Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The First American Yoga Cult Leader

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Robert is joined again by Katy Stoll to continue to discuss the founder of Bikram Yoga. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Assassinated in cold blood. This is silenced, the radio murders. You left the body there for a reason. It was the calling card. It's like the mafia used to do. The mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, they clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalosian. Listen to silenced, the radio murders. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wow. Wow. Wow. That's what we're starting with.

Katie Stoll admitting to committing a crime. Sophie, can you get the DEA on the horn real quick? Just call them up. We got to report this. It's a legal behavior. They're on your speed dial. Not on mine. I love Robert reporting meets the DEA. Yeah. I'll show them your book on my bookshelf about drugs. Hey, hey, hey, whoa, you can't you can't prove shit just because it has my name in it. You know, that doesn't mean anything. Books are lies all the time. Signed love Robert's front page.

That doesn't prove shit. It. Katie, what have you heard about Bikram Chowtury? Not that much, Robert. Just really. Okay. Okay. I actually haven't. So there's coming in fresh. So there was a billboard in Los Angeles on Olympic and like Barrington for Bikram Yoga my entire life. Yeah. Yeah. Not anymore. It's it's it's a. I've definitely seen Bikram. I do have some sort of vague association with negative association with the person. I don't think it's because I'm here on

behind the bastards and I understand the what happens here on this show. But yeah, I don't got I haven't got any information on him. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is great. This is great. You're coming in cold. He used to be as Sophie mentioned, like there were billboards for this guy, like an entire style, like one of the most like like famous and prominent types of yoga literally bear like in, you know, the American conception of yoga literally bore his name for decades. And he is a fucking monster. Very bad dude. And I mean, obviously, I started this. I initially been planning to kind of do a two parter on Bikram.

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 Bikram 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 one of Bikram'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 where we are. That's part of why I wanted to do it

this way. It's like there's a chain of these kind of guys taking advantage of the sort of trappings of yoga and, and, you know, Hindu and Buddhist mysticism in order to abuse people. And 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 yogis 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 Hatha faded, exhibitionist elements of it became more common. A good example of this would be Reba Rakshit, an Indian bodybuilder and yoga advocate who studied under a teacher named Bishnu Ghosh, who we will talk about more in a little bit. Reba immigrated to Kolkata after the partition of India and with the withdrawal of the English menace. And by the early 1950s, 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 tricks. Probably it's a lot that like elephants are smart and don't want to crush people. I don't know. I'm not 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 Chowdhury was born in Kolkata in British India in 1944. 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 Bikram is an inveterate liar. So I'm not sure I would even trust a birth date if he gave it. But 1944 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 saved 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 Chowdhury 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 Ghosh's College of Physical Education. About 15 or 20 kids there are doing the posture. 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 who we mentioned a little

bit earlier. He's the guy who trains Riba. And Bishnu Ghosh 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 1946. This is generally seen as the book that helped to widely introduce yoga and meditation to Westerners in the 60s and 70s. Steve Jobs found Eastern philosophy as a teenager by reading Autobiography of a Yoga. And he was vocal about rereading it every single year. Mark Benioff, who is the current CEO of Salesforce, has said on record that at Jobs' memorial service, you know, during his funeral, everyone who attended was given a copy of the book. 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 1960s when Ravi Shankar gave him a copy. Elvis Presley read it around the same time. Now, obviously... I bet my grandma read it. I've been sitting on this nugget that my great-grandma, a white woman, taught yoga in the 60s, started teaching it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's not even a question that she read that book. It was foundational to the not just yoga, but just in general to the New Age movement. It's just a massively influential text. And as you might expect, among religious scholars, among historians who study yoga, among people who are experts in the actual study of the religious traditions that Autobiography of a Yogi 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 seen as impossible. But 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 a myriad set of opinions on it. So it's worth giving this overview of Bishnu Ghosh and his brother, because his brother who writes Autobiography of a Yogi is a little bit more of a high-level kind of spiritual guy. Whereas Bishnu, while he's definitely using some of his brother's ideas, he's very grounded in physical sciences. And his application of yoga is really relentlessly focused on both 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 84 yoga postures that his famous brother codified. And 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 isolation exercises traditional to hatha

yoga that his brother taught. And Ghosh 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, Ghosh was also influenced by the book Muscle Control by a German bodybuilder named Max Sick. And I don't know, it's one of those things, when I read about it, it makes sense to me just in terms of what's worked for me. A major focus of my own exercise is just lower back shit, 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. Yeah. And what most people don't necessarily know is how important core strength is to lower back and vice versa. And that I believe the back, those muscles are actually part of your core. Or if they're not there, you know, so there are some a lot of like I do a lot of different types of activities. I know I kind of shit on my yoga practice in episode one. I see it's important, but I have it incorporated in everything I do and that deep. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. No, I mean, it makes total sense to me the idea that like you would kind of look at what makes people get old

and be like, Oh, well, the back is the key to all this makes total sense to me because like that's what's going to fuck up your mobility more than almost anything else. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, pretty, Vishnu Ghosh, pretty reasonable dude. So this is the guy that little kid Bikram finds and learns from. And yeah, it was Ghosh who kind of first put together this list of 28 asanas and two breathing techniques that Bikram would later take to the West. But for a time, he was Bikram's teacher. And according to Bikram Chowdhury, Bikram was an excellent student. He credits Ghosh as being the greatest health culturist of the 20th century, a rare compliment for a man who most frequently compliments himself.

Yeah. Oh yeah. No, I think it's one of those things where like you got to talk up your your teacher because like it makes the case that you're extra awesome. Yeah, it is. That's a self-serving compliment. Yeah, for sure. Bikram claims he was such a good student that at age 11, he entered and won his first major yoga championship, becoming the all India yoga champion that year. And competitive yoga is like a thing in India. Although, as we'll talk about, not really in this period. So he and Ghosh, Bikram claimed later, toured around the country, showing off various feats of yoga prowess as a mix of like Carnival Act and evangelical revival for the religion of yoga. Bikram 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 Bikram 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 like forced to quit by, you know, the yoga powers that be in India. There's an Indian journalist named Chandrima Paul who dug into his backstory with rigor. She was unable to find evidence that there was any sort of 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, you luminary, BKS, INGAR to retire from competing in order to give other contestants a chance. Now, most of the version of the Bikram 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 Bikram'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 11, 12 or 13. And his famous yoga sequence, the very core of Bikram yoga was actually not so much developed or designed by Bikram, but largely exerted with only the slightest of changes from a longer series of 91 postures that have been firmly in the public domain for the last 100 years. So, you know, this is like not an uncommon kind of grifter backstory that you would like. Like a real George Santos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's santos saying pretty hard here. The most common Bikram story after this point says

that he became next a professional bodybuilder. Again, you always have to double check everything this guy says because he's an inveterate liar. But there is some evidence for this, namely, there's photos of him looking super jacked and lifting heavy weights. So I can confirm at least that Bikram Chowdhury was once yoked as absolute fuck. Like we're talking photos of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely was swole 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, so he claims that BKS Ingar, 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 crowds, 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 NPR quote. Around this time, Bikram learned he didn't need to sleep. From here, things get weird. At age 17, during a routine training session, Bikram 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 it and 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 it was

basically like deadlifting at the time. He may have been doing like an Olympic lift, though. But like either way, I don't know how you actually crush your knee with the weight. Like I just very difficult. It seems hard to drop it on one knee like that. Like it's easy to injure yourself 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. The mechanics are alluding me. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little baffling to try to like work out in your head. He claims that like the doctors because he was like he's in his version of events, he was a super famous weightlifter. And so all these doctors run up to the stage when

he hurts himself and they, you know, do a scan and he says his knee is broken into a thousand pieces and he gets told by these doctors, oh, he's never even going to be able to walk again. And he's like, no, I 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 Bicram yoga or, you know, in some cases, hot yoga, right? That he invents 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 going to heal your knee if it shattered into a thousand pieces. I question that. No, honestly, yeah, hot yoga gives you a risk of injuring those muscles because you don't, you're so you're so warm that you don't know when you've gone too far. Anywho. Yeah. And yeah, there's a bunch of risks of overtraining with it. Yeah. But he says that in six months of of doing this yoga, his leg is all better. But he's sadly is no longer jacked because he had to give up weightlifting. So that's tragic. We hate to see it. So Ghosh told him to travel to Mumbai next and open a shop and teach this

marvelous new healing sequence to all comers. Using his injury as proof 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 Vishnu Ghosh got sick, or in some versions of the story, Ghosh decided to die and induce a heart attack in himself at age 69. I don't know. Bikram 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 you if you don't have that control and you're able to do it. Yeah. Yeah, man. Hey, I gotta go worse ways to leave the world. Sure. And also 69 pretty funny age to make it to.

Perfect. So yeah, yeah, nice. Bikram claims that before he went, Ghosh made him swear an oath, quote, my guru took my hand and told me something in English, which he never spoke. Promise me you will complete my incomplete job. He said he meant bringing yoga to the rest of the world, the West and America. And I replied, yes, I promise I will. And again, there's no evidence that I mean, he definitely worked with Ghosh. There's no evidence that Ghosh 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 get you'll go play like your sacred duty is to go to Hollywood and teach fucking, you know, what's his name, the guy from E.R. George Clooney had a fucking stretch

better. Yeah, it's also like if this guy's fellas is enlightened and wonderful as he's being made out to be. And like we haven't gotten to the specifics of Bikram yet. But yeah, I've got an idea of where this is going. Yeah, I don't think that he would be this. He must know this person's character. No, it's him as wanting all the money. And yeah. Yeah, I mean, you have to assume, you know, at this point, Bikram's claiming that he's, you know, he has no money. He's just kind of living, you know, off of donations and refusing to accumulate any any kind of wealth or possessions. Again, there's also no evidence that this is true. But perhaps it was people go on go through journeys. It is kind of worth noting the yoga he is doing, the yoga that he like that Ghosh is

doing that he kind of like takes is not really hot yoga yet. He's doing it obviously he's doing it 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 yet. So it's it's worth kind of looking at the story as we kind of go into this next phase of Bikram's life of Bikram Chowdhury is 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 and Indian culture. Chandrima Paul,

who's that journalist I quoted earlier, when interviewed about her research into Bikram, 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, 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 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 the United States. You know, there's a little difference. There's a cultural suspension of disbelief. Yeah, maybe maybe a little bit. Yeah. You know, an acceptance and it's not it's not the way we see a George Santos is just being a liar. Yeah, he's also not going to do most of this lying over there. So maybe I think it might it might be more I think what what what I'm Sandrim is saying is more that like, well, he probably gets to some extent. I see the he's probably kind of inspired in like how he's framing himself by the way these stories of these other

kind of folkloric figures are told. Yeah, which makes sense. You know what else makes sense, Katie? Um, uh, using podcasts to sell stuff. Using podcasts to sell who better to tell you what to spend your money on than two people whose primary job is sitting in front of a microphone and, you know, talking about shitty people. Where else can you learn what products and services are going to finally make you happy? Absolutely. This is probably the only place that you can possibly be advertised to I think these days. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's very hard to find, you know, people whose life experience is largely limited to the entertainment industry who can tell you, you know, here's here's what you can spend

your money on to finally be happy. You know, this is this is it folks. But trust me, you can trust us. Yeah, you can trust us. We have your best interests at heart. That's all Katie and I talk about, you know, in private is is your best interests. What do you think? What do you think's good for for our fans, Katie? You know, that's what we ask ourselves. Anyway, spend some fucking money you you sheep. Some people can't stand the rain. But at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again.

Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's VESSI.com and see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. Picture Miami, picture its beaches. Picture the palm trees swaying in the wind. Picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood. This is silenced, the radio murders. They left the body there for a reason. It was the calling card. It's like the mafia used to do. And yet, the mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And then there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, they clearly gave a green light.

I'm Osvalos Shin. Listen to silence, the radio murders. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. I hope you spend your money. Yeah, I hope you're super happy. I don't know my code. Bastards? I don't know. Yeah, Katie, I've heard this new technique that I'm using with the fans. It's called negging. Have you heard of this? Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? It works great. I have heard about it. Yes, it does work very well, unfortunately. Yeah, I'm big into it these days. It's great. It really does work so well.

Groundbreaking. Yeah, it's good. I'm trying it everywhere now. The other day, I was at the gas station and in Oregon, you're not allowed to fill your own gas up because that's considered dangerous and sketchy for reasons that are impossible to explain. But I'm at the gas station and I just kind of started negging my gas station attendant as he was filling up my car. And I got a dollar off. I think he just wanted to impress me. Yeah, there you go. See? Everybody get out and just, Robert, what are you doing? Everyone's going to become absolute assholes. That's the world I want to see. Don't do that shit. It's disrespectful. Sophie, it's the only way to destroy the power of the pickup artists. If everyone is negging,

then their teachings will have no force behind them. Be nice. Be nice to the gas station workers. Wow. Okay. I mean, yes, that is true. Last time I got gas, I got a great boomer joke from my, they were like, do you want a receipt? And I was like, no, thank you. They're like, that's cool. Receipts are for boomers. Oh, my God. That was a product and a service. Thank you, sir. Oh, burn. It is so funny. Like this fucking state, like in Oregon, like you can open carry, you know, a sword should you wish completely unregulated. You can buy still basically any kind of firearm that's legal in the United States.

