Aajonus
Vonderplanitz

Childhood

He was born John Richard Swigart in Denver, Colorado, on April 17, 1947, the second of four children in a household where yelling and physical violence ran constant from the time he could remember, his father Josef working as an inventor at General Electric while carrying Germanic and Russian ancestry, his mother Doris working as a nurse and coming from a French and American Indian background.

The brother who was eighteen months older than him resented his arrival from the moment Doris brought the newborn home from the hospital and went on to torture him daily for the next fifteen and a half years by shoving him against rusty nails and rakes and whatever other implements he could find around the property, while his father's separate beatings put Aajonus in the hospital on several occasions before the brother was finally deployed to Vietnam.

His third tetanus shot, given at eighteen months old, was by his own later account the event that triggered his autism, which he attributed to the mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, ether, and detergents in that injection entering the part of the brain that maps images onto language and shutting down that function more or less permanently. Severe dyslexia developed alongside it, so that text would swirl when he tried to read and trying to push through a page could leave him vertiginous or vomiting, while he also developed an unusual sensitivity to dishonesty in the people around him, which he later claimed was common among autistic children of his era.

By the time he was three he already carried chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia severe enough that holding an arm raised for two minutes was painful, and his parents used belts to get him out of bed in the mornings because nothing else worked, while his immune system was as fragile as the rest of him and he was allergic to a long list of foods, to cold weather, to many chemicals, to poison ivy, and to insect venom, which meant his colds and flus tended to run three to five months at a stretch and he spent two to three months of every year bedridden.

At nine he found a way around the morning beatings by working out that the coffee his parents drank gave them energy and would give him the same effect, after which he began taking what was left in the pot at night and hiding a cup of it under his bed for the morning, and by high school he was smoking between classes for the same reason, while at night he managed only one or two hours of sleep on most evenings because he was terrified that his brother or father might come for him in the dark.

Mathematics turned out to be the one subject he could function in without compensation, since he could solve problems faster than he could write down the intermediate steps, and his apparent cheating produced enough suspicion that the school eventually locked him in a room with fresh problems and confirmed he was an idiot savant, while in every other subject he genuinely was cheating, copying answers from the brightest girl in his class as if they were patterns of symbols rather than language, and the tracing of those symbols inadvertently developed the drawing ability that would later earn him a significant income as an artist.

The week before his twelfth birthday he developed peritonitis, an intestinal infection that perforated his intestines, which the doctors misread as appendicitis and treated by removing his healthy appendix anyway with the standard line about preventing future trouble, then administering injections every couple of hours for nearly five days, after which he began compulsively overeating in the months that followed and became obese enough that his brothers took to calling him Fatty Arbuckle.

He was declared borderline diabetic at thirteen, and at fifteen and a half his third polio vaccine touched off a run of muscle spasms in and around the heart that were full heart attacks even though the cardiologists found no congenital defect and told him repeatedly that the attacks were imagined, while his autism had taught him not to react visibly to pain and so he simply lay still through each one and rode it out, accumulating around three hundred of them between fifteen and twenty-two with fifty severe enough to knock him unconscious. Psoriasis developed in the same period, juvenile diabetes was diagnosed shortly after, and he was put on insulin.

Early Adult Life

Mary was a year older than him and the top student in her class, quietly motherly toward Aajonus who was getting almost no affection at home, and the two of them communicated easily despite the fact that Aajonus had no real vocabulary of his own and could only repeat phrases memorized from James Dean and Paul Newman films, which she found charming because she only knew him within the bounds of their private relationship and never saw him outside of it. They married.

Their son John Jeffrey, called Jeff, was born on September 13, 1964, when Aajonus was seventeen years old and still in school while trying to support a family, his technical school farming him out to major corporations because of his savant capacity to write programs in two hours that would take a specialist six months to a year, with Carte Blanche hiring him as a junior executive when it was the largest credit card company in the world, Time DC bringing him in as the third largest trucking company, and IBM using him intermittently, all while a professor went along to write the documentation for him because he could code in machine language but could not yet write English, and he was earning eighty thousand dollars a year, roughly twelve times the median income of the period.

The baby cried constantly and was sick constantly, Mary could not sleep either, and neither set of grandparents nor any of the doctors offered any real help, so Aajonus moved to a fifth of gin a night to wind down and benzedrine to keep functioning during the day, spending less and less time at home as he became, by his own later admission, a bad husband and a bad father who could not work out how to fix any of it and still could not spell the word "the."

At nineteen he started vomiting blood in cups at a time, and the hospital found a large stomach ulcer, after which he left his wife and son and moved to a small house in Beverly Hills where the weather was warmer, his diet by that point consisting of donuts and cereal with four heaping tablespoons of sugar on top of which he could go through several boxes in a day, plus one well-done steak in the evening. The doctors gave him Maalox, a chalk slurry designed to absorb stomach acid, which left him unable to digest much of anything, and when cancer then developed alongside the ulcer they performed a vagotomy pyloroplasty that severed every vagus nerve to his stomach and permanently ended his capacity to produce hydrochloric acid, telling him afterwards that he could never again eat any raw food because without acid in his stomach he could no longer kill the bacteria that ride on the surface of fresh food.

After the surgery, eating cooked meat caused him to break out in pustules from his knees to his scalp by the following morning, in a pattern severe enough that someone who saw him during this period later described his appearance as looking like raw hamburger.

The Death Prognosis

The six-inch incision on his stomach went tumorous within months. The growths reached an inch and a half wide and three quarters of an inch high. Ten weeks of intense radiation therapy followed. The radiation produced massive scar tissue, disintegrated the bone around his teeth, and triggered multiple myeloma, blood and bone cancer, within a month. The doctors put his odds of survival at less than 0.01%.

His teeth were so loose in their decayed sockets that biting drew up to half a cup of blood within two hours. He was receiving two blood transfusions a week. Chewing was impossible. His food had to be blended and drunk through thick straws. Glazed donuts in soda. Cereal in milk. Sitting down took him five minutes. Moving a few inches at a time produced excruciating pain, because the radiation had cauterized his spine and any movement scraped the nerves between the vertebrae. He could not sit, could not walk, could not lie on a bed. He lay on the wood floor of his living room and moved by crawling on his arms and elbows.

The progression had been mechanical. An ulcer treated with surgery had let cancer spread. Radiation for that cancer had produced blood and bone cancer. Chemotherapy for the blood and bone cancer had produced lymphatic cancer. By twenty years old he had four types of cancer in the blood, the bone, the stomach, and the lymphatic system, plus the four chronic conditions he had carried since childhood: juvenile diabetes, psoriasis, angina pectoris, and bursitis. The doctors gave him three weeks to live.

He refused more chemotherapy. Dying seemed preferable to being completely crippled for whatever time he had left. He refused to have all of his teeth pulled. He refused to go into a hospice, where he would have to die among strangers in a state his autism could not bear to expose. He stayed in his apartment, which his old programming money still covered. He vomited and defecated on the floor and moved from one clean spot to the next across his thirty-five-foot living room. He could not sleep more than about ten minutes before the pain woke him.

Carrot Juice and Hot Baths

Two hospice volunteers, refusing to leave him to die alone, came two or three days a week to clean and shop and prepare the donut slurries. One of them was Steve Flanagan, a seventeen-year-old singer travelling with a Ford Motor Company promotional group called The Going Thing. He had falsified his birth certificate to be hired. He was between six-foot-two and six-foot-four, of African, Indian, and Irish descent. Aajonus described him later as compassionate, magnificent, very advanced for his age.

Steve brought him raw carrot juice and raw milk, along with a small self-published booklet by a woman who claimed to have cured her own cancer with raw carrot juice. Aajonus thought the booklet was bizarre and unrealistic, and read it anyway. He drank the juice and milk expecting nothing. He was actually expecting the carrot juice to taste as repulsive as the cooked carrots his mother had forced him to eat. By that point in his treatment course, food tasted, as he later put it, "like postage stamp glue or cardboard."

To his surprise, both tasted good. The milk carried a faint metallic edge, which he later attributed to his body offloading heavy metals, but he craved it anyway. He kept drinking the juice and the milk for the simple reason that they were the only things he could taste. He stopped eating anything else.

Within ten to twelve days of drinking the juice and the milk together in roughly equal amounts every day, his autism and dyslexia reversed. He became able to understand language for the first time. Its structure, its grammar, even though he had almost no vocabulary. To get through the first book he ever read, he had to look up the definitions of words inside the definitions of other words. Roughly ninety percent of his reading time was spent in the dictionary.

