I am Bhuvah Thurston
Mark Honeychurch - 14th September 2026
A few years ago, in the midst of COVID, Bronwyn wrote an article about Sri Chinmoy, and in it she briefly mentioned the Lotus Heart restaurant in Christchurch and their efforts to avoid implementing sensible COVID restrictions.
Last week we received an email from Bhuvah, the owner of the restaurant, claiming that the article was inaccurate and asking us to take it down:
Dear NZ Skeptics Committee,
I am Bhuvah Thurston, named in the following article published on your website:
“Cult Dining: The Lotus Heart and the legacy of Sri Chinmoy”
https://skeptics.nz/latest/cult-dining-lotus-heart
I am writing to make a formal complaint about the article’s materially misleading and speculative presentation, and to request its complete removal from public access.
I have checked the Ministry of Social Development’s employer register. I do not dispute that it records aggregate wage-subsidy payments of $154,812 to The Lotus-Heart New Zealand Limited. What I dispute is the misleading meaning created by the article’s use of that figure.
The payments were received by The Lotus-Heart in its capacity as an employer and were applied to employees’ wages when COVID-19 restrictions prevented or seriously affected normal trading. They were not payments made to me personally, nor were they unrestricted funds that the business was free to retain or use for another purpose.
The original Wage Subsidy and Wage Subsidy Extension related to the 2020 lockdown and its effects. The final support programme for which The Lotus-Heart applied was the Wage Subsidy August 2021 programme, introduced in response to the alert-level changes beginning on 17 August 2021. The business did not apply for any subsequent government support.
The conduct discussed in your article concerned requirements operating under the later COVID-19 Protection Framework. Those requirements were not conditions attached to the wage-subsidy assistance previously received and applied to employees’ wages.
The article nevertheless describes an alleged “about-turn to sovereign citizenship” and declares that there is “some irony” in the business having received wage-subsidy assistance. This juxtaposition invites readers to believe that the employee wage support and the later conduct were meaningfully connected, or that The Lotus-Heart accepted government support and then breached conditions attached to it.
Neither implication is accurate. The wage subsidies were based on lockdown-related disruption and were used to pay employees. The later regulatory requirements were separate from the eligibility, purpose and conditions of that assistance.
The article also states as fact that I “hope[d]” presenting The Lotus-Heart as a private club would enable it to bypass government regulations, and it attributes “sovereign citizenship” beliefs to me.
I had not publicly stated my reasons or subjective intentions. The article nevertheless attributes a specific motive and political or legal belief to me without quoting any statement from me establishing either. Those are the writer’s inferences, not established facts, and there is no proper basis for continuing to publish them under my name.
These issues are central to the article’s narrative rather than minor errors capable of being resolved through a small amendment. The page remains publicly searchable and continues to associate my name and the business with these allegations.
My requested remedy is therefore removal of the article in its entirety.
Please:
- Remove the article from public access.
- Remove copies, metadata, search descriptions and social-media posts under your control.
- Take reasonable steps to have outdated copies and descriptions removed from search engines.
- Confirm in writing within 10 working days what action has been taken.
- Preserve the source material and editorial records relied upon in preparing and publishing the article.
If you are unwilling to remove the article, please identify:
- The evidence supporting the claimed connection between the employee wage support and the later conduct.
- The source for the statement about what I “hope[d]” to achieve.
- The evidence supporting the attribution of “sovereign citizenship” beliefs to me.
- Your reasons for continuing to publish those assertions under my name.
If this matter cannot be resolved directly, I reserve the right to obtain specialist legal advice and pursue any remedies available concerning the continued publication of false or materially misleading and harmful material.
Nothing in this request waives any rights or remedies that may be available.
Please keep my contact details confidential.
Kind regards,
Bhuvah Thurston
I checked over the article and figured that a couple of small changes to the wording - changing “Thurston hopes that” to “Thurston appears to be hopeful that”, and then prefixing “If this is the case,” to the next sentence - would be enough to make it clear that Bronwyn’s claims were speculative. I made the changes to our website, and replied to Bhuvah:
Hi Bhuvah,
Thanks for letting us know about potential issues with the article on Sri Chinmoy and the Lotus-Heart restaurant. You’re right that some of the claims were a little strong, but we don’t think that removal of the article is the best option. Instead we’ve taken steps to re-frame the claims you’ve pointed out as our speculation.
The URL you shared with us (https://skeptics.nz/latest/cult-dining-lotus-heart) is old, as we’ve moved our articles to a new website - so we’ve deleted the article at that location, and the new URL is at https://articles.skeptics.nz/2022/02/07/cult-dining-the-lotus-heart-and-the-legacy-of-sri-chinmoy/.
Please take the time to check over the new version of the article at the URL above. We’re happy to engage with you further to ensure our reporting is accurate, but we see no reason to remove the entire article when editing it for clarity and correctness should be sufficient. Feel free to check over all our other articles for accuracy as well - we’re always open to feedback.
Regards,
Mark Honeychurch
Editor, NZ Skeptics
I hoped that this would be the end of the matter. But what followed was a very long, suspiciously well-written email (possibly created by AI) that described in excruciating detail everything that Bhuvah didn’t like about Bronwyn’s article. I’ve still not managed to go through the entire email and check her issues, but I did notice that at the bottom of the article there was an interesting legal disclaimer:
“Please treat this correspondence as private complaint correspondence. I do not consent to its publication, quotation or use as source material for further reporting without my prior written consent.”
Now, I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but I have a suspicion that this disclaimer doesn’t actually stop us from publishing the email it was attached to, or the previous email she sent us above, for that matter. It would be weird if you could tell somebody something and then legally bind them into not being able to tell anyone else what you said, without their agreement. Of course, this may be different for circumstances where there’s a pre-existing promise of privacy, such as a documented official complaints process, or legally prescribed procedures where privacy is mandated, but for simply complaining about something that’s been posted online, it seems unlikely that a disclaimer like this would hold water.
We will continue to engage with Bhuvah and ensure that our articles are fair, while also ensuring that we don’t just capitulate to any unreasonable demands she has. After all, we’re trying to make sure people are better informed, and removing articles from our website in their entirety seems somewhat antithetical to that aim.