In May 2022, a woman I’ll call Lina traveled from Berlin to Fethiye, a small city on the southwestern coast of Turkey, to attend a secretive retreat — a gathering where people would use sex to reach for spiritual transcendence.
Lina, then 32, with shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair and wide blue eyes, had grown up in a small village in a post-Soviet Republic and moved to Berlin in 2011 for a master’s degree in English studies. Graduate school didn’t suit her — she dropped out after three semesters — but life in Berlin did. She embraced a sort of belated teenage rebellion, taking up smoking and drinking, weed and MDMA, and backpacking and couch surfing across Europe and South America. She dabbled in various subcultures, first identifying as an anarchist and then joining a self-help group that pushed radically open communication, one she would later regard as a cult.
In 2014, when she was 24, Lina fell in with the “sacred sexuality” community: people who practiced a grab bag of New Age sex-focused rituals, including neo-Tantra, the western adaptation of the Buddhist and Hindu tradition. Soon, she was teaching her own workshops in rented dance studios: hands-on, participatory courses on topics like “conscious touch.” For her, the work was about freedom.
She could “love everybody,” she believed. “It was all consensual, and you didn’t have to hide anything.”
For years, she heard from friends in the scene that she had to try ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts. It was “the Harvard” of neo-Tantra, “the mother ship.” The trainings were likened to skydiving: intense, thrilling, and risky. So in November, 2021, Lina headed to an island resort off the coast of Split, Croatia, in the Adriatic Sea, for the group’s Level 1 course, joining roughly 40 others. The cost was €1,700.
The attendees convened in a large conference room where organizers had covered the windows and walls with red velvet and laid yoga mats, cushions, and mattresses on the floor. Hotel staff were barred from entering.
ISTA calls Level 1 its “Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Experience,” though what this really means is supposed to be a secret, known only to the group’s initiates. (It calls itself a “mystery school,” claiming kinship with the ancient Greco-Roman cults.) Exercises range from energywork, yoga, and practices that seem derived from Gestalt therapy to more explicitly erotic activities. In Croatia, an exercise called “Horse and Rider” was first up. Students took turns standing in front of small groups, sometimes stripping naked. They were instructed to think of their body as distinct from their mind and self — their physical form was the horse, and they were the rider — and to describe their body’s independent hopes, desires, and regrets. The next morning, in “emotional release,” the participants, fully clothed and in blindfolds, screamed, punched pillows, thrashed, and moaned. Later, during “yoni-gazing,” women took turns sitting before the group, naked from the waist down. Late in the week was the “sacred-spot massage,” a “clearing” ritual, in ISTA’s terminology, intended to “move energy through the body”: The group lay on the floor in pairs and palpated one another’s prostates and G-spots.
In the evenings, after dinner, there were freewheeling parties, “Temple Nights.” Couples and groups retired to the same mattresses, mats, and cushions used during the day and “played” however they wanted. Some gave massages; others had sex. Instructors and assistants mixed freely with students. When an assistant offered to whip Lina, she accepted and loved it.
Throughout the week, the retreat’s three instructors, called faculty, talked often about the importance of listening to one’s body and giving consent. When the group began “lingam massages” — massaging male participants’ penises — Lina felt comfortable declining and sat on the side of the room meditating.
Lina left the training elated. Every positive thing she’d heard about ISTA seemed to be true, and she was curious to try the advanced course, Level 2. One of the leaders in Croatia, Raffaello Manacorda — a handsome, bearded Italian with a master’s degree in philosophy, then in his early 40s — had described Level 2 in mysterious but enticing terms: It was all about death and rebirth, he told Lina, and about exploring one’s “shadow and animal sides.” “I didn’t know what he actually meant,” she said; information about Level 2 was held especially tight. “We cannot spoil it,” Manacorda told Lina. At the same time, he said she needed to be cautious: The second course was not for everyone. Lina assumed this meant it would be something like BDSM parties back in Berlin. She planned to attend the following spring.
