As the girlfriend of one of the world’s most famous health experts — a neuroscientist and podcaster whose advice on healthy living is observed by millions — Sarah always knew that Andrew Huberman was in demand.
Such was the cult-like star power of her heavily tattooed, muscly ‘wellness bro’ boyfriend, who is an associate professor at Stanford University, California, and whose podcast is one of the most popular in the world, that whenever they went out together he would be mobbed by admirers. Quite how much in demand she only discovered in the summer of 2022, however, when she grabbed his mobile phone after he’d left it in the bathroom and looked through his text messages.
The couple were having IVF treatment to have a baby, but Sarah had started to get suspicious about his behaviour with other women, only for Huberman to bat away her doubts. They were just ‘stalkers, alcoholics and compulsive liars’, he reassured her. His mobile phone told a different story. Even during a camping trip he’d just returned from with Sarah, he’d been communicating with another woman, Eve.
‘Your feelings matter,’ Huberman, a master of the language of professional therapy and psychobabble, told Eve. ‘I’m actually very much a caretaker.’ In a later text he confided: ‘I’m back on the grid tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.’
It has been alleged that Huberman isn’t only untrustworthy as a lover but is also unreliable as a scientific expert
Obviously, this was no stalker. In fact, Eve was an ‘ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of woman from whom it is hard to look away’ (according to New York magazine journalist Kerry Howley) and she’d been having an affair with Huberman since she’d seen him on a private, invitation-only dating app two years earlier and they’d gone for a swim.
If one affair was not enough, Sarah eventually discovered Huberman — the ascetic who incessantly preaches the importance of self-discipline and who counsels millions of other men on how it’s critical to cut down on stress — was cheating on her with at least five women at once.
These lovers for the most part had no idea he was seeing anyone else, while Huberman’s alleged shameless subterfuge involved firing off romantic text messages to different women almost simultaneously.
The sensational details about the private life of a very public academic have been revealed in the latest issue of New York magazine. The publication, which gave the girlfriends pseudonyms to protect their identity, spoke to five of the women and reported how insiders say there is a ‘darker side’ to the American’s much-admired public persona.
It is a persona that has brought him six million followers on social media site Instagram and 5.25million subscribers to his YouTube channel, Huberman Lab, not to mention reportedly millions of dollars by running adverts for dietary supplements and wellness products.
Time magazine profiled him last year under the glowing headline ‘How Podcaster Andrew Huberman Got America To Care About Science’. It quoted another neuroscientist who said he was a ‘rock star’ in their field and said Huberman was considering one day entering politics. Asked by Time how he defined fun, he replied: ‘I learn and I like to exercise.’
Observers say it’s no surprise Huberman rose to fame during the pandemic as his intense but patient explaining of the interactions between the brain and the body seemed the perfect tonic for so many people struggling with their mental health.
And it’s been alleged that Huberman — who some of the women say could be aggressive, manipulative, ultra-narcissistic and even psychopathic — isn’t only untrustworthy as a lover but is also unreliable as a scientific expert.
It’s claimed he packs his podcasts with ‘pseudoscience’, while the laboratory he boasts about having at Stanford — and which inspired the podcast title ‘Huberman Lab’ — is no more than a post-doctoral student working alone.
New York magazine’s investigation has also cast into doubt his account of his early years in the California town of Palo Alto, where he says the trauma of growing up in a broken home turned him into a troubled youth who got into street fights and had a spell in a detention centre. The investigation instead said it found that Huberman, the son of a father who was also a Stanford academic, went to a wealthy, high-performing school where he spent his time skateboarding rather than fighting.
Its contents have clearly come as a huge blow to members of the ‘Hubersphere’, the legions of Huberman fans who religiously follow his very precise ‘protocols’ (all based on strong scientific data) to ‘maximise your productivity, physical and mental health’.
Observers say it’s no surprise Huberman rose to fame during the pandemic as his intense but patient explaining of the interactions between the brain and the body seemed the perfect tonic for so many people struggling with their mental health
They include ensuring you get early morning sunshine, filtering tap water, only consuming caffeine at set times and plunging into ice baths. And the news their hero may not be quite what he makes out has hit his devotees with the shock of one of those baths.
For while, with his hulking frame, bushy beard and cult status in the macho ‘manosphere’, Huberman might smack of another over-muscled Andrew Tate, he instead comes across in his podcasts as a thoughtful, gentle and earnest academic — who just happens to look like a modern Hercules.
Huberman hasn’t specifically responded to the serial infidelity allegations, although his spokesman dismissed other claims in the article, including Sarah’s claim that he was subject to rages (‘Dr Huberman is very much in control of his emotions,’ said the spokesman) and that they were trying to have a baby. (He says they were only trying to produce embryos).
He also insisted he was not in a monogamous relationship with Sarah until late 2021.
Social media has erupted into open warfare over the claims, with his sympathisers who say Huberman’s private life is his own affair clashing with critics who insist it’s justified to question the credibility of an ‘influencer’ who portrays himself as having virtually no vices and who has made personal integrity one of his chief selling points.
Some fans have chosen to see the lighter side to all this, joking that his tips on boosting energy certainly work, at least for him, if he can manage to have six affairs and a successful career at once. Even one of his ex-girlfriends admitted being impressed at how he managed to fit them all in, saying: ‘I can barely schedule three Zooms in a day.’
And predictably there are some males who have applauded a man who can keep up such a relentlessly packed sex life.
