The Harvey Weinstein Of Mountaineering
Updated: Aug 2
An anonymous tip led to the unraveling of one the world's most famous mountaineers. Read how the social media campaign targeting Nirmal Purja sparked the mountaineering community's #MeToo movement.
Published August 13, 2023
UPDATE (1 August 2026): Nirmal Purja's agency reported his death today, following a tragic avalanche that also killed nine other climbers on Broad Peak in Pakistan.
UPDATE (31 May 2024): The New York Times today published its first article on Nirmal Purja's string of abuse, ten months after the article "The Harvery Weinstein of Mountaineering" was posted on this blog. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/sports/mountaineering-sexual-harassment-abuse-nims-purja.html
Nimsdai Purja is Nepal's most famous living person. He protects a very dark secret at all costs.
The Harvey Weinstein of Mountaineering
Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja and his long string of sexual violence
Nirmal Purja, the legendary Nepal-born mountaineer better known as Nimsdai, is, according to himself, the second most famous person born in Nepal, right after Lord Buddha. Nimsdai is famous, no doubt, having been the subject of a widely popular Netflix documentary and the author of a ghostwritten autobiography. In his native Nepal, Nimsdai is regarded as a national treasure.
Everybody in Nepal is proud of their nation’s favorite son for shattering the world record of the amount of time required to reach the summits of all 8,000-meter peaks. There are 14 of these majestic mountains, which is why a Netflix documentary about Nirmal’s much- publicized achievement is titled “14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible.”
Only a small handful of Nepalis, however, are aware of a dark secret the world-famous mountaineer jealously guards by any means, including intimidation and overt threats of violence. Despite these coercive measures, the fact that Nirmal Purja is also a serial sexual predator, who across a timespan lasting more than twenty-five years has victimized countless women and even young boys, will soon be the subject of intense international media scrutiny, with Western journalists working feverishly to be the first accredited members of the press to break the story by filing articles with some of the world’s biggest news outlets. It is now certain that within a few days, the mainstream media will report on Nirmal Purja’s predatory behavior.
The first time anyone exposed Nirmal Purja as a rapist was four weeks ago, when I received an anonymous tip from an underage Nepalese victim describing how she was so violently raped, that she was left bleeding and unable to walk. Since then, I have exposed Nirmal Purja’s sexual violence in an intense social media campaign designed to compel other victims to come forward, as well as to pressure the mainstream media to cover this story as soon as possible, so that other potential victims would be warned.
This social media campaign, which reached hundreds of thousands of viewers, exposed in graphic detail how the self-styled Nimsdai wrecked havoc in the lives of young women as well as a number of pre-teen boys during his own teenage years. One of Nirmal’s earliest victims, a boy aged ten at the time the mistreatment began, attributed the years of sexual abuse he suffered under the elite athlete with causing a severe, decades-long depression that ruined his life.
In hours-long interviews conducted by telephone and in person, several of Nirmal Purja’s victims, as well more than two dozen witnesses of his behavior, have provided harrowing accounts of a wide range of shocking incidents involving the PR-savvy mountaineer, who invented the catchy nickname Nimsdai for himself. Nimsdai’s victims accuse him of rape, statutory rape, molestation, attempted rape, as well as sudden, severe and unwanted physical violence during consensual intercourse that continued long after the victims pleaded with Nimsdai to stop.
Perhaps as shocking as the detailed and widespread allegations of sexual abuse against Nimsdai is the fact that his behavior has for years been an open secret among the mountaineering community, with Western expedition outfitters, mountaineers, as well as clients and Nepali employees of Elite Exped, Nimsdai’s outfitting company, all describing a collective fear of incurring the ex-British special forces commando’s wrath. “If anyone got in Nims’ way, he would bury them, no doubt about it,” a Western outfitter who wished to remain anonymous explained in a telephone interview. Even journalists working for mountaineering industry news outlets have known about these allegations for several years and each gave as a reason for not reporting Nirmal’s behavior their fear of the predator’s retribution.
Fact And Fiction
Famed around the world following his record-breaking streak of expeditions to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world in the shortest amount of time, Nirmal Purja released a hugely successful autobiography. This came as a surprise to those who knew Nirmal during his childhood, because young Nirmal was not known for stellar scholastic performance. Even Nirmal’s teachers, in awe of his physical prowess, felt compelled to make their favored student repeat entire school years on at least four occasions. Surely, Nirmal had hired a ghostwriter, some of his old schoolmates reasoned, because he was hardly able to string together a coherent sentence on his own.
Yet his autobiography doesn’t list a collaborator, and so judging the book by its cover, the reader is duped into assuming that its author, Nimsdai Purja, is as well-versed in the written word as he is navigating the icy slopes of the deadliest mountains on earth. The small detail of not listing the book’s ghostwriter provides an example of one of Nimsdai’s favorite pastimes: To make others work for him while he takes all of the credit. This strategy has certainly worked well for the 40-year-old wunderkind. Today, Nimsdai commands a million dollars when he guides clients on Mount Everest one-on-one, by far the highest amount ever charged for guiding a client on any mountain.
In addition to the ghost-written autobiography, the singularly favorable and one-sided Netflix documentary has further fueled the rising star’s celebrity status, as well as his outsized ego. It is apparent that this rapid rise to worldwide fame has left a deep imprint on the diminutive athlete’s psyche: In a social media post, Nimsdai once asked his followers the rhetorical question about the names of the ten most famous people born in Nepal.
Instead of encouraging his followers to leave their answers in the comments section, he provided the answer himself: “1. Buddha, 2. Nimsdai,” thus implying that in its over 250-year-long history, the small Himalayan country has produced only two world-famous citizens. Ironically, this is almost true. Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, the first man to summit Mount Everest (minutes before Sir Edmund Hillary), is the only other Nepal-born person to become a household name around the world.
The flex about being Nepal’s second-most famous man happens to also be one of the very few truths Nimsdai has told about himself. The mountaineer takes considerable pride in recounting stories of his humble origins, growing up in a poverty-stricken family unable to afford shoes for young Nims. In his Netflix documentary, Nimsdai is careful to emphasize that his youth was marked by shoelessness. Yet according to childhood friends, the Purja family were among the more well-off residents of the area, owing to the fact that Nimsdai’s father served for a long time as a soldier in the Indian Gurkhas, the storied special operations regiment of the Indian Army. That Nims would be raised shoeless is therefore highly doubtful.
By Nepali standards, the Purjas were quite wealthy, indeed. Nimsdai’s parents could afford to send Nimsdai and his sister, Anita, to board at the best private school in the area. Mom and Dad Purja instilled in their four children a hard work ethic that quickly paid dividends. While Anita excelled scholastically, her brother was the school’s most stellar athlete, who, for several hours per day, maintained a brutal workout regime. Nirmal and Anita Purja’s two elder brothers had meanwhile enlisted in the British Gurkhas, further ensuring their clan’s prosperity. Nimsdai’s origin story is spun from the same dubious yarn as the virtuous mountaineering philosophy he trumpets today.
In his Netflix documentary, Nimsdai repeatedly criticizes Western climbers for not acknowledging their Sherpas’ name, instead simply referring to the high altitude porter belonging to the ethnic group as “my Sherpa.” However, during his own ambitious attempt to shatter the world record for the amount of time required to summit all 14 8,000ers, Nirmal Purja often rotated the members of his Sherpa support team to ensure that he did not have to share the world record with these Sherpas, who subsequently remained nameless, despite putting in the same effort as the attention-grabbing Nirmal Purja. More recently, a raging controversy surrounding the death of a Pakistani high altitude porter on K2 provides a further striking example of the disparity between Nimsdai’s public statements and his actions.
On July 27th, 2023, the same day on which Norwegian climber Kristin Harila reached the top of K2 and in doing so broke Nimsdai’s 14 peaks record, a Bulgarian climber also reached the summit of the deadliest mountain on earth. Silvia Azdeeva achieved this feat after signing up with Elite Exped, the mountaineering outfitter co-owned by Nimsdai. Early that morning, Silvia Azdeeva, her guide and thirty other Elite Exped climbers encountered an injured Pakistani high altitude porter on a feature along the upper slopes of K2 known as the traverse. Instead of helping this man, named Mohammad Hassan, Azdeeva and the rest of the Elite Exped team stepped over him and continued their summit push. Other teams followed suit, only to again climb over the Pakistani high altitude porter on their way back to camp, ultimately leaving Mohammad Hassan to die.
When the news of Mohammad Hassan’s death reached base camp, climbers offered wildly differing statements of how Mohammad Hassan succumbed to his injuries. One team declared that he had fallen into a crevasse, while another team maintained that Hassan was killed in an avalanche. Shortly thereafter, however, a film crew who flew a drone over the mountain’s upper slopes released footage in which the long line of climbers can be seen on either side of Mohammad Hassan, who can be seen laying in the snow. The footage revealed that Hassan was still alive, his leg clearly moving while another climber rubbed his chest. In total, over 150 climbers passed Mohammad Hassan - twice!
Lukas Furtenbach of Furtenbach Adventures is highly regarded among fellow outfitters for his ethics and gentlemanly style. Furtenbach, who at the time of the Hassan incident was climbing another mountain, told the online mountaineering news portal ExplorersWeb that had he been aware of the fact that a climber was injured on the traverse, he and his team would have organized a rescue, thereby forgoing their summit push. One of the excuses Kristin Harila and other climbers provided is that it was far too dangerous to attempt to rescue Mohammad Hassan. In a string of messages, Lukas Furtenbach told me that one could have at least tried to organize a rescue.
Given the fact that Nimsdai has publicly placed such a high value on the lives of high altitude porters by shaming Western outfitters, one might reasonably expect the Nepalese celebrity to set an example by coming to the ailing climber’s rescue. Yet after encountering Mohammad Hassan, Nimsdai’s Elite Exped simply pressed on and later attempted to cover up the details surrounding the Pakistani porter’s demise. A possible explanation for this egregious departure from Nimsdai’s vaulted and highly publicized climbing philosophy is that July 27th was deemed the season’s last date on which climbers would have the weather window necessary to reach K2’s summit. Elite Exped prides itself with having a 100% success rate. This, too, has been called into question, as the company is known to frequently review and amend the formula with which it justifies this claim.
After speaking with a number of past employees and clients of Elite Exped, as well as other mountaineers, it appears that Nimsdai has taken this talk of 100% rate a little too seriously in his dealings with female mountaineers. “I have never climbed a mountain without sleeping with a woman,” Nimsdai once boasted to a fellow climber. Yet throughout their 15 years of marriage, his wife, Suchi, a dental hygienist, has never joined her husband on any mountaineering expedition apart from one brief visit to Mount Everest Base Camp. During a nearly five-hour-long interview, one Western client who signed up with Elite Exped earlier this year stated that Nimsdai spent a considerable amount of time in his tent together with another woman - his European mistress. “He was very open about this affair and didn’t try to conceal it at all,” the woman told my colleague and me over lunch.
