Rachel Hollis is in hot water for comparing herself to Harriet Tubman, but it's not the self-help author's first controversy. Here's a complete timeline. (2024)

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In 2013, Rachel Hollis entered the public eye when she founded Chic Media.

Chic Media was a lifestyle content company.

Rachel ran the company and a blog, as Katherine Rosman reported for The New York Times.

She was married to Dave Hollis at the time she founded Chic Media. Dave worked for Disney as the head of worldwide theatrical distribution.

Rachel and Dave have four children.

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Hollis became famous in 2015 after posting a Facebook photo of herself that showed off her pregnancy stretch marks.

"I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini," she wrote. "I wear a bikini because I'm proud of this body and every mark on it. Those marks prove that I was blessed enough to carry my babies and that flabby tummy means I worked hard to lose what weight I could."

"They aren't scars ladies, they're stripes and you've earned them," she added. "Flaunt that body with pride!"

The post went viral, having 472,000 likes at the time of writing. Hollis also received news coverage for the post, as she was interviewed by outlets like Today.

Hollis' social-media platforms grew after she made the post.

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In 2018, Rachel released "Girl, Wash Your Face."

"Girl, Wash Your Face" is a self-help book in which Rachel talks about "real issues" and "the specific practical strategies that helped her move past them," according to the book's description on Amazon.

It was published by a Christian imprint of HarperCollins, Thomas Nelson. Much of Rachel's fan base consists of religious Christians, according to The New York Times.

The book became a New York Times bestseller, selling almost 1 million copies in a year.

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Later that year, the Hollises rebranded Chic Media to Hollis Co.

Dave left his position at Disney to work for Hollis Co., often referred to as HoCo, with Rachel, according to The New York Times.

The lifestyle company hosted "Rise" women's conferences with Rachel at the helm, and it offered lifestyle products like self-help journals.

It later expanded to offer clothes, jewelry, and a daily livestream called "Start Today" featuring Rachel and Dave. Their marriage became an integral part of the brand.

The company also sells Rachel's books; she released her second, "Girl, Stop Apologizing," in 2019. Like her first book, it became a New York Times bestseller.

Hollis Co. was created with a positive and feminine ethos in mind, with Rachel hosting dance parties ahead of meetings to get people to "embrace joy," as The Times reported.

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HoCo's business boomed in 2019.

Former employee Noelle Crooks told The New York Times that HoCo earned $20 million in revenue in 2019, and the formerly 10-person company hired 50 new people to help maintain its growth.

As the company became more successful, Rachel was also paid $100,000 to $200,000 to speak at events.

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But according to former HoCo employees, Rachel's internal persona changed as the company expanded.

In public, Rachel maintained her positive and down-to-earth persona, but as former HoCo staff told The New York Times, her behavior at the office was starkly different.

For instance, Crooks told The Times that Rachel "would go from being silly and talking about peeing in her pants" on "Start Today" "to walking into the office in sunglasses, not saying hello to anyone."

She also began talking directly about her wealth and success to staff, as they told The Times.

Former HoCo employees told The Times that while addressing her staff in a meeting at the beginning of 2020, Rachel said: "I am so rich, I could just retire to Hawaii and never work a day again, that's how wealthy I am." The employees said she was trying to relay that she does her work because she loves it.

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Rachel's followers accused her of plagiarizing on her Instagram in 2019.

As Buzzfeed reported, Rachel repeatedly posted well-known quotes to Instagram that she either attributed to herself or offered no attribution for.

For instance, she posted the quote "ambition is not a dirty word" in 2019, offering no attribution for the quote. However, Debra Condren released a self-help book titled "Ambition Is Not A Dirty Word" in 2008.

Buzzfeed found at least six instances of Rachel failing to attribute or falsely claiming she came up with a quote as of 2019.

Rachel has also been criticized for her use of words like "sis" and "girl," which are co-opted from African American Vernacular English (AAVE), The New York Times reported.

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In April of 2020, Hollis received backlash for not attributing a quote to Maya Angelou in an Instagram post.

A post on Rachel's Instagram read "Still...I RISE," as @ckyourprivilege documented in a screenshot.

The post did not attribute the quote to Angelou, who penned the poem and book of poetry titled "Still I Rise" in 1978. The lack of attribution made it seem as though Rachel came up with the statement herself.

Rachel later deleted the post and uploaded an apology, writing that someone on her team had made the graphic, not her.

"I immediately deleted the post but I want to make sure and publicly apologize," she wrote. "While I didn't create or post the graphic, I am the leader of the team that did and so I accept full responsibility for their actions. I can't imagine how deeply hurtful it is to the African American community to see the words of your heroes used without credit."

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Rachel posted about the Black Lives Matter movement on Instagram using a metaphor about tomatoes on June 1, 2020.

Hollis compared tomatoes growing in a certain environment to racism developing in Americans in her Instagram post.

"I grew these tomatoes. The intense heat of a Texas spring and the fact that I don't water them as often as I should, means these tomatoes are unique to their environment," she wrote. "Were they grown in another place or by another gardener they would be different, but how they were grown is in the makeup of what they are. They don't even know they're tomatoes."

"I am also a product of the garden I was grown in — only instead of a certain soil composition, I was raised in a country that taught me through osmosis that different skin tones suggested different values," she wrote. "I know we cling to the belief that 'I'm not racist' or 'I don't see color' because you honestly, probably don't realize you do. But, if you are a white American, racism is built into your being."

Rachel then invoked her best friend Brit Barron, who is the author of "Worth It" and a DEI speaker, in the post.