He telephoned his uncle, who was working on a doctorate at UCLA. His uncle, hearing him hold a coherent conversation for the first time in his life, was sure it was a friend playing a prank, and only believed it was Aajonus after he was given proof. The pain was still constant. Unable to tolerate it any further, Aajonus tried to drown himself in a hot bath. He thought water at 110°F would numb him into a final sleep. Instead the bath kept him afloat. He slept for two hours, the longest run of sleep he had had in nearly a year, and woke up feeling significantly better. He started living in the bathtub, reheating it every twenty to sixty minutes. The hot bath would become one of the central protocols of the Primal Diet decades later.

The Nutritionist Begins

By 1969 the bone around his teeth had grown back enough to stop the bleeding, even if not fully. He had run out of money. He borrowed $110 from Steve Flanagan, went to a bookstore in a wheelchair, and spent all of it on nutrition books, which then ran one or two dollars each. His career as a nutritionist had unofficially begun.

He had never read more than twenty pages of a book before. Now he could. The first one he finished was Siddhartha, on his uncle's suggestion. He was twenty-two. It took him a full week of sixteen-hour days, since he had to look up almost every word. The book opened up a different idea of what a life could contain.

He started experimenting with different diets and trying his theories on the people who came to him for help. He often went in the wrong direction. He pushed people toward veganism and fruitarianism, on the conviction that the human body was not built for meat and that meat itself was poison. What he had not yet understood was that the lipid peroxides and heterocyclic amines he was reacting to were produced by cooking, not by meat. For nearly two years he drank only distilled water, until his skin thinned, edema set in, and his psoriasis worsened.

He spent three and a half years being tutored by Bruno Corigliano, considered the top nutritionist in Los Angeles at the time. Bruno had quit his doctoral program when he saw the medical profession moving toward complete artificiality, and had reorganized his own diet around seventy to seventy-five percent raw food. Aajonus eventually broke from him, because the fatter Aajonus got on raw foods the healthier he felt. That was the inverse of Bruno's fat-phobic approach.

In 1975, during a reading exercise with children, the letters of his given name "John" were rearranged into "Aja" and "Aura." From that he kept "Aajonus," which had a Greco-Roman ring he liked. He changed his surname from Swigart to Vonderplanitz, which he said belonged to an earlier branch of his family. Per his account, they were orators and judges to the Russian and Prussian czars who had migrated over generations from Russia to Germany to Brooklyn.

Across North America

At twenty-seven Aajonus had enough energy that his pain was finally tolerable, but he was still searching for the answers that would finish his recovery. He did not expect to find them in modern society, which he considered to be running on unproven theories under pharmaceutical control. He thought animals and more primitive peoples carried innate health knowledge that he wanted to observe directly.

He took a bicycle and made a two-and-a-half-year journey across North America. Five passes across the United States, from Alaska down to the Yucatan. He slept on the ground, in trees when it rained, and picked whatever fruit he could find in season. He spent time with four tribes: the Yaqui in Northern California, the old Mayans in the Yucatan, the Sioux in the Dakotas, and the Inuit in Alaska.

Each tribe told him the same thing. Eat raw meat. He thought they were trying to kill him, that this was a quiet revenge against the white man. He was still terrified of bacteria after the surgery that had ended his hydrochloric acid production, and he remained a committed fruitarian vegan even as his health was going backwards. His teeth had begun to decay. He was losing weight. His diabetes symptoms had returned forcefully, so much so that standing up too quickly could black him out. He was also noticing the first signs of osteoporosis.

One day, one of the tribes pulled out a food they had buried in the ground for months. The smell was horrible to him. The children were jumping happily around it. Each child ate a pound. Each adult two to three. They offered some to Aajonus, who tried it. He felt warm, even though it was mid-September. They told him it was caribou meat. They called it high meat, for the high it gave them. Aajonus did not believe them. The thing was a green ball, and he was sure it was plant matter.

The Desert

"I ate raw meat to die... and it did just the opposite."

His blood and bone cancer came back. Anything below 50°F left him in excruciating pain in every bone and joint, unable to move. He was nearly thirty and was not willing to live in that condition any further. He decided to die.

He chose an old Native American burial site in the foothills of the St. Martinus Mountain Range in the desert outside Thermal, California. He began fasting, drinking only water to keep the headaches off. He waited. A den of eleven coyotes lived up the foothills. They came down every night around midnight for what he thought was ten or twelve days, howling at him in a way that he later said sounded like the sounds crazy people make, and treating him with what seemed like curiosity.

