A bunch of people just dancing around on warm beaches, wearing swimsuits, exercising and being emotionally vulnerable with each other while having a group therapy session. That’s what it looks like, right?
Well nopes! You couldn’t be more wrong!
This footage isn’t from some fun weekend beach getaway or anything, it belongs to filmmaker Will Allen which he took himself while he was staying in Southern California with hundreds of other people, all belonging to a secret ‘cult’ known as Buddhafield. Started by a struggling actor called Jamie Simone Gomez in Los Angeles Buddhafield to most people in and around it was just another spiritual gathering with Jamie as a teacher, spiritual leader and a guru who was just helping people through the difficult paths of their respective lives. However, with years passing by more and more horrific revelations were made!!
On January 25th, 2016 a documentary called Holy Hell was released during the annual Sundance film festival. Now this wasn’t any normal documentary. In fact, before its release no information was given about its makers or what it was about. No one had any idea what they were about to watch. So when thousands of people present in the theater, most of whom had lived in California for years, started watching the film, every single second of the hundred and three minutes of Holy Hell horrified them with disturbing details that the filmmaker Willam Allen had filmed himself while being an integral part of Buddhafield for twenty two long years!!!
In the 60s when the cinema was rising to its new heights a young man belonging to a wealthy Venezuelan family moved to LA with a dream of becoming a movie star. The name was quickly changed from Jamie Gomez to Michel Rostand, a practice that’s fairly common in Hollywood and the struggle to land a film role began. In 1968 he landed a small role in Roman Polanski’s cult classic Rosemary’s Baby however this role couldn’t bring any further success in his acting career. For some time he even participated in Oakland Ballet and after some more struggle the career was shifted to gay pornography!
When his acting career couldn’t take off Michel reinvented himself as a ‘spiritual guru’ who would help people let go of their worldly problems and get in touch with their soul. He began by organising weekly yoga sessions, a phenomenon that was gaining more and more following in America and specially LA. Soon the yoga sessions changed into meditation exercises and more and more people started joining him and eventually the group had one hundred members in it. This was the time when the word ‘Buddhafield’ started getting associated with the group.
In 1985 Will Allen was introduced to Michel because of some trouble at home. Will, who was twenty two at that time and a film student, had come out as gay to his parents and as a result his mother forced him to leave the family home. Will’s sister who was already hanging out with people from Buddhafield for the last nine months invited him to join this secretive community. Now as a young gay man who was shunned by society, Buddhafield seemed perfect to Will. A place full of like minded and fit young people, many of whom were homosexuals and free to think and live their lives at their own will, Buddhafield was certainly the place to be!
Think about it for a moment, you are a gay man and with the AIDS epidemic on rise, religious landscape and church going parents in the 80s things just aren’t going right for you. Suddenly you are introduced to Michel, a fit man wearing nothing but a speedo and some eyeliner. With his mysterious and charismatic personality he tells you that it’s ok to be the way you are, obviously you are gonna be drawn towards him and his group!!!
Because of being a graduate of film school and knowing stuff about cameras and filming Will quickly became the group’s documentarian and thus close to Michel and for the next twenty two years he continued to film most of the activities that happened in the Buddhafield.
Beliefs and Rules:
Like most cults Buddhafield had its own beliefs and rules. It was largely based on New Age ideas where the leader portrayed himself as a spiritual guru. Attracted to these ideas of self fulfilment and healing newcomers readily gave themselves over to Buddhafield. By most of the followers Michel was called “The Teacher” and they would immediately change their name after becoming part of the group. The Sanskrit word ‘Shakti’ was used for a practice where Michel would allegedly transfer his power and spirituality to his troubled followers through his finger.
Most of the people after joining the group would move in together and completely cut off their families. Some of them continued to maintain their low-end jobs but it was just to pay the rent, other than that they would rarely communicate with anyone outside of this group. After every two to three days a three to five hour long ballet practice was conducted and everyone had to participate in it. Though the group believed in living freely there were some rules that had to be followed. For example Michel demanded that in order to be part of the Buddhafield you must remain celibate. In addition to this alcohol, drugs and other worldly pleasures were banned for the group members!
In 1992 the group moved from LA to Austin, Texas. The 1993 Waco Siege is often described as some sort of personality changing event in Michel’s life. According to Will he became very paranoid after this and for six months he left his followers behind in order to search for a new location for Buddhafield. In 1993 the Buddhafield moved to Oahu, Hawaii and that is when the things became even more intense!
