Behind The Scenes: Exposing Nirmal Purja, Harvey Weinstein of Mountaineering
The recent New York Times article that has ensnared Nirmal Purja in a media tidal wave and online shitstorm was long overdue. In fact, it was published almost a year too late. In July of 2023, a journalist working on the New York Times piece indicated to me in a telephone call that the article would be out in "one to two weeks from now."
I passed this information along to a young man who reported in graphic and disturbing detail his experiences with Nirmal Purja when the victim was only nine and ten years old and Nirmal Purja four years his senior.
After I informed the victim that a New York Times article on Nirmal Purja's behavior towards women was imminent, the male victim agreed to speak with journalists and go public with his own story. "You can use my name, everything I told you really happened. I will tell the journalists everything. Nirmal ruined my life," the victim said to me. Having spoken to the victim for hours over several weeks, I felt his account was credible.
I provided the victim's contact details to several journalists working for The New York Times and Outside magazine. Anna Callaghan, an inexperienced junior journalist who co-wrote the New York Times article, curtly replied that she will not use the victim's account in her story. Callaghan did not give an explanation for her decision. I had done all of the legwork to support the victim's story, including interviewing friends and relatives who confirmed that he had told them years earlier about the abuse he suffered.
Bewildered, I contacted a colleague of Anna Callaghan who also writes for The New York Times. "I don't understand why Anna won't at least talk to the victim," her colleague told me. "It's not very professional but ultimately, it's her story so I can't second-guess her," the journalist continued. Weeks went by without the article coming out. After two months, the male victim, whom I had interviewed dozens of times and recorded with his written and verbal consent, withdrew his statement.
"I was contacted by Nirmal and I am afraid. He will sue me and I cannot defend myself. I believed you when you told me that the article in The New York Times would come out, but it hasn't. Maybe I made a mistake to trust you," the victim said. It was clear that his confidence was shaken by the absence of an article in a mainstream publication. "The story has only come out on your Instagram, but that's not enough. Now I wish I hadn't told you anything. It's very embarrasing for me to expose myself like this, you know?"
I understood and was equally frustrated by the delay.
To keep the victim from recanting, I reminded him that historically I have always come through in my various projects. As evidence I provided the example of the Nepal Fire Truck Expedition, an adventure I had been planning for years with the actor James Gandolfini. I said: "Contrary to what had been written about me in all those front-page articles in the Kathmandu Post, the expedition ended up being very successful."
I had also hunted a group of Nazi war criminals with Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the British explorer, and to his and veteran Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal's surprise delivered the goods. This was public knowledge thanks to Ran mentioning this fact in the first sentence of his subsequent book titled The Secret Hunters.
Additionally, after years of working on freelance intelligence assignments for the United States, I had stumbled upon first-hand evidence and insider information about the secret CIA assassination plot against the royal family of Nepal.
Nepal's crown prince had been framed in a Mrs. Doubtfire-esque tale as the killer, acting on a whim out of spite for his mother's alleged disapproval of a romance. In fact, the CIA had worked together with the Nepalese Royal Army to remove King Birendra by assassinating him and his entire family.
I had recently published this and much more information via social media when I was contacted by a follower about Nirmal Purja. The mountaineer was using his considerable good standing among the Nepalese to throw his support behind the Citizenship Bill.
This controversial piece of legislation was conceived by India's intelligence service, the Research And Analysis Wing (RA&W), as a back door for Indian nationals to receive Nepali citizenship in order to manipulate a future referendum about Nepal joining the Indian Union as a state. If India's plan was successful, it would mean the end of Nepal's national sovereignty. The man responsible for pushing the Citizenship Bill was Prime Minister Dahal, a war criminal and close associate of Nirmal Purja. Nepal's two-term former prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, had given me detailed insight into this and several other R&AW and CIA plots, including the secret 2015/2015 economic blockade of Nepal. The blockade crippled Nepal in the middle of winter, only five months after the two back-to-back catastrophic earthquakes, which had destroyed over a million buildings, leaving millions of Nepalese without adequate shelter in the cold Himalaya. Prime Minister Oli had given me blanket permission to document, film and help expose the blockade.
