Last week I planned to tell you the story of how Chris Ashenden, the founder of Athletic Greens, was a convicted criminal in his home country of New Zealand. I would have shown you how a year before he started the his $1.2 billion supplement company, he’d been convicted on 47 criminal and civil counts for a rent-to-own real estate scheme that the judge ruled had “strong elements of cynicism” and "calculated “exploitation of people struggling financially.” I was going to tell you how he avoided paying nearly $200,000 in fines and restitution by declaring bankruptcy and fleeing to Phoenix Arizona. While the criminal charges didn’t carry jail time, the case demonstrated Ashenden’s willingness to lie and exploit people to his own advantage. It was a key trait that, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many exerts, continues in how he markets his astonishingly expensive, but mostly-spirulina health powder AG1.
But before my report went live on YouTube, Athletic Greens hired one of the most powerful defamation firms in the country to ensure Ashenden’s criminal past remained hidden. Megan Meier of Meier, Watkins Phillips and Pusch won a $787 million judgement against FOX news.
AG1 aimed intense legal firepower at my tiny internet presence to kill my report before it ever went public.
Their strategy backfired spectacularly.
It’s difficult for me to express to you how intimidating it is to receive six emails over the course of a week from a lawyer of Meier’s caliber. She intimated that I was defaming their billionaire client because of what she said were serious factual errors in my reporting. Megan Meier and Biz Lindsay, Vice President of Public Relations at AG1, both wrote me repeatedly that Ashenden was tried in civil, not criminal court, and that by suggesting he was a convicted criminal my reporting was causing damage to AG1 and Ashenden that “compounds by the minute.” Furthermore, they stated that Ashenden didn’t “flee” his criminal judgement, rather he was too busy “backpacking the world” to attend the proceedings.
Their letters caught my attention. I took their complaints at face value—assuming that I had made an error. Maybe I was misunderstanding the first line in the 2011 and 2010 judgement that stated the court had entered “convictions” against Ashenden and two other defendants. In America, only criminals are “convicted” of crimes whereas civil judgements lead to “liability”. I forwarded AG1’s team the judgement and pointed out the line, but assumed by the force of their responses that there was a semantic difference in Kiwi law.
Within minutes of issuing my early access report to my 36 (AMAZING) paid subscribers on Substack, I was already working on a massive correction—including updating URLs and re-recording whole sections of the video. I wasn’t only motivated to avoid a potential lawsuit—it was important to me to state the facts as they were.
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AG1’s team also insisted that by saying Ashenden “fled” New Zealand I was implying he was trying to avoid arrest—or that there was a warrant out in his name. Since they insisted that the case occurred in civil court, such a statement would be impossible. Meier even provided me with a document from 2019 stating that Ashenden had no criminal convictions on his record. Again, I initially took it at face value. I edited the video to incorporate their evidence and sent corrections out on Threads and other social media platforms.
AG1 didn’t stop.
They also sent me a document saying that Ashenden paid back the fines and restitutions in 2014. I made a mental note, however, that by the time he did go back to clean up his record, AG1 was already successful and the penalties were a minuscule fraction of its operating income. Would he have made the effort to correct his crimes if AG1 hadn’t exploded?
Still, if the most well-respected law firm in the country was telling me I’d made all these factual errors, I was duty bound to do the right thing and issue corrections even if it was personally embarrassing.
But when their story started to fall apart it made me all the more determined to put out the whole truth. Not only about Ashenden’s court proceedings, but AG1’s intentional misdirection of my reporting.
