France: The Stoians’ case – When media and journalists privilege the presumption of guilt
By Willy Fautré
Media outlets are not courts and journalists are not judges
HRWF (27.01.2026) – In August 2024, while Mihai Stoian and his wife Adina were vacationing in Turkey, they decided to travel to Georgia. When they crossed the border at Sarpi on 22 August, they were arrested and then remanded in custody by the Georgian authorities on the basis of an international arrest warrant issued by Interpol at the request of France in July 2024 as part of ongoing criminal proceedings against Gregorian Bivolaru, the spiritual master of an international yoga movement, and some of his close collaborators.
The charges against these first people put in custody and then in pretrial detention in 2023 are: abuse of a person’s weakness in an organized gang, abuse of psychological or physical submission, human trafficking, complicity in kidnapping and forced confinement, and complicity in rape.
The Stoians were extradited from Georgia to France in May 2025.
According to some news leaked to the media, the Stoian couple is formally prosecuted by the Paris Judicial Court as accomplices of the aforementioned charges that they would have allegedly committed between 2007 and 2023 on French territory.
Presumption of guilt v. presumption of innocence
Journalists abiding by their ethical rules in the mainline TV channels in France usually recall that a defendant is to be considered innocent as long as a final court decision has not decided otherwise. They consult a wide range of diverse sources before commenting on judicial proceedings and give an equal voice to all the parties.
Media outlets and journalists prioritizing the “scoop” or questionable allegedly “sensational” findings quite often privilege the presumption of guilt. The French centre-left newspaper Libération, which is not to be put in the category of tabloids, provides a good example of the malpractice of its journalist in the Stoians’ case.
The use of catchy but unfounded accusatory titles
It is well-known that consumers of information usually just read the title, the subtitle and the introductory paragraph. It is therefore easy to quickly shape public opinion on a number of issues whether the opinion of the journalist is true or biased.
In December 2024, Libération titled an article “Mihai Stoian, the lieutenant in the heart of trafficking in women” as if it were an established fact while no court in France had sentenced him for such a criminal activity and he had never been prosecuted in any other country.
The journalist (S.F.) of Libération built up a questionable narrative upon this catchy but unfounded title on the alleged basis of a wide-scale personal investigation and after collecting several ‘unprecedented testimonies.’ The facts are however different, and his methodology along with his narrative are highly questionable. The sensational declarations said to have been delivered under cover of anonymity by some former female yoga practitioners, allegedly for their own safety, have already been circulated by other media outlets abroad and in research papers of foreign experts in legal matters and religious studies. The names of the few female accusers were made public well before Libération and they have not been threatened by anyone they have accused.
As of today, the validity of their statements has however not been confirmed by any court.
As media outlets are not courts, they should refrain from publishing one-sided accusations and should give the floor to several parties in the case on an equal footing. This was not the case in the article of Libération.
Writing about Gregorian Bivolaru and Mihai Stoian, the journalist raised the presumption of innocence in 6 words “The two leaders remain presumably innocent” while the rest of the over-2000-word article was instilling the presumption of guilt in the minds of the readers. There were only statements of accusers and as expected the journalist only accumulated a long list of subjectively negative complaints with a strong smell of biases and falsehood.
At no time did the journalist try to identify and share the true facts as he preferred to fully take sides with the accusers and to opt for an intentionally stigmatizing and a negatively connotated terminology, almost in every line of the article.
Journalists are not outlaws rendering justice.
No investigation from other sources
It is a duty for any investigation journalist to cross-check any information or declarations from other external sources.
In this case, the journalist of Libération has failed to abide by this fundamental rule. Only incriminating testimonies have been collected. The validity of the accusatory narratives has not been controlled by interviewing other yoga practitioners who did not seem to have reasons for complaining. No other external source has been consulted either, such as experts in freedom of religion or belief who have already investigated the issues raised by the media.
The journalist says that Atman and MISA operate in about 30 countries and have 30-40,000 followers but he has not tried to check in how many of those countries their yoga schools have been sentenced in the last ten years.
Mihai and Adina Stoian are being prosecuted for the first time and it is by France, not in any other country where they taught yoga or trained yoga teachers, or not. Both have no record of human trafficking and of complicity in sexual abuse.
No human community is perfect as it has been shown repeatedly in numerous cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests or by teachers but this is not the case with the Stoians.
With regard to the said yoga schools, their leaders and their teachers, the journalist of Libération has not tried to collect either the satisfaction index of the numerous anonymous practitioners or to cross-check the testimonies of those of the accusers with other witnesses.
Gross factual errors and fake news
Error: Mihai Stoian was said in Libération that he was in possession of half a million EUR when he was arrested in Georgia. This is not true. This was said about Gregorian Bivolaru by some media outlets in France when he was arrested in the region of Paris. There is however no official confirmation that he had such an amount.
Fake news: The 58 women put under police custody for 2-3 days and nights were not at all “rescued from some form of imprisonment, prostitution or sexual abuse, unlike several media outlets said.” None of the 58 women lodged a complaint against any organiser of the yoga retreat in France.
I interviewed about 20 of them and published some testimonies in The European Times in Brussels. They testified they had come to France by their own means, sometimes for the second or third time and occasionally with their husband or partner.
They complained they had been mistreated by the French police during their police custody and their rights had not been respected, especially about the access to competent and professional interpreters. Back in Romania, they are currently said to hire a lawyer in their country to file a complaint against France’s law enforcement.
In a previous similar situation in Romania, 26 yoga practitioners from MISA schools had successfully won their case against the law enforcement at the European Court in Strasbourg in April 2016 and Romania had to pays EUR 291,000 to the plaintiffs.
The French newspaper Libération deserves more than the poor article of its journalist on Mihai Stoian.
Source: hrwf.eu
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About the author
Willy Fautré is a former chargé de mission at the Cabinet of the Belgian Ministry of Education and at the Belgian Parliament. He is the director of Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF), an NGO based in Brussels that he founded in December 1988. His organization defends human rights in general with a special focus on ethnic and religious minorities, freedom of expression and women’s rights. HRWF is independent from any political movement and any religion. Fautré has carried out fact-finding missions on human rights in more than 25 countries, including in perilous regions such as in Iraq, in Sandinist Nicaragua or in Maoist held territories of Nepal. He is a lecturer in universities in the field of human rights. He has published many articles in university journals about relations between state and religions. He is a member of the Press Club in Brussels. He is a human rights advocate at the UN, the European Parliament and the OSCE.
yogaesoteric
February 9, 2026
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