Four decades after the collapse of Oregon’s notorious commune, a survivor exposes the systemic child neglect and sexual abuse erased from popular accounts.
The Story Left Out of the Screen
In 2018, millions of viewers watched the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram in the hit documentary series Wild Wild Country. The series captured the sensational clashes between local Oregon ranchers, politicians, and the followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Yet that telling omitted the daily lives of the children who lived on the compound. Dozens of kids grew up inside the central Oregon commune, completely invisible to the outside world.
Sarito Carroll was twelve years old when she arrived at the Big Muddy Ranch in 1981. She was the thirty-second person on site, stepping off a Greyhound bus in Madras in an orange dress and sandals. Her childhood had already been transient. Her mother had taken her from Colorado to Hawaii, and then to the guru’s ashram in Pune, India, for what was supposed to be a three-month summer trip. They stayed for three years. In India, the guru gave her the name Ma Prem Sarito, stripping away her birth name, Jennifer. By the time the commune relocated to Oregon, Carroll knew no other life.
School Without Walls
The movement preached total freedom from societal constraints. Traditional rules of marriage, nuclear families, and sexual taboos were cast aside in favor of self-expression. One of the central teachings was that children belonged to the commune, not to their parents. For many devotees, this meant walking away from daily parenting. Parents drifted in and out of their children’s lives as they pleased, leaving many kids entirely abandoned to their own devices.
Formal schooling was almost nonexistent. Carroll spent only a few weeks in a traditional classroom during her entire youth. The leadership instead offered an alternative called 'school without walls,' which was little more than a justification for child labor. Carroll worked twelve to sixteen hours every day alongside adults. Because she worked in the main office near Ma Anand Sheela and the female leaders known as 'the moms,' she ran errands and handled clerical tasks. Other children were sent into construction, where several suffered serious injuries. Youth were expected to build a city in the desert rather than learn how to read, write, or solve basic math problems.
Systemic Abuse in Plain Sight
The lack of boundaries created a dangerous reality for minors. The commune normalized adult sexuality around children, and leaders taught that sexual energy should never be suppressed. Soon after arriving in Oregon at age twelve, an adult man of twenty-nine began pursuing Carroll. Lonely and isolated, she believed they were having a romance. Within a month, he raped her and took her virginity. She later discovered he was a notorious predator who preyed on several of her peers.
Rather than protecting a twelve-year-old child, the commune leadership facilitated the exploitation. Two weeks after the abuse began, commune authorities arranged for Carroll to receive birth control. No adult stepped in to remove the man. Instead, leaders treated adolescent sexuality as adult behavior. Carroll estimates she was subjected to fifteen adult men before leaving the commune. Some of her teenage peers were involved with up to one hundred and fifty adult partners. At one point, when rumors drew outside scrutiny, commune leaders ordered the teens to write down the names of every man involved with them. The resulting list contained over one hundred adult men. Leadership gathered the men into a room and delivered a single instruction: be more discreet.
Cast Out into an Alien World
When the commune imploded in the fall of 1985 amid salmonella poisonings, wiretapping charges, and attempted murders, the leadership fled. Sheela left for Europe, and the guru soon departed under federal arrest. Carroll was sixteen years old, entirely unprepared for modern life, and left with three hundred dollars. She did not even know that the sun set in the west. Cut loose from the only community she knew, she found herself hitchhiking and fighting off older men who offered cash for sex.
Survival required an enormous reserves of strength. While many of her peers ended up in sex work or stripping just to pay for food, Carroll leaned into an instinct to survive. An estranged grandfather convinced her that education was not the brainwashing the commune claimed it was. He insisted she study for her GED. She took the test, passed, and enrolled in junior college at age eighteen, earning straight A's. She eventually transferred to a four-year university, settled in Boulder, worked for fifteen years as a technical writer, and built new careers in acupuncture and real estate.
A Demand for True Reckoning
Processing decades of buried trauma took years of therapy, grief, and confrontation. For decades, former followers dismissed survivors, telling them that holding onto resentment proved they had missed the guru’s spiritual teachings. But Carroll insists that spiritual bypassing cannot hide criminal conduct. When she wrote a detailed five-page letter directly to her original abuser—now an older sannyasin and celebrated musician within the movement—he ignored it.
Today, the Osho International Foundation controls the guru’s intellectual property, publishing hundreds of books and running social media channels with millions of followers. When confronted about past abuse, the organization has hidden behind legal shields, claiming it has no corporate link to the Oregon commune. Carroll rejects these evasions. Genuine accountability, she argues, requires direct action: an open public acknowledgment of child abuse, formal safeguards, and financial compensation to fund trauma therapy for the survivors whose childhoods were stolen in the name of enlightenment.