A British woman who was raised in the sickening ‘Sannyasin’ sex-cult led by Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh – where she was allegedly abused and raped multiple times as a child – has revealed her hell amid the upcoming release of a documentary telling her story.
In an interview with The Times, Prem Sargam, 54, spoke of the rampant sexual abuse she endured from the age of six across the three Sannyasin communities – or ‘ashrams’– she grew up in.
Sargam detailed how Rajneesh’s Sannyasin spiritual movement her parents joined when she was a young child believed children should regularly watch sex and that girls going through puberty should be guided by adult men on their sexual journeys.
‘It was considered good for the children to be exposed to sexuality,’ she told The Times, explaining how watching grown-ups having sex was a regular occurrence for her.
Sargam began witnessing these very public displays of sex at the age of six, when her family relocated from their home in Devon to a Sannyasin commune in Prune, India after her father, who had become disillusioned with his job, sought enlightenment from Rajneesh – a bearded guru and mystic whose New Age sex cult was second to none in its embrace of ‘free love’.
But the movement also believed children were obstructions to their parents’ sexual journeys.
This meant Sargam lived away from her mother and father in the children’s quarters, where she received no education and would work 12 hours a day in the kitchen.
But it was only a year after her arrival to India that Sargam’s innocence was taken from her.
At just the age of seven, Sargam was groomed by an adult man, who would make her follow him around ‘like a little dog’ and bribe her with Swiss chocolate.
‘It was only at 16 that I understood what had happened’, she said.
The disgusting sexual abuse on children in Rajneesh’s communes is explored in the upcoming ‘Children of the Cult’ documentary. The film will tell the story of three British women, including Sargam, who escaped the cult’s clutches.
And while the documentary will see her bravely speaking about her abuse, Sargam only opened up about her past three years ago on Facebook, when she wrote an open letter to her abuser.
In it, she detailed how ‘he asked me to take my knickers off, he said he was going to ‘introduce me to sex’, that I should lie back on the bed and that [is] when he performed a sexual act on me for the first time’, she wrote on the social platform in September, 2021.
‘I was scared and just didn’t know what to do… my body froze in fear and this sick feeling came over me. This is not right, or maybe this is what adults do to children, maybe this is normal? But if it is normal why does it feel so wrong and I can’t move my body?’
‘Even in my [seven]-year-old mind, I thought what a strange thing to be doing. I was already becoming very mentally and emotionally confused.’
Sargam also told The Times that between the ages of seven and 11, she and her friends were expected to perform different sexual acts on grown men who lived in the commune.
She would then be sent to the Medina ashram in Suffolk alone to attend a ‘boarding school’ programme, where the abuse continued. By the age of 12, she had relocated to the US to be with her mother, who was working in an ashram in Oregon.
There, she was raped by a man who had also groomed her.
‘I was then raped 50 times by different men’, she told The Times, adding: ‘Him stealing my virginity at 12 opened the door for the other 50 men, pretty much’.
Despite the abuse hundreds of young children were subjected to in Rajneesh’s global communes, little has been documented about it until now.
According to The Times, there was just one investigation by US child protection services into the Oregon cult.
Even when Netflix released a widely successful documentary about the cult’s Oregon branch in 2018 called ‘Wild Wild Country’, there was no mention of the children’s experiences of abuse and neglect.
But by speaking up, survivors like Sargam are encouraging others to come forward, she said.
The 2018 Netflix documentary does, however, give further insight into what life was like in the free-love cult.
Rajneesh’s unorthodox meditation techniques and sheer outrageousness attracted tens of thousands of followers from all over the world, including celebrities such as British journalist Bernard Levin and London-born film star Terence Stamp.
A philosophy lecturer who, in 1970, founded a spiritual movement and commune in Pune, near Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Rajneesh’s teachings were a bizarre mixture of pop psychology, ancient Indian wisdom, capitalism, sexual permissiveness and dirty jokes that he gleaned from the pages of Playboy magazine.
Rajneesh argued that monogamous marriage was unnatural and advocated unrestricted promiscuity, including partner-swapping, from the age of 14.
In India, he was known as the ‘Sex Guru’, while in the US he was dubbed the ‘Rolls-Royce Guru’ given the fact that he owned 93 of the luxury cars.
Just like Sargam’s parents, his followers were often highly educated professionals ready to reject the structures of middle-class convention and seek enlightenment first in India and later at communes in Oregon, Cologne and Suffolk.
Some left spouses and children, while others donated everything they had to the cult.
But it was the group’s attempt to build a $100 million utopian city in a remote corner of the northwestern state of Oregon that became its downfall in the Eighties.
Rajneesh’s move to Oregon in 1981 was prompted by an investigation by the Indian authorities over immigration fraud, tax evasion and drug smuggling. The group purchased a 64,000-acre ranch near the tiny settlement of Antelope, and the 7,000 disciples who moved in swamped the 50-strong resident Bible-bashing population.
Construction began on a self-sustaining Rajneesh city intended for 50,000 residents, with scores of houses, shops, restaurants and even an airport built, but he faced strong opposition from local politicians who believed he was leading a dangerous cult.
In 1985, he asked authorities to investigate his personal secretary Ma Anand Sheela and her supporters for a number of crimes, including a mass food-poisoning attack intended to influence the county elections, an aborted assassination plot on attorney Charles H. Turner as well as the attempted murder of the guru’s physician.
Sheela was also accused of embezzling $55 million in funds and bugging his quarters.
This led the FBI to discover 10,000 tape recordings from her mass bugging operation, plus an arsenal of unregistered guns.
As they questioned disciples, the Feds discovered even more devilish plots.
In a bid to incapacitate non-Rajneesh- supporting voters in the local area, the Rajneeshis had tried to poison the water supply of the nearest large town, and also contaminated food on display at restaurants.
This led to Sheela’s arrest. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison but only served 29 months behind bars before being released and deported.
Three other disciples were jailed.
Meanwhile, Rajneesh was charged with immigration fraud, which saw him get deported back to Pune, where he died aged 58 of heart failure in 1998.
Today, there are still small numbers of Rajneeshi devotees around the world.