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columns from the Christian Research Journal, Summer 1991, page 5. The Editor-in-Chief of the Christian Research Journal is Elliot Miller.
Werner Erhard Flees in the Wake of Tax Liens and Child Abuse Allegations
In the wake of tax troubles and allegations of wife and child abuse, Werner Erhard, founder of est/The Forum, appears to have left the country.
According to a report in the March 3 San Jose Mercury News, the former pop psychology guru had "left the [San Francisco] Bay area" and since then, according to the newspaper, no one has heard from him.
Increasingly Erhard has been in the center of a storm of allegations (and lawsuits) pertaining to his personal life and his self-help empire. As the February 18, 1991 issue of Newsweek put it, many of the allegations are "that he was running not so much an enlightenment program as an authoritarian cult."
Newsweek also cited four pending lawsuits against Erhard, one of them filed by a long-time member of his inner circle. "This year alone, three lawsuits -- involving allegations of wrongful discharge, wrongful death and fraud -- are expected to go to trial." And the San Jose article cited yet another suit against Erhard for $54,000, which was seeking to attach Erhard's warehouse property for unpaid rent.
Perhaps the most damaging blow of all against Erhard was a March 3 "60 Minutes" television report that detailed testimony from three of his daughters, several former est leaders, and a housekeeper. Together, they accused Erhard of being a tyrant and a cult leader who declared himself to be God at staff meetings, administered a savage beating to his son, ordered his ex-wife nearly strangled to death during a two-day beating, and sexually molested one of his daughters and raped another.
The "60 Minutes" report also detailed that Erhard had bailed out of his $70-million-a-year business. Published reports say he sold his human-potential movement empire in February to a group of his employees for an undisclosed sum and put most of his possessions (including the yacht where he lived in Sausalito harbor) up for sale. The San Jose Mercury News, speculating that Erhard may have fled the country, quoted a witness who said he watched three men load boxes and steamer trunks from Erhard's warehouse into a Tokyo Express moving van.
Directly after the "60 Minutes" report -- around the time he disappeared -- there was more trouble for Erhard. The Internal Revenue Service filed a $14 million lien against him followed by a $6.7 million lien in April that included property in California and New York. This placed his total tax liability at $20.9 million, according to the April 14, 1991 Philadelphia Inquirer.
Werner Erhard was originally a used car salesman from Philadelphia named John Paul (Jack) Rosenberg who was at the time married with four children. But in 1959 he had an affair and ran off with June Bryde, surfacing in the San Francisco area. According to the February 4, 1985 Philadelphia Inquirer, Rosenberg and Bryde decided to change their identities in order to evade his wife, Pat. Browsing through a magazine article about West Germany, "three names struck his fancy: physicist Werner Heisenberg, Bishop Hans Lilje, and then-economics minister Ludwig Erhard. Ingenious. The folks back home would never think to come looking for Werner Hans Erhard." They married, and Bryde became Ellen Erhard.
Once on the West Coast, Erhard became involved in several businesses and hooked up with people in the San Francisco human awareness movement, including a man who led Erhard into the Church of Scientology. Erhard also became associated with Alex Everett, founder of Mind Dynamics, a self-hypnosis mind control enterprise which was a forerunner of est and other human potential organizations.
During the same time period, Erhard became deeply involved in the occult and "studied or became involved in numerous disciplines" including "Zen Buddhism, hypnosis, Subud, yoga, Silva Mind Control, psychocybernetics, Gestalt, encounter therapy, and transpersonal psychology," according to re-searcher John Weldon's report, The Frightening World of Est. He also went to India where he spent time with Hindu gurus, including Swami Muktananda and Satya Sai Baba, according to the Jesus People USA's (JPUSA) tract, "est, Getting It or Losing It?"
Est was launched in 1971 and was "the fruit" of some of these disciplines, Weldon said. It lasted until 1985 when Erhard repackaged est into a new self-improvement seminar called The Forum, specifically design-ed to attract yuppies and corporate leaders at $525 apiece.
What was est? According to the JPUSA tract, "William Bartley, pro-est author of an Erhard biography, says the goal of est is to 'blow the mind' in order to bring about a 'higher consciousness.' He writes: 'Teaching no new belief, it [est] aims to break up the existing wiring of the Mind and thereby to trap the Mind, to allow one to take hold of one's own Mind, to blow the Mind. Such tactics create the conditions...into which a mutant of higher consciousness can be born.'"
As a result of this philosophy, est seminars were notorious for their strictness and long hours. According to JPUSA, the "training is delivered in an authoritarian, confrontational manner. Trainees are belittled, ridiculed, told their lives don't work, and generally harangued into submission, with language heavily laden with profanity." Weldon noted that the "est belief system is designed to destroy the validity of the Christian world view. Est is supposedly nonreligious, but since its purpose is to...instill a...pantheistic belief in impersonal divinity, est qualifies as religious."
In The Forum, however, the hours are shorter, there is less profanity, and rules have been relaxed into requests. Nevertheless, many over the years (see, e.g., Fortune magazine, Nov. 23, 1987) -- have accused both est and The Forum, as well as Erhard's "Transformational Technologies" (aimed at large corporations), of causing mental breakdowns.
Despite such criticism, Erhard's organization flourished. He created several offshoot firms, and in 1977 he launched The Hunger Project to eliminate world hunger, not through relief work, but by applying est philosophy to change public consciousness. His organizations have attracted major celebrities such as Valarie Harper, Yoko Ono, Cher, and John Denver. By 1985 est turned out half a million alumni (one out of every 364 adults in the U.S.) and had stretched around the world with 530 employees, 20,000 volunteers, and an annual gross income of $35 million, according to the 1985 Inquirer article.
According to the "60 Minutes" report, when Erhard began est he reconciled with his first family and moved them to California. Things went well at first, according to daughter (by his first marriage) Deborah Pimental of Honolulu, and then Erhard molested her and raped her sister who was in her early 20s at the time.
Erhard has denied both the molestation and rape allegations. In a taped interview with the Mercury News, he said it was "just plain not true and anybody that would say something about it's gotta be sick."