[imagesource:Department of Justice]

Supposedly impotent, 77-year-old Frenchman Gilbert Greaux is a master manipulator.

In a charming little potters’ village in the Southwest of France, this old man made a home and a hunting ground out of Château de Valloubière, the 25-acre vineyard located in Saint-Jean-de-Fos.

The Château offered sumptuous guest rooms, magnificent food, and fine Languedoc wines from grapes grown in the vineyards down the way – which it turns out, was all a stunning mask for some of Gilbert’s most evil deeds.

As The Daily Beast notes, the supposedly impotent helicopter pilot turned new-age healer was convicted in 2018 of sexually assaulting 17 female guests after performing what he claimed were “collective hypnosis” ceremonies on visitors already plied with copious amounts of the château’s flagship product, followed by an “energy session” or “magnetism massage.”

The rich satire of Rob van Vuuren’s ‘Namaste Bae‘ just got richer.

Image: Department of Justice

Gilbert was using legitimate therapeutic treatments to sexually assault his guests, telling his victims that he would help “open up their chakras,” before, well, opening up their legs:

Many say they were under the spell of Greaux’s “hypnotic hold,” and that they knew something was wrong but “felt hypnotized” or too “heavy” to do anything. One woman described to French investigators being in a “dreamlike state” during Greaux’s assault, and said that although she felt “disgusted” by what he was doing to her, she simply found herself “unable to react.”

Many have been left with PTSD in the wake of these violations.

When the investigation was launched in 2015, Gilbert managed to slip out of France to go to Florida but was still convicted in absentia of 14 counts of sexual assault and three counts of rape, receiving a sentence of 13 years in prison.

Gilbert’s 52-year-old son also seems to be under his spell, convinced that his father is not able to achieve an erection and that the guests are just jealous.

The probe into Gilbert’s serial sex abuse began in 2013 when a 30-year-old woman went to the police after her stay at the Château to lodge a complaint. She describes having dinner with Gilbert and other guests, after which he treated them to a group hypnosis demonstration, followed by dancing in the large dining room. Then he discreetly led the woman to a private massage room and started having his way with her.

She described feeling like her “body had dissociated from her mind,” and “she felt in a dreamlike state”, which is almost identical to what all the other complainants describe feeling, often straight after dinner and hypnosis, which is when Gilbert would pounce.

Gilbert even told a couple that he was working to “‘free the aura’ [from] the chakra root located in the pubis,” to which they were “shocked,” and “horrified,” but weren’t able to do anything to stop it from happening.

Gilbert’s son argues that magnet therapy is very powerful and can be easily misunderstood, claiming, conveniently, that people feel like they’re being touched when they’re not.

Shame, now all that hippy-dippy nonsense will just get an even worse reputation.

[source:dailybeast]