The starting point was a personal revenge by an academic who got a suspended sentence of four months in prison for harassment
On 28 November 2023, just after 6 a.m., a SWAT team of around 175 policemen wearing black masks, helmets, and bullet proof vests, simultaneously descended on eight separate houses and apartments in and around Paris but also in Nice. They were brandishing semi-automatic rifles, shouting, making very loud noises, crashing doors and putting everything upside down.
For comparison, in late August 2024, the French anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office engaged about 200 police officers to hunt a suspect who had tried to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte and caused an explosion wounding a police officer and destroying several cars nearby.
The November 2023 raids were not an operation against a terrorist or armed group or a drug cartel. It was a raid targeting eight private places mainly used by peaceful Romanian yoga practitioners.
Most of them had chosen to combine the pleasant with the useful in France: to practice yoga and meditation in villas or apartments kindly and freely put at their disposal by their owners or tenants who were mainly yoga practitioners of Romanian origin and at the same time to enjoy picturesque natural or other environments.
The first objective of the operation was to arrest people involved in “trafficking in human beings”, “forcible confinement” and “abuse of vulnerability” in organized gang. The second objective was to save victims of these illegal activities but there were no such victims.
About 50 of them happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and had nothing to do with the search warrant justifying the operation. At any rate, they were victims of the police intervention as they were kept in custody in inhuman and humiliating conditions for two days and two nights, or more in some cases, for interrogations. Human Rights Without Frontiers interviewed about 20 victims of the police raids and abuses, in particular in Villiers-sur-Marne, Buthiers and Vitry-sur-Seine. None of them and others was interviewed by the French media.
The Romanian yoga practitioners were not treated with the same respect and humanity as Pavel Durov, the big boss of the famous social media Telegram, when he was arrested at the end of August 2024, getting off his private jet in Paris. After four days of police custody and interrogation, he was released on bail despite 12 serious charges – child pornography, complicity in all sorts of arms and drug trafficking for willfully failing to regulate Telegram according to the French law. The authorities put him under judicial control at the risk of letting him escape as the Lebanese businessman Carlos Ghosn managed to do by concealing himself inside a large box shipped as freight on a private jet while he was under house arrest in Japan awaiting trial in 2019. Double standards. “Depending on whether you are powerful or miserable, the court judgments will make you white or black…,” wrote the famous French writer La Fontaine in one of his numerous fables.
The testimonies collected by Human Rights Without Frontiers about the inhuman and humilitating conditions of the custody of the Romanian yoga practitioners detained and interrogated by the French police after the November 2023 raids were confirmed by a Canadian researcher: Susan J. Palmer, an Affiliate Professor in the Religions and Cultures Department at Concordia University in Montreal who is also directing the Children on Sectarian Religions and State Control project at McGill University. She published her own findings after interviewing in Romania the yoga practitioners who had been arrested and kept in custody in France: The Police Raids Against MISA in France: Conflicting Narratives – MISA Students Tell Their Storiies – The Yogis’ Complaints About The Police – The MIVILUDES Behind The Raids.
The question raised by this paper is “What is the origin of such a disproportionate police operation targeting yoga practitioners?”
At the origin, a university researcher sentenced for harassment against a female colleague
According to the French media, the story of the widescale police raids targeting yoga practitioners started with a University of Angers medical researcher called Hugues Gascan.
His peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journal shows that he is an esteemed scientist, said Massimo Introvigne in Bitter Winter. Some of his earlier articles were co-authored with a female colleague, P.J., and others.
At one stage, a dissent emerged between Gascan and P.J. about alternative therapies for cancer and perhaps other matters as well. Gascan accused P.J. of being influenced by her participation in a “cult” led by a Canadian teacher of tantric yoga.
The conflict in the laboratory became so acute that the University of Angers in 2012 decided to close the research center where both Gascan and P.J. had worked. Gascan now presents himself as a victim of a “cultic infiltration” into his laboratory but court records tell a different story.