One day they brought him a jackrabbit they had just killed and torn open, and left it at his feet. It was warm. Aajonus remembered his uncle's old warning that a raw wild rabbit would seed a microbial infection that would kill a person painfully within two days. He took the coyotes' gift as the offer of a faster exit than fasting. He had already survived years of extreme suffering. Two more days was not much. He ate it.

It was September 1976. His first bite of meat after six and a half years of fruitarianism. The first few were difficult. He threw some up. He felt bad about eating an animal that reminded him of the Easter bunny. It took him five minutes to motivate himself to keep going, using the same trick he had used as a child to force down his mother's cooked vegetables. The more he ate, the better it tasted. By the twelfth or fifteenth bite the rabbit was delicious. He ate three and a half pounds of a seven-pound carcass. The coyotes ate the rest and left.

He walked back to camp expecting severe cramps. He woke the next morning instead, having had what he later described as the first fully restful sleep of his life. He was not as cold as usual. He climbed out of his sleeping bag in forty-five minutes rather than the usual two hours. He stood naked in the sun for ten minutes. The energy lasted three days, with the pain reduced by sixty percent. No cramps. No diarrhea. No vomiting. No symptoms at all.

He understood the tribes had not been lying. He started eating meat at least three times a week, hunting and trapping whatever he could. Birds, chipmunks, rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas. The poison glands he broke off and discarded. He found three nearby farms and traded labour for food. Milking animals, shovelling manure, in exchange for raw rabbit and chicken and eggs and all the raw dairy he could carry. He was drinking a gallon of raw milk a day and eating between a quarter and a half pound of raw butter. Two months in, his shoulders and chest bones began to develop. In two and a half months he went from ninety-six pounds to a hundred and fifty. His angina had vanished. He started running, up to thirteen miles a day, doing two hundred and fifty push-ups with his feet elevated two or three feet, and thirty handstand push-ups, every day for a year. For the first time in his life he had muscle.

He went back to Los Angeles to tell people what he had found. They told him he looked extremely healthy. A major health food store hired him to run their nutritional department. He started recommending raw meat to customers, despite none of the stores at the time even selling it. Those who tried it had significant health improvements without exception.

The Death Cap

In 1981, on Jekyll Island, Georgia, near his parents' retirement home, Aajonus misidentified a mushroom. He and his girlfriend Owanza were walking to the beach when they spotted a cluster of mushrooms growing in a yard. Aajonus checked the base for the cup that would indicate a toxic Amanita and found none. The cup was hidden, almost two inches underground. The mushroom was Amanita phalloides, the Death Cap. He and Owanza each ate one. Aajonus had consumed fifteen times the lethal dose for a person his size.

Owanza vomited quickly because of food in her stomach, and survived. Aajonus had not eaten anything that morning. Hours later, the cramping started in every muscle but his heart. After twenty minutes of spasms the pain would make him pass out, then give him twenty minutes of relief before the next round. He forced himself to eat one to two pounds of raw butter daily to keep his liver protected. The liver, like the heart, is mostly protein and almost no fat, and fat is what shields it from toxicity. He also ate raw fish, raw honey, and bananas with butter to manage the lactic acid building up in his cramping muscles.

Ninety percent of his liver was destroyed. His cancers came back twice as severely as before. His teeth began decaying again. His diabetes returned. His skin thinned to the point he could not walk barefoot. Abscesses came and went constantly. He was a semi-invalid once more. The longest anyone had been recorded to survive eating one-fifteenth of what he had ingested was ten days, in extreme pain.

He did not die. The acute symptoms lasted ten and a half weeks before improving. The real recovery took two and a half years of eating raw meat twice daily, and a full eleven years to return to the condition he had been in before the poisoning.

During this period he also swam daily for eighteen months in lakes on Jekyll Island that were full of alligators. The need to swim was stronger than the fear of being killed. The alligators were nine to fourteen feet long. They came close, dove deep, and surfaced. None bit him. Over six months one female alligator became comfortable enough with him that she swam across the lake with him three times in a day for the year that followed.

Daily Raw Meat

In December 1982 he began eating raw meat daily, then twice daily. The pain dropped substantially. His diabetes symptoms stopped. His healing doubled, perhaps tripled. In four months on the new schedule he healed as much as he had in the previous year and a half. By the end of that December the Primal Diet was about seventy percent of what it would become.