To achieve this lofty goal, Prime Minister Oli authorized his most trusted representative in America, Ambassador Arjun Karki, and me to use any means necessary. Among other initiatives, Ambassador Karki and I convinced a prominent American, the Reverend Franklin Graham, to appear on national television programs and make the secret blockade public. By this time, tens of thousands of Nepalese had died as a result of hypothermia and acute lack of medical supplies, all because of India's blockade.
Meanwhile, another member of our secret plot to break the blockade, Charles Mendies, a Canadian-Nepalese businessman, cajoled Franklin Graham to send Boeing 747 cargo planes filled with winterization gear to Nepal. To Arjun and me, Charles and Franklin were the unsung heroes of the blockade.
Our plan worked. Shortly after Franklin Graham began his PR blitz, the blockade was lifted. In the meantime, Franklin had singlehandedly bankrolled the largest private airlift in history.
While our work was secret (Dr. Karki repeatedly reminded me not to divulge the inner machinations of our effort to overcome the blockade), a smear campaign against me in Nepal's biggest newspaper, The Kathmandu Post, led me to publish all of the facts surrounding my work in and related to Nepal in a series of longform articles on this website and in a social media campaign titled "Roast The Post".
As part of this effort, I exposed the Kathmandu Post's owner, Kailash Sirohiya, as an Indian-born mafia boss who used his media empire to extort protection payments from victims. Nepal's laws prohibit foreign nationals from having a stake in Nepali media houses. Sirohiya skirted these regulations by using a doctored Nepali citizenship certificate to conceal his Indian nationality.
It would take another five years until Sirohiya was finally arrested by Nepalese authorities on citizenship fraud charges.
Finally, I exposed Sirohiya' son, Sambhav, for killing four pedestrians in a drug- and alcohol-fueled car crash in Kathmandu. The elder Sirohiya covered up his son's mess by paying off the Nepal Police. Years after I exposed these facts, Nepal's interior minister, Ravi Lamichhane, became the second person to publicly accuse the two Sirohiyas of these crimes.
Nirmal Purja's male victim listened attentively as I rattled off these accomplishments. Surely, all this information must suffice to regain the victim's trust and for him to have confidence in my investigative abilities, I thought.
The victim was understanding. "I know, I saw all your posts, Michael. But this is different. This is my life and my reputation. My family scolded me for speaking out. I am a man. In Nepali culture it's embarrassing to talk about what he did to me. You have to understand."
Follow-ups with my contact at The New York Times only yielded the same response - the legal department was going through rounds of fact-checking and vetting, this process is intense and takes a long time. "You guys have been working on this piece for almost 18 months, how much longer do you need to get your job done," I asked. According to the person at the New York Times, Nirmal Purja's lawyers were putting up roadblocks and this was causing the delay.
Meanwhile, the management and editors at Outside magazine were facing the same problem. According to someone close to Nirmal Purja, the mountaineer had spent over a million british pounds on retaining the services of Schillings, the London law firm best known for representing Prince Andrew in his legal fight against Virginia Giuffre, who claimed that Jeffrey Eppstein had paid her to sleep with the royal when she was underage. David Brown, a journalist at the Times of London, told me "Schillings' strategy is to deny, deny, and deny again. Then the victims are paid for their silence. You can expect the same to happen in this case."
According to someone close to Nirmal Purja, Schillings advised their new client to use a detailed timeline for the day on which one of the victims mentioned in the New York Times article alleged an incident occurred - the 30th of March 2023. Following the article's publication, Purja's PR team issued a statement via his Instagram account refuting the allegations by claiming that his legal advisors presented the New York Times with a detailed timeline for that particular day that exhonerates their client.
This is exactly the same strategy Schillings employed with Prince Andrew, who infamously gave an interview to the BBC in which he recounted in minute detail a timeline, including a trip to a Pizza Express outlet, in order to undermine the credibility of his accuser.
