The Bad Guru: 4. The Guru
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Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. This episode contains explicit sexual content and some strong language. He was wearing a dressing gown, I think, with nothing on underneath. Miranda is in Paris to meet the spiritual guide of her yoga school. That was the first time that I was seeing this seemingly mythical figure.

Miranda is a long way from the yoga class she joined just a couple of years ago when she was teaching English at a university in London. Her journey started in 2017 at the Tara Yoga Centre in Clerkenwell.

Since then, she's gone on retreats. She said she felt pressurised into participating in sexualised rituals. She said she's acted in an erotic film in Hungary and she's been brought to Paris on a bizarre road trip. We put on dark glasses which had masking tape on the inside so that we couldn't see where we were going.

Miranda's been in Paris for two weeks, staying in a house where there are severe restrictions on her freedom. We had to hand over our passports, mobile phones, credit cards, any other IDs. And now she's been transported to the apartment of the guru Gregorion Bivolaru himself, the man revered by Tara Yoga Centre and affiliates of the umbrella organisation, ATMAN, the International Federation of Yoga and Meditation.

She's standing on the threshold with two other women. They're all here for what they've been told is their initiation. And he looked just so much older and smaller and more frail than I had known about or imagined before. And it was extremely underwhelming. And he hugged me. I hugged him and...

I thought, I don't want to do this. But Miranda feels like she can't just walk away. No one knows where I am. No one knows what I'm doing. My family have no idea. Friends have no idea.

I have nothing. I have a plastic bag with some knickers in it and a toothbrush. Miranda looks again at this greasy guy in his dressing gown and then she willfully crosses the threshold and enters his flat. It's like she's mesmerised. Having that spiritual connection, spiritual knowledge, these kind of mystical experiences, that was a real focus for me.

And if you're thinking that gurus taking advantage of female students is a story you've heard before, I have to warn you, this is a yoga network with a hidden side I have never come across before. Will Miranda do anything he says in her quest for spiritual salvation? This is World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru, BBC Radio 4 Investigation. I'm Kat McShane, Episode 4, The Guru.

You walked through the basement car park, blindfolded. I knew that the guru was a very, very horrible person. I can remember thinking, what would I do if I changed my mind right now? The blindfolds and security surrounding Miranda's visit to the spiritual guide sound bizarre. But not surprising if you remember who Gregorian Bivalario is.

He's a wanted man. In summer 2019, there's a warrant out for his arrest on charges of aggravated human trafficking and sexual abuse. In the mugshot of him on the Interpol Red Notice, he looks the same as he does in every other photo I've seen of him. Hair that appears greasy and unkempt, and always wearing 1980s-style aviator glasses. When Miranda meets him, he's 67 years old. And if he was once handsome, that's faded.

He weighs Miranda and the two other women that she's with into his apartment. Then he disappears into a back room. Miranda waits in the dingy corridor with overflowing bookshelves.

After a couple of minutes, he returns with gifts for the women. We were given some chocolate, a necklace with the yantra, the symbol of one of the goddesses, and some kind of poster. These cheap gifts aren't the experience Miranda imagined. I don't want to go through with this. She knows the initiation will be a sexual encounter. I am physically...

Not even not physically attracted, but I am physically repulsed by this person. And then it was like that was one voice. And then another voice came in and it said, don't be superficial. This is a spiritual master. Transfigure him. Transfigure him.

For the past couple of years, Miranda's been taught that it's possible to turn something that isn't beautiful into something that is. It was part of spiritual enlightenment. And Gregorian Bivalaru is held up to be the pinnacle of the tantric yoga man. I have no idea how many women initiates have been brought to his apartment before Miranda or since, but I do know that it was going on five years earlier. That's because of someone else who's agreed to talk on the record about it.

You basically sit in a room with dirty dressing gowns for three or four days or three or four weeks.

Until he gets round to you, sleeping in a single room where there's one double bed. Beck is the Australian we heard from earlier in the series. And you're either on the floor, floor, floor, or on the bed, dirty bedding, dirty sheets, dirty dressing gowns. At the time of her trip to Paris, Beck was living in India, where she'd stumbled across a yoga school linked to Gregorian Bivalaru.

She was at a crossroads in her life. She'd gone from being inquisitive about the school's teachings to arriving at Bivilaro's house for her initiation. She was made to wait in the same bedroom that Miranda is in now, staring at Gregorian Bivilaro as he turns to go. As he left the room, I felt, like, very dizzy. There was, like, a disconnect of my physical body from...

kind of what I was experiencing in my head, which was something kind of semi-euphoric. And at the time, I attributed it to the high energy in the room. I was shaking and I thought, this is the energy here. After a few minutes of this dizziness, Miranda takes in her surroundings. She realises that there is another woman in the room. She's naked. Miranda knows this person.

It's a young Swedish woman she recognises. From the holding house, she waited out before coming to the guru's apartment. And she looked just so different. She was behaving very differently. Very smiley, kind of quite ecstatic, but in a jittery kind of way, constantly moving around. I looked at her and I thought...

well, she's changed. This is that spiritual transformation. I later found out that she left the school very soon afterwards. As the women wait to be called by Guru Gagore Mbevelaru, they can hear him through the wall of their room.

And he's fucking in the other room for, I don't know, 10 hours, 14 hours, 20 hours. And then, I don't know, he's giving lectures, recording things. You can hear him speaking. You can hear people come and go. There were no clocks and there were blackout blinds. And it was very disorienting to...

not have any idea what time of day it was. Every so often, Bivalaru brings in some food for the women. He brought in some expired tofu sausages and said, you know, that it's really bad karma to throw away food, so you need to eat them. And he just handed us the pack of sausages. He didn't eat them, but he left them for us. Um...

And we all kind of sat around this pack of tofu sausages and we were like, OK. One of the women in the group finally speaks up. And she said, OK, you know, this is a spiritual test. We have to get through this. And some of them ate multiple of these. They were fizzy tofu sausages. I think I ate half or one. In this small two-bedroom apartment, the only other place Miranda can escape to is the bathroom.

But even this space is highly controlled with strict rules. At one point, I'd used the wrong cloth for something. And a few moments or maybe an hour later, GB came into our room shouting and saying who was the last person to use the toilet, the bathroom.

I said it was me. He said, come, come with me and was shouting and showed me this is the cloth for this and this is the cloth for that. Why did you do this? Are you stupid? And I just froze. I felt very shocked. And then he stopped and I just felt like he just kind of gave up and continued with what he was doing. One of the other women in the bedroom turns to Miranda and says, you know, you actually got off really lightly. He's normally much worse. That could have been much worse.

And then she said, every time that you think he's shouting at you or being harsh or unkind, there's a spiritual message there. So that's something for you to reflect on spiritually. How can you be more attentive? Miranda says that at one point, a woman comes into the bedroom. She's just been having her initiation with GB, Gregorian Bivalaru. She was naked and she was crying and she was just sitting there on the floor crying.

And I said, are you okay? Do you want to talk? And she said, no, no. And it was late, so we all just kind of went to sleep. And she stayed there. She was crying for a bit longer. And then after maybe half an hour, maybe an hour, GB came back into the room. I opened the door. I saw the light coming through from the corridor and summoned her back into his room.

And then I heard them having sex. Miranda stays in this room for two or three days. She watches other women come and go. One time, Gregorian Bivolaru comes to collect a woman for her initiation. As he leaves the room, he turns to Miranda. I was told that I would be next after her. MUSIC PLAYS

In some ways it's astounding that Miranda has stayed in the movement and allowed herself to get this far. But she's not unusual. It sounds as if there was a steady stream of women from around the world coming to see him. I've spoken to four women, including Miranda and Beck, who ended up in the fugitive Bivalori's apartment for a so-called initiation. And I've spoken to a fifth who got as far as the holding house before insisting they allow her to leave. They're all intelligent women who love travelling the world independently. MUSIC

I was given a drink. Someone said, I'll give you a big one because it's your first time. And I was poured a glass of a kind of brown, quite thick liquid, which I was told was aphrodisiac. And it tasted kind of...

Sticky and herbal, also a bit alcoholic. The other women tell Miranda that she should go for her initiation naked, so she takes off her dress and enters Gregorian Vivalari's room. The room was very messy, very cluttered, and the bed was surrounded by some kind of fairy lights. The sheets didn't look clean.

And my initial reaction was one of complete shock because we had been told so much about how this was a perfect living example of a self-realized tantric master.

Miranda walks into the room and sits on the bed next to Gregorian Bivolaru. He takes her hands in his and they start something Miranda has studied back at Tara in London, the consecration ritual. I kind of went on to autopilot.

And we sat in the position that you were supposed to always sit in and closed our eyes and did the consecration. Miranda repeats the formula she's been taught. And it was, Lord God, I offer up to you here and now, totally and unconditionally, all the fruits of this action. I still felt completely overwhelmed by fears and trepidations and disgust and nervousness.

But I had been taught to repeat this consecration and that whenever I did that, it was right, even if I felt it was wrong. And he said, we'll begin then.

I did have sex with him and it was many hours, maybe 14, 15 hours or something like all night long. And I had very strong, intense kind of meditational experiences. But by this stage, I primed myself for this.

And this was sex with many rules. First, the initiation starts with 40 minutes of foreplay, but only Bivilaru can perform it. After the foreplay, it's penetrative sex in seven different positions, each of which is supposedly related to the seven chakras or points of energy around the body. This is then followed by the technique, or urination ritual. At this point, I'm going to mention again that the content of this episode contains descriptions of extreme sexual practices.

I wanted to get the most out of it. I didn't want to be there going, oh, that was weird and gross. I wanted to have what experience there was to have. There were moments of like, this is actually gross.

or I'm not into this. He drinks directly from your urethra. And because I had never done that before and I couldn't let go directly into someone's mouth, he told me that I had demons inside me and that's why I couldn't piss in his mouth. And then he urinates directly into your mouth and you drink it. And this is a very special blessing and initiation. I went into autopilot.

I felt completely disconnected. I felt repulsed. And even though you weren't enjoying it, why wouldn't you have stopped it? If you failed the initiation, then the implication was that there was something wrong with you. You were lacking. You weren't spiritual enough. You weren't part of the community enough. She forces herself to go through with the ritual positions and then...

After they'd been through three of the seven positions... He opened his eyes and he looked at me and said, you've lost your erotic energy, we're going to stop. I was exhausted. I hadn't slept. This was probably somewhere around 5 or 6am. They do the urination ritual. That's the most important thing to him. And then it's over. You might think that if you found yourself in this situation, you would never go back.

But Bec went to see Bivilaru once more, and another woman I spoke to went back further three times. That's consistent with coercive control. An expert explained to me that because the women are isolated from their old lives, and the love and fear they have for the guru, they have what's known as a trauma bond with him. They think that each time they go back, life will get better.

Buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing hundreds of names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for their murders. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Binge part one of Kill List, episodes one through six, ad-free, right now on Wondery+.

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After Miranda's initiation is over, Gregorian Bivalaru gets up, goes to a different part of his room and offers her a small gift. And he gave me a bag of scarves and a bag of underwear and told me to choose one. And I really didn't care. I really didn't want another gift. What I wanted was to speak to him because I'd been told and I'd come to believe that he was my master.

So I just picked the first thing that appeared in the bag very quickly. And I remember he was quite angry and he said, choose properly. And then I said to him, I really want to talk to you. And he said, oh, no, no, no, there's no time. Maybe next time. Miranda tries to talk with him about her desire for the same spiritual freedom that he is said to have, but is disappointed by a banal response.

Miranda has left everything and everyone else behind. Her English lecturer job at London University, her family in Oxfordshire, her friends. Her whole life is now the world of Gregorian Bivalaru and his followers, and she doesn't want to risk their rejection. And I knew that if I went back...

Having failed, and I had to tell people that I'd failed, I would be looked down on. Shortly after her initiation, Miranda leaves Gregorian Bivilari's apartment and is taken to yet another holding house in the city. I was completely exhausted. I hadn't slept for about 24 hours at this point. She is told that she must record a naked testimonial video. And I knew that I could only say positive things. Miranda wants to get the film over and done with so she can leave this place. Yes.

Miranda has given me the copy of a declaration which she says looks just like the one she was after signed while in Paris. And on the first page of the declaration it says,

It then says, on my own account, I now declare unconstrained of my own will and throughout the entire period of my visit to Grieg, that's what a lot of Gregorian Bivolaris followers call him, I have never been raped by Grieg or any other person. And it also declares, you have never been trafficked in any way and you have never been psychologically manipulated. I wondered how you feel about signing this now. I don't think that we had any choice.

The irony is that you're signing something supposedly of free will that is so clearly incredibly coercive. It just highlights the complete delusion and irrationality of the whole thing. But even after signing the forms and making the video, she still doesn't feel free to leave.

She's taken to a bus terminal in Paris and gets on a coach to Prague. She's accompanied by a woman from the Paris holding house who has arranged her ticket. By the time they arrive in the Czech capital, Miranda says she hasn't slept for a day and a half. Gregorio Bivolaru has told Miranda that at her next destination, huge transformations will take place. It's called the Garden of Miracles.

Girls are online now, waiting to meet you. When Miranda arrives at a villa outside Prague, she discovers for the first time what the so-called Garden of Miracles is. It's women performing as camgirls. They live stream themselves in lingerie, dancing, stripping and touching themselves provocatively for the camera. It's live. It's sexually interactive. I don't think that there's anything wrong with camgirl work in itself, if that's...

what you're choosing to do. But I didn't know I was going to be doing it. I didn't choose to do it. Miranda says she was tricked into travelling to Prague and that she didn't know she was being recruited into the sex industry. If that's true, she is a victim of human trafficking, which is a criminal offence pretty much everywhere in the world.

