Here’s What Netflix’s ‘Wild Wild Country’ Left Out About The Rajneesh Cult

In a must-read response to the Netflix documentary “Wild Wild Country” about the Rajneesh cult that nearly took over an entire county in Oregon in the early ’80s, New Republic editor-in-chief Win McCormack highlights some of the integral details downplayed or completely left out of the documentary that expose the true “evil” fueling the cult — an “evil on a scale that is almost outside the limits of the human imagination,” as one psychologist put it.

McCormack, who wrote a series of investigative pieces on the cult during its rise to power in Oregon and published a book on the group in 2008, begins his compelling “corrective and supplement” to the documentary by highlighting the account of one former member of the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who describes her horrifying experience in one of the “encounter groups” that the cult regularly required its members to attend as part of its brainwashing program:

I only knew Jan, a fifty-year-old Dutchman. The leader sat down, after he had closed the thick sound-proofed door. Suddenly a woman hurled herself at another and screamed at her, “You make me sick. You are a vampire. I want to scratch your face, you filthy thing.” She beat her. … Meanwhile two women and a young man had got up. The young man threw himself on a girl of about eighteen, and boxed her on the ears with the words: “You are a caricature of a Madonna. You think you’re better than us, don’t you. You are the worst person here.” And then, pointing at me, he said, “Together with you, you bitch. You’ve got it coming to you, too.” The girl’s nose was running with blood. She tried desperately to protect herself against the blows. Then the leader took charge: “You probably think that you have control over things. You have not even got control over yourself. You are under total control here.”

The woman was ordered to sleep with Jan that night, but she ended up falling asleep soon after dinner. The next day in front of the group, he pulled her up and “began uninhibitedly beating me,” shouting, “You whore” and threatening to kill her. “He beat me further. He tore my blouse and threw me on the floor. Like someone possessed he sat on me, beat me with his fists on my head, choked my neck …” Soon, the group joined in:

What happened next was like an evil dream. “Fight with us, you coward. Will you play holy in here, you whore?” someone said. I fled from one corner to another. They punched, scratched, and kicked me, and pulled my hair. They tore my blouse and pants off my body. I was stark naked, and they were so surrendered to their madness, that I was filled with death-anxiety. My one thought: to stay conscious. I screamed: “Let me go. I want to get out of here.” At a signal from the leader they let me go.

While the documentary does provide a brief glimpse of footage of the physically, mentally and sexually abusive “encounter groups,” it does not give viewers a chance to fully comprehend just how sadistic, abusive, and humiliating the group sessions are designed to be.

Nor does the film address one of the chronic results of that horrific sexual abuse, which also proved to be one of the sources of income for the cult: widespread prostitution among its female members. “Prostitution by the cult’s girl disciples reached disgraceful proportions. It became epidemic,” said the Pune police department’s chief inspector about the group’s activities in India.

Along with prostitution, drug smuggling became a lucrative business for the cult, a detail largely downplayed in the documentary. McCormack cites a former Rajneesh follower, David Boadella, who provided the following description of the cult’s illegal activities in a 1980 article in British psychology journal Energy and Character:

At a well-known religious community in the East … sannyasins are selling their bodies on the open market to secure the money to gain a home for their souls in the spiritual community. This may take the form of earnings from masturbation shows, or prostitution, and is tacitly encouraged by the community in question, where the immoral earnings are discreetly referred to as “getting sweets.” At the same community there is an official policy that actively discourages or prohibits drug taking. Unofficially, however, an active drug run organized by sannyasins flourishes with or alongside the community, and people in need of money to buy a place in the community are put in touch with it covertly by high-ranking officials there. Five or six kilos of cannabis are secreted in false-bottomed suitcases and are smuggled by plane via Amsterdam and Paris to Montreal, where they are sold for £9,000 (approximately $20,000). The drug ring collects £6,000 (approximately $13,000), and the person who smuggles the drugs collects £3,000 (approximately $6,500) toward his tickets to heaven. Several sannyasins are currently serving jail sentences for participating in the drug run. Two them used “brainwashing” as a defense at their trails, in order to get a reduced sentence.

