Bitter Memories: Former Hare Krishna children allege abuse
Newsday, Mar. 3, 2002
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By Tina Susman
STAFF WRITER

March 3, 2002

THE MOLESTATIONS began at age 8, and by 9, as her body began showing
the first curves of maturity, Melody Gedeon was being eyed as
marriage material. She was first raped at 13, she said, but instead
of sympathy she got anger from the community, which accused her of
being a temptress who had wrecked her assailant's marriage.

Through it all, say Gedeon and dozens of other children of Hare
Krishna followers, there were days locked in roach-infested rooms,
nights listening to the cries of other abused children and mornings
with their faces pressed into urine-soaked bedding by teachers angry
they had wet their pants.

Now 31, she still wets the bed sometimes and runs at the sight of a
cockroach.

"One roach in the room will chase me right out. It's horrible. It's
embarrassing," Gedeon says.

But she now knows who the president of the United States is, what the
Holocaust was, how to write a check, buy stamps, and pay a bill -
basics she says she was forced to teach herself after a childhood
spent in the isolation of boarding schools run by the Hare Krishna
movement.

Thirty-six years after the religious group's first U.S. temple opened
in lower Manhattan, Gedeon and 90 other former Krishna children,
including seven in New York State, are suing the organization for
what they say were years of physical and mental abuse in the schools
known as gurukulas. The suit, filed in October in Texas state court,
seeks $400 million in damages from the International Society for
Krishna Consciousness, or Iskcon, as the movement is known.

It's not the first time a religious organization has been accused of
violating its youngest followers.

Texas lawyer Windle Turley, whose firm is representing the
plaintiffs, won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in 1998 against the
Dallas Catholic Diocese for hiding sexual abuse by a priest, and the
Jehovah's Witnesses are the subject of at least two lawsuits by
adults who claim elders did nothing about reports of abuse within the
order.

In the heyday of the Krishna movement, from the mid-1960s to the
early 1980s, thousands of followers put their children in gurukulas
to indoctrinate them into the faith.

The movement's appeal was heightened by the Beatle George Harrison's
devotion to the Hindu-based religion, which decries materialism,
preaches spiritual over physical beauty, and whose regular services
feature hours of dancing and chanting and provide free vegetarian
feasts in incense-filled temples.

Iskcon has acknowledged abuses occurred in the boarding schools,
which no longer exist, and in 1998 it published a candid report by E.
Burke Rochford, a sociologist who had spent years studying the
movement and interviewing its followers.

His report, based on accounts from ex-pupils and teachers, described
the gurukula system as one "defined by neglect," where children were
abused "physically, psychologically and sexually" by adults with
neither the training nor the desire to care for children.

The report placed much of the blame on the movement's belief that
family life took time away from devotees' most important task,
sankirtan, or the distribution of Krishna literature and the
recruitment of donations and new members.

As a result, parents were urged to leave their children in gurukulas
to free them up for sankirtan, and those who failed at sankirtan were
relegated to working in the gurukulas, opening the door to
mistreatment of the children in their care, the report concluded.

Still, Iskcon denies abuse was as serious or widespread as the
lawsuit claims, and Iskcon's attorney, David Liberman, said he
doubted many of the allegations would stand up in court after so many
years. Iskcon has not yet responded to the lawsuit. However, Turley's
successful suit against the Dallas Catholic Diocese involved abuses
committed decades earlier, as do the suits pending against the
Jehovah's Witnesses and other Catholic dioceses.

The complaint includes page after page outlining gruesome acts said
to have been carried out by adult devotees, allegedly with the
encouragement of movement leaders seeking to crush resistance to
their beliefs. It alleges that children were regularly raped and
sexually molested, deprived of food and sleep, forced to eat moldy or
insect-ridden food, and made to eat their vomit when they threw up.
They were locked in dark, rodent-infested rooms, denied adequate
medical care, barred from parental contact and beaten until their
bones broke, according to the lawsuit which came about after ex-
pupils began commiserating about their experiences.

"The kids were always being abused. It was hellish," said Uddhava
Samanich, a college student in Utopia, Queens. As a child, he spent
several months at the upstate Lake Huntington gurukula, where he said
brutal beatings - including some with hot carrots - were common for
infractions such as talking to children of the opposite sex, missing
the pre-dawn wake-up calls, or simply skipping stones in a lake.

"I took a sweet off one of the altars once. I was hit for that. That
was pretty bad. You'd get really harsh treatment," said Samanich,
22. "It was extremist, the rules, the laws. They had a certain
schedule to follow, and if you didn't follow it, you were in trouble.
You could see the sleep deprivation in the kids' eyes, but if a kid
couldn't keep up, they'd start beating him."

Samanich considers himself relatively lucky. He spent only a few
months in the school when he was 5 before his mother, suspicious of
the system, withdrew him, and he was spared sexual abuse.

The unluckiest were children whose parents had no positions of
authority in the Hare Krishna hierarchy, said Dillon Hickey, whose
father was a high-ranking Krishna official and whose mother taught at
Lake Huntington.

"For one thing, the abusers had nothing to fear. Those children were
pretty much toys," said Hickey, now 31 and living in Florida, who was
in boarding schools from the ages of 4 to 16. Having powerful parents
within the organization, he said, "protected you from becoming a sex
slave, from being raped constantly."

For Gedeon, who entered a boarding school at 7, problems began when
she was 8 and was molested by a male devotee.

"I went to a teacher and told her this guy had put his hand up my
sari and into my underwear. She told me it was my fault, that
something inside me must have incited him," Gedeon said. When she was
9, Gedeon said church elders said she should prepare for marriage
because she was growing breasts. She was never married off, but she
said she was raped for the first time at 13 by a 27-year-old married
devotee.

"When everyone found out this married man was taking me, they
immediately came to me and said 'How dare you! You broke up their
marriage!'" said Gedeon, who now lives in Miami Beach, Fla. "Nobody
asked me if I was OK, not even my mother. The brainwashing was so
deep, you just didn't question anything."

Even the pupils who were spared sexual abuse say they lived with day-
to-day physical and mental battery that included wake-up calls as
early as 2:30 a.m. to recite hours of prayers, rules that banned most
music, books, television, newspapers, socializing with other children
and brutal beatings for those who violated the codes. Lessons
consisted primarily of memorizing Krishna's teachings, with subjects
such as history and geography virtually ignored, they said.

In the movement's desire to maintain its isolation, Hickey said,
adult devotees resisted anything requiring contact with the outside
world, including calling an ambulance when at 5 years old he fell
into a vat of boiling milk, or when at age 16 he fell from a tree
house. Hickey blames the half-hour ride along bumpy roads to the
emergency room, rather than the fall itself, for leaving him
paralyzed from the neck down and believes his injuries could have
been lessened had he not been jostled so much after the fall.

"The abuse was from the moment you woke up to the moment you closed
your eyes," said Hickey, who never returned to the Hare Krishnas
after months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers.

Most plaintiffs make no secret of their desire to punish the
movement, which they say destroyed their family ties and isolated
them so thoroughly as to render many of them social misfits incapable
of holding jobs or forming relationships.

Most say they are estranged from their parents, and those who are not
remain at odds with them over the lawsuit. Samanich shares a house
with his father, Anthony Samanich, who prefers to go by his Krishna
name, Tarun Krishna Das, and who makes clear he is skeptical about
the suit's allegations. If abuse was going on, his son never
mentioned it in the months he was in the gurukula, the elder Samanich
said.

"Like all the religions, there was some abuse, but it was not a
systematic thing," he said, expressing concern that the misdeeds of a
few could bring down a religion to which he remains devoted.

Uddhava Samanich's sister, however, confirmed her brother's accounts
of unreasonable and brutal discipline. While she is not a plaintiff
and said she herself was spared beatings, Adilila Samanich, 23, said
she often saw her brother and other children being "smacked" in the
face for minor infractions, or simply for crying, and once watched a
teacher pressing burning incense into a girl's hand as punishment for
talking back.

Iskcon says the amount Turley seeks for his clients would wipe out
the entire organization, and in February announced that several
temples and defendants named in the suit would file for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection.

Liberman said the aim is to avoid spending millions on litigation so
the movement can later compensate individuals who prove abuse. Since
1998, Iskcon has established a panel to investigate allegations of
abuse and a tribunal system to hear cases, and says it has committed
more than $1 million to assist abuse victims and to fund an Office of
Child Protection.

In the minds of devotees still committed to the organization, who are
estimated to number about 1 million worldwide and 100,000 in the
United States and Canada, those actions prove the movement's
commitment to compensate victims, although no tribunals have been
conducted so far.

Putting the Krishnas out of business with a lawsuit would punish the
many good people in the religion and goes against the anti-
materialistic, loving nature that Krishna preaches, said Joshua
Greene, a public relations executive from Old Westbury who became
intrigued by the movement in 1969, when he was a 19-year-old student
at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Thirty-three years later, Greene is a regular at Sunday evening
services at the Freeport temple, a rambling, two-story brick house on
a well-traveled avenue that attracts dozens of followers.

"These young people were abused terribly," said Greene, whose own son
attended Krishna schools in France and was not abused. "Who can blame
them for wanting some retribution, but is it the right thing to do?"

According to the plaintiffs, it's the only thing to do. Not only do
they want money to pay for counseling to deal with the past, they say
they want to expose their tormentors and send a message to other
religious organizations that might be harboring abusers.

"I'm hoping to establish what happened as a historical fact, so it
doesn't get retold in a totally false way and forgotten about,"
Hickey said. "I'm hoping to bring out awareness in society as to what
these cults are about, and the kind of thinking that goes on in them.
And besides that, I want revenge."
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.

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More about Hare Krishna:
http://www.gospelcom.net/apologeticsindex/i12.html