Pepin’s Protégé

[June 17th, 2009]

William Rijken says a recent WW cover story forced him to relive troubling memories when he read about its subject—Eric Pepin, a New Age guru from Beaverton who claims to read minds, cross dimensions and control the weather.

Rijken claims that five years ago Pepin also displayed another, more manipulative power: persuading Rijken to strip naked and, later, asking him to masturbate in front of Pepin as part of what Pepin described as a ritual to gain ultimate enlightenment.

Rijken’s story is very similar to claims made by a young man who says Pepin molested him in 2004 when he was 17. Pepin and Jamison Priebe—Pepin’s spiritual follower, romantic partner and employee in his Higher Balance company—were acquitted of sex abuse and child pornography charges stemming from those claims in 2007. That alleged victim, who goes by the initials CNY, now is suing Pepin for $3.1 million.

Rijken says he has no plans to sue Pepin and is not alleging a crime occurred, because he was a 21-year-old adult at the time.

But Rijken says in a sworn statement that he felt the need to go public after reading WW’s story about how Pepin rakes in millions of dollars selling his metaphysical teachings to thousands of followers (see “Eric the Enlightened,” WW, May 13, 2009).

“I was hoping this was something that I would just turn my back on,” says Rijken, 26, a cook at New Seasons who lives in Northeast Portland and moonlights as a DJ. “But when I saw his face on the cover, I was just shocked. My story needs to be heard.”

Pepin did not reply to repeated phone messages seeking comment. His business partner, Eric Robison, says no one at Higher Balance remembers Rijken.

Rijken has a different story. In late summer 2004, he was a busser living with his parents in Tigard. Pepin was 37 and had started Higher Balance to sell his teachings on how to gain psychic abilities, understand the universe and come closer to God. Pepin travels the country putting on seminars. His CDs sell for up to $299 each, and a one-on-one session costs $800 an hour.

Rijken says he was at a crossroads when he met Pepin: A family member had recently died, just as Rijken had begun to question the Catholic beliefs he was raised with. One evening, he says, he was reading a book about reincarnation in Starbucks at Beaverton Town Square—the same coffee shop where CNY says he was recruited by Pepin’s followers earlier that year.

There, Rijken says, he was approached by Priebe, a member of a tight-knit crew of young followers who have been in Pepin’s inner circle for years. Rijken says Priebe, who was 19, described Pepin as a spiritual teacher gifted in hypnosis and past-life regression. He invited Rijken to a house in Beaverton where Pepin lived with a handful of his followers.

Soon, Rijken says, he was hanging around Pepin and his group nearly every day. They meditated, traded ideas in coffee shops, and followed what Rijken describes as Pepin’s advice to stay away from outsiders, who would block their spiritual path.

“He kind of fell off the planet,” says Matt Russell, Rijken’s friend since middle school. “All of us were wondering what was happening with Will.”

Rijken says Pepin offered to teach him for free. Not long after he started, Rijken says, Pepin invited him to his bedroom and asked Rijken to remove his clothes so he could inspect Rijken’s aura. Rijken stripped, he says, and Pepin circled his body without touching him.

“I was trying to keep an open mind,” Rijken says. “I was definitely naive. I was buying everything he was saying to me.”

About four weeks later, Rijken says he came to Pepin with burning questions about the nature of good and evil. Pepin again took him to his bedroom, Rijken says, and described an ancient ritual that would allow Rijken to join Pepin’s inner circle and attain enlightenment in this lifetime. All he had to do, Rijken says, was masturbate in front of Pepin.

“He told me, ‘Never tell anyone what happens in this room.’ And he went on to say I should never get on his bad side,” Rijken says. “I felt very uncomfortable. I knew something was wrong.”

Rijken says he left immediately. When he returned the next day and said he didn’t want to join the inner circle, Pepin banished him, he says. No one else from Higher Balance would return his calls.

He says the experience left him feeling violated by a person he’d viewed as a spiritual mentor. Rijken says someone who’s truly enlightened would never have tried to intimidate him.

“I was embarrassed and ashamed—ashamed for my family, my friends, people I associated with,” he says. “I’m not trying to get his money. His money’s not important. What he’s doing, using spirituality as a tool to manipulate, is wrong.”