AFTER her mother had joined a yoga class, 12-year-old Agnes was eager to go along, too.
The totalitarian regime of Communist Romania had recently toppled and many young people were in search of a spiritualism that they had been denied for years. Yoga classes had been banned since 1982.
“It was suddenly a more alluring world that Romanians didn’t have access to before,” remembers Agnes. “Under Communism, there was a more closed mentality. But after it, people needed something to cling onto, something to believe in, to put their hopes in someone else.
“I was curious to attend the classes that my mother told me about. It was so captivating to discover that there was this spiritual guru.
“Someone with the answers to all of our questions. Simply finding myself close to the great master felt sacred.
“The girls saw Grieg as the supreme being, Shiva, the symbol of masculinity and male energy. As a 15-year-old girl, I also began to see him as a god.
“He had a certain charisma but it was not physical. He was never an attractive man. But we constantly put him on a pedestal.”
It was when she was 15 that 48-year-old Romanian “guru” Gregorian Bivolaru, the spiritual leader of an international network of yoga studios specialising in tantric rituals, decided she was ripe for her “initiation.”
This meant that, like all of the other specially chosen young women to be invited into his seedy bedroom, she was to have sex with him.
“I was initiated at the beginning of 2000,” she says. “I was a virgin. I won’t go into too much detail but it wasn’t special. I didn’t feel any pleasure. Quite the contrary. I remember that the bed was full of blood, but he wasn’t upset. I remember that tears were running down my face. I was 15 years and six months old.”
Agnes was also to find, like others before and after her, that his international yoga organisation was financed by his students working as web cam girls – live feeding themselves in lingerie, provocatively touching themselves for paying customers – for hours, days and weeks with little or no pay.
“Officially, I wasn’t allowed to do webcam work because I was underage,” says Agnes. “But it was considered completely normal to make a few appearances using other girls’ passports.”
In the three-part Apple TV documentary, Twisted Yoga, former women victims of the sex cult that had promised healthy sexual awakening, reveal their disturbing stories as they found themselves in the middle of sexual exploitation, coercion, depraved rituals and orgies.
It includes a bizarre appearance by the reclusive Bivolaru on TV, in which he denied any wrong doing, newly accessed files from the Romanian secret police revealing his love of pornography from an early age and his victims who worked together to try to bring him to justice.
A key figure in that is blonde-haired Australian, Ashleigh Freckleton, from Melbourne.
“I started to get interested in astrology, numerology, Tarot and palm reading at a young age,” she says.
“As I got older, I started to explore my identity, who I am and what I believe in, and I think that created fertile ground for me to be really open to, ‘What next?’. I always wanted to move to the UK and in 2018 I arrived in London and got a job in the NHS.”
One morning she got a message on her phone from an old friend in Australia, Ziggy, telling her about how he had devoted himself to yoga and meditation in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he had started to teach it.
He sent her a link to the UK branch of the international Atman Yoga Federation – the Tara Yoga Centre near London’s Old Street.
“It was a polished video that had an authentic feel to it,” says Ashleigh. “Everyone was there to better themselves in some way. It was exactly what I was looking for. So, I signed up to the classes.
“The way that they teach it is for you to visualise the activation of the chakra – the energising of various parts of your body. It’s more than just stretching a muscle. There is something spiritual going on in the process. I was so committed. I would not miss a class.”
After a few weeks, Ashleigh discovered that the students who showed the most potential would be invited to attend weekend workshops, in order to gain a higher spiritual understanding. And she was surprised and delighted to be approached.
“I was told there was a summer camp in Costinesti, Romania for the entire month of August and they said that I could write to the spiritual guide, Gregorian Bivolaru, and ask him if I could stay at the villa. It would be the perfect opportunity for me to learn new techniques that are specific for women and would be great for my transformation.
“So, I wrote to the guru and I had to send some photographs of myself in a bikini for him to look at so that he could read my aura, because he wouldn’t be there in person.
“It seemed a bit odd, because I wondered why he couldn’t read my aura through my clothes, but I went along with it and he sent a message back saying I had been accepted.”
When she got to Costinesti, on the Romanian coast, she was surprised to find the “villa” to be a shabby, austere and featureless apartment building with plain aluminium-framed windows, a surrounding security fence and guarded gates.
“It wasn’t my vibe at all. Once inside, they took my passport and made me swear on a bible not to reveal any of the secrets or anything that went on there.
“There were pages and pages of rules that I had to read and then I was told to take all my clothes off so they could check my aura and make sure my energies were balanced enough to participate.
“It felt strange but I decided it would be empowering. All the women – who came from around the world – walked around the villa naked for most of the time and I loved that. It felt open and safe. You could go to each other for advice and share hugs and cook each other food. It was a real community.”
The highlight of the event was the bizarre Miss Shakti competition to celebrate Shakti, the divine feminine energy in Hinduism.
“It was a Miss Universe-style pageant that was videoed for the guru. I was surprised by what I saw. Women were dancing seductively, adorned with jewels and headdresses and when it came to the competition, all the women walked onto the stage wearing micro bikinis, looking like sex bombs. It was a proper contest with a first, second and third place.
“At the end of the month was something called Integration. All the women went into a big room which was kind of ritualised with flowers, candles and fruit and then it was just a massive orgy between all these women. No men. I didn’t want to take part so I just sat, cross-legged, in a kind of meditative posture, watching.
“Then they started passing a bowl around and the women peed into it. Their urine was called ‘The golden elixir,’ which becomes ‘charged’ after lovemaking. This was later bottled into little vials so that they could add drops of it in their drinking water to embody the qualities of others.
“It seemed like I was the only one who didn’t want to take part. But I rationalised it as, ‘I’m not evolved enough. Maybe one day I will be, but I’m not there, yet.’”
“Arriving back in the UK I was confused and disorientated. I had all these fears and anxieties coming up. But we are told that such barriers are caused by the ego, which we need to keep quelling.”
Ashleigh barely had time to come to terms with her experience in Romania when she was invited to meet the guru himself, in Paris, where he lived.
Arriving by train, she was met by a woman and taken to a car where her mobile phone was wrapped in foil. She was then blindfolded so she didn’t know where she was being taken.
“It was explained that Interpol had a warrant out for the spiritual guide’s arrest and he was a fugitive in hiding,” says Ashleigh. “They said he was a victim of human rights violation and that the corrupt Romanian police had been responsible for this.
“We arrived at a three-storey house in suburbia. It was big, with lots of bedrooms with a fence around it.
“When I went inside, I saw two girls lying on a couch watching hardcore pornography on the television. They giggled and switched it off and I was settled into my room.
“I had to do the vow, again, putting my hand on the bible, saying I would never speak of anything that happened there. Then I had to sign these forms, agreeing to punishment if I was caught trying to steal any of the secret teachings from the house. One of them was that my head would be shaved for five years.
“I remember seeing there the girl that won Miss Shakti back in August. Her head had been shaved and she was sort of cut off from everyone.
“It became clear that every single woman there had been initiated.”
It was a conveyor-belt type delivery of young, vulnerable women, for his warped pleasure.
“Several girls are kept together in an average-sized bedroom, near him, and each, in turn, is called into his room for sex, whenever he wants.
“The girls’ own clothes are taken away from them, so they are either naked or wearing something very minimal. The room is locked from the outside. Inside, they sleep and eat.
“I knew that I didn’t want to go through with the initiation and they said I had to write to tell him why. I did, saying that I needed to work through my demons but that I hoped he could support me, and he scrawled notes on the page in red with exclamation marks, like he was yelling at me – ‘YOU LIE!’ ‘DO YOU FEEL EMPATHY NOW? ANSWER ME!’ You could feel the rage.
“Later, I prayed to my nanna about what to do and in that moment, I knew I had to get out of there.”
Before she could go, she was made to read a prepared statement, that was videoed, in which she said that nothing had happened there against her will, she had not been raped, forced, blackmailed, hypnotised or beaten, humiliated, tortured, offended or locked up.
A car then took her to Paris where she booked into a cheap hotel and caught the next available flight home to Melbourne, to be with her parents.
“When I left Paris, I guess I knew there was sexual abuse happening. The school was still operating and I knew that every single day, more and more women were going through the same experience. It was around May 2020 that I first spoke out.”
Ashleigh talked about her experiences on the internet and encouraged others to come forward. But she didn’t know how to progress legally until a French investigator of cults, named Hugues Gascan, made contact with her in September 2021.
“He was the missing person I needed to connect with foreign police,” she says.
He sent her testimony to the police cult crime unit in Paris and they reached out to Ashleigh, asking if she would give her testimony verbally and whether she wanted to make a formal complaint. She agreed.
Bivolaru was already a man on the radar of both French and Romanian police.
In March 2004, he had been charged in Romania for five counts – multiple sexual offences, sexual corruption, trafficking of minors, engaging in sexual relations with minors, and attempted illegal border crossings.
But the day before his trial he fled to Sweden and in 2007 he moved to France, where he remained.
Throughout, he claimed he was being persecuted because he was spiritual. His followers believed in him. Shortly before his court case, Bivolaru made a bizarre appearance on a popular Romanian TV show called Mariustuca.
With his lank, grey hair and glasses, he looked rather dishevelled and unimpressive looking for a man idolised by his followers as a god.
When asked by the interviewer, if he had sex with any of the followers at his yoga school, he replied: “I never have sex with anyone, because having sex is degrading.”
The canny interviewer then amends it to – Have you made love to any of your followers? Shifting in his seat, Bivolaru, replies, “Did I make love? Yes, I did make love. Not sexually degrading, but natural loving relationships, as we all know them, based on love and mutual respect.”
But investigative journalist Andreea Pocotila, unearthed secret documents that showed him to be a sexual pervert.
In Bucharest she had access to files kept by Romania’s secret police on various individuals during the Communist era. They had records on Bivolaru dating back to 1971 when he was 19, in his last year at high school, when he was dealing in pornographic photos and magazines that had been sent to him from Switzerland and Germany.
“Later, he set up a yoga school, which was forbidden and he was detained and put in a psychiatric medical unit,” says Andree. “He was basically portrayed as sexually obsessed.
“He told the secret police in 1989: ‘One day in 1986 or 1987, I met near my house a young 12-year-old brunette girl. I think she was a gypsy. And I asked this close friend of mine to have intimate relations with the girl and afterwards to present her to me in order for me to initiate her in sexual tantra.’”
When the Communist regime in Romania fell in December 1989, he was released and he set up his yoga school which was to spread around the world. The schools have different names in different countries – in Romania it is called MISA, in Sweden and Denmark, NATHA and in England, Tara, but they are all part of Atman Federation of International Schools.
With Ashleigh’s help, the French police continued to collect testimonies from victims, who bravely spoke of their harrowing experiences, and on 28 November, 2023 police launched a large-scale operation with 175 officers on the ground, making 40 simultaneous arrests, including that of Bivolaru, who lived in a small and shabby apartment near Paris.
He was charged with rape, human trafficking and abuse of weakness using psychological control. The prosecution hopes the trial will take place within the next two years. Bivolaru continues to deny any wrong doing.
In statements to the TV documentary, his yoga schools in Denmark, Sweden and London, all say they are complying with their country’s laws and condemn all forms of abuse.
NATHA Denmark says that it has never organised or facilitated trips to meet Bivolaru, and is not responsible for individuals’ personal choices.
NATHA Sweden that any student who had met Bivolaru had done so independently of the school and that it aims to take every concern, suggestion or criticism from students seriously. Tara Yoga Centre stated that, due to ongoing legal proceedings, it is unable to comment at this time.
Atman stated that it is not responsible for the private life of staff, students and teachers of affiliate schools, and that all current allegations remain under investigation and are unproven.
MISA denied all allegations of trafficking, abuse, manipulation or coercion, asserting that the current proceedings in France stem from a long-standing pattern of misunderstanding and discrimination against their teachings, particularly those combining spirituality and eroticism.
It emphasised the positive personal development of thousands of its students, dismissing the allegations as a witch-hunt based on the testimony of a few disgruntled people.
Gregorian Bivolaru was contacted through his legal representatives but did not respond.
Twisted Yoga drops on, Apple TV, from today
