I Helped Build This Industry. Deepak Chopra’s Epstein Problem Shows Us Why It Needs to Fall Apart.

A cultural insider’s analysis of the forces behind Liz Bucar’s piece on Chopra — and the machinery that made him possible.

Last week, when Deepak Chopra’s name surfaced in the Epstein files, I felt an unfortunately familiar reaction. If you’ve worked in the mind–body–spirit space long enough, you stop being surprised by scandals like this. They don’t erupt out of nowhere. They come out of a system built to reward charisma, mystique and spiritual ambiguity far more than responsibility or ethics.

Liz Bucar’s essay (read it first!) lays out the cultural pattern well: Americans keep reaching for figures who package “ancient wisdom” into something Western, digestible and conveniently free of context. But there’s another layer here, and that one is personal for me. I wasn’t just watching from the sidelines while the spiritual-wellness economy evolved. I was helping build the publicity scaffolding that elevated its biggest stars.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Because the same hunger that turned Chopra into a household name—the desire for profundity without context, obligation, or discipline—is the same hunger that fueled the New Age boom that came right on its heels. And that’s the world I stepped into professionally.

I was part of the original publicity engine that helped inject The Secret into the cultural bloodstream. I watched in real time as a fringe metaphysical DVD became a mainstream belief system—one that told millions of people their thoughts created their reality, their struggles reflected misalignment, and their circumstances were entirely self-authored. When Oprah amplified it, everything shifted. It wasn’t just a book launch. It was a tectonic media event, and I just happened to be standing at the epicenter.

Years later, I went on the Conspirituality podcast to talk about João de Deus—“John of God”—another figure I once helped promote. By then he’d been exposed as a serial predator. That conversation forced me to fully acknowledge something I already knew beneath the surface: when you work in this world, your choices matter, and so does your silence. What you feed the culture has consequences.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many figures in the wellness and healing space, especially men, whose public personas were built on compassion, presence and spiritual authority—while their private behavior toward students, clients and staff told a far different story. The overlap isn’t random. The more charismatic the healer, the more likely the boundary erosion. Not always, but far too often to dismiss as coincidence. This industry rewards confidence, not integrity; performance, not accountability. Charisma becomes a credential, and a lack of guardrails lets misconduct flourish quietly.

I have a very clear moral line: I can’t support people whose work harms others. That sounds basic. In this industry, it’s not. And after decades behind the curtain, I can say something most people never see: a shocking number of spiritual “teachers” leave a trail of damage the public will never know about. The machine rarely stops them. In many cases, it’s structured to protect them.

So no—I’m not offering commentary on Chopra from a distance. I’m speaking as someone who spent years inside the mechanism that elevated him.

1. Charisma is monetized long before ethics are ever interrogated.

Most people outside the industry don’t see how decisions are made. The figures who rise are the ones who project authority, emotional resonance and market-ready mystique—not the ones who demonstrate grounded ethics or disciplined spiritual training. Inside acquisitions meetings and publicity calls, the questions aren’t about credibility. They’re about whether someone can carry a morning-show segment, whether producers will book them, whether a seven-minute interview can launch a franchise.

A serene cadence, a compassionate affect, a curated aura—these are treated as market assets. Meanwhile, no one in the chain is tasked with evaluating ethical integrity or ensuring a teacher won’t harm the very people seeking help. And because charisma sells, people who learn to perform profundity often rise much faster than those who actually practice it.

2. The publisher pipeline reinforces this long before a guru reaches the public.

Publishing decisions aren’t moral evaluations. They’re economic ones. Editors advocate for ideas, but sales teams and P&Ls decide what goes forward. “Platform” is treated as a proxy for authority, and its size often outweighs the substance or responsibility behind the work.

This is how highly charismatic wellness personalities—some grounded in real training, others grounded in branding and ring lights—secure large book deals and national coverage while more ethical, community-rooted teachers struggle to get a meeting. A viral presence becomes a “lower-risk investment.” Once the contract is signed, the publicity machine confers legitimacy, creating a circular logic: they’re important because they’ve been published, and they were published because they looked important.

This is also how we ended up with the “empowerment influencer” tier of spiritual figures whose entire identity is built on polished authenticity, algorithmic enlightenment and a kind of relentless positivity that audiences read as depth. It’s a profitable formula, and the system keeps rewarding it.

3. Orientalism isn’t a glitch. It’s the design.

Bucar’s analysis of the “wise Eastern sage” archetype is accurate, and it’s not accidental. This is a marketing architecture tailored to Western spiritual longing. The most commercially successful figures strike a familiar hybrid: ancient-but-vague, scientific-but-not-falsifiable, exotic-but-reassuringly gentle.

During my years in publishing, I saw how the broader marketplace rewarded work that signaled lineage without requiring the obligations, histories, or communities that actual lineage entails. Covers, taglines, personas—all were shaped to evoke depth, without the commitments real depth demands.

Chopra became the quintessential example of that dynamic. His East-meets-West aesthetic—medical credentials paired with universalized “ancient wisdom” — offered the feeling of profound lineage without the accountability or context. It was spirituality made digestible, marketable, and infinitely scalable.

4. There are no guardrails. None.

Religious institutions have enormous failures, but they at least theoretically possess accountability structures. The guru economy does not. There’s no ethics board, no supervisory structure, no formal process for investigating harm. Just charisma, a following and a revenue stream.

That’s how someone like John of God could rise globally while abusing women for decades. It wasn’t an anomaly—it was the predictable outcome of an unregulated power structure. Chopra’s long association with Epstein fits the same pattern. When charisma is rewarded and no one is accountable, ethical decay isn’t surprising. It’s inevitable.

5. Parasocial intimacy is the oxygen of the industry.

Audiences routinely mistake affect for character. A warm voice gets read as compassion; stillness gets mistaken for depth; vague aphorisms get treated as great wisdom. Once people feel they “know” a teacher, it becomes nearly impossible for them to perceive misconduct clearly. The emotional familiarity becomes a shield.

This parasocial bond is one of the most durable forces in modern culture. Publicists, producers, and publishers all understand its value: emotional proximity converts viewers into followers, followers into believers, and believers into consumers. And once that devotion calcifies, even serious ethical violations rarely disrupt it.

This is why scandals that would end a political career barely register in the spiritual marketplace. And it’s why nothing will happen to Deepak Chopra now. Not in light of the Epstein files. Not after years of allegations. His brand is built on an emotional connection that functions as insulation. His audience won’t leave him, his business interests won’t collapse, and the wellness industry has no accountability structures that would force consequences.

He will continue as if nothing happened — because, structurally, nothing will.

6. My own complicity matters—because this is how the system perpetuates itself.

Helping mainstream The Secret taught me how quickly a worldview can take hold when it’s delivered with charisma and certainty. It also taught me how dangerous that worldview can be when it discourages people from examining structural realities or recognizing harm. The same energy pattern appears across the wellness landscape: mindset over material conditions, manifestation over responsibility, “alignment” over accountability.

Predators love that framework. Powerful institutions love it too. It keeps people quiet, inward-facing, and easy to influence.

Talking publicly about John of God was part of my reckoning. Writing this is another. The truth is simple: the wellness industry doesn’t accidentally produce gurus devoid of accountability; it’s set up to do exactly that.

7. The Deepak–Epstein revelations aren’t surprising—they’re diagnostic.

Chopra didn’t suddenly reveal a hidden shadow. He simply illuminated the architecture that built him: a marketplace that elevates charisma, protects personalities, and suspends scrutiny the moment someone presents as “enlightened.” His behavior isn’t an aberration—it’s a feature of the system.

Deepak doesn’t have an Epstein problem. The wellness industry has an Epstein problem, because it has a power problem. It is a commercial ecosystem built on unchecked authority, parasocial attachment, and the belief that spiritual figures exist outside the need for oversight. When you combine moral exceptionalism with zero accountability, you don’t just enable misconduct—you guarantee it.

8. So what do we do with this?

The solution isn’t purity, and it isn’t pretending we can extinguish charisma. Humans are wired to respond to charismatic teachers; that’s not going to change. What needs to change is our literacy. The public deserves a clearer understanding of what spiritual authority actually is—and how easily it can be manufactured. We need to be able to tell the difference between lineage and branding, community and fandom, practice and performance, ethics and aesthetic.

If we want a healthier spiritual culture, we have to get honest about the mechanisms that determine who gets amplified. Publishing rewards marketability, not integrity. Wellness culture rewards emotional resonance, not accountability. And the “spiritual but not religious” framework often removes the very guardrails that make ethical oversight possible.

This isn’t about imposing purity tests or demanding moral perfection from teachers.

It’s about cultivating discernment — individually, culturally, and institutionally. Without it, we will continue to elevate the wrong people for the wrong reasons and ignore harm until it’s too late to repair.

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A personal note

I turn down most interview requests—not out of introversion, but because I’ve seen how quickly critique becomes content. I’m not interested in joining the pundit rotation of the “wellness reckoning.” There are plenty of well-qualified people speaking to that. I’d rather speak when it matters, and only if the substance outweighs spectacle.

But I am committed to telling the truth about how this ecosystem works, because I spent years helping build it. And I feel a responsibility to unwind the parts of it that cause harm. If pulling the curtain back helps anyone see the circuitry more clearly, then it’s worth doing.