What we know from any Jerry Hicks bio comes up short as a story, with gaps scattered from the start and ending with Esther. A colorful figure, he claims, with an impressive history before meeting her, but where is it?
By David Stone
Special to The Roosevelt Island Daily News
On the Abraham-Hicks website, Jerry boasted of many careers — trapeze artist, entrepreneur, folk singer. But it’s impossible to find much evidence of his life story before the 1990s.
As the 20th Century came to a close, he emerged as a top-level Amway seller, a job given to him by the family of Trish, his fourth wife.
Before that, Jerry’s biography has gaps, some decades wide. The mystery of what’s missing isn’t nearly as interesting as why it’s hidden in the first place.
Who’s Bio: Jerry Hicks or Jerry Hickson?
Who was Jerry Hicks and how did he spend sixty years, hardly leaving a trace?
Already a senior citizen in the early 1990s, he starts an affair with Esther Hicks, Trish’s bookkeeper, that wrecks her marriage to Richard. They marry shortly after her divorce is final, but a few obscure years follow before Abraham is born.
This is where Jerry’s traceable history begins.
In the fuss over Jerry Hicks’ death from leukemia, evasions about the illness and the marketing around it, his bio got even more obscure.
It was hidden for a long time, maybe deliberately, but why?
What don’t we know from Jerry Hicks’s bio:
What was his real name?
Before latching onto Esther and the law of attraction, Jerry used at least one other name: Jerry Hickson. Others may have included spelling variations and middle names.
Jerry said he used Hickson while performing as a folk artist, but there’s no record of that. Was his invisibility made possible by using other names? That might explain why so few records can be found anywhere.
When did he learn about the law of attraction?
He claimed ignorance of its origins, even while using the term and associated buzzwords around since the New Thought Movement in the 1920s.
He tried registering the “law of attraction” as a trademark, but what the heck made him think he could get away with it? His claim failed, sending him into a rage that gave birth to “the vortex of attraction.”
Besides Amway, what did he do before meeting Esther, marketing the law of attraction and launching Abraham?
“Jerry’s life reads like a celebrity bio: circus performer, juggler, boxer, singer, gymnast, radio show host, comedian, millionaire entrepreneur.”
Abraham Hicks Website
That’s his bio, according to his own website, before and for years after he died.
If he did all these things, why is there no record?
So, how come nobody finds any record of these activities?
Jerry answered a journalist once by claiming Rip Taylor as one celebrity — Taylor was at the time — with whom he’d worked. But Rip Taylor said he’d never heard of Jerry Hicks, “and I remember everyone.”
And if he was a “millionaire entrepreneur,” as the website claimed, why were he, Esther and her daughter Tracy living in a rented apartment in Fresno when, as the myth has it, Abraham seized Esther’s voice, mind and hands?
Did Abraham show them the law of attraction to lift them out of the middle class? Why need the spooky entities if Jerry was already such a money-making blockbuster?
How old was he?
There was plenty of speculation, but in the end, it turned out that he was 82 when he died.
Where are the 60 missing years from his biography? Has anyone seen a birth certificate? A death certificate or a public obituary might shed some light on the secrets too.
Neither has turned up.
In fact, we don’t even know where he died or where his remains are.
What about the first four wives… and the kids?
What happened to his first four (admitted) wives and the fiancee Jerry ditched to land Esther as wife number five? Why don’t any of them ever come out of the closet and talk about him?
Jerry makes no bones about calling them tumultuous and dead-end relationships, but what makes them shut up, disappear or both?
Are there skeletons in the closet?
Were his children “dead-end relationships” too?
What was going on before that?
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From what we know of the sketchy details of Jerry’s life with Trish, he enjoyed the benefits of a robust Amway operation — inherited from her family.
But that doesn’t explain the website’s claim of “building a multi-million-dollar business operation engaging over 100,000 people.”
Surely he wasn’t claiming to have built Amway, although it’s not much more far-fetched than the one about Abraham’s hijacking his wife’s voice and hands.
He and Trish were in the upper tier at Amway, but not the top. So, was that just a clever use of words? What does “engaging” mean to Jerry?
Is there really some giant enterprise out there nobody knows anything about?
All we don’t know about Jerry Hicks’s Bio…
What happened to the huge business he built, and how did his not-so-wealthy family end up in a rented apartment in Fresno?
That’s not all we don’t know, but you get the picture.
Jerry’s history before Esther, the Law of Attraction and Abraham is obscure or obscured. Maybe we don’t know his real name, and maybe there are several others.
It’s not easy to expunge six decades of public records, including marriages and the births of children if using a consistent identity.
The task is too large. The facts are there but hidden behind a curtain of fiction.
Does the Jerry trail lead down a road of other identities and multiple names? How else do you wipe out all but twenty-five years of an eight-decade lifespan?
What Do We Know About Jerry Hicks?
Not as much as it’s normal to expect…
Even the segments of his life with Esther, before Abraham-Hicks, the law of attraction, The Secret and after are muddy. Misleading information suggests someone with a gift for mounting false facades.
