The Binge Cases: Scary Terri - I Am Rama | 6. Deprogramming

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Rama finds himself in the crosshairs of the Cult Awareness Network, a group dedicated to extricating people from what they consider to be cults by “deprogramming” them. But Rama’s students tell a much different story. 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

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Over the last two episodes, we spent a lot of time with two people, Will and Brenda. And I wanted to take time to tell their stories in full because to me, they occupy opposing ends of the spectrum that is, you could say, the Rama effect. The best and the worst case scenarios. A lot transpired in those years though. Will met Rama in the early 80s and stuck around for about a dozen years. Brenda's time in Rama's orbit was shorter. She disappeared in 1989. And that's around when we are picking the group's story back up. By the early 90s, Rama was steeped in controversy. From a group of women who accused him of sexual assault to exposés in print and TV. In response, Rama and his students would

themselves prepare a counteroffensive with the help of attorneys, and we'll get to all of that in the next few episodes. Around this time, the character of the group was also changing, time the character of the group was also changing the way it worked in 1992 rama told his early students that they would now also become teachers and would be referred to as st1s while their mentees or students the newest members of the group would be st2s it was an inside joke st stood for star trek the nicknames are playful but but according to Liz Lewinson, Rama's biographer, the underlying shift was a big deal in the evolution of the group. All these new students were coming. It was like a reset key, Liz told me.

The first wave of students, ST1s, became teachers of their own, specializing in meditation and computer programming. Rama suddenly had this group of newbies, and they're like the fresh ducklings that come in. Rama had a very specific idea about who he wanted these new students to be. Entrepreneurs who would learn from their ST1 role models, students who are now in their 30s and 40s and had been around for a while.

These veteran students had been sent all over the country to teach and eventually to bring a few new students back to study with Rama. Instead of Rama being the singular recruiting draw, students also became teachers at this time. A few other things were changing too. Back in the 80s, it was all about getting educated, getting a job, making a little more money, entry-level stuff for most.

But in the late 80s and early 90s, Rama started pushing his students to go bigger, to become consultants, and eventually, to start companies. Will talked about this, about how his software company was wildly successful, and he shared, he says, half of the proceeds with Rama, out of a reverence for Rama's role as his teacher. You're gonna make a lot of money, because you don't now have to go and work. Once you have your product, you just start making copies of it and sending them out,

and the money comes in. That's just one example, and really, Rama was very hands-off when it came to Will. He encouraged a number of other students to start their own companies too. This was, some students told me, a way in which Rama was investing in his students. That he wasn't just pushing them, but helping them reach their spiritual potential.

One student I talked to, his name's Josh, came to Rama as a musician and became a computer programmer, started a consulting company that did really well. Why would someone do all of those things that I did, like give up my life as a guitarist and become a computer programmer? Why would I just kind of pick up my life and go to New York? And why would I do all these kind of things that were really difficult just because there's some charismatic guy telling me to do it.

It's because of spiritual empowerment. Spiritual empowerment for young CEOs. By the mid-90s, Rama was also starting his own software companies, employing his students. Here's Liz again. Okay, so he would rent offices. He would pay salaries. So he was in it to succeed. He was in it to have people interact and have fun.

And some of the time it paid off. Liz says somewhere between six and eight of his students' companies found success. Rama's group was evolving, and that included learning to live with increased scrutiny, negative attention from the press, and other groups. There were even some people out there trying to rescue Rama's students, to pluck them out of what they considered a cult and return them to their families, their old lives, to deprogram Rama's students, to save them from him. We've actually met a student who joined around this time already,

back in the very beginning, episode one, the first golden light story you heard in a restaurant outside of Manhattan, New York, 1992, Jim Piccarello. And God damn it if the whole room didn't turn into solid gold. Jim's introduction to Rama would sound similar to so many others, to Luke's, Mark's, Buddhist magic, golden light, the whole nine yards. But his story would end much differently.

He says, dude, you're in a pyramid scheme. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm Jonathan Hirsch from Neon Hum Media and Smokescreen. This is I Am Rama. Chapter 6. Deprogramming. Jim's first golden light moment had a profound effect on him. He jumped into studying with Rama, changed his day-to-day life drastically. I start meditating twice a day, 20 minutes twice a day, and then a half hour, and then 40 minutes, and then an hour, twice a day.