"@britbarron has taught me a lot of things but the greatest gift she has given me has been holding a mirror up to my privilege," Rachel wrote. "Brit taught me (watch her Ted talk in my bio) to see the history of America through the lens of how long its citizens actively practiced slavery. 400 years."

"Even if you pretend that racism ended with the civil rights movement back in the late '60s (which we know it did not) that's still 400 years, or 3,504,000 hours of practicing and accepting slavery. 3,504,000 hours of white people believing that black people were property. Look at that through the lens of '10,000 hours required to be an expert'... that means that America had 350 x 10,000 hour sets. America became an expert at racism 350 times over."

"If you're white in America, there's a good chance you were raised to be a racist whether you know it or not," Rachel went on to say. "I have racism in me — it's impossible for me not to have it in me even as I actively work to unlearn what I have learned and reject what I don't even consciously know is there."

"What happened to George Floyd is reprehensible. What happened to Ahmaud Arbery is evil. What happened to Stephon Clark, and Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner is a travesty and if those same situations had happened again and again and again — only this time it's white boys and girls — if these same things had happened to white people endlessly, we would have been rioting in the streets long before now," she wrote.

Within the HoCo company, Hollis had her staffers attend antiracist training with Barron, though former employees said Hollis herself did not attend. A HoCo spokeswoman told The Times that Hollis had previously gone through the training.

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Rachel and Dave announced they were getting divorced on June 8, 2020.

Rachel and Dave first told their coworkers about the divorce via Slack, and they posted an announcement about it on Instagram later the same day.

"We are choosing joy — even though, I'll be honest, the last month has been one of the most awful of our lives," Rachel wrote in the announcement post. "I want to be strong and bold and optimistic for you now, but every ounce of my energy is reserved in being those things for my children."

Dave later shared in a separate Instagram post that Rachel asked for the divorce.

The New York Times reported that the divorce was shocking to both HoCo staffers and Rachel's fansbecause the Hollises were publicly talking about their relationship mere weeks before the announcement.

About a month before they shared the news of the divorce, Rachel and Dave discussed the impact of the pandemic on their "make-out sessions" on a podcast for Rachel's Rise fitness app.

Dave stopped working for HoCo after the announcement, according to The Times.

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Hollis released her third book, "Didn't See That Coming," in September 2020.

Another self-help book, "Didn't See That Coming" addressed the divorce, among other topics.

It came out just a few months after Rachel and Dave announced they were ending their marriage.

Like Rachel's other two books, it was a New York Times bestseller.

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In late March, Rachel seemingly compared herself to Harriet Tubman and Oprah Winfrey, saying they were all "unrelatable" to people.

During a TikTok live, Rachel mentioned that she had a housekeeper, and someone commented that she was privileged and unrelatable.

Rachel then posted a now-deleted TikTok responding to the comment, during which she talked about her housekeeper as the woman who "cleans the toilets."

"You're right," she said, admitting that she was privileged. "But also, I worked my ass off to have the money, to have someone come twice a week and clean my toilets."

"What is about me that made you think I want to be relatable?" Rachel said in the video while laughing. "No, sis, literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can't relate to."

"Every woman I admire in history was unrelatable," she went on to say. In the caption of the TikTok, she listed some of those women, including Oprah Winfrey and Harriet Tubman.

The video went viral, with people condemning Rachel for comparing her privilege to the struggles of Black women.The comments lost her at least 200,000 Instagram followers, according to The New York Times.

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Rachel issued a now-deleted apology on April 4.

Rachel didn't accept responsibility for her actions in her initial apology for the post, writing that "to believe that because I mentioned them, I am comparing myself to them is ludicrous."

She also said she didn't issue an apology earlier because she listened to her team instead of her gut, seemingly directing blame to unnamed people who work for her.

The apology was not well received, stirring the controversy further, as Vox reported.

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Rachel issued a second apology on April 5.

Rachel's second apology, which was shared on Instagram, did not mention her team.

"I'm not going to do this perfectly but I'm going to speak from the heart," she wrote. "I'm so deeply sorry for the things I said in my recent posts and the hurt I have caused in the past few days."

"I know I've caused tremendous pain in mentioning prominent women — including several women of color — whose struggles and achievements I can't possibly understand. By talking about my own success, I diminished the struggles and hard work of many people who work tirelessly every day," she went on to write.

"I disregarded the people whose hard work doesn't afford them financial security, often due to inherently racist and biased systems. I did not allow a space for people to voice their anger, their hurt, and disappointment, which caused even more pain," she said. "I acknowledge my privilege and the advantage I have as a white woman, no matter how I grew up.

"There are many things I would like to say to reiterate just how sorry I am, but the important thing for me to do now, something I should have already done, is honestly, be quiet and listen," the apology read. "I know I have disappointed so many people, myself included, and I take full accountability. I am so sorry."

The apology was the last post on Rachel's Instagram at the time of writing.

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Hollis Co. postponed a May Rise conference after speakers began dropping out.

Hollis Co. was supposed to have a Rise conference in May, with speakers like former NFL player Trent Shelton and online marketing educator Amy Porterfield, according to The New York Times.

Porterfield told the Times she "let the Hollis Co team know that I will not be speaking at the event," and Shelton stopped being advertised as a speaker at the event.

Later, HoCo postponed the event to September 2021.

"In an effort to genuinely grow and learn from experience, the content of this event too must change," the Hollis Co. website reads under a drop-down on why the event was postponed. "And in order to show up authentically for you, it will take some time to get this right, which is why we are postponing the event until September."

Representatives for Rachel Hollis and Hollis Co. did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.