An Open Letter to the Victim

[Pratyatosa]

An Open Letter to the Victim
By Pratyatosa Dasa

(I am writing this in response to the "Urmila d.d:" section of the <http://prabhupadavision.com/2010/11/iskcon-academia-part-two/> article.) There is a portion of this article which unfairly implicates me, my son-in-law, and the younger of my two sons:

Urmila's mataji family member was involved in the sexual abuse of a minor.

My wife said in a comment near the bottom of that same article:

During the 23 years that I was involved with a gurukula (Detroit and North Carolina) the only sexual abuse cases we dealt with involved children with children.

The above let's me off the hook, but it doesn't eliminate my son-in-law or my youngest son from being a suspect.

Therefore the reasons for me writing this "open letter to the victim" are as follows:

1. To protect the reputation of my son-in-law and my youngest son.

2. To apologize to the victim and her immediate family.

3. To explain what actually happened there in Hillsborough, NC, USA in 2005.

4. To reveal who the real culprits are.

5. To show that the CPO investigation was an incompetent farce.

6. To educate the readers so as to help prevent the sexual molestation/rape of helpless children from spreading like a cancer again in the future.

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa

Dear Gaurangi Priya Devi Dasi, Hare Krishna! Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

I very deeply regret that you were sexually molested as a helpless child while under my care. I am very, very sorry. Please forgive me. I hope that your husband, your father, and your mother can also find it in their hearts to please forgive me.

I must admit that I was naive. Neither my wife nor I had ever experienced being sexually molested as children, and since we were living in a society wherein everyone takes a vow which includes "no illicit sex," it was the furthest thing from our minds. How could an adult, in such a society, stoop so low as to sexually molest a child who was placed under his care, supervision, and protection? This is admittedly the most abominable type of illicit sex imaginable! Because of the now infamous ISKCON GBC sponsored cover-up, neither of us had any idea that such things were going on within ISKCON!

At the same time, I am extremely disappointed in you. You viciously attacked my wife and my oldest son. Although it's true that my oldest son sexually molested you when both of you were children, it was not his fault. He was taught to do things like that in the Vrndavana, India gurukula (boarding school), and the horrible sexual abuse that he suffered as a 9 to 12 year old boy at the hands of his teachers and other adult authority figures was kept secret from my wife and I by the criminally negligent GBC/ISKCON Board of Education. Although my oldest son has an unusually great amount of self-control, the sexual molestation which he suffered, to my very great regret, obviously awakened illicit desires in him at an abnormally early age, an age when he was ill-equipped to properly deal with them.

However, the fact that you were sexually molested as a child does not give you the right to become an abuser at the age of 30. Here is what my wife told me that you did:

1. She started telling anyone in the community who would listen about what happened to her.

2. She was very very angry, blaming, wanting justice and vengeance.

3. Saying her childhood abuser shouldn't come to the temple.

4. Yelling at me in person and over the phone.

5. Saying how her life had been ruined.

6. Writing letters asking for money for counseling.

Obviously, any right that you had to confidentiality was forfeited by the above actions on your part.

Not only that, but what you did was blackmail! Blackmail is a federal crime punishable by a fine and/or up to a year in federal prison. My wife and oldest son had every right to have a legal restraining order placed against you and to even have you arrested for blackmail/extortion. You wrote to me, "I contacted the CPO at a time when I was hurting tremendously and wanted retribution and justice. I got that from both [your oldest son] and [your wife], but later than I wanted, and so had already gone to the CPO." In other words, you threatened to go to the CPO if you weren't paid thousands of dollars in blackmail money. You got the blackmail money, but it was too late. You had already requested a CPO investigation.

Your husband sent me an email saying "I don't control my wife." That means that even though women are supposed to be considered innocent according to the Vedic system, an independent woman is simply a disturbance to the whole community, and is liable for her actions.

I feel really badly now that I have read the CPO report and, therefore, know about the actual extent of the horrors that you had to go through. Please forgive me for my stupid decision to have everyone have their own unlocked bedroom in that big house at 191 Riverside Drive in Detroit. What a curse that house has turned out to be! I wish that you had told me. I would have immediately changed the sleeping arrangements like I did in North Carolina after I finally found out that some sexual molestation had occurred. In North Carolina, after I found out, I had my wife sleep in the master bedroom, which had a private bathroom, with all of the girls including our daughter and the female gurukula boarders from Vancouver, Canada. I slept in a room near the boys' room which included our two sons and the male gurukula boarders from Washington DC. We also had the matter investigated by Mother Yasoda Devi Dasi, who was in charge of what later became the CPO, and we had an evaluation done by a top non-devotee expert in child abuse. As far as I know, we never had any similar problems in North Carolina.