A recently fired Elite Exped employee detailed that Nimsdai routinely pays off his Sherpas for their silence in instances where they witnessed his many extramarital affairs. Another Western climber described in a telephone call how during consensual sex with her, Nimsdai violently chocked the woman’s neck without obtaining her permission. “He continued after I told him to stop,” the climber said. “It was horrible and he was so violent.” Following this experience, the woman vowed never to have dealings with Nimsdai again. “Instead of leaving me alone, he called me 30, 40 times in one evening, demanding to have sex with me. When I repeatedly told him no, he screamed at me in several voice messages, calling me many bad names and saying do you know who I am?” Even after this woman had a new boyfriend and explained this fact to Nirmal Purja, the brash mountaineer demanded to have sex with her.
Schoolyard Bully
The origin of Nims’ violent crime spree can be traced to an elite boarding school in a city not far from the village Nirmal calls his childhood home. Chitwan is straddled along the border to India, adjacent to the eponymous National Park heralded for its tranquil natural beauty and burgeoning population of Royal Bengal tigers and one-horned rhinoceros. Well-heeled international tourists flock to Chitwan to experience the park’s bountiful flora and fauna, booking guided tours atop domesticated elephants that are steered by local mahoots, as the elephant “drivers” are called. Queen Elizabeth, as well as international luminaries like Mick Jagger and Hillary Clinton have all enjoyed elephant safaris during their visits to Chitwan National Park. As Nepal’s third-most populous city, Chitwan counted 90,000 residents in 2000, around the time when Nirmal Purja was a student at the best private school in town. It was there that Nirmal’s decade-spanning sexual abuse and physical violence against significantly weaker victims has its origin.
Small Heaven School was chartered to provide students an education, which the school is careful to spell out in its literature as the process of harmonizing and socializing an individual. By all accounts, in the case of its most famous alumnus, the Small Heaven School failed to achieve these not-too-lofty goals on even a precursory level, producing, instead, a monster, as several of Nirmal Purja’s classmates have described the school’s only bully. Small Heaven offers its students the ability to board in two off-site dormitories, one for boys and one for girls. Each hostel has twelve rooms with 16 students per room. It was in the boys’ hostel that Nirmal tormented his fellow boarders on a daily basis, while mostly sparing the day students who commuted from home.
Despite its enchanting name, Small Heaven soon became hell on earth for one boarding student in particular. Bikash Giri, the lanky, weak and highly intelligent 10-year-old scion of a prominent physician working for the United Nations World Health Organization, endured sexual abuse of epic proportions, all committed by Nirmal Purja. “It lasted until I was twelve years old. Nirmal was much older than me and much, much stronger,” Bikash said in one of twenty-five telephone calls in which he described his experiences with the man who would one day become his nation’s biggest hero.
Bikash Giri described his childhood as being idyllic, thanks to his loving parents, with whom he had an excellent relationship. Dr. Jagat Narayan Giri and his wife Kumari were extremely proud of their two sons, Avinash and Bikash, who were born eight years apart. Today, Avinash runs the hospital his father built, while Bikash languishes, following a medical discharge after a brief stint as an infantryman in the U.S. Army, where he volunteered to serve in Afghanistan. Bikash Giri has survived three suicide attempts, one each in 2014, 2017 and 2018, and all unrelated to his time in the military. “Nirmal ruined my life,” he said, adding “I just can’t get over what he did to me. I live with this shame every day.”
When Bikash Giri enrolled their younger son at Small Heaven School, they assumed the school’s stellar reputation was a guarantee for their child’s safety and wellbeing, as well as his sound academic instruction. On his second day at the elite institution, one of his classmates, a boy four years his senior and infinitely stronger, named Nirmal Purja, attempted to rape him in the sports field. From that day on, Purja sexually abused Giri on an almost daily basis over the course of more than 18 months. “Whenever he wanted to sleep with me, he would come to my bed and touch my penis and dry hump me. He would sleep with me for an hour and after he climaxed he’d go back to his bed,” Bikash told me.
According to four former classmates, Nirmal Purja had almost no friends at Small Heaven. “Everyone hated him. We all avoided him. When he came into a room, everyone would get out as fast as possible,” one man, who wished to remain anonymous, stated in a telephone interview. Asked why the other students avoided interacting with Nirmal Purja, the man explained that Purja would pick fights on a daily basis, often leaving his opponents bruised, bleeding and crying on the floor. The teachers seldom intervened as they considered Purja the school’s star athlete and enjoyed his boisterous personality. Each of the four classmates described that Purja was seldom reprimanded for his violent behavior. They also described incidents of severe violence instigated by Purja.
One of Nirmal Purja’s tiny group of friends at Small Heaven School included a boy from a local Chitwan family. The fact that Nirmal was able to create a lasting bond with this student can perhaps be attributed to the fact that this individual was a day student. Yet even this individual, who remains a friend of Purja’s to this day and who was shocked to learn of the allegations of sexual violence, described how Purja often demanded to have impromptu taekwondo sparring sessions. “He always took it to the extreme. He was so violent, even during training. It really hurt but I had no choice but to spar with him,” this friend said, recalling his experiences with Purja. The friend continued: “The other boys at Small Heaven were a lot smaller than him, because Nirmal often had to repeat a year. That’s why he was so much older than the rest of us.”
The fact that Nirmal Purja had difficulties with the scholastic rigors of Small Heaven School perhaps explains his poor command of the English language, even after spending almost twenty years living in the United Kingdom. In a podcast with Joe Rogan, Purja frequently mispronounced even the most basic words, and his accent is so thick as to render Purja’s responses hardly intelligible for native speakers. Yet his five former classmates all speak impeccable English and only have mild accents. “He was definitely not the smartest kid in our class,” one of the men recalled. His childhood and present-day friend, the day schooler who didn’t interact with Purja in the boys’ dormitory, described Purja as a typical jock who preferred playing sports over the rigors of cramming for exams.
According to his five ex-classmates, Nirmal Purja was the school’s only bully. His superior physical makeup was the result of Purja maintaining a strict and punishing exercise regimen that left him so strong that he often played volleyball with the teachers. Nirmal Purja’s astonishing physical superiority over his fellow students was both legendary and feared. At only 15 years of age, he would routinely crunch out 50 pull-ups. “Not five sets of ten pull-ups,” one classmate, a U.S. Army veteran, recalled during an interview, in which he corroborated Bikash Giri’s allegations. “No,” the veteran continued, “he did fifty in a row.”
On a few occasions, when Purja’s classmates had enough of their tormentor’s aggression, five or six boys would organize themselves and attack Purja in a reprisal for past offenses. Each time, Purja would severely thrash his opponents. “Nirmal was a monster,” Bikash Giri said, speaking from his home in the United States. One of his former classmates used the same term when asked to describe Purja in one word. Almost a quarter century after leaving Small Heaven, all five men agreed that Nirmal Purja was extremely violent throughout their time at Small Heaven. All except one -the man who remains Purja’s friend- also agreed that Nimsdai appeared to take pleasure in inflicting pain on his victims.
Exposing A Monster
In late July of this year, I began exposing Nirmal Purja’s sexually predatory behavior in hundreds of social media posts. At the time, my combined number of followers across all platforms was roughly 25,000. Most of these followers are based in Nepal, the population of which is made up of a disproportionate number of young people. As soon as the campaign to expose Nimsdai began, the follower count rose significantly, reaching a combined total of almost 60,000. Far greater, however, was the number of non-followers who regularly viewed the stories. Soon, Nimsdai’s sexual violence was viewed by hundreds of thousands and subsequently became the talk of Nepal and the mountaineering community.
A number of observers who are unfamiliar with my previous work in and related to Nepal were quick to question my motive behind unmasking Nepal’s most famous living son. After all, the people of Nepal, and especially the country’s youth, desperately need a hero to whom they can look up. This is owed to the fact that Nepalis feel let down by their country’s political leadership, government bureaucrats, celebrities and social media influencers, almost all of whom are extremely corrupt. “Why are you taking down our one super star,” an old friend asked me in a message. Another close friend wrote: “On your side. Let it be.”
Nepalis seldom protect their own. They live in a society teeming with overt selfishness and lack of compassion, at least in dealings with people outside of their social circle. If you’re a motorist and accidentally run over a young mother and her child, you can get out of jail by paying $10,000 to the relatives of the deceased. Touch a cow while driving and you land in jail without a chance of bail. “Life is cheap,” Nepalis will tell you. I discovered this first-hand when I tried to organize an air ambulance for a Nepali firefighter who was severely burned in an explosion at a gas bottling plant in the southern city of Birgunj. Nepal’s hospitals are ill-equipped to treat burn victims and so my colleagues and I found a special clinic in Delhi willing to treat the patient.
The firefighter was so severely burned that time was of the essence. His ambulance to he airport required a police escort. An air ambulance was supposed to then fly him to Delhi. Organizing a police escort is a simple task in Nepal, where money talks. But when I phoned a number of wealthy Nepali friends to ask for their help in spreading out the cost of the private airlift, they each said that they were not interested. “Life is cheap here, not like in Europe,” one of my friends reminded me again. The individuals I phoned each have a net worth of between $10-50 million. The cost of the air ambulance was less than $30,000. After suffering a string of rejections, the plan was cancelled and the fireman died. I was shocked by my friends’ callousness. This incident was the first of several in which I gleaned that Nepalis, while generous and kindhearted towards their friends, in dealings with strangers are often selfish to the extreme, and have very little empathy for the suffering of their fellow countrymen.
In matters of national pride, however, Nepalis of all backgrounds will resolutely stand together, repelling even the slightest criticism. Tell someone from Nepal that their country lacks modern infrastructure or that its cities need more than one semi-functional fire truck and you’re liable to have a close encounter with a khukuri, the storied curved knife made famous by Nepal’s Gurkhas. Attacking Nirmal Purja, the country’s most famous export, in connection with serious and graphic allegations of sexual violence is tantamount to a declaration of war. I discovered this as soon as I began exposing Nimsdai.
So myopic were the Nepalis in their defense of Nirmal Purja, that they were unable to appreciate the fact that the shame their favorite son will soon bring over their country will be of a global scale. Yet even this reality does not suffice to temper the Nepali “Bir Gorkhali” sentiment, which has its root in the bravery of its founder Prithivi Narayan Shah, the Gorkha king who united the country in 1768. Had his remains not been incinerated following his death in accordance with Hindu custom, Nepal’s founder surely would spin in his grave faster than a prayer Buddhist wheel if he knew of Nirmal Purja’s ill treatment of women and young boys.
