It all started with a minor girl the Romanian spiritual master was accused of having a relation with. Now, she tells her truth.
Massimo Introvigne
It was the night of March 18, 2004. Two girls were quietly sleeping in a cozy Bucharest apartment. The apartment was warm, and they were partially undressed. Suddenly, they heard the sound of broken windows and a smashed door, and more than twenty masked men and women stormed into the apartment. At first, the girls believed they were thieves. Then, they realized they were dealing with gendarmes. The girls were immobilized, photographed, and filmed as they were, the oldest of them with her breasts exposed. The officers broke all the furniture and confiscated computers and correspondence, as well as personal items and jewels the girls will never recover.
“I heard the brutal commands,” the younger girl recalls, “but I could not understand them. I was completely terrified. One of the gendarmes rushed at me very violently, pulled me away and slammed me face down on the ground. He kicked me very hard from the side with his boot on my right breast. I started screaming in pain, and then he pulled my hair and ordered me to shut up. I was almost out of breath. My mouth felt tight. They forced me to the ground. I held my hands to my chest because the breast, which was kicked with so much cruelty, was hurting so badly. I closed my eyes, childishly hoping that maybe that terrible nightmare would end. I could not breathe due to the terror. In those moments, I thought they were going to shoot us, and I was going to die. For several hours, they would not let me get up off the floor, not even for a moment. If I moved, they screamed at me. Some masked men kept their guns pointed at us. During all this time we were filmed.”
The younger girl’s name was Mădălina Dumitru. Both girls were members of a new religious movement known as MISA, the Movement of Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA). The group had been founded by Romanian spiritual master Gregorian Bivolaru, who was at that time the boyfriend of the older girl in the apartment. Bivolaru has been recently arrested in France and the book I review here was written before the last French events. These are thus not discussed in this review.
Unbeknownst to the two girls, this was just one of 16 raids carried out simultaneously against MISA targets throughout Romania by military of the special forces, masked and armed with machine guns and Makarov pistols, in some cases accompanied by prosecutors and TV camera personnel. It was a typical example of the early morning militarized raids against “cults” where media are invited studied by Susan Palmer and Stuart Wright. They rarely serve any useful law enforcement purpose, and mostly function as a sort of baroque theater, showing to media and society that politicians are vigilant about “cults,” and that the latter will not be tolerated.
In 2022, I published the first scholarly book in English on MISA. I was aware of Mădălina Dumitru’s important role in the history of the movement but protected her privacy by referring to her simply as “M.D.” Now, she has decided to go public and tell the story in her own words, in a 585-page book called “The Broken Flight.” It is clearly an emic book, with details readers may find hard to believe. However, the essential of Mădălina’s story has been confirmed by decisions by the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Sweden, and an appellate court in Romania.
The raids of March 18, 2004, nicknamed as “Operation Christ,” were advertised by Romanian authorities as “the largest operation against drugs and human trafficking in the history of post-Revolution Romania.” However, no drug was found, charges of human trafficking were later dismissed by Romanian courts, and no woman complained of having been sexually abused by Bivolaru. Among MISA teachings is a practice of sacred eroticism based on continence, or orgasm without ejaculation, but it was not imposed or forced on any member. The prosecutors and the police were thus left empty-handed. Their only hope was Mădălina. She was 17 and the age of consent for sexual relationship in Romania at that time was 14 (it is now 16). However, Romanian law regards sexual relations between a teacher and a pupil as a crime, and the prosecutors claimed that by teaching yoga Bivolaru could be regarded as her “teacher.” If they could prove that he had a sexual relationship with Mădălina, they believed they could charge him and send him to jail.
The problem, Mădălina explains, is that Bivolaru was never her yoga teacher (if not indirectly, by being the leader of the movement). She also emphatically denies she ever had sex with him. She tells the story of how, after the terrifying raid in her apartment, she was taken to a prosecutor’s office, denied the assistance of a lawyer, physically and verbally abused, and threatened with dire consequences if she did not sign a short statement that she had slept with Bivolaru. She signed, went home, and the following day came again with a lawyer, giving the prosecutor a statement that she had signed the first one under duress and its content was not true.
Nonetheless, the prosecutor decided to ignore the second statement and consider only the first. Bivolaru was arrested, released, and escaped to Sweden. He was found not guilty in Romania in the first- and second-degree trials but sentenced by the Supreme Court to six years in jail for the only crime of the alleged sexual relation with his 17-year-old “student” Mădălina. However, the Swedish Supreme Court had ordered the Swedish authorities to grant asylum to him, having heard the testimony of Mădălina and concluded that her story was eminently believable. The Swedish Supreme Court determined that Bivolaru’s prosecution in Romania was politically motivated and he deserved asylum in Sweden.
In 2016, however, Bivolaru was arrested while he was traveling in France, a country not particularly friendly to “cults,” and extradited to Romania. He was freed in 2017 but accused in Finland of sexual abuse and human trafficking. He was included at the request of the Finnish authorities in the European list of wanted fugitives. He was charged with sexual abuse of female Finnish disciples in France. Although he never visited Finland, he was accused of having “brainwashed” devotees of the MISA ashram in Helsinki through videos and local MISA teachers, so that, by the time they met him in Paris, they had been led to consider sexual intimacy with Bivolaru as desirable. He denies all charges, but this is a story in which Mădălina is no longer involved, as she was not involved with the more recent events leading to the 2023 arrest of the Romanian spiritual master in France.
What we learn from the book is the course of Mădălina’s life, and how she met MISA through a member of the movement called Grigore Ţiplea, a client of her sister’s coffee shop where she worked as a waitress. They quickly became lovers. Although Grigore was not entirely honest with her and waited for months before confessing she had a stable relationship with another woman, Mădălina is still grateful to him for having introduced her to MISA. His first name, Grigore, is similar to Bivolaru’s, Gregorian, and when the police seized her journal with intimate details about Ţiplea, whom she called Grig or G, they fed it to the media claiming she was confessing she had sex with Bivolaru. In fact, dates of the journal entries make this impossible, and Mădălina publishes in her book several pictures confirming her loving relationship with Ţiplea.
Much more satisfactory was her subsequent relationship with another MISA student, Remus Lomoş, who supported her during the terrible days following the raid of 2004, despite the fact that the court ordered her to remain under the care of a hostile sister whose husband, she claims, tried to sexually abuse her. Unfortunately, when they were engaged to marry, Remus died in a car accident in Germany.
Mădălina continued as a MISA student, and her testimony helped Bivolaru, besides being granted asylum in Sweden, being found not guilty in Romania in first and second degree. She also tells the story of how the Supreme Court ruling spectacularly reversing the previous decisions and concluding that Bivolaru did have sex with her was politically motivated and piloted by a prosecutor involved in several political scandals.
The situation of Romanian justice, however, is described by Mădălina as not hopeless. While she emphasizes the enormous pressure of the media, who slander everybody who dares raising doubts about the prosecution of MISA, including politicians, judges, and scholars, she notes as a positive development the repeated decisions, now final, clarifying that neither Bivolaru nor other MISA leaders were guilty of human trafficking. As judge Ariana Ilieş of the Criminal Section of the Cluj Court wrote in her 2015 decision, “The real and obvious purpose of the indictment and prosecution of the defendants [for human trafficking] was not to hold them criminally responsible, but to dismantle this school of yoga by discouraging its members from exercising their freedom of conscience.” While the words “human trafficking” immediately evoke forced prostitution and organized crime, in the case of MISA they referred to the fact that based on a concept of “karma-yoga” members worked as volunteers for the movement without receiving a salary. “Practically,” Judge Ilieş wrote in her decision, “this case is based entirely only on the completely illegal and out-of-context interpretation that the Prosecutor’s Office gives to the term ‘karma-yoga’ which it defines as ‘compulsory labor.’ However, the statements of both prosecution’s and defense’s witnesses, taken by the court, show what this concept means and why it cannot be associated with any form of exploitation.”
MISA is not the only movement against which accusations of human trafficking and even of exploiting prostitution have been raised. While she does not mention the Argentinian case of the Buenos Aires Yoga School, which has many similar elements, not the Guru Jára Path in the Czech Republic, Mădălina discusses parallels with several movements and even false accusations against Falun Gong in China. Here, she relies mostly on published sources, which may not always be entirely accurate, although she is right in identifying a general pattern of hostility generating persecution.
She also raises the difficult question of why MISA was subject to such extraordinary persecution in Romania. She identifies two reasons. One is the Communist legacy. Alternative spirituality and its leaders, including Bivolaru, started being persecuted during the Ceaușescu regime, and several police officers and prosecutors of Communist times kept their positions in democratic Romania. The second is the attempt of corrupted politicians, including social-democrat Prime Minister Adrian Năstase, who ended up in jail, to divert the public’s attention from political scandals by having the media focusing on “cults” in general and the juicy sex-connected story of MISA in particular. Politicians were also accused of tolerating very real human trafficking of minors forced into prostitution, and prosecuting MISA for its non-existing human trafficking gave the impression they were “doing something” about the issue.
The reference to Năstase is a good example of aspects of Mădălina’s book readers can find hard to believe but that are supported by documents or court decisions. At the end of 2004 1,500 pages of transcripts from internal meetings of the PSD, Năstase’s party, were leaked to the media and posted on the Internet. The MISA case was repeatedly mentioned as a “bread and circus” operation created to divert the attention from the PSD’s own scandals.
That Mădălina told her story in a reliable way was confirmed by the Swedish Supreme Court, and that the Romanian police and special forces acted with unbelievable brutality in the raids of March 18, 2004, was the conclusion of the European Court of Human Rights in the decision “Amarandei and Others v. Romania”of 26 April 2016. 26 members of MISA who had been mistreated in the raids obtained € 291,000 in damages. Parenthetically, Mădălina also mentions the European Court of Human Rights 2014 decision rendering justice to Dana Ruxandra Atudorei, a girl she knew that at age 19 was forcibly interned in a psychiatric asylum and kept under heavy psychopharmacological drugs in the attempt of “deprogramming” her and persuading her to leave MISA. Clearly, Mădălina writes from an emic perspective as a MISA student, but the most horrific details of her story have been confirmed by courts of law.
Mădălina’s life has been ruined by those who tried to use her against Bivolaru and MISA. When she visits her native village, she claims, she is insulted and has been physically assaulted by people calling her a prostitute and a fallen woman. It is not because of herself. “I was an unwilling pawn,” she writes, “in a much larger plot aimed at the destruction of the MISA Yoga School.”