These depraved enterprises, McCormack underscores, were a direct result of the cult’s brainwashing techniques, which included the “encounter groups” as well as a wide range of other mind-altering techniques employed by Rajneesh. McCormack quotes Professor Johannes Aagard, who described the identity-crushing techniques of Rajneesh and his leadership in his testimony during the trial of two of the former female cult members:

In Pune, Bhagwan and his people, not least his group of high-ranking officers, have established an alternative world. … He gives them a mala with his own picture on it, and they get a piece of his hair, connecting their reality with his. … From the beginning the aim is to do away with the mind, the personality, the memory. … You end up being nobody. You have to give up your ego. You have to empty yourself totally to surrender to Bhagwan. “Total surrender” are the key words. This is done by a series of humiliating acts where you are forced to do what you hate to do in the group. You lose the identity feeling which is connected with certain acts, certain reservations, certain sexual inhibitions. In a number of those workshops promiscuity takes place in the most rude and horrible ways. Male persons are allowed to do whatever they like with females, and vice versa, and it aims at bringing down the consciousness connected with the individual in order that a new consciousness connected with Bhagwan and his ideology take its place.

The mother of one of the girls said of her daughter Kristina in a written statement, “Kristina was commanded to have sexual intercourse with every man in the group in turn, in order to ‘kill her ego.’ The group leader, a woman, shouted at her: ‘If you are to surrender to Bhagwan, you must surrender to anybody here, to any man although the mere thought of it makes you sick—you are not to think—just let it happen!'”

McCormack goes on to detail the horrific treatment of children at Rajneeshpuram, some of whom were allegedly raped at ages as young as 10-years-old and most of whom went neglected. The shameful treatment of children stemmed from Bhagwan’s desire to eliminate all relational connections that could come between him and his followers, which is why the group pressured women to get abortions, while the sexual abuse was yet another nightmarish result of the twisted views of sex held by the group:

“Bhagwan told his followers that a woman could not become enlightened if she had a child,” a former disciple informed me, “because it would take away from her vital energy. It took so much energy to become enlightened that if you had a child, you wouldn’t have the energy to pursue that path.” Actually, the reason Bhagwan did not want his followers to have children was the same reason he did not care for them to have stable, committed, loving relationships: Having a child might motivate its parents to forsake the commune for a more normal, adult lifestyle. …

Roselyn, a child-protective social worker by profession, confirmed for us that, “The children are discouraged from living with their parents. They have one of the lowest priorities of any concern. They’re given very little attention.” But she also gave us disturbing information about the sexual involvement of young children at the ranch. She told us: “most of the twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old girls at the ranch were having sexual relationships. It was a common thing.”

The cult’s plans to conduct bioterrorism were also more extensive than the film suggests. McCormack reports that after Rajneesh’s second in command left, authorities obtained a warrant to search the ranch and found a biological warfare laboratory that included several potentially deadly pathogens:

[ Ma Anand Puja] had of course supplied the salmonella the Rajneeshees had put in the salad bars in the Dalles, but she had ordered and stockpiled many other pathogens as well: Salmonella typhi, which causes often-fatal typhoid fever; Salmonella paratyhphi, which causes a similar, less severe illness; Francisella tularensis, which causes a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease (it was weaponized by U.S. Army scientists in the 1950s and is on the Pentagon’s list of agents that might be used in a biological warfare attack on the nation); and Shigella dysenteriae, a very small amount of which can cause severe dysentery resulting in death in 10 to 20 percent of cases.

Puja, who had reportedly wanted to use salmonella typhi to poison county voters but feared it would be too easy to trace back to the ranch, was also working to cultivate a live AIDS virus in a project called “Moses Five,” apparently a defiant reference to “Thou shalt not kill.”

Read the full article here.

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This article has been expanded to include more information from McCormack’s report.