Bitter Memories
By Tina Susman, Staff Writer
Originally published in Newsday, 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."
