Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty

While filming her first season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, life coach Amanda Frances throws a painfully awkward manifestation party for her castmates. It’s not unlike the vision-board workshops you may have Zoomed into during the pandemic, when manifestation was virtually everywhere, only this one has caviar, cameras, and a host who offhandedly mentions that her house has nine bathrooms. Frances gives each guest a goodie bag with a notebook, a branded “Manifestation Moment” cup, and a signed copy of her self-published book, Rich As F*ck: More Money Than You Know What to Do With, which has a photo of her sipping pink Champagne in a tub overflowing with cash on the cover. Now, it’s time to journal. “If I could have anything, and I’d be guaranteed to get it, if the possibilities were completely limitless,” Frances prompts the table — as Kathy Hilton, who’s worth an estimated $350 million, looks on in white-rimmed sunglasses — “what would I let myself want?”

It’s the sort of question Frances often asks clients, the many thousands of women who know her as the “Money Queen” and have made her into a millionaire. Though Frances entered the Bravoverse as a relative unknown, she’s a bona fide celebrity in the world of online coaching, where the lessons are less about budgeting and investing money and more about how to feel the “vibration” of it. She regularly drops new video courses with names like “Turning Shit Into Gold,” “Become a Money-Making Coach,” and “Money Mentality Makeover,” her foundational course, which she values at more than $26,000 but can be yours for just $2,999. “Spend as though you are supported, make purchases as though more is available for you, buy things as though you are a wealthy woman,” Frances writes in Rich As F*ck. Miracles are common in her line of work; one anonymous book blurber says they received four business referrals and a random $30,000 check from an estranged uncle after reading it.

But at Frances’s Bel-Air garden party — where many of her guests are older and wealthier than she is — her shtick lands like a lead balloon. The women respond to the journal prompt with jokes and uncomfortable silences. Nobody does much writing. Bozoma Saint John, a former executive at Apple, Netflix, and Uber, speaks for many of the Housewives when she later calls Frances’s advice “woo-woo” and accuses the millennial newbie of “telling people how to manifest money by taking their money.” Since the season premiered in December, sub-Reddits have teemed with skeptical viewers who suspect that Frances’s brand of financial empowerment is just helping women sell other women the same gimmick, while some former clients told me that her advice did not, in fact, make them rich as fuck.

The Money Queen has defended her self-made empire to those crying grifter. “It’s really hard to run a business if you believe you’re taking people’s money,” Frances told me during a nearly hourlong phone call earlier this month, as we traced her history from the Bible Belt to Bel Air. “I believe that there’s a value exchange. People who value my work pay for it again and again and again. And if they didn’t like it, we wouldn’t have repeat buyers.” Plus this is a franchise with no shortage of actual fraud — from Jen Shah’s infamous telemarketing scheme to Teresa Giudice’s storied string of financial crimes. Is it really a problem to charge for a little magical thinking?

Frances calls herself a “living, breathing example that we can create what we want.” As a child, she had a book about Barbie’s life in Malibu — pink convertible, three-story house, dolphins you could see from the window. When Frances moved into her home in Malibu in 2018, she realized she had a three-story house, and a convertible and, yes, could see dolphins from her living room. She had made that happen.

But how, exactly, does one manifest the life of a Money Queen? Growing up in a middle-class family in Oklahoma, Frances spent Friday nights wandering around Walmart. Her young-adult years were marked, she says, by a cult she fell into. When Frances was in high school, youth pastors at her church said they would help her get her doctorate and become their church therapist if she attended a two-year ministry training program. They later recruited Frances and other members of her youth group to help them start a new church in Florida. But when she arrived, she discovered just how isolated she was. The spiritual advisers she once trusted controlled everything, from who she dated to how often she called home. “The less contact you have with the outside world, the less it makes sense to you,” Frances told me. When you leave, “you almost don’t have the language to be normal anymore.” (The cult has made her the butt of jokes on RHOBH. “I’ve never left a dinner party crying,” Frances told her co-star Dorit Kemsley after a tense encounter. “I thought you ran away from a cult,” Kemsley replied.)

