Louise Carpenter
The Telegraph
March 10, 2022
When Lily Dunn’s father ran away from the family home to find enlightenment in an ashram in Pune, India, he swapped his suit, tie and raincoat for flowing orange robes. Sometimes he wore a skirt and a faded pink bandana.
Philip Dunn was among thousands of people worldwide to join the movement led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a man with a long beard, flowing robes of his own and, later, 96 Rolls-Royces.
Disciples were known as sannyasins. They were encouraged to have vasectomies and sterilisations and hand over vast sums of money – many gave their life savings. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, followers were well-educated, middle-class Americans and Europeans, just like Dunn’s father, looking to escape the mundanity of ordinary life.
Disciples, Rajneesh preached, could ‘live in love’, which meant having as much guilt-free sex as they desired. Freedom was to be found through love, surrender and sex. Children were seen as an obstruction to their parents’ sexual journey.
It was an enticing sell for Dunn’s father, an established serial adulterer. ‘He just disappeared out of our lives with no mention of when he would return,’ says Dunn.
Dunn remembers when her father did return to north London after six months away in India. With his vasectomy and new way of life, tanned and thin from dysentery and with a wild beard, he met Dunn and her eight-year-old brother Ben near their home in Islington, wearing a purple Ellesse tracksuit and a long beaded necklace.
‘I’ve been reborn!’ he cried. ‘I have a new name. I will be known as Purvodaya!’
‘Pooh-va-what?’ she remembers thinking, and then, with some confusion, ‘If you’re no longer the man you were, does that mean you are no longer our dad?’
During this visit came the suggestion that her father move back into the family home, bringing with him his new young girlfriend from the ashram. She could live in the basement, couldn’t she?
‘No, you are completely bonkers,’ Dunn’s mother, the biographer Jane Dunn, told him. They divorced.
In many ways, Dunn was never again to reclaim that old ‘normal’ dad. His ‘soulful step away from the system’ meant that he left the family publishing business in a state of such collapse that his wife and children almost lost their home. Dunn’s mother, she later learnt, had to turn over the keys to the car, pay off her husband’s debts and reveal all their assets as part of taking the business into bankruptcy.
It was a dark time, but, as it turns out, the most destructive effect of her father’s decision to opt out of conventional life to find his ‘true essence’ was still to come.
Dunn is now 49. She has spent four decades chasing a dream of her father – the exciting and yet unreliable notion of him – she says, and as a result she has been unable to hold down healthy relationships. Her brother cut their father off from a very young age. ‘He had a choice, Lil,’ he would tell her. ‘He always had a choice.’
‘Ben realised the limitations of what he could get from Dad and so stopped asking for it or looking for it,’ she says today. ‘Whereas for me, there was something beguiling about a father-daughter relationship.’
Today, Dunn lives in Bristol, where she moved in 2015, back when she was a broken single mother, after her marriage ended. She has finally found happiness but it has taken years.
She teaches at Bath Spa University and is about to complete a PhD. She has a new partner, Robin, a writer, and a new life. Her house is comfortable, with brand-new shiny marble surfaces in the kitchen and pretty lamps in the bay-windowed sitting room. She lives with her two children, Dora, 15, and Arlo, 13, and looks younger than her years.
We meet shortly before the publication of her memoir, Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling. It is the work of a lifetime in that it has taken this long to get beyond her complicated feelings for the man who abandoned her, and who exposed her far too early to sex – his own and that of the other sannyasin disciples.
On the one hand, she says her father ‘was very affectionate, very sweet, very soft, kind, not a cruel person, vulnerable and this big teddy bear figure to me as a child’, and yet on the other, ‘a man who had such lack of interest in my life… such a lack of ability to allow me to be an individual and not part of him, that our relationship was toxic’.
Dunn’s early childhood memories are simple and warm: her mother’s window box full of nemesia, pansies and trailing nasturtiums; Nina Simone and Stevie Wonder on the turntable; a holiday in Corfu on her mother’s first book advance; her father crawling up the stairs pretending to be a monster while she and her brother squealed with delight in the bath.
But when Philip Dunn’s business began to flounder, Rajneesh’s ‘principles’ of enlightenment promised guiltless escape. And so he ran away to Pune.
The next four years were spent moving around London with his girlfriend and then, in 1982, the year Dunn turned 10, her father went to live at Medina, a sannyasin community in a stately home in Suffolk where up to 200 people lived and worked until it closed in 1985. It was at Medina that Dunn assimilated the unlawful message of sannyasin teaching: that young pubescent girls on their sexual journey could be helpfully ‘guided’ by older men.
During their visits to see their father, Dunn and her brother joined the other commune children, sleeping all together in the ‘Active Meditation Centre’, divided from the adults only by clouds of sheer purple organza, behind which couples copulated openly. There were drugs, too. Her father offered her hash when she was 12 and some years earlier, he had porn on the television when she was sitting on his lap. She recalls that men looked at her ‘lecherously’ as she peered out through her NHS glasses, confused by this strange new world.
‘It exposed me to a weird power dynamic,’ says Dunn. ‘I remember a guy saying to my dad: “She’s going to be pretty when she’s older.” I knew even then that was wrong and weird. My dad would say: “He likes you…” as if it were normal.’
When the Dunn children first arrived at Medina for a visit, the other children there crowded round and asked questions such as ‘have you hit puberty?’ with a confusing hint of sexual knowingness.
The fact that Dunn and her brother were forced to lead double lives – sporadic weekends at Medina and then back to London – was to be, if not quite her saviour, then certainly a dilution of the exposure.
‘I’ve since heard terrible stories, really shocking stories of survivors, of children [who lived in the sannyasin cults full time] who took their own lives, died of addiction or [contracted] Aids. This was all pre-Jimmy Savile, pre-MeToo, pre-the awareness of inappropriate power imbalances.’
Her ‘normal’ life was in London with her mother. ‘When my brother and I were with her, we had normality,’ remembers Dunn. ‘We went to school, had normal friends. We went through all the normal teenage dramas but [with her] I knew I was loved and that I had a secure home and I got a very strong sense of right and wrong from her. I think the kids who grew up in the communes didn’t have that.’
She told her mother little about Medina, intuiting that she would be forbidden to visit if she knew the extent of what it was like.
Her mother, she explains, had reasoned that ‘forbidding us to go [would lead to] my father becoming this messianic mystery, which he was for me anyway.
‘At times I’ve questioned what I was exposed to. But I don’t think she made the wrong decision. It was very, very difficult for her and I think I would probably have done the same.’
Her father’s biggest betrayal of her, she says, came not at Medina, but when she was 13, by which time he had moved to Italy with his new 18-year-old wife to set up a sannyasin community of his own in a Tuscan villa. It was from here that he began a successful book-packaging company.
Dunn remained in London but she visited in the school summer holidays, enticed by the climate, but also by the fact that Italy was a world away from normality and homework in north London. ‘I loved my home [in London] and I loved my mum and our house and our street and my friends, but I was failing at school.’
People at the villa had an enticing, wild lifestyle. She recalls strangers having sex noisily in the middle of the day. During one visit, a friend of her father’s told her she ‘inspired him’, before saying: ‘I want to have sex with you.’ The man was 38 and was taking medication for gonorrhoea, her father told her with a chuckle.
She was frightened and asked her father to make him leave. Instead, he encouraged her to lose her virginity to the man: ‘You could learn something,’ he told her. ‘He’s a good man.’
‘Yes, I absolutely see myself as a victim of sex abuse,’ she tells me now. ‘Of that man, but also a victim of a greater ignorance and a condoning.
‘I don’t necessarily blame the other people in the cult. I blame my dad. [He] absolutely failed to do the most basic thing, which was to protect his daughter. I am still unsure about whether that was because he was incapable of it or that he was so brainwashed.’
Stories from the other cult children’s experiences during that time are slowly starting to emerge: a few books, a documentary, newspaper articles, she says, ‘and the overriding message is that there was widespread and systemic neglect and sexual abuse’. One friend ‘had to work 14-hour days in the kitchen – with no schooling – and she, like me, was pursued and abused by men who wanted to take her virginity.’
In the end, Dunn did not have underage sex with the man, although her relations with him were sexual. (Many years later he tracked her down, laughing, curious about a character in a novel she published in 2007, loosely based on him. ‘Contact me again and I’ll phone the police,’ Dunn told him in an email.)
By her teens, things had already started to fall apart for Dunn. She truanted and began to drink and later take drugs. She lost her virginity at 15 to a man in his late 30s whom she met in a London nightclub. She was drawn to much older men, a pattern that was to play out again and again.
Her mother was, by then, living with her husband-to-be, a linguist and scholar. He shouted at Dunn for worrying her mother by staying out late. Wayward teenage stepdaughters were new to him. And her mother knew nothing of what had occurred at Medina or in Italy.
Her brother, meanwhile, took a different path. He cut off their father emotionally early on, she says, and settled down into a stable family life.
It would be heartening to think that Dunn too found her happy ending in the creation of her own family. But it was not to be for many years.
In 2005, she married a man called Nick, who ran a design agency. He was a good man, and she hoped that by settling down with him, she would break old patterns: ‘I was [constantly] choosing men who were unavailable, who were not appropriate for me, but there was something beguiling about them because they were familiar to me. I’d spend most of the relationship in this heightened anxiety state that they were going to leave me like my father had done.’ Nick, she says, was different.
Dora was born in 2006, followed two years later by Arlo. But her father remained in the background. She had supported him after his second wife left him, and when, in 2003, he faced financial difficulties after being scammed by Russian criminals. This was the moment a faint whiff of a drink problem became full-blown alcoholism. Immediately after her honeymoon, Dunn went to California, where her father had settled, and nursed him through a particularly bad patch. By then, he was a tragic figure of a different kind, broke and alone. In 2007, he died; an undignified and messy ending in a B&B in Ilfracombe, Devon.
‘My dad had had such a catastrophic death that I think I was quite traumatised and it started coming out in my marriage,’ she recalls. ‘I ended up feeling this longing to be elsewhere… I just wanted to flee, not from my children but from my life.’
In 2015, her marriage collapsed. Her children were eight and six, exactly the same age she and her brother had been when her father walked out.
She went on to have three years of therapy. It is only now, she says, that she can finally say: ‘I am rid of [my father]’, and that ‘I acknowledge that he is still in me and that is OK. I am at peace with what I have of him in me now.’
Before I leave, Dunn asks if I’d like to see a photo of her father that she keeps in her study. It is the same one that appears on the cover of the book. ‘I felt terrible guilt when I saw the picture on the cover,’ she admits. ‘He would be devastated if he read it.’
In the study there are many pictures, including one of her new partner when he was a child. The picture of her father is prominent on the shelf. He is charismatic and good looking, with a necktie and a 1970s shirt. She picks it up. ‘I don’t hate him,’ she says. ‘I’ve never hated him.’
When she puts it back on the shelf, it is towards the back so that the picture of her partner eclipses it. ‘Better that way round,’ she says gently.
Sins of My Father is out on Thursday March 10. To order from Telegraph Books for £16.99, call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/growing-rajneesh-cult-pursued-abused-men-wanted-take-virginity/
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