Woman who turned to yoga to find meaning after a life of privilege and partying reveals how she was forced into being a cam girl by Tantric ‘guru’ – accused of raping and kidnapping women who joined his retreats

A British woman who was allegedly sexually exploited by a notorious Romanian ‘sex yoga’ guru accused of grooming hundreds of women has spoken out about the ‘twisted’ cult in a new documentary. 

Gregorian Bivolaru, 72, was arrested during raids in November 2023, when police rescued 26 women being held at his Parisian apartment in ‘deplorable conditions’.  

The ‘out of the ordinary’ operation conducted by 175 officers finally led to the capture of the elusive tantric yoga ‘guru’, who has already served a prison sentence for raping a minor. 

He is currently awaiting trial for offences including human trafficking, rape, and kidnapping – which Bivolaru strenuously denies – and a conviction would only be the first step towards healing for his victims, they say. 

Among them is Miranda (full name withheld), an English teacher from Oxfordshire who turned to yoga seeking enlightenment but found herself pushed into the dark world of online pornography and webcamming.  

Telling her story in Twisted Yoga, a new Apple TV series releasing on March 13, Miranda claimed she was groomed and sexually exploited after she joined an east London yoga studio with ties to Bivolaru.  

The self-styled guru, who began teaching yoga under the Communist regime in Romania, founded the yoga organisation known as Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (or MISA) in the Nineties. 

The organisation, also known as the ATMAN Yoga Federation, operates a network of yoga centres across the UK and Europe – including the Tara Yoga Centre off Old Street in central London. 

The reason Miranda was drawn to Tara Yoga Centre was its focus on ‘esoteric tantra’ that was less about the sexual aspects of the practice and more about fostering a deeper connection to one’s inner self. 

Having attended a tantric yoga course in Thailand, Miranda returned to London in 2017 looking for a studio that would enrich her practice and discovered Tara. 

Miranda, now in her 30s, resonated with the teachings as she explained: ‘For a woman who has grown up having shame, judgment around your body, thinking that I was fat…in this school, there was this idea that your body is sacred, not some kind of object.’ 

She started attending the classes weekly and felt her body and mind respond instantly.   

‘My relationships were improving, my sense of self had completely changed – and that felt really exciting,’ she said. ‘I decided to quit my job and dedicate myself to [learning the practice] full-time.’ 

In 2018, Miranda signed up for a three-day ‘polarity retreat’ in Somerset as Miranda described rituals where female participants were encouraged to dance in their underwear in front of the men.  

‘That shocked me: the level of casual nudity in the dances and performances, seeing my teachers performing on stage naked,’ Miranda told The Guardian last year.

When she began dating one of the teachers at Tara Yoga, Miranda learnt about the ‘inner circle’ and the ‘Spiritual Guide’ at the centre of MISA – Bivolaru. 

By the time Miranda entered Bivolaru’s orbit, he was already a convicted sex offender. 

Bivolaru was born in 1952 in Tărtășești, now in Dâmbovița County, in the Muntenia region of Romania. 

 He started practising yoga when he was 17, and teaching at 18 under the communist regime led by Nicolae Ceaușescu. 

The regime frowned upon the practice, which led to Bivolaru being jailed twice and held in a psychiatric ward. 

Between 1977 and 1984, he was arrested for distributing pornographic materials on two separate occasions; the first time, Bivolaru was sentenced to one year in prison but did not serve any time after he was pardoned on his birthday. 

He founded MISA in 1990, as French newspaper Le Monde reported that one of the key tenets of Bivolaru’s teachings was ‘sacred eroticism’. 

In one of the books ‘bearing his signature’, Bivolaru reportedly promised male readers ‘states of cosmic orgasm without ejaculation’. 

In 2004, Bivolaru was prosecuted in Romania for having sex with a minor, and the self-styled guru fled to Sweden, where he was granted asylum and a new identity as Magnus Aurolsson. 

He was found guilty and sentenced in absentia to six years in prison in 2013 before Bivolaru was finally arrested in Paris in 2016. 

At the time, one of his victims Agnes Arabela Marques – now in her 40s – claimed she had a relationship with Bivolaru when she was 15. 

‘Bivolaru claimed that, if I had sex with him as a yoga master, I could achieve superior levels of tantric spirituality,’ she said. ‘In his apartment, there were constantly girls who 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,’ she said. ‘This way Bivolaru wanted to ensure the so-called ‘avalanche state’. To keep sexual desire alive, he said it was not good to live with your partner for too long.’

Her testimony came 10 years before the release of Twisted Yoga as Miranda described how female students from ATMAN-affiliated yoga centres across the world were summoned to Bivolaru’s apartment in Paris for sexual initiations. 

One of the most prominent voices against Bivolaru, and ATMAN, Ashleigh Feckleton recalled her trip to France in 2019 after she also joined Tara Yoga Centre in London. 

The former Bachelor Australia contestant revealed the ‘FBI-like’ secrecy surrounding Bivolaru when she arrived in Paris to meet a woman she compares to a handler. 

‘She was telling me I couldn’t tell anyone where I was going, and I had to tell my parents I was going for a silent retreat in Denmark,’ Ashleigh said. ‘That was how I got around the fact that I was going to be uncontactable.’ 

‘She took me to a car, and I had to give her my phone. She took the SIM card out of the phone and wrapped it in foil. Wrapped the phone in foil.

‘She said, ‘Oh, we’re like the FBI or the CIA.” 

The women, including Ashleigh and Miranda, were asked to wear hats and blacked-out sunglasses as they were taken to a three-storey home in the suburbs of Paris. 

