Placido Domingo and The Buenos Aires Yoga Symphony Sex Cult

12/15/22 • 39 min

A Yoga school in Buenos Aires full of classical musicians has operated for over 30 years as a hidden international sex cult.

We're talking about the recent raid by the Argentine Federal Police's Human Trafficking unit of a sex cult that has operated internationally from Buenos Aires for the past 3 decades... at least. If you like our content please become a patron to get our episodes ad-free.

In late August the Argentine Federal Police raided a yoga school filled with cash, gold, property titles, cars, and oddly... sex toys. It turns out that this was the second time the school had been accused of running a human trafficking organization. In the 1990s the school was charged with similar crimes but the case never went to trial, presumably because of the wealthy participants involved. The organization's director Juan Percowicz is arrested and awaiting trial, along with pianist Susana Mendelievich, and renowned oboe performer Mariano Kraus. Opera soprano Verónica Iacono is currently an international fugitive, also facing charges related to the cult. The late violinist Rubén González was the director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he opened the Buenos Aires Yoga School's Chicago location back in the 1990s, as well. 1

This time, there are wiretaps detailing the cult's activities and those wiretaps contain multiple mentions of the world's most famous living opera singer: Placido Domingo. This isn't the first time Domingo has been involved in sex scandals. While paying for sex in Argentina is legal and he faces no criminal charges related to the sex cult in Buenos Aires, he was fired from his management roles in the Kennedy Center Opera Company and the LA Opera Company over complaints that he had sexually harassed female performers. 2

As it turns out Placido was a customer of the young girls which the cult provided to wealthy clients, but prostitution wasn't their main business. The larger share of their profits came from a scientology-type cult which promised people spiritual healing for everything from drug addiction to chronic pain. The young sex workers were just a way to lure in cult members who were then coerced into changing their wills to gift their property to the cult upon their deaths. 3

A man named Pablo Salum has extensive information on the cult going back to the time when his parents joined it in the 1990s when he was a teenage boy. Pablo has started an advocacy organization called "Libre Mentes" or, "Free Minds" in English, which advocates for laws to combat coercive religious cults in Latin America. 4

Episode #Dubimeter: 9.5

1. Phil Greenfield. ASO Concert Strikes Strange Chord. Baltimore Sun. November 1995. ⇤

2. Anastasia Tsioulcas. LA Opera Finds 'Inappropriate Conduct' Claims Against Plácido Domingo Credible. NPR. March 2020. ⇤

3. Frederico Molina. Sex, drugs and promises of happiness: The Buenos Aires Yoga School’s money-making machine. El Pais. August 2022. ⇤

4. Pablo Salum. Here I begin the THREAD where it will be clear to you with documentation, how the human rights organizations were complicit, helped and protected the #Secta who has my family!. Ley Antisectas Twitter account. March 2018. ⇤

A Yoga school in Buenos Aires full of classical musicians has operated for over 30 years as a hidden international sex cult.

Episode #Dubimeter: 9.5

1. Phil Greenfield. ASO Concert Strikes Strange Chord. Baltimore Sun. November 1995. ⇤

2. Anastasia Tsioulcas. LA Opera Finds 'Inappropriate Conduct' Claims Against Plácido Domingo Credible. NPR. March 2020. ⇤

3. Frederico Molina. Sex, drugs and promises of happiness: The Buenos Aires Yoga School’s money-making machine. El Pais. August 2022. ⇤

Previous Episode

The North Carolina Blackout: Drag Queens vs Domestic Terrorism

A mysterious gunman opened fire on two grid substations in North Carolina, in a targeted attack during a drag show organized by Naomi Dix at a local theater which left more than 38,000 people in Moore County without power, in freezing temperatures.

The Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines went dark in an instant. The drag show was called off early, and shortly thereafter a woman named Emily Rainey seemed to take credit for the power outage in a public Facebook post. The local sheriff has questioned her in relation to the Facebook posts and determined that she's not the culprit after "a word of prayer." ...Right. 1

If you like our content and would like to support us, please become a patron to get our public episodes ad-free.

This wasn't the first drag show Emily Rainey has protested, she's been attending them in secret according to her Instagram posts for quite some time. She's also a regular guest on the podcast of a priest officially made into a hermit by the Catholic church due to his outrageous political opinions 2

This isn't the first time Emily Rainey has made national news, either. She was forced out of her Army commission after bringing a bus of 100 people to attend the January 6 riots in D.C. after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Since then she's rebranded herself as a right wing activist figure in charge of an organization called "Moore County Citizens for Freedom" but there's just one problem: according to voter records she doesn't even live in Moore County. 3

What she does do, according to her own social media history, is get pregnant after an affair with another woman's husband. The Calvary Christian School in Southern Pines was apparently very concerned about the drag show, but not as concerned with Emily's baby daddy situation. Shocker. 4

1. Khaleda Rahman. Emily Rainey Photo With Sheriff Amid North Carolina Outage Raises Questions. Newsweek. December 2022. ⇤

2. Fr. Dave Nix. In Exile From a Kidnapped Bride. Padreperegrino.org. September 2022. ⇤

3. Tom Cleary. Emily Grace Rainey: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know. Heavy.com. December 2022. ⇤

4. Taylor Shook. 'It was a beautiful moment': Moore County drag show goes on despite power outages. Fayetteville Observer. December 2022. ⇤

Next Episode

The True Murder Story behind the HBO series True Detective

How the notorious Jennings, Louisiana sherriff's and police departments covered up the murders of 8 young women between 2005 and 2010.

In this episode we're talking about the murders of 8 young women in southwest Louisiana, as reported in the great book and documentary television series "Murder in the Bayou" by Ethan Brown. The story is not only a true crime television series, but also very close in plot details to the first season of the fictional HBO series True Detective, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, written by Nic Pizzolatto. If you like our content please become a patron to get all of our public episodes ad-free. 1

The Jennings, Louisiana law enforcement agencies were notorious nationwide before these murders took place. In the 1990s they made national news in an investigation by NBC's Dateline, into fraudulent drug charges related to vehicle seizures along Interstate 10 between Houston and New Orleans. The Jennings area police complicit in that scam were paying themselves bonuses for fake drug busts and buying lavish toys and properties with the ill gotten proceeds.

But a lot is never enough, and those same police graduated to running protection for other criminal enterprises later on in the early 2000s. Most of the drug and sex trade in Jennings ran through a strip club owner named Frankie Richard, who was not surprisingly also the police's most prized informant. Frankie was implicated in at least two of the murders of the 8 women discussed in this episode, but was never tried for the crimes despite eye-witness accounts detailing the manner in which he and his niece killed the two victims. Another man was stabbed to death after only saying that he knew what happened to one of the dead girls. A third man was mysteriously hit by a train. 2

And last but not least, but perhaps most predictably, Republican congressman Charles Boustany was rumored to have frequented a motel in Jennings where the 8 dead girls often sold sexual favors. Frankie Richard said he had sex with 3 of the girls who wound up dead, and the motel was being managed and operated by one of Boustany's campaign staffers at the time. The accusations cost Boustany his 2008 run for the US Senate, but he remained the US House Representative from the district encompassing Jennings until 2017. Family values, folks. 3

1. David Renshaw. HBO executive admits he rushed ‘True Detective’ writer into creating second season. NME. January 2016. ⇤

2. Ethan Brown. Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8?. Medium. January 2014. ⇤

3. Allegra Kirkland. What’s The Deal With Those Wild Prostitution Claims Against A GOP Rep.?. Talking Points Memo. September 2016. ⇤