Williamson was born in Houston, Texas in 1952. She is the youngest of three children of Samuel "Sam" Williamson, a World War II veteran and immigration lawyer, and Sophie Ann Kaplan, a homemaker and community volunteer.
Marianne Deborah Williamson (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, speaker, and politician. She began her professional career as spiritual leader of the Church of Today, a Unity Church in Warren, Michigan. Williamson has written several self-help books, including A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles in 1992, which became a New York Times Best Seller. She was launched into prominence by Oprah Winfrey, being a frequent guest on her daytime talk show and becoming known as her "spiritual advisor".
In 1965, after Williamson came home from school in the seventh grade, she recounted to her parents that her teacher supported the Vietnam War. Her father reacted by taking the family to Vietnam to help explain to Marianne why he thought that the war was wrong. She has said that through travel she "had an experience, at a young age, that people are the same everywhere."
Williamson attended Houston ISD's Bellaire High School. After graduating, she spent two years studying theater and philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she was a roommate of future film producer Lynda Obst. In 1973, Williamson dropped out of college and lived "a nomadic existence" during what she calls "her wasted decade".
Although initially uninterested due to her Jewish faith, Williamson developed an interest in Helen Schucman's book A Course in Miracles in 1976. She explored spirituality, metaphysics, and meditation as she began reading the Course "passionately". She also reconciled the Course with her Jewishness; in her view, "A conversion to Christ is not a conversion to Christianity. It is a conversion to a conviction of the heart".
In 1979, Williamson returned to Houston, where she ran a metaphysical bookstore coffee shop, sang Gershwin standards in a nightclub, got married and divorced "almost immediately", and underwent a "spiritual surrender".
She was briefly married in 1979 to a Houston businessman. She said the marriage lasted "for a minute and a half".
In 1983, Williamson had what she has called a "flash" to close the coffee shop and move to Los Angeles. She got an apartment in Hollywood, where her roommate was 17-year-old Laura Dern. Dern has stated that Williamson "held prayer groups in our living room."
In 1987, inspired by a friend's struggle with breast cancer, Williamson launched the Center for Living, after a $50,000 donation from David Geffen. Williamson co-founded the organization with Louise Hay—a minister of the New Thought Church of Religious Science—who claimed to have healed herself of cancer.
Williamson has been actively involved with charity work, founding such organizations as Center for Living in 1987, Project Angel Food in 1989, and the Peace Alliance in 1998. She sits on the board for RESULTS, a nonprofit group which is dedicated to finding long-term solutions to poverty.
On November 15, 2018, Williamson announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee. On January 28, 2019, Williamson officially launched her presidential campaign before an audience of 2,000 people in Los Angeles. She appointed Maurice Daniel, who served alongside Donna Brazile in Dick Gephardt's campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1988, as her national campaign manager. Williamson's campaign committee, "Marianne Williamson for President", officially filed on February 4.
In 1989, having received another advance of $50,000 (~$106,954 in 2023) from Geffen, Williamson opened a second Center for Living, this time in New York City; this location was hampered by a conflict between staff and the board regarding Williamson's management style, which an anonymous former associate described as "very controlling".
In 1989, with the Centers' success, Williamson launched Project Angel Food (a program operated by The Centers for Living) to support HIV/AIDS patients. By 1992, it had raised over $1.5 million and was delivering nearly 400 hot meals a day to homebound AIDS patients in Los Angeles.
In 1990, she gave birth to a daughter.
Williamson resigned from Project Angel Food in March 1992. Employees demanded the resignation of Williamson, reinstatement of her predecessor, and a replacement of the board, threatening unionization if Williamson did not resign. Stephen Bennett, a consultant hired to assess the situation, determined that there were more paid staff on hand than needed, but with a union vote pending, Bennett refused to lay employees off.
In 1998, Williamson co-founded the non-profit Global Renaissance Alliance (GSA) with Conversations with God author Neale Donald Walsch. The organization established a network of "citizen salons" to pray for national growth, peace and liberal causes. According to Williamson, the GSA sat in small "Peace Circles" of fewer than 12 people every other week and prayed together.
Williamson resigned from the Church Renaissance Unity Interfaith Spiritual Fellowship in 2003. For a time, she lectured at Methodist, Episcopal and Unitarian churches.