In the case of the male victim who was a little boy when he repeatedly experienced Nirmal Purja's domineering aggression, the strategy seemed to work. After he recanted his statement, a number of journalists contacted me to express their frustration. They believed him, they said, but because he recanted and because he claimed he had suffered a mental breakdown which led him to make these allegations, he would no longer be a credible source in their stories. Worse, they said, even if they were to include his account, it would taint the stories of the other victims.
Meanwhile, Anu Thapa, a Nepal-born woman in her early 20s, who contacted me with claims that she was underage when Nirmal Purja committed certain acts in the UK, was reluctantly willing to go on-record with Outside magazine. True to David Brown's prediction, Purja's legal team denied the allegations categorically. In doing so, they made a crucial mistake. In one of the responses filed by Purja's representatives, they describe Anu and her background completely differently than her actual background. "Clearly, he confused me with another victim," Anu wrote via messenger. Still, Outside magazine's confidence in Anu and her account was so undermined that they refused to even publish the news of Nirmal Purja getting detained by the Metropolitan Police for questioniong related to Anu Thapa's allegations. Given how quickly the male victim recanted his statement, I feared Anu would follow suit if an article didn't appear soon in a major outlet.
I contacted the reporters at Outside and pitched a story about my social media campaign to expose Nirmal Purja. "Make me the fall guy. Just run a story about this crazy man who's highly controversial in Nepal and who's on a rampage, making serious allegations against Nirmal Purja. Write something like that Nirmal Purja already got a German court to issue an injunction against me. That way you have a paper trail that you can use in your reporting. I will also provide you with the recordings of the various victims I have spoken with, and I will give you a no holds barred interview," I said.
Despite pleading with them, the team at Outside didn't budge. According to them, they feared having to remove their article and issue an apology to Nirmal Purja. "But if you run a story, more victims will come out with their own accounts," I said. Outside remained steadfast in its position not to go to print.
My misgivings with Anna Callaghan and her shoddy journalism (several of her interview partners had complained in private about her) ruled out contacting her again. However, someone at the New York Times had assigned a more experienced journalist to help Callaghan finish her story.
I contacted the new co-writer, Jennifer Vrentas, a seasoned sports journalist, and offered to make an introduction to Anu. According to Anu, unlike the two women that would eventually be quoted in the New York Times article, Anu's experience occurred when she was underage and included far more than the removal of clothes or masturation. I never received a response from Jenny Vrentas, nor was Anu ever contacted by Anna Callaghhan or Jenny Vrentas.
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"I don't know why Anna is being so territorial about this story," my contact at the New York Times wrote. A journalist at Outside wrote "maybe she's worried she won't get a Pulitzer because you keep scooping her."
To me, this wasn't about a turf war. All of my efforts to expose Nirmal Purja would be futile if neither The New York Times or Outside magazine were willing to go to print with stories about the mountaineer's escapades. It was likely that as a result, more women might become victims of the prolific Nirmal Purja.
Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountaineer alive, was more supportive. "Give it time," Reinhold said, "if what you claim is true, then the truth will come out. I have no doubt about this. Just keep going." It was September of 2023, three months since I had embarked on the quest to expose Nirmal Purja.
A few months earlier, another world-famous mountaineer, Conrad Anker, had acted entirely differently than Reinhold Messner. After I contacted Conrad with details about the allegations against Nirmal Purja, he initially feigned shock and disgust. Conrad and my uncle, Thorsten Sperzel, had been close friends during their time at the elite Frankfurt International School in Oberursel, Germany. They went on skiing trips together but lost contact after leaving FIS. I reminded Conrad that FIS was our mutual alma mater and that I trusted him because of his friendship with my uncle. So when Conrad Anker told me how disappointed and disgusted he was with Nirmal Purja's behavior, I had no reason to doubt the man's sincerity.
Hence I entrusted Conrad Anker with a secret.
