‘Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator’ adds another twist to #MeToo movement

“Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator” is another story about a wealthy and famous man allegedly becoming a sexual predator, but it’s also a look inside an organization he founded where the devotion can only be described as cultish. As such, it’s an especially effective look at how such abuses have been allowed to fester, exploiting protective institutions as well as the allegiance and hunger of those involved.

As director Eva Orner’s Netflix documentary makes clear, Bikram Choudhury was, among other things, a world-class marketer and name-dropper, rattling off a client roster as varied as Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, George Harrison and Frank Sinatra. Clips show him appearing on talk shows not long after arriving from India in the 1970s, and celebrities touting his “hot yoga,” a myth which Bikram fed and twisted as nimbly as he did his limbs.

Pushing his clients while usually wearing, it’s noted, only a tiny Speedo and a Rolex watch, the core of the business was built around training instructors, those who attended intense workshops and gained extensive exposure to the man himself.

During those sessions, women report Bikram summoning them to his room at all hours, preceding to allegedly assault them. When one recalls reporting the incident to an instructor, she recalls being told to “separate the man from the teaching.”

Part of “Bikram” is a media story, in the extent to which people took his lines about, say, winning nonexistent yoga championships and simply ran with them. It was, to quote an old phrase, a story too good to check.

The real meat of the documentary, however, addresses not only those who say they were victimized but the extent to which adherents of his yoga clearly remain conflicted about it, exhibiting difficulty resolving their belief in what he taught — and what they say it has done for them — with his alleged transgressions.

Shown being deposed during civil suits against him, Bikram is indignant at the suggestion that he would “rape” women, insisting he has no need to assault anyone because, when it comes to sleeping with him, he has “millions” of volunteers.

Like most of what seems to come out of his mouth, there’s hyperbole in that, but obviously truth in people being drawn to and attracted by wealth and power — just as those attributes have left some high-profile men feeling entitled to abuse their positions and authority.

Notably, this documentary arrives amid a spate of reporting about misconduct within yoga, including a recent piece from the New York Times-produced FX series “The Weekly.” But it also fits with what has been, sadly, a bumper crop of #MeToo-related documentaries this year, including “At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal” and “Untouchable,” the expose about film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Even in that context, “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator’s” up-close look at the environment Choudhury created, the image that he carefully cultivated and the way that both allowed him to operate offers another illuminating window — one that contains insight into the victimizers and their enablers as well as the victims.

“Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator” premieres Nov. 20 on Netflix.