Of all the reprehensible aspects of the Rajneesh cult, the treatment of children at the ranch has been the most ignored or suppressed, probably because it is the most horrible and painful to contemplate. As far as I know, no one else has written about the subject but me. It plays no role in Wild, Wild Country.

Let’s begin with the fact that Rajneesh did not want his followers to have children, a subject I wrote about in “Bhagwan’s Strange Eugenics.” Rajneesh made the following statement to the INS in an interview in Portland on October 14, 1982: “Just as murder is considered by the society, so the birth of a child should be considered by the commune.” He wasn’t kidding. Rajneesh required that all his top women officials have themselves sterilized, and he encouraged his other disciples to do the same. If a woman got pregnant at the Pune ashram in India or Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, she was given a stark choice: Agree to have an abortion, or leave the property forthwith. There were zero children born in Oregon to Rajneesh cult members during the time the commune was extant.

“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.

As I recounted in “Bhagwan’s Childrearing,” the 50 or so children at the ranch were all born before their parents came there. Rajneesh had enunciated the principle that, “The children will not belong to the parents but to the commune,” and in fact children over five years old lived apart from their parents. There was evidence of neglect of the very youngest ones. Two adults who lived there reported that they saw young children running around outdoors during the winter months without adequate clothing. One said she saw a completely naked four-year-old girl playing outside in the month of December. The other described the fate of a boy about two years old at the ranch:

The first accident he had was when he fell down a stairway and really banged himself up badly. The next I can remember he was run over by a pickup. The poor little thing, one side of his face was nothing but blood and pus and swollen and bruised. It was terrible. The only thing that saved him was the mud was so deep. He was out there amid the machinery all the time. It’s a wonder he didn’t get killed.

In her “Memoirs of an Ex-Sannyasin,” Harfouche described a “little two-year-old baby I used to see wondering around the ranch by itself: bewildered big eyes, fingers in mouth, dirty, neglected.” 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.”

According to a 1983 report by the Concerned Christian Growth Ministries of Australia, an Australian visitor to the Rancho Rajneesh in 1982 reported: “The ranch house has been converted to the children’s house and school room. Children do not have to live with their parents; they belong to the community, and pride is exuded in the ‘modern’ approach used in their upbringing. Some children were running around naked in the schoolhouse, and it is not unusual for boys and girls to sleep together. Children are encouraged to experiment sexually with one another, and one sannyasin said children often watch their parents’ sexual involvement—‘in private, of course.’” A girl who lived at Rajneeshpuram from the ages of eleven to 13 said in an interview that female contemporaries frequently had sexual relations with older men. She claimed she knew girls as young as ten who had sexual relationships with adult men.

Allegations made to Oregon Magazine by homeless people who lived at Rajneeshpuram during the share-a-home program were consistent with the statements of these former commune residents. One said he saw Rajneesh children “feeling on each other, hugging on each other,” and fondling each other’s genital areas. He said, “They roam free, they can do what they want ... . There was one 13-year-old girl that was going with a 45-year-old guy. He said he did (sexual) things with her with her parents right there. They call it ‘open love.’”

Another homeless person interviewed after he left Rajneeshpuram by Bill Driver for Oregon Magazine said he witnessed a boy and girl, three and four years old, with their genitals exposed, simulating sexual intercourse. He said the girl’s mother was present while this was happening, and that she said: “It’s OK, that’s how you have fun.” Still another street person claimed that he saw a man “sexually molesting” a ten-year-old girl on a crowded bus at Rajneeshpuram. “I didn’t like what I seen,” he said, “and the woman I was with (a Rajneeshee) didn’t like it either. She finally went over there and told the girl to sit with us. Nobody else said a word.”

Jim Phillips, a father who filed suit in San Mateo County, California, in 1983 to prevent his ex-wife from taking their nine-year-old son to live at Rancho Rajneesh, told us the following tale. The judge in the case initially ruled that the Rajneeshee mother could take the boy to the ranch for a four-week trial period. At the end of the four weeks, the judge seemed inclined to extend the limit of the boy’s stay. After a private conference with the boy in his chambers, however, the judge suddenly changed his mind and ruled that the child could not visit “any Rajneesh ashram or ranch or any place under the control of the Rajneesh Foundation” for longer than 48 hours at a time. The judge said in his ruling: “The lifestyle of the mother at the ranch is totally controlled by the Rajneesh group and is totally alien to the lifestyle of the minor when he is with his father.”

