Giriraj Swami

Giriraj Swami (legal name Glenn Phillip Teton) is the son of a Chicago lawyer and judge, according to his GBC biography. He met A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in Boston in 1969, while a student at Brandeis University, and was initiated by letter in July 1969. In 1972 Prabhupada made him president of ISKCON Bombay and a trustee of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust. He took sannyasa in 1978 from Tamal Krishna Goswami, by his own account.

He joined the Governing Body Commission (GBC) as an acting member for Bombay in 1982 and became a full member in 1984. Over the following years the GBC minutes list him as co-GBC for Bombay, Mauritius, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Spain and Portugal; he was the GBC’s executive secretary in 1993–94. He resigned from the GBC in 2000 and was made GBC Emeritus.

Prabhupada’s will of 1977 names “Giriraj das Brahmachary” among its executors. In 2000 and 2001 the Children of ISKCON lawsuits over abuse in ISKCON’s boarding schools named “Glen Teton” as a defendant in that capacity only, as an executor of Prabhupada’s estate; the filings make no allegation about any act of his.

In 2023 a Facebook post by Damodara dasa, later reproduced by the Dharma Sanga website, quoted emails in which Giriraj Swami asked a woman who had complained publicly about Kesava Bharati Dasa Goswami to explain “exactly what the abuse was”, and in which the then director of ISKCON’s office for leadership misconduct wrote that he had asked the woman or her friend “to take down her FB post”. The emails have not been verified.

In October 2024 the GBC announced that he had been diagnosed with behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative brain disease. He stopped giving initiation at the end of 2024 and, the GBC said in April 2025, “has retired from active outreach”; it added that he would make India his home base.