The CPO report says that your parents found out about the molestation by reading your diary, but I had been thinking for years that you finally got up enough courage to tell your parents after we took you to see the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. In other words, after seeing that respectable people, after undergoing the most humiliating kind of abuse and torture imaginable, are still able to talk about it, you were finally given enough courage to speak out. Was I wrong about that?

I hope that you can understand that my oldest son was also a victim. It wasn't his fault. All six of us in that house in Detroit were victims of the GBC/ISKCON Board of Education cover-up. They kept the horrible sexual abuse of helpless children, thousands of miles away from their parents in India, in what for them was a very strange land, secret not only from the ordinary parents but also secret from parents who were gurukula headmasters such as myself and my wife!

I hope that you joined in the Turley vs. ISKCON child abuse lawsuit and are being justly compensated. I helped to start that lawsuit for you and for all of the others who had become victims of abuse/sexual molestation/rape as helpless children. Until that lawsuit was started the ISKCON leaders were making the victims feel guilty, and some of the victims had even committed suicide! After the lawsuit was started, and the list of defendants became public information, then the real culprits were finally revealed: the ISKCON GBC. After that, the suicides of the ex-gurukulis was reduced almost to nil. At last they could see clearly that they were simply the victims, and thus their feelings of intense guilt became, to a large extent, mitigated.

The lawsuit was settled out of court for about US$10,000,000. This is not very much considering that about 700 ex-gurukulis signed on to the lawsuit. Obviously Krishna let the criminally negligent ISKCON leaders get by with a token punishment. They may not be so lucky next time, if there is a next time. However, even though the settlement amount was relatively small, this settlement still represented an admission of guilt on the part of the ISKCON GBC, and the ex-gurukulis are finally receiving some long overdue compensation for their victimization and suffering.

As for the CPO investigation, I am very grateful that through the agency of their "Official Decision" I am finally fully aware of what actually happened. However, I am disturbed by the fact that they put all of the blame on a woman and a child, who according to the Vedic tradition are always to be considered innocent. Thus the victims were victimized once again. The CPO never even contacted me as part of their so-called investigation! I am available by cell phone 24/7 and by email every day, so there is no excuse for their not having contacted me. Even though I was the one who made the sleeping arrangements that led to the abuse, they made no mention of me being guilty of any sort of wrongdoing. It seems that they are too cowardly to even go after me, what to speak of the real culprits: the ISKCON GBC/ISKCON Board of Education, neither of which are even mentioned in their report! Although the report does mention "no clear direction from temple authorities," this is obviously just a whitewash. What do "temple authorities" have to do with anything? My wife and I were acting under the direction of the GBC and the ISKCON Board of Education at the time of the abuse, not the local "temple authorities!" This means that even at the time of the CPO investigation, in late 2005, more than five years after the Turley vs. ISKCON child abuse lawsuit had been filed, the official ISKCON GBC cover-up was still going on!

Therefore, the ISKCON CPO obviously needs to have more independence/power so that they are able to go after the GBC men and other ISKCON leaders who are the actual cause of the unusually large number of helpless children who were abused/sexually molested/raped.

It wasn't until early 1999, three years after I had left home to take vanaprastha (retirement), that I finally fully understood the drastic measures which must be taken to nip sexual child molestation in the bud. This revelation came about when I talked with the high-powered child abuse lawyer, Mr. Windle Turley, on the telephone. He told me that unless the abuse is brought out into the open immediately, and immediate legal action taken, the victims become perpetrators and the sexual abuse spreads like a cancer!

Why hadn't the GBC done their sacred prescribed duty which was given to them by Srila Prabhupada? Why didn't they do some research and figure this out for themselves? Were they too busy counting how many "disciples" they had and making sure their asanas (seats of the guru) were big enough/opulent enough?

Until there was the threat of a lawsuit, the ISKCON leaders didn't do anything except harass, threaten, and lay guilt trips on the victims! At the same time, they were shuffling the perpetrators from one ISKCON temple/gurukula to another where they molested even more helpless children! Why did they let the abuse go on for year after year until several hundred children were sexually molested/raped? They should have immediately brought it out into the open. They should have immediately provided funds for much needed counseling for the victims. They should have immediately put the perpetrators in jail, informed the parents, and educated all of the teachers and gurukula headmasters on how to prevent such a horrible thing from ever happening again!

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that the CPO investigation was kept secret from me is even more proof that the cover-up mentality is still there. Therefore the children are still in danger! What is it going to take to get these people to see the error of their ways? Another lawsuit? Prosecution for criminal negligence?

As for the article's claim that the Hillsborough, NC gurukula closed because of the CPO investigation, you probably know more about it than I, because I was not there at the time. In any case, it is my understanding that the school was closed due to decreased enrollment and conflicts with the parents over standards. Therefore, the teachers simply lost their enthusiasm to continue. I was told that it was closed before the CPO investigation, not after.

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa