Meet Rachel

An only child, Rachel Waters was raised by her mom, Marsha, on a dirt road outside Harlem, Georgia, where she lived until age 29. In 2012, Rachel moved to New York City where she worked as a federal investigator while volunteering as a Peacemaker with the Red Hook Community Justice Center.

After completing her master’s degree at The New School, she built a career as a nonprofit communications professional and writer, and was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Huffington Post.

In 2021, she transitioned to life sciences and medical copywriting. Combining her writing background with her passion for medicine —an interest shaped largely by her mom’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease and their shared risk factor, the APOE4 gene—Rachel juggled her job responsibilities while acting as her mom’s caregiver throughout her battle with Alzheimer’s and cancer.

In February 2025, 18 months after her mom’s hospice death, Rachel’s life was upended when she became the first person in US history to be charged with murder for someone (her own mother) who had already been medically determined to be actively dying.

After submitting new evidence to the medical examiner and district attorney, her mother’s cause of death was revised, all charges were dropped, and the case was dismissed. However, the experience fundamentally reshaped her life.

Having lost her remaining family, savings, reputation, and career, Rachel didn’t retreat, Instead, she transformed her trajectory once more to focus on advocacy.

Today, she educates others about legal, emotional, and social resilience in the face of life-changing accusations while working to pass Marsha’s Law, named for her mother, to protect millions of families from fighting the same battle that nearly cost her life.