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January 3, 2004
Dear Ambu and others,
Hello.
I was the person who helped file
the lawsuit against Sogyal in 1993/4. Mary Finnigan interviewed me for the
BBC in which I spoke up about Sogyal's sexual exploitation of me.
I never really got to fully speak
my mind about how rotten a person I thought Sogyal was at the time I got
to know him, how grossly narcissistic, deceitful, slothful, sadistic,
immoral and basically stupid I think he really was. I'd like to say that
now.
A number of women contacted me
around the time of the lawsuit by phone and letter, who had also been
abused by Sogyal but who were afraid or ashamed to speak out openly,
including a woman who had been a head of his organisation, saying how
staggeringly corrupt his sick relationship with his devotees truly is,
with them basically creating some kind of pimping service for him, called
Lama Care. He was conning people and really hurting them! Not just some
little dalliances but really USING and ABUSING women, some violently,
especially those who had just lost a loved one, for example whose father
had just died. He used people who were bereft and grieving for his sexual
gratification! How SICK is that!!!
And he did NOT write his book on
death and dying, Andrew Harvey did. I learned that Sogyal couldn't even
answer the questions about his book on radio interviews and Andrew had to
script them for him.
When I was 21, I went to India
for about half a year, returned to America for 6 months in 1976, and then
went back to India that year and stayed there for a decade, studying
Buddhism with various lamas for 6 of those years.
It was during my 6 months back in
America that I had the misfortune to meet Sogyal. After sexually
assaulting me, which I convinced myself was, as other lamas had told me,
some kind of "blessing", he conned me into using my mother's telephone
credit card, which I said he could use in case of an emergency because he
plead poverty, and he raked up a huge bill, basically stealing. He asked
me to stay at Marilee and Joel Shefflin's house in Berkeley. I assumed I
would be in a separate bedroom but he insisted I stay in his bedroom,
telling me later that he had a girlfriend in London.
When I went for 3 days to visit
my father, who was dying of cancer, I came back to the Shefflins hearing
that Sogyal had slept with 2 other women. Between feeling disgusted by my
having been duped by this bastard con artist, I was also sickened by his
focus on getting weight loss drugs, speed for himself and Shenphen Dawa.
He told me that he wanted the
sex, like a rock star, that Trungpa had out in Boulder, with girls lining
up outside the hallway. When he saw Trungpa's set up, he was determined to
be just like that and he told me that, called me from Boulder to New York
City, bragging about the girls he was going to get.
In Berkeley at the gathering for
Dudjom Rinpoche's teaching there in the summer 1976, the big joke at the
dining room table was that in Tibet monks wore robes on the outside, were
compassionate inside, but secretly practiced tantra. In the West, the
lamas said, people were sexually wild on the outside, compassionate
inside, but secretly wanted to be monks and nuns. However witty that
seemed at the time, I felt it was a denigration of any Westerner wanting
to practice morality or discipline of any kind.
In 1984, an old dharma friend of
mine had committed suicide in a meditation retreat, making herself into a
living butter lamp. This was shortly after it was exposed that the Geshe
at the Tibetan Library, our refuge guru, had been having sexual relations
with a south American woman he had ordained as a nun.
By then I had heard, seen and
experienced so many sexual abuses of Western women by Tibetan lamas, my
heart was basically broken and my faith was shattered.
And it was NOT to be discussed
openly. It was 'shameful' and to be kept secret, hushed up, and this was
the cover-up that kept it all going for decades.
Just as one example of how this
exploitation didn't just damage a person's faith but had long-lasting
repercussions, one very dear friend, who I had just advised to remove her
intrauterine contraceptive device, because they caused infertility, went
to visit Khamtrul Rinpoche in Tashijong. En route, she stopped to visit
one of the renowned Tibetan ngakpas there, whose wife she also knew. The
Ngakpa requested my friend for yab yum with him and promised he would
retain his tigle. When my friend got pregnant, he made her promise not to
tell his wife or anybody in his circle.
Unlike the ngakpa, my friend kept
HER promise to keep the breach of trust secret, and she went back to her
family in Australia where she was reviled for having a bastard half-breed,
whose father she wouldn't publicly reveal. The son grew up with this shame
on his head in the merciless Tibetan gossip-community in India, and he's
now a heroin addict after a childhood spent growing up in a monastery.
Another old dharma friend was the
Danish wife of Lama Topgyal, who had not only no compunctions about
cheating on his wife with every woman who could be conned into his bed
under the delusion that he was giving "jinlab" (blessing), but he
convinced his Danish wife that it was part of her damstig (sacred
spiritual bond with him as her teacher) to work as a prostitute in Old
Delhi, to make enough money to buy him arak, hard alcohol. When I last saw
her in 1984, she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, destitute, sick
and emotionally crushed.