The retreat center in Fethiye was rustic — a 42-acre ecofarm in a green valley surrounded by pine forest, a few miles uphill from the beach. The 53 attendees would sleep in small adobe houses, and organic food would be cooked for them in an outdoor kitchen, over a fire.
The leaders, including Pele Ohad Ezrahi, a gray-bearded, balding rabbi from Israel in his late 50s, told participants that no real names would be used throughout the week. They each drew two slips of paper printed with words that became their new names, often a childish combination of adjective and living thing — “Annoying Butterfly,” for example. They were also asked to put aside their real-world identities. “We were encouraged to forget who we were,” Lina said, “our age, profession, and where we come from.”
On the evening of the second day, after dinner, the participants gathered in the property’s “temple,” a domed hall of wood and bricks, and sat on the floor in a circle. From the front of the room, the leaders announced that the group would be performing a “sacrifice ritual.” In groups of three, the students would take turns as “the sacrifice”: practicing surrender while the others touched them however they wanted, within whatever limits “the sacrifice” chose and laid out.
Lina volunteered to be a sacrifice in the first round. She sat on a yoga mat and put on a blindfold; others around the room did the same. The rest of the students then circled the hall and selected their partners. Two men sat down wordlessly with Lina. She carefully stated her boundaries: She did not want to be licked, spit on, or scratched. No touching of the face; no poking sensitive areas like her throat; no hair-pulling; no fingers in her nose, mouth, or ears. Then the instructors turned on upbeat music and said it was time to begin.
Immediately, Lina was pushed backward by what seemed to be the force of a man’s chest against her own. Before she had time to react, her skirt was lifted and her underwear was pulled down to her thighs. One of the men forced his penis into her vagina and began thrusting. Lina was frozen — stalled. She wanted to kick him away, but she was supposed to make an offering of herself: This was an exercise in surrender. The man’s large belly kept pushing against hers. This is a sacrifice ritual, she told herself. I’m the sacrifice now. The second man began to kiss and touch her gently.
The whole experience lasted maybe two or three minutes, until the man’s penis went flaccid and he rolled off her. The leaders called “time,” and the music stopped. The sacrifices were instructed to keep their blindfolds on until the other participants had regrouped on one side of the room; those people would remain anonymous. When it came time to remove the blindfold, Lina was so disoriented the lights in the room seemed to flicker. No one else, it seemed, had noticed anything amiss. “It was just a man and a woman fucking at the sex retreat,” she said.
Lina moved forward with the exercise, taking her turn in selecting a sacrifice — a man — and sitting in a new group of three. Lina watched as her partner, a woman, touched the sacrifice tenderly, carefully, and her body filled with rage. She wanted to claw and punch him — do some violence that matched what had been done to her. But she didn’t. She went through with the exercise, caressing each person softly. When it was over, she left the hall as quickly as she could. There was a searing pain in her vagina and abdomen. “Rape is a very unpopular word to use in the sex-positive space,” she told me. “I was scared to use it.”
ISTA is one of the largest and most respected neo-Tantra organizations: Roughly 15,000 people have attended its trainings, held across 56 countries, turning to it to dispel sexual shame and rediscover pleasure. Often, they hope to process sexual trauma. But in April 2022, the month before Lina’s alleged rape, accusations of abuse at ISTA began to multiply online, first in a Facebook group called Tantra Not Trauma. Victims, bystanders, and outside critics of the organization posted stories of sexual assault, physical and verbal abuse, harassment, and manipulation.
Rumors of abuse had in fact followed ISTA almost since its founding, in 2007, by a 51-year-old man from Santa Monica named Robert Nichols. Nichols had discovered sacred sexuality in his 20s, and after striking rich in the algae-supplements business and retiring early, he decided to devote his life to it. He studied under Charles and Caroline Muir, considered the originators of neo-Tantra in the U.S., and began going by the name Baba Dez. In 2002, he opened his home in Sedona, Arizona — a ranch house with wall-to-wall carpeting and a stone fireplace — as a center for neo-Tantric activity, the Sedona Temple, technically categorized as a religious nonprofit. He began ISTA as a traveling workshop five years later.