But if you want to pump your own gas, that's a problem. The state's got issues with that. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I love it. It would take me a minute to adjust, but I think it'd be nice. I thought I would hate it. It's delightful. See, I hate it, but I like pumping my own gas. Yeah, because you're fucking weirdo. I like to get out, you know, start pumping gas, light a couple of cigarettes, you know, sometimes I just toss lit cigarettes around the gas station. It's a good time. It's a good time. So we're talking about Bikram Chowdery. So at any rate, we can say with some certainty that Bikram next left India for Japan. And this is where he would make what is by some accounts the only real breakthrough of his career. He found the winters

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 his whole knees acting up to his fucking shattered ass. 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 up 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 95 degrees, but eventually settled on 105, although sometimes he'd crank things up to like 110. 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 treat and improve their condition. But also, it makes it easier to over train, right? Like if you're, because like maybe you'll go a little like too hard, harder than you ought to, then you would if you like, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I, the yoga that I have, perhaps the most, well, not the most, I've done some heated yoga, and there are absolutely some benefits to it. Oh yeah, you get a hell of a workout, yeah. Hell of a workout. It made, it made me incredibly nauseous though. Oh yeah. Multiple times. And you're like, so far away from the door, and there's all these people

dealing with their own issues in the heat. Yeah. You're like, how do I get out of here? Right before I throw up over everyone. No, and that's the, that's the, so there are, again, like there's benefits to like doing yoga in warmer rooms. The actual metafocal benefits, well, wear off well before 100 degrees. And like by the time you get 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 overturning people die doing this, you know, and in part because like, it is, it can be traumatic for your body to, 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 100, 105, 110, 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. And so it, it's addictive, right? Yeah. You know, like there's

a, yeah, there's a degree to which it's, it's just deeply addictive. The inciting incident for Bikram'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 1973. 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 Bikram is supposed to have met him. But Bikram 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 wouldn't. 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. Absolutely. That's a PR move I've ever heard one. And Bikram doesn't start making these claims about Nixon until kind of like years after this would have happened. So what it looks like would

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 phlebitis is to get sympathy. And Bikram 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 Nick, he like basically teaches him a set of asanas that Nixon can do in order to like make his phlebitis better. And it works so well that the president can't tell any longer, you know, which was his good leg and which was his bad leg

because Bikram is just so good at this stuff. And Bikram says that, you know, tells Nixon, if you do your yoga regularly, the problem won't persist. Which number one, 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 Bikram, 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, Bikram claims the president was so grateful that he expedited and signed off on a special green card just for Bikram. In some versions of the story, he like greets Bikram on

the runway when the Yogi flies into the United States to start his first school. I got to tell you right now, we're talking about like, all of the different like timing shit on this. There's no way this happened, right? Like this absolutely did not occur. There's no evidence the two men ever met. Researchers have talked to the Nixon library and we're like, hey, this like very prominent yoga guy is claiming that like Nixon got him a green card and he like cured Nixon's phlebitis with yoga. Is there any evidence that the two even talked to each other? And the Nixon library folks like went through their records looking for any evidence that the two men ever met or corresponded and there's just there's absolutely nothing. Now, you feel like there

would be something you feel like because like, look, Nixon covered up a lot of shit about his presidency, but I don't feel like he would have fought to cover this up. This couldn't be a priority for Dick to like hide. Um, yeah. And it's like, it's, it's, it's fascinating because I would watch a movie about this relationship though. I would. Yeah. I would like a little buddy comedy Dick Nixon and it's like yoga guru hanging out and whatever Indonesia or something like. Yeah. Yeah. Nick Kate. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why Nick Kate. Yeah, but Nick Kate. Oh, Nick Cage as Nixon. I feel like we do deserve that. Like I basically, I think that's the level because we don't want to do any reverence to Nixon. No, no, no, I think. Oh, no. Let Nick Cage do his

thing to Nixon. Nick, Kate, like Nick Cage just doing drunk Nixon, like learning how to do yoga. Like that's, yeah, that's, that's, that's perfect. That's perfect. Maybe that would be casting. Okay, continue. Again, Hulu, hit us up. You know, we've got this shit. So Bikram, he does make it to the United States. He does get a green card. I just, there's no evidence that fucking Nixon signed it. And Bikram launched his yoga college of India at a small North Beach studio in San Francisco in 1972, which again, doesn't seem to time out with when Nixon was in Southeast Asia, but whatever. But it does time out with my great grandma. It does time out with your great grandma. I've also, again, there's always multiple shit. I found some articles that say Bikram's first

studio was in Beverly Hills. I think it was in San Francisco, but it's a little unclear. Either way, you get the idea. Pretty sure she was still in San Francisco at that point. Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's a good chance she was aware of this guy. So his yoga studio with its heaters and boiling temperatures and intense series of stretches and breathing exercises took the new health conscious California set by storm. He, he hits the California New Age community like a fucking bomb. I'm going to quote from the Guardian here. From the mid 1970s onwards, he drew in a celebrity clientele, including Michael Jackson, Jeff Bridges, Shirley McClain, Barbara Streisand, and Raquel Welch. His classes, heated to a regulation 40 degrees Celsius, designed to mimic

