Part Two: The First American Yoga Cult Leader

I initially been planning to kind of do a two parter on Bickram, honestly, like I felt like in order to do that, we would have just been repeating very similar stories about abuse in a way that was not productive. And then I found out about you know, Pierre Bernard and was like, oh, I think this is actually a really useful way to lead into the story of Bickram, because there's a lot of continuity between the two guys, and obviously they are not the only kind of yoga

cult leader abusive types. In fact, there was a one of Bickram's students is currently like his yoga you know cult that he created in New York City is like falling apart under allegations of like horrible abuse. So like this is there we are. That's part of why I wanted to do it this way. It is like there's a chain of these kind of guys taking advantage of the sort of trappings of yoga and you know, Hindu and Buddhist mysticism in order to abuse people. And that's

that's bad. You know. We talk about we talk about people doing that with Christianity all the time. It's worth talking about that when people do it using other you know things. So from the very beginning of the physical asana component of Hatha yoga, there was an element of exhibitionism to it, right. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode. This is like the yogi's laying on beds of nails. That's a prominent example of this.

As yoga in India became more centered around physical movements and the early prescriptions against halfa faded, exhibitionist elements of it became more common. A good example of this would be Rebo Rakshet, an Indian bodybuilder and yoga advocate who studied under a teacher named Bishnu Ghosh, who we will talk about more in a little bit. Riba immigrated to Kolkata after the partition of India and with the withdrawal of the English menace, and by the early nineteen fifties

she was winning titles and bodybuilding. She also started to perform for circuses, where she would lift the legs of elephants onto her chest and let them stand on her without crushing her. She also like, let fully loaded. I'm sure there's like some probably it's a lot that like elephants are smart and don't want to crush people. I don't know. I'm not an expert on like how this works. She would also let fully loaded cars drive over her body.

And I bring this up because number one, it's pretty cool. I think this stuff is neat. I'm a big fan of like circusy shit, and it's also interesting to I also bring it up because like to make the point that, like you might say, the kind of circusy vibe of public yoga has a pretty proud tradition back in India. Right. Bikram Chowdery was born in Calcutta in British India in nineteen forty four. I haven't ever seen a credible exact date for this guy's birthday. That's not really uncommon given

the time record keeping wasn't perfect. It's also the case that Bickram is an inveterate liar, so I'm not sure I would even trust a birth date if he gave it. But nineteen forty four is pretty seems like a pretty good ballpark estimate for like when this guy was born. We know very little about his early life life, save that he claims he grew up quite poor. This is certainly possible, even likely. In the version of his life that he spun for interviewers, Bikram Chowdery describes the foundational

moments of his existence this way. I remember all the Bengali kids used to play a little ball, and somehow I crossed the alley and I saw Gosh's College of Physical Education. About fifteen or twenty kids there are doing the postures. So I said, wait a minute, I can do those things a lot better than you are doing it. There's a man who was sitting there. He says, hey, you come here. What's your name? I said, Bikram. He said, wow,

come every day here, I will teach you more. And that guy is Bishnu Ghosh we mentioned a little bit earlier. He's the guy who trains Riba and Bishnu. Gosh is the younger brother of a famous guru and an author named Paramahansa Yogananda who wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi that was published in nineteen forty six. This is generally seen as the book that helped to widely introduce yoga and meditation to Westerners in the sixties and seventies.

Steve Jobs found Eastern philosophy as a teenager by reading Autobiography of a Yoga and he was a vocal about rereading it every single year. Mark Benioff, who is the current CEO of Salesforce, has set on record that ad Jobs's memorial service, you know, during his funeral, everyone who attended was given a copy of the book. Like That's

how central Jobs considered this. In his own life, George Harrison read Autobiography of a Yogi for the first time in the late nineteen sixties when Ravi Shankar gave him a copy. Elvis Presley readit it around the same time. Now, obviously, I bet, I bet my grandma read it.

of autobiography of a yoga is talking about. There are very mixed opinions about this book. There are some criticisms that it's basically pure mysticism, filled with stories of miracles and other things you know, seen as impossible. But you know, critiquing what is essentially a religious belief is not the place of this podcast, so I'm not going to get into it. Obviously, this is like an incredibly popular and

influential text about spirituality. Of course, there's there's a myriad set of opinions on it, so it's worth giving this overview of like Bishnu Gosh and his brother, because you know, his brother, who writes autobiography of the Yogi, is a little bit more of a high level kind of spiritual guy.

Whereas Bishnu, while he's he's definitely using some of his brother's ideas, he's very grounded in like physical sciences, and his application of yoga is like really kind of relentlessly focused on both like physical fitness and also physical rehabilitation. And I'm going to quote from the Yoga Pedia here. Bishnu believed that the root of all disease is stress. He thought that the body's energy centers around the spine, so spinal health is key to physical, emotional, and mental health.

He combined weightlifting and bodybuilding with Hatha yoga practice to promote physical and mental wellness. Bishnu Ghosh would work one on one with a student, diagnosing the problem and developing a specific program to promote healing. His program was founded on the eighty four yoga postures that his famous brother caudified. And like, he seems pretty rad. Actually, everything I've read

about him is pretty good. He was a very big advocate for a specific set of abdominal muscle ass isolation exercises traditional to Hatha yoga that his brother taught, and Gosh has kind of like he's got this very academic and even scientific attitude towards integrating this stuff with modern physical education. He trained at the University of Calcutta, and he mixed these kind of ancient teachings about diet and

lifestyle with modern bodybuilding techniques from the West. And in fact, as much of an influence as his brother's book was, Goosh was also influenced by the book Muscle Control by a German bodybuilder named Max Sick. And I don't know, like it's one of those things when I read about it, it makes sense to me just in terms of like

what's worked for me. A big, a major focus of my own exercise is just like lower backshit, because I just kind of noticed as a kid that all of my older male relatives like the thing that aged and like them the most and cause them the most problems and misery in their life was like fucking lower back pain. I think that's not an uncommon story.

according to Bikram Chowdery, Bickram was an excellent student. He credits Ghosh as being the greatest health culturist of the twentieth century, a rare compliment for a man who most frequently compliments himself. Oh yeah, oh yeah. I think it's one of those things where like you got to talk up your teacher because like it makes the case that you're extra awesome.

religion of yoga. Bickram claims his Guru told him to refuse any payment for the work they were doing and that he lived without any material possessions at this time. If this is true, it's not a habit he's stuck with. Yeah. Bikram also claims that he won the All India Yoga Championships for the next two years in a row. When talking about this three years of purported victories, he said unbeaten. The whole country complains if Bicctram competes, nobody else ever wins,

so they make me retire. Now, this is definitely a lie, like the claim that he was just so good that he was forced to quit by, you know, the yoga powers that be in India. There's an Indian journalist named Chandrama Paul who dug into his backstory with rigor. She was unable to find evidence that there was any sort of All Yoga Champion All India Yoga Championship in the

country at this time that matches his description. The best evidence I found suggests that like it was several years later that like the first competition that kind of matches this came into existence and he probably just sort of retroactively claimed that he'd won it because he knew the record keeping was bad. The Internet wasn't a thing, you know, when he started doing this, it was an easy lie

to get away with. In other versions of the story he would later tell, he would claim that he was asked by the head judge of the competition, yoga luminary Bksi Inngar, to retire from competing in order to give other contestants a chance. Now, most of the version of the Bickram story I'm giving you is from a recorded interview he gave that was used by the producers of a Netflix documentary about the man. But Bickram's claims about himself are not consistent over time, and I'm going to

quote from a write up by NPR summarizing some of them. Here. In some accounts, he started training at three, sometimes at six, other times he won the championship at eleven, twelve or thirteen. And his famous yoga sequence, the very core of Bickram yoga was actually not so much developed or designed by Bickram, but largely observed it with only the slightest of changes from a longer series of ninety one postures that have been firmly in the public domain for the last hundred years.

So you know, this is like not an uncommon kind of grifter backstory that you would like.

was swoll at one point. Yeah, it's like Alex Jones, where it's like, well he was. He was in fact shredded for a period of time, you know. Uh. So he claims that b Ksi Nngar, who's he says is the guy that told him to stop doing yoga so other people could win, advised him to do this, and that he quickly went on to break records in powerlifting. Now, this is probably a lie because there's no evidence of it, and whenever he says something without evidence, it's definitely a lie.

NPR continues and these are you know, his claims. He ran marathons with no training, he became a competitive weightlifter and broke records. He continued public exhibitions, drawing larger and larger crowd, stretching out over a bed of nails, dragging automobiles up and down Calcutta streets, and slowing his heart rate until he could be buried. Alive around this time. Yeah, and this is like he's not the only guy doing this kind of stuff. These are these are like common

sort of like I don't know, tricks. Seems like a little bit reductive, but you get what I'm saying, Like these are common like at performances that that people are doing in the country around this time. It's not He's not the only guy doing this sort of stuff. I'm going to continue that in pr quote. Around this time, Bickram learned he didn't need to sleep. From here, things

get weird. At age seventeen, during a routine training session, Bickram slipped and dropped a three hundred and eighty pound weight on his knee, crushing his patella like a seashell. Doctors who were rushed to the side of the young celebrity declared he'd never walk again. Now, like, that's about what I deadlift at this present moment. I don't know how you would drop a weight because I think in other things that I've read, well, I mean, that's not

really that much. I think in other like it because I think it was like he's claimed that he was basically like deadlifting at the time. He may have been doing like an Olympic lift though, but like I either way, I don't know how you actually crush your knee with the weight, Like I just difficult. It seems hard to drop it on one knee like that, Like it's easy to injure yourself doing lifts like that, but like I don't know how you shatter a single knee that way.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I don't know how you do it.

won't accept this. I will learn to walk again. And so he claims that, like you know, is in kind of this journey to prove them wrong. He heals himself by discovering this mix of asanas and breathing techniques that he's later going that are later going to become what's known as bickram yoga or you know in some cases hot yoga, right that he invins it in order to

heal his shattered knee. This in almost this like supernatural fashion, and like I'm not going to say, like, if you've got bad knees, I think there's there's different things in yoga that can be helpful with that. I don't think doing hot yoga is gonna heal your knee if it shattered into a thousand pieces. I question that.

of his prowess. His yoga techniques exploded in popularity and in short order people were calling him Yoga Raj, the Guru of Mumbai. He continued on this path for several years until Bishnu Goosh got sick or in some versions of the story, Gosh decided to die and induce a heart attack and himself at age sixty nine. I don't know, Bickram is like, yeah, he decided that that was the least painful way to die and he was done being alive, which, honestly, boss, move if that's the case, if.

And again there's no evidence that, I mean, he definitely worked with Ghosh. There's no evidence that Gosh was like in the you know, at the end of his life. You must you must promise me that you'll go to America and teach them yoga. You'll go, You'll go, please, like your sacred duty is to go to Hollywood and teach fucking you know, what's his name? The guy from Er George Clooney had a fucking stretch better here.

really hot yoga. Yet he's doing it. Obviously, he's doing it in like Calcutta, which is an extremely fucking hot part of the world. He's doing it in Mumbai, also very hot part of the world. But it's not they are not heating up where they're doing these sessions specifically, right, That's not a part of it. Yeah, So it's it's worth kind of looking at the story as we kind of go into this next phase of Bickram's life of Bikram Chowdhurry as not just the story of a guy

who you know later becomes an abusive cult leader. That is an element of this, but the way that he's crafted this kind of story about his early background also owes a lot to kind of long held storytelling traditions in Indian culture. Chandrympaul, who's that journalist I quoted earlier when interviewed about her research into Bickram, is always careful to point out that The fabulous and often impossible stories he weaves for listeners are reminiscent of the many tall

tales in popular Indian books, movies, and folklore. We grew up with characters like this. To actually find someone in the flesh and blood who was capable of spinning these yarns was quite something, and you know, yeah, it's it's it's like if you if you spend a lot of time, like in India, talking like just like about different kind of historical figures and stuff, you'll encounter some pieces of this.

Like I under like, it makes sense to me that like she's kind of trying to integrate him into this this kind of tradition of sort of like local folklore, because you can't really understand how he's portraying himself sort of without that. It's not it's not quite the same as as like the way in which like a George Santos lies in.

you know, I gotta I got a dollar off. Yeah, I think you just want to rest me. Yeah, there you go.

in Japan horrible. Again, This is a guy who grows up in India in particularly hot parts of India, and Japan has real rough winters. Right, large parts of Japan get extremely fucking cold. So he is miserable there and he has difficulty. He finds he has difficulty performing a number of his the postures that he's trying to do because he's like shivering so badly. So he decides to

bring yes fucking shattered, ask me. He decides to bring in space heaters to class first, just to keep himself warm, and then he notices that, like, the students who are kind of nearer to the heater are like having an easier time, So he puts more heaters in the room, and he notices that the warmer he makes the room the easier of a time, his students have locking up their knees and touching the floor with their palms and

doing you know, a number of the movements. Over time, he keeps turning the room off hotter and hotter and hotter, until the temperature in the room matched the vicious heat of Calcutta, where he'd first trained, And he seems to have started at around like ninety five degrees, but eventually settled on one oh five, although sometimes he'd crank things

up to like one ten. Now there is an extent to which heat, you know, you can like it like you put a heating pad on, like if you've got like a stiff knee or something, and you'll notice that it like makes it easier to move. Heat can benefit movement and make it easier for people with conditions like arthritis to move. But as you noted earlier, Katie, that

can there's sometimes that can be helpful. It can allow people to do the kind of stretching and exercise that can you know, help deal with and entreat and improve their condition. But also it makes it easier to overtrain, right like if you're because like maybe you'll go a little like too hard, harder than you ought to than you would if you like.

up that high you are like there. You know, there are some benefits to it, but like there's serious risk of like heat stroke, of overtraining people die doing this, you know, and in part because like it is a it can be traumatic for your body to exercise like that in that kind of heat, especially if you're not drinking enough water, if you're not like you know, taking proper precautions. Not that it's bad for everybody, but like a number of people are going to have problems in

that kind of environment. That said, when you're when you put people in that kind of situation when it's one hundred one hundred and five hundred and ten and they're doing these intense stretches in this like boiling heat with this group of people and you've got you know, as you as you stated, Katie, it can make you feel like you're like locked in and trapped. But also if you can, if you push through that, there's a kind of physical elation even euphoria that a lot of people

experience when they're doing that. And also because it is so difficult, there's like a kind of trauma bonding that you can get with other people you're doing And so it it's addictive, right, yeah, you know, like there's a yeah, there's a degree which it's just deeply addictive. The inciting incident for Bickram's rise to power, wealth and influence, and his version of events was a long trip that President Richard Milhouse Nixon took to Southeast Asia that included a

visit to Japan in nineteen seventy three. This was to shore up the increasingly toxic relations between our two countries due to his agreement to visit China. He's like, you know, in a number of parts of the region at this time. It's kind of unclear where Bickram is supposed to have met him, but Bickram claims that during Nixon's time in the region, he's you know, he's riddled with phlebitis, which is an inflammation of a vein that can It's usually

not serious, but it can cause serious health issues. And you know, Nixon is you wouldn't call him our healthiest president, right. I sure Nixon is, like he claims to have like that his phlebitis is like reared up to such a level that he like might lose his leg at some point. You could find like news articles about this, but they don't come out until he's like getting pardoned by Gerald Ford.

So I think there's a degree to which it's like, oh, was Nixon just sort of pretending that he was super sick in order to get people to like, you know, maybe want to lay off him to get like sympathy.

it looks like what happened. Nixon is in Southeast Asia before his like visit with Mao, and then a couple of years later when he gets forced out of office, he he like talks about how bad his pholebitis is to get sympathy, and Bickram is like, oh, yeah, you know, when he was in Southeast Asia, Nixon like his people brought me to him, They like flew me out to him so that I could like help him with his phlebitis and I got him in a swimming pool and

we did yoga together, right. I think in one version of the story, he spends like four days with Nixon and that like he like basically teaches him a set of asanas that Nixon can do in order to like make his flebbitis better, and it works so well that the President can't tell any longer yellow, which was his good leg and which was his bad leg. Because Bickram's just so good at this stuff. And Bickram says that, you know, tells Nixon, if you do your yoga regularly,

the problem won't persist. Which number one, the idea, the very idea that Dick Nixon ever did yoga, I find inconceivable, Like I simply don't believe it. But it's also like, you know, after this point he will continue to complain about his phlebitis, which I guess if you're Bickram, you could be like, well, you know, Nixon didn't keep his yoga up or whatever, Like I don't know if you're if you're a kind of liar, you can find ways

to explain this away. In any case, Bickram claims the president was so great that he expedited and signed off on a special green card just for Bickram. In some versions of the story, he like greets Bickram on the runway when the yogi flies into the United States to start his first school. I gotta tell you right now, we're talking about like all of the different like timing shit on this. There's no way this happened, Yeah, right,

like this absolutely did not occur. There's no evidence the two men ever met Researchers have talked to the Nixon Library and were like, hey, this like very prominent yoga guy is claiming that like Nixon got him a green card and he like cured Nixon's phil bidis with yoga. Is there any evidence that the two even talk to

each other? And the Nixon Library folks like went through their records looking for any evidence that the two men ever met a correspondent and there's just there's absolutely nothing.

I'm going to quote from The Guardian here. From the mid nineteen seventies onwards, he drew in a celebrity clienteleading Michael Jackson, Jeff Bridges, Shirley Maclain, Barbara streisand and Raquel Welch. His classes, heated to a regulation forty degrees celsius, designed to mimic conditions in Kolkatta, offered a combination of constructive hazing, cosmic wisdom, and pantomime eccentricity. He would wear speedos and

issue bizarre commands. In two thousand and seven, a writer for GQ magazine went to a class and reported him telling a student, you miss teeny winnie bikinis, spread your legs. He loaded the color green and banned people from wearing it. He had never seen carpet until he arrived in America. And believing it represented the height of luxury. Had all

his studios carpeted, hygiene be damned, which is horrible. You do not want a room, Yeah, you do not want a room designed to be sweated, to have carpets.