This past fall, I asked one of ISTA’s lead faculty, who goes by the name KamalaDevi (“Lotus Goddess”) McClure, why ISTA chooses sex as its approach to enlightenment. McClure, a former yoga teacher from San Diego in their 50s with scrubbed tan skin and graying hair, who identifies as “gender transcendent,” spoke with me over Zoom from a workshop in Ardennes, Belgium. “Sexuality is the biggest wound that exists,” they said. “There’s a split between sex and spirit, and it just pretty much cuts people in half. This work is where we go to become whole people, to mend.”
In 2010, Dez and the Sedona Temple were the subject of a documentary called Sex Magic, which depicted the rituals of the place as ridiculous but sincere. The roughly dozen congregants in the film, in bright, flowing garments — seen gasping and panting in breathwork sessions, chanting in Sanskrit, and twirling in the style of the Grateful Dead — tell the crew they’ve come to heal and manifest their dreams through the sacred power of orgasms, the eponymous “sex magic.” Dez, handsome in a rangy way with long graying brown hair, is shown having sex with various women in an effort to get his ex-girlfriend to return to him. He tells the camera that he’s had between 1,000 and 2,000 sexual partners.
In 2011, the Sedona Temple was raided by local police on suspicion of prostitution, and the manager of daily operations was arrested, but there were not charges filed against her nor Dez. The temple remained open, but Dez began to shift his efforts and attention to ISTA.
Sex Magic toured film and Tantra festivals, and the renown of the temple and ISTA rose. By that time, Dez had met Ezrahi and Bruce Lyon, a then-58-year-old white-haired New Zealander, who joined ISTA as head faculty. Though ISTA has long described itself as an “organism” rather than an organization — a leaderless phenomenon — these three men left a heavy mark on the group. According to Dez, the three together developed Level 2, borrowing from Indigenous traditions, Jungian psychoanalysis, and more. They particularly emphasized the importance of the shadow self — that which we deny and repress — and its desires, especially those considered shameful or evil. Exercises using dark spaces, loud music, blindfolds, and Holotropic Breathwork are meant to awaken what is hidden. (In another exercise, called “the Power Ritual,” participants insert objects into their asses, often carrots, which are said to create “a feeling of rootedness.”)
When allegations of wrongdoing at ISTA began appearing online, a majority described abuses by faculty. Students reporting being pressured into sex and were sometimes manipulated with the use of their private information, gleaned during group workshops. Some leaders had promised advancement up the ISTA ladder — from student to volunteer assistant to paid faculty — in exchange. Faculty can make as much as $30,000 per training, and many students return again and again in the hopes of rising in the ranks. “Imagine getting $20,000 to $30,000 a week,” one former assistant said, “while traveling to exotic locations, saving the world through the reduction of shame, and fucking whoever you want. I wanted on that gravy train, and I’m not the only person.”
Over the years, allegations of abuse were generally dismissed by ISTA leadership with some possible exceptions. In 2016, the organization cut ties with a faculty member named Andrew Barnes; two years later, an independent journalist alleged that Barnes had raped or sexually assaulted five women, two of whom he’d met at ISTA events.
In 2017, when the Me Too movement hit the neo-Tantra scene, stories about ISTA — and Dez in particular — grew louder. Dez was accused of constantly and aggressively pressuring students into having sex. Publicly, the organization continued to ignore complaints. And ISTA’s teachings, which encourage participants to reject social norms and continually question their own emotions, seem to have provided convenient cover. Students who spoke to New York said that faculty often responded to complaints of abuse by saying, “That’s your story, your projection.” The mantra of Level 2 was, in fact, “Let go of your story.”
The morning after the sacrifice ritual, Lina joined the others for breakfast outside. She studied the men as they waited in line for food, remembering the round belly pressing against her. Any one of them could be her rapist. One had visible scratches and scrapes on his shoulders and down his arms; she told him his skin looked the way her vagina felt. But he was exultant: Being the sacrifice had been a kind of triumph for him. He described the violence he’d experienced as something “wild” that had been “unleashed,” something that was “meant to be.”