conditions in Kolkata, offered a combination of constructive hazing, cosmic wisdom and pantomime eccentricity. He would wear speedos and issue bizarre commands. In 2007, a writer for GQ Magazine went to a class and reported him telling a student, you, Miss Teenie Winnie Bikini, spread your legs. He loads 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, you do not want a room. Yeah. You do not want a room designed to be sweated to have carpets. Oh no. That's so bad. Yeah. That's, that's not great. That's not ideal. That rug didn't last carpet didn't last a week before. No, no. Oh, horrible.

So it was actually actress Shirley McClain, who he credits with convincing him to give up the aesthetic, possessionless life of a yogi that his guru had advised him, and to start charging for instruction. She had met him in Mumbai years ago at his first yoga shop and told him that while taking donations might work in his home country, Americans couldn't possibly understand the concept, right? 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? I don't know, Robert, is it products and services to be advertised? It is products and services. It is. Yeah. Just, you know what, don't even,

look, I'm going to need something from the audience here, which is a little bit of faith in us. You know, don't, don't even listen to what the ads are for. Just go to the first URL I read to you during the ad break. Figure out their bank routing number and wire them your life savings. Just do it, you know? Use promo code. Yeah. Yeah. Use the promo code. You'll get 5% off of your life savings, you know? Do it. Yeah. There we go. Ads. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything, but imagine your favorite sneaker styles. Supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in

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Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Yeah, I hope you're all enjoying the possessionless life of a yogi. Now that you've given your life savings to, I don't know, fucking Blue Apron or whoever. Who sponsors this? Sophie, is it Blue Apron? Hello, Fresh. Hello, Fresh. Yeah, send them the money. They need it. So over the years, Shirley MacLean kind of tells Bikram that he has to give up living without possessions and taking, funding his yoga based on donations and start charging people. Over the years, as his actual contact with celebrities expanded, Bikram starts telling lurid lies about other famous people he'd worked with. He took credit for opening the Beatles up to Eastern spirituality,

claiming that he had worked with them in 1959 and helped like bring them together. The Beatles did not exist in 1959. So like this definitely did not happen. Well, I mean, maybe the early version of the Beatles back when they still had Pete Bass, I don't know the exact timeline, but they were so far off from this stage. Yeah, definitely not. They hadn't done drugs yet. No, they hadn't. They weren't doing anything cool. Like it's like actually the Beatles like getting into Eastern spirituality is super well documented and none of it involves Bikram Chattery. Again, we would know. Yeah, it would not be, it would not be hard to prove. He claimed to have taught his yoga to astronauts at NASA's behest. There is again, no evidence of this. In reality,

well, he did have a lot, a lot of famous people are doing Bikram yoga. You can find like clips of, you know, like fucking George Clooney and shit talking about doing Bikram 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 regular dude named Tony Sanchez. Tony started taking Bikram's yoga in 1976. Well, he was still in high school in PR rights. After his first class, Sanchez approached Chattery to thank him and asked what his philosophy of life was. He said, be good to others so others will be good to you. Chattery was already heating a studio, but only to 85 or 90 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 we get to kind of a thing that's unclear to me, which is like, was Bikram a con man from the beginning? Or was he someone who developed into a con man over time as he got influenced over people, as he got like exposed to wealth, like, did he kind of degenerate? And part of why it's unclear is that his from the time he like 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 backwards 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 85 or 90 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 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. Yeah. 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 person. Absolutely. Yeah. And we can all blame Shirley McClain for this, I guess. Yes. She's history's greatest monster. You, you, what was his teacher's name, Ghosh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Guru Ghosh. He, I mean, you specifically said that he specifically said we cannot accept money for these teachings. Yeah. And I don't know. Maybe I've just seen this movie too many, not this specific movie, but like the story of the person that, you know, the younger person that says, but it can be this way or whatever. And or, you know, really, I want to go to America, whatever it is, I don't know, missing pieces, showing, I don't know.

