Strategic Omissions: How Twisted Yoga Shapes the Story by Leaving Things Out
In the previous article we looked at how Twisted Yoga builds its narrative through techniques such as emotional priming, negative reframing, and deviance amplification. But documentaries do not shape perception only through what they show. They also shape it through what they leave out.
Every documentary must simplify reality to some extent. No film can present everything. But when key pieces of information repeatedly disappear, the viewer no longer sees a simplified reality but a selectively constructed one. In the case of Twisted Yoga, several important aspects of the yoga school and its history receive little attention or are missing entirely.
These omissions follow recognizable patterns. They create a story that appears clear and convincing but is built on a limited and carefully selected set of facts.
Context Stripping
A first pattern can be described as context stripping. This happens when pieces of information are shown without the wider context that would help viewers understand their meaning.
This technique appears repeatedly when the documentary discusses the teachings themselves. At several points viewers are shown fragments of lectures, spiritual concepts, or tantric ideas. These fragments are often followed by commentary suggesting that the teachings function as tools of manipulation.
For example, the documentary shows scenes of students attending lectures on yoga philosophy and spiritual development. These scenes are immediately interpreted as part of a system designed to influence participants psychologically.
What is largely missing from the story is the broader context of the teachings themselves. The yoga courses associated with this tradition cover an extremely wide range of topics: meditation, yoga practice, philosophy, diet, symbolism, and various forms of personal development. Participants often study these teachings for years and practice them voluntarily in their daily lives.
When this larger framework disappears, the fragments shown in the documentary become easy to reinterpret as suspicious or manipulative.
By removing the wider context of the teachings, the documentary transforms isolated fragments into apparent evidence of wrongdoing. What viewers see is not the full picture but carefully selected pieces of it.
Selective Testimony
Another important distortion concerns whose voices are allowed to speak. The documentary relies heavily on testimonies from disgruntled former participants who describe their experiences in negative terms. In sociology these are called apostates, a technical word used by sociologists that is not synonym of ‘ex-member’ but identifies the small minority of ex-members who become militant opponents of the groups they have left (most ex-members don’t).
The apostate—particularly after having joined an oppositional coalition fighting the organization—often adopts the narrative of the ’victim’ or a ’prisoner’ who did not join voluntarily. This, of course, implies that the organization itself was the embodiment of an extraordinary evil. Having been socialized into an oppositional coalition by the anti-cult movements, the apostate finds a number of theoretical tools (including powerful brainwashing metaphors) ready for use, which help explaining precisely why the organization is evil and able to deprive its members of their free will.
An essential point, indeed, the key to understand this series and something media dealing with new religious movements and minority religions should keep in mind, is that apostates are but a minority of the ex-members. Most ex-members do not become militant opponents of the group they have left, nor do they regard it as extraordinarily evil.
Their stories are often emotional and compelling, and they play a central role in shaping the viewer’s interpretation of the yoga school.
What viewers rarely hear, however, are the voices of people who remain actively involved in the courses and practices. This absence is striking because the community includes thousands of participants across many countries who continue to practice these teachings voluntarily and describe their experiences in very different ways.
A clear example appears in the sections where the documentary discusses the content of the yoga courses and the teachings associated with them. The viewer is told that these teachings are part of a system designed to influence participants psychologically. Yet the film does not give current teachers or long-term practitioners the opportunity to explain the meaning of these teachings in their own words. Instead, their motivations and beliefs are interpreted from the outside by former members, journalists, or investigators.
Not even the many former participants, who are neutral or even positive about the movement are included. Having existed for over 35 years, there are thousands of former members, who are not at all against the movement, but simply left, when they considered.
This imbalance strongly shapes the story. When only one category of participants is allowed to speak directly, while others appear only as objects of interpretation, the audience receives a very narrow view of a much larger reality.
Another telling example concerns the way the documentary discusses the internal life of the community. Decisions about relationships, spiritual practices, or daily routines are described by outsiders as if their meaning were already obvious. Yet the people who actually live within that environment are rarely asked to explain why they participate or what these practices mean to them. Their experiences remain largely absent from the narrative.
By selecting only the voices that support its narrative and excluding the many participants who see their experiences differently, the documentary presents a partial perspective as if it were the whole truth.
Legal Simplification
Another important pattern in the documentary can be described as legal simplification. The legal history surrounding Gregorian Bivolaru is long and complex, involving several investigations and court cases over many years. In Twisted Yoga, however, this complicated history is presented in a much simpler way that suggests a clear and continuous record of confirmed wrongdoing.