Before Rama, Jim was a B-minus student, a generally unmotivated college senior. But after that first night, after the golden light, Jim had a bit of a glow-up. More focused, trying harder. He was doing better in school, getting all A's, in fact. And he started running every day. I felt the endorphins. I felt healthy. And the icing on the cake? He was making his parents proud. They were like, our kid is interested in pursuing a very respectable and predictable career in computer programming.

Jim also heard about the accusations against Rama, about the people determined to expose him to save his students. But it was easy enough to block out the noise, to focus on Rama, to focus on the study. Besides, whatever outside controversies were happening, they weren't happening to him. So I handed myself over on the silver platter. Jim attended seminars whenever he could, immersing himself more and more in the group.

Rama was smart and funny. Jim wanted to be like him, wanted to be liked by him. I had moments that felt like he was psychic, where I had a question in my mind, like, I wonder what his favorite book is? And no lie, 10 seconds later, he'd say, out of nowhere,

he'd stop what he was saying and say, did you know my favorite book is Lord of the Rings, the trilogy? And then he would start talking about it. Now, to me, I was like, holy shit. He was literally in my head. I asked that question. I didn't say it out loud.

Jim dropped out of college with half a semester left. Nothing else mattered. I only had five classes to go, and I would have graduated. But I was so excited to not waste another minute of all of this bullshit that I just quit. But before he fully dropped out of his old life altogether, Jim needed to save a little money. So he decided to move back home with his mom and stepdad for a bit. And when he did, he made a point of giving his mom a heads up about something called the Cult Awareness Network, formed basically to take down groups they deemed too culty

and to save followers from the danger that being in these groups could bring. The older students had warned Jim to steer clear of Cann. Jim passed the warning along to his mom. There's this organization called the Cult Awareness Network, and they are this evil organization that will call you up and convince you that I'm in a cult. And they will extort money out of you. And then they will get a professional to quote unquote, deprogram me violently, lock me in a closet, don't feed me until I can't even remember Rama's name. So if you ever get a call from the Cult Awareness Network, don't take it.

And she goes, okay, honey, whatever you say. And I walk away. And she says to herself, this is how she explains it. She says to herself, huh, Cult Awareness Network. That sounds legit. So she calls up and they answer the phone and she says, hi, do you guys deprogram people? And they're like, no, no, no, no. We're a nonprofit. We photocopy articles. And we send out packets to folks who want to know more about certain cultic organizations that are destructive. And she says, do you have a packet on someone named Rama? And they were like, oh, yeah. Jim's mom knew right away. Rama wasn't just a guy helping her son get good grades. knew right away. Rama wasn't just a guy helping her son get good grades. According to Jim, from what Kan told his mom that day, Rama was running a cult. And Kan took him seriously enough that they had produced educational material about Rama. Jim's mom took action. And she sent them a check

for $20 and they sent her an inch and a half thick packet of articles. And she said, is there someone that I can hire to help us save my son? And they said, we don't do that. But they gave her a suggestion. Call this guy who lives in Boston and specializes in this kind of therapy. So she did. My name is Dr. Stephen Hasson.

I'm a licensed mental health counselor. Steve was suited to this kind of work because he had firsthand experience. I'm a former cult member, and I have been helping people exit authoritarian cults for over 40 years. Back when he was in a cult, Steve got in a bad car accident. During his recovery, his family staged an intervention. And he was, he says, deprogrammed. That's what getting somebody out of a spiritual group is called. It's fitting, considering Rama's enthusiasm about computer programming.

About programming the mind. Anyway. After Steve was deprogrammed, he became a deprogrammer himself. By the time Jim's mom had hired him, Steve had been at it for nearly a decade. Jim wasn't the first Rama student he had worked with. Rama, one of the tricks that he used was convince people that when they met a perfect master, they would see a golden halo around that aura, around that person's body which is a what's called a positive hallucination in hypnotic language when members would see this golden light emanating from Rama they would be

convinced that he was enlightened when in fact it really is just a hypnotic suggestion that in the context of a mind control cult, people misattribute that he had spiritual powers versus he was using hypnotic techniques to bypass critical thinking and get people to be devoted followers. The golden light. Steve says it was all a little mind trick. So Steve got started,

mostly working with Jim's family and friends to help with the effort, teaching them how to break through. You know, like multiple times a day, someone would call, someone would bump into me. You know, I had a friend who was working for the White House and he came home so he could help out for a time, you know, with the intervention. It was working a little bit. It made Jim think, at least.