I think that there is, it sounds like the origins of his training were legit. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, he got contaminated. Yeah. It's certainly, it's like, it's unclear, like, was he always this kind of guy or did it happen later? You know, that's a little bit of a mystery, I think. Guys like Sanchez seemed to suggest that, like, he was a better person earlier on, which, which isn't surprising to me if that is the case. Like, that's not a, not the only time that's happened. Yeah. We just did a whole episode on money and how it affects people over our other shows, some more news. Yeah. So that's, that's definitely a part of the Bikram Chowdhury story. So when Sanchez meets this guy, he says the yogi was attached to his

strict Indian diet. But as Chowdhury began to make some money, he found a fellow Indian immigrant to emulate the controversial ashram leader, Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. If you watch that show, Wild, Wild Country, right? That's the guy. And Rajneesh, you know, there's a number of things problematic about him. But a big thing that he's doing is he gets super rich. He has this very large cult and he's like all the way, he draw everywhere he goes. He's in a fucking Rolls Royce. Yeah. He's got Rolexes and Bikram sees this and is like, oh, shit, that actually looks pretty dope. Right. Yeah. Rajneesh is also like a sex guru. Right. Now, Sanchez claims that when he meets him, Chowdhury 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 Bikram. During a trip back to India in 1984, he met Rajesh Sri, 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. Yeah. That is, that is at least

something that people will allege. It is, in fact, after marrying Rajesh Sri that he got really serious about expanding his business. By the end of the 1980s, Bikram was making good money and steadily expanding both the size and the notoriety of his business. As the money rolled in, Bikram equipped himself with the trappings of wealth, a Rolex watch and a fleet of bentleys. He would try to like claim that this didn't mean that he was as rich as he was by telling interviewers like, oh, these bentleys were like wrecks and I restored them all. And my main job is helping restore people to health. But my spare time, I fix bentleys. Again, zero, zero evidence of this. Yeah, it's really hard to square this spiritual kind of a thing with

wanting bentleys. Yeah, especially multiple bentleys, right? Yeah. You get rich and you get one Bentley like, I don't know, maybe you could still be like, when you, by the point you have a fleet of bentleys, it's like, I don't know, man, like that, that seems like, seems like there's probably something shady going on here. Yeah. So it is around this time that the first signs of what we might call coat shit from Bikram become apparent. 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 coats that he's trying to isolate his followers from like their loved ones and stuff, you know, you can, that's, that's, we're

starting to get into that good old fashioned coat shit, right? Yeah. By the early 1990s, Bikram had expanded to Tokyo in San Francisco. He started holding teacher training classes each three months long, and he would accept just 25 trainees per year, although eventually he increases that substantially. People paid somewhere around $10,000 for the privilege of learning from Bikram for several weeks. Classes were intense, including hours of stretches every day and blazing heat, long diatribes from Bikram that had to be listened to in full, and late nights of Bollywood movies in Bikram's hotel room. He still claimed that he didn't really need to sleep, so nobody else should either. Bikram was extremely discriminating about who he allowed

to open schools and how he allowed to use the Bikram name. He was also proactive about policing what he saw as his brand. In 1985, 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 some ideas from Bikram. It seems like there was enough there that he was able to force a settlement on the issue. In 2002, I'm not invested in Raquel Welch's intellectual honesty, so it's whatever. But also, it's like, you're scummy too. Yeah. So he settles for her. He gets a house in Beverly Hills. He says some wild shit about her. She's in terrible shape and has horrible muscles, and it's like, man, she is Raquel Welch

in the 1980s. She is Raquel Welch. Shut the shut your trap. Nobody's buying that Bikram in 2002. We have eyes, man. We can go watch a series of 1980s movies. In 2002, 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 Bikram used by his master, Bishnu Ghosh, who'd made no attempt to copyright them or limit who could use them, right? Yeah. I very much do remember that. Yeah. It's super fucked up. He starts this process of trying to be like, I own this kind of yoga and you can't do it without paying me in 2002. That eventually led to a long series of lawsuits, which gets

settled in 2012 when the US Copyright Office and a federal judge say, like, no, you can't do this. You can't copyright yoga, which is fine. That's a good call. Yeah. It seems like the right choice. Yeah. It would be like if you developed a mix of squats and weightlifting and were like, I own this. No, man. You can't copyright how people use their bodies. Yeah. Yeah. You can copyright, I don't know, having Richard Simmons do it, but you can't copyright the movements themselves. So it is unclear when precisely Bikram started to sexually harass and abuse students. But we do know that this was a fairly regular occurrence by the early 2000s when Sarah Bond took her first class, her first Bikram 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 Ghosh developed, you know, this mix of asanas and breathing techniques specifically to treat. Here's how Vanity Fair describes what happens next. What happened next is the archetypal Bikram 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 Chowdhury presiding, every trainee introduced herself or himself. When it was Bond's turn, 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 Bikram and said, Bikram, I love you more than chocolate. And everybody laughed and he laughed. The third night, as students were demonstrating postures, she says, she found Chowdhury 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 back bend. 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 a past life and kissed her on the cheek. On the fifth day of training, according to the lawsuit filed this

past March by Bond, Chowdhury 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 Villani, who ran teacher training and according to Bond's legal complaint, revealed Chowdhury'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 Chowdhury'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 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 Bond, 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 over and over you hear this idea that like a woman will come in with a complaint and like everyone will be aware that Bikram is a creep, but they'll kind of be like, just don't, 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 that 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.

Yeah. It is a unfortunately very classic story of a man in power using that, abusing that position and people enabling it. There's a myth. There's a magic to him, even though it is more modern. We're not talking about the last episode where, you know, turn of the century 1900s, but like it and, you know, that still exists. It's a little bit better now, but not much. Yeah. Not much at all. And like, you know, honestly, like as much of this is based in like yoga and mysticism, the the abuser, one of the abusers that most most reminds me of Bikram is fucking Weinstein. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. He's this he's this big

industry figure. They are all working for him. Their careers rely on his approval. And that's the center of the abuse that he's able to do. And that's in a big part of the abuse he's able to do is a lot of people around him. They're not all entirely aware, but like they know enough and they just kind of like avoid making it there, letting it be their problem. You know, also, which means throwing a colleague under the bus, you know. Yeah. And as we've established with this copyright thing, you know, I'm trying to it's he is he has successfully positioned positioned himself at the center of a practice that actually is very helpful for people. Yeah. That actually can be life changing. Yeah.

Yeah. But that's not him. He's not. No, he's taking the teachings of, you know, his his guru was a much better like actual expert on physical health. He's tweaked them a little bit. But like he's he's he's pretending that like he is the font of these techniques that have benefited people. When in reality, he's just kind of like enclosing them and capitalizing on them and then using his perceived control over them to abuse women. Cool guy. So the entire world of teaching this popular brand of yoga is basically closed to you without Bikram'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, Bon 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. Bikram had picked Bikram 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, Bikram'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 their Bikram waited until other folks had left and his wife went to bed, and he assaulted Bon 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 Bon 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 bound. There's one judge who like bound claims was like, tells her you were robbed, right? Basically, Bikram came to the judges and like told us to not to give you the win. NPR talked to that same judge and the judge kind of waffled. They didn't back up Bon'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, including Bon, when they would not like yield to his sexual demands. Later that year, at a training camp in Acapulco, Bon was assaulted again by Bikram 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 assault, we're generally talking about like, you know, going in like, like not, you know, we're talking about like sexual harassment, right? Yeah. Like sexual harassment on a to a degree that's legally actionable. Yeah. So yeah, there are numerous other stories of Bikram's behavior with other women, many that unfortunately went even worse than Bon's own. As a rule, Bikram 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 Rajasri had gone to bed, Chaudhary asked her to give him a message while he watched a Bollywood movie. Eventually, Anderson says she started to nod off from fatigue, but Chaudhary 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 Chaudhary 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 that's a sexual assault. You know, that's that's rape. Like Bon, 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 Bikram's favor entirely. So she tried to continue on keeping her distance from the man. This was as covered basically impossible. Bikram's other

instructors seem 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 like Jane Doe two filed suit early last May when Jane Doe one assisted at the fall teacher training in 2011. 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 mind 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. Chattery surprised her and forced her onto the bed, pulling her pants off as she told him she didn't want to do this. And he called her idiot over and over. She says he forced her to perform oral sex, then raped her according to the suit. Defendant Chattery forcefully manipulated her legs into a yoga posture and laughed at her saying, you are a yogini. As with the other women, Jane Doe number one says walking away from the Bikram 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 Bikram. She stayed at the training and kept working, though she broke down crying at a staff meeting. Then cleaning Chattery'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 one lawsuit says she could not run or act. 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. Yeah. Yeah. And it's these are horrifying. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's Tara. He's a fucking monster. Like these are I do want to talk a little bit that because this is a very common thing that you will encounter from like shitty people,

particularly cops when someone is raped is like, why didn't you fight back? Right? Why didn't you? And like these, these are, you know, Bikram is an older guy. These women are often like physically taller and even sometimes stronger than him. You know, why don't they fight back? 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. I, he describes it the same way that Jane Doe one does, right? He just

dissociated, 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. Right. Because you also don't know what the ramifications of reacting might be. Bigger picture. Who's going to believe you? X, Y, Z, my job. There's, but also just in that moment to give a, I mean, probably a lot of your listeners already know this, but it's not fight or flight. It's fight, flight, fawn or freeze. Yeah. And especially when someone is attacking you in a position of power, you, there's something in you, your body does this, this issue. You don't know. You might want to like appease the situation.

You might want to try other tactics than fight. You're not fighting somebody you respect necessarily. You're still figuring out what the fuck is happening to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, we're kind of bringing this up just to note that like everything these, these women have said is completely consistent with, I mean, God knows how many millions over time, like of sexual assault. These are not uncommon stories. There's nothing about this that is, that is abnormal in terms of their reactions or how they, how they handle this. Eight women in total would eventually accuse Bikram 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 72 hours of marathon sex while my partner has 49 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 2011, 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 AIDS. After training, she was like, what the fuck, man. And I think her exact statement was like, yoga isn't yoga supposed to be about love. And he responded to her, we don't sell love here, bitch. And then he told an assistant, get that black bitch out of here. She's a cancer. So that's pretty bad. Williams was forced to leave and the $11,000 she had paid for training almost was not refunded. So that's also pretty fucked up. My mouth is on my jaws on the floor. Yeah, he's a real piece of shit.

So you'll get in this documentary, there'll be moments where he's like, he's making jokes about people. He'll like give him little nicknames and stuff. And it's a little bit insulting, but like in a way that like people do with their friends and you can see in the reactions of other people, they respond well to it. And then other times, and there's again documentation of this, he'll be incredibly abusive. 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 Bikram's legal representative for the company, right, you know, because he's got a corporate entity, was Mickey Jaffa Bowden. She had started recently and found the company to be a mess. There was what she called a total commingling of personal and corporate assets. Bikram would regularly do rich asshole shit, like refuse to pay his hotel bills in one case to the tune of 1.8 million, 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. But like the fact that his finances weren't in order is not my primary concern.

So Jaffa Bowden kind of gets hired to do this job. He gets her like a green card or whatever, 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 state of employment in order to like 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 Bowden. I realized that if half of this was true, we were facing a very serious situation, Jaffa Bowden tells me now.

She conducted internal investigations and challenged Chowdhury 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 tirade 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

Bikram 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, Bikram started sexually harassing Jaffa Bowden. 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 Bikram'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 Bikram, the yoga entity, which is now generally brand. Yeah. Yeah. And 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 still alive. Yeah, he's still alive. He just fled the country. Like 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. He spends a lot of his time in India. He does a lot of training still in Mexico. He is still doing teaching sessions and young yoga instructors still like pay huge amounts of money for him to teach them. He did like a tour of India after he left the United States. So like it's one of those things where his reputation is fucked for sure. That blows my mind. And he he lost control of Bikram, like the the corporate entity. But

like, you know, he's not over. He's not like in jail. He's not all of his money is not gone. You know, he has like a divorce with his wife, but it's so that she can protect their assets and stuff. Like it's not, I don't know, it's not the worst story we've had in terms of, you know, a bad guy, like not getting what they deserve, but it's not the best. So it's not great. Yeah, that's the Bikram story. Do not love that. I mean, it's yeah, it's not nothing like he's that he doesn't have control of that company. You know, it's not nothing. It's fine. But it does make me think, you know, everyone's like, just in general, the age we live in. And maybe I guess it's just always true.

But like, yeah, you can't get canceled. You're going to have other opportunities. You'll just go find the people that are like, yeah, fuck people that are too PC or whatever, fuck women. I hate those people, whatever it is. Like that's disappointing. But he legally lost that thing. Yeah, it's not going to say it's the best case scenario, but it is consequences and that is better than you get in a lot of it's better than a lot of these stories. And so I don't know. And I was surprised by that. So yeah, yeah, there's that's something. Katie, you want to plug any plugables? Oh, boy, I do. I do. I've got a show called Some More News with Cody Johnston. We have a whole YouTube channel with lots of long, funny videos. I mean,

I think they're funny, informative. And a podcast called Even More News. And we've also take the audio from the YouTube channel. And it's a podcast, lots of options. But yeah, that's, that's me. Well, I am also me. I have a book. It's called After the Revolution. You can buy it wherever books are bought. You should also check out other cool zone podcasts like Cool People, who did cool stuff, which is the opposite of the show. And we'll do a nice job of making you feel less shitty after hearing stories like this shit. Katie's been a guest. She was wonderful. I have. I love that show. It's great show. Very fun. Not depressing. So check that shit out. It's like a cleanse. Yeah, it's like a cleanse. Just like hot yoga for the soul. Oh, yeah. There

you go. There you go. I'm thinking I might crank my heat up to 110. Oh, okay. Yoga class. I'm not going to do that. Don't do that. And on that note, peace out, motherfuckers. Peace out, motherfuckers. Yeah, motherfuckers. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but. Imagine your favorite sneaker styles, super charged with waterproof tech. So whenever you're out sustaining in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup

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your podcasts.