Dec 29, 2013

Rape complaint Case against Girish Chandra Varma only after corroborating evidence

TNN | Dec 29, 2013

BHOPAL: A day after recording statement of Girish Chandra Varma, chairman of Maharishi Vidya Mandir schools group in a nine-month old complaint of rape against him lodged by a school teacher, the police on Saturday said their investigation continues and a case against Varma would be registered only after corroborating allegations.

Meanwhile, the complainant and her family alleged that the way Varma was treated when he turned up to record his statement at the police station underlines that police do not want a fair investigation in case.

The initial complaint against Varma was lodged in the month of March. Months after, Varma turned up to record his statement before police on Friday.

Officials said Varma's statement was recorded at length and questions were posed on him based on charges leveled by the complainant. The police said Varma has been asked not to leave the country without prior intimation.

Complainant's husband on Saturday came out with the pictures of Narayan Sai, son of controversial godman Asaram, with Varma and reiterated that the two are no different in many terms.

The complainant and her husband alleged that they did not have any option left but to commit suicide in case they do not get justice. The complainant highlighted how her family is being troubled and alleged police have directed her 90-year-old father-in-law to appear before investigating official.

Meanwhile, Varma is learnt to have told the police that the complainant and her husband wanted to blackmail him and rape charges against him are untrue.

Police have meanwhile said that they would register a case only if the leveled charges are substantiated by proofs and added they are yet to come across any such fact in the investigations done so far.

Dec 17, 2013

ICSA update on Castlewood Lawsuits

December 17, 2013

Two of the four lawsuits filed against the Castlewood Treatment Center, a Ballwin, Missouri eating-disorder clinic accused of implanting patients with false memories of ritualistic abuse have now been resolved out of court. All four of the former Castlewood patients in the suits claimed they were given false memories of past abuse, Two of the patients claim the false memories involved satanic rituals. The Castlewood Treatment Center, which has denied its therapists created false memories or used hypnosis, released a statement confirming that two of the four cases had been resolved.

http://www.castlewoodvictimsunite.org/#!ICSA-update-on-Castlewood-Lawsuits/c1nni/56ba3e1a0cf2fb0f6ff6da12

