola to be CDC Director, and, now that Dr. Dave Weldon’s nomination was pulled, one can always worry about that. However, the reporting that I see in the mainstream media suggests that Weldon’s replacement is more likely to be Dr. Michael Burgess, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Dr. Scott Atlas, or Professor John Ioannidis. (That, however, is a topic for another post. Suffice to say that Burgess is the least bad among these. At least he isn’t antivax.)
And, wow. The excerpts from these Zoom calls are…something. For example, when Clay begins channeling Bahlon, he starts out with what is one of the most bizarre laughs I’ve ever seen, followed by “Bahlon” asking, “How are you?” It’s truly disturbing. Bahlon also has his own strange lingo. For example, people who don’t believe in him and/or lack spiritual enlightenment are said to be “in their thimble,” whereas people who have achieved spiritual awakening are described as being “in the ocean.” Jarry also makes the observation that, after having watched Mercola for so long, he believes that Mercola is not a scammer, but a true believer. This tracks (mostly) with my observations of Mercola made over the course of more than two decades. It also tracks with his history, where he started out paying a half a million dollars over three years to spread what he considered to be useful “natural health” information before he discovered that he could make lots of money selling supplements, books, and himself. Indeed, I would argue that what makes Mercola so dangerous is that he is a true believer.
Another common feature of the conversations is that Mercola blathers on and on, and “Bahlon” says little, often answering questions simply, “Yes” or “Sounds like it.” It’s very much like psychic cons we’ve all seen before, basically a form of cold reading, in which a skilled reader can quickly guess a lot of information about a person by closely observing the person’s body language, manner of speech, and what he says during questioning, making high-probability guesses and picking up on signals whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, with the person being read often giving the cold reader the information that lets the cold reader make seemingly shockingly accurate observations and predictions about the subject. None of this stops Mercola from asking Bahlon for very specific advice, even about how to do clinical trials. Moreover, even though Jarry is almost certainly correct that Mercola is a true believer, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t also engage in some grift. There is a segment in which “Bahlon” convinced Mercola that olive oil is dangerous, after which Mercola then jokes that he won’t publish anything about the “dangers” of olive oil until after he’s sold off his existing stocks.
Like all mediums, Clay/Bahlon is not always correct, and Jarry provides examples. Perhaps the most ironic one of all is that Bahlon had apparently assured him that the platform and AI services he was using were sufficiently secure, estimating the security risk to be between 8-12%. Of course, the existence of Jarry’s video demonstrates quite conclusively that they were not, and a roughly 10% security risk to me would be way too high for most people discussing something that they consider to be the most important project of their lives.
Polito had identified who Christopher Johnson, the man who became “Kai Clay,” is, but Jarry goes much further, finding old photos and interviews that leave no doubt that Kai Clay is Christopher Johnson, as well as corroborating evidence from other sources. Interestingly, Mercola is not the first “natural health” influencer to have worked with Johnson. It turns out that Johnson had done business with the granddaddy of “integrating” quackery into medicine, Dr. Andrew Weil. Johnson also has quite the history before encountering Mercola. Jarry reports:
Here then is a timeline I’ve been able to put together of Christopher Johnson’s life. Chris Johnson attends Calvert Hall College High School in Baltimore Maryland from 1979 to 1982. He then moves to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he will graduate from Carnegie Mellon University in 1986. He crosses the pond and acquires branding experience in Europe before settling in New York City, eventually becoming the CEO of the White Horn group founded in 2005 and with an annual revenue once listed at nearly $14 million. In 2011 the White Horn Group is dissolved by proclamation. Johnson begins the process of conceiving a child through invidual fertilization and surrogacy in Guatemala, and he is interviewed about this in 2013 By PBS. He mentions making big changes to his work to accommodate his new life as a single dad, and here is where we enter what I call the missing years.
I was unable to find any trace of Christopher W Johnson, Kai Clay or Bahlon for the next 6 years. In a call with Mercola, Johnson says he started channeling 15 years prior just before the birth of his daughter, but I so far have found very little evidence to confirm this. I even reached out to a person familiar with the psychic medium channeling scene in New York City who did not recognize the names of Kai Clay or Bahlon. It’s possible Johnson was using a different identity back then. The only information I could find is an email address in the privacy policy of the Bahlon website. The domain name is spiritualmindcenter.com, which matches Kai Kay’s LinkedIn profile, which lists him as the owner of Spiritual Mind since 1999. But the earliest archived version of the site is from 2019, and it’s a placeholder. Mentions of Balon and channeling start to appear later. The Center website also claims addresses in New York City and Los Angeles. In 2019, a limited liability company by the name of White Horn World LLC is founded in St. Petersburg, FL. Its CEO is Christopher Johnson. In Lexus-Nexus, a legal Information database, under cross reference variant names is a single word Bahlon. On November 19th 2023, Chris Johnson and Joe Mercola appeared together in Miami, FL during a show poised as a premier healing event featuring the astonishing “Clarity of Divine Channel” connection with Bahlon. Soon thereafter, Johnson and Mercola begin their daily Zoom sessions with Mercola calling in from his home in Daytona, FL and Johnson from his house a four hour drive away in Miami. During these sessions the Channeler quickly zeros in on one of Mercola’s vulnerabilities grandiosity.
