CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/20/2026

[Patrick Ryan]

Deepak Chopra, Good News International Church, Legal, Guan Yin Citta

The Print: Deepak Chopra exposed in Epstein Files. So is the Indian guru-industrial complex

"Deepak Chopra’s line about 'cute girls' is not an accidental lapse of judgement. It fits the register of a world in which influence is lubricated by misogyny, sycophancy, and entitlement.

Deepak Chopra is no holistic guide. He is a master of packaging — a global merchant of comfort, calm, and cosmic language, who learned long ago how to sell India’s civilisational vocabulary to a restless, wealthy West. For decades, he has occupied a rarefied moral pedestal in the United States — one of those wellness gurus who arrived during America’s post-1960s hunger for meaning, rode the cultural fascination with the East, and converted mysticism into a lucrative, celebrity-backed industry. That carefully cultivated authority now collides with the Epstein Files.

Chopra’s name appears repeatedly in the latest tranche of documents linked to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In one exchange attributed to him, the man who built a career preaching consciousness and higher awareness wrote: “God is a construct. Cute girls are real.” Where, exactly, does spirituality go when a self-appointed moral voice sounds indistinguishable from the language of the very elite ecosystem now exposed as one of the most protected and predatory in the 21st century?

The 79-year-old has since issued a statement insisting he never engaged in criminal or exploitative conduct and expressing remorse for the “poor judgment in tone” of some past emails. But such damage control feels feeble not merely because of the grotesque source, but because of what it exposes: a decades-long pattern of Indian spiritual and alternative-medicine figures being embraced uncritically by Western audiences and elevated to celebrity status with minimal accountability. Chopra is the most recent face of that pattern. The Epstein Files have exposed him and, along with it, the Indian guru-industrial complex."

"...For years, Chopra’s authority in the West has rested on a vocabulary designed to sound scientific without being answerable to science. “Quantum healing”, “mind-body intelligence”, “consciousness-based medicine” — phrases that travel easily across talk shows and corporate conferences, but collapse under professional scrutiny. Repeated debunking of his claims by scientists and medical experts did not dent his standing. If anything, controversy burnished his reputation as a misunderstood visionary in a culture that treats scientific pushback as proof of intellectual daring. His books kept selling, the invitations kept coming, and his aura remained intact.

Chopra had already crossed over from being evaluated as a medical or intellectual figure to being protected as a cultural asset — the benevolent Indian yogi who softened corporate America, humanised ambition, and offered elite audiences a conscience without confrontation.

The business model was simple: wrap ancient vocabulary around modern anxiety, keep the claims expansive and unverifiable, and position the messenger above ordinary professional accountability."

Al Jazeera: Kenyan court charges cult leader Paul Mackenzie over 52 more deaths

Mackenzie has been charged with organised criminal activity, radicalisation, and facilitating ‘terrorism’.

"A Kenyan self-proclaimed preacher and seven others linked to an infamous doomsday cult have been charged over the deaths of dozens of people whose bodies were discovered in shallow graves in southeast Kenya last year.

Kenya’s public prosecutions office said in a statement on X on Wednesday that it had charged Paul Mackenzie and other defendants with “organized criminal activity, two counts of radicalization (and) two counts of facilitating commission of a terrorist act” in relation to the “deaths of at least 52 people at the Kwa Binzaro area in Chakama, Kilifi County.”

The defendants pleaded not guilty, with the next hearing in the case due on March 4.

“They are alleged to have promoted an extreme belief system by preaching against the authority of the government, adopted an extreme belief system against authority, and facilitated the commission of a terrorist act,” the prosecutor’s office said.

Mackenzie and others were already facing charges including murder and “terrorism” in connection with the deaths ⁠of people whose bodies were exhumed earlier from Shakahola Forest, in one of the world’s biggest cult-related disasters in recent history.

Prosecutors say Mackenzie and his Good News International Church organised a cult in which they ordered followers to starve themselves and their ‌children to death to go to heaven before the world ended. Mackenzie has denied the accusations."

DW: Australia: Two charged with spying for China

"...Australian federal police allege that the two worked together with another Chinese woman charged last August for covertly gathering information on the Guan Yin Citta Buddhist group in the capital, Canberra.

The spying activities are believed to have been carried out at the behest of China's Public Security Bureau, the country's main domestic law enforcement body.

Beijing considers the Guan Yin Citta group to be a cult.

The group describes its goals as encouraging 'people to recite Buddhist scriptures, practice life liberation and make great vows to help more people.'"

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