Dec 6, 2013

Legion of Christ unveils measures to respond to sex abuse by members



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The Legion of Christ, a religious order of priests still dealing with the fallout from revelations of sexual abuse by its disgraced founder, announced Thursday that a recent investigation has uncovered "significant evidence of sexual abuse" by another Legion official who served as the order's novice master at its Cheshire, Conn., seminary.
At the same time, the order issued a summary of actions it has taken in addressing other cases of alleged sexual abuse by its priests, as well as a long letter from Fr. Sylvester Heereman, the order's acting general director, detailing the Legion's approach to dealing with the issue of sexual abuse.
The announcements come just ahead of an extraordinary general chapter at which the Legion will elect new leaders and approve a new constitution. The general chapter is to open in Rome Jan. 8 and is expected to run about a month.
In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Cardinal Velasio De Paolis to govern the order as it and Regnum Christi, its lay branch, underwent reform and reorganization. The January general chapter is the culmination of that reformation processes.
Fr. William Izquierdo was accused of sexual abuse of a minor while serving as novice master, a position he held from 1982 to 1994. Fr. Luis Garza, territorial director of the Legion for North America, said he received the accusation in July 2012.
"In addition to immediately reporting to local authorities, the Legion commissioned Praesidium Inc., to provide a thorough, independent investigation" that concluded in August, Garza said. In a letter addressed to all Legionaries in North American, he said the investigation "revealed significant evidence of sexual abuse." The findings were analyzed in October by the Legion's North American Review Board.
Praesidium is a Texas-based firm that specializes in what it calls "abuse risk management." It is the company that the U.S. Conference of Major Superiors of Men recommends to its members needing assistance with matters of sex abuse.
The information volunteered about Izquierdo is evidence of a degree of transparency new to the Legion, which operated with great secrecy and for years defended its founder, Fr. Marciel Maciel Degollado, against an increasing chorus of accusations of sexual abuse by former seminarians and priests of the order.
Maciel, a favorite of the late Pope John Paul II, who celebrated the native of Mexico as exemplary of the priestly vocation and, on one occasion, as "an efficacious guide to youth," denied any wrongdoing. He had powerful friends in the Vatican and among the Curia who protected him from investigation and church juridical processes.
It was only at the end of John Paul's life and in the early months of Benedict XVI's tenure that a Vatican investigation gathered evidence confirming the extent of his abusive behavior. Maciel was disciplined in 2006 and died two years later.
Since then, the order has been in a kind of receivership and has been restructured under Vatican supervision.
In his letter, Garza said the Legion has received another allegation against the 85-year-old Izquierdo, who has been in poor health and was "diagnosed with an advanced state of dementia." Izquierdo has not exercised ministry since 2008, according to Garza, and he "is and was unable to respond to questions about the allegations." Garza said the second allegation is under investigation and that the accused priest is being moved to an assisted living facility.
"Although he could not participate in the investigation," Garza wrote, "after reviewing the information, we have no reason to doubt that sexual abuse with a minor actually occurred. We have also informed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith."
The summary of actions taken states that 35 Legion priests have been accused of sexual abuse of minors. Of those, 14 have been acquitted as having engaged in "imprudent behavior" or because the accusations were unfounded; nine have been found guilty, including Maciel; two have been "ineligible for canonical investigation when the allegation was presented"; and 10 are still under review. The two were ineligible because they had already left the priesthood, according to the order. The imprudent behavior was determined not to be of a criminal nature, the order said.
Of the nine who were found guilty, two were laicized and "seven had sanctions imposed on their life and ministry," according to Heereman.
Six Legion superiors, including Maciel, were accused of sexually abusing adults under their authority, according to the summary. Of those, three were acquitted and "one freely accepted restrictions on ministry as a precaution"; and three, including Maciel, were found guilty.
The release notes that the numbers mean less than 1 percent of the 1,133 priests ordained in the history of the congregation have been found guilty of sexual abuse.
In his letter, Heereman said the announcement about Izquierdo "confronts us with the painful and horrifying reality of sexual abuse of minors by members of our congregation."
In a section on understanding "the seriousness of sexual abuse and the suffering of victims," he thanks "those who have broken the silence that usually surrounds sexual abuse because of the shame and suffering that accompany it. Their voices have prompted us to seek the truth about what happened in order to help the victims and to renew our determination to prevent this from happening in the future."
The letter also notes that "many of us in the Legion maintained the founders innocence," a view that changed, he said, as "undeniable evidence of aspects of his hidden life began to come to light."
In January 2011, a pontifical delegate assigned to oversee restructuring of the Legion, established an Outreach Commission to deal with Maciel's victims if they wished to contact the order. Of those who did contact the commission, proposals were developed for "how the Legion could help them overcome their wounds and face the difficulties of their present life."
All of the cases have been closed, Heereman said, and a "conclusive report" will be submitted to the general chapter of the order which will open next month.

[Tom Roberts is NCR editor at large. His email address is troberts@ncronline.org.]

The Death Dealer

Verge
Matt Stroud
December 4, 2013

‘Secret' guru James Arthur Ray led three people to their deaths... and now he's at it again
When James Arthur Ray lifted the heavy tarp door and beckoned his devotees into a wood-frame dome, they obeyed. Tall and confident, Ray watched them enter one by one, more than 50 of them. Stooping under the low ceiling, they crowded into the dark, windowless space and sat in two tight rings around a pit filled with heated stones.
Many had spent more than $10,000 to be there, in what Ray called his “sweat lodge.” It culminated five days with the self-proclaimed “catalyst for personal transformation” at Angel Valley Spiritual Retreat, a ranch near Sedona, Arizona. During his “Spiritual Warrior” program, he’d asked participants to shave their heads, spend 36 hours in the desert meditating without food or water, and play the “Samurai Game,” in which a white-robed Ray, playing “God,” declared people dead, forcing them to remain motionless on the ground.
Before they entered the dome, he warned them his final test was a symbolic death. "You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you are not going to die," he said, according to several attendees. Around 2:30PM on October 8th, 2009, he lowered the tarp, closing off the only source of light and oxygen. The ceremony began.

