JZ Knight: Ramtha, Cult Allegations, and Lawsuits

JZ Knight is a Washington-based spiritual figure who claims to channel a 35,000-year-old warrior entity called Ramtha, and she runs Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment in Yelm. Over four decades she has drawn national attention for the channeling itself, for persistent cult allegations from former members, for an unusually combative pattern of litigation against anyone who shares recordings from her school, for a messy divorce that put a dollar value on the “Ramtha” business, and for a political donations scandal built around leaked video of her making slurs against Mexicans, Jews, gay people, and Catholics.¹

Who She Is and How Ramtha Began

Knight was born Judith Darlene Hampton in 1946 near Roswell, New Mexico, the daughter of cotton field laborers. Her childhood included abusive stepfathers and sexual assault by an uncle at age four. She married and divorced several times, taking the surname Knight from her final husband, and picked up the nickname “JZ” from coworkers. She never attended college and worked as a cable television executive before moving to the South Sound area of Washington in the 1970s.¹

In 1977, in her Lakewood kitchen, Knight says she was making paper pyramids when a seven-foot figure appeared, radiating “golden glitter in a haze of blue aura.” She identified him as Ramtha, a warrior from a lost continent 35,000 years ago. She started channeling him publicly soon after and charging audiences to watch. By the early 1990s she was asking as much as $1,000 for an individual session.¹²

Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment

Knight founded Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment in 1988 on an 80-acre property in Yelm, about 60 miles south of Seattle. The campus, a former horse-breeding operation, holds a large auditorium, classrooms, and lodging for multiday events. The school operates as a division of JZK, Inc., and Knight works with four primary teachers.¹³

The curriculum centers on “self-empowerment” and “consciousness.” Core “disciplines” include navigating an outdoor labyrinth blindfolded for hours, telepathy exercises in which blindfolded students try to sketch images other students are transmitting, breathwork, and “manifesting,” where a student concentrates on a mental image with the stated goal of pulling the object into existence. The school’s recorded library runs more than 30,000 hours, and the U.S. Copyright Office lists 1,015 entries for Ramtha. Every student signs a nondisclosure agreement forbidding them from sharing lectures or messages.¹⁴

Money comes in through retreats, online classes, lectures, book and DVD sales, and a business offering “blue-light rooms” for healing. Before the pandemic, six-day introductory retreats ran around $450 and individual events could draw 850 attendees. More recently, online “Class 101” sessions have been priced at $720 and single-day lectures at $150. Separate reporting put the price of a day with Ramtha as high as $5,000. To hold status and move up the school’s internal hierarchy of groups with names like “Blue College,” “Red Guard,” and “Comrades,” members must attend at least two events a year or risk demotion. The school also runs a private Children’s School of Excellence where standard academics are paired with lessons in “reading minds and sensing the unseen.”¹⁴⁵

Cult Allegations

Former students and outside critics have long called the school a cult. The Southern Poverty Law Center has flagged the organization. David McCarthy, who attended from 1989 to 1996, founded a site called Enlighten Me Free and a support group, “Life After Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment,” and described his own experience as involving intimidation, mind control, and family alienation.¹

The most alarming allegation came from former student Virginia Coverdale, who told FOX 13 Seattle in 2014 that members were encouraged to drink a mixture of Dead Sea water and Red Devil Lye, a caustic industrial chemical, as a path to enlightenment. Coverdale said the practice continued for five years and that Ramtha at one point told followers to “chug it,” with hair loss among the results. Dr. Brian Keay, a local physician, said he had treated sickened followers and had written to the Thurston County Health Department and the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office in late 2012. The Sheriff’s Office in 2014 confirmed the letter was part of an “active investigation” but said the school itself was not the target. Dr. Keay described the investigation at the time as “stuck in the mud.” Representatives for Knight denied the allegations as “innuendo and hearsay” and said they planned to file a complaint against Dr. Keay with the Washington State Medical Board.³

A separate practice called the “wine purge” drew notice from JW Foster, a former Yelm mayor and paramedic, who said he had been called to the campus to treat students who had “overdone it on red wine” during assemblies. Jeff Adams, a local pastor, publicly called the school “our local cult” in his column for the Nisqually Valley News.¹