Anyone familiar with Nepal can attest to the fact that the country is a magnet for scandals and negative press. International news reports of the gross mishandling of funds following the two devastating earthquakes in 2015 were soon overshadowed by a media shitstorm after the exposure of the so-called helicopter rescue scam, a quintessentially Nepali ploy in which unsuspecting tourists had rat poison and laxatives mixed into their food in order to make them sufficiently ill to require a helicopter evacuation. The helicopter companies then charged outrageous sums to the Western insurance companies, or, if a trekker was uninsured, directly to the trekker. Hospital joined in on the scam by charging even more disproportionate fees, only to then lock up their patients until the astronomical bills were paid. A number of patients died trying to escape by jumping from hospital windows. When the news of the helicopter rescue scam was splattered across the front page of newspapers around the world, Nepal’s tourism community did what all Nepalis excel at when these types of situations occur: Nothing.
In a few days, when Nirmal Purja will be exposed in a series of articles in major newspapers and magazines around the world, Nepal’s brand will again be tarnished. Its leaders and many of its citizens can be expected to react in a similar manner as in previous instances of negative PR. Possibly, the Nepali press will cover the story in a singularly one-sided manner and blame everything on a Western conspiracy designed to bring Nepal down, just like in the case of Nepali airlines being banned from European air space following a number of deadly accidents. Instead of taking exception with the unprofessional manner in which the aviation sector is run, Nepali officials and news outlets instead blamed Westerners for their overly stringent rules. In the case of Nirmal Purja, as soon as I began exposing him, a number of prominent Nepalis who met at an exclusive dinner party alleged that I had an ulterior motive and that I was paid by a foreign power to bring down their idol.
However, anyone who is remotely familiar with my body of work in Nepal is well aware of my years-long effort to aid Nepal, beginning with documenting and exposing the illegal and secret economic blockade orchestrated by the Government of India. My company sparked the Nepali watch industry and produced highly favorable mainstream news headlines around the world when we launched the $16,500 Kobold Himalaya, which features as its dial a piece of rock collected from just below the summit of Mount Everest. In addition, my colleagues and I have produced five documentary films designed to support Nepal tourism, and hosted a number of celebrities and VIPs in the country. More recently, in December of last year, we delivered a modern, German-made fire truck to Kathmandu. Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes, and the actions of my colleagues and me can leave no doubt that I am Nepal’s well-wisher. So why expose Nimsdai? Precisely because I am Nepal’s well-wisher.
Beginning Of The End
Nirmal Purja’s downfall is almost certain, now that more than half a dozen Western journalists are racing against the clock to file their stories with international publications. However, Purja sustained the first chink in his armor when his sexual violence became the topic of hundreds of posts on my social media channels. This campaign originally focused only on the fact that Nirmal Purja publicly supported an Indian-backed effort to undermine the sovereignty of his native Nepal. At the time, I was unaware of any sexual abuse allegations against Nirmal Purja.
In early June of 2023, following separate visits to Delhi by Nepal’s president and prime minister, a highly controversial piece of legislation known as the Citizenship Bill was re-introduced in Nepal’s parliament. This bill was drafted at the behest of the Government of India, which intends to use this legislation as a foreign policy instrument designed to provide Indian nationals the ability to obtain Nepali citizenship. In the past few decades, millions of Indians have been granted Nepali citizenship following back-room deals made between corrupt Nepali politicians and the shrewd officials of the Indian embassy in Kathmandu. In this manner, for example, Indian-born businessmen were able to circumvent Nepal’s strict laws governing the ownership of media houses.
Only Nepali citizens are allowed to own newspapers, television channels and radio stations. This, however, runs counter to the Indian embassy’s objective of controlling Nepal’s mainstream media. After obtaining Nepali citizenship, for example, Indian-born Kailash Sirohiya was able to become the owner of Kantipur Media Group, which comprises a large portfolio of news outlets, including a radio station, a television channel, and several newspapers such as the Kathmandu Post. It is an open secret among Nepal’s powerful elite that several other media houses are also owned by native Indians holding Nepali citizenship, and that these news outlets are poorly concealed mouthpieces of the Indian embassy in Kathmandu, the Government of India’s largest diplomatic outpost in the world.
Nepal is a place where secrets travel faster than an atom through the CERN particle accelerator, and so the whispered rumors of waves of Indian immigrants obtaining Nepali citizenship quickly enraged the proud Nepalese. In several meetings, past prime ministers, including Madhav Kumar Nepal, Baburam Bhattarai and K.P. Oil, have substantiated these rumors, detailing how millions of Indians obtained their Nepali citizenship under the table as a result of shrewd backroom deals. The Citizenship Bill legitimizes this long-running practice. Its true purpose, however, is part of a sinister longterm plan the Indian government has been pursuing for decades.
According to political analysts, the Indian game plan is to one day hold a referendum in neighboring Nepal about whether the country should join the Indian Union. If the referendum goes in favor of India, Nepal would lose its sovereignty and become an Indian state. This secret plot was confirmed to me in conversations with high-ranking Nepalese officials and members of their immediate family.
If Nepal loses what little national sovereignty it has left, India wins because it can then take full control of the construction of hydropower dams and manipulate the flow of the country’s enormous rivers, while at the same time fending off the increasing assertiveness of Nepal’s only other neighbor, China. The Communist country in recent years has significantly increased its influence in Nepal, much to the chagrin of the Indians and their most important ally, the United States.
It doesn’t take much more than a Small Heaven education to figure out why Western powers have a vested interest in supporting India’s ambitions to rule Nepal. Since 2001, the West has cozied up to India and signed a great many secret agreements with the largest democracy on earth in order to maintain a strong geopolitical influence in the region, and to keep China’s expansionary course in check.
In private conversations, Nepalese politicians predicted that Citizenship Bill will serve to open the floodgates of Indian immigration, and that India will eventually succeed in swallowing Nepal. This explains why the Indian embassy lobbied intensely to ensure that the Citizenship Bill’s provisions are included in Nepal’s new constitution, the final version of which was being drafted in 2015.
After Nepal’s politicians rejected the citizenship measure and promulgated the country’s new constitution-against India’s strong objections, the Government of India enacted a punishing, secret economic blockade, which lasted for almost six months through the winter of 2015/16. The blockade curtailed the supply of essential goods such as fuel, cooking gas and medicine, thus killing tens of thousands of Nepalis in the higher mountain areas due to hypothermia and preexisting medical conditions.
Only a few months after Nepal suffered the two worst earthquakes in its history, neighboring India cruelly subjected Nepal to the greatest humanitarian crisis in its history. Ask any Nepali around the world what they considered worse and more painful, the two earthquakes in 2015 or the blockade, and you will receive only one answer. Now, eight years later, India was finally scoring its much-desired victory by ensuring that the Citizenship Bill was being shepherded through parliament.
It was in this context that I was alarmed when a number of my most politically minded friends in Nepal brought to my attention the fact that Nirmal Purja was using his social media channels, with millions of followers, to strongly support the Citizenship Bill. In a series of posts, Nimsdai explained why the measure was good for Nepal.
In essence, according to Nimsdai, the bill enabled British citizens like himself, as well as other non-resident Nepalis, to re-acquire Nepali citizenship (the country does not permit dual citizenship, though this law is often ignored by well-heeled Nepalis). Following the discovery of Nirmal’s posts, and knowing of his close relationship with the Indian-backed prime minister of Nepal, Prachanda, I began attacking Nims via my channels. Ironically, this turned out to be the beginning of the end for Nirmal Purja’s status as a celebrity mountaineer.
A Mysterious Suicide
Shortly after I started posting about Nimsdai’s treachery, news reports emerged of the suicide of one of Nepal’s most promising actors. 31-year-old Saruk Tamrakar was the only child of veteran actor Sanu Tamrakar and his wife Rukmani. The parents combined the first parts of their names to come up with a unique name for their son and only child.
By all accounts, Saruk was his parents’ pride and joy. The Tamrakars maintained an exceptionally harmonious and close family bond, even by the standards of Nepal, where family values are steeped in tradition and are strictly observed. In Nepal, marrying someone literally means marrying into that person’s family, because you’re bound to spend almost as much time with your new relations as with your spouse. You marry the family, not just the person, a Nepali friend once told me during wedding season. It is not surprising, then, that selecting an appropriate life partner involves a considerable amount of vetting by all parties concerned.
Much to the dismay of Saruk’s parents, their son brought home a famous actress of ill repute. To add insult to injury, the woman was more than 12 years older than Saruk. Surely, he could not be seriously considering this woman as his wife, his parents thought. Under normal circumstances, Saruk settling down with an actress would have been an occasion to celebrate.
However, in tiny Nepal, Namrata Shrestha is known less for her acting skills than for her prowess as a bachelorette who has had countless affairs, one of which produced several sex videos that were leaked years earlier. When Saruk’s friends later discovered one of these videos on the porn platform Xhamster.com, they were equally dismayed as his parents. This sentiment grew when Saruk gradually began withdrawing from all of his old friendships. According to Saruk’s friends, Namrata was extremely jealous and thus began alienating her boyfriend from his old circle.
In a tightly-knit society like Nepal, with rigid, conservative norms, leaked sex videos and a colorful history of dozens of intimate partners all but render a 43-year-old woman untouchable.
Saruk’s parents protested vehemently, pleading with their son to find a more suitable partner who was less controversial and closer in age to him. Saruk, however, was adamant about continuing his relationship with Namrata and moved out of his parent’s house, settling instead in a rental property his girlfriend leased from an old friend: Nirmal Purja.
Eventually the couple convinced Saruk’s parents to issue their approval for their wedding. By this time, Saruk was increasingly spending time by himself, having withdrawn from all of his old friendships, even going so far as inexplicably blocking on social media a number of female friends, including the actress Shristi Shrestha. For many years, the former Miss Nepal was one of Saruk’s closest confidantes.
Over the course of their three-year-long relationship, Namrata gradually firmed her grasp on Saruk, which some of his friends have referred to as brainwashing. Once Saruk was fully controlled by Namrata, he barely had regular contact with anyone from his old life. Friends and neighbors report that Saruk frequently spent a lot of time alone in the couple’s rented home, while Namrata traveled around Nepal with her friend, the mountaineering celebrity Nirmal Purja. The two were seen together all over Nepal, including in Pokhara, where they went skydiving together. The pair also took several helicopter flights to the small village from which Nims hailed. The two made no secret of their close bond. Namrata was Nims’ companion at an official event in Chitwan, where the celebrated mountaineer was the guest of honor of the daughter of Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known by his nom-de-guerre, Prachanda.
Prachanda is the Nepal-born revolutionary who led the Maoist insurgency in the 1990s and early 2000s. Trained and armed by India’s Research And Analysis Wing, the country’s external intelligence service, the Maoists wrecked havoc in Nepal by recruiting child soldiers, extorting protection payments from business owners (many of whom were killed to set an example), and preying on foreign tourists as sources of foreign currency. It is an open secret in Nepal that Prachanda is a war criminal who will never be prosecuted because he keenly serves the interests of India and its Western allies. In 2023, after becoming prime minister for the third time, Prachanda boldly touted his invincibility by publicly claiming responsibility for 17,000 deaths during the insurgency. Following an intense public outcry and demands for his prosecution, the Indian henchman shepherded a bill through parliament that grants -who could have guessed- immunity to war criminals.
