stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

318 STRIPPING THE GURUS
More recently, allegations of sexual improprieties with other female
followers have surfaced. Indeed, expert witness Pamela Cooper
White reportedly told a California court in 1998 that, in her
opinion,
Walters clearly fell within the profile of a clergy sex offender.
She added that he was on the “most destructive, predatory
end of that spectrum, that of the multiple repeat offender
who deliberately seeks vulnerable women to exploit for his
own sexual gratification” (Sullivan, 2003).
The same article lists no less than eight women accusing Walters
of sex-related infractions, ranging from indecent exposure to
sexual slavery.
Walters himself, however, has a different perspective on those
alleged sexual encounters. Thus, in a court deposition (Walters,
1995; italics added), in response to the accusations of one of the
women whom he reportedly admitted had massaged and masturbated
him on eight separate occasions in early 1982, he apparently
stated:
Let me repeat that it was not a romantic or passionate feeling,
but it was a friendly feeling. I was not using [woman #2].
I did not feel that I was using her.
Her statements many years after the fact are not corroborated
by my memory of her action then, which was in
fact to thrust herself upon me, against my pleas to the contrary....
I was trying to be in seclusion. She and (woman #1)
came down repeatedly to my house. And I said, please, leave
me be. I want to be quiet, and I want to meditate and understand
this confusion that I’m going through with (woman
#7)’s departure. I was in a state of emotional shock, confusion
and trauma, but I did not in any way notice at the time
that she was being upset, hostile, resistant. Rather, quite the
contrary, she was thrusting herself on me.
The woman (#2) in question was a twenty-something exstudent,
just out of university, at the time; Walters was in his late
fifties, balding and overweight.
In any case, judging from Walters’ other (e.g., 2002) writings,
unwanted attempts at seduction seem to be a recurring problem: