Content warning: This story includes mentions of sexual assault.
In the fall of 2010, Bikram Choudhury, the then 66-year-old celebrity yogi, held a training session for aspiring Bikram Yoga instructors in a San Diego resort. The students had paid upwards of $10,000 each for the nine-week program. Choudhury alternated between walking through a sea of lithe, bent-over bodies and standing on a podium as he roared directions into a mic headset. “Go back! Way back! More back!” Later, as the attendees lay on their backs in savasana, Choudhury reportedly said that people should leave gay people “to die of AIDS” on an island.
At the end of the session, when Pandhora Williams, a student, asked Choudhury why he was “preaching hate” when yoga is about love, he snapped, saying, “We don’t sell love here, b****” and instructed an attendant to “get that Black b**** out of here.”…
