Two women who claim they were sexually abused by the guru who founded Yogaville in Buckingham County, VA have filed a lawsuit alleging negligence. The suit, filed in November in New York, names as defendants Integral Yoga Institute, Inc. and Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville, Inc. It alleges the organizations were negligent in failing to protect young women from the late Swami Satchidananda’s sexual abuse over a period of decades starting in the late 1960s and asks the court to determine an award.

“The Institute stood by as this abuse occurred, failed to investigate, and actively encouraged it,” the suit reads. “By teaching young women to obey unquestioningly and requiring them to work closely alongside him, the Institute was an integral component of Swami Satchidananda’s abuse scheme.”

According to the suit, the two plaintiffs, Albemarle County resident Sharon Norris, who goes by Shanti, and Connecticut resident Susan Cohen were among at least 10 young women Swami Satchidananda abused between the 1960s and the 1990s. The suit alleges the organizations had knowledge of the abuse well before Satchidananda’s 2002 death including via the 1972 publication of an article in the Village Voice detailing allegations of abuse by Swami Satchidananda. In addition, the suit cites 1991 coverage in U.S. and Canadian publications that described protests of sexual abuse by Swami Satchidananda. 

In an interview with Charlottesville Right Now, plaintiff Norris recalled her first impressions of Satchidananda, who by that time had achieved enough celebrity that he delivered an opening speech at the Woodstock music festival in 1969. Norris was introduced to him by a friend when she was 19 and living in New York. 

“I remember going up one evening when he was scheduled to give a talk and sitting in this room and listening to this person,” she said. “I’d never seen anybody who looked like him. As a friend of mine says, Swami Satchidananda looked like he came out of central casting. He was tall, he had a beautiful radiant face; he had a long whitish beard, long dark hair, and he wore a long orange gown. And he had around him a kind of peacefulness, an aura of wisdom and calm… he spoke about sort of higher truths, and he spoke about things that nobody else was talking about in my life.”

Norris said she was drawn by his messages of love, wellbeing and service to humanity. She stopped smoking, became vegetarian, and continued to follow Satchidananda’s teachings along with a group of peers.

“We had this sense with this dynamic person that there was a different sense of hopefulness in the world, that we could in a way change the world through these teachings and these practices. It was already changing our own individual worlds, and we felt like we could create, in a way, a new reality,” she said.

According to the suit, both Norris and Cohen were hired by the institute to serve in roles close to Satchidananda. Norris said she was initially “thrilled.”

“I thought this was sort of a divine person. We all thought he was enlightened, whatever you might call that. And I don’t know that he ever claimed to be enlightened, but he didn’t claim not to be. So we all saw him as this person who was kind of beyond reproach, who was a celibate monk. He taught celibacy to his students,” she said.

But the lawsuit alleges that over time, Swami Satchidinanda made increasing demands for physical intimacy from both Norris and Cohen. They went along with it, the suit claims, because they had been trained to obey him and were forbidden from resisting his authority.

“It felt like in order for me to have this opportunity, what I saw as a profound opportunity to be with this realized master, it felt like in a way, the price of admission was to agree to have sex with him,” Norris said in the interview. “When I say that I was afraid of him, I remember thinking, ‘He can read my mind. He knows more than I do. This is a powerful person.’”

It wasn’t just fear though. 

“There was also a lot of love,” she said. “Part of his teachings was sort of devotion and surrender. And in the historical yoga community, in the history of…yoga texts and scriptures, there’s always talk about the necessity of having a guru to experience enlightenment. There’s always talk about surrender to the guru. You don’t question the guru. And the institute taught those teachings as well. That became part of integral yoga.”

The defendants in the suit have until late March to file a formal response. Reached by phone, Yogaville’s attorney Wayne Wilinsky said the allegations in the suit are “wholly without merit.”

“We believe there is an orchestrated collaboration of several people to undermine the organization and the institute, and we intend to counterclaim for interference with business relations and other causes of action,” he said.

