How Hacker Shyama Rose Escaped a Cult

According to Rose, while she was a toddler her mother took off to travel with Saraswati. (Tui says she went for medical reasons, not to be with the guru.) Her father, an insurance salesman, was left to take care of her and her brother, who was four years older. “Suddenly he’s like, ‘I’m a single dad whose wife has bounced out of the picture,’  ” says Rose. “When I was three and a half, he committed suicide." She doesn’t remember much (neither she nor her brother were at home at the time), except she’s been told that at the funeral she tried to climb into the casket to hug her father’s body.

“My mom came home and had to pack up our lives,” says Rose. For a few years they lived in California, where Tui had made friends with other followers, but struggled to get by. When they moved to Barsana Dham, life was better. “We had 15 ‘brothers and sisters’ and 200 acres to run around in,” says Rose. “We had a creek that went through the property; we’d go swim and jump off cliffs all day.” She didn’t leave except to attend the local public school, though in her long skirts and long braids, she’d sometimes get called “devil worshipper” by the other kids. “I didn’t care. I just thought, Screw you; you’re stupid,” she says. “It had been drilled into my head that I was this special snowflake and I’d been put on this earth to find God—the brainwashing started when I was a few months old.”

Things changed dramatically when Rose was 12. One day in Saraswati’s kitchen, he began adjusting her sari and suddenly his hand was all over her breasts. He was a half century older than she. He was considered a divinity. “And I was 100 percent devoted,” she says. “I knew it wasn’t right. But I felt like if I said something, I would go to hell.”

Still, she did tell her mother about the incident. “She said it was grace; it was coming from God,” recalls Rose. (Tui remembers the conversation this way: “I asked [Shyama] was she sure he didn’t accidentally bump her while working the sari and gracing her by his attention? She didn’t respond but was not visibly upset at all. I wish with all my being…a red flag would have gone off.”)

Soon the abuse was a regular, at least weekly, event: “There was lots of fondling, lots of touching,” Rose says. After she was assigned to be his personal servant, “I would be sent into his room, and he would do sexual stuff,” she says. “Sometimes he would show up at my bed at three in the morning. It was terrifying.”

When Rose was 13, Kate Tonnessen, a 14-year-old at the ashram, confided that she was also being molested by the swami. “I was sleeping over with Shyama, and going, ‘Say you were abused,’ ” recalls Tonnessen. “I needed her to back me up.” Rose couldn’t. “I still believed in him,” she says. “I didn’t know anything else.”