He played along, but was secretly still planning on skipping town, rejoining Rama and his students, and never coming back. He even knew when he was going to do it. So this is at three months before they don't know this, that I'm going to disappear forever. So the clock is ticking, right? Towards the end of the summer, Jim went out to the market one day and ran into an old friend who was home from his freshman year of college. And Jim, he wasn't doing too hot. It felt like I was living in two separate brains at the same time, I was living in two separate brains at the same time, as if my brain was being ripped in half, which is what it was. I had the cult brain, and I had the old Jim brain that was questioning.

So when Jim asked if they could meet up later to talk, his friend agreed. So that evening, Jim told his friend everything about Rama, what he'd experienced, what he'd seen. He said, I took a class in Buddhism my freshman year. And he goes, so wouldn't it be amazing if you're actually following an enlightened being? That is incredible. And he goes, well, what does that guy say about the Four Noble Truths? And I was like, what are the Four Noble Truths? He's like, it's the basis of every version of Buddhism in the world. And he explained what the Four Noble Truths were about illusion and suffering and everything.

And I was like, no, he'd never mentioned that once in a year. And he said, well, what does he say? And then I told him the bit about getting the energy, meditating, programming, making lots of money, giving the money to him. And he was like, this is a 19-year-old. He says, dude, you're in a pyramid scheme. And it hit me like a ton of bricks.

The next morning, Jim's friend Bob stopped by unannounced, and Jim quickly sussed out what was going on. This was an intervention, the deprogramming event. Jim went willingly to Bob's house and found some familiar faces. And my friends and family are there. And it's like an intervention, like you'd have for an alcoholic or drug abuser, right? Also in the room were two former Rama students and Steve Hassan. About three hours in, I had the sensation that a cork had popped out of my brain,

and I woke up from a year-long dream. And I went, holy shit, guys, you have no idea what I believed. It was like I suddenly had all of my perspective from before I joined all at once. And it was terrifying. It was like, that was not me for the last year. That was, I was watching that whole thing. That wasn't me.

At the beginning of the series, we heard Jim Piccarello describe the golden light, the sensation he felt at his first meditation, what some call the Buddhist magic that Rama could summon. But here, he's telling us, nah, that wasn't me. Jim still remembers it happening, but eventually came to the same conclusions as Steve Hassan. It was all a trick.

I have what they call, I think it's called a positive hallucination. It's where I use the dream part of my brain and it actually imprints over my visual system. So I can see a hallucination from my imagination, from my dream state on top of reality. So is Rama a trickster or a divine magician? The truth is most everyone I talk to

seems to deeply believe what they're saying, whichever side they take. This has been one of the most vexing parts of making this podcast. I feel like I'm on a jury, weighing evidence. And in the end, the only way I could honor the story, the whole story, was to give space for some students, both devoted and skeptical, and some detractors, to share their truths. And let you, our listener, make up your mind about what you think really happened. After his intervention, Jim spent the next six months depressed, soul-searching, trying to make sense out of the year he had spent with,

some would say, lost to Rama and his students. My personality had been erased. I had taken on the persona of who Lenz or this Rama was, with his desires, with his intentions, with his interests, everything. And so leaving the group when I did, the person that I was had been replaced. And the person I had been, I couldn't trust anymore, because that person got himself into a cult and was seriously manipulated. Eventually, Jim got himself right.

He got in and out of Rama's group in about a year, a blip, really, in a long life. With the Cult Awareness Network, Their interactions with Rama and his group were nowhere near done. Hi, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness. Clean water, fresh air, our health. Electricity, honey. We tend to take for granted the things

that matter most, like the separation of church and state. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been on the front lines defending your freedom to live and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Most folks don't see how church-state separation affects our daily lives until that freedom is gone. The separation between church and state covers many core freedoms like civil rights for LGBTQIA plus people, women and racial slash religious

minorities, or reproductive justice and freedom. But those rights are not a given. Every day, Americans United works at the state and federal level to make sure these freedoms and more are protected for every American to enjoy and benefit from. They can't do this alone though. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and growing the movement because church-state separation protects everyone. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more and get involved at au.org slash curious. Hi everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness. Clean water, fresh air, our health. Electricity, honey. We tend to take for granted the things that matter most,

like the separation of church and state. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been on the front lines defending your freedom to live and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Most folks don't see how church-state separation affects our daily lives until that freedom is gone. The separation between church and state

