In the early 1980s, a religious movement took over a small town in Oregon’s high desert. Its leader, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, was best known as the guru with a fleet of Rolls-Royces. His right hand was his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela.
Most people know the story now from documentaries. I knew it from the inside. For a time, I was one of the lawyers standing between the people of Antelope and the Rajneeshees. This is the story of how I got there, what it was like to face them, and the verdict that came out of it.
The Rajneeshpuram Litigation: A Timeline
1981: The Rajneeshees bought the Big Muddy Ranch, a 64,000-acre property near Antelope, Oregon, for $5.75 million. Antelope had about 40 residents. The newcomers began building a city on the ranch. Within months, Antelope’s residents, sensing what was coming, tried to disincorporate their town so it couldn’t be taken over. Rajneeshees registered to vote in Antelope and defeated the measure.
May 1982: Residents of the ranch voted to incorporate their own city: Rajneeshpuram. After local elections and resignations, the Rajneeshees held a majority on the Antelope City Council. The Rajneeshee-controlled council eventually renamed Antelope “Rajneesh.”
September 1984: Rajneesh personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, contaminated salad bars at restaurants in The Dalles with salmonella with the help of her associates. The goal was to make enough voters sick to swing the November Wasco County elections. According to the CDC’s investigation, 751 people became ill in the largest bioterrorism attack in U.S. history. (It also backfired; Residents turned out in force and voted the Rajneeshees down.)
1985–1986. Sheela fled the country in 1985, and the Bhagwan was arrested and left the United States under a plea agreement. In November 1985, Antelope’s remaining residents voted unanimously, 34 to 0, to take back their town’s name. Sheela was later extradited and, in 1986, pleaded guilty to charges that included attempted murder, assault, and wiretapping. She served 29 months for these crimes.
How I Became Involved
Before Antelope, I had done work for John Jaqua, a Eugene lawyer and past Oregon State Bar president. Jaqua helped Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman launch Blue Ribbon Sports, the company that later became Nike, and sat on Nike’s board for decades.
Bowerman was the legendary University of Oregon track coach and head coach of the 1972 U.S. Olympic track and field team. His brother lived in Antelope, and openly despised what the Rajneeshees were doing to his town. He called Bill, and Bill called his friend John Jaqua. And that was when John called me.
How the Rajneeshees Tried To Intimidate Me
This case was unlike any situation I’d ever encountered, before or since. The Rajneeshees were organized, well-funded, and relentless. They had their own lawyers, their own government, and their own police force.
Everywhere I went, Sheela seemed to be there. She was striking, sharp, and impossible to ignore. I was reminded of how General Motors once had Ralph Nader followed by private investigators after he exposed the Corvair: a campaign GM’s own president later apologized for before the U.S. Senate. Pressure like that is meant to rattle you—and, honestly, it did for a time—but I redoubled my focus and concentrated on the job at hand.
Then they came to my home to intimidate me. The Rajneeshees parked a car with two of their members in front of my house in Newport, around the clock, every day. It was meant to intimidate my family and me. I installed a state-of-the-art alarm system, and alerted the Newport police; they parked a marked patrol car, with a city officer, directly behind the Rajneeshees’ car, also around the clock.
After three days, the Rajneeshees went home.
The Defamation Case against Ma Anand Sheela
During the course of her involvement with the Antelope, OR community, Rajneesh’s personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, installed herself as chair of the local school board. When a mother stood up and raised concerns about the curriculum at an open school board meeting, Sheela told the woman that if she had stayed home more, maybe she wouldn’t be a widow. (The woman’s husband, an Oregon State Police officer, had recently died in an accidental shooting.)
That senseless and cruel comment was meant to humiliate a grieving mother in front of her community. It was the Rajneeshee strategy in miniature: if you couldn’t be outvoted, you could be shamed into silence.
In 1985, I filed a defamation case on the woman’s behalf against Sheela.
Sheela’s lawyer was Swami Prem Niren, also known as Philip Toelkes: the Bhagwan’s personal attorney and, by then, the elected mayor of Rajneeshpuram. Niren was one of the most skilled trial lawyers I have ever faced. He was smart, prepared, and persuasive.
Nevertheless, the jury returned a verdict of $625,000 for my client. You can see this verdict, along with others, on our Results page.
40 Years Later: Why The Rajneeshpuram Litigation Still Matters
Our successful defamation verdict did not bring back our client’s husband. It didn’t end the Rajneeshee era on its own, or stop the tsunami of outside money that essentially bought a town. What it did was tell one woman, in front of her whole community, that what Ma Anand Sheela said to her was wrong—and that the Rajneeshees, regardless of their influence, had to follow the law like everyone else.
That is what juries are for, and why my legal career has centered around the power of ordinary people. When power is concentrated in the hands of people who think the rules don’t apply to them, a jury of ordinary citizens is one of the few places where everyone stands on equal ground.
I’ve carried that lesson through my career. I took this mission into the first lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America to go to trial, the first lawsuit against the Vatican over clergy abuse, and the institutional abuse cases our firm still takes today. Our opponents will change, but our work—our values—never will.
You find the person who was hurt, you tell their story truthfully, and you don’t back down, even when the other side plays dirty.
Postscript on John Jaqua and the Bowermans
The circle that brought me into Antelope closed many years later. Bill Bowerman’s son Tom helped found the McKenzie River Trust, which, in 2024, took on the conservation easement protecting Yakona Nature Preserve on Yaquina Bay. This is the land my family has worked to preserve.
Barton Trial Attorneys: Standing Up to Powerful Opponents for More than 40 Years
When people come to us, they almost always say they don’t want what happened to them to happen to anyone else. That is why we do this work: to level the playing field between ordinary people and entities that are bigger, richer, and better organized than the people they hurt. ‘
As a boutique trial firm accepting only a handful of cases at a time, we’ve successfully taken on religious movements, national institutions, hospitals, and corporations. Learn more about our firm, our core values, and our team — or call for a free consultation:
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