(RNS) — “The system isn’t just the abusers. It’s also the ones who stay silent. If you are a leader in the industry, or just want to help, I wrote this for you.”
This was the conclusion of spiritual coach Scott Mills’ widely circulated Feb. 12 Substack post — “The Silence: Inside the Chopra-Epstein Files” — that revealed the depth of New Age guru Deepak Chopra’s friendship with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and reflected on its troubling ethical implications for the wellness and spirituality industry.
It would be hard to name a more well-known leader than Chopra, who was catapulted into spiritual celebrityhood by his 1993 appearance on “Oprah.” Since then, his popularization of some of the ideas behind Ayurvedic medicine and fusion of spirituality and science have made him one of the most successful figures in the industry. His more than 90 books have been translated into 43 languages, and his meditation and alternative medicine products — the latest is Digital.Deepak.AI — earn him somewhere around $20 million a year.
Since the Jan. 30 release of the Epstein files, Chopra has come under a different type of spotlight: His name appears about 3,500 times in the redacted documents furnished by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The apparent close bond between Epstein and Chopra has sent shockwaves through the spirituality and wellness industry. The friendship between the two seems to have begun in 2016, eight years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14. It continued after the 2018 Miami Herald report that Epstein had secured an extraordinary lenient plea deal — serving just 18 months for sex trafficking underage girls — for a crime that could have resulted in a life term in prison.
Chopra and Epstein were in regular contact, joking about picking up girls, attending retreats, brokering lucrative deals and relaxing at Epstein’s residences. Part guru, part wingman, Chopra’s advice to Epstein includes the now widely circulated comments: “God is a Construct. Cute Girls are Real.” “Come to Israel with us. Relax and have fun with interesting people. If you want use a fake name. Bring your girls.” “Anything we share is between us. I share nothing with anyone but trust you.”
When Epstein informed Chopra that a woman had dropped a civil case claiming that he and Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her when she was age 13, he responded “good.”
In a public response on X on Feb. 5, Chopra said he had never been involved or participated in any criminal or exploitative conduct, saying, “Any contact I had was limited and unrelated to abusive activity.” He further claimed to be “deeply saddened by the suffering of the victims” and to be focused on justice and accountability for them. A week later, when asked why he had remained friends with Epstein for so long, Chopra deflected by saying, “You decide” and “I’m not answering.” As the exchange continued, his wife eventually intervened and asked his interlocutor to “talk about something nice.”
While many of Chopra’s peers — big hitters such as Oprah Winfrey, Eckhart Tolle and Tony Robbins — have also remained silent, others have expressed dismay at both Chopra’s friendship with Epstein and what it says about the spiritual and wellness culture he exemplifies.
An early rebuke came from the Science and Nonduality Conference, a major site for contemporary spirituality. Acknowledging that they had platformed Chopra many times, they warned that when a “teacher becomes a brand” it is already a “red flag” and “often a sign that shadow is not far behind.” The group said the community should name the harmful dynamics that often operate in the spiritual arena — spiritual ego or the avoidance of bad impulses known as spiritual bypassing. SAND concluded that “spiritual discourse needs to belong into the realm of accountability, grief, and collective witnessing.”
As some of Chopra’s audience sought to defend his actions, Jeff Foster, a popular British spiritual teacher, blasted the use of spiritual concepts such as “soul contracts” and “pure consciousness,” which suggest that the abused minors brought it on themselves or otherwise minimize the harm done to them. Female teachers, such as indigenous lawyer and activist Sherri Mitchell and bestselling author Lissa Rankin, have denounced Chopra and other gurus for having a sexist or patriarchal mindset.
Other commentators, such as “Conspirituality” podcaster Matthew Remski, have zeroed in on the neo-liberal logic and predatory capitalism that underlies the spirituality industry. Yet others have said the ethical failure lies not just with Chopra but, in the words of Mills, with “an industry that built a billion-dollar empire on the words courage, truth, and transformation — and when the moment came to actually be courageous, to actually tell the truth, to actually transform, it went silent.”
The ethical crisis is reminiscent of earlier reckonings in other religious communities. The Boston Globe’s 2002 coverage of the decadeslong cover up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church began ongoing legal battles and an institutional reform process. In 2022, a third-party investigation found that senior leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., had failed to respond to evidence of hundreds of cases of sexual abuse of children.
Western Buddhism has also seen abuse scandals, as when Rinzai Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki, who died in 2014, was accused of sexually assaulting and harassing hundreds of female students for decades, and Sogyal Rinpoche, who died in 2019, was forced to resign as director of Tibetan Buddhist organization RIGPA after eight senior students detailed extreme sexual, physical, psychological and spiritual abuse occurring over decades.
The yoga world had its own #MeToo reckoning. One of many cases was that of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, the late founder of Ashtanga yoga, who faced allegations of sexual misconduct and sexual assault from multiple women.
So why do so many people seem so shocked by Chopra’s friendship with Epstein?
The spiritual and wellness world often presents itself as immune from patriarchal and authoritarian aspects of religion. As scholars such as Linda Mercadante and Jeffrey J. Kripal have discussed, many people who identify as “spiritual but not religious” turned to deinstitutionalized forms of spirituality after experiencing harm in institutional religion. Many celebrate their communities as democratic, scientific and female-centric alternatives to traditional religion.
But the friendship between Chopra and Epstein tells a very familiar story of male power and protection. It shows that abuse and the structures that enable abuse to occur are present across traditional religious and modern spiritual contexts.
There have been recent attempts within the spirituality and wellness community to acknowledge its dangers and foster more transparency and accountability. Nonprofit organizations such as the Association for Spiritual Integrity and Seek Safely offer educational and legal resources aimed at making the unregulated industry safer and more ethical. These are promising collective initiatives that deserve recognition.
Given that the very foundations of modern wellness culture — individualism, narcissism, capitalism, spiritual bypassing, charismatic male gurus, spiritual consumerism — have been found liable, a radical revisioning appears necessary. That revision would replace the charismatic guru with the caring community and a spirituality of self with an ethic that emphasizes mutual respect and healthy relationship. Most of all, it would replace an idealization of the divine feminine with an actual feminist response.
(Ann Gleig, an associate professor of religion and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida, is author of “American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity.” Her work is supported by the John Templeton Foundation. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service)