covers many core freedoms like civil rights for LGBTQIA plus people, women, and racial slash religious minorities, or reproductive justice and freedom. But those rights are not a given. Every day, Americans United works at the state and federal level to make sure these freedoms and more are protected

for every American to enjoy and benefit from. They can't do this alone, though. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and growing the movement. Because church-state separation protects everyone. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more and get involved at au.org slash curious. The Cult Awareness Network was one of the many groups that arose in response to new age

spiritual groups. Here's a clip from a 60 Minutes special from December of 1997 about Cannes. There was a time if you were worried about your son or daughter being in a cult, you could get help from a small non-profit organization called the Cult Awareness Network, or CAN, for 20 years the nation's best-known resource for information and advice about groups it considered dangerous. CAN was a non-profit that basically functioned as a hub of information and resources for the public. Now, according to Jim and his mom, Can claimed at one point not to directly perform deprogrammings. But from all that I've learned, it's safe to say that if a parent wanted to pull

their kid out of a spiritual group, out of what they considered a cult, Can would help them. And that often included setting up, at least, a deprogramming. I'm here because of a career I had in cult intervention, something that they've called deprogramming and exit counseling and other terms. Joe Simhart made a living as a deprogrammer for a little over a decade. I'm probably going against the grain of almost all so-called cult experts out there because I don't define cult as evil or bad. It's not just a four-letter word. Joe's journey into this world starts back in 1980 in New Mexico

when he fell in a little too deep with a spiritual group himself. He was an art student looking for inspiration, and he decided to mimic what some modern artists had done, turn to spirituality. I got caught up in this church universal group for about a year and a half. I began to go out to their conferences. I started chanting the way they did. And, you know, I got actually derailed from thinking of it as an art career choice and

more as a spiritual choice. And he lost sight of himself a little bit, forgetting why he joined. My interest in the arts drew me into the occult, which drew me into the cult group. He eventually got out, and as Joe tells it, he found himself in interesting conversations afterward with the people from the Universal Group. And so I sat down with a number of them, and they left based on the information that I had gathered then, which wasn't a whole lot, but it was enough to tip them over the

edge and decide to leave the cult. He had similar experiences with people from other groups, too. They'd start talking about spirituality or trying to convince me to join their little Bible church, and I'd talk to them, and then they would turn around where they'd end up leaving their Bible church after talking to me. So. Joe began attending cult awareness conferences and his name got around. Deprogrammers started contacting him, paying him to help with interventions. That's how I got started in this whole thing. I, you know, my reputation grew. I kept getting calls and I got

swept up in it. He started working with Cannes in 1986. So it became my full-time income for about 12 years. And his job was talking people into leaving their spiritual groups. It's more conversational, closer to

what you'd call the Socratic method. So I'm not taking anything away. I'm actually adding something to their point of view so that they can make a new choice. Joe says the word deprogramming comes with a lot of baggage. It's just one of those words like cult and brainwashing that is out there in the public. And it kind of triggers some kind of an image of what we're talking about, even though the words aren't really descriptive of what we do. In about a decade of work, Joe started to notice a pattern of psychology in people he was working with. It's developed into a rubric of sorts that he uses to explain how a cult works.

Joe says the attraction one feels towards a cult and its leader is rooted in two elements. Grandiosity and constriction. To achieve your transcendent goals, you had to walk a pretty narrow path. So if you have something which is attracting you, something transcendent, which makes you feel like you're gonna gain something

from it, you're gonna become a better self, you're gonna become a better salesman, you're gonna become more spiritual, you're gonna find your way to heaven. You know, in other words, it's grand, it's grandiose. And that's the attraction. So at first it's expansive, it's attractive, and then in order to get to that goal that's offered,

now you've got to constrict yourself. You've got to submit to the rules, the regulations, to the meetings. Your life begins to orbit around this central idea that is headed up by a guru. And that makes it really hard to leave. That connection you have with this transcendent world that you committed to is now the focus of your life, and you don't want to lose it. And the group keeps encouraging you that you should stay in here because anything else is worse. There's nowhere to go but down.

