Neither the Fabe sisters nor the Cincinnati Enquirer gave any evidence for their theory that Divine Light Mission members used sophisticated methods of Mind Control. In fact, while the Fabe women mqay have unusual in having continued contact wth their supportive family, it only took a few hours (literally) of conversation to make them realize their "experience" was nothing but hope and faith in others possibly having the "experience" Rawat promised. They had both joined DLM relatively late (1976 & 1978) but Linda (3 years) was already Community Co-ordinator in Cincinnati. Both were certain they would not have joined competing cults like the Krishnas and the Moonies and did not understand the similarity with DLM. The bonds of brother and sisterhood with ther ashram premies proved to be negligible but having ex-premies who knew the DLM line in the deprogramming team was important.

The Fabe sisters were particularly lucky, they had loving parents and despite being ashram premies who realized they had been kidnapped to be deprogrammed said: "I knew that if my parents were there, nothing bad was going to happen." The parents were "convinced their daughters were caught in something which would sever them from their family" presumably forever but they were wrong. In another few years Maharaj Ji (Prem Rawat) would close the ashrams, order the nightly satsang meetings ended and reduce his demands (except for financial ones) on the followers. Half of his Western followers abandoned him and the rest presumably had plenty of time on their hands to spend with family. Deprogramming the sisters was quite easy, it only took a few days away from other premies and long conversations with former premies who had already ssen the light.

Barbara realized "I have been very close with a lot of initiators who are the closest ones to Guru Maharaj Ji. "And they don't have it and I don't have it and I don't know anyone who has it," she said of the DLM goal of merger with God. The experience of meditation "had not been much." Other premies told her "I'm not open enough and for some people, it takes longer …" They realized that all they had was "faith that this is the truth, that this is God, because I know I haven't had that experience." This was not unusual in the DLM community, many premies openly admitted meditation was a bore, some, even those close to Maharaj Ji, didn't do it at all.

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Deprogrammers Bring Premies Into 'world'

By Ben L. Kaufmann
Enquirer Reporter

Barbara and Linda Fabe suspected nothing where they grudgingly returned to their parents' North Avondale home for dinner.

Helen and Harry Fabe had no stomach for the spinach lasagna or what would follow.

Hiding in the basement was a team of former cult members, hired to break the hold Guru Maharaj Ji and his Divine Like mission (DLM) had on the Fabe's daughters.

No one knew how violent the confrontation would be. Linda, 22, had been in DLM more than three years. Barbara, 24, had followed a year later. They were loyal, avid premies, as the guru's followers are called.

"The signal was that when one of us opened the door to the basement, the six deprogrammers would come up" Harry said. "We ate in the kitchen," Helen said. Harry locked the doors behind them.

It was Thursday before Thanksgiving.

Within days, the Jonestown horrors would fill the papers, lending new urgency to the operation.

It would be painful, no matter how the confrontation resolved itself. Linda and Barbara did not see themselves as a cult members or victims of a fraud. As Helen would recall "My kids used to say, 'Hell, I would never be a Moonie. I would never be a Krishna, they're queer …"

Windows were nailed shut. Every door in the home had a lock, turning 760 Red Bud Ave. into a prison.

"I think they ate okay," Helen recalled a few days later. "The rest of us didn't eat so hot that night."

As the Fabes talk in their living room, the six deprogrammers were working on their daughters in other rooms. The parents and the deprogrammers - all former cult members - faced jail terms if the young women broke free and went to police.

"I served spinach lasagna because at that point they didn't eat meat, fish, chicken or eggs, because they were told not to," Helen recalled.

The Fab's visiting nephew, Tom, had been the bait to get Linda and Barbara to come to supper. He's a family favorite.

"When they came at the first minute there was that tenseness," Tom said. "Are they going to suspect something at the moment they come in here?"

Barbara and Linda, their minds already on 7:15 when they would leave for the evening satsang session of praise of Guru Maharaj Ji and his teachings, suspected nothing.

After dinner, the daughters helped clear the kitchen table. Tom and Harry were talking.

"What's happening? Barbara recalls saying. "What are you guys whispering about?

"I don't remember what he said," Barbara continued. "All of a sudden Tom went downstairs and up walked six young people, normal looking young people whom I did not know. Mom said "Oh, these are friends of ours."

My insides we're just churning and racing and I was so upset, I was frantic." Barbara continued in a recent interview.

"I knew before anyone said anything I was going to be deprogrammed. I was real nervous so I said, "Do you guys live in the basement?"

"One of the girls said, 'We're here to deprogram you.' "

When Linda saw the six strangers, she was "scared for that moment because they all looked completely creepy."

"Immediately, one of the girls started talking," Linda recalled. "While we were standing there, we had a chance to find out what was going to happen. I immediately found out that my parents were going to be there, and I found out that we were just going to be talking and immediately all fear left. "I knew that if my parents were there, nothing bad was going to happen" Linda said.

