Deepak Chopra's Professor Role at UC San Diego to End After his Name Appears in Epstein Files
Deepak Chopra, a guru to celebrities, is named thousands of times in convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Espstein's files
(Photo: Protest in Washington DC demanding release of all Jeffrey Epstein files. Courtesy: Creative Commons.)
May 1, 2026
Starting in July, Deepak Chopra will no longer be a Voluntary Clinical Professor, without salary, at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. The university “is aware that Deepak Chopra, MD, has been mentioned” in the Jeffrey Esptein files, a university spokesperson told the media. The “crimes Jeffrey Epstein committed were horrific, and any association with him is regrettable.” Chopra’s appointment at the university has “an expected job end date of 6/30/26,” the spokesperson added.
In July 2019, Epstein was arrested by US prosecutors on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls”, including at his homes in New York City and Palm Beach, Florida. He “knew that many of his victims were under 18…”, according to a United States Department of Justice statement. Epstein, 66, died of suicide the next month, while being held in a prison in New York.
Chopra is mentioned 3,354 times in the Epstein files, according to the public database of millions of files released by the Justice Department. In a post on X/Twitter, Chopra states some of his email exchanges with Epstein “reflect poor judgement in tone…Any contact I had was limited and unrelated to abusive activity.” One reader responded on X/Twitter, “Mr Chopra fails to mention that his emails are dated after Mr Epstein had been tried and found guilty of inappropriate sexual conduct with minors.”
In 2018, Epstein’s guilty plea and conviction in 2008 was widely covered by the media following an investigative report by the Miami Herald. In 2008, Epstein began serving an eighteen-month prison term after “pleading guilty to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14,” The Guardian reported. The news was widely covered at the time, including by TV channels.
The email exchanges between Chopra and Epstein include talk of sex, “prey” and “cute girls”, with Chopra urging Epstein to come with “your girls” to one of his workshops in Switzerland, CNN reported. The exchanges between them, including meeting at Epstein’s homes in New York and Florida, occurred from 2016 to 2019, the report added.
In 2017, Epstein made a donation to a UC San Diego laboratory led by Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran, a director of the university’s department of psychology. Chopra introduced Epstein to Ramachandran, according to the UCSD Guardian. Ramachandran continues as an Emeritus Professor at the university.
On his website, Chopra, 79-years-old, is described as pursuing a mission “to create a more balanced, peaceful, joyful and healthier world…Dedicated to blending ancient spiritual wisdom with modern science, advocating for holistic well-being, self-awareness, and the boundless potential of human consciousness.” An author, and speaker, Chopra was a spiritual guru to Oprah Winfrey, the Beatle George Harrison, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson and other celebrities.
Starting today, May 1, Chopra offers “A 40-day embodied yoga journey,” to discover “your body as a living field of awareness, intelligence, and timeless presence. One posture at a time.” The fee for the virtual program is US $149. Chopra’s site also offers other courses including one titled Happiness Prescription for $39.99. An upcoming Chopra program is titled “Love In Action.”
Then, for $29.99 a month, there is the Deepak Chopra Membership. The site states it is a “daily sanctuary for conscious living…(which) supports balance, clarity, and well-being. Find stillness, insight, and connection with Deepak’s direct presence and a private global community rooted in compassion and shared growth.”
In 1996, Chopra co-founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California. The Center offered programs that integrate the healing arts of the East with modern Western medicine “to help people experience physical healing, emotional freedom, and higher states of consciousness.” The Carlsbad center, which reportedly closed in 2019, was acquired by Deepak Chopra’s Chopra Global, a healthcare company.
Earlier, Chopra was the Chief of Staff at the Boston Regional Medical Center. “My ambition,” he writes, “was to equal or surpass my American colleagues.” Chopra served as a professor at Tufts University and Boston University. In 2004, he obtained his medical license in California, and, in 1973, in Massachusetts, according to EBSCO, a research database. He began his career as an endocrinologist.
Chopra moved to the US in 1968, recruited during a shortage of doctors. He completed his medical internship and residency in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Virginia. He earned a medical degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. He was born in New Delhi.
Chopra also runs Chat with DeepakChopra.ai, an online artificial intelligence-based platform to “Unlock Your Infinite Potential.” The fee is 50¢ per session.
“The wellness industry already has zero accountability structures” writes Liz Bucar in a piece titled, How Deepak Chopra’s AI spirituality is hijacking spiritual hunger, in religionnews.com. “No licensing boards. No ethics committees. No regulatory oversight. No complaint processes. Now we’re automating the very thing that had no guardrails to begin with.” A professor of religion at Northeastern University, Boston, Bucar is author of the book “Beyond Wellness.””
A 1997 Newsweek report, titled Don’t Mess With Deepak, refers to lawsuits filed by Chopra against publications, including The Journal of the American Medical Association for printing an article “that he believed mocked his beliefs.” In 1996, after Chopra was accused of sexual harassment, he pre-emptively sued the plaintiff--and her lawyers--for allegedly threatening to file a “meritless’‘ claim, the weekly reported.
A piece in TIME stated that “the immense frustration some critics feel about Chopra’s vagueness, his seeming unwillingness to distinguish between fact and metaphor and his chronic overpromising is not simply intellectual nitpicking.”
Thousands of mentions of Chopra in the Epstein files, “adds one more accolade to Chopra’s resume — friend of one of the most notorious sex-traffickers of minors in history,” states a report in the Voice of San Diego. The report adds, “the messages themselves do not prove wrongdoing on Chopra’s part.”
Among the victims of Epstein was Rina Oh, an Indian student who lived briefly in Epstein’s mansion in Florida. “I was trapped, with no transportation, no money, and threats of physical harm. That fear kept me silent for decades,” Oh told India Today. She told NDTV, “it was very easy to manipulate me. I was already very damaged. Jeffrey (Epstein) saw that, and he took advantage of me.”