An old friend from my Everest days, Garrett Madison, had told me an account of one his friends who had a shockingly bad and criminally relevant experience with Nirmal Purja in a California hotel room.
"Garrett told me repeatedly not to tell this story to anyone, but I know I can trust you, Conrad," I said naively. "He fears for his life and doesn't trust Nirmal at all. So please, whatever you do, don't pass this information along."
The very next day, Garrett Madison messaged me a screenshot. It was from Nirmal Purja, asking Garrett why he had thrown him under the bus with Conrad. I was shocked and confused. Why would Conrad Anker act so recklessly and betray my confidence? When I related this to the journalists at the New York Times and Outside magazine, they, too, were in disbelief. "I can't believe Conrad did that," my friend at The New York Times wrote. "So disappointed in Conrad," wrote another journalist.
Within a week Conrad Anker joined Nirmal Purja and fellow expedition members in Kathmandu. On his social media accounts he posted pictures of himself with the Nepalese mountaineer. "This will come back to haunt Conrad," a journalist wrote to me in a private message.
I phoned up Simon Messner, Reinhold's son, to express my frustration. An avid climber himself, Simon had been a sounding board throughout the ordeal. I appreciated his unvarnished take on things and knew he could be trusted.
"These guys all stick together, Mike," Simon said. "They may not necesssarily like each other, but they have each other's backs in public. It will be extremely difficult for you to break their bond. Particularly since Conrad and Jimmy Chin continue to be so public in their support of Nirmal." Reinhold Messner, meanwhile, had stopped associating with the Nepal-born mountaineering star.
Undeterred by these setbacks, I continued exposing Nirmal Purja on social media and in a longform article on this blog. One day, my Instagram account, which had meanwhile swelled to 40+ thousand mainly Nepalese followers, was banned for violations of the terms of use. I decided to end my campaign and wait for the first mainstream article to come out.
I reflected on the past few months. They were marked by an intense activity on social media as an increasing number of victims contacted me. And there had been smaller victories along the way. Pen and watchmaker Montblanc quietly severed ties with Nirmal Purja after I contacted the luxury goods purveyor directly.
Months passed without any other results. It was extremely frustrating.
Then, to my complete surprise and delight, The New York Times finally published its first story with detailed allegations against Nirmal Purja on Friday, May 31, 2024 - eleven months after I had begun my campaign. Almost instantly, the mountaineering community reacted. It was clear that many people were eagerly awaiting this development.
Despite the watered-down allegations contained in The New York Times, which stand in sharp contrast to the far more severe accusations against the famous mountaineer made by Anu Thapa and the male victim, as well as by scores of women who have not had the courage to go on-record with their own experiences of abuse, the public outcry was swift.
Everyone, it appeared from scanning social media posts and comments, has either heard rumors of or made experiences with Nirmal Purja that dovetail with the allegations made against him in the New York Times.
The male victim who had recanted his statement last year contacted me. He apologized and said he now believed me. The articles had finally come out, just a lot later than anticipated. Was it too late for him to now speak with a journalist, the victim wanted to know. I asked him if he could provide me with insight into what happened behind the scenes that led him to make the decision to recant his story.
"Nirmal Purja sent me a pre-written statement via a mutual friend and pressured me to send it to him via email. He threatened to sue me. I am not a rich man, please understand. And none of the articles you promised came out. I didn't know what to do. So I just sent the email to Nirmal. I simply copied and pasted exactly what he asked me to send.
Below are screenshots provided by the victim of messages between him an a representative of Nirmal Purja who was instructed by Purja to squash the victim's story:
"What do you think, can we still proceed with an article," the victim asked via WhatsApp. I knew the answer from Outside magazine would be a firm no. But when I informed a journalist in Europe about the back-and-forth, that person was intrigued and began pitching the story to a major publication. "In light of what has transpired, there might be a way to incorporate his account in a wider story about how Nirmal Purja squashed his testimony and intimidated other victims," the journalist said.
