One weird looking dude...
Posted on 06/12/2005 2:03:11 PM PDT by wagglebee
As an FBI agent under J. Edgar Hoover like all Bureau men of his time, Mark Felt was a spit and polish company man who spent much of his time investigating radical hippie movements, wiretapping groups like the Weather Underground and registering disgust over the so-called free love counter-culture.
But apparently the counter-culture had captured his own daughter Joan. In an extensive profile of Felt's rebel daughter the Washington Post revealed her ties to the Adidam cult.
The paper reported that the cult’s leader is a "a self-proclaimed guru who, in two California lawsuits and several public statements 20 years ago, was accused of sexual abuse, slavery, false imprisonment, assault and brainwashing that was said to include persuading people to give him all their money."
The lawsuits that dogged the group in the mid-1980s were settled with payments and confidentiality agreements, a California lawyer, Ford Greene, who handled three such cases, told the Post.
Joan Felt refused to discuss the group and suggested that her involvement was past history.
But the Post revealed that Felt’s name and home phone number are currently listed on the Internet as a contact for an Adidam Study Group in Santa Rosa, Calif., where she lives with her father and sons.
It is not known whether she ever lived at any of the cult's many communal households and sanctuaries throughout California and elsewhere.
She did, however, live at a commune in 1974 where her eldest son, Nick Jones was born - a birth recorded for a documentary called "The Birth of Ludi," according to the Vanity Fair article which revealed Mark Felt as Deep Throat.
The article also described Felt's parents visiting her there and finding her sitting naked in the sun while breast-feeding her baby.
Adidam is named for its leader, Franklin Albert Jones who was born in New York in 1939.
The guru who founded his cult in 1972 in Los Angeles has also been known as Adi Da Samraj, Bubba Free John or Da Love-Ananda, as well as several other names.
Since 1982, he has lived in seclusion with a harem and devotees on the tiny Fiji island of Naitouba, according to defectors from the cult as well as news articles. The Post reported that he bought the island for $2.1 million from actor Raymond Burr.
According to an Adidam Web site, the cult practices "the devotional and spiritual relationship with Adi Da Samraj," and seeks "to bring one's life and body-mind into greater balance." Its purpose is "to transform every moment in life -- whether one is eating, sexing, meditating, doing business or whatever -- into Divine Communion."
The Adidam movement is believed to have just a few thousand followers, with groups and book stores in several major cities, including one in the suburbs of Washington D.C.
Steve Hassan, a licensed mental health counselor and a Boston-based cult expert for nearly 30 years, told the Post that Adidam fits the classic cult model. "I have counseled victims of this man," says Hassan, " . . . a couple dozen over 20-plus years," including as recently as 2002. Joan Felt bristled when the Post asked about Adidam, noting that "her pleasant disposition turns testy when she is pressed to discuss past allegations against the guru."
She told the paper during a phone call, "That's all way far in the past. This is 20 years ago, 20 years ago, that you're digging up stuff."
While Felt rose through the ranks, his daughter, Joan, became decidedly anti-Establishment. As Joan's lifestyle changed, her father quietly but strongly disapproved, telling her that she and her peers reminded him of radical Weather Underground members—a faction he happened to be in the process of hunting down. Joan cut off contact with her parents for a time (she has been reconciled with her dad for more than 25 years now), retreating to a commune where, with a movie camera rolling, she gave birth to her first son, Ludi (Nick's brother, now called Will), a scene used in the 1974 documentary The Birth of Ludi. On one occasion her parents arrived at Joan's farm for a visit, only to find her and a friend sitting naked in the sun, breast-feeding their babies.
Joan's brother, Mark junior, a commercial pilot and retired air-force lieutenant colonel, says that at that stage their father was utterly absorbed in his work. "By the time he'd got to Washington," Mark recalls, "he worked six days a week, got home, had dinner, and went to bed. He believed in the F.B.I. more than anything else he believed in in his life." For a time, Mark says, his dad also served as an unpaid technical adviser to the popular 60s TV program The F.B.I., occasionally going onto the set with Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who played an agent with responsibilities similar to Felt's. "He was a cool character," says the younger Felt, "willing to take risks and go outside of the rule book to get the job done."
http://tinyurl.com/aptu6
"Where are you going?" someone shouted to Felt. He must have misheard, for he showed the wad of bright green chewing gum in his mouth.
One weird looking dude...
That would be my bet.
New Age Liberals
No wonder she's after a boatload of money. "Al-Di-La" has given the orders.
And this cult's Web site went up... how many years ago?
{{shudder}} what a creepy photo
Felt and his wife, Audrey, who died in 1984, had two children, Joan (born circa 1944) and Mark. Joan, who had earned two degrees from Stanford University and won a Fulbright Scholarship, in the 1970s joined a commune and, according the Vanity Fair article by John D. O'Connor revealing Felt's secret, gave birth to her son on camera for a documentary, The Birth of Ludi. Joan had three sons, Will (aka Ludi) Felt "(born 1974); Robbie Jones (born circa 1979); and Nick Jones (born circa 1981). Nick Jones was a schoolmate of O'Connor's daughter and they met at a party. Joan teaches Spanish at Sonoma State University and Santa Rosa Junior College.
Joan Felt has never been married.
Gee You, Are You? [ = GURU, from Firesign Theather, just about the time her son was born]
Cults have fascinated me always. We ought to have an entire FR thread on cults. I am shocked at how many there are.
***
I'll bet he was willing.
And, how long ago did Watergate happen?
Hell, she's trying to cash in on a crime her father committed over thirty years ago.
It may be the cult that has won the lottery. You can bet they will remind her to donate.
"circa"? WTH?
Could this get any funnier!
just more "investigative journalism" (a.k.a.- chasing after a buck)
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