I saw this happen a lot in Adida's group with my parents. Adida was everything, and it felt really good to be noticed or validated by him. Even if being in the group sometimes included a lot of sacrifice, getting to the outside might be even harder. From what I can tell, Rama didn't have the same effect. Probably because he so regularly kicked students out. Still, when there's someone you respect, whose admiration you want, and who's enlightened, you'll follow his lead, even if he didn't explicitly tell you to. After spending time living by Rama's rules,

making a new choice can be daunting. Some people say he made pretty strong suggestions about what to wear, what kind of dog to get, what kind of car to drive. It certainly wasn't that he forced anyone to do anything. That's not it at all. But instead, he split these worldly possessions into two buckets, high vibe and low vibe. According to Joe, the lifestyle pressures were mechanisms of manipulation. You know, the brochure is very different than what goes on behind the curtain.

Sometimes what can feel like spirituality, like magic, he says, is just plain neuroscience. If you want to get technical about it, the prefrontal cortex shuts down where you do your judgment and reasoning and stepping back from a situation

and looking at it more thoroughly and more expansively. And the emotional center kicks in, you know, and what some people call the God spot in the brain. The God spot. Where you get these transcendent feelings begin to kick in. It's easy to project all kinds of divine significance

to every movement a guru makes. Like the golden light, or how Rama guessed what Jim was thinking. It must be divine. He must be enlightened. There are no coincidences here. I mean, they could excuse almost anything he did or find ways of explaining these so-called miracles

that happened around him that other people would look at as hypnotic tricks, but they saw as some kind of occult, a sorcery, extra-worldly event. It's the intensity of these contrasting beliefs, magic versus manipulation, that fueled the escalating conflict between spiritual groups and deprogramming groups

like the Cult Awareness Network. Soon, Rama's group would be in the trenches too. From the director of The Greatest Showman comes the most original musical ever. I want to prove I can make it. Prove to who? Everyone. So, the story starts.

Better Man, now playing in select theaters. What was the last thing that filled you with wonder, that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic or your sink full of dishes? As an actor, it's very free being part of these shows. You can step in the booth and kind of be anything. Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is anime. Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I leo murray and i'm leah president and welcome to crunchy roll presents the anime effect it's a weekly news show i literally when i saw it when i found out about this i literally had like a nervous breakdown in a good way with the best celebrity guests

i've never pirated anything but i'll steal it if I have to. That was how I felt when I started to get really hooked on Black Butler. Oh, it's coming back. It's coming back. So join us every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll

or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. The Cult Awareness Network kept tabs on a variety of groups, including Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, and Branch Davidians. Among its leaders was the daughter of the congressman who died investigating Jonestown. These were like the big leagues of cults. But Rama's students? They did not think they deserved that kind of attention. They were not a cult. Here's Liz Lewinson explaining one reason why she didn't think Rama's group qualified. Rama used to say in almost every meeting,

he would point at the door and he'd say, there's the door. There's the door. You can leave if you want. In fact, it was hard to stay in the group. The tuition, the constant relocating, how Rama always challenged his students. The way Liz sees it, this is what makes Rama not a cult leader. In fact, she says, the cult awareness network needed to look in the mirror. They were the real cult. So as a PR person for Rama, I had quite the interesting experience.

And I'm grateful to have so much, to be able to stand up to that level of toxicity. I'm grateful for the honor, frankly. Liz was at the forefront of fighting against Cannes on behalf of Rama. She says unapologetically that they were promoting misinformation. In our world today, this goes on all the time. But at that point in time, late 80s to 90s, I still believed that journalism had balance. For a while, I would try getting people to talk to these journalists who never, ever included anything we said. To be fair, a lot of reporters I spoke to did do their

due diligence and talk to people who were currently or previously studying with Rama. Liz says it wasn't good enough, that at the time the reporters asked for her comment, they were usually a week out from publishing. The programmers weren't just handing out leaflets about unconventional religions, Liz says. They were contributing to a culture that straight up didn't tolerate a group like Rama's.

In the 70s, 80s, 90s, you saw horrific stories about cults that you would think to yourself, God, that's so outrageous. I can't believe it. And I would say to you, don't believe it. Someone got hustled. A parent got hustled because all these people, deprogrammers, exit counselors, advisors made money. They all got paid. And should anyone ever come to you in the present time and say,

your kid is in a cult, I would hold onto your wallet, ask your friend-child relationship, whatever, what the group's actually about, and move on. Luke Sutton became part of Rama's security team in the 90s. He says the most hurtful peddlers of misinformation were the students who left Rama's group and turned on their old teacher. I hope these stories get into the podcast because this is very significant because over all these years, there have been so many naysayers and that includes some of the people who left our study. And that includes some of the people who left our study.

