Yoga guru Pattabhi Jois accused of sexual assault in new photos

Mangalore Today News Network

New York, Oct 09: Asthanga yoga’s legendary founder Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois is accused of sexually assaulting a former student in disturbing new photos published for the first time Tuesday.

Karen Rain, 52, shared the images in an essay for Medium.com after previously stepping forward to say Jois regularly groped her, pinned her down and rubbed his genitals against her crotch and buttocks during poses.

“I wanted to share the photos because I feel they represent a story of the normalization of sexual assault,” Rain, who was born in New York and raised in New Jersey, told the Daily News in a phone interview.

“They show my innocence,” she said. “My posting is meant to turn the shame around, because I was innocent, as are all victims of sexual assault. We have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Rain said she studied with Jois in Mysore, India, for two years in the mid-1990s.

“For me, the most frequent and dehumanizing form of assault was when he placed his penis against my genitals and moved his pelvis rhythmically, while I held my body still in various yoga poses,” she wrote on Medium.

“In the photo of me in a backbend, he is not even using his hands. His pelvic region, his genitals are the only thing making contact with my body, my pelvic region, my genitals,” she wrote.

Jois died in 2009 at age 93. His athletic style of yoga exploded in popularity during his lifetime and was touted by celebrities including Sting, Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Rain said she normalized Jois’ invasive, hands-on adjustments at first, largely due to his revered image and because he abused multiple women the same way in full view of other students.

“This may sound like consent on my part, but the power differential, and my fear of the repercussions if I protested  —  losing my friends, my career, and my sense of belonging  —  made consent impossible. I was powerless,” she wrote.

“Here was a yoga master, a heavy man, lying on top of me, humping me, while I was in compromising postures. I acquiesced. I endured. I tried to tune it out. I did not consent,” she said.

Rain wrote that she eventually left yoga altogether.

Other women have levied similar allegations against Jois.

Brooklyn resident Anneke Lucas described her alleged assault at the hands of Jois in a post on YogaCityNYC.com in 2016.

She said it took place during an Ashtanga workshop in Manhattan. She and about 400 other students were there to practice with Jois inside the Puck Building in Nolita.

Lucas said she was curled up in a pose when she was “suddenly groped by the guru.”

She rolled back to a sitting position “in absolute shock,” she wrote.

When she tried to confront Jois at a later date, he claimed he couldn’t understand her and sneered, she wrote.

Rain said it took her two decades to work up the courage to write about her own experience with Jois.

“I’m sharing my story because I want to be a part of building a world that is safer and more welcoming for victims to recognize and report abuse when it happens, where we will be believed and protected,” she wrote on Medium.