Russian Orthodox Church Urges Inquiry Into Religious Cult

RIA Novosti
December 2, 2013
A spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church called for an inquiry Monday into the activities of a Russian sect that he says “imitates Orthodoxy.”
The unregistered Kuzya-the-God religious group, which experts say bears the hallmarks of a totalitarian sect, gained notoriety last week after its members allegedly attacked a Russian TV crew that was investigating its activities. An adherent of the group reportedly sprayed an unknown chemical on the team of journalists, inflicting chemical burns on some of them and damaging video equipment.
“Law enforcement agencies and society in general should look most carefully into how legitimate this group’s actions are: whether fraud, deception and the use of force against followers have taken place, and as what [type of offense] the outrageous attack on the TV crew and the use of an unknown chemical substance against it should be qualified,” said Vsevolod Chaplin, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church’s press service.
According to the Pravoslavie i Mir religious news portal, the so-called Kuzya-the-God sect was founded by 36-year-old Andrei Popov, who calls himself Kuzya in honor of his late parrot. His followers believe that Kuzya is the reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.
“The person who heads it has styled himself as a god on numerous occasions, and before that he posed as an Orthodox priest and even a bishop,” Chaplin said. “We have said many times that this person is not a priest of the canonical Orthodox Church, and so he should be regarded as an impostor by any Orthodox Christian.”
The Russian Orthodox Church launched a crackdown on the sect when it discovered that Kuzya-the-God followers, pretending to be Orthodox monks and priests, were collecting thousands of dollars in donations at Orthodox fairs.
In 2011, the Church established a commission to oversee the numerous religious fairs that have become increasingly popular in Russia. According to the commission, Kuzya-the-God followers were collecting millions of rubles in profit at fairs on a daily basis.
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131202/185219376/Russian-Orthodox-Church-Urges-Inquiry-Into-Religious-Cult.html

Yoga guru Bikram Choudhury 'raped students in cult-like training'

