He ran a cultlike empire until his death. Did this ‘hypermasculinity’ pioneer escape justice?

A. Justin Sterling, the elusive founder of a chauvinistic relationship group who died March 21, paved the way for the toxic male influencer culture of Andrew Tate.

San Francisco Chronicle/March 28, 2025

By Raheem Hosseini,

A. Justin Sterling, the elusive founder of an Oakland-based self-improvement empire accused of misogynistic and cultlike practices, died Friday, March 21. He was 82.

For more than four decades, Sterling cultivated a brand as a relationship guru who professed to strengthen heterosexual bonds by teaching men to embrace their egos and women to support their men. A strutting counterpoint to second-wave feminism, the 5-foot-7 Sterling often took the stage of his segregated weekend seminars in snug T-shirts and lifted boots, and extorted his audiences to embrace traditional and even prehistoric gender roles.

His followers lauded him for changing their lives. His dissatisfied customers and two ex-wives accused him of emotional, verbal and financial abuse. And his brand of chauvinism paved the way for the current generation of men’s rights influencers, said Rick Alan Ross, executive director of the Cult Education Institute, a New Jersey research nonprofit.

“He was one of the early pioneers of hypermasculinity,” said Ross, a national authority on cults who testified in Sterling’s second divorce and held interventions for his followers. “And the people that are pushing this now are pushing exactly the same thing, whether they knew him or knew of him or not.”

Reinventions

Born Arthur Karsijian in Brookline, Massachusetts, in September 1942, Sterling moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and changed his name following a grand theft arrest and a formative stint learning from self-help godfather Werner Erhard, according to a 1999 Details magazine profile republished by the Cult Education Institute.

Emerging from the 60-hour seminars of Erhard Seminars Training Inc., or est — which now sells its workshops as Landmark Worldwide — Sterling incorporated the Sterling Institute of Relationship in Oakland in 1981, state business filings show. The eponymous institute and the weekend seminars it conducted lifted much from Erhard, said Ross, down to promising life-changing results with scant details, and mixing deprivation and group therapy-style trappings to erode attendees’ defenses.

For nonrefundable sums of hundreds of dollars and their signatures on confidentiality agreements, Sterling’s weekend attendees endured long waits, longer lectures and compromising activities that reduced men to nonverbal howls and women to fetal sobs, said Ross and former participants.

The men’s weekends climaxed in a pseudo-ritualistic ceremony where the men were commanded to strip naked, paint themselves and chant as volunteers filmed the proceedings, said former participants. Male graduates received necklaces spooled with two bolts, to signify their reclaimed testicles.

Women’s weekends culminated in a different type of display, with women urged to recount their sexual experiences in detail as Sterling watched.

“He sat in his little director’s chair listening to them and getting off on it probably,” recalled Amber Alton, 47, who attended a 2019 weekend in Los Angeles after her then-husband fell into the group. “It was a very disgusting display, but some of the women thought they were freed. … At the end, he said we used to have crazy monkeys in our heads telling us things, but now it would be him in our heads.”

Alton and her former husband were referred to Sterling by their marriage therapist, Alan Hill, who said he sponsored more than 100 people to the weekends.

“I can’t think of one that had a terrible experience,” Hill said, before correcting. “Maybe there was one, now that I think about it. I think there was one.”

A recovering alcoholic who didn’t meet his father until his 40s, Hill, 68, attended his men’s weekend in January 1996 and remained involved with his Sterling men’s group for 25 years. He said the weekend helped him develop closer bonds with other men, whom he credits with holding him accountable to his goal of obtaining his therapy license.

Hill said his Sterling brothers also supported him when his oldest son, a men’s weekend graduate, died by suicide. Hill doesn’t blame Sterling; quite the opposite. He said his son wasn’t able to utilize the tools he learned from Sterling.

“I think Justin Sterling was one of the most profound influencers of how I live my life,” said Hill, who stopped leading Sacramento-area meetings around 2021, as Sterling’s appeal waned. “It had gotten quite a bit smaller.”

Sterling was able to build something close to a one-man empire by relying on his followers to recruit weekend attendees and run his conferences, Ross said. That’s a common tactic of “large group awareness training,” or LGAT, models like the Sterling Institute. “The other purpose was to create this subculture of peer reinforcement where the ideas that you accepted … through the indoctrination process of the weekend would be reinforced and agreed upon constantly.”

And while new LGAT gurus crop up regularly, Ross said, they’ve been supplanted by their online children in the “manosphere,” personified by “male supremacist” influencer Andrew Tate, who has 10.8 million X followers despite facing charges of running a criminal human trafficking ring in Romania.

“The new incarnation of people like Sterling is that they recruit online, they have a following online, they make their money online,” Ross said. “Sterling … was like the historical precursor of all this.”

