The distinction between Choudhury's brand of yoga and his own became especially important after Choudhury sued Yoga to the People and Gumucio for copyright infringement in 2011. (The case was settled the following year, with Yoga to the People agreeing to stop teaching the yoga techniques under dispute.) In a New Yorker story from 2012, Gumucio again put distance between himself and his former mentor. The New Yorker wrote that Gumucio implied he, unlike Choudhury, respected women’s boundaries, mentioning that he teamed up with feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon to design an anti-rape t-shirt. (MacKinnon and her assistant did not respond to a request for comment.)But a VICE News investigation reveals that the space between the two yoga gurus might not be as wide as Gumucio would have his followers believe. Interviews with more than 30 people who knew or worked with Gumucio dating back to the mid-1990s depict him as a predator with a penchant for controlling and sexually manipulating bright and often vulnerable young women. (One of the reporters on this story, Shannon Wagner, worked for the company for five years, met Gumucio in passing only once, and left on good terms.) A review of public databases reveals a criminal record with felony convictions. And while Gumucio marketed his brand of yoga as separate and apart from Choudhury’s as he built a yoga empire and drew in millions of dollars over the years, aspects of the two gurus' yoga “teacher training” programs shared key similarities. Choudhury, according to a lawsuit against him, once referred to his own teacher trainings as “brainwashing”; Gumucio’s teacher trainings, people who participated and internal documents say, involved breaking the participants down physically and then compelling them to reveal their darkest secrets in a “truth circle.”VICE News is continuing to report this story. If you would like to talk to a reporter or have any information to share about Greg Gumucio, Yoga to the People, or other yoga practices, you can reach the reporters directly at laura.wagner@vice.com, laura.wags@protonmail.com, or shannon@womensstrengthcoalition.com.
A review of internal spreadsheets and daily totals makes clear that millions of dollars in cash were at stake.
Heather Fantin had, she said, recently graduated from high school when she met Gumucio in 1996 at his Bellevue, Washington, studio. She had recently been raped and was terrified of her abuser, who she said had threatened to kill her if she told anyone what happened. She had been a dancer in her childhood, and liked how yoga made her feel like she could move her body again, like she was strong. And she was good at it. She said she came to view Gumucio as a mentor, but that as they discussed her becoming a yoga teacher, Gumucio became controlling, demanding that she stay in constant contact with him.“Basically, it was, ‘If we're going to be in a relationship, here are the rules’ kind of a thing,” she said. Fantin said it felt weird to her, and it was only the first of the red flags.“I kind of got an icky feeling.”
“I wanted to please him. I desperately wanted to make the relationship work.”
“Gumucio was ‘worshipped’ at the studio by the majority of the women.”
Bayne said she “escaped” Gumucio and Yoga to the People in 2012 and went home to her mom in Colorado, leaving her music career behind. She said none of her previous friends tried to contact her.“I was discarded,” she said. “All my friends, my ‘family’ or whatever, they didn't care about me.”One of the many NYU students and recent graduates who found her way into Gumucio’s studio was Carly Hicks. A former dancer, she taught at and managed several Yoga to the People studios in New York and on the West Coast between 2009 and 2011. She recalled that one night she had been invited over to the apartment across the street from the St. Marks studio, headquarters functionally, to count money—the donations were collected in tissue boxes and then lumped together in envelopes and delivered to the apartment. She said she was just sitting on the floor when Gumucio brought out a book on pressure points in your feet, and how they relate to different organs in your body.“Bags and bags and bags, gigantic black garbage bags filled with cash. And we had to sit on it to make it warm so it could go through the counter.”
“He said, like, ‘Oh, I just called to make sure that you would answer,’” Hicks said, adding that he told her she should “meditate on that for a while.”Dakota Lupo was a Yoga to the People instructor in 2009. Though straight men were rarely welcomed into Gumucio’s inner circle, Lupo says he thinks Gumucio recognized value in him. He was fast-tracked as a teacher and even began watching Gumucio’s child. Lupo recalled that during his teacher training, Gumucio told the men, “The first overall rule is don’t fuck the students,” something he came to recognize as deeply ironic.Lupo characterized his time with Yoga to the People as being full of “emotional fuck arounds.” Lupo told VICE News about one such incident. He said Gumucio showed up to the studio one day with a black eye. “He had glasses on […] everyone was so hush hush, like, 'Oh, a jujitsu accident.’ I was like, ‘Eh, it looks like he got punched in the face.’” Later, when Lupo was at the St. Marks apartment watching Gumucio’s child, Gumucio called him into the bathroom to talk to him. “He was in a towel, like Q-tipping his ears, looking in the mirror,” Lupo said. Gumucio confronted him about “saying something” and talking about people when it’s not his business. Lupo said he apologized, and that he later heard Gumucio had plastic surgery on his eyes.“I had a manager one time tell me it doesn't matter if your boyfriend's inside you, you answer his phone calls.”