In reality, the picture is quite the opposite. During the communist period in Romania, Bivolaru was convicted twice – for possession and distribution of obscene material in 1977, and for escape from police custody in 1984. The real reason he was under surveillance by the secret police (Securitate) was that he taught yoga, which was illegal under the Ceausescu regime. Later, in 2011, the Bucharest Court of Appeal ruled that those convictions had a political character.
The legal saga continued after the fall of communism in December 1989. Following the police raids of 18 March 2004 in Bucharest (a large operation targeting members of MISA yoga school, founded by Gregorian Bivolaru), Romanian prosecutors opened two main criminal files. Each file involved different accusations.
In the first and most publicized case, Gregorian Bivolaru was accused of sexual act with a minor and corruption of minors, accusations based on allegations that he had sexual relations with a 17-year-old woman, Madalina Dumitru. She denied that this sexual act ever took place, insisted that the nature of the relationship had been misrepresented during the proceedings, and she also described the pressure from Romanian police during the investigation. She later elaborated on these claims in greater detail in a published book about the case, ”The Broken Flight”, where she discusses how the investigation and the public narrative surrounding it developed. In 2005 Madalina Dumitru was heard by the Swedish Supreme Court, which found her testimony credible and honest and decided in 2006 to grant political asylum to Gregorian Bivolaru, considering that he would not receive a fair trial in Romania.
After being acquitted both at first instance and on appeal, in 2013, Romania’s High Court overturned the previous rulings and sentenced Gregorian Bivolaru in absentia to six years in prison for sexual relations with a minor in continued form. While the legal age of consent was 16, the court erroneously assessed that it was an abuse of a teacher–student relationship.
For a more nuanced perspective on this case, see also Rosita Soryte, “The Swedish Asylum Case of Gregorian Bivolaru, 2005”, cesnur.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/tjoc_6_4_4_soryte.pdf.
The second case involved a broader investigation into MISA members and alleged activities within the organization. Prosecutors charged Bivolaru as well as 21 yoga students and teachers with human trafficking, organized criminal group, recruitment and exploitation of women. After 17 years of proceedings and two separate trial cycles, in 2021 the Cluj Appeal Court uphold the Tribunal’s decision that acquitted Bivolaru and the other defendants, ruling that the evidence did not support the charges. The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ requests for moral damages.
By compressing decades of complex legal developments – many of which ended in acquittals – into a simple narrative of guilt, the documentary replaces a contested legal history with a far more convenient story.
Event Reframing
Another form of distortion occurs in the way specific events are presented. This can be described as event reframing: interpreting events in ways that make them appear to confirm a particular story.
A clear example appears in the final episode of Twisted Yoga, where police raids in France are presented as the dramatic climax of the documentary. The narrative suggests that these raids uncovered a hidden system of exploitation and confirmed the accusations described earlier in the film.
What receives much less attention is how the individuals involved interpreted these events themselves.
None of the women who were described as “rescued victims” said that they considered themselves victims. All who were interviewed afterwards by Human Rights without Frontiers director Willy Fautre and acclaimed Canadian Professor of Social Sciences Susan Palmer insisted that they had chosen their participation freely and rejected the description that they had been rescued. (see: Willy Fautre, FRANCE: The Stoians’ case – When media & journalists favour guilt presumption, hrwf.eu/france-the-stoians-case-when-media-and-journalists-privilege-the-presumption-of-guilt/, also Susan Palmer in cesnur.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/tjoc_8_2_3_palmer.pdf)
Instead of examining these statements seriously, the documentary treats them as further evidence that the women had been psychologically influenced. This narrative is heavily influenced by French anticult ideology, which according to Professor Massimo Introvigne:
…relies on theories dismissed by scholars, international institutions, and courts of law in most democratic countries as pseudo-scientific. These theories claim that the difference between legitimate ‘religions’ and illegal ‘cults’ (sectes), now renamed groups guilty of ‘cultic deviances’ (dérives sectaires), is that religions are joined freely. ‘Cults,’ it is argued, are joined because their leaders (gourous) manipulate the victims through techniques of ‘abuse of weakness’ (abus de faiblesse) or ‘psychological subjection’ (sujétion psychologique), French terms conveying the same ideology of the English ‘brainwashing.’ Brainwashing theories have been dismissed by scholars and the courts of law in the U.S. and most European countries as pseudo-scientific.
