Leaked audio of Marianne Williamson volunteer staff call reveals a bleak state of her campaign

Longshot Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson privately warned volunteers that her campaign was desperate for cash and that she did not have the personal funds to keep it going at its current state.

“I have put my own money in, and I don’t have the money to continue putting it in at the level I have,” Williamson said in a Zoom call for campaign volunteers obtained by POLITICO. “Cause remember I’m not making a living while I’m doing this.”

A best-selling author and spiritual guru, Williamson blamed several factors for the current financial status of her campaign. Among them, she alleged, were the press’ focus on internal turmoil and a concerted effort by her political opponents to sabotage her operations. She agreed with a volunteer on the Zoom who said that “DNC insiders” and efforts from the Democratic Party are determined to “undermine her campaign.” Williamson said she discussed the theory “quite a bit” with her campaign manager Carlos Cardona.

“It is shocking to us too,” she said. “It really makes you wonder. I've never seen anything like this. And it does make you wonder.... politics is dirty.”

At another point in the call, Williamson said she believed that “the DNC, Biden, whomever” were working to stunt her popularity on TikTok, where she has millions of viewers.

The DNC and the Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The purpose of the Zoom meeting was to revive morale with a Q&A session with Williamson that went on for about two hours.

"When it comes to finance, we're an insurgent campaign. We don't have celebrity relatives that are throwing money at us or super PACS. We're going to focus on — just like Bernie Sanders did last election — those $27 donations," Cardona, Williamson's campaign manager, said in an in-person interview on Thursday. "It's going to be a people's campaign and people's campaigns aren't always the wealthiest."

Williamson is running a progressive primary campaign against President Joe Biden, but she has experienced consistent staff turnover and is struggling to fundraise. Most recently the campaign lost more than six staffers in one week, including the former field director who took to social media to accuse the Williamson campaign of being more of a book tour than a run for office.

Williamson dismissed that allegation on the Zoom call, noting that other candidates who run for office also release books. She explained that the book coming out in September, titled “The Mystic Jesus: The Mind of Love,” is one that she was contracted from her publisher ahead of her 2020 campaign. Instead of writing that during her first presidential run, she negotiated publishing her campaign book, “A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution,” instead.

She said her political book didn't sell well and added that she only gets 50 cents a book.

One supporter on the call suggested that she could quiet the critics who said she was merely trying to turn a profit by making her book free for a week. Williamson bristled at the idea.

"It's called a library," she responded. "It's called a library."

Elsewhere on the call, Williamson’s staffer, Wendy Zahler, who has managed her past book tours, defended her.

“I’ve actually run a number of Marianne’s book tours. This is nothing like a book tour,” Zahler told the volunteers. "I had to sort of laugh when I saw the allegations that she’s just trying to run a book tour. Nothing could be further from a book tour than what goes on here. While I was laughing I was also very pained. It was very painful for me to see what’s said about Marianne because I know it’s not true.”

Time and again during the two-hour call, Williamson returned to the dire financial state of her campaign, to which she already loaned $100,000 in 2023, according to a financial disclosure from the first quarter of this year. She was questioned several times about turning to her old celebrity connections, but said she wouldn’t reach out to Oprah Winfrey. “Oprah will let me know if ever she’s interested,” she explained.

Williamson did say she had emailed actress Laura Dern, her former roommate, and had not gotten a reply. At another point in the call, she said that even former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has reneged on an offer to stump for her South Carolina. Yang told POLITICO that he did not extend such an offer.

The negative press “has made me radioactive to some people,” Williamson said.

She said a recent fundraiser in Chicago, where tickets sold for $350, yielded nearly $20,000, but $250 tickets for an upcoming event in Los Angeles weren’t selling.

In another exchange, she called fellow Democratic primary challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced that he raised $6 million in his first financial disclosure, the “bright, new, shiny object” this cycle.

“Everybody’s throwing money at Bobby,’” Williamson said.

Asked, at one point, how she combats the critics and political opponents looking to undermine her, Williamson pointed to the Zoom itself as a counterbalance.

"We do what we're doing right now,” she said. “Just deep in this conversation, forming more of a field. I think everyone on this call will be more active in their own way, clearing some energy. Because it's a force field. It fuses the forcefield, you know. It's a state of awareness that miracles come from."