The Shift:
Michel who was a ‘guru’ or ‘teacher’ till now,, started thinking of himself more as a godly personality. In his eyes, he was something more than a human now and he wanted his followers to think the same. The group that had started with meditation had taken a sharp turn towards worship and it was Michel who had the centre stage in all this. For Michel it had all come down to the fact that now he had a strange power over these hundred plus young individuals and he was certainly loving it. With time, this power kept on increasing and the fact that Michel was a hypnotist made it a lot easier for him to take over the minds of these young and extremely vulnerable individuals. Slowly the things started getting even worse when Michel began taking complete control of the lives of these individuals. According to some former members, one time when a group member’s father died Michel didn’t let her go visit her family. One other time he forced another member to get an abortion for some religious reasons. In various interviews some of the group members have revealed that Michel would first ask them to share what was going on in their minds during his weekly hypnotherapy sessions and then use these confessions against them whenever they wished to leave. Similarly he used the ongoing AIDS crisis during that time to scare his gay followers and frightening them into staying. He was also known to forcefully suggest plastic surgery and extremely strict diets to his devotees in order to look younger and more attractive!
Soon a practice called ‘Groupthink’ was introduced to the followers of Buddhafield. A practice where the members of a group were brainwashed into believing the same things that Michel believed in. In an interview given by one of the former members he described this practice as,
“It was methodical. Every day, we were being reprogrammed. It was brainwashing because we had groupthink, as well. Groupthink is where we all just keep supporting the same thought. And if you thought outside of that, it was criticised, of course, and it was not the way to enlightenment.”
But this certainly wasn’t the worst part about Buddhafield, by far!!!
Rape and Abuse:
During all those years of Buddhafield, Michel had always been keen to have more and more young and attractive devotees in the group. With him getting more and more power over his followers, another practice that he started was forcing his several followers to be naked infront of him. Yep! I know this sounds extremely weird and believe me it is but Michel had ways to make all the members see the reason behind this practice. According to him,
“If you can’t stand naked in front of your master, you can’t stand naked in front of your god”?
Now the group members who at that time were blinded by all the brainwashing and promises of spirituality didn’t even realise that their ‘guru’ had turned into a sexual predator, or maybe he had always been one!
2:01-2:16
In the late nineties and early twenties more and more people started leaving the group and with this the revelations of sexual assault started coming to surface. According to many former members Michel who had enforced strict celibacy in his group would often engage in sexual relations with his followers who most of the time were young men in their twenties. Sometimes he would disguise these relations as a source for his followers to get even higher on the spiritual ladder while other times it was straight up rape and abuse!!!
In 2006 after a lot of people had come forward about the abuse at the hands of ‘the teacher’ Will decided to leave Buddhafield for good. But he wasn’t done with Michel, not yet!
Making of Holy Hell:
Will after leaving the cult had no idea what to do with his life as for 22 years he was practically in sort of an isolation with about 150 members and Michel. After some time he started meeting with other people who had left the group and this is when he began to realise that almost all of them had been subjected to sexual abuse by Michel. This is when Will realised that ‘Buddhafield’ wasn’t a spiritual, religious, yoga or meditation group, it was an extremely secretive ‘sexual cult’ where the leader Michel Rostand was abusing his hundreds of followers!
This is when Will realised that he still had the footage he had recorded over his 22 years in the group and he could use it to make something that would tell the world about the reality of ‘Buddhafield’. But the problem was he needed more to make a documentary. For this purpose British filmmaker Polly Morgan went undercover to record Michel and his followers in Hawaii. She described this experience as,
“ The leader is a powerful and manipulative personality, so there was fear and trepidation to be close to him and his new group of cult members.”
As a result the documentary film “Holy Hell” came into being!
What happened to Buddhafield:
Unlike most of the infamous cults nothing actually happened to Buddhafield even after this documentary was aired on CNN. Currently the group’s leader Michel continues to live along with his followers in Hawaii and even after loads of sexual abuse allegations against him no action was taken whatsoever.
One may think that why no one from the group has ever pressed charges against Michel but one of the group’s ex members answers this question as,
“Legally, it’s hard to prove because none of us were under age, you know, and you have to explain how this happened and that we were really brainwashed. And I think people also – psychologically, you have to understand that we were this family. And it’s like – abuse happens all the time in families, and nobody presses charges on Grandpa or Uncle Jim because he’s part of the family. And so it took us a long time to separate ourselves psychologically from him, and he had trained us to protect him. He had – he had – he had programmed us to protect him.”
Outro:
The group now has lost most of its devotees but there are some who still believe in the spirituality of their ‘teacher’. Michel after the documentary was aired strictly shunned all the allegations and continues to live freely among his followers.
I’ll meet you soon with another video until then adios!!!
