At the age of 18, Jill Lawler joined Bikram’s Yoga Training Seminar and set out on her life’s dream of becoming a Bikram Yoga instructor.
That dream turned into a nightmare when she was allegedly groomed in cultish environment. Specifically, Lawler was sexually assaulted and raped by a then 66-year-old Bikram Choudhury, who “took every advantage of his role, stature, and prestige,” according to her lawsuit.
To this end, as the lawsuit alleged, Choudhury used his exhaustive teacher training program to force Lawler and numerous other victims into submission, and once exhausted, he would invite these female students to his hotel room late at night to watch movies so he could have his way with them against their will.
Infamously, the yoga guru once told an HBO interviewer that he doesn’t need to force himself on women because “famous, beautiful, rich women” line up for him and “people spend $1 million for one drop of my sperm.”
After eight tumultuous years of litigation ups and downs, Lawler achieved some vindication last month in her case against the Choudhury. Due to Choudhury and his Yoga College’s repeated and willful discovery failures, refusal to follow the rules, terminating sanctions and finally a default judgment was entered by a judge in the Superior Court of The State of California against Choudhury and his now defunct College in the amount of $9,182,587.52.
After several verdicts and defaults against him in the range of tens of millions of dollars, Choudhury fled the country in 2016 and took painstaking efforts to abscond with his fortune and hide his assets as best possible. The next year, his College filed bankruptcy.
Thus, Lawler’s only avenue of recovery are insurance policies, such as those issued by AIG subsidiaries.