He dropped his high-carbohydrate fruit intake from thirty percent of his diet to five, and eliminated high-carb juices entirely. Clarity, focus, and composure improved markedly, even under stress. He started drinking a quart of raw vegetable juice a day, mainly celery, to deliver the micronutrients he needed without the sugar. The juice corrected the imbalance of an almost entirely animal-based diet and stopped the fruit cravings. He cycled raw juice, then raw meat, then raw juice again across the day, with raw fats eaten alongside both.

The word "primal" does not refer to the past, to cavemen, or to paleo. It refers to the basic requirements of the body.

In September 1986 Jeff, his son, had a life-threatening car accident. He drove into a tree at high speed, was propelled through the windshield, and ended up in a coma with four-fifths of his brain damaged. The neuro-specialists said he would never come out of it. Aajonus went to the hospital and fed Jeff raw foods in secret. A formula of half raw unsalted butter and half unheated honey, slipped under his tongue. Within twenty-four hours Jeff was out of the coma. Aajonus then started giving him ground raw beef and ground raw fish mixed with honey. In twelve days Jeff was out of intensive care and in rehabilitation. By August 1987 he had recovered. The doctors had said that even if he survived, which they had insisted was impossible, he would be mentally handicapped. Jeff returned to Cincinnati and finished college.

By 1992, eleven years out from the mushroom poisoning, Aajonus had fully recovered to his pre-poisoning state. His success rate with cancer was ninety-five percent. He had been working with hundreds of patients for over a decade and a half.

Legal Career & Raw Milk

Between 1988 and 1995, Aajonus went to Venice Beach every day with a table to talk about the diet. Across those seven years he spoke with roughly ten thousand people. About three thousand two hundred of them tried the diet and reported their results back. He also opened a second front, on the legal side. When the police started preventing runaway teenagers, many of whom had fled abusive homes, from running small businesses on the beach, he worked with the activist Jerry Rubin to print legal documents that informed those teenagers of their civil rights and offered attorney representation. The police arranged for somebody to attack him. He fought the attacker off with a stick, was arrested for assault and battery, and sued the Los Angeles Police Department in federal court, representing himself. He took them through five years of proceedings, sleeping ninety minutes a night, questioning over twenty officers across twenty-two days. He did not win. He cost them millions of dollars.

On August 8, 1998, he founded Right To Choose Healthy Food, a non-profit trust set up to protect farmers whenever federal or state agencies moved to outlaw raw foods. The same year, with James Stewart, he started what would become the Rawesome food club in Venice, Los Angeles. The legal structure was a private membership operating under a lease agreement. Members were the legal owners of the animals and the land. The farmers were paid as workers to tend what was already the members' property. Since the FDA only has jurisdiction over commerce, the model put the food outside their reach.

In 2000 the Los Angeles County moved to outlaw raw milk. Aajonus investigated each of the five cases the health department had cited as harm evidence. None of them had a real link to raw milk. Dr. Nancy Mann, a biostatistician from UCLA, rejected the report's methodology independently. Aajonus published a counter-report with Dr. William Campbell Douglass and added a legal notice on the cover threatening a class-action lawsuit, which forced the county to read it. The Board of Supervisors held a hearing in March and voted four to one in favor of raw milk. Three other government bodies later used the same report to change their own laws.

In 2001 a Ripley's Believe It Or Not segment featured him eating raw meat that had been aging months and years, fungal and bacterial. He had learned from the Inuit to call it high meat. The episode became the show's most-rerun. A German news program filmed him in 2002 eating meat months older still. Mel Gibson publicly credited the Primal Diet on the David Letterman show around the same time. Dr. Elnora Van Winkle, a neuroscientist from Columbia University who had spent forty-seven years on brain biochemistry, telephoned two hundred and forty-two of Aajonus's cancer patients. Two hundred and thirty-two were alive, with their cancers healed, all of them more than seven years on the Primal Diet. She declared the results statistically valid.

Publishing the Primal Diet

After twenty-eight years of experimentation and work with over three thousand people, he published We Want To Live in 1997. The first hundred and twenty-five pages cover the story of saving Jeff in the hospital after his car accident, with the rest of Aajonus's own story. The second volume is an index of over two hundred diseases and their remedies, with a strict inclusion threshold. Nothing went into the book unless it had worked on at least eighty-five percent of the people who had tried it. Nothing was included on theory alone.

