Carol Merchasin featured in Defector’s investigation into McO lawsuit concerning abuse allegations against Swami Satchidananda and the legacy of Yogaville.
Extract:
In late 2021, Netflix released Tiger King: The Doc Antle Story, a three-part true crime exploration of a big cat zoo owner accused of abuse and intimidation and, in his earlier days, maintaining a harem with mostly underage women (and a modern day harem with adult women as well). The documentary paintedAntle as a megalomaniac and master manipulator obsessed with power. His persona, according to those interviewed, was shaped in large part by his former guru, on whose ashram he lived and met younger women: Satchidananda.
“Swami Satchidananda used to always laughingly say that yoga institutes were asylums, and we were all the inmates,” Joan Cichon, a former Yogaville devotee, said in the documentary. “People would go ‘Ha ha ha! That’s so funny Swamiji. But it was true.”
On Jan. 22, 2022, members of the community gathered for a “healing circle”Zoom meeting to discuss the series, hosted by the Yogaville Community Association, which has since changed its name to the Village Sangha Association. That same year,
David “Vijay” Hassin, a longtime member of the sangha, emailed a letter to leadership asking the organization to formally acknowledge accusations of sexual misconduct committed by Satchidananda.In July 2022, Shanti Norris, one of the guru’s former personal assistants, wrote a letter to Integral Yoga leadership revealing she had been in a 10-year sexual relationship with Satchidananda.
“He took advantage of many of his female students’ innocence and adoration and continually mimicked the life of a celibate monk while living differently,” Norris wrote.
The guru, who preached that “truth is one, paths are many,” had previously been accused of abuse by female followers in the
1990s. But the #MeToo movement, Tiger King, and Hassin and Norris’s letters pushed the long-forgotten allegations against Satchidananda back into the community’s consciousness. To some, it felt past time for the organization they loved to embrace a more complete version of the guru.
In October 2022, Yogaville and Integral Yoga leadership finally addressed the comments — but stopped short of taking accountability.
“It is not possible for the organization to make a statement on his behalf or to definitively comment about consensual relationships, or allegations of comments of a sexual nature or sexual advances that are alleged to have occurred thirty to fifty years ago,”
the statement read.
A year later came the lawsuit. In November 2023, Norris and Susan Cohen sued the Integral Yoga Institute (IYI) and Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville for five causes of action, including sexual discrimination and gender-motivated violence. In March 2024, Yogaville and Integral Yoga countersued Cohen and Norris for tortious interference with business relations, libel, and slander. Norris and Cohen then filed a motion to dismiss Yogaville’s counterclaims, based on New York’s anti-SLAAP Law.
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Carol Merchasin, the attorney for Cohen and Norris, declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit and the counterclaim but said in a written statement that “both courts and society have recognized that psychological coercion can strip even adults of the ability to say no. It’s long past time to bury the outdated myth that silence equals consent.”
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