Nepal is highly regarded for many things, yet even the proud Nepalese themselves admit that the concepts of speed and efficiency are as foreign to the Nepali mindset as chaos and disorganization are to that of a German. However, rather tellingly, after Prachanda returned in June from his brief visit to Delhi, he and Nepal’s pro-India president teamed up to ensure that the Citizenship Bill was passed at lightning speed. Nimsdai, who for years often took pride in publicly demonstrating his close association with Prachanda and his family, immediately joined the sustained publicity blitz designed to quell animosity among Nepal’s citizens. If the country’s favorite son was so much in favor of the Citizenship Bill, then how could ordinary Nepalis raise their voices against this singularly exploitative measure?
This sentiment changed abruptly after Saruk Tamrakar’s lifeless body was found hanging from the staircase rail in his parent’s home in Katmandu, and after Nirmal Purja was linked to the cover of the suspicious suicide. Saruk’s relatives and closest friends speculated as to the reason behind this tragedy. On the surface, the young star had no reason to take such a drastic step. At the time of his death, Saruk’s acting career was well underway, with the prodigal scion appearing in over 50 films. As his parents’ only child, Saruk stood to inherit a sizable fortune, including three houses in Kathmandu. Handsome in a classic way, Saruk had legions of female fans. Should things with Namrata Shrestha not work out as planned, he had access to a large pool of eligible bachelorettes. The absence of a suicide note further fueled the already intense speculation.
According to neighbors, friends and relatives, Saruk had returned to the couple’s rented home earlier in the day and discovered something that made him highly irritable by the time he returned to his parents’ home. Saruk’s parents were scheduled to attend a party together, and since his father was not feeling well, Saruk instructed his mother to call him when the party was over, so that he could come and pick them up. The parents were reluctant to leave their son alone in such a low mood, but Saruk implored them not to break their engagement. Later that evening, after the parents’ calls to their son went unanswered, they returned home by taxi and arrived to the tragic scene of their only son’s death.
The parents summoned Shristi Shrestha, the actress and former Miss Nepal, who was the first friend to arrive at the Tamrakars’ home. A short while later, Namrata Shrestha (no relation to Shristi) arrived as well. Upon discovering the former beauty queen, Namrata immediately began screaming profanities, demanding that Shristi leave immediately. When Saruk’s parents defended Shristi and informed Namrata that Shristi was their guest and that she was welcome to stay, Namrata grew even more angry.
After shouting a string of profanities at the stunned parents and at Shristi, Namrata rushed upstairs to Saruk’s room, where she rummaged through his belongings. Meanwhile, Saruk’s heartbroken parents and the equally saddened Shristi remained downstairs with Saruk’s lifeless body. The three do not know what Namrata was looking for with such haste, but they were all equally relieved when the foul-mouthed woman departed the Tamrakar home half an hour after she arrived. This was the last time anyone can remember seeing Namrata Shrestha.
What happened next is subject to considerable speculation. Neighbors stated that the witnessed Namrata return to her and Saruk’s home only to then to make a hurried departure in the presence of Nirmal Purja. The next piece of information was provided by an informant with close ties to the Nepal Police. According to this source, Namrata and Nirmal paid a substantial bribe to the senior most police officer at the station in command of the area where Saruk and Namrata lived. While this information cannot be independently verified, it is not at all uncommon high-ranking Nepal Police officials to accept bribes in exchange for scuttling investigations.
A senior official at CID, Nepal’s version of the FBI, told me in a meeting that one of the things that frustrated him most was that investigations were frequently hindered by political influence or by police officials accepting bribes. What is also established as fact, is that Nirmal Purja has close ties with the seniormost officials of the Nepal Police. In May of this year, a team of Nepal Police officers reached the summit of Mount Everest, proudly hoisting their organization’s flag on the top of the world. The group’s outfitter was Nirmal Purja’s Elite Exped.
Not long after Saruk Tamrakar’s suicide, Namrata Shrestha and Nirmal Purja were publicly castigated for their apparent involvement in Saruk’s death and the ensuing cover-up. Instead of coming out of hiding or at least addressing the social media maelstrom, Namrata and Nirmal limited the ability to leave comments on their social media channels and deleted all critical comments. They also blocked the accounts of their many vocal critics. Meanwhile, calls for a proper police investigation went viral on social media.
Soon thereafter, the Nepal Police issued a news bulletin stating that it would take forensic investigators at least a month until they received Saruk’s and Namrata’s telephone records. But as anyone familiar with the inner workings of telecoms knows, obtaining these records takes only a few hours if the matter under investigation calls for expedited handling. To the hapless Nepal Police officials, however, the suspicious suicide of one their country’s biggest stars, and the disappearance of his famous and controversial fiancee immediately thereafter, evidently did not constitute a matter of any urgency.
Sniping Girlfriends From Contemporaries
At age 16, Nirmal Purja found himself locked in a room of the boy’s dormitory at Small Heaven School in sweltering Chitwan, surrounded by an angry group of twenty of his classmates. The enraged students had set a trap for the school’s most disliked student and were intent on avenging some of Nirmal’s most egregious behavior. The schoolyard bully had repeatedly tried to chat up the other boys’ girlfriends. When the respective boyfriends demanded that he stop this behavior, Nirmal thrashed them mercilessly in front of the girls, leaving them laying on the ground, bleeding and scarred. This sort of humiliation greatly appealed to the muscular athlete’s sense of superiority, according to five of his former classmates, who described the incident during telephone interviews.
“One boy wanted to kill him. He had a brick in his hand and when Nirmal was struggling to get up, he almost hit him over the head with it. One of the other boys stopped him. If he hadn’t done that, things would have gone very differently for Nirmal,” the witness stated. While the incident still left Nirmal bruised and bleeding, a result of a number of boys landing punches squarely on their target, Nirmal won even this fight, walking out of the room after leaving his opponents to lick their wounds. That a 16-year-old was strong enough to fend off twenty angry assailants, offers a glimpse into Nirmal Purja’s extraordinary physical strength.
Besides Bikash Giri, the lanky boy four years Nirmal Purja’s junior, Purja also forced another boy to sleep with him. According to Bikash Giri, over the course of several years, a nine-year- old boy was repeatedly forced to perform oral sex on the powerful bully. “I think he was just very sexually active and needed to get his satisfaction. You know Nepal, it’s different from Europe or America. When you have a girlfriend, that means the most that’ll ever happen is holding hands. So maybe if he had found a girlfriend and convinced her to sleep with him, he wouldn’t have forced himself on us,” Bikash Giri’s best friend, who wished to remain anonymous, said, speaking by phone from the United States. Bikash disagreed with this assessment. “I think it’s all about power for him. He needs to feed his ego by having power over people. Trying to steal someone’s girlfriend is not okay, but he always tried that, just to feel powerful.” Going after other men’s partners is a practice Nirmal Purja continued in adulthood.
According to a number of former Elite Exped employees, Nirmal Purja repeatedly slept with his female clients on mountaineering expeditions, even though these clients were married or in serious relationships. Bound by a strict confidentiality agreements, the former employees spoke on the condition that their identities would be withheld. In order to back up their claims, these witnesses produced a great many WhatsApp messages detailing their shock and disgust with Nirmal Purja’s behavior. One former employee wrote “I think elite expel is funded by an army of distraught sugar daddies.” Another ex-employee wrote “There was one girl on Everest last year who was sleeping with him who tried to shut me down when I made an innocent comment about what she had climbed before...she said she’s ‘with the best in the business and that I should mind my own business’ then went on to say she’s ‘doing what she’s doing for strong women everywhere’...I couldn’t resist...I replied ‘strong women don’t fuck other strong women’s husbands’...”
One tradition that is carefully observed on all expeditions organized by Elite Exped is the nightly partying. During these parties, alcohol flows freely. Due to the extreme altitude, most of the women are quickly too drunk to be able to fend off the confident celebrity’s aggressive advances. One former employee stated “I always thought the reason he has so much alcohol and parties at his base camps is for the sole reason of getting girls drunk.” But the many parties organized by Elite Exped are not the only events when the consumption of alcoholic beverages is permitted at base camp.
In fact, drinking hard liquor is encouraged by Nimsdai at all times of the day. One victim described how Nirmal offered her gin and tonic at ten o’clock in the morning. “I felt uncomfortable but I also didn’t want to offend him, so I agreed to join him for a drink. We later on had sex and he did things I did not want him to. But Nirmal continued anyway.” The power dynamic between Nirmal Purja, as the expedition outfitter’s CEO, and the young, inexperienced women is extremely unbalanced. Elite Exped charges its clients $50,000 to $250,000 to climb Mount Everest. The contract, which all climbers are required to sign, clearly states that Elite Exped reserves the right to cancel a client’s participation for any reason, including poor attitude. “When you think about it, once the female clients are on the mountain and don’t do what Nirmal wants from them, he can send them home on the spot,” a former employee stated, and went on to add “he doesn’t care if the women have boyfriends or husbands.”
One of Nirmal’s many victims, a mountaineer from South America, described in a phone call how Nirmal made a sustained effort to convince her to have sex with him. “He knew I had a boyfriend and he didn’t care,” the woman said. “He sent me dick pics, nudes, and he requested nudes. He was so pushy. No matter how many times I told him ‘no,’ he just continued. Now I’ve blocked him.”
When Saruk Tamrakar was found dead in his parents’ house, one of the first things his closest friends agreed on, is that he was distraught over the affair his fiancee, Namrata Shrestha, was having with Nirmal Purja. Yet instead of investigating the connection between the suspicious suicide and Namrata and Nirmal, the Nepal Police informed Saruk Tamrakar’s mother that given that her son died by suicide, there was nothing to investigate. Only after Rukmani Tamrakar filed an official complaint weeks later, did the station’s senior police officer reluctantly agree to open an investigation.
The Cover-Up
After growing tired of the delays in the police investigation, the country’s youth mounted a public awareness campaign using the hashtag #justiceforsaruk. Shortly thereafter, the police issued a statement that a typed-out suicide had been found on Saruk’s phone. The document read that Saruk did not wish for any controversy to arise as a result of his death and that he absolved everyone close to him in connection with his decision to commit suicide. This statement immediately drew the public’s rebuke and considerable outrage, and fueled speculation that someone had either typed out the suicide note after the suicide, or doctored it in an effort to stop the investigation into Namrata Shrestha’s role in her fiancee’s death. “Who writes a suicide note on their phone, please? It doesn’t make any sense,” one of Saruk’s relatives stated.
The purported suicide note also included a sentence that drew a strong objection from Saruk’s family and friends: “I wish to be born again in my mother’s womb”. The family had a closely- held secret, namely that Saruk had been adopted as an infant. Whoever doctored or created the suicide note evidently was not aware of this fact. The reaction on social media was immediate and deafening. The same day, the Nepal Police withdrew their earlier announcement and stated that the suicide note was fake. This swift about-turn reminded many Nepalis of a similar blunder Nepali officials committed in a far more high-profile case: The massacre of Nepal’s royal family.
Following the June 1st, 2001 slaughter of the entire royal family, a media blackout was instituted after officials falsely claimed that the deaths were caused by a machine gun that had gone off accidentally. The next time officials updated the citizens of Nepal about this huge national tragedy, they stated that Crown Prince Dipendra had acted alone and wanted to avenge the misgivings his mother expressed about his girlfriend, an Indian-Nepalese princess who hailed from a family that was even more wealthy than Nepal’s royals. This new official version, too, was widely called into question, particularly because it included the detail that Crown Prince Dipendra was too drunk and high on marihuana to stand and had to be carried up to his room, from where he emerged only half an hour later, dressed in military fatigues and carrying two machine guns, which he used to kill his closest relatives with great precision.
According to the official report, after killing his entire family and kicking the lifeless body of his slain father, Dipendra killed himself with a service pistol. The bullet entered his head on the left side. This detail made little sense to Nepalis because it was common knowledge that Dipendra was right-handed. A medical doctor later stated that he had seen bullet holes in Dipendra’s back. Before another, more thorough investigation could be launched, the building where the massacre happened was razed. Today, a great majority of Nepalis refuse to accept the official version of events. “If our royal family cannot get justice, how can we expect Saruk to get justice,” one person commented on social media.
The question Saruk’s parents asked themselves was who had anything to gain by throwing off the police investigation into their son’s suicide. Saruk’s natural disposition was cheerful, gentle and reserved, almost shy. He had no enemies and was one of the country’s most popular young stars.
With the benefit of hindsight, Namrata’s behavior immediately after his suicide appeared suspicious to them. Too despondent over their son’s death, the Tamrakars did not have the presence of mind to question Namrata about what she was searching for in their son’s room. Reached by telephone, Sanu Tamrakar lamented that the woman who almost became his daughter-in-law had been verbally abusive and emotionally cold to his son. In this way, she and her lover, Nirmal Purja, made the perfect match. Saruk was perhaps too naive to realize that he was dealing with not one but two people who exhibited the traits of a sadistic sociopath.
Saruk’s friends detailed similar behavior, and the couple’s neighbors corroborated statements from a film crew working with Saruk and Namrata that the 43-year-old actress had repeatedly screamed at her fiancee and openly ridiculed and humiliated him. Friends and family described that Namrata had treated Saruk this way for most of the three years of their relationship. A number of witnesses explained that Namrata and Nimsdai had carried on an affair for a least eight months prior to Saruk’s death. Later, a Western climber who had a chance meeting with Namrata two months before Saruk’s suicide stated that the actress had said she was single and didn’t have a boyfriend. This statement stands in sharp contrast to what Namrata had told Saruk’s parents. Asked whether he had ever heard that his son’s and Namrata’s engagement had been broken, Sanu Tamrakar denied having any knowledge of this kind. He did, however, express his frustration over the silence that prevailed regarding his son’s case.
The Campaign
A month after Saruk’s suicide, his family and friends grew increasingly concerned over the lack of progress in the police investigation. Namrata Shrestha, meanwhile considered by police a person of interest, was still in hiding and out of contact. The Nepali mainstream media, as well as the country’s celebrities and social media influencers mostly remained silent. Much to the Tamrakar’s chagrin, even old friends like Sisan Baniya, the popular YouTuber, refused to join in the campaign to publicly demand justice for Saruk. How could all of Saruk’s famous friends refuse to take a public stance in support of their late colleague and friend, the family wondered. An omertà of silence appeared to cloak the truth behind the real reason for Saruk’s suicide. Who might be behind this effort, the parents wondered. As usual, the trail leads to Nirmal Purja.
Sisan Baniya, the YouTuber, years earlier worked as a camera operator on Nirmal Purja’s documentary, “14 Peaks,” and often bragged about his close friendship with the famous mountaineer. Before anyone had ever heard of Sisan, the young, inexperienced man worked as a wedding photographer and videographer. I hired Sisan, then still unknown, as my cameraman during the 2015/16 Indian blockade. We worked together on a near-daily basis for over five months, during which Sisan was almost always late and often forgot key equipment. Unprofessionalism is a common trait many Nepalis share, a result of the deplorable state of the country’s education system. However, Sisan Baniya was unprofessional to the extreme.
There is a certain way of doing things in Nepal that is best characterized as laid back to the extreme. “Hey, we are Nepali,” is a common and impossibly cheerful response a Westerner can expect to hear if one questions the possibility that a certain activity, which at first glance is steeped in chaos and absent of any apparent logic, will yield favorable results. It’s ironic that this "Nepali way” can actually be quite charming and the source of much bemusement once a Westerner has jettisons all expectations and instead embraces an ironclad belief that all will end well. However, forgetting critical equipment such as a $1,000 lapel microphone as well as the costly lighting setup that were specially flown in from the United States for an exclusive sit- down interview with the prime minister of Nepal, is hardly charming or amusing, even for the most lenient veterans of the “Nepali way.”
With repeated instances of taking the “Nepali way” too far, Sisan Baniya thoroughly tested my patience during the days of the blockade, not only because he frequently forgot his equipment, but because he frequently disregarded the instructions I gave him in basic camera technique (“hold still, maintain an angle for at least ten seconds, record for five seconds before and after panning”). Sisan did have a built-in advantage over other cameramen. His complexion is not dissimilar of an Indian, which meant he could blend in during assignments in Nepal’s Terai region, a huge benefit to our mission of documenting the blockade, since the Terai is where all the action was happening. Although he was a shoddy cameraman and slow learner, Sisan did have a knack for social climbing. He had never met any of Nepal’s VIPs before we began working together documenting the blockade. Suddenly, he was meeting multiple ministers, the prime minister, a former prime minister, senior members of the diplomatic corps, and many of Nepal’s celebrities all in a single day.
Sisan parlayed some of these introductions into a successful career as a YouTuber. At the time I was quite happy for Sisan’s rapid success, but soon I wondered quietly about his motives to befriend Saruk Tamrakar. Then, one day over lunch at Fire & Ice Pizzeria in Thamel, Sisan excitedly told me that he had become a YouTube sensation. “I’m famous now, Mike,” he said, gleaming with pride. During the same lunch, Sisan steered the conversation toward his friend Saruk Tamrakar. “He’s going to be a big star one day,” he said. “His father is a very famous actor, so Saruk is going to do really well one day.” To my ears, it sounded like Sisan, who hailed from a humble background, had found his mark. The newly minted YouTube star overtly explained that Saruk could become useful to him in the future, in order to open the doors in the world of film and television. I felt bad for Saruk and, disgusted by how transparently calculating Sisan was about selecting his friends, distanced myself from Nepal’s new mini-celebrity.
After the lunch ended, I drove back to my office and reflected on the time Sisan and I worked together with Saruk during one of my interviews with Prime Minister K.P. Oli. I quietly observed the two young men prepare the set before our time-pressed interviewee arrived. Saruk was quiet, docile and happy to take instructions from his friend, whose manner was clearly domineering. I felt a little bad for Saruk even then, long before I realized that Sisan would on day use his friendship to mine Saruk for his contacts, all in an effort to continue his climb up the social ladder. This is precisely what transpired a few years later.
Once Sisan Baniya was an established name among Nepal’s youth, he was introduced to Nirma Purja, who immediately hired him as one of his camera operators. This was certainly a clever strategic move, as Purja could count on the rising YouTube star to promote “14 Peaks,” as well as his own involvement in the film’s creation. While basking in the mountaineer’s glory, Sisan Baniya also became friendly with Namrata Shrestha. This is where Sisan’s approach to friendship and loyalty and that of Saruk’s other friends diverge. While Saruk’s original set of friends detested Namrata Shrestha for how the woman treated their old friend, Sisan actively sought to be close to her and Nirmal Purja. Several of Saruk’s friends expressed their outrage that Sisan would betray his friendship with Saruk in order to gain access to the world-famous mountaineer and his celebrity girlfriend. Which serves to explain why Sisan has remained silent about Saruk’s case, other than reading a short statement at a memorial service held in Saruk’s honor at the Boudhanath stupa, the largest Buddhist temple outside Tibet.
After Saruk’s family contacted me to express their frustration over the fact that Saruk’s case was fast being forgotten, I renewed my efforts to campaign for justice for Saruk via my feeds on Instagram and Facebook. In a series of posts, I exposed Nirmal Purja’s connection to the case and detailed his months-long affair with Namrata Shrestha. Almost immediately, my follower count increased by 300-500 per day. The more stories I posted, the faster the number of followers increased. Soon, several Nepali followers created translations of these stories.
After that, the topic went viral and was viewed by hundreds of thousands of Nepalese netizens.
After a few days, I received a number of messages on Instagram from a young woman claiming to be in St. Tropez. From her profile picture, the woman appeared to be between 25-30 years of age. Her Instagram account, with its more than 100K followers, was filled with pictures of a bikini-clad woman who appeared to be more Thai than Nepalese. All of the posts were created within the last two months. To me, this was clearly a case of someone going to significant lengths to protect their privacy. The sender, named Rita, detailed how she had been receiving unwanted nude pictures and sexualized videos from Nirmal Purja. “Could you please expose this Nimsdai,” she pleaded.
A short while later, I placed a phone call to the woman using the pseudonym Rita. She sounded Nepali and described being in possession of several videos and images in which Nimsdai clearly crosses the line of what is considered appropriate. “He uses Instagram to contact girls, then he immediately asks for their WhatsApp number and starts using the disappearing messages function to send nudes of himself, including dick picks. He also asks for nudes from girls,” Rita said. Over the course of the next few weeks, I would hear similar stories from over a dozen women from Nepal, Europe, the United States and South America.
Not long after posting Rita’s bikini picture and a screenshot of the messages she wrote concerning the sexual harassment she suffered under Nirmal Purja, another female sent a message through Instagram. This time, I believed the profile to be of a genuine person. The young woman demanded to remain anonymous but agreed to meet my colleague and me for lunch. Over the course of almost five hours, the European woman, who turned out to be a recent client of Elite Exped, detailed sexual abuse and other violent behavior by Nirmal Purja. She further stated that Nirmal had an affair with another female climber while at Mount Everest Base Camp. She also described how Nirmal demanded nude pictures soon after making initial contact. Her story matched closely with what Rita had described.
After posting an anonymized summary of this female mountaineer, further details emerged, including from a young woman who claimed she was 16 years old when Nirmal committed statutory rape in his elected home of England. “I told him to stop but he kept going. It hurt so much and after he finished I was bleeding heavily. I couldn’t walk properly for two weeks,” the young woman stated. After posting this information on Instagram, I received an increasing number of messages from young women in Nepal, as well as from old friends, describing how they and their acquaintances had also received messages from Nims requesting to send him nude pictures.
The flood of incoming messages was so great that I almost missed that of a 36-year-old Nepali man living in the United States. He wrote “Hi, I am also one of Nirmal Purja’s victim.” I was more interested in pursuing evidence of sexual harassment and assumed that this man must have had some business dealings in which he was burned by Nimsdai. Yet after receiving my reply, the man identified himself as Bikash Giri and began detailing years-long sexual abuse at the hands of Nirmal Purka while the two were students at Small Heaven School in Chitwan.
After agreeing to be recorded, and for the recording to be posted on my social media channels, Bikash Giri gave a vivid and harrowing account of countless incidents of molestation. His wife, eight months pregnant with their second child, had recently followed me on Instagram and read through some of the posts detailing Nirmal’s sexual violence towards women. “You should read this,” she said to her husband, “he has been doing this to other people as well.” Bikash explained to me that when his wife read to him the accounts of the other women, he was reminded of his own ordeal, which he had described to his wife six years earlier. “There were other boys, too. I will contact them and convince them to speak with you,” Bikash told me.
In telephone interviews, members of Bikash’s family and four of his friends from Small Heaven School detailed how Bikash’s disposition darkened soon after arriving at the school. “It was hell, I hated that place. It was all because of Nirmal and what he did to me. At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening, but later on, as I grew up and understood, I felt ashamed. I thought I had done something wrong and that I was a bad person. Before I met Nirmal, I was a good kid,” Bikash explained. “I just can’t forget what he did to me.” Bikash paused for a moment, before adding “I think he enjoyed tormenting me, you could see it in his eyes.”
After posting the audio clip of Bikash detailing his traumatic experiences caused by Nirmal Purja, a prominent Western mountaineer who’s been my friend for 15 years, contacted me about another victim. We spoke by phone for half an hour about the allegations against Nirmal. My friend then relayed an experience one of his closest friends had in a hotel room in the United States. “Nims all but raped her. He did everything besides penetrate her vagina with his penis. She was incapacitated and only escaped after an hour. The guy is a monster and I would definitely never want to stand in his way. He will bury anyone who gets in his way.” Asked if he was fearful of getting killed by Nirmal Purja or one of his associates if he spoke out on-the-record, this climber said “Absolutely. He’s a trained assassin and he openly brags about killing people.”
Around this time, one of my followers forwarded me a post by Nirmal Purja in which he brags about his time in the British special forces. The Special Boat Service is the UK’s version of the U.S. Navy SEALs and it was in this elite unit that Nirmal served for a number of years. He bragged about doing operations that people normally only see in movies and specified that these were James Bond type of things. This led me to use the nickname Nims Bond in subsequent posts on social media, not least because James Bond, at least in the early films, also forces himself on women.
Western Media
After gathering sufficient evidence and getting a number of witnesses to back up the detailed allegations against Nirmal Purja, I contacted a number of journalists, including some who worked at the biggest mainstream media houses, as well as representatives of the mountaineering press. Astonishingly, the writers each explained that they were well aware of Nims’ illegal behavior with women. Most journalists I contacted stated that they had known about these allegations for years but felt it too risky to expose Nims. Only one journalist, working on a commissioned feature for one of the biggest media outlets, was planning to finish a meticulously researched article on the subject. According to this journalist, there were over a dozen women who had described their encounters with Nirmal. “Well how many women do you need to speak with until you go to print,” I asked. The journalist repeated that the feature must be unimpeachable and would require more time until it was ready for publication.
When asked how soon this article might appear, the journalist remained ambivalent, stating only that it wouldn’t be within the next four weeks. This journalist’s collaborator stated that a possible timeframe for publication might be three to four months. However, it wasn’t at all certain that this timeline was realistic. “We have to do our due diligence and abide by the highest journalist ethics,” this seasoned writer explained. I promised not to reveal to the public the name of the media house, and agreed to share information about credible witnesses and victims whose accounts could be corroborated.
However, when I phoned the young female journalist again to relay a detailed account of Bikash Giri’s experiences, I was cut off curtly and told that his story would not make the cut. “Why not, this is a perfect example of how Nirmal hasn’t changed since his childhood days,” I asked. The woman’s answer got me so angry that I decided to shop the story around to journalists who had a greater sense of urgency regarding their reporting. Soon, more than half a dozen writers agreed to cover Nirmal Purja and his rapist ways. The initiative to compel the mainstream media to cover what can best be described as a niche story reminded me of another instance in which it took an enormous effort to get a story out that effected relatively few victims.
In 2016, Russell Brice, the legendary mountaineering outfitter, an old friend from my days on Mount Everest, during a wine-fueled dinner during which Russell finished the entire bottle (I don’t drink alcohol) the cheerful New Zealander confided in me his frustration with how the local outfitters were taking over the mountain. According to Russel, companies like Seven Summits were jeopardizing the safety of their clients and staff alike by taking unnecessary risks and by acting unprofessionally. Already, a number of Seven Summit clients and staff had died on previous expeditions. One Western journalist with whom I discussed this matter referred to the Nepali-owned company as Seven Cemetery Treks. Gone were the days when Western outfitters like Henry Todd and Russell Brice were regarded as the mayors of Everest Base Camp. The new kids on the block cut corners, charged their clients considerably less, and provided a bare-bones experience with inexperienced Sherpa guides.
This new order on the slopes of Everest had been enough to cause Russell Brice considerable discontent. Now, however, the Nepalis were really upsetting Russ, whose wine-fueled account startled me. In addition to strong-arming the Western outfitters, the Nepalis were engaging in a scheme to defraud trekkers and mountaineers by rushing them to Base Camp too fast. This meant that their clients had fewer days to acclimatize, thus increasing their chances of suffering from altitude sickness. In each case when a client complained, the Nepalis suggested calling a rescue helicopter. The helicopter companies grossly overcharged for their services and the trekkers passed the cost onto their insurance companies. In some instances, guides mixed rat poison and laxatives into trekkers and climbers’ meals. The scheme generated tens of millions of dollars in profits for the outfitters and the helicopter companies alike and led to a sharp increase in helicopters in the small country. When I first arrived in Nepal in 2008, the country had very limited private helicopter service. Today, Nepal boasts more helicopters per capita than any other country on earth.
When I told Russell that he should take his insider knowledge to the media, he stated that he previously had bad experiences with journalists and therefore didn’t trust them. After I returned to America, I mentioned the helicopter rescue scam to a number of journalists, all of whom declined to cover the story. Then I returned to Kathmandu and had a chance meeting with the bureau chief of Agence France Press, the famous wire service. Would the helicopter rescue scam be of interest, I asked. After getting a positive response, I met Russell and explained to him that the AFP’s previous bureau chief was a friend of mine and that he had vouched for his colleague. I convened a meeting on the terrace of the Hyatt Regency in Kathmandu and introduced Russell to the Kathmandu-based journalist.
After yet another rotation of bureau chiefs, the story was finally handed over to Annabel Symington, a young Englishwoman who in 2018 eventually broke the story in a feature article that was picked up by news outlets around the world. The official response was swift and decisive. Nepal’s tourism minister vowed to prosecute the culprits to the fullest extent the law. Russell rolled his eyes when I read the minister’s statement to him. “Nothing will change and no-one will go to prison, Mike. This is Nepal and this is how things work here. And that’s why this is my last year in this country.” Russell was so disgusted with the Nepalese leadership that he subsequently closed down Himalayan Experiences (or HimEx), his highly successful mountaineering company, and permanently relocated to Australia.
This story is relevant in the context of Nirmal Purja, who is almost certainly not going to face charges or any other serious consequences in his native Nepal, where as a close associate of Prime Minister Prachanda he is literally above the law. Which brings us back to the cover-up of Saruk Tamrakar’s suspicious suicide and Nepali media’s complicity in ensuring that this high- profile case is soon forgotten and never properly investigated, much like the helicopter rescue scam, which became the subject of intense scrutiny by the international news media. Before departing Nepal, Annabel Symington, the AFP bureau chief who wrote the groundbreaking article, told me how her superiors at AFP, fearful of getting sued, were too afraid to publish further details about the helicopter rescue scam.
Piercing The Veil of Silence
Fear is the one common trait shared by the Western outfitters and climbers with whom I spoke about Nirmal Purja. While they each recounted several episodes in which Nims sexually abused women, not one of these individuals agreed to be quoted for this story. They each explained that they were afraid of what might happen to them if they returned to Nepal. “You know how it works, if you say anything negative, you’re banned. I run my expeditions in Nepal, so I can’t just jeopardize my business,” one outfitter said. Several female climbers, among them some of the most famous in the world, stated that they, too, were afraid for their lives and their livelihoods.
“Nepal is run by mafias. There’s the helicopter mafia, the hospital mafia, the taxi mafia and the climbing mafia, just to name a few. If you piss off one of those, you better not return to Nepal or they’ll kill you,” an American climber said. It is a bitter irony that some of the most famous and revered mountaineers on earth shudder at the thought of standing up to Nirmal Purja, the perpetual schoolyard bully.
Bikash Giri, one of Nirmal’s first victims, agreed with this dim assessment. Speaking from his elected home in America, he said: “They are ruthless. They’ll gut you in the street if you go up against them. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I don’t know why you love Nepal so much, but I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. There are even Nepali gangs in England and here in the States. If they find me, I’m not sure that they will let me live.” Asked why he agreed to be Nirmal Puja’s most public accuser, Bikash Giri, with his baby daughter on his shoulder, responded: “Someone has to stop this man. I thought he had changed and I even went to meet him earlier this year. I was finally at peace with myself because I thought he was nice and so I forgave him. But after reading your posts on Instagram, I realize Nirmal is still the same monster. And we have to stop him. So if I suddenly die, then everyone will know who was behind it.”
Self-censorship by the Western mainstream media is so prevalent that not even India’s illegal and secret economic blockade, which killed tens of thousands of innocent Nepalese, received any notable coverage.
When the Nepal did receive coverage, the Western media concealed the blockade’s existence by using euphemisms and by not reporting its deadly effects. The media only referred to the blockade as protests on the Nepal side of the border, thus perpetuating India’s official version of events. When a reader of the New York Times sees an article about supply-chain issues in Nepal caused by protests at the border to India, it’s a sufficiently dry topic to induce insomnia. If the story were told the other way around, namely that India, seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, was shattering U.N. law governing landlocked countries’ access to the sea, in the process killing untold innocent Nepalis, the article would certainly generate a lot more interest. “The world does not care about Nepal,” was a often repeated line in the days of the secret blockade. Similarly, a number of Nirmal Purja’s victims have complained that their voices were not being heard by the media.
After I began exposing Nirmal, several victims came forward and stated that they had tried to alert the news media about this predator, and that their calls went unheard. This revelation, together with the information I gleaned during my conversations with several journalists who were long aware of Nims’ behavior, inspired me to double down on the social media campaign, and to write this article. The beauty of Instagram is that it can easily be used as a platform to send anonymous tips and other useful information. That’s because opening a burner account is straightforward and takes mere minutes. Whenever a new follower provides potentially valuable information I use a certain methodology to carefully vet the source, often over a timespan of several months, including by conducting a series of telephone conversations.
Nepal Omertà
The Italian mafia is famous for its ability to maintain a veil of silence over its illegal activities. Called omertà, this code of silence has at its core the understanding that there is no greater sin than betraying someone’s secret to the authorities, regardless of the severity of the infraction. It wasn’t until sophisticated eavesdropping technology was developed, that law enforcement officials were able to penetrate this veil of silence and score significant legal victories by apprehending and prosecuting top mafia figures.
The concept of omertà exists in every last corner of Nepal, a melting pot of cultures that boasts over a hundred distinctly unique ethnic groups and more than fifty spoken languages, plus an untold number of dialects. Yet none of the languages spoken in Nepal have a word for omertà, which is surprising insofar that the practice is so prevalent at all levels of Nepalese society. The Italian mob could learn a lesson or two from the Nepalis in the effectiveness with which they protect their own from inquisitive outsiders and from prosecution. There’s a running joke in Nepal that you only end up in prison if you didn’t have enough money to bribe the police, the prosecutor and the judge. In order to demonstrate the ironclad nature of Nepal’s omertà in an effort to contextualize the silence surrounding Saruk Tamrakar’s death and the cover-up of Nirmal Purge’s countless affairs and incidents of sexual violence, this story must take major detour.
While it is considered almost sacrilege to rat out someone to the authorities, it is a far greater offense to give insider information to an outsider, particularly if the outsider is a Westerner. My colleagues and I discovered this on numerous occasions when we attempted to bring a fistful of fire trucks to Nepal. As part of our efforts, we produced a documentary film about structure fires across the country and the haphazard response by fire departments. One day, a high-ranking official met with my co-producer and me and handed us a USB stick filled with evidence of how Kathmandu’s fire department is part of a massive conspiracy to defraud Nepali insurance companies.
From the files contained on the USB stick, we gleaned that the fire department systematically delayed its response to structure fires by up to an hour in order to ensure that the fire destroyed every piece of evidence that could be used to demonstrate that the blaze was the result of arson. Everyone was involved in this scam, according to our informant, including the fire chief, the police chief, the disaster management officials, senior officials at the mayor’s office, the owner of the building on fire, and, in some cases, even representatives of insurance companies.
In addition, most fires were not included in the Kathmandu Metropolitan City Disaster Management Office’s official database. The actual number of fire incidents in Kathmandu was multiple times greater, but if this statistic were to become public, officials would be forced to step up the fire department’s anemic resources by procuring additional firefighting vehicles. For years, the fire department and disaster management officials did everything to ensure that the vehicles we wanted to donate were not allowed into the country. Now we finally understood the reason behind the officials’ surprising stance. If they had functioning fire trucks, the public would expect them to extinguish fires.
My colleagues and I decided to document as many blazes as possible and monitor the fire department’s response time, and use the most jarring examples of willful negligence in a film about the department’s corrupt practices. Early one morning in September 2018, a massive fire broke out in a five-story building located just south of Thamel, Kathmandu’s bustling tourist area. We were tipped off by an insider working for the mayor’s office who had heard of our fruitless efforts to bring fire trucks to Nepal. The fire began in a clothing shop on the ground level but quickly spread through the rest of the building. When the fire reached the storage unit of an expedition outfitter, countless explosions occurred as cooking gas cans and oxygen cylinders were ignited.
The explosions were so loud that they could be heard for several kilometers. Even a junior firefighter at the city’s only fire station, located a few hundred meters from the incident, later admitted to clearly hearing the explosions. When the first explosion occurred, it was shortly after four o’clock in the morning. We discovered that at a slow pace, it takes less than ten minutes to cover the distance from the fire station to the incident site on foot. With the streets free from traffic, the first fire engine should have arrived in under three minutes. This, however, was not the case, and before long the entire neighborhood helped the fire department cover up the truth.
For six days, my colleagues and I interviewed dozens of residents throughout the building, as well as neighbors up and down the street and in the surrounding area. On the first day, most people told us that the fire department took over thirty minutes. Some said they phoned the fire department as soon as they saw the first flames and that the response time was 45 minutes. They showed us their phones and the call lists clearly backed up these witnesses. Others stated that the firefighters arrived 30 minutes after the first explosion. A few said that the fire department was on the scene in five minutes. This disparity was suspicious and so we decided to go back the next day and interview more neighbors.
On the second day, the witnesses stated that the response time was 20-25 minutes. Several of the people we spoke with the previous day corrected their statement. We decided to return the following day. This time, the witnesses stated that the fire department arrived within 15 minutes. Even those who had already corrected their statements did so again, emphatically stating that they were tired and confused. On Day Four, the response time had dropped to ten minutes. Finally, on Day Five of our investigation, the residents all agreed that the fire department had arrived in under five minutes. A charming old lady staffing a corner produce shop smiled and shook her head as she overheard one of the neighbors explaining away the fact that he had originally testified to the fact that the response time was 40 minutes only to recant and fall in line with the sub-five-minute timeframe. After this man walked off, the lady coyly smiled and pointed at the surveillance cameras fastened to a pole on the street corner opposite her shop.
We sought out the local warden and asked to see the camera footage. “No footage, nothing, power outage, sir,” the official told us. We then visited the fire department and learned from the fire chief that he and his men departed the station within two minutes of receiving the first call about the fire. Located a few city blocks from the fire department is a station of the Traffic Police, which we visited next. After a few minutes of negotiations involving a fistful of thousand rupee notes, the traffic cops happily showed us their surveillance footage, complete with a time and date stamp. Not surprisingly, the first fire engine could be seen leaving the station a full 40 minutes after the first call had been placed and at least 30 minutes after the first explosion was heard by witnesses living several blocks south of the incident site.
Armed with a short clip of the police surveillance footage, we went back to the warden and confronted him with this evidence. This time, the warden relented and instructed one of his colleagues to let us see the surveillance footage. As expected, the footage revealed that the fire burned for a long time before any firefighters arrived. However, we noticed the time stamp was off by about 35 minutes and it appeared that a substantial piece of footage had been cut out. We knew from neighbors that dozens of explosions had occurred, yet the footage, which included recordings from a camera pointed directly at the building, showed fewer than half a dozen explosions before the first firefighters arrive. Unfortunately, there is one more example of omertà in Nepal with respect to this incident.
Nepal Tourism Board’s Omertà
Since the explosions rocked nearby Thamel, leaving many tourists and hotel owners concerned about their safety, we presented the evidence we compiled to the Nepal Tourism Board’s senior officials. Surely, NTB would be interested to learn of these unsafe conditions and take steps to ensure the safety of foreign tourists. When we briefed NTB officials, they all reacted in a panic, but not in the way we had hoped. Instead, they nervously questioned our motives for conducting such an in-depth investigation and castigated us. “You are a tourism ambassador, why are you doing this? And why are you still here, ambassadors go home, they don’t stay here forever,” Shradha Shrestha told us. Another NTB official demanded that we destroy the video footage we obtained from the police. “This is highly illegal, you could go to jail for a long time,” the person scolded us.
My colleagues and I departed the Nepal Tourism Board feeling surprised and deeply concerned. NTB had entered into an agreement under which we were supposed to receive $200,000 in exchange for conducting a tourism promotion campaign in conjunction with the fire truck expedition, a celebrity-studded overland adventure I had dreamed up together with the actor James Gandolfini, my close personal friend and the star of the HBO series “The Sopranos”. NTB had already broken several parts of the agreement, including only paying half of the $200,000 in advance and not facilitating with Government of Nepal officials to clear the fire trucks into the country. We were hence already suspicious of NTB. Now we feared that NTB would become even more uncooperative. This is precisely what happened.
At this point, we had already exceeded several goals of our contract with NTB. Instead of five VIPs, we hosted eight in Nepal for tourism-promotion activities, including the legendary Hollywood actor Malcolm McDowell. Instead of one documentary film and TV program, we completed five. Yet NTB was unhappy because not a single fire truck had been delivered to Nepal. The agreement obligated us to deliver five firefighting vehicles to Nepal. I had purchased more than that number plus the City of Pittsburgh had donated an additional fire engine. The fire chief of Kathmandu had traveled to Amish Country in northwestern Pennsylvania to personally inspected these vehicles.
The Kathmandu fire chief, Nepal’s ambassador in Washignton, D.C., and a senior member of Nepal’s former ruling family each took rides in the vehicles and found them to be satisfactory. Yet the officials at various Government of Nepal ministries, as well as at the Kathmandu Metropolitan City Disaster Management Office each did their best to withhold permission for the fire trucks to enter the country. Even a sustained effort by Prime Minister K.P. Oli and his emissary in Washington, Dr. Arjun Karki, didn’t suffice to cut through Nepal’s kevlar-lined red tape. Only intense backroom dealmaking between Ambassador Karki and various ministry officials finally yielded the desired result and paved the way for a new legislation to be passed regulating the importation of firefighting vehicles.
Following Arjun Karki’s success in breaking the yearslong deadlock in Kathmandu’s Singha Durbar, the expansive government complex where all ministries are located, senior officials of the Nepal Tourism Board, together with their attorneys, convened a meeting with me in December 2018. To my considerable relief, NTB finally agreed to a solution for which my colleagues and I had lobbied for eighteen months. I would have to agree to forgo the second $100,000 payment still owed per our original memorandum of understanding in exchange for NTB promising to pay the same amount Maersk, the Danish shipping giant, to transport the firefighting vehicles from Pennsylvania to Nepal. Finally, the fire truck expedition would become reality.
However, after announcing this welcome about-turn, the NTB representatives surprised me with an additional demand, one that we had not discussed previously. NTB demanded that the documentary film about the fires and the corrupt Kathmandu fire department not be released. After stating that this was categorically not possible, NTB’s lawyer admitted to bluffing and said that NTB’s CEO would be in touch with Maersk the following week to arrange modalities for the shipping fees to be covered. I drove home to the Hyatt Regency unsure if I should celebrate. Two weeks later, NTB recanted its assurance of paying Maersk the $100,000 fee for delivering the fire trucks to Nepal. As a result, of Nepal Tourism Board breaking yet another agreement, the fire truck expedition was delayed once again. However, more poignantly, NTB proved the existence of a Nepal omertà. Anyone who dares to break this unwritten code of silence can expect to suffer dire consequences.
