The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - I Am Rama | 7. Accused

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

Multiple women accuse Rama of sexual misconduct and emotional manipulation. Many of Rama’s students defend their teacher.  A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. A quick warning, this episode includes descriptions of sexual misconduct

and some difficult conversations about it. Mark Lertzema left Rama's group in 1989. He became disillusioned with the practice, and with Rama. Well, you know when you're a frog and you get into tepid water and somebody turns the heat up, you don't necessarily notice it first. He said there had always been red flags for him, like Rama rolling up in a Porsche while Mark struggled to find an affordable mattress. Then there was this one evening in 1987 in Palo Alto, California.

After a seminar, Rama called out a few of his students by name. They were like his 10 closest students, women. He said that they had formed a circle to harm him and his other students. Mark believes Rama had slept with all these women. And that night, he kicked each of the 10 women out of the group. I mean, he embarrassed them in front of everybody that night, kicked them all out. I was unable to independently verify that story or this next one.

Mark had recruited a woman he'd been dating into Rama's group. He had helped her fill out an application and send in a photograph that was customary at the time. And I remember he looked at the picture for a minute and he said, oh, I love to destroy the innocent she's in. And it kind of wrenched my heart at that moment. She got involved with the group. And one day she comes to me, and she says,

Rama said that I need to break up with you. Sometime after that, Mark left the group. It was for a number of reasons, largely around feeling that he'd given over too much of himself to Rama. But those moments, around the women Rama kicked out, around his girlfriend, stuck out to Mark. From the beginning, Rama had been outspoken about women in a way that gives the impression that he very much was aware of the power dynamics around sex and gender inequality. This is from a video of one of Rama's lectures titled,

Why Don't More Women Attain Enlightenment? When you wish to subjugate a people, you have to convince them of their own inherent weakness. If they believe that they are weak, they will not rebel. If they believe that they are strong and intelligent, they will rebel. So the social repression and ideological repression of women began with depriving them of education, political decisiveness, mobility, and essentially sexual slavery, in marriage, through childbirth, and in many other ways. He also had some complicated, arguably ahead-of-his-time views on gender. This is from that same video. But there is no such thing as a woman or a man.

What we consider to be a woman is an idea. Some students told me that this emphasis on the enlightenment of women is what attracted them to Rama. Multiple people brought this up to me. A lot of spiritual practices hardly mentioned gender at all, much less examined where women fit into it. Rama wasn't just inclusive, they claimed.

This acknowledgement of women was kind of progressive. But some others didn't see anything empowering about the way Rama treated women. In fact, just the opposite, and some took their stories public. In this episode, we're going to hear some of those stories and also hear about how Rama and his students responded. From Neon Hum and Smokescreen, this is I Am Rama. Chapter 7. Accused. In the 1980s, to the best of my knowledge, six women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Rama. They were all former students.

Now I should say, Rama was never formally charged, and to the best of my knowledge, none of the accusers ever went to the authorities. And I can't ask Rama to tell his side of the story, because he's no longer alive. But back then, these allegations became public, in some cases, very public. Daytime television became the platform and, as you'll hear soon, also the battleground over which these claims would be explored. These are difficult stories to hear and should really be in the words of the accusers. I tried to contact every student who publicly alleged sexual misconduct by Rama.

Some declined to take part, some never responded. But there is video footage of two of them from TV programs about three decades ago. And that's what you're about to hear. Lisa Mercedes Hughes studied with Rama in the late 1980s. She'd spent the summer of 1987 with Rama at his house in Long Island. They were dating. Later that year, Mercedes and two other students went public with allegations of abuse, sparking a flurry of critical newspaper and magazine stories about Rama that would dog him the rest of his life.

Talking to reporters that year, Lisa said she felt trapped at Rama's Long Island house. Here she is on a TV show called A Current Affair, talking about her relationship with Rama. He said that sex with him was not an action based on desire between two people. He said that he had sex with many of his women students. It was strictly a spiritual exercise designed to energize me and raise my awareness level up to a higher realm. On the show, she says the experience in Long Island

started out as a sort of honeymoon. But she says it turned dark when the two took LSD together. And he would hypnotize me and put me in trances and play with my head for hours and hours and hours about how powerful he was. And he would look, he'd say, look at me, see how I change, see how powerful I am. And the worst thing he did was he convinced me, slowly, that I was possessed by demons. Another ex-student, Annie Eastwood, talked about going over to Rama's Malibu home for what she thought was a group meditation. This was five years earlier, 1982. Annie talked about it in the late 80s on a show called People Are Talking.