Harry, who had qualms about the whole enterprise and forcing his will on Linda and Barbara, will never forget those dreadful moments.

"Helen started to explain the reason we were doing this and she couldn't contain herself and she burst into tears.

"The two girls walked over to her and put their arms around her and they said, 'Okay mother, we'll listen to anything they have to say. We'll listen to the story and make the decision what we want to do.'

"There was no scramble. As soon as they walked up, the worst was over."

Neither daughter tried to escape from the Fabe home or during the rehabilitation, when they and four deprogrammers spent weeks playing at Lake Tahoe.

Bu the women began fighting back within seconds. They believed Guru Maharaj Ji was God, they liked being premies and they had buried all skepticism

"Linda said, 'Well, tell me, how will you know when we're deprogrammed?' Harry recalled.

Helen told Linda and Barbara, "When Ted Patrick gets here, he'll know, he'll be able to tell us when you're deprogrammed."

Patrick, known as "Black Lightning" had agreed to deprogram the Fabes' daughters after Helen and Harry called him every day for weeks, trying to get past others clamoring for his aid.

It would cost the Fabes about $5500 for each woman, plus $1500 a week for "rehabilitation." Patrick came in and out of town, checking the progress of the effort. He has more than one team working at any time.

The Fabes were fortunate. They had kept contact with Barbara and Linda and their daughters had come for dinner.

By the time the deprogramming week was half done, Harry had dropped his qualms.

"If snatching them is the only way it can be done and if it means the parents have to go to jail, it should still be done."

Linda had joined DLM seeking "answers to things she didn't realize had no answers," her mother said. Her religious shift made her parents "curious" but physicians and rabbis they consulted "told us it was a 'stage.'

Harry and Helen felt Linda's infatuation with Guru Maharaj Ji "was a passing fancy … "

Wrong.

"Barbara went in very fast. Linda was much slower. Barbara went in, 'Phhhhhhhht,' one week," Harry said.

Even when Harry was sure what he was doing was right, he recalled, "I still could not bring myself to put my desire over theirs."

By mid-1978, that was changing. Frantic investigations followed. The Fabes read everything they could find, talked to friends and parents of cult members and quizzed former cult members.

Helen and Harry became convinced their daughters were caught in something which would sever them from their family.

That's when they enlisted Patrick. He has deprogrammed about 1600 young adults, all but 30 successfully, Helen said. The technique focused on probing questions to get through cult members certainties.

The two women and four men deprogramming Linda and Barbara stuck to this approach. Long-distance conversations with callers identified as former DLM members encouraged doubts planted by the team.

For the entire week, Barbara and Linda were alone only when they went to the bathroom.

A female team member slept in bed with each sister. Another team members slept in front of each bedroom door and window.

Teams of three worked with each daughter.

"I figured, 'Look, Guru Maharaj Ji's Lord,' " Barbara said in an in an interview recently. "I'm going to do what he says, and he's going to save me. I wasn't worried. I didn't try to break for it. I knew I couldn't get away."

Her beliefs crumbled under the arguments of a team member who had been a premie.

"She kept raising up fallacies, raising up inconsistencies, forcing me to look at my experience and asking me, 'Did you get what you were promised?'

"I had to say, 'No.'

"If he's God, why does he need all this money and stuff?" the deprogrammer demanded of Barbara.

"I gave the programmed answers. I was very, very willing to listen to what they said. I had faith in Guru Maharaj Ji that he would save me.

Barbara meditated before falling asleep and the next morning.

Within a couple of days, "I was tired, so tired, confused, but the more they talked, the more I became clearer and understood more and more. "Wait a minute, I'm not getting what I was promised. Wait a minute, I'm not serving God."

Barbara recalls "I came out real quick." Within three days, she was going to movies, discos and bars with team members. Linda followed soon.

Helping young adults re-enter the world they left for the cults is essential to deprogramming, Patrick told the Fabes.

"I still had people with me all the time. It's real important in deprogramming. Most of the time there's a failure … it's because the person gets away before they are fully deprogrammed."

Barbara's breakthrough occurred when she realized "Wait a minute. I was one of the highest people" in the Cincinnati DLM community. "I have been very close with a lot of initiators who are the closest ones to Guru Maharaj Ji.

"And they don't have it and I don't have it and I don't know anyone who has it," she said of the DLM goal of merger with God. The deprogrammers showed her, she said "Man, who's got this then if it's unattainable?"

Barbara felt triumphant when she, her father and three team members went to the DLM commune in Mt. Lookout in a rented truck to reclaim the sisters' goods.

Commune members had called the Fabe home when Barbara and Linda failed to show for Satsang. Eventually, the family told the premies what was happening.

"I walked into the house with my shoes on, which was a very big thing because it's sacred. It's very rebellious … You always take your shoes off upon entering.