Said Phillips: “I looked at the judge’s face when he came out (from talking to his son) and I knew that he finally understood what’s really going on up there at that ranch—that it’s a kiddie-land for adults, and the children are getting screwed over.”

Wild, Wild Country is too murky with respect to the basis of the conflict between the Rajneeshees and residents of Central Oregon. Were their opponents a group of prejudiced, white, Christian, country yokels, or were they motivated by genuine concerns regarding the impact of new city on the fragile ecology of a farming community in the high desert? Was the conflict in fact basically a land-use dispute, in which the Rajneeshees from the outset furtively and systemically violated both the spirit and letter of Oregon’s land-use laws?

When the Rajneeshees first arrived at the Big Muddy Ranch (soon the be renamed Rancho Rajneesh) in July 1981, they declared their intention to operate a “simple farm” and “religious commune” with a mere 50 agricultural workers. Within a month, however, they had applied to Wasco County for permits to locate 34 trailers on the Wasco County portion of the property. The permits granted allowed five inhabitants per trailer, which would bring the population of the ranch to 170 people. Oregon law requires a minimum of 150 people to incorporate a city. Three months later, in October 1981, Rajneesh representatives applied to the Wasco County Commission for permission to hold an incorporation election on grounds of the renamed Rancho Rajneesh.

The Oregon Land and Conservation Development Commission (LCDC) had three principal planning goals relevant to the idea of incorporating a new city at Rancho Rajneesh. Goal 3, the Agricultural Lands Goal, called for the preservation of agricultural lands in the state. Goal 14, the Urbanization Goal, mandated that urban development in the state take place in an orderly and efficient manner within an approved urban-growth boundary. However, to complicate matters, Goal 2 allowed exceptions to Goal 3 and Goal 14 in cases where it could be shown that an exception would advance the overall cause of sound land development.

Rajneesh moved to Central Oregon to build “the first Sannyasin City,” which he aimed to grow to a population of 100,000. Courtesy of Netflix

In meetings with Rajneesh representatives in the fall of 1981, staff attorneys for 1,000 Friends of Oregon, a citizens’ land-use advocacy group, warned them that they would have to seek an exception under Goal 2. The 1,000 Friends’ representatives predicted the likelihood was that an exception would not be granted, because Oregon land-use laws already permitted the kind of simple farming and religious activities the Rajneeshees said they wanted to pursue. They could obtain permits for farm-related structures on a case-by-case basis from Wasco and Jefferson Counties. The Rajneesh representatives responded that the process of obtaining permits on a case-by-case basis was too burdensome, and the expenses required for travel between the ranch and the county courthouses too great, for this to be a practicable plan for them.

Instead, the Rajneeshees went ahead and campaigned for permission from the Wasco County Court to start building their city. “Findings of Fact” submitted to the commission asserted that “the uses to be established within the proposed city are of a rural nature ... to meet the needs of the predominately agricultural work force residing within the area. Limited commercial and industrial uses will be of a similar nature.” It was on the basis of these finding that Commissioner Rick Cantrell, also the county executive, and Commissioner Virgil Ellett overrode the opposition of the third commissioner and voted to allow the official incorporation of Rajneeshpuram. Whatever his real views on the incorporation matter, Cantrell possessed an added incentive to vote the Rajneeshees’ way: They bought his entire herd of horses from him for more than they were worth on the open market at time when he was having severe difficulty meeting his payments on a loan from the U.S. National Bank of Oregon. They didn’t pay him the money, however, until after the vote endorsing their plans for a city had taken place.

After receiving permission from the Wasco County Commission to begin building their supposedly agriculturally-oriented city, the Rajneeshees proceeded to construct the following kinds of structures: several hundred houses, several multiplex apartment complexes, a two-story shopping mall, a 21,900-square-foot “counseling complex,” a series of office buildings and restaurants, a large warehouse, a four-story hotel, a factory, and an airport landing strip capable of accommodating private jet airplanes. Granted permission to build a “simple greenhouse,” they erected a 2.2-acre, 80,000-square-foot public meeting hall called a Mandir. All of these structures were outside the limits of an urban growth boundary, because there wasn’t one in that area.

