"Rama?" started a woman disciple from the audience. "I recently dreamt that seven of the nineteen flew around me like witches."
Rama nodded. "Recently," he said, "they have networked and conspired to murder Jack Kukulan."
Several months later, Rama gave Karen a "Warrior's task." He told her to call and instruct each of the nineteen to attend a private meeting. The meeting was to be held hundreds of miles south of Palo Alto, in an obscure park in the mountains of Malibu. It was scheduled for December 5th, 1987—the following night.
They showed.
Under the guise of helping them protect their careers, Rama warned the approximately thirty people—the nineteen women and about eleven other disciples—that newspaper articles targeting him in a negative light were in the offing.
He spoke to them about 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.