That’s right. It’s Jesus Christ Superstar Mercola! Or maybe Mercola Christ Superstar.
Indeed, in the next segment, Mercola thinks he is going to capture more than 10% of the wellness industry, valued at over $5 trillion currently; that’s right, he thinks he’s going to capture $500 billion. Now, given his current status, I can—unfortunately—envision Mercola’s business growing to a low single digits billion dollar industry, particularly given his proximity to power now, but $500 billion? Mercola also seems to think that he is a greater, more historically consequential person than Steve Jobs, with Bahlon helpfully predicting that Walter Isaacson will one day do a biography on him, just as he did of Steve Jobs, and that Mercola’s brilliant scientific results will one day be published in Cell, Science, and Nature, the three most prestigious biomedical science journals in existence. Mercola brags about out a groundbreaking hypothesis that he’s thought of—”because I’m a genius” (which he’s just repeating because Bahlon says it)—and says that he’ll prove it within six weeks and win a Nobel Prize for it, likening it to the first Apple Computer or to the Model T automobile. He further likens himself to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix and Albert Einstein’s work that won him his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect, going on to brag that he’ll hold the world record for Nobel Prizes, to which “Bahlon” responds, “Yes.”
On the plus side, there is a clip where Mercola actually admits that shooting ozone “up your butt” is stupid, but wow. Just wow. Too bad he undermines it by saying that putting CO2 up your butt is great. Mixed in the whole segment, in which he exults about how the CO2 protects his cells, Mercola asks, “How could they think I was irrational?” How indeed? Sadly, Bahlon does make a couple of predictions that might well come true, first that RFK Jr. might appoint Mercola to an important position and, second, that Mercola might well find himself “sitting on a sofa in the Oval Office before the end of next year,” which would be this year, 2025. Sadly, I can envision Mercola meeting with RFK Jr. and President Trump in the Oval Office before the end of this year. I wish I couldn’t, but I can.
Jarry sums it all up thusly:
What Johnson has managed to convince Mercola of is that ealth boils down to three things things: air, water, and light. Mercola has decided that “air” is CO2 up the bum, that water is structured water, and that light is near infrared light and how it interacts with the collagen in our body to create a sort of photosynthesis. None of this is scientifically grounded but Mercola thinks these discoveries which he will prove will earn him multiple Nobel Prizes.
Nice. Meanwhile, Johnson/Clay/”Bahlon” is influencing Mercola to replace all the top executives in his company with people known to Johnson. IT, HR, and executives? Gone. It’s all very cult-like in that the cult leader pushes the member to disassociate himself from family and old connections who might come between the cult leader and his followers. As a result, Mercola’s company is now controlled by people associated with Johnson, and former CEO Steve Rye is suing Mercola claiming breach of contract:
The former CEO of Dr. Joseph Mercola’s supplement brand — fired in February after the doctor began taking advice from a purported psychic — has sued the brand claiming wrongful termination and breach of a severance contract.
The lawsuit made additional allegations that the psychic advised Mercola to remove Christians from the staff and questioned changes made at the company since the February firings. It also alleged the company is paying the psychic $100,000 every month.
The complaint, filed in Lee County, Florida, where the company is based, called for Mercola’s company, NHP Innovations, to pay former CEO Steve Rye $5 million and cover Rye’s legal costs. The suit contended the $5 million severance was part of Rye’s contract with NHP, the company behind the Mercola brand.
And:
In videos of Mercola’s consultations with Christopher Johnson, who claims to channel a “high-vibration entity” named “Bahlon,” Johnson and the doctor discuss the evils of Christianity. Johnson also speaks of Rye as opposing Mercola and his plans to bring “joy” to “billions” with a book and a chain of clinics that would, among other things, administer CO2 gas via the rectum.
The lawsuit named NHP, Dr. Mercola, Johnson and Laura Berry, who was hired as CEO on Rye’s departure. Berry has a documented history working with Johnson and his psychic enterprises dating back to at least 2022.
And:
After taking the CEO post, Berry entered the company into a consulting arrangement with an LLC owned by Johnson, paying that entity $1.2 million yearly in monthly $100,000 payments.
