On the afternoon of Saturday, September 19, 2026, Presley Gerber, the 27-year-old son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, used drugs and became frightened that he was losing control. According to reporting by TMZ, the sober coach who had traveled with him around the clock for months called a sober living house in Santa Monica, told staff Presley was high, and asked whether they would still take him. Staff said yes. That evening, a friend and the coach dropped him off, and the coach left. Presley was found unresponsive the next morning. His official cause of death has been deferred, and police have said there is no indication of foul play.
The house was not a treatment program. California’s Department of Health Care Services has said it did not need a state license because it operated only as a recovery residence, which means it had no physicians, nurses, or licensed therapists on site. People familiar with the program told TMZ that Presley should first have gone to a medical detox facility, where patients are typically checked every fifteen to thirty minutes. His family had been talking with him about returning to treatment, and according to TMZ, they did not know where his team had arranged for him to go and would never have approved it. The Daily Beast, citing NBC News, reported that the psychologist who founded the residence had his own license temporarily revoked in 2006.
Who Was Standing Beside Him?
In the days since, Jennifer Barton, who leads the Real Talk About Rehabs community, posted publicly about the person she was told served as Presley’s sober companion. The professional profile she shared describes him as an “Addiction & Recovery Expert,” an interventionist, a family recovery advocate, and a sober companion. The work history on that profile lists about two years as a residential technician at a treatment program, where the duties described included intake paperwork, drug testing clients, and picking up and administering medication. It then lists ten months as an admissions coordinator and several years of self-employment offering recovery coaching, mentoring, and case management. I have not independently confirmed that this profile belongs to the person who was with Presley that weekend, and the reporting has not named him. I share it because the pattern it shows is one I see constantly in this field.
Those are real jobs, and people who do them well matter enormously in a treatment setting. However, they are not trained in key areas of the profession and should not be conflated with experts in treatment. A residential technician is usually an entry-level position that works under the direction of nurses and clinicians, and admissions work teaches a great deal about how programs operate. However, neither role trains someone to assess withdrawal risk, determine the right level of care, or decide whether an intoxicated person is safe to leave without medical monitoring. Those are clinical judgments, and they are exactly the judgments a family believes it is buying when someone calls himself an expert.
The facts of that weekend are still emerging, and my heart is with that family. I am not in a position to assign blame to any individual, and I will not try. What I can say with certainty is that anyone trained in substance use disorder treatment or clinical intervention learns early that a person who is actively intoxicated and afraid of losing control needs a medical assessment, and an unlicensed house with no medical staff cannot provide one. A chain of people stood between Presley asking for help and Presley walking through that door. Every link in that chain deserves scrutiny, and so does the word that so many of them may have been leaning on, expert.
Can Anyone Call Themselves an Expert?
In our last piece, I asked families to check credentials before hiring anyone to help a loved one in crisis. This time I want to look closely at that one word. I have worked in this field for more than forty years. I hold a master’s degree in counseling psychology, a state license, and board registration as an interventionist, and I still choose my words carefully when I describe what I know. So, the question deserves a plain answer. Can a person simply declare that they are an expert?
For the most part, yes. Professional titles are protected by law, while the word expert usually is not. In Georgia, the counseling licensure statute prohibits anyone without a license from using the title “professional counselor” or any words or letters implying that they are one (O.C.G.A. § 43-10A-7). The Composite Board’s rules go further and list dozens of variations that unlicensed people may not use, from Professional Mental Health Counselor to Family Counselor (Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 135-10-.02). Most states protect titles for physicians, psychologists, social workers, and nurses in similar ways.
Look at what those lists leave out. Coach, companion, specialist, consultant, advocate, and expert are largely unregulated words, and in most states so is interventionist. A person can work as a technician, start a companion business, and describe himself online as an expert in substance use disorders, and in most cases no licensing board will ever review that claim. Recovery coaching is, by definition, nonclinical work. Coaches do not diagnose or treat substance use disorders or mental health conditions, and many coaches are honest about that boundary. The good ones work under clinical supervision, but danger comes in when the word expert quietly erases the boundary in a family’s mind.
There is one place where federal rules take the word seriously in advertising. Federal Trade Commission guidance holds that when an advertisement presents someone as an expert, that person’s qualifications must actually give them the expertise they are represented as having (16 C.F.R. § 255.3). The FTC’s own illustration is a car endorsed by someone described as an engineer whose training turns out to be in chemical engineering, which the agency calls deceptive. The principle carries straight into our field. Expertise belongs to a specific domain, and it has to be real.
What a Courtroom Requires
If you want to see how seriously our society treats this word, walk into a courtroom. Before a witness may offer opinions as an expert, the judge must be persuaded that the person qualifies. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, a witness may be “qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education.” Qualification alone is not enough. The testimony must also help the judge or jury, rest on sufficient facts or data, come from reliable principles and methods, and reflect a reliable application of those methods to the case at hand.
In practice, this begins with a process called voir dire of the witness. The attorney offering the expert walks the court through education, licensure, supervised training, publications, years of practice, and prior testimony. Opposing counsel then has the chance to probe every item and to argue that the witness lacks the background for the specific opinions being offered. I have been through this process, and I can tell you it is humbling by design. A witness can be qualified in one area and excluded in the next, because the court measures expertise against the precise question being asked.
