Texas Monthly Mag reports
The shaman lights a hand-rolled cigarette, inhales, and blows plumes of pungent Amazonian tobacco smoke onto the heads, chests, backs, and clasped hands of his acolytes.
Next, he might move about the room while beating on a drum. Standing six foot four, with an unruly shock of platinum-blond hair, he’s accustomed to being the center of attention. These ceremonies have taken place nearly every week for years inside his downtown Austin compound.
Some Indigenous Americans believe the tobacco, known as mapacho, possesses healing and protective qualities. But this self-professed shaman isn’t Indigenous. He’s a white, 69-year-old attorney named Mark Mueller, and his acolytes are lawyers, paralegals, and others who work for him. A Wisconsin native who earned his law degree from the University of Houston—and later graduated from the Power Path Seminars & School of Shamanism, in New Mexico—Mueller seems to revel in his eccentricities.
He sometimes shows up to depositions with a stuffed toy animal named Wizard Bear MD, JD, Esq., which appears in illustrated form atop the logo of his firm, Mueller Law Offices. He attends spiritual retreats in Latin America and the countercultural Burning Man festival, in the Nevada desert. Visitors to the elegant, 150-year-old mansion that serves as the firm’s headquarters enter through a hallway flanked by a rack of wizard and jester hats and a bench piled high with dozens of stuffed animals. The office decor also includes animal bones and teeth that Mueller has brought back from his travels.
Mueller founded the firm in 1992 and grew wealthy as a plaintiff’s attorney specializing in birth-injury cases. He claims to have won more than $400 million in settlements and verdicts for his clients, and Mueller Law maintains satellite offices in Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, and Montclair, New Jersey. In recent years, he has participated in litigation against manufacturers of pelvic-mesh implants, which doctors use to treat incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse but which have been linked to organ perforation and chronic pain. He fashions himself as a liberal crusader, with a special focus on women’s health. According to the firm’s website, he has volunteered as a rape crisis counselor and supported “a wide variety of environmental and progressive groups and causes.” A 2012 magazine advertisement quotes Mueller as saying, “The reason clients come to us is because we are guided by the principles of what’s right and wrong.”
Contrary to this marketing, however, four former employees described Mueller Law as a highly sexualized work environment in which women were subjected to Mueller’s innuendo, harassment, and misogynistic language. Last June, paralegal Delilah Stevens filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that she was treated in a “hostile and discriminatory manner” despite consistent praise for her work. Mueller, who is contesting the EEOC complaint, denies committing sexual harassment or fostering a hostile work environment.
More at. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/mark-mueller-shaman-lawyer/
