The Lawsuit
My landing in Hawaii was on the island of Oahu, the city of Honolulu. It was November of 1984 and Siri Brahma had arrived ahead of me, renting us a cottage in Paololo Valley, in the town of Kaimuki. It was a simple one-bedroom cottage, tucked down behind a larger main house.
Valleys in Hawaii are the formations generated by lava flows in the original creation of this island chain. The valley ridges on either side are usually steep and they move up towards a peak. There are no through-roads in these valleys. Just one way in and the same way out.
It was blissful to be lulled to sleep at night with the refreshing air filled with fragrant ginger and plumeria scents, carried on gentle breezes and misty rains that swished down through the valley. It was nurturing, soothing, healing.
Our first six months on Oahu were otherwise full, with moving and unpacking and buying a car. We attended a course on how to buy real estate with nothing down. Moving to a new state involves qualifying and testing for new licenses. Siri Brahma got his electrical license and my parents loaned us the down payment to purchase a piece of property in a newly developed subdivision next to Waimea Bay on the North Shore of Oahu. (That is one of the main ways to purchase with nothing down – borrowing the down-payment.)
Throughout those first months, Yogi Bhajan was calling me on a regular basis, as I continued to hope and expect that he would want me to remain within the embrace of the community that I loved. I couldn’t believe that he would want to push me out. However, I soon began to hear some of the ways in which I was being portrayed to his faithful followers and I recognized the pattern. I was being characterized as having fallen to my second chakra, and as a traitor to the Guru.
A few months had passed when the Yogi called one afternoon to tell me the story of Karta Purkh’s departure (i.e., escape). His version of her departure included his cover story. He told me that Karta Purkh was claiming she had been sexually assaulted by him. His defense was to claim that, actually, she had been sexually abused by her own father, therefore she was emotionally damaged, and that’s why she now was falsely claiming that the Yogi had abused her.
I was horrified. I knew he had begun to have sex with Kate. I had seen the bruises, the marks he often left upon his secretaries. By then she was around 20 years old, and I never imagined it was non-consensual. I had met her parents – her father and mother. They had visited the Ranch a few times. Their two daughters, Karta Purkh and Guru Amrit, were both part of the Yogi’s household.
Now I was shocked that he was making up this horrific story about their father, in order to cover himself! It was bad enough that he was portraying me as a fallen woman, a traitor to the Dharma, but to slander the father of Karta Purkha and Guru Amrit? That was beyond the pale for me.
It was six months before our marriage ceremony took place in May of 1985, and following the festivities, we immediately moved onto the vacant piece of land that we had purchased, next to Waimea Bay. We stayed in a tent on the land and began construction of a two-story house located about 100 yards from a rocky shoreline. Every lunch time provided a break in our physical labors and we enjoyed a daily snorkel off that rocky shore.
I had told Siri Brahma about my prior relationship with the Yogi. I felt I had to tell him before I could expect him to honestly be prepared to marry me. Now that we were married, Siri Brahma grew increasingly irritated with the Yogi calling to talk to me. It was about 8 weeks after our official marriage, when the Yogi called again one evening. Siri Brahma was very tense about it, and I expressed my frustration with being in the middle between them. On this occasion, at my encouragement, Siri Brahma got on the phone and proceeded to tell him: “I am getting quite annoyed at the fact that you keep calling and only talking to my wife.”
That did it! I’m sure hearing me referred to as ‘my wife’ was the last straw. The Yogi lost it totally – he began screaming and cursing and telling Siri Brahma that he had betrayed his teacher, had betrayed his destiny, that he was cursed and on and on. Shocked at the outburst, Siri Brahma dangled the receiver in the air between us, as we looked at one another in disbelief, listening to the Yogi raging and screaming and totally losing control. We hung up the phone at our end and that was the last conversation we had for a number of years. It was actually a relief.
After six months, we finished building the house. By then it was the end of the fall, and I began to have my first experience of the impact of wintertime waves on the north shore of Oahu. The waves were sometimes 20 feet high, crashing just 100 yards from our front door. It gave me a sense of feeling under siege. We completed the last details of the house and then put it up for sale. The profit we made on that project made it possible for us to pay back the loan from my parents and to buy our next property, on the island of Maui.