Telegraph
Raf Sanchez
Bikram Choudhury, the founder of the Bikram school of hot yoga, told a student "I need to spiritually enlighten you" as he raped her, according to one of a blizzard of lawsuits against him
December 5, 2013
The 67-year-old Indian yoga master is being sued by five different women in the California courts, alleging that he used his guru status to lure in victims and then "crush anyone who speaks against him".
Mr Choudhury's method of Bikram Yoga, practiced at 105F (41C) heat, has become wildly popular in Britain and the US and its celebrity devotees include Jennifer Aniston, Lady Gaga and David Beckham.
Yet court documents describe a cult-like atmosphere where the charismatic Mr Choudhury would tell young women training to be instructors they had been "touched by God" before forcing himself upon them.
He "used his status as a guru to identify and victimise the most vulnerable women from among his flock, grooming them, breaking down barriers, and ultimately assaulting them when they were at their most physically, emotionally, or financially vulnerable," according to court papers.
The lawsuits - which contains allegations of rape, sexual battery, fraud and false imprisonment - are also levelled against 25 unnamed members of Mr Choudhury's inner circle who allegedly knew of his behaviour "yet did nothing to prevent this from happening".
Mr Choudhury has previously denied the charges but neither he nor his staff responded to a request for comment.
The Calcutta native founded the Bikram Yoga system in the early 1970s and is practiced by millions across the world, generating a fortune that Mr Choudhury has turned towards Rolexes and Rolls Royces.
Among his fleet of cars is a Royal Daimler he said once belonged to the Howard Hughes, the reclusive millionaire, and includes a toilet in the back seat.
But his yoga empire is now under siege in the Los Angeles courts, where four former students and his ex-legal advisor are pursuing him.
One woman, named only as Jane Doe 2 in court documents, said she enrolled in a $13,000, nine-week instructor training course taught by Mr Choudhury, where he insisted students wear "tight, skimpy clothing" and banned them from having green clothes.
Students were allegedly taught that Bikram Yoga could "cure cancer" and "enable practitioners to live to be 100 years old" and that Mr Choudhury "is on the same level as Jesus Christ or the Buddha".
Mr Choudhury allegedly singled out Jane Doe 2 among his students, telling her: "You will be greater than Mother Teresa, but you have to follow me."
On the night of November 18, 2010, Ms Doe alleges that the guru invited her to come to his room to discuss a job offer at his headquarters.
Moments before raping her, Mr Choudhury said: "I need to spiritually enlighten you. In order to do that, we need to become one," according to court documents.
Larissa Anderson, another of the plaintiffs, claimed she "found herself drawn into a cult and made a victim of gender violence".
Ms Anderson claims that Mr Choudhury sexually assaulted her on Halloween, 2011, and "subsequently retaliated against...her business as a result of refusing his advances".
The Bikram Yoga school is tightly-controlled and has filed lawsuits against yoga studios that it believes are copying its methods.
Ms Anderson alleges that after she resisted him, Mr Choudhury refused to endorse her studio or allow it be listed as an official Bikram Yoga practice, causing damage to her business.
In June, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, Mr Choudhury's former legal advisor filed suit against him, saying he presided over "a hyper-sexualised, offensive and degrading environment for women".
She alleged he was ordered not to investigate claims that a student had been raped during one of the teacher-training courses.
During a separate investigation of alleged sexual assault by male trainers, Mr Choudhury allegedly told her "those boys didn't do nothing to that stupid girl".
Mr Choudhury released a statement in March in response to one of the first lawsuits, saying he was "disappointed by the false charges" but would not comment further.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10498946/Yoga-guru-Bikram-Choudhury-raped-students-in-cult-like-training.html

How Chairman Mao of Brixton built his sect of 'slaves’

