Cult members sue their guru: ‘wild sex, drug orgies’

Press, 16 May 1985, Page 13

Cult members sue their guru: ‘wild sex, drug orgies’

From

WILLIAM SCOBIE

in San Rafael

A tiny tropical isle in the Fijian chain, bought as a refuge for a California cult leader who calls himself Da Free John — selfanointed incarnation of the Deity — has become the scene of wild sex and drugs orgies, according to defectors from the sect.

Former top-level aides of the “Master,” born Franklin Albert Jones in New York 45 years ago, has come forward with a stream of charges of brainwashing, faked miracles, physical abuse of women cultists, and financial chicanery. No-one, it appears, wanted to leave Translation Island, where Jones lords it over a rotating audience of 40 devotees, mostly female and young. “Why would they?” asks Mrs Beverly O’Mahony, one of a score of disenchanted followers in California. “They’ve given him all they had. They think he’s God. So does he.”

Mrs O’Mahony has filed a ?5 million lawsuit in California’s Marin County, charging that she was held against her will on the private island and forced to take part in “various sexual acts” on Jones’s orders.

The corpulent, bald “Master” of the “Johannine Daist Communion” (J.D.C.), with an estimated worldwide membership of 2000, most of it in California, has not spoken (except to the Fiji Embassy), but aides in San Rafael, where J.D.C. has its headquarters, say the whole affair was “trumped by a few dissidents, not more than 20.” They have filed a countersuit accusing Mrs O’Mahony, aged 35, and six others of conspiring to extort money from the “church.” Mrs O’Mahony, once a flautist

with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, is the estranged wife of the guru’s current top aide, one of nine defendants in her 33-page complaint, which besides listing the unpleasant sex acts she was allegedly made to perform, says she was beaten and cuffed, starved and brainwashed into “control of my every move.” Brian O’Mahony concedes that in the past “there was alcohol and marijuana abuse, and a fairly liberal attitude towards sex” within the cult. “But all that’s changed,” he adds.

It has not, according to 28-year-old Mark Miller, a former University of California tennis star, who joined J.D.C. at 19 and left in disillusion last year. “People are still being abused, misused, and having their pockets picked in the guise of spiritual teaching.” Like other former devotees who have “gone public” against J.D.C., Miller, who says his former girlfriend, a sometime Hugh Hefner “playmate of the month” is now one of Jones’s nine “wives” — is an angry man.

“I lost eight years of my life and all I had. I was incredibly dumb. I didn’t even fight when Jones took the girl from me. I cried, and meditated extra hours before his picture.” California officials say the cult took in well over 53 million last year, mostly in tithes and gifts from devotees.

The Fijian paradise, his northern California lakeside ranch, his

Hawaiian retreat, the headquarters building in San Rafael, and other goodies have all been paid for by admirers.

The island retreat was bought from the actor, Raymond Burr, for $2.1 million by an Australian-born industrialist, Neal Stewart, head of Astec Hong Kong, a firm that makes computer parts. Stewart also gave a million to underwrite Jones’s publishing interests, which includes a glossy monthly, dozens of bookstores, and his own 40-odd books. What sort of man is Da Free John, and how does he exert his sway? “He’s intensely charismatic, almost hypnotic, and highly intelligent,” says Sal Lucania, another disenchanted leading aide. His writings have been praised by the likes of Alan Watts and other counter-cultural heroes of the 19605. He survived experiments with LSD, peyote, and other drugs, bouts with Scientology, and visits to gurus in India to come up with his own blend of cultism, which mixes scientology-like disciplines with mystical eastern mish-mash. “People have told him he’s wonderful, he’s the greatest, for 15 years. Now he thinks he’s God,” says Lucania. Lucania means this literally. He showed me recent writings of the “Master” in which, among other apocalyptic warnings, Jones promises to prevent a third World War. “No-one on earth compares to me,” writes Da Free John.