Talented but Tainted: Often, especially after a scandal or community collapse, pundits will label the leader as a fraud. In this judgment, the guru was only pretending to be spiritual and really only wanted money, sex, fame, or power. Everyone who followed them was duped. While those kinds of low-level hucksters are abundant, as NXIVM’s Keith Ranière recently illustrates, at the higher levels of attainment, like Osho or Adi Da, it’s rarely that cut-and-dried.