Telegraph
Patrick Sawer, Claire Duffin and Robert Mendick

The full story of 'Comrade Bala' and the women of the south London Maoist cult he held in his thrall can now be told
December 1, 2013
They were the brightest of girls with the brightest of futures. But for three decades, the women allegedly lived in the fearful, dark shadows.
They were, according to police, the victims of terrible psychological and physical abuse; effectively kept as slaves and held against their will as members of an extremist, political cult.
The Telegraph can now piece together how Aravindan Balakrishnan – a disciple of Chairman Mao, the late Chinese communist leader, and known as Comrade Bala to his devotees – ran a community so secret that nobody realised that three women, apparently free to come and go at will, were apparently shackled in all that time to their mercurial leader by “invisible handcuffs”.
Josephine Herivel, now aged 57, was one of those women. She was a brilliant young violinist, whose eminent father had been instrumental in breaking the Nazi’s Enigma wartime code at Bletchley Park.
But Miss Herivel became cut off from her family in the mid-1970s some time after arriving in London from her native Belfast, where her father was a lecturer at Queen’s University. By the time he died, two years ago, she had been left out of the family will while his obituaries made mention of just two daughters, not three.
Aishah Wahab, 69, also had a glittering career ahead. She had come to London from her native Malaysia as long ago as 1967 after winning a scholarship to study in London. She, too, apparently fell under Comrade Bala’s spell and rapidly lost touch with her family.
The third woman apparently rescued by police and anti-slavery charity workers is Rosie Davies. She is 30, half the age of the other two. It is not clear who her father is but she spent her life under the spell of the Maoist cult. Her mother, Sian Davies, had been educated first at Cheltenham Ladies College before obtaining a law degree. Sian was a postgraduate student at the LSE when she, too, first encountered Comrade Bala.
When Rosie was just 14, her mother died in mysterious circumstances, as the result of a fall from a second floor bathroom window on Christmas Eve 1996. She was living at one of the commune’s houses, owned by the local council, in Herne Hill, south London.
For seven months, Sian Davies lay in a coma at a London hospital. Yet when her family inquired as to her whereabouts, they were told Sian had gone travelling in to India but that she sent her love. When she died of her injuries, the authorities never bothered to inquire about her daughter, Rosie, left behind.
Comrade Bala appears to be the charismatic force that kept the commune together, long after the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s and 1970s had died away.
Now aged 73, he was arrested and subsequently bailed on suspicion of being involved in forced labour and slavery following the joint investigation by the Metropolitan Police and an anti-slavery group, Freedom Charity. Balakrishnan’s wife Chanda, 67, was also arrested and bailed.
Police had been called in after a tip-off to the charity. It is thought Miss Herivel had made the telephone call that was to trigger the ensuing furore.
Until two weeks ago, Balakrishnan had gone largely unnoticed for years. He had come to Britain in 1963 at the age of 23 on a British Council scholarship from Singapore and enrolled at the LSE, where Ralph Miliband – father of Ed Miliband, the Labour Party leader – and then darling of British socialism, was star lecturer.
The LSE was the place to be for the far left and Balakrishnan threw himself into the scene almost immediately, becoming involved in Communist protest groups, reacting to the 'oppressive’ governments back in south-east Asia.
Revolution was in the air and Balakrishnan was beating the Chairman Mao drum. Conferences would begin with a clenched fist salute to the Chinese revolutionary leader.
“Balakrishnan was charismatic and dominant,” recalled David Vipond, a communist at the time who met Balakrishnan at meetings, “There was money, they [the leadership] ate well. Balakrishnan did not see himself as being one of the 'plebs’. He saw himself as a big shot.”
From its foundation in 1968, Balakrishnan was a senior member in the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and already was demonstrating “cultish” behaviour. Mr Vipond told The Telegraph: “We were made to feel as though we were not up to scratch. We only had three to four hours sleep a night, but if you missed a meeting, and said 'I’m knackered, I overslept’ it was because of your bourgeois, imperialist state of mind.
“That is how they kept people down, so you could not leave. They told you that you were following your self interest and letting down the people.”
In October 1971, Balakrishnan married his comrade in the struggle, Chanda Pattni, a 25-year-old Tanzanian history student of Indian origin whom he had met in London. The couple set up home first in north London before moving south of the river a year later.
They established up a bookshop in Brixton called The Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. It was unmissable, even among the four far-left bookshops Brixton then boasted, with its windows covered in Chinese Communist flags and the inside with giant Mao posters, one of them 20ft high.
Comrade Bala and his followers would parade up and down with their Mao red books and Mao badges; even going to the market for food was a “political act”.
In 1974, Balakrishnan was expelled from the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) for breaching party discipline for “splittist activities” – In other words, Balakrishnan wanted to go his own way. In return, he published a leaflet through his Workers’ Institute labelling his old party “fascists”.
It may have been little wonder they split. By now, Balakrishnan was preaching to his hundred or so followers that the Chinese Liberation Army was going to invade the “capitalist imperialist West” and bring a peasants’ revolution.
The job of his followers was to get ready for it, and manning the bookshop was the main method of preparation. The forces of the West were everywhere. When a fire engine drove past a visitor to the bookshop was told it was evidence of “psychological warfare”. “The sirens weren’t even on,” a visitor, then a teenager but now in his mid-50s, told The Sunday Telegraph.
Sian Davies is thought to have come on the scene in 1973. She had a boyfriend at the time but – increasingly drawn into the world of the Maoist commune – she withdrew from both him and her family. Eventually, having graduated from LSE in 1975, there was virtually no contact at all.
Miss Wahab was already thought to be a member of the group by then. Last week, her sister, Kamar Mahtum, 73, saw her for the first time at a secret meeting arranged by police and charity workers. Mrs Mahtum, who had flown to London from Malaysia for the highly charged reunion, had not seen her sister since 1967. They kept in touch at first but within a few years all letters home had dried up. The revolutionary commune had led Miss Wahab to cut all ties.
