In 1976, a Jewish housewife left New York City after visions of Jesus Christ and two Hindu spirit guides ignited her into an
interfaith odyssey.
Along with a handful of followers, she settled on 7 acres along the St. Sebastian River, just west of the City of Sebastian. She called her mission Kashi Ashram.
Preaching racial, ethnic and religious tolerance, crusading against the AIDS virus and embracing its victims, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati now presides over an 80-acre sanctuary that claims a worldwide outreach. Her efforts have earned citations for public service.
But Bhagavati's ashram also has endured spasms of controversy. In 1993, for instance, after a deadly fire destroyed the
Branch Davidian compound, People magazine spotlighted Kashi under the banner: "It's not just Waco --
Cults ruled by paranoia flourish all over America."
Having celebrated its 25th anniversary in December, the ashram dedicated to promoting world peace is no stranger to human conflict. Although longtime members and associates describe Kashi as a model of harmony, a Florida Today investigation reveals the ashram has also produced some bitterly divided families.
More recently, several former key members are accusing Bhagavati of
brainwashing, intimidation through violence, illegal drug use and siphoning off nonprofit funds for shopping and gambling sprees.
"I know I'm going to look like a total dupe, a fool, a moron," said Richard Rosenkranz, the ashram's disillusioned ex-public relations director. "But will it stop me from telling the truth? No. This needs to come to an end. This sham needs to stop."
Salvatore Conti, an erstwhile treasurer for one of Kashi's fundraisers, states in a police report that he witnessed Rosenkranz's teen-aged son getting beaten on orders from Bhagavati. Furthermore, Conti claims more than half a million dollars was raised for the construction of an AIDS convalescence house that never went up because Bhagavati squandered the money on herself.
Kashi's current public relations director said Conti's "baseless" allegations are part of a "smear campaign" orchestrated by Rosenkranz, a "disgruntled former employee" engaged in alimony negotiations against his soon-to-be ex-wife, who lives at the ashram.
"This is a divorce case, pure and simple," Sita Ganga said. "It has nothing whatsoever to do with Kashi, but Richard has chosen to drag Kashi into the middle of it."
For her part, Bhagavati said her conscience is clear and insists Rosenkranz is the one with money issues.
"It borders on the ridiculous, the lengths people will go to in order to protect an inheritance," said Bhagavati, whose nose diamond and arm tattoos fashion a compelling visual presence. "Both men are very sad and lonely people. And I love them both."
An estimated 150 people live at the quiet, wooded Kashi Ashram, which hosts shrines to many of the world's major religions. Residents -- a blend of teachers, psychologists, lawyers, bankers and other assorted white- and blue-collar vocations -- are given Hindu names. United in communal living, they pitch in with maintenance, prepare vegetarian meals, practice yoga, meditation and celibate lifestyles. Ninety students, grades K-through-12 attend Kashi's on-site River School.
Kashi's religious mission enjoys tax-exempt status, and its 38 acres at 11155 Roseland Road are appraised at $873,260, which netted Indian River County $372.83 in property taxes for 2001. And although Kashi operates a number of international relief projects -- from medicine distribution in Cuba and Africa, to orphanages in Mexico and Uganda -- the ashram keeps an unobtrusive local profile.
Bitter divorce
However, a bitterly contested divorce last year which has yet to be resolved is reeling some old controversies into the public arena and challenging Bhagavati's nonprofit activities.
As Richard Rosenkranz, 59, seeks to end his 1982 marriage to 43-year-old Kashi monk Gina Rosenkranz, witnesses for both parties in the alimony tussle are speaking up.
[...]
By Bhagavati's own account, life took a "far out" turn in 1972. That's when, during yoga exercises to lose weight and quit a chain-smoking habit in her native Brooklyn, the 32-year-old mother of three said she was approached by Jesus, who delivered this message: "Teach all ways, for all ways are mine."
Other visitations followed, specifically from a deceased Indian swami named Nityananda. On Good Friday, 1974, she says stigmata wounds began bleeding from her forehead and hands. Then came materializations by Nityananda's disciple, the late Neem Karoli Baba. Baba would give Joyce Green a new name: Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, Sanskrit for holy woman, victory, purity and follower of the fortunate.
Marriage woes
Transformed into a servant of humanity, Bhagavati would endure the collapse of a marriage as her teachings in New York expanded. One of her earliest students was Richard Alpert, the Harvard LSD pioneer better known as Be Here Now higher-consciousness author Ram Dass.