I think there's some example of like, they won't respect it, they won't like take it seriously if they're not spending money on it, YadA, YadA, YadA. Speaking of which, Katie, do you know what is worth taking seriously because it costs money?

nine and helped like bring them, you know together. The Beatles did not exist in nineteen fifty nine, so like this definitely did not happen.

are doing Bickram yoga. You can find like clips of you know, like fucking George Clooney and shit talking about doing Bickram in various like late night shows and shit. But while he you know, winds up a lot of famous people do his yoga. His first follower in the United States is a reggueler dude named Tony Sanchez. Tony started taking Bickram's yoga in nineteen seventy six while he was still in high school n PR Rights. After his first class, Sanchez approached Choudhury to thank him and asked

what his philosophy of life was. He said, be good to others, so others will be good to you. Chowdhury was already heating his studio, but only to eighty five or ninety degrees. Sanchez started coming in every day, then began working the front desk part time. He felt that yoga was sacred, says Sanchez, a discipline that would actually help people not only physically but also mentally, spiritually, and morally.

And this is where you get to kind of a thing that's unclear to me, which is like, was Bikram a khan man from the beginning or was he someone who developed into a con man over time as he got influence over people, as he got like exposed to wealth, like did he kind of degenerate? And part of why it's unclear is that from the time he becomes prominent, he's lying about his past. He's lying about all this stuff.

That happened, and I think that can kind of like back words cloud the story of the guy that he is when you get like one of the things that's interesting about what Tony says is he's like, yeah, you know, it's like eighty five or ninety degrees, which is like a reasonable temperature for to do a hot yoga thing in, but he keeps bringing it up up up up to a degree that's like a lot less healthy and a

lot less reasonable. I think over time he realizes, like the intense impact that this has on people, that it kind of the unpleasantness makes it more addictive, and I feel like there's a degree to which that's something he's

absolutely conscious of and like purposefully doing. I also think it's possible that like he comes in with better motivations at the start, and as he gets famous, he becomes sort of more Number one, having money changes you, and number two having that degree of influence over people, like people following you, treating you as a guru. That's not like good for you, Like it doesn't make you a better personally.

He has this very large colt and he's like always he dries everywhere he goes. He's in the fucking Rolls Royce. Yeah, he's ye Rolexs And Bickram sees this and is like, oh shit, that actually looks pretty dope, right. Rajnische is also like a sex guru right now. Sanchez claims that when he meets him, Chowdhurry is in. He's in. You know, he's got a couple relationships over time, but they're always monogamous. He's interested in like massages and stuff, but he's not

really like motivated by sex. Sanchez claims that even told him, like, I'm not really sex doesn't mean much to me. This is not always going to be the case for Bickram. During a trip back to India in nineteen eighty four, he met Rajashri, a teenaged girl who became his wife via an arranged marriage. She was a yoga champion at the same school he'd studied at, and the whole situation is kind of problematic. But as far as I've been able to tell, she seems to have been an active

and engaged part of his business. There are a lot of allegations that she is a huge part of the fucked up shit he does later. She's certainly an enabler right of this, that is, that is at least something that people will allege. It is, in fact, after marrying Rosistere that he got really serious about expanding his business. By the end of the nineteen eighties, Bickram was making good money and steadily expanding both the size and the

notoriety of his business. As the money rolled in, Bickram equipped himself with the trappings of wealth, a Rolex watch and a fleet of Bentley's. He would try to like claim that this didn't mean that he was, you know, as rich as he was, by telling interviewers like, oh, these Bentley's were like Rex, and I restored them all, you know, you know, and my my main job is helping restore people to health. But my spare time I fixed Bentley's. Again, zero evidence of this.