Nice grift if you can get it. Meanwhile, under Bahlon’s spell, Mercola ghosted Barbara Loe Fisher and stopped donating to the NVIC:
Sadly, Fisher was clearly hurt by Mercola’s treatment, going on to ask:
Did that person tell Dr. Mercola to walk away from our partnership and his long-standing commitment to NVIC without contacting me to explain why?
The media articles published in February and March detailed the fact that this self-identified psychic who Dr. Mercola is now consulting with had convinced him that he, Dr. Mercola, is “a god” and “the new Jesus.”22 The articles contained references to videos and descriptions of what had taken place at the Mercola.com company in early February when Dr. Mercola without warning fired top executives, including his own sister, who helped him establish and has worked at his company for 40 years.
The harm that has been done to good people is shocking and heartbreaking.
The horror…the horror….
Why should we care about this?
I can imagine that, after having read my post and (hopefully) having watched Jarry’s video, you might ask: So what if Mercola tanks his multi-hundred million dollar company because he’s fallen under the sway of someone who is obviously a psychic grifter? It’s a fair question. One of my first responses would be to point out how influential and powerful Mercola has been for the two decades that I’ve been writing about issues relevant to science-based medicine and how now he is closer to power than ever before since his buddy RFK Jr. is now HHS Secretary. One could easily counter that, now that these videos of his Zoom calls with “Bahlon” are out there, there’s no way he would ever be confirmed by the Senate for anything. The problem, of course, is that many powerful positions at HHS don’t require Senate confirmation. The HHS Secretary appoints whomever he wishes, and that’s that. The person gets the position. Even if Mercola didn’t get a position at HHS, he could easily influence policy behind the scenes, given his long history of collaborating with RFK Jr.
Another reason I wanted to discuss Mercola is because it is an extreme case of what I mentioned at the very beginning of this post, namely the tendency of wellness influencers and “natural health” advocates to drift, either slowly or more rapidly, deeper and deeper into more and more bizarre pseudoscience, quackery, and conspiracy theories, particularly if, like Mercola, they are true believers in the woo that they started out promoting. It might be fun to indulge in a bit of schadenfreude over Mercola’s company going bankrupt and Mercola himself potentially being conned out of his life’s savings by a grifter claiming to be a psychic channeling an ancient powerful “high vibrational being” named Bahlon, with Johnson walking away with control of assets that used to belong to Mercola. However, I’m not so sure anymore that this will necessarily be the outcome. While Mercola won’t write books that will safe the world and cement his status as “the new Jesus,” that doesn’t mean that his swing into psychic and spiritual New Age nonsense might not turn out to be immensely profitable and influential.
One only has to read Conspirituality and/or listen to the podcast to see how that might happen—or even just observe how over the last ten years there’s been an increasing confluence between gauzy New Age spirituality and right wing conspiracy mongering, a confluence that is now in charge of all non-military federal health programs in the United States under the “leadership” of RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. As I like to say, if you had predicted to me in 2005 after I had first discovered RFK Jr.’s antivax conspiracy theories that in two decades he would be HHS Secretary, I would have laughed in your face.
It also gets darker. Near the end of the video, Jarry curates a bunch of clips of Mercola, under “Bahlon’s” encouragement, saying some truly scary things, with fantasies of violence, discussions over whether Mercola should move to Mexico, referring to himself as a “rifle” and not a “shotgun,” and his rants about how evil the Catholic Church is, which leads Bahlon to caution him not to mention the part about Catholicism anywhere because legally it could get him in trouble for religious discrimination. (His sister is Catholic.) Not for nothing does Jarry see parallels between doomsday cults and the sort of rhetoric that Mercola was engaging in with “Bahlon,” citing Jim Jones and Jonestown in Guyana, David Koresh and his Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, and the Order of the Solar Temple in Quebec.
I tend to doubt that the story of Mercola’s being conned by a psychic grifter will end that way, if only because it would be very much against Johnson’s interests for it to end that way, no matter how much some antivaxxers are making fun of Mercola right now and complaining that in one fell swoop he’s discredited the supplement industry. (If only!) Unfortunately, the undercurrent is there in Mercola’s rhetoric that makes such an end at least possible. What interests me more is the tendency of a true believer like Mercola to go more and more down the rabbit hole of quackery, until that’s not enough and he goes down a different rabbit hole, this time of New Age spirituality that leads him to believe that someone like Johnson can channel an ancient spiritual being who can provide him with guidance regarding his business, his products, and his life. We are all prone to believing in nonsense, but, as I’ve learned over the last 25 years or so, some are very much prone to believing not just in one form of nonsense, but multiple forms of nonsense. Unfortunately, these people have more power and influence than ever in our country. Indeed, the confluence between beliefs that lead to “Bahlon” and general wellness pseudoscience and quackery are basically the driving factors behind MAHA. There’s good reason, as I have argued recently, to liken MAHA to The Secret.