Josephine Herivel – known as Josie – had, like the other two women, come to London to study but soon disappeared into Balakrishnan’s paranoid and delusional world, cut off from reality. She had won the last of her prizes for her musicianship in her native Belfast in 1974 but soon after broke off contact with her family.
When the Queen came to Brixton for her Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977, the route went past the bookshop; the crowds cheered outside, but the Maoists stayed inside, clutching their Red Books.
The same year, the Singaporean authorities claimed that Balakrishnan and others, many of them former Singaporean students he had associated with in London, were plotting to overthrow Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s leader. Balakrishnan was stripped of his citizenship, which means it will now be impossible to deport him there. It is not known if he has a passport for any other country.
During the 1970s, Balakrishnan and his wife had been arrested eight times for a variety of offences. He and his associates were also jailed. On one occasion in 1976, two “comrades”, a Malaysian engineering graduate and the other a Tube worker from Barbados, were sentenced to 12 months’ in Brixton jail for assaulting prison officers as they visited Balakrishnan in Brixton prison. Why he was there was not known, but their cause was not helped by their chants of “long live Chairman Mao” from the dock.
A raid in 1978 was a turning point however. The bookshop was shut down; authorities had had enough. The group disintegrated, several of them deported.
“I did wonder what had happened to them when they suddenly disappeared at the end of the 70s,” recalled Paul Flewers, 58, a member at the time of a rival Left-wing grouping. “I suspect that after the police raided the bookshop several of them were deported as illegal aliens and Balakrishnan decided they had to go undercover.”
Mr Flewers added: "The rest of the left treated them as a joke. We'd come across them handing out Mao leaflet in Brixton town centre and have a good laugh because they were so insane - they were politically certifiable, talking about peasant revolution in a country like Britain."
While others may have left, the three women stuck with Balakrishnan. The Telegraph has established this because in September 1978 Miss Herivel, Miss Wahab and Miss Davies – and three other women – went on trial at Inner London Crown Court accused of obstructing and assaulting the police.
They each faced 13 charges and all were found guilty but given conditional discharges, except Miss Davies, whose 14 days in prison on remand cancelled out her jail sentence.
The end of the court case marked a change in tone. Comrade Bala and his followers largely disappeared into the shadows, popping up to publish a fresh defence of Mao in 1984, just as China’s leaders turned towards capitalism.
Rose Davies had been born a year earlier but it was to be a strange childhood in a “commune” made up of her mother, Balakrishnan, who may or may not be her father, his wife, and the two other women.
Despite her birth being registered officially, she was, it appears, never sent to school, and even as the group moved from house to house nobody seemed to ask why she was not being educated.
For the next 13 years or so, little is known about the group. There are reports a concerned neighbour contacted Lambeth council over the teenage girl who had never gone to school. Then, Balakrishnan’s world exploded again when Miss Davies fell out of an upstairs bathroom window at the council-owned house where the collective was living, suffering a broken neck. She was 44 at the time.
Seven months later she died at King’s College Hospital, in Lambeth, with her family told by Balakrishnan or his followers that she was “travelling in India” and sent her love.
At the inquest into her death, Selena Lynch, the coroner for Southwark, strongly criticised the remaining members of the collective, saying that she could not understand how Miss Davies had come to fall out of the window.
She said: “I wanted to call everyone in the house as we had a mystery, there’s no other way of describing it. I still find it hard to know how she fell out of the window, indeed what was she doing opening the window at that cold time of year.”
At the hearing, the other members of the group who gave evidence all claimed that Miss Davies had fallen while taking a bath and claimed she had pleaded with them not to tell her family about the accident in order not to upset them.
Television footage of Balakrishnan and the women taken during an ITN news documentary on Miss Davies’s death give us the only images of the group.
For the next 14 years, they disappeared again until the extraordinary events sparked by Miss Herivel’s plaintive cry for help.
But even now it’s not clear just what’s gone on. Nor what even the crime, or crimes, might be.
Miss Wahab’s sister has been able to give the world only the merest glimpse of life behind closed doors, most latterly at 1C Peckford Place in Brixton, the commune’s most recent address.
After her meeting with her sister, Mrs Mahtum told The Telegraph that her sister appeared in good spirits. They spoke in English rather than Malay and Miss Wahab did not discuss the conditions in which she and the other rescued women had been living, nor their alleged captors. “When I asked her about what had gone on she just clammed up,” said Mrs Mahtum, “The only thing she wanted me to perceive is that she is happy. She told me: 'I have got friends here, I work here. I do important work here’, but she could not reveal what she did.
“Each time she said something that made me smile she would say: 'Oh, I love your smile. Don’t frown, laugh, smile.”
Mrs Mahtum said her instinct had been to reach out and help her little sister, but Miss Wahab insisted she had never been lonely in London and had people who looked out for her. “Aishah said, 'I’ve got enough’, 'my friends feed me’, 'my friends love me, I love them, they help me out’.”
Mrs Mahtum added: “When she said that I felt that she was trying to tell me … that even without us, she can survive, as she has been for the last 40 years. We’re nothing that important. I felt a lot of disappointment.”
The other two women will presumably be having meetings with their families too. What they tell them and police will have a bearing, it is clear, on what course the police investigation now takes. Comrade Bala held the women under his thrall for three decades and more. It was a spell only broken – after many missed opportunities – by the intervention of the authorities he hated.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10486213/How-Chairman-Mao-of-Brixton-built-his-sect-of-slaves.html