It started the same year as his marriage, when he excommunicated his first student, Sanchez, after Bikram demanded that he break up with his girlfriend and Sanchez refused. So that's we've got some cults. He's trying to isolate his followers from, like their loved ones and stuff, you know, you can's that's that we're starting to get into that good old fashioned cult shit. Right by the early nineteen nineties, Bikram

had expanded to Tokyo in San Francisco. He started holding teacher training classes each three months long, and he would accept just twenty five trainees per year, although eventually he increases that substantially. People paid somewhere around ten thousand dollars for the privilege of learning from Bickram for several weeks. Classes were intense, including hours of stretches every day in blazing heat, long dia tribes from Bickram that had to be listened to in full, and late nights of Bollywood

movies in Bickram's hotel. He still claimed that he didn't really need to sleep, so nobody else should either. Bickram was extremely discriminating about who he allowed to open schools and who he allowed to use the Bickram name. He was also proactive about policing what he saw as his brand. In nineteen eighty five, Raquel Welch published a book that he claimed was a copy of his different yoga teachings.

He settled with her for enough money to buy a house in Beverly Hills, and look, maybe Raquel Welch was stealing somebody's from Bickram. I certainly, like it seems like there was enough there that he was able to force a settlement on the issue. In two thousand and two, he's like, I don't I'm not invested in Raquel Welch's intellectual honest. Yeah. So like it's whatever.

can go watch a series of nineteen eighties movies. In two thousand and two, he started registering trademarks and applied for a copyright for his yoga, which you'll remember was based on a series of asanas and breathing patterns that were generations old and had first been organized in the structure that Bickram used by his matester bishnu Ghosh, who'd made no attempt to like copyright them or limit who could use.

by the early two thousands. When Sarah Bond took her first class, her first Bickram class in Washington State, she was a sophomore in college and had suffered from scoliosis since high school. So obviously, like, this is the kind of thing that Gosh developed, you know this, this mix of asanas and breathing technics specifically to treat Here's how Vanity Fair describes what happens next. What happened next is

the archetypal Bickram story. She loved the yoga, and as it healed her spine and spirit became consumed by it, dropping out of school and taking out loans to attend teacher training so that she might devote her life to this thing that had changed her life. She was pretty and enthusiastic the first week, with Chowdery presiding, every trainee introduced herself for himself. When it was Bond's term, she said, this yoga saved me. Now I'm happy. I don't get sick,

I don't get pain. As Bond recalls in an interview, I looked up to Bickram and said at Bickram, I love you more than chocolate, and everybody laughed, and he laughed. The third night, as students were demonstrating postures, she says she found Chowdery staring at her, then watched as he dispatched a young woman brushing his hair to bring Bond his diamond spangled rolex. She returned it after class. She was flattered by the guru's attention. I had a very

deep backbend. I thought he probably just noticed my spine, but also found it uncomfortable. After class, he kept her behind, she says. He told her they knew each other from past life and kissed her on the cheek. On the fifth day of training, According to the lawsuit filed this past March by Bonn, Chowdery called her into his office and said, should we make this a relationship? I have

never never felt like this about anyone. Shocked, she protested, made her way out of the office and broke into tears, She says. After telling her boyfriend what had happened, she approached Greg Vlani, who ran teacher training and, according to Bonn's legal complaint, revealed Chowdery's overture to him as well. In an interview, Bond told me that Villani said she should separate the man from the teacher and not tell Chowdery's wife what had happened. So that's you know, that's gross.

There's a lot of that too, and part of it is that, you know, some of these other teachers all had like some of the different kind of physical problems that were helped by you know, this yoga they're doing, and then like Bonn, they kind of turn it into their life because they get you know, they feel both the sense of gratitude to it and maybe even kind of an addiction, and it also becomes the way that they make money, and so so over and over, you hear this idea that like a woman will come in

with a complaint and like everyone will be aware that Bickram is a creep, but they'll kind of be like, just just don't be alone with him. We'll all stay in the room when you guys are together, We'll make sure that you're never alone or whatever. And they always fall short of that. There's kind of maybe some suspicions you get reading it that sometimes they know that they're abandoning her, right, Like it's unclear.

So the entire world of teaching this popular brand of yoga is basically close to you without Bickram's approval, and as someone whose serious spinal problems had been treated to a substantial degree by this yoga, someone who also had decided to like make this her professional life, Bond more or less took the advice of her colleagues at first, right where she's just like, I'm just going to try

not to be alone with them. Yeah, I'll try to separate, you know, the teachings from the things about him that are imperfect. You know, nobody's perfect, right like she's doing. You know, this is not an uncommon way to react to this. She continues to attend events while he's present, and you know, just tried to avoid being alone with him.

Bram had picked. Bickram had picked another mistress by this point, which helped on the few occasions when he did try to make advances on Bond, she was able to get away. So for a while things are fine. She's moving up in yoga. She's an extremely prominent person in the community. She's doing great, and eventually Bickram's wife invites her to a Thanksgiving dinner at their home. This was a big event within the professional community, so she chose to attend there.