Frances tells me it was hard to leave behind the only world she knew. “I felt like I was losing God. I felt like I was losing my family, my people,” she says. She still wanted to be a therapist — she studied psychology at Oral Roberts University, the evangelical college named after its prosperity-gospel-preaching founder, and moved to Dallas to pursue a masters in counseling — but her dream of opening a private practice would take years. Then Frances discovered life coaching. She had overheard a professor and fellow student talking about it (“What is this life coaching thing? It’s not licensed, it’s not regulated”) when something clicked. She could work wherever she wanted and start on her dream career now, before graduating: “If I have something to say and something to give, why wait?”

Turns out she had a lot to say about money. It had always felt out of reach for her, but even before studying subjects like the energy of money, she knew she was made for the finer things; her book begins with a story about how she used to sneak into upscale Dallas hotels by walking in behind someone with a key, then lounging at the pool and charging soda and guacamole to her card instead of her nonexistent room. On the “cusp of inspiration” one day, Frances wrote down a prayer: “Teach me how to earn and receive money, and I promise to teach women everywhere to do the same.”

Fifteen years later, Frances has more than 21,000 clients in 100 countries. The key to her success was taking ancient teachings and making them “blonde-girl friendly, which is a way of saying, ‘I am young, and I’m teaching it how I would want it to be taught to me,’” she says in our interview, sounding at times exactly like the disaffected Housewife she portrays onscreen and at others like an inspired Valley-girl preacher. According to Frances’s surveys, 95 percent of people who take her Money Mentality Makeover course are happy they did, and the vast majority of her customers are repeat buyers. Online, former clients swear by her — many of whom, it just so happens, are now life coaches too. “Just because people don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s a scam,” says Carley Greiner, a 29-year-old former fifth-grade teacher who has followed Frances for years and now runs her own online hypnotherapy business to help make “women rich through rewiring and regulation.” One coach who specializes in manifestation and astrology says she’s inspired by the way Frances “always shows up, despite the criticism and the backlash”; on Threads, a another coach gushed about how Frances getting cast on Housewives “teaches us you can turn your coaching business into literally fucking anything.” On Substack, graduates of the Money Mentality Makeover courses post about hitting their income goals and getting ready to “invest” in Frances’s more expensive offerings.

Pina began following Frances when she was starting up her own law practice in Toronto during the pandemic. It wasn’t that Frances offered anything unique — all life coaches, she says, “teach you to brainwash yourself into believing in yourself” — but Pina liked Frances’s ultra-feminine packaging and “Bible girl” spirituality, even though she isn’t religious. “The other people that teach this either are men or they’re boring,” Pina says. She bought a few bundles for a little more than $1,000. Was the money she spent worth it? Not exactly, she says, but only because Frances’s free content was so valuable. The main thing Frances taught Pina is that the power was already within her. Coaches are just guides and motivators; it’s still on you to do the real work of fixing your life. “You have to understand it’s not like you’re buying a product. It’s not nail polish, where you’re putting it on and actually see the result, right?” Four years ago, she started coaching fellow lawyers.

Others feel like they were drawn in by Frances’s flashy marketing when they were at low points in their lives. Jenna (not her real name), a 38-year-old restaurant worker, came across Frances in the late 2010s after losing a pregnancy. All her friends were having babies, and in a trying time, Jenna bought crystals, “weird supplements,” and a “Kick Ass Business Bundle” from Frances for a little under $300, comforted by the blessings she sent in her emails. “When you’re vulnerable, you find things you wouldn’t ever normally look at and think, Maybe this will help,” Jenna says. “I just kind of followed her. I was like, I just won’t think about money, I’ll spend and spend and spend.” She dropped around $2,000 on her courses, started traveling and attending concerts, and before long had racked up $10,000 in debt. Of course, Frances wasn’t the one hitting “purchase,” and in hindsight Jenna feels silly thinking of the chokehold Frances’s angel numbers and email blessings had on her. But watching her former coach hike around Sedona and show off her Chanel backpack on Housewives, Jenna felt unnerved. “I funded her lifestyle for no reason,” she says.

