In some way, Swami Satchidananda Saraswati, who died in 2002 after preaching peace to the Woodstock generation, is embroiled in the fight of his life.
The international collection of nonprofit organizations he founded — including a Charlottesville health food store and Yogaville, a 750-acre spiritual center in nearby Buckingham County — find themselves accused in a lawsuit of abetting the sexual abuse of some of his young female devotees.
“They have not done an adequate job investigating the several instances of reported sexual abuse, including my own,” litigant Shanti Norris told The Daily Progress.
“They have not only not adequately investigated these, which is their responsibility to do, but many people in the administration seem to have believed or known that they existed,” Norris added. “And still to this day, they seem to refuse to want to admit that these things happened.”
The lawsuit prompted the defendants, the Integral Yoga Institute Inc. and Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville Inc., to concede that their supposedly celibate spiritual leader, whose photograph adorns walls and websites, did have sex with some of his followers — but they were consenting adults.
“Plaintiffs’ claims are barred,” according to paperwork filed by the defense, “as any sexual conduct which may have occurred [was] consensual, voluntary, and agreed to by all parties involved.”
The late swami’s companies delivered not just denials but also a counterclaim alleging defamation. While the New York court where the case was filed more than a year ago rejected that counterclaim earlier this year, the matter has been appealed, and discovery has commenced in the initial lawsuit.
Yogaville calls the lawsuit an “organized attack” orchestrated by those that think it a cult. In its defense Yogaville points to Satchidananda’s numerous awards and books, and the late leader’s unification of the six traditional branches of yoga.
“The great swami scandal” as the Village Voice termed it in 1972 has been brewing for decades. But the legal action, filed in December 2023, represents the first time Satchidananda and his companies have been publicly named in an abuse lawsuit.
While the Yogaville ashram and the health food store on Charlottesville’s Preston Avenue may be the most visible manifestations in Central Virginia, Integral Yoga International has taught a global network of instructors with physical locations in San Francisco, Maui, New York, Montreal and India.
A flashpoint occurred more than three decades ago when the swami was the keynote speaker at the 1991 Psi Symposium conference at the Charlottesville Omni Hotel. After protesters hoisting signs reading “Yogaville covers up guru’s abuse” and “The swami is no saint,” eventual plaintiff Susan Cohen interrupted Satchidananda’s speech.
“How can you call yourself a spiritual instructor when you have molested me and other women in the community?” she asked, according to a next-day account in The Daily Progress.
Cohen claimed the guru pulled her into bed while she was giving one of his twice-daily massages.
“He used me; he abused me,” Cohen said. “I did not find pleasure.”
Cohen went so far as to call the sexual contact incestuous.
“He was definitely a father figure to me and acknowledged it himself,” she said.
According to The Daily Progress account, many of the estimated 200 attendees inside the Omni ballroom began chanting “Hari om,” drowning out Cohen’s assertions.
Three days later, the swami welcomed The Daily Progress to the Yogaville ashram, where he called the allegations “absolute nonsense.”
Things were calmer three years later when several Hollywood actors converged on what was then known as the Charlottesville High School Performing Arts Center for the Satchidananda’s 80th birthday. In attendance were “Jurassic Park” stars Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern along with Dern’s mother, Diane Ladd.
“We love him,” said Goldblum.
It was a visual artist named Peter Max who was credited with luring to the U.S. the man formerly known in his home country of India as C.K. Ramaswamy Gounder. Perhaps the swami’s most celebrated moment came Aug. 15, 1969, when he provided the opening message for the Woodstock music festival.
“Let all of our actions, and all of our arts, express yoga,” said the bearded guru dressed in an orange robe. “Through that sacred art of music, let us find peace that will pervade all over the globe.”
Five days later, American astronaut Neil Armstrong placed the first human bootprint on the moon. That was the night, plaintiff Norris says, that Satchidananda first violated her.
“I’ll never forget,” she told The Daily Progress, “because he was sitting in the living room and watching television, watching the moonwalk. And soon thereafter, he asked me if I had faith in him and if I trusted him. And of course I said yes.”
She said was then employed as his assistant when they traveled together to a house in Los Angeles.
“And would I live up to my faith being tested? And I said yes,” she said. “I was adamant: I was going to be a student, an acolyte, a disciple of this person.”
“And so he said, ‘Well, would you be naked in front of your teacher? Would you expose yourself? So I said yes.”
“So he said, ‘Then do it.'”
She said she went into a bathroom and took off all her clothes and came back into the room. She said the guru then wrapped her in a blanket, hugged her and told her she passed the test.
“And that was it,” she said. “I went back into the bathroom and put my clothes back on, and I thought, ‘OK, strange test, but I’ve passed the test.'”
But she now sees that broken boundary as grooming. The sex began the next day, and for the next decade, the two had sex at least once a week while they traveled.
Pressed on the issue, she called it “coerced consensual” sex because of the age and power differential. She was 20; he was 54.
“The guru-disciple relationship is one of extreme authoritarianism,” she said. “It’s not possible to have a consensual relationship in that dynamic.”
Integral Yoga contends that it had no employees in the 1970s when the alleged abuse occurred and hints that this is overreach stemming from the #MeToo movement that began in 2017 and culminated in New York with a law that lets alleged victims avoid the usual statute of limitations.
“The picture painted therein, that this was an organization with some powerful, dictatorial cult leader, and that the people around him were mere sheep without free will contains not a scintilla of truth,” says the defense.
For her part, Norris concedes that until recently she pushed back at those making such allegations against Satchidananda. In 1992, in a public letter, she rejected the assault assertions by saying that “everyone casts their psychological problems at the feet of the master.”
She lived at Yogaville for a while with her three children, and now she says she regrets not speaking up sooner.
“I have always thought until a few years ago that the right thing for me to do was to protect his legacy, the teachings,” she said. “I’ve benefited so much from the teachings, as have so many people.”
The suit seeks unspecified financial compensation. No trial has yet been set.
Hawes Spencer (434) 960-9343
hspencer@dailyprogress.com
@HawesSpencer on X
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