{"id":231012,"date":"2026-04-14T19:36:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T19:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=231012"},"modified":"2026-04-14T19:37:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T19:37:18","slug":"twisted-tv-how-a-documentary-bent-the-facts-out-of-shape-1-misa-in-romania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/twisted-tv-how-a-documentary-bent-the-facts-out-of-shape-1-misa-in-romania\/","title":{"rendered":"Twisted TV: How a Documentary Bent the Facts Out of Shape. 1. MISA in Romania"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by <\/em>Massimo Introvigne and Rosita \u0160oryt\u0117<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

An Apple TV series against Gregorian Bivolaru and his movement even rehabilitates the notorious Securitate police of Ceausescu.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Article 1 of 4.<\/p>\n

On February 16, 2026, one of us (Introvigne) received an email from Vince Calvi, Senior Manager at the company producing a documentary titled \u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>.\u201d Calvi requested an interview and insisted that the documentary would examine \u201ccontested allegations<\/em>\u201d impartially, without \u201cdrawing conclusions<\/em>,\u201d avoiding \u201csensational true-crime storytelling<\/em>,\u201d and \u201cemphasizing balance<\/em>.\u201d This appeared to be half a dozen unrequested excuses in a brief email. With over forty years of experience confronting anti-cultism disguised as \u201cbalanced\u201d journalism, Introvigne reviewed the trailer, smelled a rat, and responded on February 19 with a two-line message: \u201cIt seems precisely the kind of project we DO NOT want to be part of<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

He was, as expected, correct. Apple TV<\/em>\u2019s three-part \u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>\u201d doesn\u2019t focus on balance and instead aims to draw sensational conclusions. It addresses not general problems within the yoga community but a specific group, MISA, the Movement for the Spiritual Integration into the Absolute, whose founder, Gregorian Bivolaru, is currently in jail in France awaiting trial. Introvigne wrote the only book-length scholarly analysis<\/a> on this group.<\/p>\n

Recycling Propaganda<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>\u201d is interesting. It clearly shows how sensational anti-cult media stories are made. It also confirms some details about the MISA case in France that we suspected before and have now been proven true.<\/p>\n

We will explore how \u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>\u201d revises the origins of MISA in Romania, how the French case was initiated, the perspectives of some women accusing Bivolaru, and the stance of the French specialized anti-cult police.<\/p>\n

With the help of a Romanian journalist hostile to MISA, the documentary initially shows Bivolaru\u2019s legal issues during Nicolae Ceausescu\u2019s Communist Romania. Her stance is that the files of Ceausescu\u2019s infamous police, the Securitate, should be trusted as gospel. She also suggests that she is the first to have reviewed them recently. However, this is not true. Romanian scholars such as Gabriel Andreescu have studied these files for more than 20 years.<\/p>\n

The journalist explains that Bivolaru was arrested as a young man, not because he taught yoga, but because he had acquired pornographic material from abroad. She states that he was imprisoned \u201cbecause he owned and distributed pornographic materials<\/em>.\u201d She emphasizes that \u201cHe was not jailed because he was a yoga practitioner. This is what we see from the [Securitate] files<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obviously, totalitarian regimes rarely include in their files that they have arrested dissidents for their opinions. Dissidents are often \u201cfound\u201d in possession of pornographic pictures or drugs, a practice still ongoing in present-day Russia, reflecting ingrained habits from Soviet times. What \u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>\u201d does not specify, however, is that, as Andreescu documented, the \u201cpornographic material\u201d the Securitate claims to have found in Bivolaru\u2019s possession consisted of several issues of \u201cPlayboy<\/em>\u201d and the serious book by Italian esoteric author Julius Evola, \u201cThe Metaphysics of Sex<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The journalist also takes at face value the assessment by the Securitate\u2019s psychiatrists, who sent Bivolaru to the notorious Poiana Mare asylum: he was, she says, \u201csubject to psychiatric exam, which says that he lacks the mental capacity to assess his own actions, his own deeds<\/em>.\u201d The problem is that similar \u201cdiagnoses\u201d were given to several political dissidents, who also ended up in Poiana Mare.<\/p>\n

That the Securitate\u2019s accusations against Bivolaru were fabricated is not only the opinion of scholars. He was officially rehabilitated by a decision from the 3rd Civil Division of the Bucharest Law Court on July 1, 2011. The court examined both the pornography charges and the psychiatric assessment. It concluded that the real reason for his conviction was that the regime wanted to \u201cdiscredit and dismantle<\/em>\u201d those with dissident opinions. The court cited several statements in the Securitate files that said Bivolaru\u2019s activities should be stopped because of their \u201coccult<\/em>,\u201d \u201cmystical<\/em>\u201d nature, and because he criticized the regime, and \u201cattracted followers<\/em>.\u201d The 2011 ruling and the documents it references are completely ignored by \u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>.\u201d It is quite unbelievable that some people still defend the Securitate, its files, and its methods in 2026.<\/p>\n

The 2004 Raids Revisited: What \u201cTwisted Yoga\u201d Leaves Out<\/strong><\/p>\n