The theory of ‘abus de faiblesse’ (abuse of weakness), aka ‘brainwashing,’ is at the heart of the French attitude about sacred eroticism groups, MISA, Gregorian Bivolaru, and the Stoians. It is assumed that MISA is not a religious group but a ‘cult,’ using ‘brainwashing.’ It is also argued that the choice of women to go through rituals involving erotic initiations cannot, by definition, be free. Even if (most) women claim it is a path they have freely chosen, they are, it is argued, not believable. Such ‘strange’ behavior cannot be chosen freely. The women merely ‘believe’ their choices were free because they were and still are under the influence of ‘abus de faiblesse,’ ‘psychological subjection,’ or ‘brainwashing.’
On November 28, 2023, the French police raided several premises of MISA and arrested Gregorian Bivolaru and others. They then told the media that they had ‘liberated’ dozens of women (none of them French) who were ‘kept prisoners’ and would be ‘raped.’ Soon, however, the problem emerged that not even one of the women, although submitted by the police to what they described as abusive treatments and pressures [from the authorities], agreed to file charges against Bivolaru and MISA. As some of them confirmed to international scholars who interviewed them, they claimed they went to France freely and knew precisely what MISA was about. Some (not all) intended to participate in sacred eroticism rituals, but said they were familiar with the MISA literature describing them and had freely chosen this admittedly unconventional spiritual path. They asked that their choices be respected. In fact, more than twenty of them have since filed complaints I have examined, not against Bivolaru or MISA but against the French police.
Deprived of the testimony of the ‘liberated’ women, the French case against Bivolaru and the derivative one against the Stoians rests on the complaints filed by seven ‘apostate’ ex-members who have left MISA and the ATMAN schools, in some cases several years ago, and cooperate with anti-cult organizations, claiming they now realize (ex post facto) that during their period in the school they experimented with sacred eroticism because they were under psychological subjection. French prosecutors have told the media that only these seven ex-members are believable, because they are those who were able to break free from ‘brainwashing,’ while the women ‘liberated’ during the 2023 raids are not believable because they are still under the influence of ‘psychological control.’
We do not deny that the discomfort of some ex-members may be very real. They need to be understood and helped. It is, however, an entirely different matter when it is dogmatically affirmed that in all cases, countries, and groups, only the women who report these were bogus rituals devised to abuse them ‘tell the truth,’ while those who offer a different interpretation are either lying or under ‘brainwashing.’ The latter are regarded as not capable of making free choices. The prosecutors, the police, or the media believe they know better than these women what they wanted – or did not want.
Furthermore, Professor Susan J. Palmer points out:
Although the public in various countries still embrace ‘brainwashing’ as if it were a scientific fact that offers a straightforward psychological explanation for an individual’s sudden conversion to a radical religious or political movement, since the 1980s the scientific community and the courts have discarded ‘brainwashing’ theory as lacking in scientific rigor. The vagueness of the ‘brainwashing’ theory, and the inherent difficulty in proving or disproving its claims puts the alleged perpetrator of ‘abus de faiblesse’ into what one of my informants described as a ‘Kafkaesque’ situation.
The law of 2001 is based on three ‘anticult’ stereotypical assumptions:
1.That all ‘sectes’ are like organized gangs or cartels: intrinsically evil and ineluctably prone to harmful and criminal activities.
2.That ‘gourous’ tend to be manipulators who have mastered a mysterious, ineluctable technology of mind control/ coercive persuasion/ ‘brainwashing’—which they rely on to convert, control, and exploit their followers.
3.All ‘cult members,’ due to their ‘brainwashed’ state, are ‘vulnerable,’ weak, and psychologically helpless, and therefore cannot be held accountable for their regrettable decisions—hence they must be protected by the state.
It is important to be aware of the social and political context of the law of 2001. It emerged out of the anti-cult activism of France’s state-sponsored ‘antisectes’ movement, which established a series of interministerial missions at the highest level of government, whose stated mandate was ‘la lutte contre les sectes,’ ’fighting cults.’ Hence, one finds a strong bias against new alternative religions written into the About-Picard law. The amendments the government introduced in 2023, creating yet another new crime of ‘psychological subjection’ in addition to the ‘abuse of weakness,’ the difference being that one can become a victim of ‘psychological subjection’ without being in a situation of ‘weakness,’ signal the willingness to make the ‘fight against cults’ even tougher.
However, the new provisions will not be applicable retroactively to Bivolaru. His case is yet another application of the About-Picard law in France’s ‘war against the ‘sectes’’ and it points to a growing tendency to frame, psychologize, and criminalize the guru-chela (master-disciple) relationship, a venerable Hindu tradition, as an ‘abuse of weakness.’
The complex legal history of Bivolaru that spans forty years and extends across seven countries has been documented in book-length studies of MISA by Gabriel Andreescu and Massimo Introvigne and has not been recounted in this series. However, these studies make it clear that allegations of rape, prostitution, human trafficking, so eagerly broadcast in the media, have not been supported by the Supreme Court of Sweden in 2005, the European Court of Human Rights in 2014, 2016, 2017, and the Romanian courts themselves. […]
It appears that France has taken up these old allegations based on the complaints of female apostates and crafted a new, ‘only in France’ case against MISA’s ‘gourou’ in which nebulous notions of ‘abus de faiblesse’ and ‘dérives sectaires’ clash with esoteric concepts of sacred eroticism.”
One serious problem for those charged with ‘abus de faiblesse’ is that the lawyers working for the UNADFI or the MIVILUDES, have the power to file complaints on behalf of the alleged victims—without the latter’s assent, or even without their knowledge. When the so-called ‘victims’ protest they are not victims, the court’s response is often to interpret their denial as proof of ‘brainwashing,’ since ‘brainwashed’ people don’t realize they are ‘brainwashed.’ If their statements are not accepted by the court, it is the job of the Prosecutor to scrounge up additional ‘victims.’
Through this process of event reframing, an ongoing and contested situation is turned into apparent proof of the documentary’s narrative. The voices of the people most directly involved are again interpreted rather than heard, while none of the above quoted academic publications and court decisions mentioned have been given space in the documentary.
Madalina Dumitru, the young woman with whom Gregorian Bivolaru allegedly had sexual relations
Cultural Isolation
A final pattern can be described as cultural isolation. This occurs when ideas or practices are removed from the wider traditions in which they exist, making them appear far more unusual or disturbing than they actually are.
Many of the spiritual concepts discussed in the documentary—such as devotion, surrender, or the transcendence of ego—are common themes in spiritual traditions around the world. Similar ideas appear in classical yoga texts, Buddhist teachings, and Christian mysticism.
Yet in Twisted Yoga these ideas are rarely presented within that broader context.
One example appears when tantric practices are discussed. The documentary presents them mainly as strange or disturbing exercises without explaining that tantra is a long-standing tradition within several spiritual paths and has been studied by many western scholars, such as the famous Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) and the celebrated historian of religion and exiled dissident of communist Romania Mircea Eliade, Gregorian Bivolaru having had correspondence through secret letters with the later, one of the reasons why he was under observation by the Romanian Secret Service. The documentary fails to mention this. Among recent scholars analyzing Tantric practice of Sacred Eroticism are Professor of American Religious History Gordon Melton and Sociology Professor Massimo Introvigne. In 2022 Introvigne published a book Sacred Eroticism: Tantra and Eros in the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA) (Milan and Udine: Mimesis International, 2022), one of more than seventy books Massimo Introvigne has devoted to new religious and spiritual movements and religious pluralism.
Introvigne warns the reader since the introductory part of the volume: “Irrespectively of how you call it, sacred eroticism is rarely popular with the media.’ The immediate reaction to the inclusion of sexuality or eroticism in the theory and practice of a religious or esoteric group is hostility towards that movement, its leader, its members. We can easily expect to see the erotic components of the group associated with sexual abuses of which the leaders are accused, or with the notion of ‘deviance.’
Introvigne, […] finds media reconstructions of religious movements engaged in sacred eroticism as ‘deviant cults’ quite simplistic. Media and the public opinion may tend to perceive erotic rituals as invariably abusive and criminal. Introvigne does not discard the possibility that, in some groups, abuse may occur. However, he challenges the discursive strategy of the media that label religious or esoteric movements that include in their doctrines teachings on eroticism as necessarily ‘deviant,’ ‘criminal,’ or ‘abusive.’
Without this wider background, viewers may easily conclude that these practices are bizarre inventions of the group itself.
By isolating these teachings from the traditions in which they belong, the documentary makes them appear far more extreme than they actually are. What disappears is the cultural and spiritual context that would allow viewers to understand them properly.
A Story Built Through Omission
Taken together, these patterns reveal how strongly the documentary shapes its narrative through omission. Context stripping, selective testimony, legal simplification, event reframing, and cultural isolation all narrow the viewer’s field of vision.
Instead of encountering the full complexity of the yoga school and its history, viewers are presented with a carefully limited set of elements that support a particular interpretation.
The result is a story that appears clear and convincing but is built on a selective picture of reality. What is presented as investigative truth is in fact a narrative constructed through systematic omission.
In the final article of this series, we will step back and look at the larger pattern behind these techniques. When the narrative strategies identified in these analyses are viewed together, they reveal a consistent method through which documentaries about controversial spiritual communities can shape public perception while presenting themselves as neutral investigations.