Academic opinion is split. J. Gordon Melton, a scholar of new religious movements, has argued the school functions more like an educational institution for people interested in alternative esoteric philosophy. Robert Moore, a professor of Jungian psychology at the University of Chicago Theological School, questioned whether Ramtha was a “benign close encounter” with the collective unconscious or the product of a “dysfunctional psyche.” Anti-cult specialist Joe Szimhart said the school encouraged belief in psychic powers and that there was “nothing illegal about it, but it certainly has social consequences.”⁶

The Jeff Knight Divorce

Knight’s fifth husband, Jeffrey Knight, married her in 1984 and divorced her in 1988. Under the first settlement he took property and $120,000, while JZ kept the business marketing Ramtha products, “Ramtha Dialogues.” Jeffrey later went back to court, claiming he had been coerced into signing through threats to cut him off from “Ramtha.”²

In December 1992, Pierce County Superior Court Judge Bruce Cohoe rejected the coercion claim but found that the goodwill of the Ramtha business had never been valued. He set the goodwill at nearly $1.6 million and awarded Jeffrey half, roughly $792,000. Joe Szimhart testified as an expert witness, and Jeffrey alleged JZ had fostered a “cult-like atmosphere” and used spiritual influence to manipulate the proceedings. Jeffrey also said he had been infected with AIDS and had been deprived of medical care because Ramtha “scorned modern medicine.”⁷²

In September 1994, the Washington Court of Appeals overturned the $792,000 award, with Judge Karen Seinfeld writing that “the evidence does not support the trial court’s finding that the parties overlooked the asset of goodwill.” The court did uphold about $149,000 in attorney fees for Jeffrey. He died in early July 1994, before the appeal was decided. As of March 1995 the case was on further appeal to the Washington Supreme Court. JZ Knight also filed a separate suit against Jeffrey’s attorney, Mary Gaudio, alleging Gaudio had used threats of adverse publicity about tax evasion and cash skimming to force a modification of the divorce settlement.⁷⁸

Lawsuits Against Former Students and Critics

Knight and JZK, Inc. have gone after people who distribute recordings from the school, leaning on the nondisclosure clause every student signs.

JZK, Inc. v. Coverdale

In October 2012, Virginia Coverdale posted a two-and-a-half-minute video on YouTube showing footage of Knight from a February 2012 event. JZK, Inc. sued her in Thurston County Superior Court for breach of the nondisclosure clause in the school’s “Conditions of Participation.” The court granted summary judgment for JZK, Inc. and awarded $600,021 in attorney fees and costs. Coverdale tried to bring counterclaims for defamation, outrage, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act, but they did not succeed at trial. She argued the secrecy clause was unconscionable and against public policy; the courts held that the relevant precedent limiting secrecy provisions in consumer contracts was confined to arbitration clauses. The Washington Supreme Court declined direct review in July 2014 and sent the case to Division Two of the Court of Appeals, which in January 2016 affirmed summary judgment on the breach of contract claim and reversed and remanded a contempt order against her.⁹¹⁰

Knight v. Freedom Foundation

In 2014, Knight and JZK, Inc. sued the Freedom Foundation, former staffer Glen Morgan, and his wife in U.S. District Court in Tacoma for copyright infringement after Morgan distributed DVDs of Knight’s speeches to elected officials and media outlets. In May 2014, Judge Benjamin Settle denied Knight’s motion for a temporary restraining order to suppress the videos, finding her attorneys had not shown a “substantial likelihood” of prevailing on the merits or any “irreparable harm.” Knight’s counsel argued the footage was from a copyrighted webcast under nondisclosure and had been “edited for length” to embarrass her; the defense countered that the release was fair use. The suit was dismissed in 2015 after a settlement in which no money changed hands.¹¹¹²

Knight v. Weaver

In an earlier case, Knight sued former student Whitewind Weaver, founder of Art of Life Coaching Inc. in Lacey, Washington, for breach of contract. Knight alleged Weaver violated a registration agreement by copying seven proprietary school processes, including one called “Fieldwork,” and teaching them at a seminar in August 2006. Weaver’s attorneys denied the allegations and noted Weaver had been a loyal student who had enrolled in more than $8,000 worth of classes. The case went to a civil jury trial in Thurston County Superior Court.¹³

The 2012 Donations Scandal and a Political Pivot

For years Knight was a significant Democratic donor. Her gifts included $70,000 to the Washington State Democratic Party, more than $45,000 to the Obama campaign, and $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee.¹⁴

