Hypnosis
Crime

Various people have been suspected of or convicted for hypnosis-related crimes, including robbery and sexual abuse.

In 1951, Palle Hardrup shot and killed two people during a botched robbery in Copenhagen - see Hypnosis murders. Hardrup claimed that his friend and former cellmate Bjørn Schouw Nielsen had hypnotised him to commit the robbery, inadvertently causing the deaths. Both were sentenced to jail time.

In 2011, a Russian "evil hypnotist" was suspected of tricking customers in banks around Stavropol into giving away thousands of pounds' worth of money. According to the local police, he would approach them and make them withdraw all of the money from their bank accounts, which they would then freely give to the man. A similar incident was reported in London in 2014, where a video seemingly showed a robber hypnotising a shopkeeper before robbing him. The victim did nothing to stop the robber from looting his pockets and taking his cash, only calling out the thief when he was already getting away.

In 2013, the then-40-year-old amateur hypnotist Timothy Porter attempted to sexually abuse his female weight-loss client. She reported awaking from a trance and finding him behind her with his pants down, telling her to touch herself. He was subsequently called to court and included on the sex offender list. In 2015, Gary Naraido, then 52, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for several hypnosis-related sexual abuse charges. Besides the primary charge by a 22-year-old woman who he sexually abused in a hotel under the guise of a free therapy session, he also admitted to having sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl. In December 2018, a Brazilian medium named João Teixeira de Faria (also known as "João de Deus"), famous for performing Spiritual Surgeries through hypnosis techniques, was accused of sexual abuse by 12 women. In 2016 an Ohio lawyer was sentenced to 12 years of prison after hypnotizing a dozen different clients into committing sexual acts under the guise of a mindfulness exercise.
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