In 2004, the GSA's name was changed to The Peace Alliance and was given a new mandate focused on grassroots education and advocacy organization. The intended purpose was to increase U.S. government support for peace-building approaches to domestic and international conflicts. The Peace Alliance advocated for lobbying congressional representatives directly.
In 2006, a Newsweek poll named her one of the 50 most influential baby boomers.
In 2010, Williamson launched "Sister Giant", a series of conferences to "start a new conversation about transformational politics" and encourage more women to run for office:
In 2012, Yale University's Women's Campaign School – an independent, nonpartisan, issue-neutral political campaign training and leadership program hosted at Yale Law School – partnered with the series, which focused on how to better address social issues like child poverty, campaign finance reform, and high incarceration rates.
In 2013, Williamson reported having assets estimated to be valued between $1 million and $5 million (not including personal residences).
In 2014, Williamson ran as an Independent for California's 33rd congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Williamson ran unsuccessfully as an independent for California's 33rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives in 2014, finishing fourth with 13.2% of the vote. She ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, eventually dropping out and endorsing Bernie Sanders. She runs in the 2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries, challenging incumbent President Joe Biden. Williamson's presidential platform calls for an end to the war on drugs, a federal minimum wage increase, reparations for racial injustice, addressing climate change, and creating a U.S. Department of Peace. On February 7, 2024, she announced she had suspended her campaign after receiving 2.9% of the vote in the Nevada Democratic primary, but on February 28, 2024, Williamson re-entered the presidential race after placing third in the Michigan Democratic primary, receiving 3% of the vote.
Williamson supports gun control, and has described the issue as one personal to her. On November 4, 2018, she gave a keynote address to several hundred Muslim and Jewish women at the Sisterhood of Salaam-Shalom conference in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, eight days after 11 Jewish people were murdered at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue. A Jewish woman, she argued against fear being used as a political force and advocated for love in its place.
Williamson does not support open borders, but calls for what she describes as a more humane approach to border policy. In June 2019, Williamson criticized then-President Donald Trump on his immigration policies after reports of children being separated from their families and being put in a detainment center; she called these acts "state-sponsored crimes". After Trump's announcement that ICE would begin mass-deportations, she said it is "no different" than what Jewish people faced in Nazi Germany.
Many pundits treated Williamson's brief campaign as comic relief. However, some found her message persuasive and influential. After the July 30, 2019, Democratic debate, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, "It feels insane to say this, but Williamson out-debated virtually everyone else on the stage. She gave a compelling answer on reparations and returned again and again to the most important issue for Democratic voters, beating Trump."
On January 10, 2020, Williamson announced the end of her campaign and pledged to support the Democratic nominee.
As of May 1, Williamson had a campaign staff of 20. A week later, she announced she had received enough contributions from unique donors to enter the official primary debates. Her campaign had raised $1.5 million (~$1.76 million in 2023) in the first quarter of 2019, during which it received donations from 46,663 unique individuals. Williamson subsequently met the polling criteria, with three unique polls at one percent from qualifying pollsters, on May 23.
Williamson's 2024 deputy campaign manager, Jason Call, departed from her team on May 20, 2023, a week after her campaign manager, Peter Daou, had announced similar intentions. The two gave substantially different reasons for their actions than did the campaign. Earlier in 2023, a dozen former staffers from her 2020 campaign, who remained anonymous due to having signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), described working for Williamson as "toxic," "traumatic," and "terrifying". Williamson has been accused of throwing phones and shouting at staff so intensely they were reduced to tears. According to one account, her anger over logistics in South Carolina led her to strike a car repeatedly to the extent that she had to receive medical attention for a swollen hand. Williamson has denied the phone-throwing charge, admitted to the car incident, and acknowledged that she may have room for personal growth.
Williamson began "working on putting a machine together" to run for president in 2024, visiting South Carolina and New Hampshire in early 2023. On February 23, 2023, she confirmed that she would launch a run for president in the future. She started her 2024 campaign on March 4, 2023.
More staff left Williamson's team in June 2023, including her new campaign manager.
In July 2023, Politico reported that Williamson had contributed $220,000 to her own campaign and that the campaign's most recent financial disclosure showed $270,000 in unpaid debts.