After breakfast, there was a daily check-in with one of the retreat’s assistants, a woman who goes by the name Katara, and a smaller group of students. Lina told the group what had happened. As the first ritual of the morning began, Katara asked Lina to step out of the hall and take a walk.
Katara, in her 30s with long dark hair and almond eyes, had recently left a tech career in Silicon Valley and fallen in love with Ezrahi. Walking in the grass outside, she asked Lina what she would have done during the sacrifice if she hadn’t been instructed to surrender. They could hear loud music, moaning, and growling coming from inside the central hall. Lina said she would have kicked the man, and Katara led her to a large tree and directed her to kick it. Lina did and felt, she said, the “emotional charge” of the assault leave her body. Katara was approving: She’d seen Lina’s energy shift, she said.
Lina felt she’d regained some power but that something more needed to be done. During a break in the morning activities, she decided to speak with the training’s only female instructor, Michal Maayan Don, an Israeli in her 50s, who on a podcast in 2016 described herself as having been “born a sexual shaman.” Lina didn’t particularly trust Don, but she believed a woman would help her.
The three faculty — Don, Ezrahi, and Manacorda — sat on a stage at the front of the room on makeshift thrones: tall stacks of long cushions covered in velvet and ornate, embroidered cloth. Lina approached and kneeled down in front of Don, her head at the teacher’s knees. “I was raped yesterday,” she said. She asked how she could “integrate” this experience using ISTA knowledge.
Don appeared unconcerned. According to Lina, she replied, “We all have predators inside us. It could have been me who did this to you. I am also a predator.” Lina, she noted, had a lot of fire inside her, a lot of pitta — an imbalance in Ayurveda, one that could cause anger and conflict. Fire draws fire, Don said.
Over the next few days, Lina tried to accept that something like this could be true — that there was a justification for what had happened. She thought repeatedly, At least I wasn’t raped in the forest or on the streets. At least it was in the safe container. The safe container was another ISTA buzzword; the gatherings themselves were often shorthanded as containers. It meant a special, secret place, cordoned off from regular experience, “safe” from the rules of society.
ISTA taught that suffering was sent by the universe to reveal some hidden truth, and as the week progressed, Lina went in and out of what she now calls “magical thinking,” wondering if the assault had “divine purpose.” Part of her was turning away from the group. On the third or fourth day, Ezrahi had the students lie on the ground with tea candles burning on their bare chests, and Lina decided it was a pointless exercise in pain.
As she told the story of her rape to more people, she heard repeatedly that she had been “lucky”: To be challenged in such an intense way was a blessing. In the ISTA mind-set, there was no such thing as a victim. As McClure put it to me later, “So much of what we’re striving for is waking up to more and more self-responsibility — to wake up from the trance of being a victim.”
On the sixth day, the retreat’s “blood sacrifice” was announced — Lina learned that many Level 2’s had one. Sometimes it was a rabbit; others, a snake. A farmer, standing next to the three faculty, held a ram between his legs and cut its throat. When it had bled out, a male student hoisted up its severed head and held it on top of his own like a crown.
In June, a month after Lina’s assault, a new Facebook group collecting allegations of abuse appeared: Issues With ISTA & Highden Temple. Highden was Bruce Lyon’s own spiritual retreat center — a Victorian estate on New Zealand’s North Island, purchased in part with ISTA funds in 2017. Trainings there were often called “ISTA on steroids”; they lasted as long as six weeks, and participants effectively gave up their lives to attend.
As accusations accumulated, a handful of longtime critics of ISTA decided to push the organization to take some form of accountability. Lalita Díaz, a psychotherapist in her 40s, became the de facto leader of the group. She had never attended an ISTA training, but she was deeply invested in the sacred-sexuality world in California, and she’d been hearing about the group’s abuses for years. It felt like a scourge on her community — something actively harming her peers and damaging the reputation of sacred sexuality itself.
