The Shocking Charges Against Hare Krishnas Three Women Tell GLAMOUR Their Chilling Stories of Abuse--p.240.

Entertainment Editors

October issue on newsstands Sept. 11, 2001

NEW YORK--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--Sept. 10, 2001

In 1981, three-year old Ananda Tiller was tied to a chair while a man forced his swollen penis into her mouth. The incident Tiller described to Glamour allegedly took place while she was living in a gurukula--one of the 11 ashram-based boarding schools across the nation for children whose parents were members of the Hare Krishna religious sect.

Although she was removed from the gurukula at age 10, Tiller's physical scarring may result in her needing a partial hysterectomy, while her emotional scarring continues to haunt her. "One man made me perform oral sex, then spit on me to purify himself because I'd made him sin," Tiller recalls.

Tiller and approximately 100 others who claim they have suffered at the hands of the Krishnas have joined a $400 million lawsuit against the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the founding organization of the Hare Krishnas, which currently has an estimated one million members worldwide. Filed in June 2000, the lawsuit alleges that Hare Krishna children were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused at many of the 11 gurukulas across the US, primarily between the years 1972 to 1990. Specific charges range from rape to beatings to starvation.

"Girls were married off as young as 12 to men about three times their age," says Nori J. Muster, author of Betrayal of the Spirit (University of Illinois Press), an autobiography of her years as a Krishna. "Since Krishna authorities often allowed men to hit their wives for misbehavior, a girl was at the mercy of her husband," adds Muster.

Hare Krishna founding guru Prabhupada encouraged parents to leave their children in the sect's gurukulas so that the parents could devote themselves to spreading the Krishna word and raising money for the movement. "They believed that sending their children away was best for the children as well as for the group," explains Rick Ross, a cult expert in Jersey City, New Jersey.

At three-years old while living in the Dallas gurukula, Vilasini Silverman was forced daily to wake up at 4 A.M., take cold showers, chant and pray for hours before breakfast, and eat bug-infested meals on the floor. Years later after leaving the gurukula only to rejoin in 1982, Silverman was raped at the age of 13 by a devotee at a Krishna festival. The man was never charged with the crime--in fact Silverman was made to feel guilty when teachers accused her of luring the man to have sex, and was ultimately punished.

Druta-karma Dasa, a member of the Los Angeles Krishna chapter responds, "if men are put together with women in certain situations, they might do things they might not otherwise do."

Similar to Silverman, Melody Romero-Gedeon experienced abuse and was blamed for provoking men like a prostitute. "When I confided in my teacher that a devotee put his hand inside my underwear, she told me I incited him by acting like a prostitute," she recalls. Today, Romero-Gedeon still fears the dark, as a result of being forced to sleep in a garage.