I show up there, and there's the iron gate, and I speak into the box, and the gate rolls back, and I drive in, the gate clanks shut, and I don't see any cars around, and I don't see any other students. And I start feeling nervous, like I wasn't told I was going to be seeing the teacher by myself. Rama met her at the front door. Before this moment, Annie says, she'd only seen Rama across a room on a stage. Now he's up close. She says Rama intimidates her. He's the authority.

He knows the answers. I don't. The object is to get me to doubt myself. Annie says this goes on for six hours. She's getting more nervous, more scared, trying to convince herself that Rama's a person she can trust. Then he takes me on a tour of the house and winds up in his bedroom.

And I'm going, what am I doing in his bedroom? You know, what does this have to do with anything? And he locks the door and there's nobody around. So that's when my fear kicks in. And I say, it's sex on the agenda. I don't want to do it. And he says, the heck you don't. And he says another few hours pass.

The sun sets. And then he goes in the bathroom, comes out. There's a loaded gun. I jump about three feet away. He's holding the gun. Yes. And he says, what's the matter? You know, I'm going, they're good.

And he says, oh, what, this? This is all for my own protection. And he puts it down by the bed. Rape is really about power over. It's called power rapes. You only use as much force as is necessary to reach the goal, which is to render another person totally helpless and to humiliate them. That is what rape is about. Sex is the medium. A few other print news outlets, including Newsday, Newsweek, and the San Diego Union Tribune, ran stories about Annie's accusations. She also shared a shorter version of her story on A Current

Affair. I'm going to play you the voiceover that aired right after. Rama followers point out that Annie never filed charges against Rama and that she did not leave the group until months later. She says it took her time to realize what had happened to her. They say she enjoyed Rama's There are so many reasons a survivor of trauma might not file charges or even leave the person they say abused them. So in that way, whether Annie or anybody else making accusations against Rama went to the police is a moot point. And the counterpoint feels incomplete here. I'm left with so many questions. A lot of these programs from the time don't seem to be especially motivated to shed light on what happened,

to flesh out the controversy in any substantive way. That is, you don't get the feeling from watching this tape that the shows are drawing attention to the accusations to give them more credibility, maybe inspire prosecutors to look more closely. If anything, it can seem like the opposite, like an attempt to discredit the accusers. Maybe it's just plain unreasonable on my part to expect that, but times have changed quite a bit in the last three decades. None of this would fly today.

A Current Affair actually invited Rama on the show, giving him a chance to respond to the accusations. But even segments like this were produced more like a political roundtable, flashy, confrontational, and hovering on the surface of the issue. It opens with Rama sitting across the table from the host, Maury Povich. In this clip, the audience has just seen a packaged feature on Rama. After a little back and forth, Povich says that the charges against Rama were very serious. Here's Rama. Well, they're very absurd is what they are. They're not serious. These people are all part

of the cult awareness network. His defense? It's a conspiracy. Kan is putting the accusers up to it. He's the victim here. The cult awareness network, the organization that aimed to educate people about alternative religious groups they considered dangerous, but also was alleged to be involved in deprogrammings. Rama dismissed a lot of accusations by saying they came from Cannes. Associating anyone with kidnapping accusations, I can't say for sure, but I can imagine how it would change the conversation away from sexual misconduct, from rape. At least, level the playing field for Rama. I have yet to encounter hard evidence that Lisa Mercedes Hughes and Annie Eastwood had an affiliation with Ken,

but Rama certainly seemed to think they did. My response is that these are individuals that are part of a group that goes around on a regular basis discrediting religious figures. We're called the Awareness Network. I'm just their latest hit. Povich points out that Rama admitted to having sexual relationships with some of the women who had made accusations of sexual misconduct. Here's Rama's response. I went to bed with Lisa Hughes. Yes, that's true.

And with Annie Eastwood. They were two people I went out with. And there was no abuse. To this, his defense is, it was all consensual. Rama looks incredulous through the segment on a current affair. His response to the accusations, he's not exploiting or abusing anyone.

It's actually those ex-students who are out to get him. Hearing Rama give answers like this, deflecting in a public forum, sort of feels familiar. He refocuses the conversation on the cult awareness network, on the boogeyman he says is coming for him and his students, and in turn, away from the question of whether or not he's at fault for the things his accusers say he's done. But what I wasn't expecting was how the audience members, the representatives of the public, reacted. It's important for context to remember that the clips you are hearing in this episode aired in the late 80s, a really different time, decades before Me Too, long before people

regularly identified misogyny and rape culture, and before society began to hold accountable those who promoted it. It was also much harder to get an assaulter convicted back then, so coming forward was, even more than today, risky without much of a promise of justice at the end. Everyone handled the topic of sexual assault differently, with far less compassion, less nuance. The other show, People Are Talking, ended differently than A Current Affair. They let audience members ask Annie Eastwood questions.

I find this one the hardest to get through. The first question was from a woman asking if Rama became, in her words, stronger to Annie in the 11 months after the story Annie told about her first visit to Rama's Malibu home. As Annie continued to see Rama, here's her response. He became increasingly more abusive to me emotionally. He rejected me. He humiliated me in front of the inner crowd constantly. Why did you stay? That's a good question.

Why did I stay? Because I was absolutely devastated. But could have you walked out any time, any of you? Could have you walked out the door? The whole thing is a mess. It's just a free-for-all for everyone in the audience, seems to me, at Annie's expense. In the video, Annie looks composed, confident, capable of telling her story to the world.

Still, I can't imagine how difficult it was have been for someone like Annie to come forward. This next one illustrates the reception that Annie and some of the others on stage with her got. What happened to your self-esteem? There was none. There was none. It went out the window when I was raped. It's impossible to know how these accusations would have been responded to had they come about today. But I have

to think that Annie and the other accusers would have found more support after coming forward. Instead, they were met with suspicion, disbelief by a society that didn't have the tools, the words to talk about it. Meanwhile, Rama and some of his students had a hard time with the

widely circulated accusations and they responded in various ways. Victims of sexual assault don't often come forward. According to RAINN, the Rape and Abuse and Incest National Network, 310 of every 1,000 sexual assaults are reported to police. Of those, 50 reports lead to arrests. RAINN cites feared retaliation or uncertainty around whether police would do anything as the biggest reason someone might not report an incident.

And when they do, it's well known that they're often silenced. The Me Too movement has revealed the scope and consistency of how perpetrators get away with assault and how our culture supported that for so long. And it's not like it's all better now. This is the culture we live in. In 1995, there were 5,383 rapes reported to the FBI by local law enforcement. But that's kind of deceiving because the numbers are comprised of 1,368 local agencies

that cover only 7% of the population that reported to the FBI and were recorded as part of the study. In other words, statistics can be deceiving both because rape is so underreported and because of the way law enforcement has traditionally kept data. So much so that the FBI warns that this data can be deceiving and warns against comparing two years to each other. By the late 80s and early 90s, Rama and his students had grown more sophisticated in a number of ways. There was always advertising,

but now there was an even more organized public relations effort. Liz Lewinson describes herself as a PR person for Rama during this time. And from what I can tell, the group had a lot more help from lawyers in these years than before. That's something we get much more into in the next episode, but one way to see it is to look at how Rama and his students responded to the sexual misconduct allegations. I'm not sharing these as some sort of response or counterpoint to the allegations we heard earlier in the episode. Rather, I want you to hear the tone and the ferocity of belief that Rama's defenders carried and still carry to this day.

Liz Lewinson completely rejects the sexual assault allegations against Rama. I was completely stunned and astounded because it was so not true. Liz remembers an article that came out in 1987 alleging that Rama had forced sex on some of his students. There was this huge headline, bigger than the start of World War II. It was half the page at least. And it said, sex and drugs mar Guru's realm. I couldn't find a copy of this article

and was unable to independently verify what Liz said about it. She didn't believe it, she says, because it didn't match up with her experience with Rama, with the group. And I remember being so stunned because I'd been there for seven years, no sex, no drugs. And all my contemporaries, no sex, no drugs. A few of the accusers in the article stuck out to Liz. One had, according to Liz,

previously bragged about sleeping with Rama. Now she was accusing him of assault. It didn't sit right with Liz. And she explained her take on where it came from, that it seemed planned. How the same article had been appearing wherever Rama had taken out a full-page ad. A sort of rebuttal to his advertising.

She called it a hate story. One, she thinks, was coordinated by the Cult Awareness Network. None of these people in that article knew each other. They were all completely unrelated. So Rama, the first thing he noticed was that they didn't know each other. So he assumed right away there had to be something or somebody behind it because, you know, talking about collaboration and organization, there was no unlikely that these accusers could have found each other like they could today, unless there was, in her words, a destructive network involved. And she wanted Rama to fight back. I was eager that Rama would get his chance to say his side of the story.