“ISTA was hurting people’s mental health,” she said. “People were coming trying to get healing, and some of them, their lives were getting worse. And any time one of those people would say that they were harmed, they would be silenced or attacked.”
Díaz didn’t want to involve lawyers or the police, if it could be avoided. “It’s such a predominantly sex-negative culture,” she said. “I mean, how many sex-cult documentaries are there?” She was committed to the ideals of sacred sexuality — overcoming sexual shame and taboo, centering pleasure, expanding the boundaries of intimate relationships — and she had no interest in adding to the stigma; in her view, other workshops, especially those led by women, were delivering on ISTA’s expansive promises without hurting anyone. She also didn’t really believe it would work to shut down ISTA — its bad actors would only scatter to other organizations. Instead, she wanted meaningful safeguards within the organization, guidelines that its leaders might actually buy into.
Díaz invited a handful of others in the broad sex-positive community to join her, and they began to gather allegations, reaching out to people who had posted about their experiences and asking them to submit formal accounts.
Between June and late October, Díaz’s group, which eventually took the name 3SC (for Safer Sex-Positive & Spiritual Communities), had collected 51 reports of abusive incidents at ISTA and Highden events in the U.S. and 18 other countries, spanning back to 2008. Among these reports were 30 instances of what 3SC called sexual and physical “consent violations.” Nearly all reports involved abuse by ISTA faculty. Many alleged that teachers had pushed sexual boundaries under the guise of spiritual development and often used spiritually inflected doublespeak, or “spiritual bypassing,” to dismiss their complaints — asking, for example, “What does it mean about your trauma that you’re bringing this accusation against me?”
I spoke with seven women who said they experienced severe and prolonged mental-health issues that began at ISTA trainings. One was a German immigrant to the U.S., a chef and former Christian minister in her 40s, whom I’ll call Sonja. Before the sacred-spot massage at Sonja’s second Level 1 training, in Cuzco, Peru, in 2018, an instructor told the female students to cater to the desires of the men, putting aside their own comfort. “We were told our experience didn’t matter,” she said. They were directed to be “an empty vessel, and also to be in the feminine, with no boundaries, desires, or will.” “There was significant pressure to dissociate from our own experience,” Sonja said, “to give the men exactly what they wanted.”
Sonja spoke up in opposition, and Dez and others accused her of sabotaging the retreat. She attended a Level 2 the next week at the same location; like many others, she didn’t want to give up on her plan to advance in ISTA. But at Level 2, the pressure to violate her own boundaries felt more sinister. Early in the retreat, she experienced a psychiatric episode and couldn’t distinguish between reality and hallucination. She returned home from Peru unsure of basic parts of her identity, including her gender, and six years later she feels she’s still recovering from her time with ISTA.
Sigrun (also not her real name), an artist, writer, and social-media marketer from Scandinavia, attended an ISTA Level 1 in her home country in 2019, when she was 27. She’d been sexually assaulted as a teenager, and among other desires for her time at ISTA, she hoped to reclaim, in her words, her “sexual well-being.” On the retreat’s second day, during the emotional-release ritual, she had a psychotic break. As she remembers it, she spent two days wandering the grounds, drifting in and out of consciousness, before ISTA leaders called emergency services. She was eventually picked up by paramedics. She is still unclear on the entirety of what happened to her.
A woman I’ll call Tali, from a village in the north of Israel, was the victim of one of ISTA’s worst reported abuses. Tali first had a sexual encounter with Ezrahi when she was 19 and he was 52: She’d become enthralled by him from afar after reading a book he’d written — a novel about an Israeli “sexual shaman” — and paid him for a private “yoni massage.” She began attending ISTA trainings as soon as she could afford them, at the age of 21, in 2019, and ISTA became the center of her life. Ezrahi became her mentor. “I had father issues,” she says now.
