In July 2017, following a letter from eight current and former students detailing years of alleged abuse, Rigpa's founder and spiritual director for nearly four decades, Sogyal Lakar (Sogyal Rinpoche), resigned his role. In a letter to the Rigpa community dated 20 July 2017, Sogyal Lakar responded that he was clear in his own mind that he had never acted toward anyone with a motive of selfish gain or harmful intent; he did not deny the specific allegations against him. Rigpa's board commissioned the London law firm Lewis Silkin LLP to investigate. The firm's report, published in August 2018, found on the balance of probabilities that some students within Sogyal Lakar's inner circle had been subjected to serious physical, sexual and emotional abuse by him, and that senior figures within Rigpa were aware of at least some of these issues and failed to address them, leaving others at risk. Among the report's twelve recommendations was that Sogyal Lakar have no further contact with Rigpa or its students, a full disassociation Rigpa adopted.
Two years later, the Charity Commission for England and Wales closed its own statutory inquiry into Rigpa Fellowship, the charity's UK arm, opened in November 2018. Its findings matched Lewis Silkin's: some students had been subjected to mental, physical and sexual abuse by Sogyal Lakar, and named former trustees Patrick Gaffney and Susan Burrows had failed to recognise or had downplayed the seriousness of the allegations despite direct knowledge of them. Burrows was permanently disqualified from any charity trusteeship; Gaffney was disqualified for eight years.
Sogyal Lakar died in Thailand in August 2019, two years after resigning and without facing criminal charges. The documentary record against him rests on these two independent, converging findings rather than on any court judgment, which is why this atlas states them as an investigation's and a regulator's findings rather than as an adjudicated fact.