His female colleague P.J. filed criminal charges against him for “moral harassment” and had him sentenced in first instance, and on appeal, and finally by the Court of Cassation on May 14, 2013, which confirmed the suspended sentence of four months in prison. The term “harassment” was used 11 times in the final judgment.
According to the court decisions, he also harassed other employees of his laboratory. Several people in the university testified that they had personally been subjected to a similar pattern of denigration of their work, and to various forms of bullying which led to their isolation from the group and their removal from the department.
The judges noted as well that a forensic psychological examination of P.J. had confirmed she was in a good mental health, and that even the governmental anti-cult agency MIVILUDES, reported that no cultic deviances had been identified” in her behavior.
This experience seems to have developed a deep hatred of Tantric yoga groups in Gascan.
Gascan and MIVILUDES behind the massive police raids
After this failure, Gascan declared war on cults. In 2022 he created a small confidential anti-cult group of two persons called GéPS (Groupe d’étude du phénomène sectaire/ Study Group of the Cult Phenomenon). This ‘group’ was almost unknown until November 2023, has no website and no public report of activities but surfing on the anti-cult wave in France easily attracts the attention of the media in a positive way. It was a way for Gascan to bury in the sands of oblivion his judicial troubles and his suspended sentence of four months in prison, and to restore his personal public image.
He boasted in some French media, as Le Point and Nice-Matin, that for 10 years he had investigated the activities in France of the Romanian Tantric yoga group MISA founded by Gregorian Bivolaru who had been accused of using it for sexual abuse. Moreover, he claimed that he had provided testimonies and his research documents to the governmental anti-cult agency MIVILUDES (Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Cultic Drifts) but they never emerged in any trial. His thunderous declarations earned him the pinnacle of certain media outlets in search of sensationalism as “The man who brought down MISA.”
According to him, the then president of MIVILUDES, Hanène Romdhane, transferred his reports to Claire Lebas of the Cellule d’assistance et d’intervention en matière de dérives sectaires/ Assistance and intervention unit with regard to cultic deviances (Caimades) and from there to Major Franck Dannerolle, head of the Office central pour la répression des violences aux personnes/ Head office for the repression of violence against persons (OCRVP). The result was the police raids of 28 November 2023 on eight separate houses and apartments in and around Paris but also in Nice, Gascan said.
While readers of French media are led to believe that this operation was the result of a Sherlock-Holmes-like work by GéPS, the sensational stories and accusations that he shared with some journalists had been known for years by the French authorities. At this stage, the accusations of trafficking in human beings and sexual abuse of foreign women have never been confirmed by any court decision in Europe.
Moreover, two scholars have investigated the testimonies of so-called victims of sexual abuse and have highlighted their unreliability: the Italian scholar Massimo Introvigne in his book Sacred Eroticism: Tantra and Eros in the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA) (Milan and Udine: Mimesis International, 2022) and the late Swedish scholar Liselotte Frisk in her research the case of Finnish women claiming to have been victims
In Gascan’s public narrative, there was nothing new, except the claim that in November 2023 several women were allegedly held captive in eight houses and apartments in France to be sexually abused by Bivolaru.
Surprisingly for the 175 policemen wearing bullet-proof vests and armed with semi-automatic rifles, none of the women reportedly ‘liberated’ and interrogated by the police confirmed Gascan’s story but numerous women were victims of abusive police custody in humiliating and traumatizing conditions during which there were serious breaches of the law as Human Rights Without Frontiers brought to light throughout interviews of about 20 female yoga practitioners.
Whether Gascan’s fake story about the alleged trafficking and detention of several foreign women for sexual abuse in France really influenced the MIVILUDES and the French judicial authorities in the decision that was taken to launch such a huge operation finding no victim will only be verifiable if access to key administrative documents of the MIVILUDES is granted to researchers.