In the summer of 2021, she attended an overnight party with dozens of people associated with ISTA, out in the woods not far from her village, hosted by Ezrahi. Drugs and alcohol are prohibited at official ISTA events, but at Ezrahi’s parties — what he called “Lucy Ceremonies” — staged around campfires, with altars of crystals, candles, and flowers, he handed out MDMA, LSD, and mushrooms. Tali, who had little experience with drugs, took a dose of MDMA, diluted in a glass of water. As she remembers it, when she didn’t feel anything an hour later, Ezrahi poured her a second glass, and she soon found herself sitting by the fire, sick, disoriented, and emotionally overwhelmed. People came to offer her water, a cigarette. But when Ezrahi arrived at her side, he lay down and asked her to join him. According to Tali, he performed various sexual acts; she tried to resist, but she had limited control of her body. When Ezrahi was finished, he returned to the throne he’d made for himself at the other side of the fire — a pile of pillows covered in cloth. He called to another man, telling him to give Tali a downer. (Ezrahi denies this account.)
It took Tali a year to accept that what had happened to her was abuse. When she did, she searched Ezrahi’s name online and found multiple accounts of him assaulting other women at Lucy parties, going back ten years. In their descriptions, he often returned to this throne when it was over. Ezrahi maintains that he has never sexually assaulted anyone or violated anybody’s consent.
When Lina returned home to Berlin, she found she was afraid to go outside alone. She shook as she walked down the street, and she couldn’t bring herself to take the U-Bahn, which she’d previously used every day. She felt like she was followed or harassed by men every time she left the house. She didn’t know if the city had become more antisocial or if the rape had changed her, marked her in some way as prey.
She tried to return to sex-positive “play” parties she’d been to many times before, but she felt repulsed by ISTA people — they were everywhere — and she was uninterested in the sex itself.
As she withdrew from sacred sexuality, she spent her time with the radical self-help group she’d fallen in with before ISTA. In May 2023, she was leading one of its communication workshops in Northern Italy. At a lakeside café, over espresso, she told a longtime friend from the group what had happened in Turkey. “He went absolutely ballistic,” she said. He was especially horrified that no one had called the police.
Lina was shaken. Most of the people she’d told had some loyalty to ISTA; she knew right away that his response was the right one. The ideas that had been pushed by her friends and acquaintances in ISTA — that she’d been “lucky,” that the rape had a divine purpose — were utter bullshit.
Back in Berlin that summer, Lina started seeing a cult-recovery therapist. She began to speak out about what had happened, to friends and in posts online, describing ISTA as a cult and as “a paradise for rapists.”
As her old friends from the sacred-sexuality community began to turn on her, she became increasingly isolated. She wanted to meet new people, but she was wary of groups and felt as though she no longer understood who she was. Everything she’d based her life on in Berlin — breaking the status quo, seeking freedom and pleasure — all felt tainted.
“I was empty,” she said. She stopped working and spent full days lying in bed, or in the hammock in her room, swinging and staring at the wall.
ISTA was a group ostensibly built on love and consent. But 3SC believed that the organization had ignored accusations of abuse for years and didn’t really believe that its leaders wanted to change. 3SC hoped that collecting such a volume of serious accounts, however, would at least threaten the group’s bottom line enough to force a correction. Some victims had signed their names to their accusations; these could not be dismissed as rumors or one-off incidents.
In July 2022, former participants and other critics began to pressure venues to cancel trainings and cut ties with the group. (ISTA and 3SC were not yet in touch, but ISTA would later accuse Díaz and other members of inciting this campaign.)
The next month, ISTA posted a vague statement on its website, saying that the leadership had been “listening to your feedback and concerns,” had “engaged in deep inner and outer reflections,” and was “genuinely open to making positive changes.” The organization set up an online portal to receive complaints, hired consultants — a two-person firm called Safe Mediation — and invited any involved participants to enter a “mediation process”: one focused on “empowerment, healing, and accountability.”
Behind the scenes, ISTA leadership remained deeply resistant. Both Manacorda and McClure described the attitude in those early months as a continuation of the “pioneer” mind-set that ISTA had had for years. The thinking, Manacorda said, was “We’re doing edgy work. Society is going to be not appreciative of that.” Critics were dismissed as “sex-negative” or motivated by personal vendettas.
In September and October, the allegations reached the press, first in an article in Israel’s Haaretz — which reported that ISTA instructors sexually and physically abused participants “in the guise of therapy” — then the New Zealand Herald, which wrote that ISTA had turned “a blind eye to predators,” referring specifically to Ezrahi and Dez. Lyon, defiant, posted a 1,700-word screed on his Facebook page, titled “On Being Called a Dangerous Cult Leader”:
“I accept the charge. Dangerous. Cult. Leader. A flash of lightning that appears and then disappears in this brief instant of timeless time called a human life. Crackling and alive. Dangerous to those that don’t want to burn. Electrifying to those that do. A propagater [sic] of storms. An experiment in new culture.”
In late October, when 3SC had finished compiling and categorizing accusations, Díaz finally reached out to ISTA’s leadership council, writing that her group sincerely hoped “to enter into productive and peaceful talks” with ISTA and a mediator. ISTA agreed, but communication was tense: Leaders implied that they would take their own legal action against the members of 3SC — as individuals — if the campaign to cancel events didn’t stop.
In February, the two parties finally began formal conversations. In their early sessions, according to Díaz, 3SC pushed ISTA to admit that those who had come forward really had been hurt. “I remember pleading with them,” she said. “Please, make your colleagues understand that this is real harm that happened to real people.”
Díaz and 3SC had a list of demands for ISTA: Among them was a ban on sex between teachers and students and a new, public code of conduct for faculty. They also wanted the organization to cut a line from its release waiver that said that participants agreed to take “full responsibility for the nature of [their] experience.” Most of all, 3SC wanted ISTA to stop teaching that sexual interactions with male leaders were a source of liberation and healing for women — an idea they traced to Dez. Dez had quietly stepped down from leadership in 2016 and stopped teaching ISTA workshops three years later. But according to many, he had established the notion that — in the words of 3SC member Dave Booda — the “dick is magic and can heal trauma.” Some former assistants called this “the magical cock.” (Dez disputes this.)
Manacorda told me that the organization has never taught that having sex with teachers would be beneficial: “It would be very irresponsible for us to do that,” he said. But McClure, who told me that they had found “tremendous positive value” in “making love” with their mentors, said mentor-student sex should happen only under a “group gaze” — that is, with the approval of other teachers, an approach that, according to many complaints, has previously enabled abuse.
Somewhat to the surprise of 3SC, ISTA leaders seemed to accept the necessity of change. After five months of discussions, the organization announced that three faculty members would be temporarily barred from teaching and would begin “a structured process of self-reflection, learning, ownership, and amends related to their impact on the community”: Buddhi Dana, another Israeli teacher in his 40s; Eugene Hedlund, an American in his 40s; and Ezrahi. All had been accused of coercive sex with students.
It was unclear why Bruce Lyon, who had been accused of more abuses than any other faculty member, was excluded from the list of barred teachers. ISTA declined to comment on the allegations against Lyon, and on his seeming exemption, and no one I spoke with would go on the record about activities at Lyon’s Highden Temple.
In an explosive September 2, 2023, letter that ISTA dismissed as “a personal dispute between two longtime friends and colleagues,” Dez alleged that Highden was connected with rape, trauma, and suicide. Lyon admits that of the many people who have attended Highden events, “not all of them had only positive experiences, especially in the early years,” but he denies all allegations of rape and any link to suicide.
In January 2024, after almost a year of conversations with 3SC, ISTA announced a set of tepid reforms. Safe Mediation would stay onboard for the foreseeable future, hosting conversations between victims and alleged abusers. Sex between faculty and students would be banned at Level 1 trainings, but as McClure put it, it is still approved at “the inner levels of the mystery school.” Sex between assistants and students was also exempt. Díaz was disappointed but felt that 3SC’s work had done at least some good; systems had been created at ISTA for future reports of abuse to be taken seriously.
The very next month, Lina sent an email to ISTA, via their new “accountability portal,” stating that she had been raped during a ritual at Level 2. She said that she was now riddled with “chronic anxiety and unreasonable fear of men in public spaces” and that her therapist believed the rape had caused her PTSD. She asked for a refund for the workshop and compensation for her therapy, which at that point had cost her thousands of euros. A representative for ISTA replied quickly, saying they would get back to her. They never did.
In March, nearly two years after the assault, her parents asked her to come home. Her mother had had an operation, and her father needed help caring for her. Lina was ready to return to the comfort of her family.
Back in her parents’ small house in the countryside, Lina fell apart completely. She began to have chronic joint pain and was unable to sleep. A psychotherapist diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress, depression, and acute-stress syndrome. She was prescribed sleeping pills.
That September, two of the men whom ISTA had identified as “accountability candidates” and suspended from teaching were welcomed at the organization’s CORE gathering, a training for organizers, apprentices, and faculty — a retreat of around 80 people at a secluded vineyard in Italy. Dez and Lyon were both present. In a photo, Ezrahi can be seen shirtless and grinning next to McClure, Manacorda, Don, Lyon, and others.
When I asked McClure why these men had been invited to attend, they told me ISTA believed others could “learn from their accountability process”: “So ISTA can understand what, basically, dark night of the soul each of them has had to face,” they said. “So that other facilitators can understand what a person is going through when these harms are caused.” Their grammar was notable. The only people “going through” something — the only people recognized at all — were the alleged abusers, and the “harms” were “caused” by some indistinct, airy force. McClure continued, “This is all part of helping the whole body get educated on these topics.” This “educating the body” seemed to imply that ISTA leadership was using its standard practices — including sexual activity — to process sexual-abuse allegations. (ISTA claims that McClure was referring to the collective “body” of those in attendance.)
Though the ISTA leadership now speaks of its negotiations with 3SC and its resulting changes in self-congratulatory terms — “It’s a pretty ground-up, revolutionary change,” said McClure — the energy and resources the group has spent on its transformation have been dedicated almost entirely to the accused abusers, providing them with extensive support, including therapy and expensive coaches — among them, a “men’s life and leadership” trainer. The survivors, meanwhile, have been offered only conversation with their abusers.
In September, seven months after her unanswered letter to ISTA, Lina wrote to the organization again. This time she received a reply, from Laurie Handlers, a 77-year-old lead-faculty member who’d been teaching with the group for the past decade.
Handlers apologized to Lina for the delay in ISTA’s response. “We were saddened by what you said you experienced,” she went on, inviting Lina to have a conversation with her and a representative from Safe Mediation. Lina declined. “I don’t need to be understood,” she told me. “I don’t need to understand them. I understand that they made mistakes. What I want is my money back.” ISTA eventually said it would agree to refund Lina’s Level 2 training on the condition that she sign a non-disparagement clause and an agreement releasing the organization from any further liability. She did not sign. ISTA told New York that it vehemently disagrees that what happened to Lina in Turkey was rape.
Lina is still living with her parents. She remains mostly unable to work, and she has too much shame, she said, to try to meet new people or to spend time with childhood friends. She can only handle being with her family, though her discomfort around men now extends to even her own father, with whom she’d had a loving relationship all her life.
She regrets ever stepping foot in the neo-Tantra world. She wishes she would have explored sex in other ways. “This whole spiritual-sacred spin was totally unnecessary,” she said. “I’m embarrassed I ever thought that an orgasm is healing somehow. It’s embarrassing remembering the nonsense I used to believe.”
Lina often took deep breaths as we spoke, looking out the window of her bedroom in her parents’ home onto the green hills nearby. “I can see fields and other small towns and villages,” she wrote in an email in January. “Life is slow here.” Her neighbors, most of whom she knew, were poor; many were farmers. It all felt closer to the “reality of people.” “I think it’s healthy for me to be immersed in that,” she said, “after spending a decade dissociated in magical thinking.”