"I felt real good. I felt okay. Confident. I also had four other people with me, which adds to your confidence"

Given the demoniac skills Barbara said cult members have for catching the unwary, she was glad for the company and reinforcement it gave her.

"I wouldn't have gone in by myself nor would I go in by myself now. I really don't want to.

"I think that if I came up and were confronted with satsang just right to my face, there is a chance I could be snapped back into that old framework and just forget my rational, thinking mind."

Before Barbara was finished, Patrick interviewed her. Today she concedes that, in a way, she was "reprogrammed" as well. She was filled with information about cults and loathing for their operations.

Today, Barbara is an implacable foe of any cult or teaching of meditation techniques.

"Your values are switched around" in DLM, she said. "Right now, I don't think celibacy is a proper thing for a 24-year-old woman, and I don't think hating your parents is a proper attitude for anyone."

About six weeks after her deprogramming, when she was interviewed by The Inquirer, Barbara took a call asking her to join her third deprogramming as a team member. She went - It was in Florida - and Barbara still is working for Patrick in various parts of the country.

Linda was harder to convince.

I didn't feel threatened I knew what I was doing what was totally right. There was no question. I knew I'd come through it fine.

"So I felt like, 'Well, at least once and for all we can settle this between my parents and I because it had been a source of conflict.'"

Three deprogrammers took Linda into the basement, while three took Barbara upstairs.

"I noticed there were locks and that we couldn't get out. I don't think I would have stayed if I'd been allowed to leave.

The unhurried session ended by midnight.

"I went to bed feeling they hadn't touched anything in terms of my feelings about what I was into," Linda recalled. "I tried to meditate for a couple of hours lying down. I was in a double bed with a girl named Fran.

Linda daydreamed about getting free" "I figured out that they might have forgotten to look to lock a particular door. I had my escape all planned. They'd remembered and they'd locked the door. They were very thorough."

Isolation is important to deprogramming just, as it is to effective indoctrination by a cult.

"I felt like saying to Barb, 'How do they tell you to respond in these situations?' But I couldn't do that because everyone was around."

And even if there had been a chance to talk alone, there was a problem: "I knew that I didn't want to talk to Barb because getting into DLM and practicing Knowledge was a very individual decision and choice. Within a couple of days, however, Linda asked "So, Barb, are you deprogrammed yet? They didn't touch me at all."

But Barb responded, "I think maybe they're beginning to make sense to me."

Linda shook that off.

Deprogramming meant endless questions:

"They'd say, 'Look at your experience. What do you experience in meditation?' And I'd be honest, and I'd say, 'Not very much, but it's because I'm not open enough and for some people, it takes longer …'

"Somebody would say, 'why are you practising this knowledge?' And you know, I'd be saying something, and they'd say, 'Yes, but why?'

"Finally, it came down to, well, I guess there's just a faith that this is the truth, that this is God, because I know I haven't had that experience. Maybe some premies know that they have, but I haven't."

Long-distance conversations about discrepancies within DLM broke Linda's certainty. Linda believed only premies were Guru Maharaj Ji's intimate associates, but a long distance telephone conversation with a woman identified as a former DLM official told her about businessman constantly at headquarters who treated premies badly.

That tale, "inconsistent" with DLM reports of a whom Maharaj Ji keeps around him, "was the key" to cracking her convictions.

"When I began to see things more clearly, it was like, 'How long am I going to keep doing that? Am I just going to keep putting in all my effort here without getting the results I was promised?' "

She was on her way out.

Her parents had initiated Linda's withdrawal from DLM, but, the young woman said, "I don't have that feeling of gratitude … I can't feel like, 'Oh yeah, they saved my life."

Linda, who now lives at home with her parents, said she told them "I don't see how I could go back to practising knowledge with what I understand, but I also can't say, "O, Mom and Dad, thank you so much. You saved my life from this terrible thing.' "

In those agonising weeks, as the Fabes began to imagine what Guru Maharaj Ji might ask Barbara and Linda to do, Harry and Helen had weighed the alternatives"

• "We don't want to lose our children and alienate them … They come to our house, we have a relationship, they see their grandmother, we don't like what they're doing, but at least it's half a relationship.
• "If we attempt it and it's a failure, they may move away and we'll lose contact with them and lose them for good."

They finally decided.

"We don't have their minds. We've lost them already. And if we consider them lost already, then there is no risk."

Harry and Helen have a advice for other parents

Don't delay. Get the kids out.

"Barbara have would never have got involved if we knew then … Barbara got involved because of Linda and we would have gotten Linda out," Helen said.

"The only thing that we would have done differently is … We wouldn't have waited that long," Harry echoed.

Keeping in touch with the girls, even to helping them buy a house and furnish a DLM commune, "was the most important thing we did," Helen said.

It's been the heaviest week of my life," Helen said midway through the deprogramming. "It's been the best week of my life."

And Harry added, "When I was driving that truck back from the ashram (DLM commune in Mt. Lookout) I said this is the happiest day of my life."