My years in a cult that groomed children to have sex with adults

Prem Sargam was six when her parents became followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, seven when her abuse began and twelve when she was first raped. The cult’s systematic sexualisation of children has never been made public — until now

The Times, UK/September 28, 2024

By Louise Carpenter

When Prem Sargam was six years old, her father left his job with IBM and disappeared from their home in Devon to join an ashram in Pune, India, in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment as a sannyasin or religious adherent. She didn’t know it then, but she was about to lose everything: her name, her home, any notion of conventional morality, her mother and, devastatingly, her innocence. What she would get was a new name after an initiation ceremony in an auditorium, a set of orange robes of her own and a new philosophy by which to live, which identified children as an obstruction to their parents’ sexual journey.

The other message of sannyasin teaching, both unlawful and shattering, was quickly assimilated by those joining the ashrams springing up worldwide, including the children: young pubescent girls on their sexual journey could be helpfully “guided” by older men.

Within a year, Sargam was a sannyasin too — nowhere near puberty, but regularly watching sex and displays of sexuality in the Indian cult. At first, in India aged six, Sargam was among thousands of followers living outside the main ashram, but soon she was taken into the children’s quarters, away from her parents, later working 12-hour days in the kitchen, receiving no education. It was there she waved goodbye to her innocence overnight.

“It was considered good for the children to be exposed to sexuality,” she says. “We used to go from hut to hut watching people have sex. We were like sports commentators. ‘He’s a bit fat.’ ‘She’s on her period.’ ‘Why don’t they change position?’ ” Children slept in beds next to others in which sex would be going on. “We had nothing to relate it to. There was no context.”

Thousands worldwide joined the movement led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also known as Osho), a man with a long beard, his own orange robes and, later, 96 Rolls-Royces. The cult collapsed in 1985 when Osho was investigated by the FBI (he died in 1990), but its meditation teachings exist today, copyrighted by the Osho International Foundation. It is immensely lucrative.

Osho’s philosophy was that his disciples should “live in love”, having as much guilt-free sex as they desired. Children should watch because sex was not shameful. Freedom was to be found through love, surrender and sex. So they wouldn’t obstruct and limit their parents’ sexual freedom, children were separated in their own living quarters.

At seven, an adult male performed a sex act on Sargam, having groomed her for months with chocolate. “It was only at 16 I understood what had happened,” she says. Between the ages of 7 and 11, she and her friends were performing different sex acts on the ashram’s “guards”.

In India, she had quickly been sexualised to perform these regular sex acts on men. This abuse continued in the cult’s Medina ashram in Suffolk, an Arts and Crafts house near Mildenhall, where she was sent alone to attend its “boarding school” aged 11.

There was as little regulation of the cult’s behaviour in Suffolk as there seems to have been anywhere else, bar one article written by a brave New York-based journalist in 1985 and one investigation by US child services. By then, the cult was falling apart.

After a spell in Suffolk — about six months — and a lot of begging to the ashram higher-ups to join her mother, by then working in a super-ashram in Oregon, founded in 1981, Sargam arrived in the US. The cult was at this point worth millions of pounds thanks to donations from its disciples. It was here that Sargam was groomed for sex by an adult man. She lost her virginity to him. “I was then raped 50 times in 3 years [by different men]. I was a child sex slave — that’s how lawyers later told me that the law would see it,” she says. “Him stealing my virginity at 12 opened the door for the other 50 men, pretty much.”

The Osho International Foundation is today registered in Switzerland with an office in Manhattan. The OIF says it is simply the publisher, not the custodian, of Rajneesh’s legacy. It states that none of the OIF’s current directors had any involvement in or knowledge of the historic abuse allegations and therefore the foundation cannot comment.

In Oregon, there is a record of only one visit by the US authorities to check on the children’s welfare. Sargam and her friends were, she maintains, asked by a senior in the Oregon ashram, Ma Anand Sheela, to make a list of the men they had slept with. Sheela only wanted to know about the older men. Those people were then called into a meeting and told to be discreet. There were 50 on Sargam’s list. Another friend had 70, another 150. This has since been denied by Sheela. Sargam was “presented” to the authorities in the manner of, she says, “look at these perfect kids”. She had been fitted with a diaphragm aged 13 after being told to go to the cult’s health centre.

Today, Sargam is among a collection of those children who are recalling their childhoods — or lack of them — in a new documentary, Children of the Cult, co-directed by Maroesja Perizonius, who went through the same things. It has taken years to pull together.

