Jay Shetty lied about time spent with monks in India, plagiarised people’s stories: Report

Jay Shetty’s life as a monk, his claim to fame and a serious addition to his credibility in the mental health space, may be under question, according to a report by The Guardian.

Shetty has often detailed that he was a business student whose life changed after he attended a talk by a monk. He has also claimed of realising spiritual awakening after his time spent in solitude in an ashram in a “village near Mumbai”.

But The Guardian’s report says that doesn’t add up, a suspicion based on interviews of dozens of people, including high-ranking members of Iskcon, people who know Shetty personally, his schoolmates, his former employees, academics who study Hinduism and graduates of Shetty’s life-coaching school.

Shetty, in various interviews, has mentioned his age as 18, 21 and 22 at the time of the monk’s lecture that changed his life. Shetty’s legal team confirmed to the Guardian that the lecture took place in 2007, when he would have been 20 years old.

Shetty has claimed he lived as a monk for three years, from 2010 to 2013, in a Hindu ashram. However, Virabhadra Dasa, a Krishna devotee who lived in Iskcon’s Soho Street temple in central London from February 2011 to September 2012, says he saw Shetty several times over this span during visits to Bhaktivedanta Manor, a Tudor estate in Watford, a town just outside London.

Shetty’s blog Essence pointed to a shorter stay in India at the time as a 2011 post read, “Came back from India>>>went to see a few people at City University (was a good laugh)>>>then planned an action packed weekend>>>but got sick>>>stuck at home in bed for 10 days (few nice souls came and visited)>>>came back to stay at the temple where i’ve been busy going to programs, distributing flyers and books on the streets all over the UK and enjoying festivals!… After almost four months in India, I realised that there was so much to process from my trip.”

The Guardian article also mentioned finding “multiple allegations of Shetty using people’s content without consent or attribution and distorting details about his past as a monk”.

In 2019, a social media influencer Nicole Arbour claimed in a video that exhibited how Shetty built his social media presence by lifting content from other people and making inspirational quotes from accounts with lesser followers look like original content. Arbour told The Guardian that she received a flurry of messages from writers and digital creators who said Shetty had appropriated their work and refused to give them credit.

This was followed by a strict assessment of all of Shetty’s posts for attributions and the deletion of 100 posts, and then a strong crisis PR campaign.

A self-proclaimed former Hindu monk, Jay Shetty grew up in north London. His mental health podcast On Purpose has seen the likes of Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon and late Kobe Bryant. He is the author of two best-selling books Think Like a Monk and 8 Rules of Love, and has an armada of 14 million followers on Instagram and 6 million across his two YouTube channels. Add to this the Calm app and the Jay Shetty Certification School, where students are taught the Jay Shetty discipline.

Shetty has been seen at the White House state dinner for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, interviewed President Joe Biden on the government’s mental health initiatives, featured with his wife in a Gap campaign and appeared in Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me…Now.

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