Ricky Williams's Foundation For At-Risk Kids Has Been Taken Over By A Rasputin-Inspired Cult

The Ricky Williams Foundation was started "to be instrumental in the physical, mental, emotional and educational development of at-risk individuals from low social-economic communities." You wouldn't expect anything less from Ricky Williams, by all accounts one of the nicest, most genuine guys in football. But how exactly is his foundation helping kids? The foundation's angel investor, Gary Douglas, explains one way:

"I teach them how to be aware of what they are aware of, and how to take answers out of other people's heads when they take tests and stuff so they can all get A's and B's instead of C's and D's."

Oh boy.

When Williams retired from the NFL after last season, he found it hard to raise money to keep his foundation going. In swooped Douglas, the founder of movement/cult/scam/pseudoscience Access Consciousness. His cash saved the Ricky Williams Foundation, but in doing so turned it into a training ground for his own organization.

What is Access Consciousness? It's hard to say. ( Their official website's FAQ doesn't clear a single thing up, but there are references to "awareness" and "energetic blockages" and "touching 32 points on the head" which produces a result "similar to deleting files off your computer's hard-drive." One (admittedly hostile) blogger describes it thus:

It all started when a "being of light" (or, alternatively, "beings of light") called Novian used the late Russian faux-monk/Whirled-class charlatan Grigori Rasputin to channel an "energy transformation technique" to a Santa Barbara, California realtor named Gary Douglas.

It sounds for all the world like an imitation of Scientology, but with a lot more sex. (Sex is huge in Access Consciousness. All marriages are open, and the promise of free love is a major selling point for Access Consciousness.) The blogger quoted above regularly posts letters from people concerned about family members who joined the world of Access Consciousness, and are too far gone to be retrieved.

What does this have to do with Ricky Williams? Everything, now. Ricky's all about Access Consciousness, just as he's previously given himself over to Ayurveda or self-medication. Ricky was practicing Access Consciousness without even knowing it, apparently—it just took Gary Douglas to recognize it—and now he's passing it on to the children. Williams taught "Level I" to his foundation's underprivileged kids last week, with Levels II and III to be taught by Douglas. (Normally these courses cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.)

As RosterWatch's Alex Dunlap points out, these indoctrination camps are taking place on public school district property. And the Ricky Williams Foundation is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, so it's tax-exempt. And even if you don't have a problem with that, perhaps you're bothered by at-risk Austin-area kids who just want to meet and hang out with a former UT and NFL star, and are instead getting recruited by a shady cultlike organization. It's hard to blame Ricky, innocent, trusting, Ricky—you get the feeling he's been scammed too.