Dec 5, 2013

Kabbalah Centre sued for fraud, misuse of funds by former followers

Haaretz
December 5, 2013
Los Angeles -- The Los Angeles-based Kabbalah Centre is being sued for over $1 million by former followers in two lawsuits alleging fraud and misuse of funds.

Both suits were filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Nov. 27 and claim that the Centre pressured the plaintiffs “to give money until it hurts,” in order to receive “the light” from its leaders, Karen Berg and her adult sons Yehuda and Michael.

Carolyn Cohen, a San Diego real estate broker, said that she and one of her companies lost some $810,000 to the Centre, which, she claimed, “engages in a pattern and practice of raising funds … for the purpose of enriching itself.”

San Diego business owners Randi and Charles Wax, the other plaintiffs, alleged losses of $326,000.

In both cases, the plaintiffs said they were told that the donations were earmarked for a new Kabbalah Centre building in San Diego and for a children’s charity.

But, they said, the new center was never built and the charity abruptly ceased operation.

Neither the Berg family not their lawyer responded to requests for comments, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The late Rabbi Phillip Berg established the initial Kabbalah facility in Jerusalem and the first American operation in New York in 1965. Since 1984, the Centre’s worldwide operations, with 50 branches, have been headquartered in Los Angeles.

Over the past years, the Centre has been the target, as well as the originator, of numerous lawsuits in the United States and Britain. In 2010, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service launched a tax evasion investigation, but the outcome is still pending.

Traditional rabbinical authorities repeatedly have denounced the Centre’s teachings and methods as a perversion of the Kabbalah’s profound mysticism. However, the Berg family has received worldwide publicity by attracting such Hollywood followers as Madonna, Britney Spears, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/kabbalah-centre-sued-for-fraud-1.5297500

Dec 4, 2013

Lawsuits target LA Kabbalah Centre

The Associated Press
December 4, 2013

Los Angeles -- Former supporters of the Kabbalah Centre have sued the Los Angeles-based spiritual organization, claiming more than $1 million in contributions was used fraudulently.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that two lawsuits filed last week claim the center, which attracted Madonna and other celebrities, raised money to enrich itself instead of using the funds to build a new facility in San Diego and for a children's charity.

The lawsuits say the center was never built and the charity abruptly stopped operation. More than $40 million in damages are being sought from the center and its leaders.
After a boom in popularity due in part with its association with celebrities, the center in recent years has been dogged by controversy. A federal tax-evasion investigation was launched but the current status of the probe isn't known.