Some of them very close with Rama. And he gave them so much. And for them to leave and to turn their backs on him and to talk badly about him. I read some of the things that these people said. They were disgraceful. They forgot all the wonderful things that he did for them. And they went out and the media loved this stuff. So they didn't have any trouble finding media that was that he did for them. And they went out, and the media loved this stuff, so they didn't have any trouble finding media that was willing to listen to them,

because Rama was kind of famous as a spiritual teacher. And they went out and did this, everything they could do to just dirty his name. As far as Luke and Liz were concerned, the only people guilty of mind control in this story are the deprogrammers themselves. The Cult Awareness Network was the real enemy. The accusations about the deprogrammers didn't stop at lies, at manipulating the media. Some said Cannes could be much more hands-on, literally. Parents would actually pay them about 50 grand to kidnap their offspring to deprogram them.

I mean, it's just unimaginable. Kidnapping. This one woman was invited by her father for lunch. And after lunch, they went down to the parking lot. And suddenly, a van pulls up. And these two men jump out and throw her into the van while her father stood there watching. And they drove away. And they drove her to a dingy motel and tried to deprogram her for a week.

She tried to escape. Her car keys were taken away. She was not given sufficient food, not allowed to sleep. The windows and the doors are nailed shut. Complete sensory deprivation. The woman who was allegedly kidnapped remembered that one of the deprogrammers, a guy named Mark Bloxham, used a particularly crude but effective method of intimidation. This is how Liz remembers hearing about it. He would put his face like six inches from hers and yell, you're stupid, you're stupid, you're stupid.

Can you imagine? I mean, torture. And so she was strong. She tried to run into the street and it was night and there was only one car came by and she was waving at it and screaming and it did not stop. And the programmers grabbed her and put her back, dragged her back in. And she, after another day of that, just pretended that she was completely successful and she did everything you're supposed to do, which is cry and do all kinds of stuff.

And from what I heard, the only way she escaped was that she faked being programmed and they let her go. I should say, I have an affidavit from Mark Bloxham. It's one of many, upwards of a dozen, I've seen from around this time that address controversies surrounding Rama. We'll talk about these more in later episodes, but long story short, I don't really have a way of independently verifying this document. Anyway, in the affidavit, Bloxham mentions the same woman that Liz and Luke told me about. But he claims he never used techniques like physical abuse, humiliation, ridicule,

sleep deprivation, or food deprivation. He's now in prison serving a sentence for aggravated assault and armed robbery. His convictions aren't related to deprogramming. And while I was reporting this series, I reached out to Mark Bloxham for comment. And the night before this episode went live, that is yesterday, a two-page handwritten letter arrived in the mail from Arizona State Prison in Tucson. It's from Mark Bloxham. In the letter, he says that, quote, my experience working with families to extricate their loved ones from destructive extremist cults was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. End quote. He went on to say he'd personally dealt with a number of prominent Eastern religious groups

that were accused during that time of being a cult, groups like Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh and Guru Maharaj. But surprisingly, he wrote that he didn't have firsthand knowledge or direct experience with Rama. So, according to Mark Bloxham's letter, that event involving a Rama student, he doesn't seem to remember it happening, even though it appears in the affidavit with his name on it. Again, I can't independently verify the origins of this affidavit. And in his letter, Mark Bloxham did not reference the kidnapping allegations pertaining to the Rama student. So I wasn't able to get a comment from him on those allegations.

I did reach the woman who was allegedly kidnapped and held by Mark Bloxham and others through an intermediary. I was told that she didn't want to talk to me for the series, so we decided not to use her name. After she apparently escaped, she ended up going on the offensive against the Cult Awareness Network, calling them out for kidnapping her. Later, she would say they would continue to harass her after she was kidnapped. She would continue to study with Rama, though, and years later, as I understand it, she made amends with her parents. Liz, in response to this kidnapping and others, reached out to the ACLU. She says the Cult Awareness Network was already on their radar.

As far as Liz was concerned, besides running a scam committing crimes by allegedly kidnapping people, Cann was also infringing on freedom of religion. Liz and the ACLU were not the first ones to think that. It's the linchpin of the dozens of lawsuits filed against Cann, many of which were filed by Scientologists. I came across a booklet created by Rama's lawyers to share information about the Cult Awareness Network. According to the booklet, there were Cannes chapters all over the country, and there were about 300 people loosely involved with the organization, including 85 deprogrammers. They performed 1,200 deprogrammings a year. I wasn't able to independently verify those figures.

