The Bad Guru: 5. The Breakthrough
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This episode contains sexual content. How does a yoga movement become a recruiting ground for camgirl work? Someone who was once involved in the business side has agreed to talk. What he's about to tell us will help explain what happened to Miranda, a university tutor from England who

who joins a yoga school in London called Tara Yoga Centre. All of these nice, smiley, shiny, happy, good-looking people. And through a series of encounters with different bits of the international movement it's part of,

ends up working in a topless massage parlour in London and being taken to Prague to work in a live online pornography business. She said, look, we do cam girl work and you need to pay for your passage here. The women she works with in Prague are from around the world.

Most, if not all of them, are, like her, students of an international yoga movement inspired by a guru called Gregorian Bivolaru. I've been trying to work out the relationship between the yoga schools, the guru and live stream pornography. And now someone is about to explain how it works, right from the start. The video chat business, I think it started in 1999. It was a legitimate business in Romania at that time.

Mihai Rapture was close to the guru in the yoga movement's early days in Romania. He says he even acted as his lawyer. After webcamming took off in Romania, some individuals in the yoga school asked Rapture if he could do the legal paperwork to help them set up their own operations. With girls from the yoga classes, you know, they met the girls there and they proposed, you can work for me, but nothing organized.

Rapture thought he should consult their guru, Gugurin Bivalaru, about this. Bivalaru was against prostitution, but web-comming, the guru said, was different. In fact, he said he thought there might be something spiritual in this work. Because the girls have this kind of power of transmitting something spiritual. And he...

He was very, very categorical on this, that it's prostitution only if you are physically involved in a relationship, sexual relationship with somebody. And nothing wrong if you are making video chat. And I think he encouraged the girls to do this, proclaiming that in this way they become more feminine. Mihoy was doubtful. That guy who is at the other part of the camera,

He's jerking off, you know. This is his main purpose. So there's nothing spiritual here. Andy says that as the years went on, he saw women from the yoga school being financially exploited in businesses where they did erotic performances.

I had wondered if Gregorio Bivilaru owned these businesses, but Mihai is sure. No, no, no. He was involved only in writing books, studying and having affairs with girls. So Bivilaru doesn't own these businesses, but he encourages members of his international yoga school to work as cam girls. And they donate their earnings back to the guru and his network. Rapture thinks it helped the movement grow internationally.

Rapture was concerned about what it had become. It's already a cult. He says in 2009, he told the guru it was time to get out of the sex business. Maybe we can go back to only simple yoga. We have enough. We have everything we need only to do yoga and that's it, you know.

We wrote to the Romanian yoga organisation MISA, which was founded by Gregorian Bivolaru. They told us that Mr Rapture has long been a fierce enemy of their school and of Gregorian Bivolaru and accused him of making false accusations. We also wrote to Gregorian Bivolaru through his lawyer. We did not receive a reply.

Mihaly Raptcha left the movement in 2011. He wasn't able to stop the sex businesses from operating, which is one of the reasons why, in 2019, Miranda, a university tutor from England, is working as a cam girl in Prague. But she's starting to have the same doubts as Raptcha. Oh, God, maybe this is a cult. This is World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru. Radio 4 Investigation, Episode 5, The Breakthrough.

We should put on one of these pairs of dark glasses which had masking tape on the inside so that we couldn't see where we were going. You wouldn't be let out of the car. This is really, really, really big. After Miranda has done six months in the cam girl house, she goes to live in Hungary, in a commune of Bivolaris followers where she'd spent some time before. Although she's dared to think that maybe she's in a cult, she hasn't decided yet. And this movement is still her whole life.

In February 2020, she takes a trip back to London to help out at an open day at the Tara Yoga Centre. But then... Lockdown. Overseas travel is banned. Yoga classes are off.

Miranda decides to stay in London for a few months and then she moves to Oxford, just a few miles away from her parents. For Miranda's mother Penny, it's a sign of hope that she might get Miranda back. She was back here, she wasn't talking about going abroad again and she seemed happier. So I thought, OK, I think things are normalising. I've heard that sometimes when people decide to leave a cult, they have a lightbulb moment where everything clicks into place.

That wasn't the case with Miranda. Although she's having doubts, she can't fully admit them to herself or leave the community of Gregorian Bivolaru's followers, so she starts attending the Tara Yoga Centre in Oxford. One of the people she meets there surprises her one night when they're having dinner, and they start talking about Gregorian Bivolaru, or as Miranda now calls him, GB.

And he said to me at some point, GB is always calling other people demonic. He's calling everyone else demonic and awful. What if he's the demonic one? What if he's the awful one? And to me, that phrase was just sacrilege. I could barely, you know, comprehend that he had said that and I was really angry.

And then he went on to say, you know that it's a cult, right? You know that you're brainwashed. And again, I was extremely annoyed and angry. It took me quite some time to process that. I think I didn't talk to him for a few days. But on some level, I was beginning to be ready to hear it. And gradually, over the next few months, it did start to sink in.

Miranda's journey to the heart of Gregorian Bivalari's international movement started with the yoga classes she attended at Tara Yoga Center. I've spent hours watching the center's video lectures and webinars, like this one entitled The Transforming Power of Pleasure, hosted by Maria Poresvelt, then one of Tara Yoga's directors in London.

There's a clue in her talk about why so many people like Miranda might find it difficult to break away from spiritual organisations, even if they go on to be treated badly. It's the promise that if you stay, life will be amazing. Ecstasy is not so difficult with a little bit of training, coming with many more benefits than you can anticipate.

The lecturer, Maria, is a blonde, radiant Dane who looks younger than her 40 years. As I stare at her, smiling sweetly and talking gently, it's hard to believe that she could ever be connected with anything sinister. And as for having anything to do with the cam girl business, well, exploring erotic pleasure without a partner, she says, is just not the tantric way. From a tantric perspective, in order to really have these profound experiences of orgasm,

You do need someone else there. I just want to mention that we are a charity and donations, however big or small, are always very warmly welcomed. You might assume, from Maria's slightly disapproving tone about solo sex, that she'd want nothing to do with the sort of web-coming business that Miranda and other followers of their guru ended up working in.

But in December 2023, something comes to light that directly links a house once used for webcamming in the Czech Republic with Maria and another senior figure at Tara Yoga. An investigation by the Czech newspaper, says Namzapravi, uncovers a webcam house 80km north of Prague. And like the house Miranda lived in, most, if not all, appear to have attended yoga schools affiliated to the Atman Federation.

The newspaper's reporter, Kristina Surakova, gets hold of the purchase agreement for the house.

Unlike the house that Miranda lived in, this house is actually owned by the Atman Federation. The agreement is dated September 2020. And the two people who have signed the purchase agreement on behalf of the Federation are two senior teachers from the Tara Yoga Centre in London, Maria Pawsfeld and Bogdan Radasanu. Both were directors of the Atman Federation when the webcam house was bought.

As the Guru Bivalaru's former lawyer told us at the start of this episode, the sex businesses are usually owned by followers of Bivalaru, not owned by Bivalaru himself or by the yoga schools. For a house like this to actually be owned by the yoga school's umbrella organisation is surprising and you might think revealing. We asked the Atman Federation to tell us what they thought the house was being used for.

They didn't answer this question directly, but they did say, the Atman Federation categorically condemns any kind of abuse. We also asked Maria Poresvelt and Bogdan Radasanu what they thought the house was being used for. Neither replied.

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+.

It's New Year's Eve, and instead of going to a party to welcome in 2022, Miranda is at her parents' house in Oxfordshire, in her bedroom, watching documentaries about cults. I just knew, I knew in my heart, in my bones, in my body, that I had to leave and I had to tell people. It wasn't an easy thing to admit. It was very difficult. It's very difficult to admit to yourself, let alone admit to your friends and family and others that...

You made a mistake. The next morning, on New Year's Day 2022, Miranda sends a message to a friend of hers who was in Tara but left. And she put me then in touch with some other people who had left and I knew. I mean, I knew even before I spoke to her, but once I spoke to her, it was confirmed that I had to leave. Miranda also called her mother, Penny. She invited me to come and have a coffee at a cafe in Oxford.

On a winter's day in January 2022, Penny navigates her way through the tables and jolly groups of people, peeling off their coats, ordering coffees and hot chocolates. Penny sits down at a table opposite Miranda.

Penny likes to think of their relationship as close, but the truth is that she knows very little about Miranda's life over the past four years. She doesn't know the full story of why Miranda abandoned a career as a university lecturer in London to seek spiritual salvation. She doesn't really know much about what Miranda was doing when she lived in Prague and why she rarely heard from her.

All she knows is Miranda joined a yoga group in Clerkenwell, central London, called Tara Yoga Centre, and then became involved in the international movement of which it is part. And she told me in broad brush terms that the organisation was a cult.

Miranda takes a gulp of her drink and starts telling her mum the full story. Miranda tells her mum everything, even about her so-called initiation with the spiritual guide Gregorian Bivolaru, who Miranda now calls GB. The initiation was in fact a really traumatising sexual encounter. Miranda has no idea how her mum will react to her revelations. And it was difficult, it was painful, it was embarrassing, it was vulnerable.