Bickram waited until other folks had left and his wife went to bed, and he assaulted Bonn again, like he comes after her. He's, you know, putting it on her and stuff. He's like going in with his hands. She reacts negatively to his advances. He complains about being lonely and calls his wife a bitch. And then when Bond still didn't buy it, when she somehow didn't find that endearing, he said, you will never be a champion without me.

Sure enough, at the next year's Yoga Championships, she came in second, despite what she claims should have been a clear victory. Now I can't judge that statement. I'm not a yoga expert. NPR talked to one of the judges. There's one judge who like bound claims, was like tells her you were robbed, right, Basically, Bickram came to the judges and told us not to give you the win. NPR talked to that same judge, and the judge kind of waffled. They didn't back up Bond's claims, but they

also like didn't deny them either. So I don't entirely know if that's accurate, but there's significant evidence that he harmed a number of people's careers directly when they would not like yield, and including Bond, when they would not like yield to his sexual demands. Later that year, at a training camp in Acapulco, Bond was assaulted again by

Bickram and again managed to get away. From this point on, he stopped letting her teach advanced classes and contacted studios that had booked her for sessions and advised them to drop her. And when I say, as salt, we're generally talking about like you know, going in like like not you know, we're talking about like sexual harassment, right, like sexual harassment on to a degree that's legally actionable. So yeah, there are numerous other stories of Bickram's behavior with other women,

many that unfortunately went even worse than Bond's own. As a rule, Bickram seems to have a pattern. He will invite promising new instructors into his inner circle. At some event, they will all wind up in his hotel room watching Bollywood movies. At a certain point, everyone else just kind of knows to leave, and then Bikram has his way

or attempts to have his way with someone else. Vanity Fair describes what happened to another instructor, Larissa Anderson quote one day after dinner, when Rajastri had gone to bed, chowder asked her to give him a message while he watched a Bollywood movie. Eventually, Anderson says, she started to nod off from fatigue, but Chowdery asked her to stay, then tried to kiss her. She said no, she wasn't

interested in that. You are my family and I want to go to bed now, but Chowdery persisted and raped her. According to Anderson's suit, Larissa was horrified and went into what she now understands was trauma shock. She simply froze. Larissa could not find her voice to cry out for help. Defendant forcefully spread Larissa's legs apart and ejaculated. It did not last long. That's a very you know, clinical police way of talking. But you know that's a sexual assault.

You know that's rape. Like Bonn Anderson was unable to leave the environment, right. She has spent a huge amount of money making a profession out of teaching yoga. This is her job. She can't just like bounce right. It's not like, you know, not that it's easy when it's like someone that you're socially related to with. But like her ability to like survive is reliant upon being involved

in this community. She believed that her life would be effectively over if she lost Bickram's favor entirely, so she tried to continue on keeping her distance from the man. This was, as covered basically impossible. Bickram's other instructors seemed to have been at least passive accomplices, clearing out with surprising regularity when he wanted time alone with a new victim. Again, it's unclear what they knew what he told them, But yeah, it seems a little sketchy when you read a bunch

of these stories kind of in sequence yeah quote. The pattern allegedly repeated with Jane Doe one, who liked Jane do two, filed suit early last May. When Jane Doe one assisted at the Fall Teacher Training in twenty eleven, she says Chattery flattered her by saying he had a gift for her, a transmission, because they thought the same. According to the suit, on another night soon after, he told her, I have never met someone who had a mine quite like my Guru. You have the divine in you.

You have been touched by God. One morning, her legal complaint asserts, when she was doing her duty of tidying his suite and making sure there was fresh fruit, Chottery surprised her and forced her onto the bed, pulling her pants off. As she told him she didn't want to do this, he called her idiot over and over. She says, he forced her to perform oral sex, then raped her. According to the suit, defendant Chowdery force fully manipulated her legs into a yoga posture and laughed at her, saying

you are a yoghini. As with the other women, Jane Doe Well number one says walking away from the Bickram yoga community wasn't a simple choice for her. She was broke. She had spent what was for her a lot of money to attend teacher training and had invested the last five years of her life in teaching Bickram. She stayed at the training and kept working, though she broke down crying at a staff meeting, then cleaning Chowdery's room. Days later,

she says she was attacked again. The plaintiff could not feel in her body. She felt dissociated. Jane Doe's Number ones lawsuit says she could not run erect. Plaintiff remembers feeling that his sexual assaults were incestuous, like a family member attacking her. Eventually, she borrowed money from her mother to enable her to leave the training.