I was asked by Lama Topgyal to
help be the midwife to his Danish wife's first child, even though I had no
knowledge about this. I was staying with them for a few weeks before she
gave birth to their son, and for a few days when their son was several
months old. Not only did lama Togyal hit and yell at his infant child, he
bullied his wife into letting the cold, wet child scream itself to sleep,
because to nurture the baby was, according to lama Topgyal, to spoil him.
When I met his wife years later,
after she had worked as a prostitute, she said she had to send their child
away as early as possible because lama Topgyal beat the child so badly and
wouldn't buy food but only wanted liquor for himself.
For about half a year in 1980, I
went to live in Rajpur, across the street from Sakya Trinzin. I asked him
for teachings on my meditation practice and he convinced me he had a
vision of him and me yab yum and that it was important for him to act on
it with me. Not only was it the most pathetic sex act of my entire life,
it was such a total farce. It was about as enlightening as a mosquito
bite, less even, if that's possible. And when it seemed impossible that he
could get beyond his Ganesh sized belly to have sex, I offered him oral
gratification. He was worried that would get me pregnant.
From that time on, Sakya Trinzin
had no interest in teaching me anything, and any conversation I tried to
have with him was focused on his adolescent-style lasciviousness, jokes,
and obsessing about doing it next, and how wherever I went in the world I
had to let him know where I was so he could have sexual access to me.
He also knew that his main
Western student was cheating with a married woman and did nothing to stop
this breach of ethics, which went on openly for many years.
I wrote the Dalai Lama directly,
gave my name and address, said in no uncertain terms did I think that
Tibetan lamas were abusing Western women sexually and doing them harm by
tricking them into thinking it was part of some tantric or spiritual
practice when it wasn't at all.
By then I'd told a number of
lamas about Sogyal's exploiting women, and they thought it was just a
joke. They ALL knew that Sogyal used his disciples for sex and did
nothing. They all knew what lamas were exploiting what women and laughed
about it.
Thinley Norbu was infamous for
mocking any sense of female virtue, and I sat in a room where he bullied a
Tibetan nun into saying the Tibetan words for penis and vulva because,
according to him, it would cure her of her attachment to any virtue.
In 1999, when I first learned how
to log onto the Internet, my computer was too old to be able to access the
forum in which Mary Finnigan was talking about the sexual abuses of
Western women by Tibetan lamas. So she posted my posts for me, and Evelyn
Ruut, with whom I spoke over the phone a number of times, supported me in
my speaking out about these abuses.
The responses I received were a
number of emailed death threats, to which I responded that I would contact
the FBI if they continued. That is also a warning to anybody else who
reads this and thinks they can either harass me or send a death threat. I
will take legal action. I am not afraid of any lawsuit, because what I am
saying here is the truth.
On the Buddhist discussion board
I was ridiculed and slammed for telling the truth, and it hurt not to be
able to respond to all the mudslinging, but I realised that with many of
the viciously misogynistic fanatics there it would have been exhausting,
and it was painful enough to talk about how my deepest faith, most
profound trust, had been so callously defiled by the very Tibetan lamas I
had been told by other lamas were reincarnate, very holy, living Buddhas,
teachers of the truth and compassion.
I didn't feel psychologically
strong enough before to talk about this subject openly. I do now and I'm
angry at the cowardice of the other people who have been abused and not
come forward. I know there are THOUSANDS out there. I've personally met
dozens and heard about many more.
When the Karmapa was in Delhi,
dying of cancer, he had a married translator, Achi, who had a conveyor
belt of sex partners and all the other lamas knew it and did nothing.
Women would arrive in a state of abject reverence and were simply easy
pickings for this translator, who was notorious for having had an affair
with Thartang Tulku's wife.
The depth of sordidness in the
Tibetan lama scene was pretty revolting.
Once, when I went to meet
Dodrubchen Rinpoche, and held up my mala to show him that he and I had
similar beads, he took my hand, with the mala in it, and rubbed it in his
crotch to masturbate. I mean YUCK!!!!
It hurts very deeply to be
spiritually defiled, to have one's truth path trashed by a so-called
teacher of the truth. To have been used, manipulated, scorned. The very
word for female in Tibetan is "inferior birth" - kyi-min.
I don't even know where to go
with my first-hand experience of how the Tibetan people think Westerners
are just to be milked as sponsors. Even Tibetans who are rich want "jindaks"
for their kids, as a status symbol.
Having spoken at
length with June Campbell, I was disappointed that she no longer thinks of
herself as a Buddhist, but I can fully understand why. I do still deeply
appreciate many aspects of the Buddhist path, and want to tell my
experience about how Tibetan lamas are using some grotesque and cultic
version to exploit and parasite off of gullible Westerners. And worse,
this exploitation is really hurting a lot of people!
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