I was hypnotised, told to join orgies and given yoga guru's urine to drink at depraved sect: Cult 'victims' were also stripped naked at 16 and made to parade at sex beauty pageant
Gregorian Bivolaru was arrested in Paris last Tuesday after years on the run
By JAMES REYNOLDS
PUBLISHED: 10:22 EST, 7 December 2023 | UPDATED: 11:18 EST, 8 December 2023
Agnes Arabela Marques was only 15 when she met the leader of a controversial yoga sect accused of running an international tantric sex ring that used women as slaves.
'At first he seemed nice,' she said of 71-year-old guru Gregorian Bivolaru, who was arrested last week in Paris after six years on the run on suspicion of rape, exploitation, kidnapping and people trafficking. 'He was very respected, speaking with a very calm voice.'
But things soon took a sinister turn. Bivolaru invited the young Marques to his home and pressured her into performing lesbian sex acts with dozens of other women, before having sex with the yogi himself - presented as her initiation into tantric yoga.
Within a year, aged 16, Marques was one of around 300 women parading naked at a 'Miss Shakti' beauty pageant on the Black Sea, with some even masturbating on stage in front of thousands of onlookers.
Former members of Bivolaru's so-called Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA) have since described the horror of being held in overcrowded houses in the suburbs of Paris where they were shown pornography, hypnotised, encouraged to take part in orgies and given the guru's urine to drink.
The terrifying sect saw dozens of women held in 'deplorable conditions' over a period of nearly two-decades before the raid last week, a multinational effort to bring the guru to justice.
Agnes Arabela Marques was only 15 when she met 71-year-old guru Gregorian Bivolaru
Romanian guru Gregorian Bivolaru is escorted to a vehicle, after a hearing at the Romanian Police headquarters in Bucharest, Romania, Wednesday, Aug 24, 2016
The year was 1999 and Marques, a dual Romanian-Portuguese national, had just followed her older sister from a small town in Romania to the capital Bucharest to join Bivolaru's Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA) yoga school.
The school, one of the first in a network that eventually spread to over 30 countries, taught tantric yoga, a practice loosely based on an ancient Hindu philosophy about achieving liberation through sex, among other rituals.
Any misgivings Marques had about the school's teachings were allayed by the fact that among the students were 'important people' like doctors and lawyers.
'I told myself I had nothing to worry about,' she said.
Bivolaru soon inducted Marques, then a minor, taking her to his home and pressuring her into sex acts. She believed it was part of an initiation ritual, the start of her spiritual journey.
'We were told the sexual act with the guru was a consecration, that it was approved by God,' she said, but Bivolaru nonetheless warned her 'not to say anything' about how she lost her virginity.
'Bivolaru claimed that, if I had sex with him as a yoga master, I could achieve superior levels of tantric spirituality,' she explained. 'In his apartment, there were constantly girls that were there to have sex with him.
'The girls living in that apartment would spend a few days or even a few weeks there and afterwards their place would be taken by other girls.
'This way Bivolaru wanted to ensure the so-called 'avalanche state'. In order to keep sexual desire alive, he said it was not good to live with your partner for too long.'
'Gregorian Bivolaru was interested in an Indian myth that said you could get to a high spiritual level if you had sex with 1,000 virgin girls. He knew the age of each girl he had sex with because he received photos from his yoga students and the date of birth was written on the back.'
The women freed today had been 'kept in deplorable conditions' both in terms of space and hygiene, a source said
For two decades this continued to run the sect out of safehouses in multiple European countries. For years, the 'MISA' school stayed in the crosshairs of judicial authorities in Romania, Sweden and France, a source close to the investigation says, as it continued to bring together hundreds if not thousands of members.
The movement became known for its bizarre rituals called yoga spirals, in which devotees would gather and hold hands in order depending on their zodiac sings.
Women were also encouraged 'to agree to participate in fee-paying pornographic practices in France and abroad', a source said.
Women paid for yoga workshops via sex chats and men paid through manual work, a judicial source told Afp. The workshops were 'clearly exclusively dedicated to the satisfaction of the main suspect's desires,' the source said.
French police were finally able to move in and arrest Bivolaru in a house in Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris on Tuesday.
More than 50 women were found, being kept in 'deplorable conditions' between two overcrowded houses in the greater Paris suburbs.
They included nationals of Romania, Argentina, Germany, Belgium and the United States.
The police said the women had been 'freed from a sect' and that they found sex toys, pornographic material and photos of Bivolaru.
At the guru's own home in the southeastern Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine they also found over 200,000 euros ($215,000) in cash, pornography and fake identity documents.
Ashleigh Freckleton, a 31-year-old Australian woman who joined a MISA ashram in Romania in 2018, took part in one of the French 'initiation rituals'.
On arrival in Paris, she was taken with a group of other mostly foreign women to a house in the Paris suburbs with all the blinds drawn, where they were shown pornography, hypnotised and encouraged to take part in orgies.
Her passport and telephone were confiscated, she told AFP in a phone interview.
The women were also given Bivolaru's urine to drink but Freckleton pulled up short at having sex with a man presented as 'an enlightened being'.
'I knew I needed to get out,' she told AFP.
MISA was kicked out of the International Yoga Federation and the European Yoga Alliance in 2008 because its commercial practices were judged to be 'illicit'
On its official website, yogaesoteric, the group describes itself as the 'largest yoga school in Romania and in Europe' and Bivolaru as its 'spiritual mentor'
In 2004, he fled Romania, where he was being investigated for sex with minors, for Sweden, where he obtained political asylum.
In 2013, a Romanian court condemned him in absentia to six years in prison but he avoided arrest until 2016 when he was arrested in France and handed over to Bucharest.
Within a year he was free, after securing early release, but was immediately the target of an Interpol search warrant after complaints from several Finnish women, who claimed they were forced to have sex with him in Paris.
It took six years before French police caught up with him last week and placed him in preventive custody, along with five other suspects.
A French human rights group has collected statements from 12 of his former followers alleging abuse.
One French judicial source told AFP that MISA, also known as ATMAN, taught tantric yoga with the aim of 'conditioning victims to accept sexual relations via mental manipulation techniques which sought to eliminate any notion of consent'.
Women were pressured both to have sex with Bivolaru and 'to agree to participate in fee-paying pornographic practices in France and abroad'.
One investigator said the group was 'reminiscent of the mafia' with 'pimping disguised as philosophy'.
MISA denies wrongdoing, telling CNN Bivolaru had not founded Atman (the international name for the school) nor taught yoga since 1995.
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