In that vein, Huberman has earned the possibly unhelpful support of Russell Brand. The self-proclaimed ‘sex addict’, who denies accusations from various women of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse, dismissed the new report as an ‘astonishing hit piece’ on a man who champions a ‘return to traditional male values’ such as ’empowering lifestyle, autonomy, fitness, strength’.
The ability to multi-task is not widely regarded as a ‘traditional male value’, but how else would you describe Huberman’s alleged synchronised philandering?
The various women reportedly in Huberman’s life say they gradually discovered the lengths he was having to go to keep them all thinking his relationship with each of them was an exclusive one. Sarah began a relationship with Huberman in 2018 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they both lived, after he messaged her on Instagram.
Both of them ‘had devoted their lives to healthy living’, but Huberman wasn’t yet famous. Both were ‘self-optimisers’, obsessed with making themselves physically and mentally as perfect as possible.
She says they agreed to have a monogamous relationship but she soon discovered he could be strangely elusive, regularly disappearing or failing to turn up as agreed, even to a 2018 Thanksgiving party at which she’d planned to introduce him to her parents and close friends.
It is a persona that has brought him six million followers on social media site Instagram and 5.25million subscribers to his YouTube channel, Huberman Lab, not to mention reportedly millions of dollars by running adverts for dietary supplements and wellness products
Some of his male friends attested to this unreliability as they also did to Sarah’s claims that he was prone to flying into rages. In 2021, Sarah’s suspicions were aroused when she contracted a sexually-transmitted infection, linked to cervical cancer, even though she had tested regularly for it for the past ten years. Huberman reassured her she could have contracted it in various ways other than from him.
Later that year, he had an evolutionary psychologist named David Buss on his podcast when Huberman turned the conversation to ‘infidelity in committed relationships’. When his guest assured him it would be impossible to have ‘long-term affairs with six different partners’, Huberman curiously corrected him, saying: ‘Unless he’s juggling multiple phone accounts or something of that sort.’
The following summer, Sarah and two children she had from a previous relationship moved to Malibu to be closer to Huberman, who despite being an associate professor at Stanford had rented a house in Topanga, a six-hour drive away.
She says his angry outbursts became more frequent and that he once told her, revoltingly, that dating her was like ‘bobbing for apples in faeces’, although he denies he said that.
After she found the giveaway text messages to ‘Eve’, Huberman reportedly apologised, explaining in his typical therapy-speak: ‘The landscape has been incredibly hard. I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety.’
The following month, the two women connected online after Eve spotted Sarah was looking at her posts on Instagram.
Some are asking if Huberman can recover from such cringe-making allegations and still keep pontificating about good mental and physical health on his podcast
‘Is there anything you’d rather ask me directly?’ asked Eve. The truth came out in a phone conversation. Eve reported how she’d also had to contend with Huberman’s ‘endless excuses for not showing up’ during their two-year relationship, during which he’d talked about starting a family.
‘Our children would be amazing,’ he reportedly told her.
Sarah says she finally left Huberman in December 2023 — 16 months after finding the tell-tale texts — when she turned up announced at his home and, through a window, saw him on the sofa with another woman.
The following month, another woman — dubbed ‘Alex’ — got in touch with Sarah via Instagram. Alex was an ‘intense, direct, highly educated’ woman from New York who also thought she was in an exclusive relationship with Huberman.
The three women started an online group chat and soon had a fourth member, Mary, a ‘dreamy, charismatic Texan’ Andrew had been ‘seeing for years’. Mary’s friends called him ‘breadcrumbs’ for his habit of suddenly disappearing without explanation. And there was a fifth woman in Los Angeles who was ‘funny and fast-talking’ but is not named in the article.
Alex admitted she ‘felt foolish for believing Andrew’s lies’ and feared she would find the other women also gullible. She instead discovered they were all ‘assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted’, although — perhaps making them vulnerable to a ‘wellness’ guru — they were all obsessed with good health.
The group never discovered the sixth woman — the one Sarah had seen with him on the sofa — despite attempting to trace the black pick-up truck she had left parked outside. They were, however, able to pool the text messages on their phones and put together an ‘extraordinary record of deception’ by Huberman.
On a single day in Texas, for instance, after Sarah left his hotel, he slept with Mary and texted Eve. And on another in March 2021, ‘a day of admittedly impressive logistical jiu-jitsu’, while Sarah was in the home they shared in Berkeley, California, he had Mary fly from Texas to Los Angeles to stay with him in the house he rented there in the LA suburb of Topanga.
While Mary remained there looking after his dog, he then drove to a local coffee shop where he met Eve. They discussed their relationship and how much he wanted to make it work.
Later, as he texted Mary to say he’d been out of touch because his phone had died, he messaged Eve to say: ‘Thank you … for being so next, next level gorgeous and sexy.’ He also texted Sarah, telling her: ‘Sleep well beautiful.’
According to Mary, Huberman told her ‘that what he wanted was a woman who was submissive, who he could slap on the ass in public, and who would be crawling on the floor for him when he got home’. His spokesman denies he said this. One of the women said he told her he wasn’t a sex addict but a ‘love addict’.
Some are asking if Huberman can recover from such cringe-making allegations and still keep pontificating about good mental and physical health on his podcast. If everything his critics say about Andrew Huberman is true, it wouldn’t be the first time an internet superstar has been found to have feet of clay.