He eventually moved to Florida, but kept up the yoga. The scandal forced Desai to resign his $150,000-a-year post.

No wonder it was something of a shock (perhaps greatest to his wife) when in 1994, the beloved teacher admitted to having affairs with three of his followers. With his followers calling him 'guru dev,' or 'beloved teacher,' one of the things Desai taught at the yoga center he founded in Massachusetts in 1972 was that celibacy was spiritually mandatory for unmarried people.ĭesai even took a vow of celibacy himself in 1974, despite being married with children. He began giving yoga lessons on the side and ended up training several thousand people, who in turn became yoga instructors around the country. Mental Floss: 10 aphrodisiacs around the worldĪ onetime art student, Amrit Desai came to the United States from India in 1960. He's still hurling rhetorical fire and brimstone on TV, radio and online, albeit on a much smaller scale. That's right, Jimmy Swaggart was linked to (brace yourself!) another hooker in 1991.Ī couple of lost lawsuits, an IRS tax lien, and that was the end of the line for Jimmy Swaggart. Swaggart's tearful, televised confession kept his $12-million-a-year, 10,000-employee religious empire together - until he got caught with his pants down again. But the bombastic and fantastically successful television preacher - and cousin to rock-and-roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis - was doing something with that prostitute in a cheap New Orleans hotel room in early 1988. Swaggart was one of Jim Bakker's fiercest critics when the Bakker scandal broke, telling an interviewer he himself had never even kissed a woman other than his wife. Mental Floss: 10 great love affairs in history In the end he only served five, and moved forward with his life, eventually opening a new ministry in a restaurant in Branson, Missouri. In 1989, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for fleecing his flock of $158 million. But when the scandal broke in 1987, questions began to be raised about Bakker's financial dealings. He had paid a former church secretary named Jessica Hahn to keep quiet about a sexual encounter they had in 1980. Mental Floss: Proposing the presidential wayīut Jim had a couple of dirty little secrets. They pulled in millions of dollars in contributions to their PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry, and even built a sort of fundamentalist Disneyland called Heritage USA in South Carolina.

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