Ann Gleig explores the answer that reveals everything wrong with the wellness industry.
Writing for Religion News Service, scholar Ann Gleig tackles one of the most disturbing questions facing the spirituality and wellness industry: How could Deepak Chopra, one of the world’s most celebrated spiritual gurus, maintain a close friendship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein?
Gleig observes that Deepak Chopra’s name appears 3,500 times in the redacted Jeffrey Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice, revealing a friendship that began in 2016—eight years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14. The messages are damning: Chopra advised Epstein that “God is a Construct. Cute Girls are Real,” invited him to Israel saying “Bring your girls,” and reassured him “Anything we share is between us.” When Epstein informed Chopra that a woman had dropped a civil case claiming sexual assault when she was 13, Chopra responded “good.”
This isn’t just about one guru’s moral failure. As spiritual coach Scott Mills wrote, “The system isn’t just the abusers. It’s also the ones who stay silent.” The Chopra-Epstein friendship exposes foundational problems in the spirituality and wellness industry: charismatic male gurus operating without accountability, spiritual bypassing that avoids confronting bad impulses, and what the Science and Nonduality Conference called the danger when a “teacher becomes a brand.”
The industry often presents itself as immune from patriarchal and authoritarian aspects of traditional religion—a democratic, scientific, female-centric alternative. But Chopra’s friendship with Epstein tells a familiar story of male power and protection. It shows that abuse and enabling structures exist across religious and spiritual contexts, whether Catholic church cover-ups, Southern Baptist failures, Western Buddhism scandals, or yoga’s #MeToo reckoning.
The very foundations of modern wellness culture—individualism, narcissism, capitalism, spiritual consumerism, and charismatic male gurus—have been found liable. As Mills concluded, this is “an industry that built a billion-dollar empire on the words courage, truth, and transformation—and when the moment came to actually be courageous, to actually tell the truth, to actually transform, it went silent.” Real change requires replacing the charismatic guru with caring community, self-focused spirituality with mutual respect, and idealization of the divine feminine with actual feminist accountability.
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