Like many of her public utterances, the message that Australia’s platinum-haired self-help guru Rhonda Byrne sent out last November to her millions of followers was a rhapsodic outpouring of goodwill.
“Remember,” Byrne wrote, “if you are criticising, you are not being grateful. If you are blaming, you are not being grateful. If you are complaining, you are not being grateful.”
Those are worthy sentiments, but it was an odd time for Byrne to be expressing them because her lawyers had just sued two of the very people who were instrumental in launching her book and film The Secret to phenomenal success.
For a woman whose central message is the power of positivity, Byrne has a surprisingly long history of such bust-ups, stretching back to her days as a television producer in Melbourne.
In The Secret, Byrne claimed to have uncovered the key to human happiness, which turned out to be a very simple principle called the “law of attraction” — the notion that if you focus on your desires, the universe will deliver them.
If there’s a karmic backlash brewing, it’s one that even some alternative spiritual thinkers welcome.
Not that Wilson doesn’t admire Byrne’s marketing genius.
Nothing is excluded from the law of attraction.
RHONDA BYRNE RARELY APPEARS in public now — her last major interview was with The New York Times a year ago, when she held court in her Santa Barbara apartment wearing a glittering silver circle glued to her forehead.
In early May, however, Byrne emerged from seclusion when she turned up at a lawyer’s office in Los Angeles to give a videotaped deposition in her company’s lawsuit against Dan Hollings.
“I don’t control anything I create,” she told the lawyers, professing to have little grasp of the legal disputes in which she is embroiled.
This is a very different-sounding Rhonda Byrne from the savvy and ambitious TV producer who worked the phones relentlessly as a producer at the Nine Network’s Midday show in the early ’90s, before going on to create a stream of reality-TV programs about UFO encounters, unsolved murders and near-death experiences.
“She knew exactly what was going on around her,” recalls TV producer Peter Wynne, her former boss at Midday’s Melbourne office.
Emma McLean, who worked alongside Byrne at Midday, has claimed that the Nine Network fired both of them after they set up a sideline business in their office selling calorie-counting pedometers which had been featured on the show (they even sold one to Wynne).
“She started saying, ‘I’m the creative person and they’re my ideas, therefore I should be getting more of the profit,’” McLean told The Sun-Herald last year.
Interviewed for this article, McLean declined to comment further.
According to the dramatic narrative of The Secret, it was four years later that Byrne was shattered by the sudden death of her father and the news that Prime Time was effectively bankrupt.
The full story of how Byrne turned that realisation into “the greatest success story in the annals of viral marketing” — to quote The American Spectator — is only now emerging in court papers filed in the US and Australia, and from interviews with the participants.
Having discovered the Grand Unifying Theory of the self-help movement, Byrne conceived the idea of making it into a TV series, and turned to a 25-year-old Melbourne director called Drew Heriot. Heriot had worked for Prime Time since 2000, and in early 2005 he began helping to refine the idea into a two-hour TV special.
It was to be a whirlwind ride for the young director, who in the course of filming became a confirmed adherent of The Secret’s philosophical tenets, and remains so.
Now living in Los Angeles, Heriot recalls that early on Byrne promised him a percentage of the film’s profits, but rebuffed his request for a written contract.
“But by the same token, my company and Rhonda’s had worked together for several years, so I had come to trust her.
For much of 2005, Heriot says he pushed aside his reservations as he poured his energies into the film, whose striking visual style — the medieval motifs, the dramatic re-enactments, and the technique of having each speaker talk directly to the camera — he claims to have devised. He recalls editing down 100 hours of interviews over several months, and says he was paid monthly fees which eventually totalled a “five-figure sum”.
In January 2006, executives from Nine watched the film and dropped a bombshell — they had decided against screening it. The indefatigable Byrne then decided to release it via the internet in the US, a high-risk strategy that was undertaken with the help of Dan Hollings, an Arizona-based internet consultant. Like Heriot, Hollings claims Byrne offered him a percentage of profits; in court filings he quotes an email from Byrne which allegedly promised him $8000 per month “plus a share of 10 per cent of gross margins of all revenues from The Secret website”.
“I had seen the trailer and it was remarkably well done,” says Hollings from his home in Tucson. “I said, ‘Holy cow, I don’t know what this is but it looks like it’s going to be good.’”
The Secret had no conventional advertising, and Hollings says he devised viral marketing techniques involving Google adverts and blogs, and also helped Byrne set up her online ordering and customer-support systems. In March 2006 the movie was launched as a teaser-download linked to a $US34.95 DVD, and within weeks it had taken off. Although no verifiable figures have been published, the film was reported to have grossed nearly $20 million in its first eight months.
The disputes about money began almost immediately. When Heriot emailed a request for payment to Byrne the day after the film’s release, she responded that he was being “unappreciative” and that they had “some serious thinking to do” — an exchange she has acknowledged in court filings. Hollings says he put in his claim for profit-share a few weeks later. “Money was flowing in incredibly well during that first month and I fully expected that, as agreed, I’d get paid the monthly percentage of revenues from the site from that point on,” he says. His court submissions allege that Byrne’s Chicago business office issued a succession of false assurances that the money would be forthcoming.