In October 2012, the conservative Freedom Foundation released video clips of Knight, speaking as Ramtha, making derogatory remarks about Mexicans, Jews, gay people, and Catholics. The recordings included statements such as “the invasion of the Mexicans who just breed like rabbits” and a claim that Jews had “earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the [expletive] gas chambers by now.” The Washington State Democratic Party at first resisted calls to return the $70,000 but reversed on October 26, 2012, splitting the money between the campaign for Referendum 74, which sought to legalize same-sex marriage, and the Anti-Defamation League. Washington Senate Democrats also committed their portion to the marriage equality campaign. An Obama campaign official “rejected this type of hateful language” but did not explicitly say whether the $45,000-plus would be returned.¹⁴¹⁵

Knight kept giving. In July 2016, Thurston County Democrats accepted a $50,000 gift from her and declined to return it despite public calls from Republicans and the Latino Civic Alliance. That October she donated $54,000 to “People for Thurston County,” a political committee that used the money for mailers backing Democratic county council candidates. Committee chair Jay Manning defended the donation by pointing to shared environmental values.⁵

Her rhetoric then shifted. On December 8, 2016, during what the school called a “prophetic vision,” Knight channeled Ramtha praising Donald Trump, saying “that man is trumping deceit” and claiming he would receive protection from UFOs. Ramtha called Trump’s election “purposeful good” and said the “greatest misjudgment of character” was thinking a woman should win. In the same session, Knight as Ramtha claimed the FBI, not Russia, had leaked Democratic Party documents to WikiLeaks, and attacked the Clinton Foundation. A local newspaper ran the headline “Ramtha: Trump Will Save the World.” A spokesman for Knight said she did not vote for Trump and continued to support Democratic candidates in local and state races, and there is no public record of her donating to his 2016 campaign.¹⁶¹⁷

Where Things Stand Now

Knight reached her widest mainstream audience in the 2004 documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!?, which mixed spiritual self-actualization with claims drawn from quantum physics and grossed $11 million on an investment reportedly a third of that. Physicist David Albert publicly said the film misrepresented his research, and critics called it a distortion of physics in service of a “cultish ‘create your universe’ world view.”¹⁸

Knight is now in semi-retirement, but the school is still running. As of 2026, RSE lists in-person workshops in Yelm, “Fieldwork Wednesdays” on campus, and international retreats in Mexico and Spain, along with live-streamed events and downloadable teachings. It has a presence on Telegram, Rumble, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. The school has said there will be no successor channeler after Knight’s death; its recorded library of more than 30,000 hours is meant to carry the teachings forward.¹⁹¹

1
Seattle Met. JZ Knight Ramtha Yelm Washington School of Enlightenment
2
The New York Times. Worldly and the Spiritual Clash in New Age Divorce
3
FOX 13 Seattle. Shocking Allegations From Former JZ Knight Follower
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Cult Education Institute. What the Bleep Is Ramtha
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KUOW. Ramtha Channeler JZ Knight Channels $54,000 Into Olympia Elections
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Religion News Service. A Channelers Quest for Credibility Yields Few Answers
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The Seattle Times. JZ Knights Divorce Settlement Overturned
8
The Spokesman-Review. Spiritualist Hires Simpson Lawyer; Knight Says Ex-Husbands Attorney Used Threats
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Washington Courts. JZK Inc. v. Coverdale, Petition for Review
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Washington Courts. Supreme Court Sends Coverdales Appeal to Appellate Court
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Freedom Foundation. Court Denies JZ Knights Request to Suppress Vulgar Videos
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KUOW. Democrats Take $50K Gift From Warrior Spirit Ramtha Despite Anti-Mexican Slurs
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The Seattle Times. Ramtha School Head Grilled Over Lawsuit
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The Seattle Times. Squirming Dems Release Ramtha Donation After Insulting Comments
15
Northwest News Network. Washington Democrats Reverse Course, Shed JZ Knight Contributions
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The Seattle Times. Guess Whos a Big Trump Fan: Ramtha, as Channeled by Democratic Donor JZ Knight
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Nisqually Valley News. Ramtha: Trump Will Save the World
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NBC News. What Lies Beyond What the Bleep
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Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment. Current Events