Sterling, who didn’t grant interview requests while alive, flirted with the virtual space during the pandemic, resulting in some of his only public recordings. In 2020 and 2021, he posted short videos on Facebook promoting his weekends.

In his final video, posted in December 2021, he addressed his “well diggers,” graduates who recruited others to the weekends. “That’s the basic foundation of this community, people helping other people,” he said. “As we move forward in producing weekends, let’s hope that we can continue to deepen and broaden the scope of this community.”

The video had 14 likes.

Inside Sterling’s world

Amber Senegal, 44, was among a handful of people to draw a paycheck from Sterling.

Her husband attended a 2005 men’s weekend and Senegal, trying to hold her marriage together and contemplating suicide, attended her women’s weekend in Los Angeles in December 2007.

“It saved my life,” Senegal said. “It helped me realize that I married the wrong man for me.”

Senegal began volunteering for Sterling. In March 2009, she became his executive assistant. She made $15 an hour and was held below 40 hours a week so she wouldn’t receive benefits, she said.

She said she did everything the accountant didn’t do, including processing payments for 24 weekend seminars a year in Oakland, Los Angeles and New York. She noted, anecdotally, that roughly a third of weekend recruits seemed to be actively in recovery for alcohol or substance use.

Alton said her then-husband was encouraged to recruit people at his 12-step meetings.

Senegal left Sterling’s employ in April 2012 to pursue a health care career, but a crippling knee injury and a lengthy recovery scuttled that path and put her into the street.

Around August 2013, Sterling’s second wife offered her a job as the couple’s live-in home manager at their $2.5 million Piedmont estate. Senegal got her same wage and the maid’s quarters in the basement. She also saw a different side of Sterling, whom she had considered a good if stingy boss.

Senegal said she witnessed Sterling verbally abuse his wife on multiple occasions, calling her misogynistic slurs and humiliating her for doing things he’d asked her to do. The Chronicle was unable to reach her for comment, and is not naming her.

“It was bad,” she said. “Here’s this guy teaching us how to have great relationships and doing the opposite. … He was a complete dick.”

Sterling’s first wife had accused him of child abuse and divorced him, the Mercury News reported in 1996. His second wife took out a domestic violence restraining order in 2016 and filed for divorce the following year, Alameda Superior Court records show. The couple divorced in 2020.

Ross, who testified in the second divorce, said it was the first time he saw Sterling in person. He did not come away with an improved impression.

“What is his credibility based on? His personal experience, which is two divorces, estrangement from his children, abusing his wife,” he said. “To me, that says it all. He had nothing to offer, really, other than a very negative, destructive philosophy. But that’s his legacy.”

Senegal said Sterling laid her off in December 2015. Her next five years were a tailspin.

She used crystal meth, fell in with a crowd of scammers and sadists, and was convicted of fraud, identity theft and drug possession. She clawed her way to sobriety, but still has psychic scars, she said. The San Jose resident is on Social Security Disability Insurance, attends therapy, cares for her dogs and lets them take care of her.

Around 2021, she reached out to Sterling’s second ex-wife for a character reference as she tried to get off probation early. Senegal said she received a lengthy text apologizing to her and saying they had been victims of Sterling’s cult. Senegal said she used to joke when people outside Sterling’s circle told her that.

“‘You’re absolutely right, I am,’ and I’d say, ‘You want to join?’” Senegal said with a laugh.

Senegal said she still thinks the weekend saved her life, even if it wasn’t a cure-all, even if Sterling ultimately led her to a different dark place.

“Such is life, in a sense,” she said.

The future of the Sterling Institute for Relationship is being discussed internally, a representative said through Facebook, where the institute has 1,000 followers. The institute is still advertising $725 packages for men’s and women’s weekends in May and November on its website.

Della Mae Chadwick, 49, of Cotati is helping organize an online tribute to Sterling.

She did her weekend in 2006 with about 75 women and worked for Sterling as an administrative assistant for about a year in 2012. The personal trainer, acupuncturist and massage therapist said she sponsored 20 men and 45 “little sisters” to Sterling weekends even though she hated her own and found Sterling obnoxious. But she eventually came around to his appeal.

“He’s a mad scientist, he’s a genius and, yes, I’m still using present tense because Justin is still alive in my heart,” she said. “You either love him or hate him. And for me, I didn’t like him during my weekend. … It took me several years.”

Ross said he wouldn’t be surprised if the weekends carried on in some fashion, but petered out without its founder, who made millions telling other people how to live. And though Sterling’s profile never reached the level of Erhard, the subject of IRS investigations and damages lawsuits, or NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, now serving a 120-year prison sentence on racketeering and sex-trafficking offenses, that may have been Sterling’s savviest move, Ross said.

“He did fly under the radar,” he said. “And I think that may be part of his legacy as well: ‘I got away with it.’”

Alton, now happily divorced, had a different take. “He has no legacy,” she said.