Sogyal's sexual exploitations

[Stevyn]

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!

[Stevyn]

http://forum.rickross.com/read.php?12,100679,page=1

Sogyal was an insatiable womaniser from puberty. Maybe before. He is a spoiled brat who exploits his power over women. He is a sadist who enjoys beating people and humiliating them in public. He is a charlatan who was never trained as a lama. He is a liar -- he did not write The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It was ghosted for him by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey. He is a con man who heads up a multi national organisation which purports to teach Buddhism but is in fact a business designed solely to make money. There is more, but I think that will do for now.

Just heard that Sogyal's lawyers are trying to prevent the Canadian documentary from being broadcast by Vision TV on 23 May. I gather the TV company is holding firm and intends to go ahead. The item has been passed by ultra-cautious media lawyers for broadcast in Canada. One has to wonder on what grounds Sogyal's lawyers are arguing that it should not be shown. Does he perhaps have something to hide? I have been told by several sources that there is a mafia-like culture of silence around Sogyal's sex life. But I also know that at least one of his recent "dakinis" is no longer afraid of him and has blown the whistle.

------------

Corboy, I know one of the women who gave testimony in the Canadian documentary. She also testified in the Sogyal lawsuit. She also knew Andrew Harvey back when he was a devotee of Sogyal's, and a graduate student. She said Harvey wrote the book (if there was a co-author, she didn't mention him), plus he had to write answers to pre-submitted radio interview questions, because Sogyal didn't know enough about the subject matter in the book to be able to respond during interviews. I don't think it's deviating from the topic to say that Sogyal didn't author the book, and yet not only continues to take credit for it, but the the popularity of the book is what allowed him to build a commercial empire of bereavement counseling centers and hospices, which in turn gave him access to thousands of grieving women, many of whom he molested. Andrew Harvey was a brilliant grad student who, I imagine, as an act of devotion to his guru, wrote the book (in collaboration with at least one other person, I gather from this thread). No one could have foreseen the results of that act.

----------------

Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage that Sogyal was a part of, told Sogyal that he needed to go back to India and "ripen his practice", because Dudjom disapproved of Sogyal's behavior. So Sogyal simply removed Dudjom Rinpoche's name from the Buddhist centers Sogyal was running, and continued as before. (He originally advertised his centers as Nyingma lineage, under Dudjom Rinpoche, for credibility.)

It's unbelievable that Sogyal is still going strong after all these years, and the lawsuit! Many people dismiss the lawsuit, because it ended in a settlement, so people interpret that as evidence that he didn't lose the lawsuit, he just paid the complainant some money to make her go away. But as my friend who was a party to the suit said, "people don't pay a settlement unless they have to", i.e. unless the case is unwinnable for them.

------