[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement:
Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous in many contexts—but the site brought to light other, more outlandish features of Friend’s secret world. Specifically, it said that he had established a Wiccan coven with six women, some of whom were Anusara teachers and a few of whom were married, as a way to raise ‘sexual/sensual energy in a positive and sacred way.’ As proof, there was a letter that Friend had written to the coven, in which he apologized for attracting a former member ‘into my life, into our lives, by vibrating in my mind-body with a frequency of deception and lack of integrity.’ This woman hadn’t left quietly, Friend wrote: Her ‘vampire novel imagination conjured JF … as the next Aleister Crowley or Pierre Arnold Bernard! The Texas Tantric guru is the Big Bad Wolf in magick cloaks taking innocent girls from their faithful husbands and wrecking families to drink the juice of innocent Little Red Ridinghoods—Wow!’
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