Tyler Henry

Tyler Henry Koelewyn (born 13 January 1996), known professionally as Tyler Henry, is an American television personality and self-described clairvoyant medium, best known for the E! reality series Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry and the Netflix series Life After Death with Tyler Henry. He has built a career largely around filmed readings for celebrities, and has separately been involved in a small number of cases connecting his readings to unsolved crimes. His work has drawn sustained criticism from sceptics, who attribute his results to cold reading and hot reading rather than any genuine psychic ability.

Early life

Henry was born in Hanford, California, a small city near Fresno, and grew up as an only child to parents Theresa and David Koelewyn. He has said he first noticed intuitive mental images at around age 10, in 2006, coinciding with his grandmother's terminal cancer diagnosis, and that he later came to interpret these as a foretelling of her death. As a teenager at Sierra Pacific High School in Hanford, Henry began giving informal readings to classmates and, by his own account, some teachers, in exchange for money. Dissatisfied with conventional high school, he left to complete an accelerated homeschooling programme, graduating at 16. He briefly attended West Hills College in Coalinga, California, intending to train as a hospice nurse, while continuing to give private readings at a local bookstore.

Career

Discovery and early television appearances

Henry has said a psychic he consulted while in college told him he would begin filming a television show at 19 — a claim he has cited as an early validating experience of his own. Actress Sarah Paulson, after receiving a reading, invited Henry to a Los Angeles gathering where he met talent managers Michael Corbett and Larry Stern; Corbett, describing himself as "a total skeptic," booked a private reading and has said he became convinced enough to pursue producing a television show around Henry. Footage of Henry reading a group of friends became the pitch that led to a deal with E!. Henry's first public television appearance came in a November 2015 episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, in which he gave a reading connecting the Kardashian sisters to their late father, Robert Kardashian.

Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry

Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry premiered on E! in January 2016, when Henry was 19, and ran for four seasons, drawing an average of roughly 900,000 viewers per episode. The format centred on filmed one-on-one readings with celebrity guests, typically staged without Henry being told in advance who he would be reading — a point the show consistently emphasised on camera, partly in response to sceptics who alleged he researched subjects beforehand. Henry has said that after the first season aired, he received over 175,000 requests for private readings.

Later television work

Henry went on to host Life After Death with Tyler Henry on Netflix, which continued the celebrity-reading format and also incorporated cold-case material (see below), and Life From the Other Side, a further Netflix series airing in autumn 2024. He has also published two books: a memoir, Between Two Worlds: Lessons from the Other Side (2016), and Here & Hereafter: How Wisdom from the Departed Can Transform Your Life Now (2022).

Celebrity readings

Across his television career, Henry has read a wide range of celebrities on camera, including Kim Kardashian, Megan Fox, Jaleel White, RuPaul, Jim Parsons, David Arquette, Chrissy Metz, Rebel Wilson, Lizzo, Nene Leakes, Jaime Pressly, and television host Matt Lauer, among others. Notable individual readings include:

• Megan Fox — Henry reportedly raised concerns during a reading that foreshadowed relationship difficulties between Fox and then-partner Brian Austin Green.
• Jaleel White — Henry connected White with a message he attributed to his late Family Matters co-star Michelle Thomas.
• RuPaul — Henry has described this session as his own personal favourite reading given during his career.
• Matt Lauer — a 2016 televised reading, later revisited by sceptics after Lauer's 2017 dismissal from Today amid misconduct allegations, questioning whether any element of the original reading could be read as having anticipated the scandal.

Involvement in crime-related cases

Henry has occasionally connected his reading practice to real unsolved cases, though always in an unofficial capacity rather than as part of any police investigation.

Tommy Booth and the "Smiley Face Killers" theory

Henry appeared in the Oxygen series Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice, giving a reading connected to Tommy Booth, a 24-year-old contractor who disappeared in January 2008 and was later found drowned in a creek in circumstances his mother, Barbara MacKay, has long argued were not accidental. Investigators involved in the wider "Smiley Face Killers" theory believe Booth may have been a victim of a broader pattern of drowning deaths among young men, a theory that remains disputed within law enforcement and among criminologists generally.

Life After Death cold case

The premiere episode of Life After Death with Tyler Henry featured Henry conducting a reading connected to an active cold case, working with a private investigator rather than a family member directly. Henry has described the process as fundamentally similar to reading a living person, applied instead to case material. Critics reviewing the episode noted that Henry's specific statements — including a claim of difficulty breathing in connection with a case that was in fact a hit-and-run — did not clearly match the known facts of the case once the family's own account was included.

Personal life

Henry is gay, and married photographer Clint Godwin in 2025.

Scientific and sceptical perspective

Henry's work has drawn sustained, detailed criticism from the sceptical community, most notably from writer Susan Gerbic, who has published a long-running series of investigations into his readings for Skeptical Inquirer under the title "Operation Tater Tot." Gerbic and other critics argue that Henry's results are consistent with cold reading — offering vague, broadly applicable statements and adjusting based on a subject's visible reactions — rather than genuine mediumship, and some critics have further alleged instances of hot reading, meaning prior research into a subject conducted before a session despite on-camera claims that no such information was available to him. A 2022 review of Life After Death by McGill University's Office for Science and Society reached similar conclusions, noting that unsuccessful or unconvincing readings are unlikely to make it into the final broadcast cut, and that specific details in Henry's Netflix cold-case reading did not hold up against the actual facts of the case once compared directly.

See also

• Mediumship
• Psychic Mediums

External links

• Wikipedia — Tyler Henry
• Skeptical Inquirer — This Is the Last Time I Will Write About Tyler Henry. Probably
• McGill University Office for Science and Society — Netflix's Afterlife Show with Medium Tyler Henry Is Dead on Arrival
• Tyler Henry — official site