Once you start spending money on manifestation classes, it can be hard to stop, especially if you want the life a coach is portraying on Instagram. Jessica, a 45-year-old California nurse, found Frances when she was burned out by life in the ER and wondering what her true purpose was. Frances seemed to have the answers, and Jessica, fascinated by the idea of living life without a fixed income, splurged on Frances’s Money Mentality Makeover course. “I was like, I can take this course and make a shit-ton of money, and achieve more of my vision-board goals, like living in a bigger house or on the beach.” She went on to spend $3,000 on more of Frances’s courses, then started her own life-coaching business while continuing to pay for more guidance from other coaches. Jessica estimates that she ended up spending six figures on these courses in total, including $40,000 she put on credit cards and about $40,000 she took out of her retirement savings. Eventually she went back to working as a nurse, disillusioned by the “black hole” of it all. In hindsight, a life’s purpose “is just something I don’t think we’ll ever get the answer to,” she says. (If someone wants to use her teachings “as an excuse” to rack up debt, Frances says, “I can’t stop them, but that’s never been my advice.”)

As the scrutiny ramps up, Frances has tried to take the criticisms in stride. She laughs along in interviews about her “absolutely woo-woo” business, though she emphasizes that manifestation is just one part of it, a buzzword the public gloms onto. After filming this season of RHOBH, she started selling a $37 iced-coffee glass that says “Scam Artist + Cult Leader” on it. “I’ve learned through my career that you have to take your power back around things,” Frances told me. The comments took a toll on her, and sticking them on a product was her way of reclaiming a narrative that had spun out of her control. “Now that nothing crazy has come out about me, and nothing wild is being said by my actual students, I think people are kind of like, Oh, maybe this was just a ridiculous story line,” she says.

Some viewers think Frances has been trying to control too much. In January, an Ohio woman posted screenshots from some of Frances’s video courses and meditations — a woman looking out at a city skyline; Frances speaking from a hotel room — along with a short transcript of Frances’s introduction to her Drop the Motherf*cking Money Struggle course. “For thousands of dollars, I got Law-of-Attraction recycled garbage in pink-and-gold 2016 font,” the woman told me. Not long after, she received a cease-and-desist from Frances’s business manager — a fellow life coach with a “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible,” Dalai Llama quote in her email signature — demanding that she delete the screenshots. The woman took the post down, but the cease-and-desist caused a stir online, and the podcast The Bravo Docket dedicated an entire episode to it (“Is Amanda Frances Manifesting Legal Trouble?” the co-hosts called the deep dive). Frances claims the student was actually selling her content online, and she doesn’t consider her to be an “average client.” Have I noticed, Frances asks, “that anytime anyone says something bad about me anywhere on Reddit, she’s there within 30 seconds?”

Manifestation became so popular during the pandemic and the years after because it offered the idea that we could spruce up our dismal realities using the one thing within our control: our thoughts. Maybe the Bravoverse would have received this life-coach crossover differently back then, when we were all a little more woo-woo, subscribing to Lucky Girl syndrome and budgeting $30 a month for the To Be Magnetic app. We haven’t moved past the desire to delude ourselves, but the backlash against Frances suggests we might be looking for other ways to do so.

Not that buying what Frances is selling is so different than shelling out for a vibration plate or placing a bet on Kalshi. “Truth is truth,” Frances says; all religions touch on the same principles as she does. And she knows what people want. During her Housewives season, she launched an “Unavailable” course to teach the “art of energetic protection, clean boundaries, and regulated power.” It’s not about her time in Beverly Hills per se, but she did almost title it “Bitches Be Gone.” There’s even a Manifestation Moment Party training in which Frances gives you the experience she tried and failed to give her co-stars. It’s pay-what-you-feel, but the course was “always meant to find you,” the website says. “If something in you knows there is more for you … you are in the right place.” Scroll down a little, and a “join me” button brings you to the checkout page.

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