than him, you know, why don't they fight back? I And to tell to kind of talk about that one of the things that comes up in my mind a lot. I interviewed a man years ago who, while he was a marine stationed in Iraq going out and combat missions every day, was raped by his male sergeant. And he was like, he was not bigger than me, Like I was a I like fought for a living. I was very, very physically strong. He describes it the same way that

Jane do Won. He just associated right, the fact that this person who he had like been in this trusting position with the fact that this person he was like relying on to keep him safe out in combat like assaulted him. He just completely lost the ability to physically act.

how they how they handle this. Eight women in total would eventually accuse bitrum of rape while or various other kinds of sexual assault and while all or harassment, and while all this is going on, he would brag loudly and often like kind of like weirdly about his sexual prowess in interviews, claiming stuff like that he had seventy two hours of marathon sex while my partner has forty nine orgasms I count. He also claimed this was I think this was him kind of trying to protect himself.

He would tell interviewers that women begged to have sex with him. Like from his classes, and that would they had threatened to kill themselves if he said no. And again I suspect that was him like trying to like set up like, oh so if somebody later accuses me, I can say, like, oh, no, it was that, you know. I that's my guess as to why he was doing that. So all of this is fucking nightmarish, but none of it's what brought his empire down. It started with simple racism.

In May of twenty eleven, Pandora Williams and it's spelled p A N d h O r A Pandora Williams sued him over a training session she had attended the previous year. She claimed that during a training he had started ranting about how all gay people should be put on an island and left to die of ades. After training, she was like, what the fuck?

And I think part of what makes the abuse both more baffling and kind of it takes people maybe sometimes longer to figure out what's happening, is that, well, sometimes he does this in a way that's not abusive. Sometimes it's kind of playful and like fun, and then he'll turn and it'll say it's very suddenly not at all playful. And that's part of classic abuser shit. Yeah, very very

classic abuser shit. Right when she sued Bitcram's legal representative for the company, right, you know, because he's got a corporate entity, was Mickey Jaffa Boden. She had started recently and found the company to be a mess. There was what she'd called a total commingling of personal and corporate assets.

Bickram would regularly do rich asshole shit like refuse to pay his hotel bills in one case to the tune of one point eight, which is like, you know, we can talk about like the things that are not financially appropriate he did, But I don't really care about that when we're talking about like a serial rapist, like the fact that his finances weren't in order, It's not my primary concern. So Jaffa Boden kind of gets hired to do this job. He gets her like a green card

or whatever. She's because she's an Indian woman. So she comes over the United States, and again she's in a very vulnerable position because she is reliant upon this this state of employment in order to stay in the country. So she finds this kind of mess and she's working on fixing it, and these allegations that woman Pandora Williams sues him, and she's kind of as she's trying to work through the financial problems within the company, kind of

shaken by this. And I'm going to quote again from Vanity Fair here and this is them talking to Jaffa Boden. I realized that if half of this was true, we were facing a very serious situation. Jeffa Boden tells me now. She conducted internal investigations and challenged Chowdery on his behavior. She found him unremorseful. He would pick on someone in the crowd. If someone got up to go to the toilet, he would say, where are you going to change your tampon?

He uses profanities, he's anti Semitic, he's homophobic. He'll say things like blacks don't get my yoga. And once he starts on his ti rate of profanity, he doesn't stop. Once he's picked on you, then you've had it for the entire class. Why did no one stand up to him? There's very little you can do. He's up there on a podium, he's miked up, and it's really hot. Many trainees feared losing the thousands of dollars they had already spent on their fees. Their livelihood depends on putting up

with it. The problem was that Bickram had set things up in such a way that without his continued patronage, you can't teach anywhere else. Some of his victims would come back to his training and just try to take precautions. Eventually, Bickram started sexually harassing Jaffa Boden. She quit in part because he'd also asked her to shut up other witnesses. And then she got together with one of the lawyers who'd been representing Bickram's other victims. She sued him, and

the lawsuit ends. To make a very long legal story short, the lawsuit ends with her in legal control of Bickram, the yoga entity, which is now generally brand Yeah. Yeah, she's and he has. He is not It's not like he's not like in jail or anything like. He has not been charged criminally, but he has lost a number of legal cases. He owes a shitload of money to a bunch of different people. So he's yeah, he's still alive.

He just fled the country, like he's been. He's violated a number of court orders to be deposed basically in order to avoid being like held legally to account for the things he's doing. He just like bounced, He like left the United States.

So it's not great. Yeah that's the story that I mean, it's yeah, it's not nothing like that.