So much Sturm und Drang surrounds the Rajneesh story that people telling it, either in written form or in film, can forget to make clear how straightforward a story it really is, and readers and viewers can miss it. Rajneesh had repeatedly said when he and his followers were still in India that he wanted to build “the first Sannyasin City,” indicating it might start out with 10,000 residents and eventually reach 100,000, and he came to Oregon with that purpose in mind. 1,000 Friends of Oregon, with the support of local ranchers and farmers, pursued a legal strategy to stymie his project, to the point where eventually it seemed that the original Wasco County Commission vote giving the Rajneeshees permission to incorporate their city might be overturned, and the city literally deconstructed. It was at that point that the Rajneeshees hatched an imaginative but not very realistic scheme to gain control of the Wasco County Commission, which was going to get a redo vote on the issue.

So much Sturm und Drang surrounds the Rajneesh story that people telling it, either in written form or in film, can forget to make clear how straightforward a story it really is.

Their scheme had three parts: debilitating two of the county commissioners by poisoning them, and running two of their own candidates for their seats; poisoning potential voters in the county so they couldn’t get to the polls on election day; and bringing in a few thousand homeless people from around the country to register them to vote, because they did not have enough Rajneeshee voters on the ranch to carry the day. This scheme fell apart in dramatic fashion, for reasons that the Duplass brothers’ film tracks very well. An elaborate voter-registration process set up by Oregon Secretary of State Norma Paulus and the Wasco County clerk deterred the homeless residents from trying to register. Most of them hadn’t been the least bit interested in registering to vote in the first place.

Homeless people, stranded by the Rajneeshee in various bus stations around the state, without the return tickets to their cities of origin they had been promised, had plenty to say about the prevailing atmosphere on the ranch. “It’s a peace and love thing, right? Wrong!” Duane Hartman told the Vancouver Columbian newspaper. “Everywhere you look, there’s someone checking up on you.” Another homeless man from New York named Steve Maranwille told the same newspaper, “I hated it. It was like a terrorist camp.” John Irwin told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “There’s rampant sex and they’re trying to twist people’s minds in these all-day brainwashing sessions.” Irwin reported that he was kicked and beaten in his tent after refusing to register to vote. Reporter Roddy Ray wrote in the Detroit Free Press, “Periodically, during dinner, a voice came over the loudspeaker: “Attention, friends. If you are an American citizen and over eighteen, you are eligible to register to vote.” Some of the homeless people claimed that food, clothing, and bedding were withheld from them if they refused to register.

“It’s a constructed environment that invokes most of the senses,” Warren Barnes, from Berkeley, California, explained to the Seattle Times. “Color predominates. Image dominates—you see Bhagwan’s picture all the time. Words predominate—Rajneesh, Rajneesh, Rajneesh.” Barnes said personal decisions such as where to work, where to eat, and where to live were taken away at Rajneeshpuram. “It’s a continuing process where you can be a baby again,” he said. “And these subliminal things weaken your will to resist.”

“They say peace there, but there’s guns everywhere you look,” Donnie Harman, a homeless man from Tyler, Texas, told the Seattle Times. “They say no lies, but I was lied to until I left.” Reporter Jay Maeder of the Miami Herald described Rajneeshpuram as “a dark-souled, us-against-them kingdom, full of beaming, soft-singing spiritual storm troopers whose high priests daily drum into the acolytes that the world outside is a savage forest full of predators who mean to destroy them.” Maranville described to The Dalles Weekly Reminder a meeting at which the homeless people, particularly Vietnam veterans, were asked to “defend the community.” “They said they’d arm people if they had to,” Maranville claimed.

“These people are dedicated and dangerous,” Michael Sprouse of Jacksonville, Florida, told the Weekly Reminder. “They are dedicated fanatics and they’re armed ... psyched up to the point of firing on American citizens or U.S. military personnel, if the Bhagwan asks them to. I know Oregon people are concerned. But I don’t think they’re taking them as seriously as they should.” Toward the end of the story recounted in Wild, Wild Country, ex-Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Weaver—who throughout the film seems bent on convincing viewers that the authorities were on top of the Rajneesh problem from the outset, when in fact they didn’t even lift a finger to ameliorate the situation in Central Oregon or aid the troubled local residents in any way—outlines the military-style invasion of Rancho Rajneesh, with several hundred national guardsmen and an FBI swat team, he had in the works. If this operation had actually been undertaken, there might have been a bloodbath at Rajneeshpuram that would have made the FBI’s later fiasco at Waco look like the mission of mercy it purported to be. Fortunately for Weaver and everyone else concerned, Bhagwan forestalled this possibility with his attempted escape from America in one of his Lear Jets, which when his jet stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina, to refuel he was arrested and brought back to Portland for trial.