And I was sure that somebody out there, that this, I thought it was kind of a freakout. That was just an aberration that these stories had appeared. Again, I'm not sharing Liz's viewpoint here as a counterpoint to the accusations. It's just important to hear what the circle around Rama was like. Ardent. Committed. Luke Sutton was a part of that circle, and he has another theory.

These are just women with broken hearts. I should say, he did point out to me that he'd only heard about these accounts from others and didn't witness anything firsthand and can't attest directly to it. But I've heard that there were some women that wanted to have personally relationships with him, romantic relationships with him, and they loved Rama, they were close with him. And when Rama said, no, that's not what this is about,

they felt, you know, they felt that this was inappropriate. They felt bad. They had their feelings hurt and they left. And some of them created stories. Oh, he sexually abused me. He forced me to do this, this, and this. So people started to create all kinds of false stories. Luke and Liz said these things recently to me in the last few months, but the protection around Rama had a similar feeling back then, too. Their observations didn't compute with the allegations levied against Rama. One step that the group took was to collect written affidavits. As Liz explained it, they were preparation, sort of at the ready to be sent to media outlets doing stories on Rama.

In my experience, this is pretty unique. Some might say even abnormal. And as I've mentioned earlier in the series, I've seen a lot of these affidavits while reporting the story. And for most of them, I don't really have a way to independently verify these documents. I'd like to share a few selections from an affidavit I have by a woman named Karen Lever, who says she used to be Annie Eastwood's roommate from December 1982 to March 83, about four months. The voice you hear is a colleague of mine, not Karen Lever herself. Here's paragraph two. On a number of occasions while we lived together,

Annie told me about her relationship with Dr. Frederick Lenz. She told me that since they first met, she'd been very attracted to him and had hoped they might develop a romantic relationship. She said she was very much in love with him and often talked about his qualities that she admired, such as his wit, intelligence, love of nature, and sensitivity to women's issues. It reads like a character statement about Rama so far, about how great he is and how great Annie thought he was. The next paragraph is about when, according to Karen, Annie told her about an evening when she had sex with Rama. It has some of the same details as Annie's story of being assaulted by Rama,

but with different, consensual details. They watched the sunset together from his bedroom window. Then they talked about how she was feeling. During the night that followed, he let her direct the course of events. It was she who suggested that they have sex. Annie says it was the most wonderful evening she had ever spent with a man. And she left his house feeling very much in love. The affidavit goes on.

Annie told Karen she had visions that showed herself and Rama as soulmates. How Karen often came home to find Annie on the phone with Rama. Annie was always talking about her destiny to be with Rama. I can't attest to whether Karen is telling the truth in this affidavit, but I will say that she does a thorough job of painting Annie as a bit obsessed with Rama. A little further in, Karen gets to the question of assault. When talking about Dr. Lenz, Annie never mentioned a handgun or even hinted that Dr. Lenz had ever forced, pressured, or intimidated her into anything. And there you have it. Karen's affidavit is saying that Annie seemed like she was in love with Rama and in a consensual relationship with him.

I have another affidavit from a different student, also about Annie, and another from a third student, one about a different woman who accused Rama of sexual misconduct. Not all the elements are the same, but I'd describe them all as running counter to the public narratives of the accusers. I should note, I wasn't able to independently verify the details in these affidavits. All taken, the wall around Rama was built on this sort of hearsay and conjecture. I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this is not how assault cases get decided. That being said, the totality of the discourse around Rama's sex life and alleged misconduct happened outside the courts, to my knowledge, in the press, and on TV. Rama would never be

charged with any acts of sexual misconduct. Evidence one way or the other was not a precursor to determining fault in the court of public opinion. But looking at the whole of it, it's not hard to see how difficult it must have been for anyone to take the risk of speaking out against him. But it was clear that the public pressure

was beginning to wear on him. He was looking for a way to fight back. He tried to protect his reputation by hiring a lot of lawyers, by letting the media have more access to him and his students. More scrutiny was on the horizon, but Rama wasn't about to give in. That's next time on I Am Rama. I Am Rama is a Neon Hum original podcast

reported and produced by Kate Mishkin and me, Jonathan Hirsch. Our editor is Vikram Patel. Catherine St. Louis is our executive editor. And I'm the executive producer of the show. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Jonathan I. Hirsch. I'll be sharing tons of source material,

photos, and other stuff related to our work on the series, so be sure to check it out. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Justin Klosko is our fact checker. Our production manager is Sammy Allison. The theme song for this series is Dolphin Dance by Tangerine Dream.

Other tracks you heard in this episode are from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And you can find more about this series and all the podcasts we produce at Neon Hum by visiting our website, neonhum.com. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Thanks for listening. you