His publisher was Paul Kruhm. Paul told him directly that he would not have published the book had Aajonus not looked as healthy as he did. Paul's brother had been an insomniac for sixteen years, unable to sleep more than twenty minutes at a stretch, antisocial, with ADD, and suicidal. Paul sent him Aajonus's manuscript. After four days on the diet his brother slept five to seven hours straight. His family was so alarmed by the silence that they broke his door down to make sure he was alive. Their father wrote Paul a check for seventy-five thousand dollars to publish the book.

In 2002 he published the second book, The Recipe for Living Without Disease. The first fifty pages explain how to follow the diet and the reasoning behind it. The middle hundred and twenty-five pages are recipes, including eighty-two raw sauces designed to make raw meat more palatable, and raw cheesecakes. The final fifty pages cover the underlying science. The same year, a sports physician at the St. Louis Washington University Medical Center, who worked with most of the high-profile athletes in professional basketball and football, asked Aajonus to bring him people who had been on the diet for at least five years. Aajonus brought him two patients who had been on it for twenty. They performed twenty times better than the physician expected. Aajonus himself, who had not exercised since 1979, did not begin to strain on the bench press until the weight reached one hundred and ninety pounds. His heart rate normalized in three minutes after exertion. For most people, the same recovery would take an hour. The physician told him he had never seen results like it, not even from people training three times a week.

Rawesome, Persecution & Conflict

In May 2005 the Los Angeles County Health Department arrived at Rawesome with a citation for selling food without licenses or permits. Aajonus sent a letter reminding them they had no jurisdiction over the private membership structure. The citation was dropped. In 2007 he and five others spent approximately seventy-five thousand dollars from the trust to lobby every congressional office in Washington. Five hundred and thirty-five offices, six to sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week, for three months. They handed a spiral-bound copy of the raw milk report to every representative and every senator. Ron Paul agreed immediately to write a bill. Fifty-eight other representatives had told them they would co-sponsor whatever bill emerged. After Paul wrote and submitted it, none kept their word.

One night in 2009, in a hotel in the Philippines, he was forcibly abducted. He woke up while a group of men in dark suits were injecting him in the shoulder. They put a cloth to his face and he passed out instantly. He came to later, sick, with three injection lumps and needle holes in his arm and lumps forming across his skin. He was passing out every twenty minutes. Standing up dropped him in three. He suspected three swine flu doses. He had the hotel arrange a driver to the shore. He found a two-day-old stingray at one of the wharves that the fishermen were about to throw away, on the principle that decomposing stingray gains ammonia, and ammonia binds to the kind of toxins that were now circulating in his body. He ate three or four ounces at a time across several hours, vomited most of it, but enough entered his bloodstream that he stopped blacking out. He had again survived an apparent assassination attempt. He published photographs of the skin eruptions and the iris changes in his newsletter. On returning to the United States he went on three more radio shows about the swine flu vaccination campaign and refused to be intimidated.

On June 30, 2010, Rawesome was raided. The agencies present included the FBI, the FDA, the Los Angeles County Health Department, the California Department of Agriculture, the Los Angeles City Attorney, and unnamed Canadian government agents who declined to identify themselves. Armed officers drew their weapons. Seventeen large coolers of food were removed, on a warrant that cited only misdemeanor permit violations. Warrants for raids of that scale cannot legally be issued for misdemeanors. Aajonus was in Thailand but gave instructions by phone. The club reopened within six hours of the agents leaving. The backlash was international. Stephen Colbert discussed it on his late-night show.

An internal scandal erupted in parallel. One of Rawesome's farmers, Sharon Palmer of Healthy Family Farm, had been buying commercial frozen chicken and commercial eggs, rebagging them, and selling them through Rawesome and farmers' markets as organic. Aajonus had documentation. Former employees, photographs, laboratory results showing high mercury in the eggs. He had told James Stewart about it forty times across two years. James had dismissed him every time. After the 2010 raid, Aajonus hired a detective firm and assembled the case formally. He then discovered that James owned a share of Sharon's farm and was making roughly ten thousand a month from it. He launched a civil lawsuit. The internal conflict that followed divided Rawesome's membership and weakened his network for the rest of his life.

On August 3, 2011, Rawesome was raided again. Sixty to eighty thousand dollars in food was confiscated. James Stewart, Sharon Palmer, and Victoria Bloch were arrested. Rawesome never reopened. In July 2012, at fifteen miles an hour on a narrow road in Thailand, Aajonus's truck veered off the road and rolled upside down into water. He had had the vehicle fully checked at a Toyota dealership days before. Inspecting his other vehicles afterwards, he found structural damage that could only have come from deliberate sabotage.

Death

Aajonus Vonderplanitz officially died on August 28, 2013, at sixty-six years old, from a balcony fall at his remote property in Thailand. The official account is that he was cleaning a wound on his hand and walked to the balcony railing to throw out the rinse water. His girlfriend turned to do something else and heard a crash. She ran down and found him on the ground below. The railing had broken. He had severely fractured his back near the first rib and could not move his legs.

He refused surgery. He had the hospital wrap his torso to stabilize the bones and instructed them to feed him raw butter and honey. He stayed in apparently good spirits for two days. On the third day he sent his girlfriend to a court proceeding in Bangkok, three and a half hours away, over her objections, insisting she go. While she was gone he went into a coma. His kidneys stopped. By the time she returned he was deteriorating fast. His heart failed in the early hours of August 28. They tried to resuscitate him for half an hour. The flatline beep was audible over the phone to the Thai member listening from a distance. They stopped resuscitation at 2 AM Thai time, noon the day before in Los Angeles.

"Your honor, I came here for your help to get justice but you have done nothing but undermined this case from the beginning."

The quote above is from his last courtroom appearance, the Sharon Palmer trial, on July 8, 2013, seven weeks before the fall.

Questions remain. Photos of his body were never shown publicly. Autopsies listed five causes of death across eleven different doctors, as Jeff revealed in an interview in June 2022. Jeff and many others who knew Aajonus believe he was assassinated. The argument rests on the prior attempts. The rat poison placed inside the silk cover of his office chair. The forced injections in the Philippines hotel. The sabotaged vehicles in Thailand. The pattern of opposition to health authorities and the food industry that had run uninterrupted for four decades.

A small number of former associates reported sightings of a man matching his description in the Los Angeles area in the months following his death, with what they said looked like plastic surgery to alter his face. They said he hurried away whenever they tried to get close. Health blogger David Gumpert, who had known him, wrote about those sightings three years later. Some have noted that Aajonus reconciled with his former cameraman Ebrahim only three weeks before the balcony fall, after years of estrangement over Rawesome. They read it as deliberate closure. His webmaster Jim Ellingson reported a dream around the same time in which Aajonus said goodbye to him.

The death has never been definitively resolved. His publisher Paul Kruhm, who inherited the trusts, posted a video in October 2018 supporting the accidental death theory and arguing against both the assassination and the staged-death theories. Critics of the video cite the participants' visible nervousness on camera. The questions have not been settled to the satisfaction of those who knew him best.

Negative articles appeared within a day of the announcement of his death. One of them quoted his estranged former associate James Stewart saying that Aajonus had "pushed the karmic envelope" and would "do a better job" in a next life. Several of Aajonus's works remain unpublished. The unfinished detoxification book. The recordings of his nutritional classes. The results of over a million dollars in independent laboratory experiments conducted across eleven years, whose documentation was lost when the laboratory owner died and the family asked for two hundred thousand dollars to release them.

Legacy

He was not a credentialed scientist. He was a man who had been handed a death sentence at twenty-one years old, carrying four cancers along with juvenile diabetes, psoriasis, bursitis, and angina pectoris. He cured himself through observation and experimentation, and then spent four decades doing the same for other people.

His success rate with cancer reached ninety-five percent by his fiftieth year of practice and ninety-nine percent in his last year. He had spent over a million dollars on independent laboratory experiments across eleven years. He had worked directly with roughly fifteen hundred cancer patients in his last thirty years. He had fought the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, and the Los Angeles County health authorities in legal proceedings, almost always representing himself, and had won enough of those proceedings to protect dozens of farms and hundreds of thousands of people's continued access to raw food.

His two published books, We Want To Live and The Recipe for Living Without Disease, remain the primary texts of the Primal Diet. His popularity has continued to grow in the years since his death. The diet he developed across four decades of clinical observation, laboratory experimentation, and personal experience represents, in the words of Dr. Elnora Van Winkle of Columbia University, statistically valid results that the medical establishment has consistently refused to engage with formally.

He was born John Richard Swigart. He died, or disappeared, as Aajonus Vonderplanitz. He is remembered by those who knew his work as someone who changed the course of tens of thousands of lives. What happened to him remains, like much of his story, a question that the terrain theory he spent four decades building cannot answer: not what is true, but what will ever be proved.