Alpert would disavow Bhagavati's mysticism in a 1976 Yoga Journal essay called "Egg On My Beard," in which he claimed her energies "came not solely from spiritual sources, but were enhanced by energizing pills." He dismissed her personal testimony as an "incredible tapestry of half truths and lies." Bhagavati countered that Alpert was angry because she rejected his romantic advances.
But one of Bhagavti's most enduring relationships began in 1975, when Fulbright scholar Richard Rosenkranz was drawn to her call to for interfaith unity. He followed Bhagavati to the banks of the St. Sebastian River, where a vision directed her to establish a healing center. She called it Kashi, which means sacred city.
[...]
The flip side of Kashi's legacy emerged in the 1980s, when law enforcement began running interference for parents.
Armed with a court order, members of the Miami-Dade Police Department grabbed 16-year-old Paul Rousseau from a Kashi retreat in Miami on Dec. 11, 1981. It marked the abrupt culmination of a custody gridlock between Bhagavati and Paul's parents, Jean and Michele Rousseau, who grew disaffected with the ashram and left in 1978.
On July 19, 1989, Rosanne Henry and her husband Harry Brodie were reunited with their 7-year-old daughter, Tess, after an Indian River County Sheriff's Department SWAT team removed the youngster from a Kashi outing at a movie theater in Vero Beach.
Like the Rousseaus, the Brodies once gave Bhagavati permission to raise their child. But when they changed their minds and left the ashram, they needed judicial intervention to recover their daughter.
The Brodies' battle was complicated by the fact that Rosanne had doctored her daughter's birth certificate after Tess was born in 1981. The name she signed as the biological mother was Joyce Cho. (In the confusing flux of legal name changes, Bhagavati – the former Joyce Green – was then married to entrepreneur SooSe Cho.)
But Henry, who said she dyed her hair dark to impersonate Bhagavati before entering the hospital, wasn't the only Kashi member to fake a birth certificate. Two others from 1982 falsely stated that Joyce and/or SooSe Cho were the biological parents of babies born to ashram devotees. False signatures were signed by Gina Rosenkranz and Karen Rinehalter, who lives in Sebastian.
From her home in Littleton, Colo., Henry said she and her husband, who stayed at the ashram from 1978-82, once believed Bhagavati was divine. They gave her their daughter after being told the child would be groomed as her successor. She said Bhagavati told her to change her hair color as a hospital disguise, and to forge the birth certificate to circumvent the adoption bureaucracy.
"It's difficult to explain to people who haven't been through it just how you become so gullible and vulnerable," said Henry, a practicing psychologist and a recovery specialist for the American Family Foundation, a national cult-awareness group.
Drug allegations
Harry Brodie, a family physician, said he ultimately left because of what he describes as Bhagavati's "drug addictions," which he said she concealed from the majority of her followers. He said her "nightly use" of cocaine beginning in 1981 created a paranoia that led to all-night darshans, or spiritual gatherings, and a frenzy in which he said Bhagavati attempted to slash him with a razor blade.
"She justified her cocaine use by saying she was taking it for karma purposes," Brodie said. "It was her way of taking on the sins of the world."
[...]
At the Indian River County Sheriff's Department in Vero Beach, Capt. Mary Hogan remains suspicious.
"Do I think Joyce is running a cult? Absolutely I do," said Hogan, commander of the criminal investigations division. "But at this time, there's nothing I can go after. In the last decade, she's taken great steps to legitimize her operation from a public relations standpoint.
"The average person cannot comprehend how
mind control can and does take place. But when you'll go so far as to dye your hair and forge birth certificates, I'd say that speaks for itself."
The divorce proceedings took a more intense turn last April when Sal Conti logged a police report detailing what he claimed was his eyewitness account of Bhagavati orchestrating the beating of Wang Chun Rosenkranz, then 13, in 1996. Filed two years after the statute of limitations expired for prosecution, Conti's action has sparked outrage at the ashram.
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Safety concerns
"(Bhagavati) was convinced he'd had sex with one of the other students, and when Chun kept denying it, she told me she was going to teach him a lesson," Conti charges. He said Bhagavati told Chun that the father of the girl had put out a Mafia contract on him, and that she --Bhagavati -- couldn't guarantee Chun's safety.
