AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)
Brutal initiation ceremony at Satyananda yoga movement ‘saw seven-year-old girl sexually assaulted after leader licked her blood’
by Australian Associated Press and Amy Ziniak for Daily Mail Australia
A seven-year-old girl was stripped naked and held down while the skin between her breasts was cut by a swami who licked the blood and had intercourse with her during an initiation ceremony at a NSW yoga ashram, an inquiry has heard.
A woman has told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney she moved into the ashram in the foothills of Mangrove Mountain on the NSW Central Coast with her mother and sister in the 1970s.
At a public hearing on Thursday, she recalled the initiation in a hut across the river from the ashram.
The woman, given the pseudonym APR, said five or six male swamis were there. The man who raped her was the spiritual leader and founder of the Mangrove Satyananda ashram, Swami Akhandananda.
Akhandananda was jailed in 1989 for indecent dealings with four girls, but was released when the High Court overturned the conviction in 1991. He died six years later.
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