Sarito Carroll lived in Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s commune in Oregon, which collapsed under criminal charges 40 years ago. Like most teenagers in Rajneeshpuram, she was sexually abused there. Now she is holding the cult of “Wild Wild Country” accountable.
Sarito Carroll holds two pairs of shoes in her hand and looks undecided. For the stroll through town, she opts for the more stylish ones: “I definitely don’t want to look like a hippie!” The author and acupuncturist from Boulder has flown to California for a discussion on stage the next day. The recorded live event will be about Osho. The name stands for an ideology that has liberated many people and destroyed others — especially former children of the new-age movement, who still have a stronghold in the Rainbow Region.
Carroll’s father was a junkie from New York; her single mother was a hippie. In 1978, the restless seeker and her young daughter ended up in the Indian commune of Osho, who was known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh back then. Thousands of followers from all over the world flocked to his ashram in Pune, India, dressed in orange and later red. Most were middle-class and educated, and more than half were female.
The sannyasins danced, meditated, played music and toiled in a state of perpetual euphoria for their guru. The mystic and philosopher loved to provoke as a capitalist rebel with diamond watches and a fleet of Rolls-Royces. His promise was divine ecstasy through sexual freedom.
In encounter workshops, his followers howled, screamed and lashed out. There were mental breakdowns, broken bones and even rape. The goal was to overcome parental conditioning and old moral values. To surrender, let go. Transforming into a new person without shame, fear, attachments or jealousy. Open relationships were the norm. Young women got sterilized because the master didn’t want children, claiming they would hinder spiritual development.
“Bhagwan always said that we don’t belong to our parents, but to the community,” Carroll recounts on her way to the café. Her copper-colored curls bounce. She speaks fast and precisely, and appears composed. Thanks to decades of therapy, any bitterness or anger is barely noticeable. She even sounds dry when she says, “They were meant to give us up to be happier.”
The girl hardly saw her mother in the ashram anymore. They lived separately, and their relationship was permanently shattered at that time. In the sea of new people, the nine-year-old felt lonely and lost.
French kissing and touching
Soon after arriving in Pune, everyone received new Indian names. American Jennifer became Ma Prem Sarito, meaning “River of Love.” For her, it meant that she finally belonged. The photo of the sannyas initiation, where the bearded guru laid his hand on her, is the cover of her memoir In the Shadow of Enlightenment. This shadow is disturbing when you read the book. It describes the dark side of a parallel world where “love and light” were preached. Always be radiantly positive. Above all, don’t be a victim.
Bhagwan also said that one should follow one’s “energy”. Give in to your sexual urges and also act them out in front of children so they wouldn’t become uptight. “Our cultural norm shifted,” says Carroll. “We were desensitized. There were no boundaries, no one was looking out for us.” The ashram children mocked the uninhibited adults or imitated them. Nothing could shock them. “I saw many erections,” Carroll writes in her book.
She was only ten when a security guard pulled her onto his lap in front of others and practiced French kissing with her. Another man urged her and her friend to give him a hand job. When he ejaculated, the shy girl tried to suppress her nausea: “I didn’t want anyone to see that I wasn’t carefree like we were expected to be.”
Departure to Oregon
In 1981, the enterprising sex cult expanded to the US. In the Oregon hinterland, the Rajneeshees bought the deserted Big Muddy Ranch from which they planned to take over world domination. The utopian dream required volunteers to transform 260 square kilometers of desert that was covered in snow in winter and in mud in spring into a thriving oasis with its own city. A new wave of maroon-clad pilgrims started: free labor as “worship”.
Sarito was one of the first to arrive, without parents or guardians. Her move across the world for what she now considers child labor had been decided from above. Once again, the 12-year-old was a stranger and lonely. The cold dormitory, where she was housed alone with 14 men, had mattresses instead of beds and only one bathroom. No one locked the door. The shower and toilet were used in front of everyone, naked.
Sarito tried to shower secretly at night, ashamed of being so prudish and hiding her body. It wasn’t “juicy” like all the sensual women of the commune. Before falling asleep, the pubescent girl heard people compare their conquests of the day and comment on her own sprouting breasts and pubic hair. “All of this was normal to me,” Carroll says, looking back. “Only I didn’t feel normal because I had this old-fashioned idea of pure, romantic love.”
Youngest with a boyfriend
In her first month, she met Milarepa (Augustus Pembroke Thomas III), the star of the Rajneesh Country Band. Most nights, the American left the communal dining room with his arm around a different “Ma”. After playing Eagles songs on his guitar, he invited Sarito to a poker game.
When Milarepa held the cards in one hand, he casually slid the other under her t-shirt and played with her breast. She froze and tried not to react, because no one else seemed bothered. Since the scenario soon repeated itself, Sarito believed, “I’m special to him”. That was what she longed for. Not the fondling.
Milarepa was 29 and part of a gang that prided itself on taking someone’s virginity. The first time with him, in his trailer, was painful. There was none of the ecstasy everyone raved about. He didn’t use a condom and curtly excused himself the next morning for his 12-hour shift. Sarito was upset and disappointed. But she told herself that she should actually be proud: “I was the youngest girl on the ranch with a boyfriend. It was an honor.”
