Buddhist Chaplain at Tufts U. Resigns After Being Arrested in Prostitution Sting
“allegedly responded to an advertisement posted by undercover BPD officers on a website frequented by sex traffickers”
What can one even say about this? It doesn’t even sound like real life.
Tufts Daily reports:
BREAKING: Tufts Buddhist Chaplain arrested in prostitution sting, resigns from university
Tufts Buddhist Chaplain Ven. Vineetha Mahayaye was one of seven men arrested on Saturday by the Boston Police Department’s human trafficking unit for allegedly attempting to pay for sexual acts. Mahayaye resigned from his position at Tufts, which he had held since December 2024, on Monday.
Mahayaye, 32, pleaded not guilty and is set to appear in court on Sept. 2 on a misdemeanor charge of sex for a fee.
Mahayaye allegedly responded to an advertisement posted by undercover BPD officers on a website frequented by sex traffickers, along with four of the other accused men. The advertisements were created as part of a larger sting operation called Operation Red Card, aiming to crack down on sex trafficking in preparation for World Cup games held in the Boston area.
The individuals arrested allegedly requested a variety of sexual acts and offered to pay amounts between $125 to $400. According to police logs, the men were arrested at the Moxy Boston Downtown hotel, with several of them in possession of the exact amount of cash they had offered to pay.
“Yesterday, we were notified by Ven. Mahayaye Vineetha that he has resigned his position at Tufts University effective immediately,” Patrick Collins, executive director of media relations, wrote in a statement to the Daily.
In a communication sent via the chaplaincy’s newsletter, University Chaplain Rev. Elyse Nelson Winger wrote that Mahayaye had resigned effective Monday and that a search for a new chaplain will happen this summer. She added that all Buddhist Chaplaincy programming will continue.
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Comments
He was attempting to reach nirvana the old fashioned way.
Didn’t they open for the Grateful Dead back in ’84?
Same as fulfilling your chakra or whatever that was.
Becoming one with everything can get expensive.
1) Why should he resign? Nothing in Buddhism that I know of making prostitution wrong for them. Unless there’s a university rule about being charged with a crime.
2) Can we stop with the use of “sex trafficking” for prostitution? Yes, some fair portion of prostitution is trafficking. But there is also some large part of it that is women willingly engaging in sex for money. “Trafficking” is a way to make prostitution sound worse than it often is, in order to make it somehow more repugnant.
How about we just compromise on “semi-automatic high-capacity sex?”
With a thing that goes up?
Sexual abstinence is expected of members of the Sangha.
Holy cow.