Rachel And Dave Hollis Played Themselves

It’s ironic, though, that while the Hollises were publicly depicting their marriage as a healthy one, they were apparently under marital duress. In June 2020, the couple announced in an Instagram post that they were divorcing. This sent shock waves through their community precisely because of how the couple had chosen to make their marriage part of their personal brand. In her announcement, Rachel asked for grace from her followers, saying she hoped they “can allow [the two of them] a human moment” of failure.

For the fans, though, it wasn’t about the failure of a broken marriage, it was the apparent hypocrisy. How could the Hollises have a great, enviable relationship one minute and then divorce the next? Did something calamitous happen? Or, even more sinister, had the Hollises not been truthful all along about their relationship?

For influencers in general, being genuine with your followers is paramount. It doesn’t matter if someone is a good or bad person, vapid or serious — but if followers think the influencer is lying about who they truly are, they can turn quickly.

For Rachel, this was even more important. She had not just launched an Instagram account based on her lifestyle; she had made a career out of telling her followers she held the keys to their personal, professional, and marital success. For her fans, like blogger Kalissa Friedman, the realization that the Hollises were selling her something they weren’t practicing themselves was gut-wrenching.“They told me I wasn’t trying hard enough,” she wrote of the Hollises in June 2020 after their divorce announcement. “They told me to work harder at it and they weren’t.”

The announcement of Rachel’s divorce appeared to have an effect. Her September 2020 book, Didn’t See That Coming, which promised to teach others how to overcome hardship, like the one she had just announced, failed to match the success of her previous ones, spending a mere six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Dave and Rachel were also forced to messily untangle their shared business ventures. According to LinkedIn, Dave left the Hollis Co. in December 2019 to be an author and motivational speaker full time, while Rachel launched The Rachel Hollis Podcast and continued on with her Rise brand.

But then this spring, Rachel faced her biggest scandal yet.

At the end of March, she posted a now-deleted rant on TikTok. She had apparently taken umbrage with a commenter calling her “unrelatable” for mentioning that a woman cleans her toilets twice a week.

“What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable?” Hollis said in the video. “No, sis, literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can’t relate to. … If my life is relatable to most people, I’m doing it wrong.”

She then proceeded to list the women in history who she admires but thinks are also “unrelatable.”

“Harriet Tubman, RBG, Marie Curie, Oprah Winfrey, Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Wu Zetian…all unrelatable AF,” she said.

Rachel’s apparent hubris, sense of entitlement, and delusions of grandeur were galling. Commenters wondered if she was attempting to imply that she was just as “unrelatable” as the women she listed, or if she thought of herself as just as influential. “Malala was SHOT on the bus by Taliban for going to school. What does this have to do with your little relatability fight on the internet? This is appalling to me,” one person wrote.

#Toiletgate spread like wildfire through the internet, with many bloggers and vloggers railing against Hollis as an out-of-touch phony who capitalized on a cheap message of empowerment while being spoiled and rude behind the scenes. Some said they thought this new scandal revealed the true darkness hidden in her message all along.

“The issue I have with many celebrated white wellness spaces and women’s empowerment influencer or brands is that they oddly seem to equate ‘success’ to getting what white men have and wielding that power in the exact same oppressive inhumane way that white men have been doing for generations,” influencer and activist Rachel Cargle wrote of the incident.

Rachel Hollis apologized in an Instagram post a few days later on April 5, saying she was “deeply sorry” for diminishing the “struggles and hard work” of “many people” and for mentioning “women of color whose struggles and achievements [she] can’t possibly understand.”

However, the damage was done. In that one short video, she revealed a side of herself that fans found hard to reconcile with the image of the loving, positive, and encouraging older sister she insists she is. “I have a feeling you’ve showed your true colours,” one commenter wrote on the apology post.

Couple that controversy with Dave’s recent rant, and the once-mighty Hollis empire might have fallen for good.