Conti said two Kashi members, acting on Bhagavati's instructions, donned ski masks and dark clothing, bound Chun, muffled his cries with duct tape, and proceeded to beat him with rocks wrapped in socks. "It was absolutely merciless," said Conti, who claims he and several others watched the beating from a distance.
He adds that a second beating occurred several weeks later. When he protested, Conti said he was evicted from the "inner circle." He left the ashram several months later.
When confronted with the police report obtained by Florida Today, an emotional Chun Rosenkranz, 19, rebutted with a counter-accusation that surprised the two Kashi officials supervising the interview.
"It was Sal Conti," insisted Chun, who was raised on the Ashram under Bhagavati's stewardship. "Sal was the one who hit me." The reason: Chun said he lied to Conti about completing a chore he'd been told to do.
Seeking sympathy
Now estranged from his father, Chun said he fabricated the first story to manipulate his parents: "When Mom and Dad were splitting up, I wanted some sympathy and decided to play one against the other. I stupidly told my dad that I was beaten by people here, which was a lie, and now he's using it against me."
Although Vero Beach attorney Russell Petersen -- now representing Gina Rosenkranz -- said Chun never told him about getting hit by Conti, he calls Conti's report "a preposterous piece of garbage."
Conti insists he filed the report because he wants the truth to come out. He said he wasn't surprised by Chun's denial. "Chun's hovering around her (Bhagavati) like a sick puppy. It's a classic abuse syndrome," he said.
The Kashi leadership categorically denies that violence has occurred on the ashram, but such stories nevertheless persist.
Jeanne Rousseau, a forestry technician in Quebec, was living at Kashi Ashram in the early 1980s when she said an adult male member was accused of sexually abusing a child. Rather than alerting authorities, Rousseau said, Bhagavati and several others held the man's arm over a lit candle, giving him severe burns.
"They wanted the scar to remind of him what he'd done," said Rousseau, "but they didn't want what had happened to get out."
Dr. Harry Brodie, the Colorado physician, said he witnessed a Bhagavati "hit man" slugging a subordinate upon instruction, and dislocating his jaw in an unprovoked attack. "The guy had to be hospitalized," he said.
Violence alleged
In a 1997 autobiography called It's Here Now (Are You?), spiritual chanter Bhagavan Das writes he was confronted by Bhagavati's followers when he tried to leave Kashi: "I was beaten until I was bruised and bleeding. Fortunately, they didn't break any bones. I . . . thought, 'We have given (Bhagavati) the power of God. It's time to leave.'"
Kashi associates such as Judy Martin, however, label such allegations ludicrous. Now a radio/television journalist in New York City, Martin said when she was vacillating between pursuing her career or staying at the ashram, Bhagavati encouraged her to choose New York.
"For every person who feels compelled to say something negative about Ma," said Martin, "there are thousands more like me who are in gratitude."
Likewise, ashram resident and child psychologist Robin Bruner said she's never seen or even heard of anyone getting beaten at the ashram.
"I've worked for the DCF (the Department of Children and Families), and I know what the symbols and signs of abuse are," she said. "There's nothing like that here. This is a wonderful, sort of old-fashioned environment for kids, particularly teen-agers."
But in 1996, a prospective ashram member named Colin Dougherty said teen-ager Kwang Mae convinced him to leave. "She said, 'You have no idea what (Bhagavati)'s really like,'" he recalled. "She said, 'She pulls my hair, she punches me, she knocks me down, she screams at me,' and I'm thinking, what's going on here? Why doesn't anyone say or do anything?"
[...]
Appreciation
For Paul Rousseau -- brother of the woman who reported the candle punishment -- memories of being reunited with his parents by court order remain fresh. Today, at age 36, Rousseau said he appreciates the complexities of growing up at Kashi.
"It was an insular environment, and I didn't want to leave," reflects Rousseau, who said he saw adults get physically punished, but never kids. "I realize now, looking back, just how clever Joyce (Bhagavati's name by birth) really was, how well she manipulated us.
"When my parents took me back to Canada, I wanted to go back to Kashi. In fact, I ran away twice. They told me all I had to do was accuse my parents of rape, destroy the house, and generally go wild, and they'd send me back to the Ashram.
"Would I have lied for Kashi?" said Rousseau, a computer engineer now living in California's Silicon Valley. "Sure. I did lie for them. They were my family."
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