They ended up “losing themselves there” like Agnes Arabela Marques. She is one of the victims of Gregorian Bivolaru, the guru suspected of sexual violence within a sprawling sect arrested in France after a long run. Agnes was 15 when she met Gregorian Bivolaru in Romania in 1999. At that time, she was worried about her older sister, who had gone to Bucharest to the ashram of the founder of Misa (Movement for Spiritual Integration towards the absolute). She decides to join him there.
Tantra yoga or “yoga of love” is taught there, a practice from Hinduism aimed at sexual fulfillment. Renamed Atman during its international expansion, present in more than thirty countries, the movement today has more than 100,000 followers around the world. In the ashram, the teenager notes the presence of “important people”, doctors, lawyers… “I told myself that I was worrying for nothing. And I ended up getting lost there too,” she confides, contacted by videoconference and met by AFPTV.
“He preferred virgins”
As for Bivolaru, “at first glance, he seemed nice. He was a very respected person,” she said. “He never got angry. When he said something, people kept quiet.” She stayed at the ashram for a while and then, she says, “he invited me to his house.” Bivolaru is already surrounded by a dozen women there. With them, the teenager followed meditation sessions, was pushed into lesbian relations… “It was part of the tantric initiation,” she says.
The women follow one another in the bedroom of the guru who is then approaching fifty. “And then it was my turn.” He pushes her to lose her virginity, and asks her not to “say anything”. A sort of “welcome gift”, she quips to AFP. “We were told that the sexual act was a consecration, that it was authorized by God.” She remembers a “methodical” man with long nails. “Grig,” as she called him, was considered a “god” by his followers. “He preferred virgins,” she adds.
“The testimonies coming out today are just a drop in the ocean! », Estimates Agnes. “We are not isolated cases.” During the vast police raid last week in France, more than fifty women, locked in pavilions, were able to be “extracted from the sect”, according to the police.