Unbeknown to both men, the corporate structure behind The Secret had changed dramatically, for in late 2005 Byrne had met the man who would become her business manager — Bob Rainone, a Chicago-based executive from the computer and internet industry. Rainone helped Byrne create a new corporate structure around her film and on April 11 they transferred the copyright to a Hungarian company which operated out of a lawyer’s office in Budapest.
Your wealth is waiting for you in the invisible, and to bring it into the visible, think wealth!
IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER this that another dispute opened up between Byrne and Esther Hicks, a 59-year-old spiritual-medium from Utah who had been central to the film. Hicks, who tours the US speaking in the disembodied voice of a spirit entity called Abraham, publishes a range of best-selling New Age books based around the law of attraction. She narrated the film, and in an open letter on the internet has claimed that Byrne contractually agreed to pay her and her husband, Jerry, a percentage of both net profit and video sales, but then asked them to rescind the contract.
“We received an email from the producer of The Secret lovingly explaining (we never have received correspondence from her that was anything other than extremely loving) that the contract that we had all agreed upon and signed was no longer sufficient for their further distribution of the project,” Hicks wrote in the email. The original contract, said Hicks, had been for a TV broadcast, but with the film now being distributed online, Byrne wanted the contract annulled or she would “reluctantly” be forced to edit Hicks out of the film.
Lawyers were called in, and the dispute threatened to derail publication of a tie-in book Byrne had contracted to write. Hicks, who had earned $500,000 from the film in just a few months, agreed to be edited out of the film after consulting her spirit entity, and in October 2006 Byrne released The Secret — Extended Edition, with the Esther Hicks segments replaced in part by similarly worded passages from other teachers. Jerry Hicks has since said he and his wife contemplated legal action but felt it would be a negative use of energy.
Drew Heriot, meanwhile, had moved to California. About a month after the film’s launch, he says, he met Byrne over lunch at the Santa Monica restaurant Shutters to raise the issue of his remuneration, and by the end of lunch Byrne had fired him. “Essentially, she said my company wouldn’t be working with her again and they’d be using another writer and director for the sequel.
“The money was returned but at this point I had moved to America to be part of the expansion; I didn’t have a proper working visa so I had no other income. It was so hard to believe, because it was counter to all the principles of The Secret and our working relationship. Basically, she had got what she wanted from me. It really felt like a betrayal.”
All good things are your birthright!
IN THE SECRET, a succession of American personal-development gurus explain that by really focusing on what you want, your positive energy flows out into the universe and is rewarded.
It’s a message of self-gratification that’s been promoted by thousands of motivational spruikers for many decades, but when Byrne repackaged it as an ancient secret with a red wax seal, she hit the holy jackpot. Ellen DeGeneres, the American talk-show host, told her audience that Byrne’s book was so profound it would change their lives.
By February last year Byrne’s book was number one on The New York Times’ bestseller list and she had appeared before the 23 million viewers of Oprah Winfrey, whose personal endorsement launched The Secret into the sales stratosphere.
Even alternative spiritual teachers such as Paul Wilson have criticised the book’s message as simplistic and contradictory.
Byrne herself sounds equivocal on this latter point, telling one interviewer that “many factors” cause millions to die in tragedies such as the Holocaust, but “if their dominant thoughts and feelings were in alignment with the energy of fear, separation, powerlessness and having no control over outside circumstances, then that is what they attracted”.
One person who was profoundly affected by The Secret was its director. Like Esther Hicks, in fact, Drew Heriot was reluctant to engage in litigation with Byrne until he realised that taking a stand would not conflict with the film’s philosophy.
Last September Heriot contacted an attorney and filed a copyright claim on The Secret in the US. Dan Hollings, meanwhile, had hired a lawyer to negotiate his pay dispute after Byrne’s company fired him in February 2007.
“In my opinion it’s a bogus lawsuit merely constructed to make me fold and go away,” says Hollings, who denies the side-commission claims and says Byrne gave her personal blessing to his music CD.
In May this year, Hollings accompanied his lawyers to Los Angeles to obtain a deposition from Byrne in the lawsuit.
Byrne said she knew nothing about the Hungarian company and regarded the business as merely “a channel for it (The Secret) to go out into the world”.
Both Heriot and Hollings are now suing Byrne in the US, alleging fraud, with Hollings claiming he could be owed $US3 million plus damages on top of the $US194,000 he has already been paid. Byrne, who once thanked both men in her book, recently filed a counterclaim asserting that Heriot’s role in the film was merely that of “supervisor”, and that she exercised complete creative control over the film.
All of which seems to contradict the law of attraction — unless you believe the universe is trying to restore balance by undermining the entire glittering edifice of self-help entrepreneurialism.
Like all of those who appeared in the film — except Esther Hicks — Canfield received no payment, but says he has benefited many times over from the exposure.
Whatever you sow, you reap!
FOR HIS PART, Drew Heriot’s faith in the law of attraction remains unshaken.
“Rhonda and I were good friends — she trusted me to execute the vision, and I trusted her to share the profits with me as co-creator,” he says.
If bad energy is floating The Secret’s way, there is no sign of it yet — the book and film are so popular that bootleg versions are appearing as far away as Iran. But Dan Hollings — who never did believe in the law of attraction — is not so optimistic about what the universe might have in store for Byrne.
Staff writer Richard Guilliatt’s previous story was “Solitary man” (July 26-27), about Australian film and stage director Jim Sharman.