Virtually everything that happened in the story of the Rajneeshees in Oregon (including the takeover of Antelope, which was their backup city) pertained to the land-use issue, and the question of whether their city would survive its legal challenges. The poisoning of nearly 1,000 restaurant patrons at Sunday brunch in The Dalles was a dry-run to determine how effective it might be if used to keep voters from the polls. In the end, this diabolical plot didn’t come to fruition either. But it provides a convenient point for returning to the subject of evil, and measuring the exact degree of danger posed by this cult.

I happened to be in Washington, D.C. not long after the poisonings in The Dalles, and dropped by Congressman Jim Weaver’s office in the late afternoon to say hello. He called me into his personal office, mixed up a couple of cold gin martinis, sat down, and began to explain why the only possible source of the salmonella poisoning in The Dalles was Rajneeshpuram. Jim came from an agricultural background in Iowa (his grandfather, James O. Weaver, was the candidate of the Populist Party for president in 1892), and he had a detailed knowledge of salmonella (which is found on eggs and raw poultry). He insisted that there was absolutely no other explanation for salmonella being present in the salad bars of a dozen different restaurants on the same morning. And, of course, he turned out to be right. The Centers for Disease Control had blamed it on the food handlers in the restaurants.

Jim went on the floor of the U.S. Congress and gave a speech called “The Town that Was Poisoned,” taking dead aim (after running down the scientific basis of his interpretation) at the Rajneeshees, though not mentioning them by name. For this act of public service, he was pilloried by the editorial page of the Oregonian, which supported the Rajneeshees and their leader to the bitter end. Jim and I had both been the subject of strong criticism from Portland liberals, who viewed Rajneesh as a victim of racial prejudice and religious bigotry from the country bumpkins in Central Oregon.

Since we were two of the leading liberals in the state ourselves, the criticism of us was especially personal. At the Democratic Convention in San Francisco in 1984, the chairman of the Oregon delegation walked out the room when he overheard me talking about Rajneesh (he should have listened in more carefully: I was gathering details from a man I met who lived in San Francisco and claimed he had participated in a bachelor party orgy with Rajneesh escort girls). When the ACLU came out in support of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on First Amendment grounds, I offered to address their board and outline for them what I thought was really going on up in Central Oregon. They rejected my offer out of hand—they simply didn’t want to hear another other side of the story. Conservatives often criticize liberals for refusing to recognize evil when it clearly presents itself, and they are not completely wrong in this assessment.

One time I heard that the head of the Rajneesh Medical Corporation, Ma Anand Puja, was coming to Portland to give a talk about the commune’s medical program, and I went to hear her lecture. She projected, for want of a better way to put it, a very dark and menacing aura. After Sheela left the ranch and the authorities gained a warrant to search the Rancho Rajneesh thoroughly, it turned out that the Rajneesh Medical Corporation actually housed a biological warfare laboratory, which Puja oversaw. She 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. Reportedly, Puja had at first wanted to use salmonella typhi to poison Wasco County voters, but decided against it when it was explained to her that it might cause a typhoid epidemic which could be easily traced to the ranch.

Inside the same building law enforcement officials also discovered the following books and other written materials: Deadly Substances, Handbook for Poisoning, and The Perfect Crime and How to Commit It, as well as numerous articles on assassinations, explosives, and terrorism. There was also an article entitled “poison investigation” with sections on symptoms highlighted, and a clear plastic bag with articles on infectious diseases, chemical products, and chemical and biological warfare.



But that’s not all. There was also discovered a top-secret research project called Moses Five, whose objective was to cultivate a live AIDS virus. Rajneesh had predicted that two thirds of the world’s population would die of AIDS, and the first question was: If Puja could have produced such a virus, might Rajneesh possibly have used it to make his prediction come true? In his book on Aum Shinrikyo Destroying the World in Order to Save it, Robert Jay Lifton introduced the concept of “action prophet” to describe a cult leader who “aggressively sought to bring about whatever he predicted.” “What made Asahara an action prophet,” he explained, “was the inseparability of prophecy and action, of what he imagined and what he did.”

If Puja had succeeded in cultivating a live AIDS virus, would Rajneesh have ordered is use? If seems that Judith Miller, in her 2001 book Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, reached more or less the same conclusion I did about Puja—that she would have almost certainly deployed it. But what about Rajneesh? Would he have ended up as an action prophet if the commune hadn’t come unraveled?

I had a conversation with Congressman Weaver on this subject. Same place, same office, same time of day, same libations. Jim had said in his speech about the salmonella poisonings that “People who would do that would stop at nothing”: