The Marianne Williamson zombie campaign marches on, screwing over vendors

Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP

The candidate who was going to defeat Donald Trump “with love” isn’t showing much compassion to vendors who engaged with her campaign. In case you’d already forgotten about her, spiritual guru Marianne Williamson spent some time running for president last year. She withdrew from the race in January, suspending her campaign operations and removing one of the more entertaining aspects of an otherwise dismal primary. (Full disclosure: The author was a Marianne Williamson donor. I sent her a dollar to help her qualify for the first debate because I thought she would be hilarious.)

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Speaking of campaign contributions, Williamson took in a fair amount of cash during her pointless bid for the nomination. She also ran up a lot of bills. And that’s the main subject of today’s story. As the New York Post reports, she’s still sitting on a ton of campaign debt and doesn’t appear to have any intention of making good on those obligations, leaving some smaller vendors in a serious bind. Meanwhile, she’s still racking up campaign expenses for a campaign that supposedly shut down months ago.

Marianne Williamson is facing a powerful new dark psychic force — campaign debt.

The New Age author’s presidential campaign committee still owes $238,180 to various election vendors, some of whom now say she is trying to renege on the payments. Williamson suspended her campaign in January 2020.

“She’s not paying us,” Jennifer Marshall, co-founder of Next Digital Connection, told The Post. “We are a very small business, and we will be totally and utterly bankrupted if she doesn’t pay her bill.”

The North Carolina family business Marshall runs with husband Jeffery provided much of the texting and phone-banking services the Williamson campaign used to raise money and build her profile during her quixotic run for the White House.

There are more vendors out there who are getting the short end of the stick, but the story of Next Digital Connections is probably the most damaging for Williamson. The company is composed entirely of Jennifer Marshall and her husband Jeffrey. They are two senior citizens with a very small operation. And to top it all off, Jennifer Marshall was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer last year.

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The Williamson campaign owes them more than $72K and if they don’t get it they will be effectively bankrupted. But when Jennifer contacted them last month to remind them that the bill was months overdue, Williamson’s campaign called them and offered them “pennies on the dollar” to eliminate the debt. They’ve thus far received nothing.

Another vendor that the Post spoke with is owed more than $10K. They said that at this point, they doubt they will ever see a dime of the money. So much for being all about love, I guess.

But even that isn’t the worst of the story. Williamson is still plowing through her remaining campaign cash. Her FEC filings show that the campaign spent more than half a million dollars in the first three months of the year, despite having dropped out of the race. The bills include more than $6,500 for stays in a “five-star ultra-luxe hotel” in Washington, along with other posh resorts in Los Angeles, Hollywood and New York City. On top of that, she still has at least five staffers on the payroll who collected a total of $30,587 in salaries during the first quarter. For a campaign that ceased to exist months ago. At this point, the campaign no longer even has enough money to cover Marshall’s bill in full.

Watching her burn through money like that while she still owes the Marshall family more than $70 thousand can’t be a pleasant pill to swallow. But there’s also probably not much to be done about it. Thanks to our overly generous campaign finance laws, if Williamson can manage to summon up even a marginally plausible reason why those trips were related to her campaign and if the staffers have performed any trivial tasks for her, her campaign will likely be legally allowed to spend the money. And the Marshalls will be left standing on the sidelines, watching helplessly. I have to wonder if Williamson’s many fans will still come flocking to her for her spiritual guidance and “power of love” nonsense after this story makes the rounds.

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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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