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Although there are those devotees who suspect Prabhupada was poisoned by his closest disciples, at 82, he was also a sick man suffering from diabetes. Partly because he was vague about who would succeed him, his death in 1977 created a controversy that still smolders. In 1970, he set up a "governing board commission" to function as the managerial arm of the movement. Most of its members consisted of men who had risen to the spiritual level of sannyasi, ostensibly dedicating their lives to celibacy and preaching. In the days before he "left his body," he gave nine of these men the authority to initiate new devotees, the traditional province of the guru. The following day, one of the more powerful sannyasi, Tamal Krishna, announced that Prabhupada had appointed him and his 10 godbrothers as successor gurus.

"He said, 'All 11 of us are equal to the body of Prabhupada,'" says Nori Muster. "There were challenges to it, and some devotees left the movement, but most just sheepishly accepted the takeover. It was quite a coup."

These successor gurus were not wise Indian elders who had begun their spiritual journey after living a full life. Most were former hippies now in their late 20s who had either left their wives to follow Prabhupada or never married. But when they saw power, they grabbed it, dividing the world into 11 zones, huge fiefdoms where they could be worshiped like gods.

A guru's control over the life of his devotee was absolute. To criticize him was blasphemy, the worst of the 10 offenses recited each day during the morning ceremony. A guru's instructions were deemed "perfect" not only in matters of the spirit but in material matters as well. He would tell you whom to marry, when to have children, what kind of work to pursue. The guru was your direct channel to God; please him, and you please Krishna. Raise money for him, and you raise money for Krishna. "If your guru asked you to steal or scam or sell drugs, it wasn't wrong," Muster says. "Just as long as it's done in the name of Krishna."

Certainly there were gurus with integrity, highly intelligent and spiritually evolved. Others have been implicated in murder plots, drug running, prostitution rings, racketeering scams or child sex abuse. Among these, one is serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison, and a devotee beheaded another.

After the successor gurus took power, chauvinistic attitudes hardened and women were relegated to the back of the temple. They were instructed to lower their gaze, keep their heads down, remain chaste.

In the movement's earliest days, Prabhupada taught that men and women were equal souls. He allowed both to pray side by side in the temple, initiated both, even made women priests. On the other hand, he said women were less intelligent than men, their brain size only half the size of a man's. They were also "nine times lustier," which is why, as a preventive measure, a man should refer to any woman not his wife as his mother. Early on, he arranged marriages, but he stopped after becoming fed up with the marital problems of his devotees. The movement began to view marriage and children as a spiritual weakness, a temptation of the material world. Women were instructed to submit to their husbands, and some leaders even advocated wife beating to maintain control.

"The whole repression of women is very related to the child abuse," says psychologist Maria Ekstrand, who is co-editing an academic book titled Hare Krishna: The Post Charismatic Phase of a Religious Transplant. "Only when women feel disempowered do they lose their maternal instincts and agree to send their children away."

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Dallas attorney Windle Turley had received national fame when a Dallas jury returned a $119 million verdict against the Catholic Church for concealing abuse by one of its priests. During the trial, Turley received a phone call from a former ISKCON leader who asked him to investigate allegations of child abuse in the Hare Krishna movement. But he didn't speak for Dillon Hickey and five other gurukula (boarding school)kids, who later contacted Turley and became his first plaintiffs.

"What happened to the victims in the Catholic Church case was bad, but I had never seen this kind of abuse before," Turley says. "I spent a year investigating this case, talking to these young people. Some of them had become street kids. They have no education, no family support, no understanding of how to survive in the outside world."

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New York Times May 20, 2019

[www.nytimes.com]

Ms. Salzman said that recruitment of additional members into D.O.S., particularly those who might be powerful or influential, was among Mr. Raniere’s highest priorities.

“I think he envisioned that there would be thousands or millions of people in it,” she said, adding, “We might be able to have a candidate, a D.O.S. candidate, for political office.”