THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY JUST CALLED HER OLD SIDE HUSTLE “SORT OF A PYRAMID SCHEME” — IT WAS BEACHBODY, AND 300,000 PEOPLE WORE THE SAME BADGE IN ONE YEAR

THE WOMAN WHO BRIEFS THE WORLD’S PRESS ON BEHALF OF THE MOST POWERFUL GOVERNMENT ON EARTH JUST DESCRIBED HER OWN SIDE HUSTLE AS “SORT OF A PYRAMID SCHEME”. Not a critic. Not a regulator. The White House Press Secretary herself, talking about the years she spent selling a protein shake for Beachbody. And the company’s response was not a denial — it was a confirmation that she was one of 300,000 “independent Team Beachbody distributors” in a single year.

Read that number again. Three hundred thousand people, in 2013 alone, wearing the badge of a business that its own former participants describe in exactly the language regulators use. That is not a fitness company. That is a recruitment machine with a workout video attached.

And before anyone reaches for a party badge: this is not a left-or-right story. It is a story about what multilevel marketing does to ambitious people — the ones with drive, with a network, with a gap in their CV and a friend who says I’ve got something for you. It happens in every income bracket, every political tribe and every country on earth. This week it just happened to surface in the briefing room.

WHAT SHE ACTUALLY SAID

On 15 October 2026, WIRED reported that Press Secretary Katie Zacharia’s LinkedIn profile showed an unexplained gap stretching from 2013 to late 2023. Part of that gap, she confirmed to the outlet, was spent as an affiliate marketer for Beachbody — the company behind P90X, Insanity and 21 Day Fix.

Her product was Shakeology, marketed as a “superfood nutrition shake”. She says a friend brought her in. She says she stopped using and promoting it because of its vitamin A content, which she did not feel was safe for her while pregnant.

And she described the structure she was selling into, in her own words, as “sort of a pyramid scheme.”

Beachbody — now trading as BODi — confirmed she was never an employee. It also confirmed the part that matters: she was one of its 300,000 “independent Team Beachbody distributors” in 2013.

Three hundred thousand. That is roughly 822 people a day carrying that badge, selling shakes and workout subscriptions to their friends, family and Facebook feed. Not employees. Not franchisees with protected territories. “Independent distributors” — which in plain English means people who carry the inventory risk, the monthly purchase requirement and the reputational cost, while the company books the revenue the moment the product leaves its warehouse.

THE NUMBERS BEACHBODY NEVER PUTS ON THE TESTIMONIAL PAGE

MLMs survive on selective memory. So here is the part the recruitment videos leave out.

1. They were already caught lying about what the products do. On 28 August 2017, a final judgment was entered against Beachbody in Santa Monica Superior Court. The company paid $3,579,000 — $2,579,000 in penalties plus $1,000,000 in restitution — after the City Attorney’s office ran an undercover investigation and alleged the company made health claims that were “false, misleading, and not backed by scientific evidence”. The claims in question covered detoxifying, anti-aging, reducing inflammation, balancing hormones and preventing mental decline. The judgment also required Beachbody to stop charging customers’ credit cards on an automatic, recurring basis without their express prior consent.

That is the product line the distributors were told to sell with a straight face.

2. The “coach” economics are a joke told at the seller’s expense. In May 2023, a class action filed in California put real numbers on the dream. The lead plaintiff was a schoolteacher who joined Beachbody hoping for a bit of extra income. According to the Los Angeles Times‘ reporting on the case, she ended up putting roughly $20,000 of her own money into her coaching “business” and was paid about $50 a month for about 50 hours of work — roughly a dollar an hour, before you count what she spent.

That is not a business. That is a second job where you pay the employer.

3. It was never a few bad apples. When Truth in Advertising (TINA.org) audited every company on the Direct Selling Association’s membership list between June and November 2017, it found that more than 97% had made or were making improper income claims. Beachbody’s distributors were so prolific that TINA.org built a dedicated public database of their earnings claims — screenshots and videos of ordinary people promising riches that the company’s own income disclosure statements could never support.

