FreeLife

Ray Faltinsky

FreeLife International is an American multi-level marketing company established in 1995 by Ray Faltinsky and Kevin Fournier that supplies nutritional supplements.

Ray Faltinsky and Kevin Fournier were backed by a group of investors that included family, friends and Anson Beard, previously of Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter. BFreeLife International was launched as a direct sales company based on Ray Faltinsky's prior research on that business model.

FreeLife includes operations in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Trinidad & Tobago, and the United States.

Over several years, the company's spokesperson Earl Mindell made claims of unfounded health benefits from consuming the company's goji juice product called "Himalayan Goji Juice", implicating anti-cancer and anti-aging properties. Specifically in 2007, Mindell's statements were made during a hidden camera investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation whose reporter, Wendy Mesley, questioned the supposed anti-cancer properties of Himalayan Goji Juice. During the same investigation, it was found that Mindell's Ph.D. qualification was in fact invalid, as had been questioned a decade before. Mindell's Ph.D. was supposedly conferred in 1985 by Pacific Western University, an unaccredited distance-learning institution with no campus. Authoritative databases of accredited US institutions exist at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA database) and United States Department of Education (USDE accreditation database); neither lists Pacific Western University as of February 2007. It was proven by subsequent studies that Mindell's claims were unfounded and based only on preliminary laboratory research on cancer cell inhibition, a finding that was never confirmed in other laboratory or human studies. As a result, FreeLife severed its relationship with Mindell in 2008, but was further associated with him as a codefendant in a 2009 legal case (below).