The judge serves as what the Supreme Court calls a gatekeeper. In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993), the Court gave trial judges responsibility for screening expert testimony for relevance and reliability. In Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999), it extended that duty to testimony grounded in experience and technical skill as well as science. In December 2023, Rule 702 was amended to make the point unmistakable. The party offering an expert must show the court that each requirement is more likely than not satisfied, and the expert’s conclusions must stay within what their methods can reliably support. Georgia follows the same standard and, through House Bill 478, extended it to criminal cases effective July 1, 2022.
One phrase from this body of law has stayed with me. In General Electric Co. v. Joiner (1997), the Supreme Court held that courts need not admit an opinion connected to the evidence “only by the ipse dixit of the expert.” Ipse dixit is Latin for “he himself said it.” That is exactly what a self-appointed expert offers a family. In a courtroom, a claim of expertise is where the questioning begins. On a professional profile, it is usually where the questioning ends.
What Expertise Actually Is
The research on expertise points in the same direction as the courts. In their landmark study, psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues found that expert performance develops through years of deliberate practice, meaning effortful work with instruction and corrective feedback, as distinct from simply accumulating time on the job (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). In clinical work, that feedback has a name, supervision.
This is why credentialing bodies require so much of it. In Georgia, a Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor at the first level must document 6,000 hours of supervised work experience, roughly three years of full-time practice, along with 300 hours of supervised practical training that includes at least 120 hours of face-to-face supervision, formal education that includes ethics, and a passing score on an examination. A licensed professional counselor completes a graduate degree and then years of supervised postgraduate practice before being permitted to work independently. These requirements are demanding because the work is dangerous when it is done badly.
There is a second finding worth knowing. Psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning showed that people with the least skill in a domain tend to overestimate their ability the most, because the knowledge required to perform well is the same knowledge required to recognize one’s own errors (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Someone with a couple of years on a residential unit has seen enough to feel confident and too little to recognize what can kill a client. They may not yet understand that withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines can be fatal without medical management, that tolerance falls quickly after a period of abstinence and leaves a person vulnerable to overdose, or that a co-occurring psychiatric condition can change the entire risk picture. An expert carries that knowledge, and just as importantly, an expert knows the exact point at which a situation has moved beyond their scope.
Lived Experience is Valuable, and it is Different
I want to be careful here, because I have deep respect for people in recovery who give their lives to helping others. Lived experience brings credibility, hope, and a kind of understanding no textbook can teach. Peer support has a real and important place in a continuum of care, and Georgia, like many states, now certifies peer specialists with their own training and ethical standards.
Lived experience is a qualification for a particular role. It prepares someone to walk beside a person in recovery, model what is possible, and help them stay connected to care. It does not prepare someone to make medical decisions, assess suicide risk, or judge whether an intoxicated person is safe to leave alone. The honest peer specialist or companion knows this, says so openly, and works alongside clinicians who carry that responsibility. Expertise includes a clear understanding of one’s own limits, and anyone who presents personal recovery as a substitute for clinical training has misunderstood both.
Questions Every Family Should Ask
Start by asking what license the person holds, and then look it up yourself on the state licensing board’s website. If they hold a certification instead, ask which organization issued it and verify it with that body directly. Ask who supervises their work and who carries their malpractice insurance, because a professional who answers to no one has no one to catch their mistakes.
Then ask a scenario question. “What would you do if my loved one arrived at the airport, or at your door, clearly intoxicated?” Listen for words like medical detox, physician, emergency department, and monitoring. Ask what falls outside their scope of practice and to whom they refer when they reach it. A genuine expert answers these questions easily and welcomes them. Hesitation, vague reassurance, or offense at being asked is itself an answer.
A Standard Worth Keeping
Expertise is earned slowly, verified by others, and bounded by honesty about its limits. The families who call us are often living through the most frightening days of their lives, and they deserve help from people whose claims have been tested by someone other than themselves. In a courtroom, a judge requires a witness to prove it before the word expert is allowed. Families deserve the same courtesy.
References:
- Barton, J. (2026, September 29). Presley Gerber: A failure from top to bottom [Facebook post]. Real Talk About Rehabs.
- Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).
- Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.
- Federal Rule of Evidence 702, Testimony by Expert Witnesses (as amended effective December 1, 2023).
- Federal Trade Commission. Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, 16 C.F.R. § 255.3, Expert endorsements.
- General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997).
- Georgia House Bill 478 (2022), amending O.C.G.A. § 24-7-702, effective July 1, 2022.
- Georgia Composite Board of Professional Counselors, Social Workers, and Marriage and Family Therapists. Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 135-10-.02, Without Any License.
- O.C.G.A. § 43-10A-7, Licensing requirement; exceptions.
- Alcohol and Drug Abuse Certification Board of Georgia. Certification requirements (CADC-I, CADC-II, CAADC). adacbga.org/certifications
- Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.
- Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).
- Los Angeles Times. (2026, September 26). Inside the ultra-luxury sober living home where Presley Gerber died. latimes.com
- TMZ. (2026, September 22). Presley Gerber had around-the-clock sober coach before suspected overdose death. tmz.com
- TMZ. (2026, September 25). Presley Gerber was dropped off at rehab by friend, sober coach. tmz.com
- TMZ. (2026, September 30). Rehab owner where Presley Gerber died mum on lapses. tmz.com
- The Daily Beast. (2026, September). Disturbing details emerge about Presley Gerber’s sober living house. thedailybeast.com
