I was harassed by the owners of an illegally operating retreat centre...Magia Del Duende My Experience at Magia Del Duende — A Personal Account Trigger warning: mentions of miscarriage. I (30F) traveled to a small ayahuasca retreat center in Chazuta, Peru, in late April 2025, to work with plant medicine and a few master plant dietas. I was hoping for something healing and restorative. What I got instead was months of harassment, intimidation, and a criminal case I never expected to be filing. I'm sharing this because I think other people considering this kind of work deserve to know what can happen when it goes wrong — and because staying quiet is exactly what worked in the perpetrator's favor for a long time. For the first three or four weeks, everything was fine. I kept to myself, worked on my dieta, and got to know the center's co-owner, a woman I'll call Akiko, before she left for a few weeks of travel. Her husband at the time — I'll call him David, who was still a co-owner of the center then — came back from his own travels around the same time she left. My first impression of him was that he talked a lot, and that very little of it seemed to mean anything. Weeks later, that impression would prove exactly right. Despite having run the retreat for years, David started having near-daily "integration" talks with me — which struck me as strange, since a master plant dieta is supposed to involve isolation, not daily one-on-one check-ins with the owner. During those talks, I ended up sharing why I'd come: a difficult childhood, an abusive relationship I was recovering from, and a miscarriage. Not long after I joined an ayahuasca ceremony he also attended, he came to my isolation hut and told me he thought he was "falling in love" with me. He described a vision from the ceremony that he said connected me to something deeply personal and painful from his own life, and used that to frame the sudden declaration as fate rather than what it actually was: something completely inappropriate, directed at a guest he'd known a week, while his wife was out of the country. I told him plainly that a week wasn't long enough to fall in love with anyone, that he was married, and that this was disrespectful — to me, to my process, and given what I'd shared with him, to my own loss as well. He didn't let it go for a few more days, continuing to push the conversation despite my clearly telling him I wasn't interested and that his behavior was out of line. He also asked me not to tell anyone else what he'd said. I told a former Workaway volunteer at the center anyway. Her response was immediate: she'd noticed him doing something similar before. She spoke to him about it directly and was angry on my behalf. Even so, I ended up staying — I didn't want to lose the time and money I'd already put into the dieta — and for a while, he kept his distance. Less than a week later, from what I saw, he began pursuing that same volunteer romantically, describing a nearly identical vision from a different meditation. She turned him down too. Around that same time, I also witnessed him behave inappropriately toward another guest who had raised concerns about how the center was being run — pressuring and intimidating her at a moment when she was alone, deep into a long isolation fast. That, on top of everything else, was the last straw. She and I left the center together the next day. After I left, I posted a review describing what had happened. That's when things escalated in a way I genuinely wasn't prepared for. David reached out repeatedly, by phone and message, pressuring me to take the review down. Even the former volunteer I mentioned earlier reached out to ask me to remove it. He also escalated into explicit legal threats — telling me directly that he was on his way to file a complaint against me with Interpol over my review, and in one of his written responses, naming me in full alongside a partial number from my passport. That combination — a specific threat of international legal action paired with publishing part of an identity document — read less like someone trying to resolve a dispute and more like someone trying to frighten me into silence, and I have both of those things in writing. Akiko's role in this is its own story, separate from David's harassment, and I want to give it the space it deserves rather than treat it as a footnote to his. By the time much of what follows played out, David and Akiko had separated, and Akiko had taken over as the center's sole owner. Her issue with my review, as she's expressed it, is that it reflects badly on the business she now runs alone — not that she's defending what David did. I want to keep those two things distinct. But separate from his conduct doesn't mean separate from harassment: what she did was its own sustained pattern of pressure. Over close to a year, Akiko contacted me repeatedly, by email and WhatsApp, to push me toward removing the review. Twice, she offered me something of value in exchange — first 3 free weeks of accommodation and a dieta, later a cash refund — conditioned explicitly on taking my review down. I declined both times. This didn't stop when things got serious. It continued after David's investigation for sexual harassment was formally opened, and after a Peruvian family court granted me protective measures against him. If anything, it intensified: she pushed heavily for me to remove my reviews, including threatening me with legal action similar to how her husband had. At one point, I told her directly, in writing, that any further contact from her would constitute harassment. The contact continued anyway. One part of that pressure campaign I've struggled with how to even describe: to convince me my review was causing harm, Akiko sent me screenshots of glowing reviews from two former guests (with their full legal names) — attached, unprompted, to descriptions of those women's own histories of childhood sexual abuse, framed as proof of the emotional breakthroughs the center had given them, and by implication, of what my review was supposedly taking away from other women like them. I'm not naming either woman here. Whatever they may have shared with Akiko in confidence, they didn't consent to having that trauma handed to me as a guilt-trip, and I'm not willing to compound that by naming them publicly myself. But I think it's worth being honest that this happened, because using other survivors' pain as leverage to silence someone else's account is its own kind of manipulation. One detail I'll note as an observation rather than a claim I can prove: on the day she was pressuring me hardest to meet her in person, David happened to fly into the same city. I can't say for certain that this was coordinated — I only know that I noticed it, and that it was part of why I didn't go to that meeting. The wave of other reviews that appeared afterward — several from former guests and people connected to the center, criticizing me and my character — was coordinated. I have this in David and Akiko's own written words, not just as an inference from timing. A number of those reviews were later edited or quietly removed once the criminal case was formally opened. I, of course, have copies of every review that targeted me directly, as well as which reviews were changed after the criminal case became formalized. I did end up filing a police complaint, and a criminal case for aggravated sexual harassment was opened against David. That case is still ongoing — it's currently in the preliminary investigation phase, and there's no conviction at this point. I think it's important to be upfront about that. I have also since filed a separate complaint regarding Akiko's conduct, given how long and sustained the pattern of contact was. David also filed his own complaint with police, alleging that I had fabricated the harassment and was, in his telling, the one who'd been in love with him. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that. In a lengthy public response he posted himself, David also made a claim that he had spied on me while I showered. I'm not asserting that as an independently confirmed fact beyond what he wrote — it's something he stated himself, in writing, in response to my review, and I have that documented. There were other things that happened during this period — legal threats, disputed accusations around money that was actually owed to me, and more. Some of it is still working its way through the legal system, and I'd rather let that process run its course than make allegations here that I can't fully back up yet. What I can say is that a genuine criminal investigation is underway, and I intend to see it through. I have documentation of everything I've described here. Thank you for reading. I am also writing a multi-part investigative series on Medium. @kalia.melrose/shadows-in-the-shamanic-renaissance-when-retreat-centers-re-victimize-the-vulnerable-91fab368e819" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">link