They have not asked for an interview with me – which should have been their first thing because I exposed the whole thing. They should have asked me, but they did not. I had to ask them, “Please have an interview with me.” Four times they gave a date, a time, and four times they canceled it. This way they delayed again one week. The fourth time I told them, “If you cancel it, then this evening I am going to call a national press conference. I am going to talk to them, and I am going to say it clearly, that ‘these people are not working to find out the criminals; their strategy seems to be to protect the criminals and destroy the commune’.” They would like somehow to arrest one thousand sannyasins who are absolutely innocent, who have not done anything; or even if they did anything they had no idea why it was being done. They may have carried some bags from one place to another place not knowing that the bags contained poisons. They may have dug ditches not knowing that those ditches were going to be used for bugging homes.

These people are innocent, and all the people who knew what they were doing…they killed a man and threw his body out of Rancho Rajneesh; they tried to kill the three people most intimate to me who were a danger to them – because they were my physician, my dentist, my caretaker, and they might inform me about things that were going on. They even tried some kind of poison in my milk. They never wanted me to speak again. They didn’t have the idea to kill me; but they certainly wanted me to remain sick, weak, so that I could not come back into the commune and make Sheela’s image as high priestess that she has created in three and a half years disappear – because when I am present there is no need for any mediator between me and my people.

She insisted in many ways, “Your health is not good, and it will be dangerous to speak again. Everything is going well – you need not bother, we are working perfectly well.” “But,” I said, “what am I going to do with my health if I have to remain my whole life closed in the room? My health has to be used for my people. If I live two years or four years less, it does not matter – but whatever I want to do, I should do.” That became a trouble in their minds, and they started arranging to escape, to get married in Switzerland. And they committed bigamy: Sheela was married here to an American sannyasin, she got married secretly to a sannyasin in Switzerland; the Swiss sannyasin was married to an American woman here – they both have committed crime.

But this all went on secretly, silently; only now are things surfacing. As they escaped from here, thousands of sannyasins started coming to the office and informing us of whatever they knew. They were fragments, but those fragments indicated many things, and all put together, it became a bigger Watergate. Even the FBI people had to accept it, that this gang has used more sophisticated instruments for tapping the phones, for bugging the houses, than Nixon had used. And Nixon has bugged only a few places, they have bugged hundreds of houses. For each bugging, a five-year punishment…

An American law?