Every one of those claims was made by a “business owner” who was told, in training, that this was how you build a brand.

THEN, QUIETLY, THEY ADMITTED IT

Here is the sentence that should end every argument about whether the model was ever honest. In 2024, BODi announced it was axing the multilevel marketing model entirely in favour of a single-level affiliate programme, with the old network sunset by 1 January 2025. The company’s own executive chairman called the MLM structure “outdated and unsustainable.” The same announcement confirmed layoffs affecting approximately 33% of staff.

Outdated and unsustainable. Translation: it stopped working — for them. It had already stopped working for the 300,000 people a decade earlier, who were carrying the badge long before the phrase became inconvenient.

And the company’s defence today is telling. BODi told WIRED that Team Beachbody was a “peer-to-peer sales and support network” that helped “tens of millions of people” pursue their health goals, and that conflating that history with its current operations would be “misrepresentation”.

Misrepresentation is a strange word to reach for. Because the misrepresentation that was proven in court here was a $3.6 million judgment over product claims, and the structural change only came after a class action and years of income claims that could not be substantiated. Rebooting the brand name does not retire the receipts.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND ONE RÉSUMÉ

Because the recruitment pitch is exactly the one that worked on the most media-trained, most scrutinised, most ambitious professional in the country — and it came from a friend. That is the vector. Not a billboard. Not an advert. A person you trust saying I’m doing this, you’d be good at it.

MLMs do not recruit the desperate first. They recruit the energetic, because the energetic have networks, and networks are the actual product. Your contact list is the inventory. Your credibility is the marketing budget. Your family is the customer base. And when the maths finally catches up — when the £300 of product is sitting in a cupboard and the “team” has stopped replying — the loss is not just money. It is friendships, and the story you told yourself about being the kind of person who makes things happen.

The person who gets out with their savings and their relationships intact is the lucky one. The one who describes the whole thing afterwards as “sort of a pyramid scheme” — on the record, in the press, sixteen years later — is telling you what the income disclosure statement was designed to hide.

IF SOMEONE IS RECRUITING YOU THIS WEEK, DO THIS

Demand the income disclosure statement — then read the bottom line, not the top. Find the percentage of active distributors who earned nothing. Find the median, not the average. If the document splits participants into “those who chose to build a business” and “everyone else”, ask who decides which bucket you land in after you’ve paid.

Add up the cost of participation, not just the cost of the product. Monthly product minimums, training, “business tools”, event tickets, branded merch. The FTC has already forced one major MLM to stop charging new recruits for training in their first year — ask yourself why that rule had to exist.

Check whether the money comes from customers or from recruits. If your commission depends more on who you sign up than on who you sell to, you are the customer.

Report it. In the US, file at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. In the UK, report misleading earnings claims to the Advertising Standards Authority and to Trading Standards through Citizens Advice — screenshots of the claim, the account and the date. In the EU, your national consumer authority. Complaints are free, they take ten minutes, and they are the only thing that has ever moved this industry.

And warn the friend. Not with a lecture — with arithmetic. Ask them what they spent last month, and what they earned. Then ask them, kindly, which of those two numbers is growing.

THE POINT

A company that once sold “detoxifying” shakes, auto-charged credit cards it wasn’t allowed to charge, and ran a network of 300,000 independent distributors in a single year has now decided that its own past is a misrepresentation of its present.

It is not. It is the same business, in a better costume. And the proof is that the people who sold it still describe it the way regulators do — in the past tense, with a wince, and with the word pyramid in the sentence.

Sources: WIRED, 15 October 2026 · Santa Monica City Attorney, 29 August 2017 · Athletech News on BODi ending its MLM model · TINA.org Team Beachbody income claims database · Los Angeles Times, May 2023 (class action reporting, via WIRED).