Omertà in the Mountaineering Community
As mentioned previously, Nepalis can be counted on to recoil at even the slightest criticism of their country. In the Nepali telling, foreigners exposing the wrongs of one of the most corrupt places on earth are most likely foreign spies sent by Western governments to cause maximum reputational damage. Another popular response to foreign troublemakers is to simply brand them as racists. Complain about Nepal’s horrendous air safety record? You’re a racist. Dare to explain to a Nepali that the country’s education and health sectors are in deplorable states, and you’ll be labeled racist as well. Yet with respect to the omertà, the foreigners who have dealings in Nepal are just as guilty as their Nepali hosts.
Westerners are considered welcome only for as long as they serve their intended purpose. In most cases, this involves tourists leaving their hard currency behind while visiting the country, which, despite being one of the poorest in the world, is also one of Asia’s most expensive in terms of prices charged for meals, hotel rooms and other tourism-related items. The other highly lucrative source of hard currency are the hundreds of mountaineers who flock to Mount Everest every spring. As it turns out, Western mountaineers and outfitters rival their Nepali brethren when it comes to the omertà, as demonstrated when 70 climbers marched past injured high altitude porter Hassan Mohammad on their way to the summit of K2. Instead of admitting that they left an injured climber to die, every climber and every outfitter provided an excuse why they failed to organize a rescue or, at the very least, demand that one is organized.
The same regrettable behavior can be observed in the cases of more than two dozen members of the mountaineering community, who eagerly detailed their experiences with Nirmal Purja, pointing their fingers at his illegal and dangerous behavior, only to then declare that they couldn’t speak on the record under any circumstances. By declining to go on-record, each one of the mountaineers perpetuated the code of silence that serves to protect the criminal, in this case Nirmal Purja, thus enabling him to continue with his crime spree. The selfishness that prevails in the mountaineering world is difficult to comprehend for most people, as is evidenced by the media shitstorm that ensued once Mohammad Hassan’s case became public. It will be interesting to see what happens after the mainstream media starts covering Nirmal Purja and the fact that the budding MeToo movement of the mountaineering world was almost extinguished by elite climbers who pride themselves on achieving all kinds of records but are too afraid to speak truth to power.
Finally, the mountaineering world’s trade press, rather than using its extensive contacts to expose Nirmal Purja, remained mum as well, even weeks after my colleagues and I began the social media campaign that encouraged victims like Bikash Giri to go public with detailed allegations of sexual abuse by Nirmal Purja. Would the media have reacted the same way if a beautiful young caucasian woman had leveled similar charges agains the mountaineering world’s biggest star? If ever Nepalis had the right to label Westerners racists, the case of Bikash Giri provides them with ample ammunition.
The Aftermath
Since established news organizations cannot be trusted to cover a matter of such magnitude as Nirmal Purja’s decades-long streak of sexual abuse and violence without any sense of urgency, it falls on independent writers to get the story out as soon as possible. This strategy, although renegade and highly unorthodox, has so far produced impressive results. First, a number of Nirmal Purja’s victims who have not yet spoken with journalists, have come forward with accounts of their own experiences. Second, Nirmal has contacted a number of his victims and offered them payments in exchange for their silence. He has retained a public relations crisis firm and a group of attorneys to go after me, as well as offered $250,000 to various groups who are working on a counter-offensive to silence me.
Nirmal Purja’s sister has unfollowed her school mate Bikash Giri on social media, evidently a sign that the Purjas know the identity of the man who leveled such detailed allegations against Nirmal in the minute-long recording, which did not reveal Bikash’s name (this article, which came out subsequently, names Bikash Giri for the first time). A Sherpa and a Western climbers, both ex-employees of Elite Exped have come forward with a hair-raising account of how one evening on Everest Base Camp, Nirmal Purja sent two Sherpas to a climber’s tent to extract a 19-year-old woman who was too intoxicated to move. The Shepras carried the woman to Nirmal’s tent next door. There, the most famous Nepali citizen alive could be heard having sexual intercourse with the passed-out female.
My colleagues and I spoke off-record with a number of Nirmal Purja’s sponsors, some of which have stopped using the climber in their advertisements and online promotions. RedBull, Nirmal Purja’s biggest sponsor, is famous for not responding to media requests. However, through contacts at the company we learned that they were aware of the allegations and had been closely monitoring the social media campaign to expose Purja.
Reinhold Messner, the mountaineering legend who became the first man to climb all 8,000- meter peaks without oxygen, was the last person I spoke with before publishing this article on Instagram on August 13, 2023.
Over the years, Reinhold and I have run into each other at various events in Kathmandu. We once had a long lunch at my office, during which Reinhold detailed how he was wrongfully castigated by the media for his brother’s death on Nanga Parbat back in 1978. Reinhold lamented that the journalists, without knowing the ins and outs of the mountain, had laid the blame for Guenther Messner’s death squarely at his feet. It wasn’t until the year 2020 that Reinhold and his son, Simon, in a documentary film titled “Nanga Parbat” were able to use recently-discovered hard evidence to prove that Reinhold’s version of events was correct.
Whenever I visited Reinhold and Simon at their home in Bolzano, Italy, this delicate topic came up in conversation. It was clear that on top the trauma Reinhold suffered from losing his brother, he was deeply affected by the singularly one-sided news reports that haunted him for decades. To me, Reinhold’s painful experience always served as a poignant reminder that a journalist has the duty to tell the whole story and ensure that it is based in fact, not speculation.
I waited to apprise Reinhold Messner of my findings about Nirmal Purja’s sexual violence until I was certain that the story was bulletproof and that at least one international mainstream publication would soon provide detailed coverage. Reinhold was surprised to learn of the allegations. “If it’s really true, then he is done,” he said. We spoke about Nirmal Purja’s climbing record, and Reinhold clarified that he was not a fan of the methods which Purja used, because having a prepared route and oxygen went against his personal mountaineering philosophy. In mountaineering circles, Messner is known as a firebrand purist, a longtime proponent of traditional alpinism, which eschews such modern conveniences as a supplemental oxygen supply and fixed ropes that lead to the summit.
Reinhold Messner also explained that Nirmal Purja accomplished what he set out to do, which he felt was deserving of recognition. “Of course, to the Nepalis he is a hero, someone that the whole country looks up to because here is one of them, doing what Western climbers had always done.” He felt it most regrettable that Nepal would soon be deprived of such a hero. Then he added an interesting observation: “The Sherpas don’t respect him because he did everything to ensure that his porters didn’t achieve his world record. He kept them at bay to make sure he was the only hero. When I recently opened my new Sherpa museum, the officials made it clear to me that Nirmal Purja was not welcome.” To clarify, Nirmal Purja is not related to the Sherpas. He hails from a completely different geographic region, as well as from a different ethnic group.
Back in Nepal, one of the country’s most popular musicians, Nasty, was inspirited by the social media campaign to expose Nirmal Purja. The campaign ad meanwhile reached tremendous proportions and Nasty decided to create an entire album of songs on the subjects of Bikash Giri’s bravery to come forward with his traumatic story, Saruk Tamrakar’s death, Namrata Shrestha’s disappearance, Nirmal Purja’s sexual violence, scuttled police investigations, as well as the omertà that prevails across Nepal.
Saruk Tamrakar’s family became been emboldened to hold the corrupt Nepal Police to account, demanding a meeting with the senior police officer who allegedly accepted a bribe from Nirmal Purja and Namrata Shrestha in order to grind the investigation to a halt. Following this meeting, the Tamrakars reported that the police officer was not at all helpful. The veil silence that is so characteristic of Nepal, has already descended on the case of Saruk Tamrakar. In a few months from now, the international news media will cover the case of Nirmal Purja, Nepal’s most prolific rapist, in great detail. Soon thereafter, all will be forgotten in Nepal, where the motto is always “business as usual.”
Then, on the eve of the first mainstream media organization publishing a story on Nirmal Purja, Sanu Tamrakar died. Evidently, the loss of his only child was too much for the septuagenarian to bear. Just 24 hours earlier, his wife cried inconsolably during a press conference in which she admonished the media for being complicit in covering up the details of her son’s death. The outpouring of Nepal’s online community was overwhelming, as was the criticism of news outlets like Routine Of Nepal Banda, with its over 2 million followers, for not joining in the call for justice in Saruk Tamrakar’s case.
Unanswered Questions
Many questions remain unanswered, including the one how Nirmal Purja’s wife, Suchi, is faring as a result of the highly embarrassing revelations published via the social media campaign. Suchi has looked the other way for 15 years while her husband carried on with his many affairs, many of which were in plain sight. After all, a number of female climbers who volunteered to have horizontal relations with Nirmal Purja have not had to pay for their participation in certain mountaineering expeditions. As her husband’s business manager, Suchi must surely wonder about why these female clients could participate free of charge.
And what exactly did Nirmal Purja know on the slopes of K2, as the Mohammad Hassan, the Pakistani high altitude porter, lay dying? Why was no rescue mission organized? This year, an Austrian climber named Lukas Woerle, gave up his summit bid on Broad Peak in order to help an ailing high altitude porter. Could Mohammad Hassan have survived if Nirmal Purja and his clients had helped him? And what exactly are the details of the reportedly one-sided contract Nirmal Purge’s Elite Exped requires its clients to sign before the are allowed to join an expedition?
Finally, what did Saruk Tamrakar discover at his and Namrata Shrestha’s home that made him sufficiently angry that he made the sudden decision to commit suicide? Did he discover the secret, months-long affair between his fiancee and her landlord, the world-famous mountaineer, or did he learn of something even more embarrassing? Did Saruk become the victim of a sinister game in which he was dominated by two sadistic sociopaths? Who knows if any of these questions will ever be answered or whether the Nepal Police will simply close the book on his case and the end the investigation into his suicide and the role played by his fiancee and Nirmal Purja.
Such a tragedy could not have befallen a nicer man than Saruk, who was humble to a fault. In the days of the blockade, before he became a household name in Nepal, Saruk was the second cameraman during one of my interviews with Nepal’s Prime Minister K.P. Oli. He also helped me edit a short film detailing the effects of the blockade. Later, Saruk and I occasionally met for lunch or dinner at Fire & Ice, a pizzeria frequented by members of the climbing community. Seared into my memory are Sauk’s kind and genuine disposition, which set him apart from many other Nepali celebrities, most of whom have not said a word about their former friend and colleague following his demise. Will they speak up in favor of Saruk once Nirmal Purja aka Nimsdai falls out of favor, or will they continue to remain silent?
One certainty does, however, exist: That the Nepali authorities, including the corrupt officials of the Ministry of Tourism and the incompetent leadership of the Nepal Tourism Board, will once again look the other way when the mainstream news media at long last exposes the prolific sex crimes of Nirmal Purja, the most famous man born in Nepal - since Buddha!
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