Survivor of infamous Osho cult speaks on sexual abuse she endured from age 12

Sarito Carroll is a survivor of the Oregon commune Rajneeshpuram, known from the Netflix series Wild Wild County. Rajneeshpuram collapsed under criminal charges 40 years ago, but the teachings of its original guru, Osho, remain popular, including with New Zealanders, and were an inspiration to our own most famous cult leader, the late Bert Potter of Centrepoint. Carroll talks to Anke Richter about being a child in the commune, the sexual abuse she and many other teens endured, and the community’s ongoing denial of these crimes.

Sarito Carroll holds two pairs of shoes in her hand and looks undecided. For the stroll through town, she opts for the more stylish ones: "I definitely don't want to look like a hippie!" The author and acupuncturist from Boulder has flown to California for a discussion on stage the next day. The live event will be about Osho.

The late guru’s name stands for a new age ideology that has liberated many around the world and destroyed others, especially former children of the movement. It still has active followers in New Zealand and inspired Centrepoint founder Bert Potter back in the mid-1970s – with similar disastrous dynamics and consequences.

Carroll's father was a junkie from New York; her single mother a hippie and restless seeker who, in 1978, took her young daughter to the Indian commune of Osho, who was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh back then. Thousands of followers from all over the world flocked to his ashram in Pune, where they dressed in orange and later red. The controversial mystic and philosopher loved to provoke as a capitalist rebel with diamond watches and a fleet of Rolls-Royces. His promise was divine ecstasy through sexual freedom.

Bert Potter, a pest control salesman from Auckland, stayed in Pune for three months. Deeply inspired, he returned to Albany as a self-proclaimed therapist and started New Zealand’s largest intentional community in 1978, literally calling himself “God”. Centrepoint was based on the same spiritual principles as the Pune ashram, but sans the garb. It was raided by police in the 1990s for drug manufacturing and rampant child sexual abuse and ended in 2000. Over a dozen members went through the courts or to jail.

In India, the sannyasins, or seekers, danced, meditated, played music and toiled in a state of perpetual euphoria for their guru. In encounter workshops, they howled, screamed and lashed out. There were mental breakdowns, broken bones, even rape. The goal was to overcome parental conditioning and old moral values. To surrender, let go. Transforming into a new person without shame, fear, attachments or jealousy. Open relationships were the norm. Young women got sterilised because the master didn’t want children, claiming they would hinder spiritual development.

"Bhagwan always said that we don't belong to our parents, but to the community," Carroll recounts on her way to the café. Her copper-coloured curls bounce. She speaks quickly and precisely, appears composed. Thanks to decades of therapy, any bitterness or anger is barely evident. She even sounds dry when she says, "They were meant to give us up to be happier." The girl hardly saw her mother in the ashram anymore. They lived separately, and their relationship was shattered at that time. In the sea of new people, the nine-year-old felt lonely and lost.

Soon after arriving in Pune, everyone received new Indian names. American Jennifer became Ma Prem Carroll, which means "River of Love". For her, it meant she finally belonged. The photo of the her initiation, where the bearded guru laid his hand on her, is the cover of her memoir In the Shadow of Enlightenment. The book is disturbing, describing a parallel world where, alongside a darkness, "love and light" was preached. Always be radiantly positive. Above all, don't be a victim.

Bhagwan also said that one should follow one’s "energy". Give in to your sexual urges and also act them out in front of children so they don’t become uptight. "Our cultural norm shifted," says Carroll. "We were desensitised. There were no boundaries, no one was looking out for us." The ashram children mocked the uninhibited adults or imitated them. Nothing could shock them. "I saw many erections," Carroll writes in her book.

She was only ten when a security guard pulled her onto his lap in front of others and practised French kissing with her. Another man urged her and her friend to masturbate him. When he ejaculated, the shy girl tried to suppress her nausea: "I didn't want anyone to see that I wasn't carefree like we were expected to be."

In 1981, the enterprising sex cult expanded to the US. In the Oregon hinterland, the Rajneeshees bought the deserted Big Muddy Ranch from which they planned to take over the world. The utopian dream required volunteers to transform 260 square kilometres of desert, covered in snow in winter and muddy in spring, into a thriving oasis with its own city. A new wave of maroon-clad pilgrims started: free labour as "worship”.

Sarito Carroll was one of the first to arrive, without parents or guardians. Her move across the world for what she now considers child labour had been decided from above. Once again, the then 12-year-old was a stranger and lonely. The cold dormitory, where she was housed alone with 14 men, had mattresses instead of beds and only one bathroom. No one locked the door. The shower and toilet were used in front of everyone.

Carroll tried to shower secretly at night, ashamed of being so prudish. This wasn't "juicy" like all the sensual women of the commune. Before falling asleep, the pubescent girl would hear people compare their conquests of the day and comment on her own sprouting breasts and pubic hair. "All of this was normal to me," Carroll says. "Only I didn't feel normal because I had this old-fashioned idea of pure, romantic love."

In her first month in Oregon, Carroll met the star of the Rajneesh Country Band. Most nights, the American left the communal dining room with his arm around a different "Ma". After playing Eagles songs on his guitar, he invited Carroll to a poker game. While he held the cards in one hand, he casually slid the other under her T-shirt and played with her breast. She froze and tried not to react, because no one else seemed bothered. As the scenario soon repeated itself, Carroll believed: "I’m special to him”. That was what she longed for. Not the fondling.

This man was 29 and part of a gang that prided itself on taking girls’ virginity. The first time with him, in his trailer, was painful. There was none of the ecstasy everyone raved about. He didn't use a condom and curtly excused himself the next morning for his 12-hour shift. Carroll was upset and disappointed. But she told herself that she should actually be proud: "I was the youngest girl on the ranch with a boyfriend. It was an honour."

The week after her deflowering, she was summoned to the commune's clinic with three other minors to have diaphragms fitted. To this day, Carroll doesn't know who arranged this. None of the "moms," as the motherly women in charge were called, had discussed sex with her. "But someone in a high position knew."

The nights with the older man continued. Carroll believed it to be a relationship, a secret love story. All her thoughts revolved around her first lover. Even though she was the youngest, she wasn't the only one: Carroll estimates that 80 % of the approximately 40 teenagers on the ranch were sleeping with adults. She knows of one girl who was with 70 men before the age of 16. Another with 150. "It was statutory rape" the 56-year-old clarifies. "Child sexual abuse." Sanctioned, covered up and ignored.

Carroll hardly attended school anymore. At first, she worked in the commercial kitchen and then in the office, in the inner circle, under Bhagwan's infamous secretary Ma Anand Sheela. The guru’s powerful assistant was tasked with transforming the makeshift enclave into the model city of Rajneeshpuram with a hotel, an airline and a paramilitary unit. An average of 4000 “orange people” lived on the land. For the group’s annual World Festival, the number rose to 20,000.

Publicity mattered for this megalomaniac mission. A model in Bhagwan's wake suggested Carroll have her photo taken. She was the poster child on the cover of the Rajneesh Times. At 14 years old, she became an air hostess and flew in a maroon uniform for Air Rajneesh. Even though she didn't feel like a woman, she was regarded as one. More men approached her. The girls who gave in gained respect: "The more 'liberated' you were, the better." But she was still hopelessly in love with her older “boyfriend”, who also slept with others. "For over three years, with several hundred," Carroll says over lunch. His friends jokingly nicknamed him "rapist".

A teen disco was held every week at Rajneeshpuram's icecream parlour. Always present were the men and women who were sexually interested in teenagers. One party ended in an orgy with blindfolds, with her older boyfriend also involved. This was followed by a dressing-down from Sheela. The drill sergeant was angry about the noise and alcohol, not the men's assaults.

To get over her heartbreak, Carroll also became promiscuous. She had lost all self-respect. Someone seduced her by insisting that it would cure his back pain. Then she thought she was in love with a British guy in his thirties, an Eton graduate – the same old story. Each time, she felt used when the erotic interest in her revealed itself as fleeting, because everyone lived "in the moment”. Her underlying anger grew, and with it her cognitive dissonance. The constant message was that she was lucky not to live in the outside world among the unenlightened, but instead in Bhagwan's presence.

The Rajneesh movement spread to more than 30 countries in the early 1980s. In Germany, the cult’s main European base, 43 centres were established with 13 discotheques which welcomed half a million visitors in their first year. Carroll was suddenly asked to switch countries again. For five months, she was shuttled through communes from Munich to Zurich where she worked behind bars. In Amsterdam, she injured her back on a construction site.

Today, she suspects that one reason for the "foreign exchange" was to cover up the abuse. During her absence, the top “moms” compiled a secret list of more than 100 names of those who had sexual relations with minors. Those on the list were simply advised to behave more discreetly in the future so that nothing would leak to the press. "When journalists showed up," Carroll recalls, "we always pretended that we were totally happy, and everyone was going to school."

Meanwhile external and internal tension in Rajneeshpuram rose to a max. The animosity between the tiny neighbouring town of Antelope and the paranoid commune dwellers escalated to criminal activities: mass scale immigration fraud, drugging homeless locals to get their votes, even attempted murder. More than 700 people in The Dalles region were poisoned in the largest bioterror attack in the US – plotted by Bhagwan’s right-hand woman Sheela – when ten local salad bars were contaminated with salmonella.

Forty years ago today, on September 14, 1985, Sheela fled to Germany where she was later arrested and extradited. By the end of October, her master was arrested too, and the commune came to a standstill. The outside world was horrified to learn of the crimes committed under the guise of a new religion. But little was said about its youngest victims.

When the crime saga was retold in the 2018 Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, the filmmakers omitted the fate of the Osho kids, although the facts were known by then. A 121-page survey from 1983 by the US Ministry of Justice had explicitly stated that sex between adults and children was the norm at the community. The fact that this was ignored in the documentary was a turning point, says Carroll, who had binged the six-part series in two days. "We didn't want to stay invisible any longer."

The Oregon commune dispersed in panic in the fall of 1985. The Byron Bay area of Australia became a catch basin for many displaced devotees from the US. Carroll didn't know where to go. She had had little contact with her mother for four years. Without money or family, a new odyssey began – with a brutal awakening about her ex-lovers: "I finally realised the truth about them."

The wider truth about Osho and his accomplices only dawned on her much later. After a short stint in a US jail, the cult founder returned to India where he died in 1999 at 58 years old under mysterious circumstances. He only rebranded himself to Osho shortly before his death.

Adjusting to the cultural norms of the outside world was tough. "I felt like an alien reintroduced to society as part of a social experiment," Carroll writes in her book. She hid her body under oversized sweaters. Friends from the ranch supported themselves through sex work – "some still do". The biggest hurdle was her lack of education. Carroll got her school leaving certificate to study literature. When she read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in her freshman year, the plight of the sexually exploited handmaid felt disturbingly familiar. From then on, the student knew she had to tell her story. But it took more than 30 years.

During this period, she lost close friends from the Ranch who’d experienced similar abuse. One ended up in a psychiatric ward and attempted suicide. Another died of an ectopic pregnancy after reversing the sterilisation she had undergone at a young age in India. Among the so-called "second generation", as with Centrepoint and other cults, there are disproportionately high rates of suicide, depression, illness, drug addiction, prostitution and poverty. Carroll describes this legacy of the utopian dream as a "path of devastation". She feels lucky to have survived it.

As Carroll went about writing her book she found that neither her mother nor her former “boyfriend” wanted to talk about the past. In 2018, Carroll sent a letter via Registered Mail to the latter, who was still involved with the group, demanding accountability. There was no response.

Finally, in 2021, Carroll and another woman appealed to the entire remaining community, estimated at over 100,000 members worldwide. They named names, demanded clarification and reparation. Suddenly, her abuser spoke out via video and posted a video apology to Carroll and the other woman. To Carroll, his words rang hollow and came too late. "It was a PR stunt to save his reputation."

Contacted by the Sunday Times after the apology, he clarified his view that “there was no grooming or molestation”.

Some members of the first generation reacted with compassion. But very few saw any complicity in their own actions and silence, let alone that of their long-dead guru. They were stuck in the old ideology: If you have a problem, then you alone are responsible for that and need to work harder on yourself. "This gaslighting is crazy making," says Carroll. "We were marginalised as children, and now again.” The last time she ran into local Osho devotees, they shunned her. Nevertheless, she considers most of them to be "warm-hearted, kind and idealistic”. That's why it hurts so much.

Despite the internal denial, the flood of exposure could no longer be stopped. Media reports with paedophilia allegations from the Rajneesh schools in England followed. And then the answer to Wild Wild Country arrived in 2024 with the BAFTA-nominated documentary Children of the Cult, in which Carroll participated. Dutch director Maroesja Perizonius, a commune kid herself, interviews the 76-year-old Sheela who still claims her ignorance of the child abuse. Perpetrators are confronted on camera too, including Carroll’s abuser – again without further consequences. The statute of limitations for his crimes has long passed.

The estimated number of children abused in the communes is over a hundred, but unlike with New Zealand’s homegrown sex cult, not a single perpetrator has ever been in court. A British law firm gave up on a class action lawsuit after six months, says Carroll. The OIF (Osho International Foundation), which manages the cult founder’s intellectual property and books which have sold millions of copies, denies any responsibility. “There is no one in Osho International who had any organisational function in any of the entities mentioned, and so they know nothing of these accounts,” an OIF spokesperson told the Sunday Times in 2022. The former ashram in Pune is now an upmarket meditation resort.

"Each of us should receive a decent compensation for all our years of therapy," says Carroll, pushing her half-eaten salad aside. "I could have bought a house with my therapy fees alone." Now she's agitated. Her voice is coarse when she mentions her broken relationships and why she never had children. "I was just too afraid of becoming a single parent myself. Because I experienced it as so horrible."

Why did she keep her Sannyas name, once she was fully aware of the negative association? “When I wrote my book, it was a protection mechanism,” she explains. "Those who want to threaten me will only come after Sarito.” Jennifer is still her legal name. She could hide behind it and not be found. But she’s also not shying away from wearing red anymore. "I'm taking the colour back. It doesn't belong to Osho. And it suits me." She almost packed a scarlet top in her suitcase for the upcoming event.

Carroll's cell phone buzzes while she finishes her iced tea: a message from a friend from back then, who will be coming tomorrow to sit in the audience. One of the few who didn't duck away after the tell-all book. They haven't seen each other since escaping the ranch together 40 years ago, but the memory is still fresh: "I sat in the back of the car with my few belongings and was in shock."

This spring, the author returned to the fateful place for the first time for a TV interview. It’s now a Christian summer camp. Again, she was overwhelmed, but this time by the beauty of the landscape, the vastness and the tranquillity, "without the thousands of people". The tour around the old buildings was healing. Nothing triggered her anymore, she says. "It felt like closure." At Krishnamurti Lake, which the freedom seekers had once built as a huge water reservoir, she performed a spontaneous ritual and threw stones into the water. Then the tears came.

Anke Richter is a Lyttelton-based journalist, the author of Cult Trip and director of Decult. She visited the OIMR (Osho International Mediation Resort) undercover in 2017.