The week after her deflowering, she was summoned to the commune’s clinic with three other minors to have diaphragms fitted. To this day, Carroll doesn’t know who arranged this. None of the “moms,” as the motherly women in charge were called, had mentioned Milarepa to her. Let alone ever offering proper sex education. “But someone in a high position knew.”
The nights with Milarepa continued. Sarito believed it to be a relationship, a secret love story. All her thoughts revolved around her first lover. Even though she was the youngest, she wasn’t the only one: Carroll estimates that 80% of the approximately 40 teenagers on the ranch were sleeping with adults. She knows of one girl who was with 70 men before the age of 16. Another with 150. “It was statutory rape,” the 56-year-old clarifies. “Child sexual abuse.” Sanctioned, covered up and ignored.
Flying for the master
Sarito hardly attended school anymore. At first, she worked in the commercial kitchen and then in the office, in the inner circle under Bhagwan’s infamous secretary Ma Anand Sheela. The “Goebbels to the guru” was tasked with transforming the makeshift enclave into the model city of Rajneeshpuram with a hotel, its own airline and a paramilitary unit. 4,000 “orange people” lived there on average. For the annual World Festival, the number rose to 20,000.
Publicity mattered for this megalomaniac mission. A model in Bhagwan’s wake suggested Sarito have her photo taken. This landed the poster child on the cover of The Rajneesh Times. At 14 years old, she became an air hostess and flew in a maroon uniform for Air Rajneesh.
Even though she didn’t feel like a woman, she was regarded as one. More men approached her. The girls who gave in gained respect: “The more ‘liberated’ you were, the better.” But she was still hopelessly in love with Milarepa, who also slept with others. “For over three years, with several hundred,” Carroll says over lunch. His friends jokingly nicknamed him “rapist”. Some of the boys, therefore, called the musician “Milaraper”.
A teen disco was held every week at Rajneeshpuram’s ice cream parlor. Always present were the men and women who were sexually interested in teenagers. One party ended in an orgy with blindfolds, with Milarepa also involved. A dressing-down from Sheela followed this. The drill sergeant was angry about the noise and alcohol, not the men’s assaults.
To get over her heartbreak, Sarito also became promiscuous. She had lost all self-respect. Someone seduced her by insisting that it would cure his back pain. Then she thought she was in love with a British guy in his thirties, an Eton graduate — the same old story. Each time, she felt used when the erotic interest in her was only fleeting, because everyone lived “in the moment”. Her underlying anger grew, and with it her cognitive dissonance. Because what she always heard was that she was lucky not to live in the outside world among the unenlightened, but in Bhagwan’s presence.
German disco tour
The Rajneesh movement spread to more than 30 countries in the early 1980s. In Germany, the cult’s main European base, 43 centers were established, with 13 discotheques that welcomed half a million visitors in their first year. Sarito was suddenly asked to leave the country again. For five months, she was shuttled through communes from Munich to Zurich, where she worked behind the bar. In Amsterdam, she injured her back on a construction site.
Today, she suspects that one reason for the “foreign exchange” was to cover up the abuse. During her absence, the top Moms compiled a secret list of those who had sexual relations with minors. There were more than 100 names. Those were simply advised to behave more discreetly in the future so that nothing would leak to the press. “When journalists showed up,” Carroll recalls, “we always pretended that we were totally happy, and everyone was going to school.”
External and internal tension in Rajneeshpuram rose to a maximum. The animosity between the tiny neighboring town of Antelope and the paranoid ranch dwellers escalated to criminal activities: mass-scale immigration fraud, drugging homeless people to get their votes and even attempted murder. 700 people in Dallas were poisoned with salmonella in the largest bioterror attack in the US — plotted by Bhagwan’s right-hand woman.
The empire in red collapsed when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrived. On September 14, 1985, Sheela fled to Germany, where she was later arrested and extradited. By the end of October, her master was arrested too, and the commune came to a standstill. The outside world was horrified by the crimes committed under the guise of a new religion. But no one cared about the youngest victims.
When the crime saga was retold in the 2018 Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, the filmmakers omitted the fate of the Osho kids, although the facts were known by then. A 121-page survey from 1983 by the US Ministry of Justice had explicitly stated that sex between adults and children was the norm in the community. “That was a turning point,” says Carroll, who binged the six-part series in two days. “We didn’t want to stay invisible any longer.”
Escape into Society
The Oregon commune dispersed in panic in the fall of 1985. The Byron Bay area became an international catch basin for many displaced devotees from the US. Sarito didn’t know where to go. She had had little contact with her mother for four years. Without money or family, a new odyssey began — with a brutal awakening about her ex-lovers: “I finally realized the truth about them.”
The truth about Osho and his accomplices only dawned on her much later. After a short stint in a US jail, the cult founder returned to India, where he died in 1999 at 58 years old under mysterious circumstances. He only rebranded himself as Osho shortly before his death.
Adjusting to the cultural norms of the outside world was tough. “I felt like an alien reintroduced to society as part of a social experiment,” Carroll describes this time in her book. She hid her body under oversized sweaters. Friends from the ranch supported themselves through sex work — “some still do.”
The biggest hurdle was her lack of education. Sarito got her school-leaving certificate to study literature. When she read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in her freshman year, the plight of the sexually exploited handmaid felt disturbingly familiar. From then on, the student knew she had to tell her story. But it took more than 30 years before she fully ventured out of the shadows of the past.
During this period, she lost close friends from the Ranch who had experienced similar abuse. One ended up in a psychiatric ward and attempted suicide. Another died of an ectopic pregnancy after reversing the sterilization she had undergone at a young age in India. In the so-called “second generation”, as from other cults around the world that are now under scrutiny, there are disproportionately high rates of suicide, depression, illness, drug addiction, prostitution and poverty. Carroll describes this legacy of the utopian dream as a “path of devastation”. She calls herself lucky to have survived it.
Reconciliation and repression
Neither her mother nor Milarepa wanted to talk about the past. In 2018, Carroll sent a letter with registered mail to him, demanding accountability. There was no response. He continued to tour the world as “Osho’s musician”, still a star of the scene.
Finally, in 2021, Carroll and another woman appealed to the entire remaining community, estimated at over 100,000 members worldwide. They named names, demanded clarification and reparation. Suddenly, Milarepa spoke out via video and posted an “Apology to Sarito and the Osho-Sangha.” For his victim, his words rang hollow and came too late. “It was a PR stunt to save his reputation.”
Some members of the first generation reacted with compassion. But very few saw any complicity in their own actions and silence, let alone that of their long-dead guru. They were stuck in the old ideology: If you have a problem, then you alone are responsible for that and need to work harder on yourself.
“This gaslighting is crazy making,” says Carroll. “We were marginalized as children, and now again.” The last time she ran into local Osho devotees, they shunned her. Nevertheless, she considers most of them to be “warm-hearted, kind and idealistic.” That’s why it hurts so much.
Despite the internal denial, the flood of exposure could no longer be stopped. Media reports with paedophilia allegations from the Rajneesh schools in England followed. And then the answer to Wild Wild Country arrived in 2024 with the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) nominated documentary Children of the Cult, in which Sarito participated along with European women. It will screen at the Dutch Film Festival in the Netherlands at the end of September.
Director Maroesja Perizonius, a commune kid herself, interviews the 76-year-old Sheela, who still claims her ignorance. Perpetrators are confronted on camera too, including Milarepa — again without further consequences. The statute of limitations for his crimes has long passed. Earlier, he claimed that “there was no grooming or molestation”.
The estimated number of children abused in the communes runs over a hundred, but not a single perpetrator has ever been in court. A British law firm gave up on a class action lawsuit after six months, says Sarito. The OIF (Osho International Foundation), which manages the cult founder’s intellectual property and books that have sold millions of copies, denies any responsibility. “There is no one in Osho International who had any organizational function in any of the entities mentioned, and so they know nothing of these accounts,” an OIF spokesperson told the Sunday Times in 2022. The former ashram in Pune, where Sarito’s story began, is now an expensive meditation resort run by the old believers.
“Each of us should receive decent compensation for all our years of therapy,” says Carroll, pushing her half-eaten salad aside. “I could have bought a house with my therapy fees alone.” Now she’s agitated. Her voice is coarse when she mentions her broken relationships and why she never had children. “I was just too afraid of becoming a single parent myself. Because I experienced it as so horrible.”
Return to the ranch
Why did she keep her Sannyas name then, once she was fully aware of the negative association? “When I wrote my book, it was a protection mechanism,” she explains. “Those who want to threaten me will only come after Sarito.” Jennifer is still her legal name. She can hide behind it and not be found. And she’s also not shying away from wearing red again. “I’m taking the color back. It doesn’t belong to Osho. And it suits me.” She almost packed a scarlet top in her suitcase for the upcoming event.
Carroll’s cell phone buzzes while she finishes her iced tea: a message from a friend from back then, who will be coming to San Francisco tomorrow and will sit in the audience. One of the few who didn’t duck away after the tell-all book. They haven’t seen each other since escaping the Ranch together 40 years ago, but the memory is still fresh: “I sat in the back of the car with my few belongings and was in shock.”
This spring, the author returned to the fateful place for the first time for a television interview. It is now a Christian summer camp. Again, she was overwhelmed, but this time by the beauty of the landscape, the vastness and the tranquillity, “without the thousands of people back then.” The tour around the old buildings was healing. Nothing triggered her anymore, she says. “It felt like closure.” At Krishnamurti Lake, which the freedom seekers had once built as a huge water reservoir, she performed a spontaneous ritual and threw stones into the water. Then the tears came.
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
The post 40 Years After the Oregon Cult Commune: The Girl from the Osho Ranch appeared first on Fair Observer.
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