ut the case of Annie Eastwood. A former follower,
Ms. Eastwood reported that during one encounter, Rama had misled her
spiritually, abused her psychologically, showed her a gun, and demanded
that she have sex with him. Rama later told the press: "At no time
during our evening together [with Annie] did I brandish a hand gun."
But now, at the 1987 late night Malibu gathering, he admitted: "I did
have a hand gun with me that night with Annie... but I did not wave it
around."

Later that night, Rama asked five or six people to walk back to the
cars and wait in the parking lot. Anne and Rachel remained.

Rama faced the remaining disciples, roughly half of whom had
participated in one of his group LSD trips. "If anyone asks you about
LSD," he said somberly, "you all *know* that I gave you a placebo."

Then Rama, perhaps nervous about what I had observed in 1984 and 1985,
told the disciples: "Mark was always a little young, a little naive, a
little stupid... he thought that I actually *had* given him LSD... we all
used to indulge him... we all knew that it was just that goofy Mark
again... "

Rama went on to say that one day they might have to explain "all this"
to a judge and jury. But under *no* circumstance, he warned, should
they speak to the press.

Toward the end of the meeting, he told the nineteen that if they wanted
to return to the Centre in this life, they must first hand in an
essay--typed, double-spaced--in which they were to confess to and
apologize for their hurtful, wicked deeds.

After the meeting, Rama returned to his latest project: staging a
national, six-month, six hundred and fifty thousand dollar "Zen"
seminar promotional campaign. The effort included the placement of a
two-page spread in the Sunday New York Times. One page was a photo of
himself; the other advertised his free talk on Zen and success at Alice
Tully Hall, Lincoln Center (see Appendix D). The full-page spreads also
appeared in the L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Vanity
Fair, and in more than a dozen college campus newspapers across the
country, including MIT, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, UC San Diego, San
Diego State, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.

Rama's aura of allegations came to light in the press in the midst of
his national speaking tour: Newsweek, "Who Is This Rama?--The master
of Zen and the Art of Publicity is now having some very serious
problems", 2/1/88; The L.A. Weekly, "The Cosmic Seducer: Ho