(Or just plain disgust without the "as if." )

I can't help thinking about another plausible explanation. It reminds me of how I felt when arriving home late drunk or stoned or worse to a house full of suspicious parents and step-siblings when I was in high school. "Okay... flip a switch. Keep it together. All you have to do is make it to your room." Multiply that a hundred times if you're Wadi Sue arriving home and caught off-guard by a crowd of eighty intrusive premies smiling at you in that wierd way! 

After 36 years in that cult and 15 years on this forum - call it 51 years - I only heard of Prem use the word "mistake" one time when it wasn't in the context of mocking, ridiculing, disparaging or otherwise putting premies down... or scaring them out of leaving! That was shortly after the ashrams closed:

"Mistakes were made."

Ten years of many hundreds of relatively young people drastically altering their lives, trajectories and important relationships resulting in immeasurable mental, financial and even physical harm, and that's all he could muster? Even then, it's far more likely that he was referring to mistakes made by others whose "incompetence" resulted in his loss of coveted ashram income. And when you add "and the mistake was his fault," the answer is a big fat zero.

I've posted several times that in 1978 (using Hans Jayanti in Kissimmee as a benchmark) Chuck Nathan proudly boasted, "I want to make a million bucks for Maharaji." He obviously did that many times over. The irony is that I witnessed a seriously ill DECA premie, who desperately wanted quiet and isolation from hectic ashram activity, build and sleep in an "igloo" of boxes of books accumulated by several book buyers... in a garage attached to an ashram.

Bill Burke saw it, too. I've also posted before that he had a heart of gold. As kind as anyone you'd ever want to meet. Wherever he is, I hope he's doing well.

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As for Marolyn, in my opening post, I said that part of my role as a community coordinator was to do my best to set a good example. That was based largely on several things Prem said: "First they'll look at me and then they'll look at you, and if they like what they see, they'll look at me again," and "The purpose of the moon is to reflect the sun."

So let's look at her, the closest person to Prem Rawat. All I can come-up with is a broad spectrum based on my observations, second-hand stories and more importantly, credible eye-witnesses. It ranges from a sincere, caught-up victim to a privileged, opportunistic and complicit co-conspirator to broken, damaged and alcohol dependent to cynical and jaded to a numbed state of deep denial and compartmentalization to perhaps even predatory... all in varying degrees at different times. Certainly the harsher side of the benefit of the doubt.

(I must've looked up at the wrong time and and saw a new moon.)

Moreover, the extent to which drugs, alcohol and dysfunction permeated the entire family is no secret. That's why her contorted spiel in the coffee shop video was laughable.

Having had, as you alluded to, a programed soft-spot for the Durga Ji we saw on stage and in the pages of Divine Times, I find her to be a darkly tragic figure. If she ever was a sympathetic figure in the first place - sincere, victimized and well-intentioned like everyone else - then she certainly landed on the wrong side of things.

(Where's Cynthia when I need her to wop me upside the head and tell it like it really is.  )

What a naive, goody-two-shoes deluded chump I was.

By evoking memories of high school, Chuck, Bill and Cynthia, your post took me back like a time machine!