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Laxer, Mark Eliot

"Take Me for a Ride: coming of age in a destructive cult"

"
He told her to call and instruct each of the nineteen to attend
a private meeting. The meeting was to be held hundreds of miles
south of Palo Alto, in an obscure park in the mountains of Malibu.
It was scheduled for December 5th, 1987--the following night.
They showed.
Under the guise of helping them protect their careers, Rama warned
the approximately thirty people--the nineteen women and about eleven
other disciples--that newspaper articles targeting him in a negative
light were in the offing.
He spoke to them about the case of Annie Eastwood. A former follower, Ms.
Eastwood reported that during one encounter, Rama had misled
her spiritually, abused her psychologically, showed her a gun,
and demanded that she have sex with him. Rama later told the press:
"At no time during our evening together [with Annie] did I brandish
a hand gun." But now, at the 1987 late night Malibu gathering,
he admitted: "I did have a hand gun with me that night with Annie...
but I did not wave it around."
Later that night, Rama asked five or six people to walk back
to the cars and wait in the parking lot. Anne and Rachel remained.
Rama faced the remaining disciples, roughly half of whom had participated
in one of his group LSD trips.


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