In addition, he claimed that both plaintiffs “have given prior inconsistent statements that they had voluntary willful sexual relations with Swami Satchidinanda and that there was no coercion of any kind.”

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Carol Merchasin, told Charlottesville Right Now that society’s understanding of coercion and consent have evolved since the alleged acts took place and she says a feeling of powerlessness is common among survivors of sexual violence in spiritual communities.

“When we’re in a religious situation, a faith-based community, a spiritual community, we’re talking about something that is very integral to your own belief system. And it’s also, in many cases, as it is here, a part of your community, it’s not just that you were walking down the street and you were sexually assaulted. It’s being assaulted by someone that you trust. It’s being in a community that is going to shun you, that is going to say that this couldn’t possibly have happened. And so I think that what we know is that psychologically people take a long time before they realize what has happened,” she said. 

Merchasin has years of experience with such cases. After retiring from a career in corporate law, she took a pro bono case investigating claims of misconduct in a Buddhist community in Canada called Shambala. She soon began hearing allegations of sexual abuse in other religious or spiritual communities.

“I began to do about a four or five-year pro bono project trying to investigate these claims and bring them to the attention of the boards of directors so that they would take action and hold themselves accountable. But unfortunately, many of them do not wish to do that,” she said.

She joined the McAllister Oliverius law firm and now focuses her work entirely on sexual misconduct in spiritual, religious and faith-based communities. 

The suit against Yogaville was made possible, Merchasin explained, because the state of New York opened a one-year window for claims of sexual abuse to be brought years after the standard statute of limitations had closed.

“I think as we have dealt more publicly as a society with issues of sexual violence, we have come to learn that people need more time in order to process these things before they can come forward,” Merchasin said. “So recognizing that reality, a number of states and New York is one of them have said the statute of limitations is too short. So we’re going to open up a time period for people who have been assaulted in the past to be able to come forward and bring their claims.”

Another attorney with expertise in sexual abuse cases agrees that society’s understanding of concepts including consent and coercion has evolved.

”Here you’ve got, as alleged, a person to whom allegiance was given as a religious spiritual leader. Obedience was demanded and allegedly a grooming took place for this obedience and this unquestioning respect of his authority,” said Palma Pustilnik, a Charlottesville attorney who works solely with victims of sexual and domestic violence.

Proving the allegations will require some corroboration in the form of records or witnesses, she said.

“Witness testimony is always available and that’s going to be a credibility determination,” Pustilnik told Charlottesville Right Now. “They’ve asked for a jury trial in this situation. So that’s going to be a credibility issue for the jury to determine. It’s going to be a situation of outcry witnesses for certain factual questions because the Swami is not there to refute the specific allegations about his behavior, which is at the root of this.” 

She said defendant’s threat of a countersuit against the plaintiffs is common in such situations but can carry other repercussions.

“They risk looking like they’ve already been accused of failing to protect these women when they were very, very young, and now they’re taking another cudgel to them,” she said. “It’s a balancing act, and they need to think about that.”

Norris says she previously asked the organizations to acknowledge the truth of hers and others’ claims and did not want to be involved in a lawsuit.

“I’d say probably three or four years ago now, in conversation with a number of people and seeing what was happening with the institutes, it looked like all these wonderful people that I had known as sort of people with high integrity were being asked to sit on this lie,” she said. “There was so much conversation in the background about the sexual abuse. And yet the leadership in all the organizations seemed to refuse to want to acknowledge even a little bit of it publicly. And it just felt like it was a kind of sickness within the organization.”

Her main goal, she said, is “a full acknowledgement of the truth. I think that’s the main thing. Had that happened back two years ago, there would not be a lawsuit.”

Listen to the interview with Shanti Norris here.

Listen to the interview with Carol Merchasin here.

Listen to the interview with Palma Pustilnik here.