The pro-Securitate journalist also presents her own version of the 2004 raid in Romania in \u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>.\u201d She fails to mention that the Orthodox Church and the media had campaigned against the \u201cheretical\u201d ideas and practices of Bivolaru for about ten years before the raid. Since the early 1990s, MISA yoga sessions across Romania were disrupted, police interrogated yoga practitioners, and some lost their jobs. Romanian intelligence agencies monitored MISA since 1997, claiming it posed a threat to national security.<\/p>\n

Official and media hostility towards MISA peaked with the March 18, 2004, raids, which Romanian police named \u201cOperation Christ<\/em>.\u201d Masked gendarmes and special forces, armed with machine guns and Makarov pistols, accompanied by prosecutors and TV cameras, broke down the doors and entered 16 MISA ashrams across Romania simultaneously at 7 a.m. Main TV channels echoed the official statement, claiming that \u201ctoday at 7:00 a.m., police carried out the largest operation against drugs and human trafficking in Romania\u2019s post-Revolution history<\/em>.\u201d This exemplifies the early-morning militarized raids on \u201ccults,\u201d as studied in a book by Susan Palmer and Stuart Wright<\/a>. These raids typically serve more as theatrical displays than effective law enforcement, reinforcing society\u2019s vigilance against \u201ccults\u201d and signaling intolerance. As in many similar cases, no drugs were discovered, and the raid yielded little substantive evidence against MISA.<\/p>\n

In \u201cTwisted Yoga<\/em>,\u201d the journalist reports that police found minors being trafficked and that Bivolaru had sexual relations with them. The documentary includes testimony from Agnes Arabela Marques (born Mure\u0219an), whom we will revisit later in this series. Agnes states she had sex with Bivolaru at age 15 years and 6 months, and although she claims she does not want to disclose many details, she ends up doing precisely so. The documentary does not mention that Bivolaru was never convicted in Romania for the alleged sexual affair with Agnes or for trafficking. In the 2021 trafficking case at the Court of Appeal of Cluj \u2013 which Bivolaru and MISA won \u2013 the judges noted that Agnes failed to provide evidence supporting her accusations.<\/p>\n

Through the European Court of Human Rights decision \u201cAmarandei and others v. Romania\u201d of April 26, 2016, 26 members of MISA who had been mistreated during the 2004 raid received \u20ac291,000 in damages from the Romanian government. The decision stated that the raid was based on insufficient evidence and that the excessive use of physical and psychological violence violated the complainants\u2019 human rights and dignity. On February 28, 2017, in the decision \u201cBivolaru vs. Romania,\u201d the European Court of Human Rights ordered Romania to pay Bivolaru \u20ac6,980 for his illegal detention in 2004.<\/p>\n

\"\"
M\u0103d\u0103lina Dumitru<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The journalist is correct to note that Bivolaru was convicted on one charge (not related to Agnes), but she does not provide the full context. In all the Romanian cases against him, Bivolaru was convicted only once, for an alleged sexual relationship with 17-year-old Madalina Dumitru. We do not use \u201calleged\u201d out of a pro-Bivolaru bias, but because the Supreme Court of Sweden<\/a>, when granting him political asylum in 2005, concluded that he had never had sex with Dumitru and that the accusations were fabricated for political reasons.<\/p>\n

Dumitru was 17 during the alleged relationship, with Romania\u2019s age of consent at 15. Bivolaru was not convicted of statutory rape but for abusing a teacher-student relationship, as the Romanian Supreme Court in 2013 considered being a yoga teacher equivalent to being a schoolteacher, even though Dumitru testified she never attended yoga classes directly taught by Bivolaru.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Dumitru published a voluminous book<\/a>, in which she explained that she had been abused not by Bivolaru but by the Romanian police and prosecutors, who coerced her into signing a false statement. She maintained that she never had any sexual relationship with Bivolaru. She confirmed her version in an interview with \u201cBitter Winter.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus, the Romanian segment of \u201cTwisted Yoga\u201d already exposes the documentary\u2019s bias. It only presents the anti-Bivolaru version of the facts, even when court decisions contradict it.<\/p>\n

Article originally published on <\/em>Bitter Winter.<\/em><\/a> Subheadings added by the Editor. <\/em><\/p>\n

Massimo Introvigne<\/strong> (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR<\/a>), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia<\/em><\/a> (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy<\/em>). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion<\/em><\/a> and of the executive board of University of California Press\u2019 Nova Religio<\/a>. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the \u201cRepresentative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions\u201d of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe <\/a>(OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

yogaesoteric
\nApril 14, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Massimo Introvigne and Rosita \u0160oryt\u0117 An Apple TV series against Gregorian Bivolaru and his movement even rehabilitates the notorious Securitate police of Ceausescu. Article 1 of 4. On February 16, 2026, one of us (Introvigne) received an email from Vince Calvi, Senior Manager at the company producing a documentary titled \u201cTwisted Yoga.\u201d Calvi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[835],"tags":[1512],"class_list":["post-231012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-modern-crusade-against-spirituality-3480-en","tag-bivolaru_case"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231013,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231012\/revisions\/231013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}