It's worth noting, the Cult Awareness Network denied criminal kidnapping and deprogramming. Joe Simhart and Steve Hassan have also denied it, and Steve has pointedly denounced it as well. The final blow came to the Cult Awareness Network, CAN, when they were accused of kidnapping and deprogramming an 18-year-old member of a fringe Pentecostal church in Washington state. The member filed a civil suit that went to trial in federal court. The jury assessed over a million dollars of damages against Cannes, enough to drive it out of business. But that wasn't the end of the story yet. This is a clip from the 60 Minutes episode about the network and what happened to it after the civil suit. Today, Cannes is under new management.

Hello, Cult Awareness Network. Now when you call looking for information about a cult, chances are the person you're talking to is a Scientologist. The Church of Scientology bought Cannes' name, logo, and hotline number in bankruptcy court. Yeah, that's right. Scientologists are now the voice behind a non-profit previously dedicated to rooting out groups like the Scientologists. No comment on that one. Anyway, Rama's detractors had some compelling talking points. How students separated themselves from their families and funneled their money to him. Brainwashing was mentioned too.

And there were some allegations of sexual misconduct. We'll talk about those in the next episode. But these alleged kidnappings, they became Rama's defenders' main rebuttal. How could this group claiming to save Rama's students be legit if they supposedly had to resort to grabbing people off the street and locking them up in motel rooms? I have to say, their argument is persuasive. It's a bad thing to be the archetype of what deprogrammers did.

It undermined a lot of the rhetoric levied against Rama. This was the general discourse around Rama in the late 80s and 90s when a new kind of TV was emerging, tabloid. One of those shows, a syndicated show called A Current Affair, tackled celebrity affairs, true crime, and miscellaneous scandals. And they did a segment on Rama in the late 80s and brought him on at the end. Rama appears across the table from

the host with a big mess of curly hair as usual and a tweed suit jacket, very profesh. There's a TV at the end of the desk with the Current Affair logo on it. And true to tabloid TV form, the host, Maury Povich, tells Rama he's got a surprise for him, none other than Joe Simhart. At this point, the TV in the background changes. Instead of the show's logo, there's Joe. Povich introduces him as the head of the Cult Awareness Network. Rama issues a correction. This guy's not the head of the Cult Awareness Network. This is a programmer who's hired to do kidnappings for $50,000 a hit.

Povich turns to Joe and asks him what Rama does to engender loyalty from his students. Here's Rama's rebuttal. He's a legit Buddhist, and he does a few seminars a month. I don't see how this rates as a cult. I think we're talking about two different items here. I do seminars that are like real estate seminars in very simple Buddhism. Rama goes on to explain that Joe's not attacking just him, but all of Buddhism.

He accuses Joe and Kan of kidnapping people who are just trying to enjoy their rights, the freedom of religion. Basically, all of these allegations are kind of non-starters because, well, anything Rama does is protected by the U.S. Constitution. Povich seems to take Rama's side as he tosses the question to Joe. So in other words, he just accused you

of the same thing that you said that he does. The stalemate is the most interesting part to me. Instead of just owning up to the less flattering parts of their groups, they simply passed the buck back and forth. Said, well, look how bad that group is. Rama goes on to accuse Joe of kidnapping the woman I talked about earlier. The one everyone seems to use as an example of the cult awareness network at its very worst. Joe's not impressed.

Well, what he's saying is not true. Most of the cases that I work on are voluntary. I do not kidnap people myself. Often the families will hire a security team to secure the individual. And in about one out of ten cases that I work on, I may come in and counsel that individual after they've been secured. And after a three-minute tete-a-tete, the host basically says they're out of time.

I'm glad, at least, that you two have had a chance to chat with each other. Nice to see you, Joe. See you, too. Bye-bye sometime. All right, and we'll see our viewers after this. Thank you. I should mention, a lot of students weren't exactly enthused by the way

he handled himself on these TV shows. They told me that on background, but some told me that the way he appeared on television wasn't how he acted in private. On TV, he sometimes just appeared smug. Behind closed doors, Rama was serious about his work and his students. Of course, just the fact that there was a Rama special on TV in the first place, I can't imagine that went over well. This wouldn't be the last time Rama was the topic of discussion on TV. Rama was also shielding himself from something else. Multiple women had come forward and accused Rama of sexual misconduct. Some of the accusations played out on television programs and forever changed the way the outside world saw Rama. And they sparked sharp responses from some of his students.

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.