Garguilo was paid only $45 per evening for “caretaking” janitorial work, and $17.50 per hour for teaching; while she was living with her parents, she said, she “cannot imagine how [other staff] were able to support themselves with what we were being paid.” She said she was never issued tax documents for her time working there.Garguilo also experienced Gumucio’s abusive reactions to seemingly innocuous questions. After Garguilo inquired why another studio caretaker had a key to the space and Garguilo herself did not, within a day she was placed on a three-way call where Gumucio called her “ungrateful” and said that an opportunity he’d offered to set up for her to teach at a California studio was “off the table.”The person who spoke to VICE News on background in support of Gumucio and Yoga to the People characterized Gumucio as mostly absent from the day-to-day operations of Yoga to the People. The person said Gumucio only wanted to create a safe space for accessible yoga and that managers were responsible for what happened at the studios.In 2013, Erin was attempting to put distance between herself and the previous life she’d led as a “party girl” in New York City. Deciding to spend New Year’s Eve of 2014 sober, she decided to take class at Yoga to the People St. Marks. “The line was around the block. That felt powerful.” When class ended, she called her mom, exclaiming, "Oh my God, I just had the most beautiful experience for New Year's."“I just remember feeling really disturbed, like looking around me and seeing all these people just crying.”
Erin was alarmed, but conflicted. “When someone's abusing their power in a really discreet way, and this person is your leader, that makes you feel special at the same time. It's just so hard to walk away from.”She felt Gumucio used intimate knowledge about his staff to manipulate and control them. “He knew what all of us had been through or were going through, because of the truth circle. He knew who had been raped. He knew who had issues with drugs, alcohol. He knew who had body dysmorphia. He knew who was gay. He knew everything. He manipulated so many situations.”A few days later, on the evening of a Teacher Training graduation, Gumucio invited all of the senior teachers to dinner. Erin was not invited to the dinner, she said, but asked to stay behind and clean up the graduation party instead. She expressed to a friend that she was tired from the long hours, and the fact that she had been working every day for two weeks.The following night, after teaching the evening’s last class at the St. Marks studio, two managers approached Erin, she said, and invited her across the street to Gumucio’s apartment; they led her into a back bedroom and shut the door as they called Gumucio, placing the phone on speaker in the middle of the bed. Gumucio berated Erin, she said, for expressing exhaustion in confidence to another teacher. “You're off the schedule,” he yelled. “You’re tired? We’ll see how tired you are. You’re off the schedule for two weeks.”Baya Voce was 21 when she moved to New York in 2008, and “struggling with low self-esteem,” she told VICE News in an email. “I had a sort of desperation to find myself and heal, and spent the last of my savings to pay for the training, which I saw as my answer.” As part of the teacher training, she said, she went on a silent retreat with Gumucio and some of the other trainees, which involved going into a sweat lodge. Voce said this terrified her because she’s claustrophobic. She said Gumucio encouraged her to sit next to him near the door, which she did, and that she sobbed the whole time.“Afterwards we all lined up and silently acknowledged each other. When Greg got to me he stopped and whispered about how brave and beautiful I was,” she said. “That one interaction started the whole thing.”Back in New York City, Gumucio squired her around town to fancy restaurants and concerts and shows, she said; she felt special and seen.“But behind seeing each other was this: We can’t use condoms because what we have is sacred. We have to keep this silent because it's sacred. Don't tell anybody, it’s sacred,” she said.“He bound my wrist and then he yanked my arms up to the sky.”
When she found out that Gumucio was sleeping with other women, she was shocked. When she confronted him, she said, he blamed her for ruining what they had.“He looked at me and, for the first time, I saw his anger. He told me, as he had so many times before, that what we had was sacred, only this time it was accompanied by him saying that I had ruined our sacred connection by getting involved in the gossip,” she said. “He said it was over and ushered me out of his apartment. I left believing I did ruin what we had and it was my fault."She left Yoga to the People soon afterwards, but the experience profoundly affected her."Looking back, I realize how the whole experience, from choosing me, to the grooming and gaslighting, was all so textbook. What has taken me years to understand is that regardless of my participation, what happened and the abuse of power was never OK,” said Voce, who is now 33 and works as a facilitator. She is “I decided to speak out because I don’t want anyone going through something similar to feel alone."As of the publication of this story, the YTTPShadowWork Instagram account continues to publish anonymous accounts about experiences within the Yoga to the People community. On social media, former managers and teachers continue to reckon not only with how Yoga to the People harmed them, but with how they were complicit in harming others. Other people tied to Yoga to the People remain loyal to and defensive of the community, decrying the haters in Facebook posts. (VICE News reached out to two of these people for their perspective; one did not respond, the other said they would be willing to talk, then changed their mind.) The idea of closure and justice is different for each person involved. Some want to heal through community and conversation. Others just want to forget. Even after so many people have told their stories, as many questions as answers remain—many of them questions only Greg Gumucio can answer.One that lingers is the nature of his relationship with his former mentor, Bikram Choudhury. The two gurus took shots at each other during the copyright lawsuit case, but photos on social media show that Gumucio attended a Bikram yoga teacher training in Acapulco in 2018. VICE News asked Choudhury’s spokesperson, Richard Hillgrove, for comment on Choudhury’s relationship with Gumucio and whether the former invited the latter to his teacher training in Mexico. Hillgrove told VICE News he would respond the next day but did not. He also stopped returning emails.“‘We have to keep this silent because it's sacred. Don't tell anybody, it’s sacred.’”