Matthew Remski
2 min readMar 28, 2019

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For perspective and to push back against minimization, Jubilee Cooke, who Pattabhi Jois assaulted over several months in 1997, has this to say:

“What has frustrated me is how some in the Ashtanga yoga community have mischaracterized and minimized the nature and extent of Pattabhi Jois’s sexual assaults. The public still does not understand the number of victims. I know of five women who lived in Seattle, including myself and Catherine Tisseront [see p. 79], who were assaulted by Pattabhi Jois either in Mysore or during his Seattle stop on his 2002 World Tour. I suspect there are more. Assuming at least five victims lived in each of the twelve cities he visited on this 2002 tour, we quickly arrive at 60 victims, a conservative estimate, which does not take into account those from out of town who traveled to his workshops. If we also factor in Pattabhi Jois’s other world tours and other cities where he taught and consider his brazen assaults of multiple women daily in Mysore over the years, I believe that his victims number over 1,000. “Aside from the times when Sharath adjusted me, Pattabhi Jois assaulted me daily in three different ways during practice in Mysore — that’s three sexual assaults in one day to just one person. Even if Pattabhi Jois committed only three or four sexual assaults per day, six days per week, the number easily amounts to 1,000 sexual assaults in one year. Consider that Pattabhi Jois taught Westerners for over three decades and that reports of abuse and visual evidence date back to the early 1980s. We can then calculate a conservative estimate based on these figures and conclude that Pattabhi Jois likely committed over 30,000 sexual assaults.”

(Practice and All is Coming, 2019, p. 29)

Cooke’s own writing is here: http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/why-didnt-somebody-warn-me-a-pattabhi-jois-metoo-story-jubilee-cooke/

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