Jerry met Esther while she worked as his wife’s bookkeeper. Whether the relationship took seed while Esther still worked for Trish or after the divorce, we don’t know.
We know that Esther’s first husband discovered their affair, finding her car parked in a motel lot.
Jerry was engaged to wife-to-be #5 at the time. That probably explains why they nestled in a motel instead of his bachelor pad.
Neither Esther nor Jerry tell this story. They say Jerry had dead-end relationships and Richard was “controlling.” That’s all.
Richard’s controlling nature probably objected to her sleeping around. We don’t know if Jerry’s fiancee #5 became a “dead-end” before or after he hooked up with Esther.
Two years into the marriage, after researching Seth, an entity much like Abraham, although vastly more complex, channeled by the late Jane Roberts, they took a session with Sheila Gillette.
Gillette channels Theo.
Not much later, Abraham seized Esther and made them rich, as the story is told.
Abraham had features in common with Seth, Theo, Jane and Sheila. Abraham was in the spirit world and chose Esther, just as Seth chose Jane and Theo chose Sheila.
At great sacrifice to themselves, as many Abraham-Hicks followers insist, Jerry and Esther followed these examples in selling that wisdom in private sessions and public appearances.
“These two fun-loving adventure-seekers are currently breathing in huge lungfuls of joy as they figure-eight across the United States in their rock star monster bus, following the good weather, meeting friends along the way and enabling as many people as possible to visit with Abraham.”
Abraham-Hicks Website
Phew! Talk about sacrifice!
We don’t know all the details about how Esther and Jerry gave birth to Abraham. But we do have an incoherent story they published that doesn’t jell with other versions.
It went from intimate performances for friends, Esther and Jerry claim, and grew into crowd-pleasing live audience performances.
Jerry Hicks’s bio rolled along on his wife’s Abraham gig, writing books and editing transcripts for sale to followers not fortunate or wealthy enough to attend.
They even set up subscriptions for those in need of hearing “the teachings of Abraham” monthly on tape.
Because the invention of Abraham bonded them like asymmetrical Siamese twins from different mothers, there were never two separate people living their own lives after The Secret, inspired by an Abraham-Hicks workshop.
They were together 24X7, in their monster bus or in one of their plush residences. This shielded Jerry and his bio even further.
Until Jerry Hicks’s Death Did Them Part, The Law Of Attraction Malfunctions
Given the circumstances surrounding the last year of Jerry’s life, the end involved as much diversion and misdirection as his early years must have.
The little we know about Jerry’s bio suggests he had a relentless tendency to con. Even when inclined to talk straight, he was hushed by Esther, as we saw when they sat for a British interviewer, eager to break into new territory overseas.
They never did that again, risking only controlled “interviews” on YouTube and with the awestruck and undiscerning Oprah Winfrey.
The public portion of Jerry Hicks’s glide down to the end launched with an email blast, carrying his signature, straining to blame a spider bite at the center of his having begun “heavy chemotherapy.”
Esther later claimed, without opening the door to a rebuttal, that everyone understood “heavy chemotherapy” meant cancer.
Uhm… No, they didn’t.
Comments on Abraham-Hicks forums at the time argued that cancer was not the cause of Jerry’s hospitalization. One true believer explained that taking aspirin was a form of chemotherapy.
True believers hung onto hope that Jerry’s cancer and his choice of conventional medicine didn’t mean what it obviously meant… that Jerry and Esther knew that the teachings of Abraham were dangerous nonsense when it came to health and death.
How, skeptics wondered, did the law of attraction deliver Jerry Hicks’s incurable leukemia? Why did he seek such a death through his “vibration” and thoughts?
Esther was mute on the subject.
As disturbing as all this was to the Abraham-Hicks camp, it exposed one more secret.
Certainly inadvertent was the exposure in Jerry’s writing that he needed to put back on “fifteen pounds” of flesh.
His illness had been severe much longer than the month claimed unless he lost all fifteen pounds by surgically removing more than 10% of his body in a couple of weeks.
True believers hung onto hope…
Comparing email blasts from the group, the wonderfully funny Cosmic Connie showed that, at the time of their messages to followers, Esther and Jerry Hicks boasted of some wonderful time off after he began his first round of chemo.
But the marketing went on and workshops continued at a reduced frequency, leaving Esther and Jerry time “to play” in the intervals.
Evidence suggests that much of this play involved alternative cancer therapies, including stem cell replacement, that may have led the couple to South Korea for treatment.
Jerry’s last public appearance among other than family occurred during a Skype test. Abraham-Hicks Publishing thought it might lead to lucrative webcasts — with no more traveling.
But all anyone heard was Jerry’s voice, sounding “old and sick.”
Esther’s dress was a hit, though, turning it into sort of its own focus group.
For publicity purposes, promoters later released pictures of Jerry out with the family for a balloon ride.
Released in September, more than three months after finishing chemotherapy, and apparently designed to present a healthy and buoyant image of the then critically ill octogenarian, they ended up seeming crudely and cruelly exploitative.
By now, the upbeat email blasts with health updates, still never mentioning cancer, ended, and after the balloon jaunt, so did all mention of Jerry Hicks until, strangely, five days after the date on which Esther says he died.
The day before Thanksgiving, Esther wrote a message and sent it by email to her followers. Jerry Hicks had “transitioned” on the previous Friday.
Absent were her usual crude remarks about “croaking,” tossed out proudly when referring to anyone else, and never once did she remind us that, “It’s always good when the old ones go,” a phrase she used, getting out of the way of a more capable younger generation.
Adding to the secret of much of Jerry Hicks’ life was that her message to followers had little to say about Jerry, just some fond references to his being “sweet.”
Rather than a death notice, the message was mostly about Esther. Her narcissism failed to let her down even with the announcement of his death.
What About Jerry Hicks’s Bio After Death?
No death certificate or obituary for Jerry Hicks was found by researchers or offered by Esther.
When and where did Jerry die? Having announced that he was dead and admitted at last that the cause was cancer, what was there to gain from obscuring the details?
And why wait five days? Was there a name other than “Jerry Hicks” on the death certificate, and where did his death occur?
Information quickly removed from the internet suggested a trip to South Korea in search of a miracle cure. Was it one last dodge from questions about why Jerry did not follow the teachings of Abraham?
And how did the law of attraction lead him to an illness and death that he said he did not want?
Maybe Jerry Hicks will tell us himself.
In an event weird even for this crowd, Esther began channeling him publicly during her Abraham-Hicks workshop shows. So far, he has only appeared in asides that Esther and her followers find witty.
Maybe in future sessions, he’ll tell us his real name and explain what became of those missing fifty years.
You know, I doubt it, but maybe…
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A lot of people have been talking about Esther Hicks and the Law of Attraction lately. But what is the real story? Is she a fraud, or is she onto something? Let’s take a closer
Apparently you don’t understand the theory and teachings of law of attraction. All these questions you write and for which you have no answer. This is because no answer for you would satisfy. You would resist them, thereby continuing your loop of questioning.
Nowhere does the law of attraction say you will get a miracle in the 11th hour of something. Instead, you get what you vibrate with. (aka “As you think, so shall you be.”) In this article, you are vibrating with skepticism, so you get confirmation of that. In the meantime, who cares about what brought Jerry Hicks to where he is or isn’t today? Living life is imperfect and, amidst that imperfection, we may or may not be a conduit of spirit that changes the world or changes even one life. No one successful is called to be perfect. We are encouraged, instead, to embrace and live our own lives to the fullest. So, if and when you get on that road, see if you are still questioning minute details of how Jerry Hicks lived his life.
Your writing this article is lovely proof that Jerry Hicks did well his life’s work.
Hey, you learned all the preachy talk and the evasive memes, all the spacey rationalizations to explain away whatever it is Jerry wanted to keep hidden. But since this article is ten years old, I rather thought you apologists had run out of gas.
I agree with you that he did his work well. Esther too. But that’s only if you believe that hiding inconvenient facts and failing to practice what you’ve preached in life and death decisions is okay. I think it’s not, and carrying on the tradition that’s risked the lives of so many is nothing to be proud of.
Dear Mr. Stone. What amuses me the most is how you go out of your way to try and discredit Jerry, Esther and Abraham. You have created all these conspiracy theories and assumptions, which is fine, but the real issue here is, you feel threatened by this material, otherwise you would have stopped long ago. there is something very strange with your obession with all of this that is telling. It speaks loudly of your own fears. It has nothing to do with your target. You feel threatened. Sit down Mr. Stone, you’re embarrassing yourself. You might want to seek some type of counseling or therapy.
Oy vey!You guys need to come up with some new material. This is boring stuff. And changing the subject by attacking the writer is an old tactic that doesn’t do much to make your case. So, let’s suppose you’re right, and I’m oh, so fearful of “this material.” Would that make the facts any different? And it’s just awkward when you drag out the shopworn “conspiracy theories” as a weapon. It’s so overworked, it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
We do honor freedom of thought and speech here, however, and you’re more than welcome to try another tactic. I’d suggest trying something new, though, or doing what any normal person would do. And that is, comment on the material. If you disagree, say so and explain how. This finger-pointing exercise just looks like you have nothing genuine to say and you’re grasping at straws.
You’re stupid
Aw, gee, Wyonna. Really?
Thank you, David Stone, for the information about Jerry and Esther Hicks. I happened to pick up their “Ask and it is Given” audiobook at my local library, because I was interested in what the Biblical Abraham might say on this topic. Imagine my surprise when I started to listen! I googled more info, and read your article. No one, even Einstein, argues with the premise that all things vibrate, and that frequencies attract – but the rest of their “revelation” is preposterous.
The more you read, the nuttier it gets. Thanks!