Over the months, Siri Brahma had been pressuring me to sue Yogi Bhajan. He was adamant that I should be properly compensated, that YB had used and abused me over all of my years of service. It was true that I had never been paid for all of my 16 years of work, nor had I received any formal training to advance my career skills. I had attempted to negotiate some kind of assistance or compensation, but the answer the Yogi gave was always the same: “I cannot do that, Premka, it would set a wrong precedent.”
I resisted the idea of a lawsuit, but I also knew it would be a way to send a signal to the community about the fact that Yogi Bhajan was, at the very least, deceptive and duplicitous. I also wanted to support Karta Purkh in the event that she was to sue him. I thought that if I filed alongside her, it would be more likely that she would be believed. Again, I still believed in the ‘myth of Premka’ - I though people would believe me. Sure, I would hope to come out with some financial compensation for my 16 years of service, but mostly I was motivated by the idea of sending a signal to the community. I wanted to face YB in open court, force him to speak the truth. If what he was doing, if having physical relations with his staff, was acceptable, then he should stand and claim it!
I had no idea how to reach Karta Purkh. It turned out that both Karta Purkh and I, separately, reached out to Stephen Josephs (former Guru Shabd Singh of Millis, Mass.) Stephen had left 3HO in 1983. He arranged a meeting for both of us with an attorney named Peter Georgiadis and with a man named Pritham Singh. Pritham Singh was a fierce adversary of YB. He was a former student and one who perceived YB’s dishonesty, his deception, his flagrant ego. We all met in Massachusetts in 1986.
The basis of my lawsuit remained focused upon the lack of proper compensation for my 16 years of work. I had been provided with housing and a car to drive, but the lack of any salary, any independent income, kept me virtually imprisoned. Dependent. Dis-empowered. Although the power equation was highly imbalanced and inappropriate between me and YB, I would not claim that I was forced, that I was raped.
Kate’s lawsuit involved extreme violent rape and imprisonment. I was shocked to learn that this was what he had done to her. It was nothing like my own experience, so it was difficult for me to imagine. Nonetheless, our lawsuits would proceed, intertwined. I would stand with her. I knew the basic fact was true – YB had violated her. She had come to him as a 13-14-year old child. She worshiped him, as we all did. He proceeded to have sex with her at around the age of 19. At the time, I had no idea it was non-consensual.
Over the years that followed, I endured a frozen shoulder on the right side, while pregnant with my son. Meanwhile, YB kept claiming medical exemptions, provided by his in-house doctors, to avoid sitting for his deposition.
My son was born and then a toddler as I went through meltdowns. I was experiencing grief from betrayal by my spiritual teacher, grief from the loss of my precious spiritual family/community, combined with the pain of knowing YB was suffering heart conditions, surgeries, etc. I was spending my daytime hours at home with my toddler, while crying virtually all my waking hours.
And in the midst of all that, Pritam Singh, who had agreed to put up the funding for the legal expenses, was pressured to withdraw. YB had found a way to get to him, through his client base. Pritam was being financially impacted, and so he wanted the cases to be dropped. I was told, through Pritam’s representative, that Karta Purkh was accepting a settlement. I was asked to settle for $10,000.00.
My god, I had given YB that amount of my personal savings back in 1969! Now I had exposed myself, naked to the world. And I was seriously being asked to give up, and accept $10,000 to just go away? NO.
My attorney agreed to stand with me on a contingency basis moving forward. But I would also be burdened with the debt left by Pritam Singh. Pritam Singh abandoned me. Karta Purkh never spoke to me. She was gone too. I was on my own.
In 1987/88 I received a call from an Indian Sikh man in Vancouver, Mr. Malik. He was proposing a settlement, in order to get beyond all of this painful process. I was worn down, and it all felt rather hopeless. The community had been turned against me by the lies of YB – so I recognized that nothing was going to change their minds at this point.
Malik Singh was negotiating directly, and asked me if I couldn’t just dismiss my attorney? That would save the expense of paying anything to my attorney. My reply was, “That is how you all do business. It is not how I do business. Absolutely not. My attorney stood by me and I’m not going to cheat him now.” We came to an agreement.
The idea for pursuing the lawsuit did not come from any outside source and there was never any offer of money to pursue it. This was another one of the lies that YB made up about Premka.