With the publication of the New York Times article, things that had gone astray as a result of its delayed release were beginning to fall back into place. The Neue Zuericher Zeitung (NZZ), Switzerlands largest newspaper, and 20 Minutos, a mainstream publication in Spain, credited me with being the first to publicize allegations against Nirmal Purja. A small but welcome vindication after several followers on social media expressed doubts that these allegations were fabrications.
As the controversy surrounding Purja gained even more international media attention, one major publication remained conspicuously silent. For years, the Kathmandu Post has seemingly covered every triumph and new world record of Nepal's most famous person. Yet it has failed to even mention the ongoing controversy and the global media coverage thereof.
In similar fashion, after publishing front-page articles about how the Nepal Fire Truck Expedition was a scam that would never materialize, the newspaper was the only one that didn't cover the expedition's arrival in December of 2022.
Another major Nepali news outlet, Routine of Nepal Bhanda, which typically reports every minor controversy surrounding B-List Nepalese celebrities also chose to stay mum on the ongoing controversy surrounding Nirmal Purja. This despite the fact that a member of Nepal's parliament, Rajendra Bajgain, publicly denounced Nirmal Purja and in an open session in parliament demanded that the mountaineer be banned from Nepal for bringing shame to his country of birth.
I felt that it was now time to get the most prominent mountaineer to weigh in publicly on the brewing controversy.
I phoned Reinhold Messner and thanked him for his moral support and for not betraying my confidence. We again spoke about Conrad Anker and about how his decision to warn Nirmal Purja had jeopardized the safety of Garrett Madison. Then we discussed the New York Times article. Reinhold had read it and sounded disheartened.
"The problem in mountaineering is far bigger than this disgusting Nirmal Purja. I am afraid that there is much more to this story. He is an embarrasment but there are many more men like him. And now I feel very embarrassed that I supported him early on.
He pulled the wool over my eyes and he treated people I know and whom I respect in such a poor manner. Sponsors as well. He was so rude to them in front of me that I was deeply embarrassed. I'm the one who introduced him to Montlanc (Reinhold is a Montblanc brand ambassador) and now this! I don't know what else to say. It's all such a big shame. And from what you have told me, it is going to keep getting worse. More and more women are going to come forward. Eine Schande! (A disgrace.)"
In the 12 years I've known Reinhold, I've never heard him sound so down and disillusioned. For someone as accomplished as the Reinhold Messner, a true living legend, it must feel especially bitter when a protege turns out to be a major disappointment. Particularly, when his intentions were so noble. "When he came to me and told me about his project, I thought that this is an opportunity to help someone from Nepal and to help the Nepalis."
In earlier conversations, Reinhold had told me about an internal conflict. While he didn't agree with Purja's style of mountaineering, he still chose to support him because of his Nepali background.
Nirmal Purja could never have risen to global fame without the support of Reinhold Messner, who even provided considerable financial backing at the beginning of Purja's 14 Peaks project. Now, the greatest mountaineer of all time was cutting him loose.
I asked Reinhold if he would feel comfortable making a public statement via social media in support of the two brave women who came forward with their stories, which were published in The New York Times. "I think it's better if I speak to a journalist," Reinhold said. "I know a good one, he writes for Outside magazine. Is it okay if I provide him with your number," I asked. "Yes, of course. Tell him to call me anytime."
A few hours later, the journalist and Reinhold conducted a brief interview. It was evening in Europe, Reinhold was at an event and cut the interview short.
"Got some decent stuff. He was ready to talk more," the journalist wrote via WhatsApp.
In the ensuing call, the journalist confirmed to me what I detected in my conversation with Reinhold earlier today. "I got the sense that Reinhold - I called him Mr. Messner - was deeply pained and embarrassed. And that he supported Nirmal because he wanted to help Nepal," the journalist said. "Unfortunately, I only got to speak with him for five minutes, but I think I have enough information for my piece." Here's to hoping that following this particular interview, the editors at Outside magazine will at very long last have the confidence to publish a story about Nirmal Purja's escapades that has some bite.