Not least because everything that I'd believed in so much and preached to other people about how wonderful it was and even tried to get other people involved in, you know, there I was admitting that it was a cult and a sex cult and that they abused me. And, you know, to admit that to my mum, to someone who I even invited to attend events there was, yeah, it was awful. It was horrific, extremely, you know, painful and embarrassing.

And I just sort of listened and said, uh-huh. I mean, it's such a mixture of emotions. I mean, there's such relief that she saw the light. What parent in particular, what mother would not feel in the very core of her being some of the emotional stuff that her daughter has been through? And, you know, as a parent, especially when they're very small...

You want to protect them. You wish you could keep them in that bubble, that they never have to deal with the crap in the world. But of course they do. But you still retain, even when they're in their 30s, some of that desire, that wish that they didn't have to go through tough stuff. This is beyond tough. And what was it like for you as a mother hearing her talk about going to Paris and GB? Ah, that really shook me, actually, because I had...

No inkling about all that. I was horrified, absolutely horrified. A shock that it can happen to your daughter with all the advantages that she's had. We somehow think that those advantages should protect someone from having to experience that. Well, the fact is they don't. Nobody joins a cult. You just get sucked in so gradually.

And it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. How do you feel towards the organisation now? Absolute revulsion. I couldn't despise them more. I think to hide behind something as ancient and spiritual as yoga is particularly reprehensible. How would you describe GB? A complete shit.

Elsewhere in Oxford, Laura Hancock, an independent yoga teacher and founder of the Yoga Teachers Union, has spent years investigating Tara Yoga Centre and the wider international movement it's part of. Miranda hears that she's working with a journalist called Kat McShane. That's me. And as I explained in the first episode, Laura is the person who got me started on this investigation.

Laura and I have exchanged hundreds of messages and spent hours on the phone together investigating everything we can about this yoga network. Morning, Kat. I just wanted to say that I've updated the spreadsheet with a few more links. I'm feeling a little bit unsettled about the Tara case. We did calls with people from Australia and Denmark, as well as the UK, but we hadn't spoken to anyone from Britain who had the whole story and was willing to go on the record. We didn't know about Miranda.

Now, just a couple of weeks after Miranda had stayed up on New Year's Eve watching cult documentaries, I get this voice note from Laura. Sorry, a slightly urgent message coming through. I got a message from Miranda late last night. Miranda had decided that the best way to stop other people being exploited in the same way she had been was to talk publicly about her story. It'd be good to get your thoughts before I reach out to her. Cheers, Kat. Cheers.

A few days later, Laura and I have a Zoom chat with Miranda. We learn the true scale of exploitation. It's the story that you've just heard. There is a psychological reckoning for ex-members who have to reconcile all the good they think they experienced in the movement with what they know now. Some people I've spoken to still speak of their time in the movement lovingly. One person, even with tears in their eyes, the community had become their family and sometimes they still miss it.

Yes, they might feel that they have been manipulated, but many of the people they might now see as the abusers, or the enablers, were or are themselves victims too. Miranda wants to ensure that nobody else is manipulated. Going public will be part of that. But she also wants Laura to help her get the police involved. When I heard Miranda's story...

For me, that was like, I cannot justifiably not take this to the police. This has to go to the police. So Laura talks with Miranda and other former members and then goes to Thames Valley Police. Didn't end the meeting and be like, right, we're launching into investigation right now, which I think a part of me was kind of hoping they would do. Thames Valley Police do an investigation, but then it goes quiet.

Thames Valley Police told us that they had done a thorough investigation but concluded that no offences had taken place in their area, so the case was filed. Like it disappeared into the ether and there were no updates. We knew that, yeah, that wasn't going to be an effective route. In summer 2022, Miranda has been driven by a friend to Glastonbury. The atmosphere in the car is slightly awkward because one of the other passengers is someone who is very involved with Tara Yoga Centre.

The other passenger doesn't know Miranda's story and so goes on about how wonderful Tara Yoga Centre is and starts praising one of the teachers. I could just feel this anger bubbling up inside me. Eventually, Miranda can take no more, so she tells the other passenger her whole story. And she had the strongest reaction to it of anyone still in the organisation I'd told up until that point. The most humane and compassionate reaction she was getting.

genuinely shocked and upset and she said almost straight away I want to help. I feel that I need to do something about this. I felt this like sense of solidarity from her that I hadn't felt from anyone else still in the organisation up until that point and a few weeks later she told me that she'd been talking to a few of her friends and she was going to organise a

A meeting in Hyde Park and if I wanted she could tell my story second hand or if I wanted I could go there and tell it first hand to still current students. There was a group of, I don't know, about seven or eight people when I arrived and then more people came. Miranda decides she's going to address the group herself.

So whenever you get in a car, you have to wear dark glasses with tape on the inside and wear a hat and pull it down over your eyes so that you can't see where you're going. I started to share my story and to speak. Most people were respectful and understanding. Maybe we do questions up until now.

How does everyone feel about that? There was one person who wasn't understanding. One of the teachers from Tara Yoga has turned up. He has a camera around his neck. It was horrible. It felt very intimidating speaking to people who were still within the doctrine that I was speaking about, most of whom were completely clueless of what was going on, others of whom may have been complicit.

But quite a few people after that challenged the teachers. Quite a few people left. Maybe she doesn't realise it, but Miranda has declared war on Tara. And they are about to fight back. We will start now with the presentation by Miranda. This is a secret recording we've obtained. It's from one of a series of meetings Tara Yoga held about Miranda. It's the recording you heard right at the beginning of this series. One of the teachers, Bogdan Radhasanu, reads out a letter.

At the time, Bogdan is a director of the umbrella organisation that Tara Yoga is affiliated to, the Atman Federation. He is also one of the people I mentioned earlier who signed the purchase agreement for a cam girl house in the Czech Republic.

The letter he reads out is apparently written by Gregorian Bivalaro himself. The former student, Miranda, has cleverly taken advantage of your naivety. It's an attempt to discredit Miranda's account. In order for each of you to be edified, we suggest you attentively listen to a recording in which you will hear what Miranda was saying four years ago.

about the experiences she has had and which are of a completely different nature when compared to the statements she is now making. A recording is played.

The audience is told it was recorded on Miranda's trip to Paris to meet the spiritual guide. Miranda has heard this recording of herself. One of the things that always makes me cringe...

when I listen back to myself is the intonation and the accent and I can hear it there how I sounded like the teacher sound and how I sounded like this kind of prototype this cult personality kind of robotic prototype I will never forget this experience and if I do I will then fit into the category of the superficial shifting and stupid woman

I find it disturbing that they keep all of these recordings. It seems fundamentally unfair to play a coerced recording from someone's past to somehow suggest that they are lying in their present, that they think they have that level of ownership over my story, my reality, my voice.

That was one of the hardest times of my life, when those meetings were happening. You know, having this sense that people are sitting for hours talking about you behind your back and lying about you. It was extremely disturbing. It felt like a personal attack. It felt like a witch hunt. We wrote to Tara Yoga Centre and Bogdan Radhasanu. We put it to them that the way Miranda was denounced added to the picture of their organisation as a cult.

They did not address this issue. Tara Yoga Centre told us they unequivocally condemn all forms of abuse. Miranda wanted Gregorian Bivalara to be arrested. She wanted no one else to go through what she's gone through. She's decided to sue Tara Yoga Centre. Miranda has reported her concerns to Thames Valley Police. Local yoga teacher Laura Hancock has also spoken to Thames Valley Police about her concerns. She feels frustrated that more hasn't been done. It's really hitting home.

I just need this out in the open and for stuff to be done to change it. Bec, another former follower of Gregorian Bivoularu, is in London for a few days and I suggest we meet up for a walk in the park. Bec's the Australian we met earlier. She went to Romania for the yoga festival and had an initiation with Gregorian Bivoularu in Paris. She's trying to persuade the French police to investigate. Miranda is helping her.

But Bec is finding the process frustrating. Well, a lot of women have spoken out. It's completely mind-blowing. And when someone says to me, you know, about this organisation, and I say, you know, women are held without their passports in houses, without mobile phones, without internet access for weeks at a time, someone says, why is something not done? Well, good question. Hi, Kat. I'm delighted. It's huge. It's huge.

On the evening of 28th November 2023, my phone starts blowing up. I'm kind of in shock and I'm full of relief and I'm kind of crying. The spiritual guide, Gregorian Bivilaru, is arrested. I'm totally just like, what the... Not being able to quite process that he's been arrested. I'm just like, I can't believe he's arrested. This is like ten years of my life. I mean, I'm just... I don't know how I feel. I just feel, like, joyful and also, like...

It's like a relief, but it's also like, yeah, it's just like being heard. We approached Gregorian Bivilaru through his lawyer for comment, but did not receive a response. MISA, a yoga organisation associated with Mr Bivilaru, 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. That's the house and there's someone in that house. I can't, I'm kind of shaking a bit. 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.

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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+.