Recently I learned the term “Institutional Betrayal” and
within 24 hours of that I heard a story about the way the Jagdeo issue was managed
in the early 2000s when I and other victims were posting about it. I do not
want to post the details of what I heard, just how it made me feel.

 I am posting a link to an article on Institutional Betrayal
at the end. I want to say how this affected me. I became a premie when I was 13
years old.  The first few years I was a
premie, I was an absolute true believer. I truly in my heart thought I would be
an adult in a world where the entire world became premies; I believed Guru
Maharaj Ji knew us all on some cosmic level that our mere human brains could
not comprehend.  The perfect master’s children were my little
brothers and sisters, and Durga Ji was my beautiful spiritual mother. I
believed it all. When Guru Maharaj Ji said, “when you sing Arti, mean it” and
when you say “Bhole Shri Sat Guru Dev Maharaj Ki Jai mean it”.  That was not a problem; I meant it.

It caused me a great deal of emotional pain realizing the truth of how
the cult and Prem Rawat managed a child molester within the ranks. Anth talked about "drips", Dr. Janja Lalich makes a similar analogy of a shelf the follower puts a doubt upon, and one day the doubts get too heavy and the shelf collapses. What Jagdeo did made me think Guru Maharaj Ji had a bad follower; seeing Jagdeo as one of those ushers in a darshan line tunnel was one of my biggest drips, or perhaps, a bowling ball on my shelf. It wasn't the final drip, or the final thing on the shelf, but it made the shelf ready to topple.

Reading this
article on Institutional Betrayal validated why that was always true for me. While I thought Jagdeo was
special as my initiator, he was not who I “believed” in. Also, what happened to
me was so much less than what happened to other children who were younger and more
seriously assaulted; that may also be why institutional betrayal trauma is what
rings so true in my case. Learning that there might have been a concerted
effort to suppress information that would have back then absolutely supported
me and the other victim who spoke publicly, facing the fears and risks that come along with telling the truth about a much more powerful person, wakes up those feelings.  I feel betrayed
not just by Prem Rawat, but by premies who could have stood up for us back then
and didn’t.  It still hurts, decades
later, to know this.

Why is this relevant now?

It is relevant because now, in 2023, followers of Prem Rawat may have similar choices. Is it a cult, or isn’t it? Because a cult member protects the
leader at all costs. A cult member, when faced with supporting a victim or dismantling
cherished long held beliefs, is willing to disparage a victim. We live in a
world where Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein hurt people unchecked for
decades. It is a societal problem made worse within a cultic system. People in
power exploit systems that continue to give them the edge. We live in a world
where employees are silenced by non-disclosure agreements and the silence of
victims is purchased in settlement agreements. Cultic systems benefit from
both.

“We didn’t join a cult, nobody joins a cult. They join a
good thing. And then they realize they were fucked.” Mark Vicente of NXVIM said
in HBO’s “The Vow”.  I knew many premies,
I didn’t see people who wanted to be part of something that would enable any
kind of abuse.  

Elan Vital eventually posted that they took some sort of
legal action against Jagdeo in India. 
But what did they do first? They posted things casting aspersions on the
victims.

http://www.ex-premie.org/pages/jagd_evpr_bg.htm

https://survivingchurch.org/2022/07/29/institutional-betrayal-compounding-the-trauma/

https://www.facebook.com/reel/6719349251451063