Employees of Bivolaru allegedly told the women this was because there was an arrest warrant out for the ‘Spiritual Guide’ who, they claimed, had been a ‘victim of human rights violations.’ 

When the women arrived at their destination, they were greeted by female members of the group, who checked their bags. 

They confiscated their passports and any electronic devices before revealing an extensive list of tasks to complete before they could receive the sexual initiation from ‘Greig’. 

Ashleigh said they had to take a vow on the Bible and swear they would never speak of anything that happened during the ‘retreat’ as well as agreeing to a list of ‘punishments’. 

‘One of the things that I had to sign was agreeing to the punishment of shaving my head for five years if I was caught trying to steal any of the secret teachings in the house.’ 

Miranda, who felt the initiation was a ‘promise’ for a better life, said she became ‘focused on getting those tasks done’ – including watching a series of porn films and writing about ‘what kind of states we perceived the women were having’. 

‘It was like everything that had ever happened in the school had been leading to this.’ 

After two weeks, Miranda was blindfolded and taken to a different location that she would later come to know as Bivolaru’s grubby, tiny apartment. 

Another former student said that, on any day, three or four girls were brought to the house every day, adding: ‘Some girls would go every month, his favourites.’ 

The women were then asked to knock on the door and wait before ‘Greig’ came out wearing a dressing gown. 

 ‘Looking into his eyes, it was almost like an empty space,’ said Miranda. ‘It pulls you in at the same time as being empty. I couldn’t sense any emotions from him, nothing.’ 

Miranda was then shown a blacked-out bedroom ‘and that is where the girls who are taken to him for sex are kept’. 

The room is locked from the outside, and the women’s clothes are taken away. 

‘There were between four and six of us. We did our yoga practice as best we could, watched DVDs and read books. We slept on a mattress on the floor that we moved during the day and on bunk beds.’ 

She remembered Bivolaru would get upset about small things like using the wrong towel, as Miranda said there was ‘a feeling of a low-level threat’.

When it was Miranda’s turn, she discovered the initiation was a long sexual encounter with Bivolaru. 

Despite not feeling any attraction to Bivolaru, Miranda convinced herself not to be shallow and even recited mantras to help her through the experience.   

‘I would say I was also pretty detached from the physical, at this point: ‘I’m here now, I have to get through this.’ There was a fair amount of dissociation going on.’

But that was far from the end of Miranda’s ordeal. 

Miranda was then taken to a house in Prague and she said the bus ride was her first chance to sleep in ’42 hours’. 

She was told that the women in the house would be expected to perform erotic rituals in the morning, and then ‘after that you had to do a four-hour shift, six days a week on a cam girl site’. 

Bivolaru’s aides explained the sex work as a spiritual practice because the energy from the morning’s rituals would be used ‘to amplify our power’. 

 ‘Ultimately, this was used to encourage us to make a profit through sex work.’

The Guardian also reported that the women who were forced into webcamming were told it was a way to pay off their debts to the organisation, including the costs of food and accommodation, as well as travel to the retreats. 

After six months, Miranda was finally permitted to leave Prague and she returned to London in February 2020.  

On 28 November 2023, the Swedish-Romanian yoga guru was one of 41 people arrested in raids against his controversial sect that has been accused of exploiting young women for sex. 

Bivolaru and his group, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA), are accused of several charges, including holding women against their will.

The people were arrested in the Paris region and southern France and included other key members of the sect, the source added.

Bivolaru himself was apprehended in a house in Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris.

Some 175 police officers were deployed for the operation, during which 26 women – several of whom were held against their will – were freed.

They had been ‘kept in deplorable conditions’ both in terms of space and hygiene, the source said.

The investigation was sparked by France’s Human Rights League, a human rights NGO, which contacted the prosecutors’ office after receiving statements from 12 former MISA members, a judiciary source said.

Under Bivolaru, MISA has been repeatedly in the crosshairs of judicial authorities in Romania, Sweden and France in the last years, a source close to the investigation said.

MISA, which became known as ATMAN after its expansion beyond Romania, 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’, the source said.

Bivolaru allegedly brought female followers to his personal home for ‘sexual initiation’ into tantric yoga.

Several women, of different nationalities, said they had been victims of the MISA organisation and its leader, the source said.

Women were encouraged to accept sexual relations with the group’s leader and ‘to agree to participate in fee-paying pornographic practices in France and abroad’, the source said.

The judicial source told AFP that so-called yoga workshops were paid for by women members via sex chats and by men with manual work.

The workshops were ‘clearly exclusively dedicated to the satisfaction of the main suspect’s desires,’ the source said.

A French judicial source said the sect had ‘several hundred’ members, but no precise figure was available.

The arrests follow a probe into the sect launched by Paris prosecutors in July, on suspicion of kidnapping, rape and people trafficking among others.

A kidnapping charge can result in prison of up to 30 years under French law.

The case is ‘insane’, a source added, because it involves ‘a group reminiscent of the Mafia and pimping disguised as philosophy’.

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’, the source said.

In a statement on its website, ATMAN said the raids were part of a ‘witch hunt’, adding the organisation ‘categorically condemns any kind of abuse’. 

The message read: ‘We are deeply concerned about the unsubstantiated attacks of the police and media against affiliate members of our Federation and their teachers and students.

‘We refute any of these current absurd allegations that have been brought up with no evidence. We consider that basic human rights should be respected, and everybody should benefit from the presumption of innocence.’

Twisted Yoga premieres in the UK on Apple TV on March 13. 

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