The film is part retrospective, part unfolding investigation. For the first time, the story is told of the children who grew up in the global communes of the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Perizonius has tracked down men and women whose adult lives, following a childhood in such an oversexualised atmosphere, have been blighted by addiction and poverty, and who have complex emotional issues around trust and self-sabotage. “I still have trust issues,” Perizonius says, although she has been in a stable relationship for 13 years and has a terrific relationship with her 17-year-old daughter.

Perizonius had sex with three men and one woman when she was just thirteen and living in an ashram in Amsterdam. She rebuilt her adolescence “by starting from scratch, reinventing myself after leaving the ashram with my mother and telling myself, ‘Right, you are going to behave as if you are still a virgin.’ My way of coping has been to make films but some of the others do not have that outlet.”

Coming to terms with what happened 40 years on has been a shock for Sargam, she says, because her abuse was conducted within a so-called “spiritual” framework.

It’s been a long journey for her to understand what has happened to her. She is 54 now, living in Hastings with a 20-year-old son. Her life has been rocky: hostessing in Japan; an itinerant late adolescence once out of the cult; a violent rape during which she almost died; a spell in rehab for an addiction to cannabis, her way of self-medicating the pain; a difficult relationship. She still appears vulnerable, for all her courage.

For the past three years she has been backed by an international community of victims — both men and women — who have come together for the film to share experiences just like hers after reading a letter she posted on Facebook in 2021, naming the man who groomed and raped her. In large numbers, other survivors are finally telling their stories too.

“When I first started speaking about it online in 2021, there was a view in the sannyasin community that I wasn’t a good sannyasin, not spiritual enough, that I hadn’t done my ‘trauma work’. It was spiritual gaslighting.

“I’ll always have bits of the cult in me,” she says, “but to understand the abuse I had to let go of the fact that it was fully done within a spiritual context.”

Sargam’s father, like other often wealthy European and American adults in the late Seventies and early Eighties, disillusioned and bored of living in the mainstream, had seen the light. He had returned to Devon wearing flowing orange robes. We’ve all got to go to India, he told her mother.

“And when you join, you leave your old life behind,” Sargam explains.

In 2018, Netflix made a hugely successful six-part documentary about the cult and the Oregon ranch called Wild Wild Country. Nothing about the children’s negative experiences was mentioned.

“It was a brilliant Netflix series,” Perizonius says, “but it felt like a blow that the children were not even mentioned.”

There was so much damage among the child survivors — “A great friend of mine took her life last year,” Sargam says — but it would take time, collective strength and a post-#MeToo culture for them to feel brave enough to talk.

Sargam set the ball rolling in 2021 on Facebook with that letter to her abuser. “I want a financial fund started for the kids [of the cult]. I want financial help for the kids who are alcoholics and living in garages and can’t afford to pay for therapy, who basically aren’t surviving. Lots of these children’s inheritances, including mine, were handed over to the cult. Sexual abuse was systemic and worldwide.”

Perizonius’s mother was asked by the cult to sign a consent form when Perizonius arrived at Medina in Suffolk, agreeing to her child being given contraception. (Back then, Perizonius was known as Chandra, a name she dropped in her twenties.) Her mother didn’t sign it.

“Sex was everywhere. Nobody taught us about consent or the power to say no. You had to manage in a world without boundaries. There were condoms everywhere. Everybody, even people my [young] age, had a little cupboard by the bed with gloves and condoms in it because we were told, because of Aids, we had to be extremely careful and have sex with gloves on,” Perizonius explains.

“But we filled the gloves and the condoms with water and threw them at each other.” It is a detail that sums up the harm.

In the film, Perizonius confronts Sheela, who featured heavily in the Netflix documentary. Why was she complicit in allowing the children of the ashram to have under-age sex? Why did she ask the children to list their adult sexual “partners” in diaries that later went missing? And what about the authorisation of the fitting of contraception? She denies all of it.

“No one has said that children should engage in sex, and if it happened, it is the children’s choice,” she tells Perizonius in the film.

“But I don’t think you can say that of a 13 or 12-year-old child or even younger,” Perizonius retorts.

“But I cannot take responsibility,” Sheela replies.

“I think you can,” Perizonius tells her. Sheela ends the interview.

Sargam articulates the way, despite understanding the harm inflicted on them, victims can feel shackled to the doctrine fed to them as infants, as if their pain is a sign of their failure to be a good disciple. And yet the children were helpless, vulnerable and impressionable. Crucially their protectors — their parents— were separated from them physically and indoctrinated themselves.

“My mother did later encounter the man who had sexually assaulted me at seven,” Sargam says, “and she pummelled him with her fists. I didn’t understand what he had done to me but I told her he had hurt me. Violence was not allowed. But this man just picked her up and moved her to one side and walked away.”

Authorities in multiple countries did not protect the children. The Medina in Suffolk escaped the attention of British social services. Why did the 2018 Netflix documentary not mention any of this?

A common response to this terrible past suffering has been that it was a product of the times; we looked at things differently then. But as Perizonius says, this is a cop-out. “I think people chose not to see what was happening. It was like an open secret.

“When you are talking about sex and children, back then it was a crime too. It’s also not a thing of the past. Trauma is not the past; trauma is now. It’s alive and it’s there every day.”

It has been a challenging journey for Perizonius too, putting the film together from Amsterdam “when I had totally stepped away from that whole world for years. The contributors were from all over the world so often I would start and end my day with Zoom calls about their sexual abuse. The only way I could switch off was to watch Ted Lasso and read Tintin in the bath.”

By phone, Perizonius calmly confronts the man who took Sargam’s virginity. He has apologised privately to Sargam — as some other adults have to now grown-up children — but it is not enough for the victims. She doorsteps another asking for answers. “I don’t understand how I remain so calm,” she reflects, “except perhaps it is easier when you are doing it on behalf of another victim.

“What I have found is that people were really severely hurt and damaged, and I think a lot of them have shown immense resilience to get acknowledgment of their abuse. A private apology from somebody who had sex with you or raped you when you were beneath the age of 16 is not enough. There is enormous motivation now to tell the story of what really happened to a lot of the children,” Perizonius says.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashrams were everywhere. Disciples were encouraged to have vasectomies and sterilisations. Many women who made those early decisions have been left without the choice to have children. Disciples also handed over often vast sums of money (as Sargam’s family did). The language spoken leading up to sex was the feeling of “shared energy” or “deep connection”.

Perizonius still has Post-it Notes from those days. “Beloved Chandra,” reads one from a German man in his thirties. “It is beautiful to be with you. I love to sleep with you. To feel your body.”

“I was 13,” she says in the film, “but it was ‘normal’. I don’t have any other words for it.”

In certain ashrams, some children were sexually active themselves by the age of ten. “One of our teachers in Pune came to Medina and it was common knowledge he was in a relationship with a ten-year-old,” Sargam explains. This same man — in charge of the “school” — assaulted her while giving her a piggyback. The young girls in Suffolk were encouraged to sit on a photocopier without underwear. The images of their genitals were circulated.

Binui, Sargam’s friend who also features in the film, recalls the girls having a gynaecologist at the Oregon ranch, but she tells the camera, “Nobody asked why we had so many yeast infections when we were children. Nobody took us aside and said, ‘Maybe you don’t need to have sex with all these people. Focus on something else.’ ”

After Sargam’s post on Facebook, she began to be contacted by women and men. One man breaks down in the film. He was encouraged to have sex at 14 by an adult woman.

That post led to Perizonius getting in touch as well, together with her friend Lily Dunn. Dunn is a Bristol-based academic and writer who, in 2022, published Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling, an exceptional memoir that attracted wide critical acclaim for its account of the negative consequences of her father joining the Osho cult. At Medina, which Dunn visited sporadically to see her father, she also witnessed a lot of sexual activity. While researching her book, she found that “the overriding message was that there was widespread and systemic neglect and abuse… with girls made to work 14-hour days in the kitchen with no school and pursued and abused by men who wanted to take their virginity”.

Dunn is the film’s consultant producer. “It evolved from my friendship with Maroesja,” she explains, “and from a deep-seated desire to listen to the voices, to follow the instinct that something was not right and an impulse to put right the wrongs. Throughout my teens and my young adult life, I lived with the feeling that I had been wronged by my father but also by the community in which he lived… I carried it around with me and it affected my behaviour, the choices I made, my life.”

The cult’s darker side was written about as early as 1985. The Oregon branch was under investigation for a number of serious crimes including a plot to kill state officials. It led to Rajneesh’s deportation to India and his subsequent name change.

“The thing that I noticed with all the contributors to this film,” Perizonius says, “is that we were all treated as adults, not children. We learnt to speak about our feelings from a young age but we missed a vital part of being a child. I wish I hadn’t been emotionally articulate at 14. I wish I hadn’t gone to a school playground in Amsterdam straight from the bed of an adult man, hearing normal children talking about their homework and their spots and thinking, ‘I’ve got much bigger problems than that.’ I wish I could have been silly.

“And so I guess that’s why I read Tintin now. I kind of deserve it.”

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