Arguably, she was also a victim of modern slavery, which includes recruitment of people for exploitation by means of deception. So some of them would just want to talk, but most of them would want you to do something. Touch yourself in a certain way or move in a certain way or...

say things to them. Sometimes working until the early hours, Miranda stands in a basement room in this villa in Prague in her lingerie, putting on a show for paying customers. You had to make an effort. You had to try and make as much money as you could. And if you weren't smiling or you weren't looking active enough on the site, one of the coordinators would come and

Miranda needs to make as much money as possible because cam girl work is the way to pay for living in this house. And you don't have to do it, but if you don't do it, you need to pay for being here and you need to pay for your passage here. The other women in the house, like her, have been involved with yoga schools affiliated with Atman. There's a woman from the Portuguese affiliate, another from the Hungarian school and several from Romania.

The rules Miranda signed up to included a confusing system of orders and fines. Leaving the fridge open was a €10 fine. Leaving a plate that you didn't wash up immediately was a €25 fine. Leaving a tissue in your pocket when you gave your laundry to them to do was a €150 fine.

Being late to the site, even by one minute, was a €500 fine. But despite all this, Miranda still believes she's doing the right thing. Followers of Gregorian Bivlaru have this phrase called burning karma. What Miranda understood by this was that if you do something selflessly, even if you don't want to do it, you'll burn karma and it will help you on your path to spiritual liberation.

Anne Miranda says she's been told that performing as a cam girl won't just benefit her karma, it would also help the men who are watching her. It would awaken and transform the souls of the clients and that they would burn karma when they paid us, even if they paid us all their money, even if they paid us money they didn't have. They were burning their karma.

And in addition to the men burning karma, the money they spent on camgirls would also help the whole yoga movement and the spiritual guide Gregorian Bivolaru, who Miranda calls GB. The camgirl house will be Miranda's home and workplace for six months. The regime sounds oppressive, but when Miranda is given a month off, she doesn't ditch the movement. She splits her time between London and a camp run by the spiritual guide's followers in Romania, and then she returns voluntarily to the house.

The reason she does this is she believes it is part of a spiritual programme set for her by her guru and she doesn't want to fail. She's almost cut herself off completely from her family back in Oxfordshire. She kept the communication going, however sparse it was at various points.

I'm going to say she didn't abandon her family. Miranda's mum, Penny, is getting phone calls from her daughter less and less frequently. Miranda only has intermittent access to her phone and the calls are short. But Penny has enough mother's intuition to know that things are seriously wrong. After Miranda hangs up, Penny turns to her husband. They discuss whether it is time to stop trusting that Miranda will leave the yoga movement of her own accord forever.

Has the time come to take matters into their own hands? Talk about how ghastly it was and should we do something rushed out there? Grab her and bring her back? But they decide against it. In Prague, Miranda is worried about leaving. She says she's been told that despite being employed in the house as a cam girl, she owes the house money. She is convinced that she is 700 euros in debt and if she doesn't pay it back, she'll be banished from the yoga movement.

If only her mother knew. If there had been any suggestion that there was physical coercion in some way, that she was in some sort of clear and present danger, we would have done something. But always coming back to this thing of we're actually powerless here. Did you ever give up hope that you would get Miranda back? No, not once.

I knew she'd come back. And perhaps Penny is right not to give up hope on her daughter returning home. You see, when Miranda first arrived at this villa in Prague, a flicker of a thought passed through her mind. It was when she was greeted by a couple of the women who lived in the house. And they were both wearing long, floaty dresses, looking quite similar. And they came up to me with this kind of smile. And that was the first time...

that I remember thinking, oh God, maybe this is a cult. Thinking this is a cult is one thing. Getting out of it is another.

We approached Gregorian Bivolaru through his lawyer for comment, but did not receive a response. MISA, a yoga organisation associated with Mr Bivolaru, strongly defended him, stating that he has been the victim of political persecution and false allegations and that his teachings are followed by more than 40,000 people around the world.

Next time on World of Secrets, The Bad Guru. It felt like a personal attack. It felt like a witch hunt. World of Secrets, The Bad Guru is a BBC Studios audio production. It's presented by me, Kat McShane, and produced by myself and Emma Wetherill. The executive producer is Inez Bowen.

Subscribe to World of Secrets. Episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the full series right now, first on BBC Sounds.

These were police agents.

I'd have to find other agents. Just how was one man allowed to lead a double life for so long? It's not like James Bond. It's not a black and white situation. When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe? I wouldn't even know where to start, and I'm with the IRA. Stake Knife. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

Buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing hundreds of names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for their murders. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Binge part one of Kill List, episodes one through six, ad-free, right now on Wondery+.