Bir Krishna Das Goswami

In September 2011 a former member of the Hillsborough community, Pratyatosa Dasa, posted online that Bir Krishna Das Goswami (“Bruce Jacobs”) was “currently being investigated by the Orange County, North Carolina Sheriff’s Department for covering up a confirmed sexual child molester and for hiding cases of sexual child molestation”. The post gives no case details, and no police record or news report of such an investigation has been found.

Related: his 1997 summary of the Lokanath Swami case to the GBC is a separate entry on this record.

Madhuha dasa’s account. He wrote that during the 1995 summer tour two young men who had been in the Vrindavan gurukula for years told him of complaints against Dhanurdhara Swami. On the advice of Muralivadaka dasa, then in charge of the gurukula ashram in Alachua, he arranged for them to be interviewed by Bir Krishna Goswami in Hillsborough, North Carolina. He says they first refused, fearing for younger brothers still in the school, then agreed and spent a full day giving their testimony. When he phoned about a week later to ask whether the allegations would go to the Sannyasa Committee, Bir Krishna Goswami, he wrote, said: “After closely analyzing my interview with [them] I’ve concluded that they were young arrogant boys and Dhanurdhara Swami was the authority in the gurukula. We all know that young boys do not like authorities, and so I am dismissing their whole testimony as 99% fabrication. It is not going past me, it’s done. Thanks for calling.” Madhuha dasa wrote that he did not press the matter at the time and that he no longer thinks Bir Krishna Goswami was simply “distracted or too busy”.

Context. The account is first-hand but stands alone, and was posted 27 years after the events in a Facebook group campaigning on child protection; it was reposted on a critic’s blog. The 1999 CPO decision on Dhanurdhara Swami records that in November 1995 several former Vrindavan students met him in Los Angeles to discuss abuse at the school and that he resigned as principal in December 1995; it does not mention Bir Krishna Goswami. The CPO later found that Dhanurdhara Swami had physically and psychologically abused students.

No response from Bir Krishna Goswami to this account has been found.

The 1997 email (Appendix H of the panel’s appendices, pp. 46–48). He wrote to the GBC: “It is important that you be aware of the decisions and findings of the committee so that you can properly deal with rumours that are circulating. Please understand that those matters are strictly confidential. I am requesting each GBC member to not show this message to anyone else. Also please erase this message after reading it.” The summary that follows, in quotation marks in the email (so possibly a committee text rather than his own wording), says Lokanath Swami “touched a young pre-adolesent girl in an inappropriate way by putting his hand on her lap”, that “the hand holding the book (the back of the hand) rested on her lap as he read the Krishna Book. The hand did not move”, and that “The GBC committee concluded that this deviation from the acceptable conduct had been accidental.”

What the committee’s records show. In the version attributed to Lokanath Swami in Appendix C (p. 14), his hand “landed on her thigh, and it very gently moved across her thigh a few times … Then, it moved towards the upper thigh, including the private area.” At the GBC’s October 2011 meeting (Appendix G, p. 42) Bir Krishna Goswami himself said that “when lok did this thing of putting his hand on the private part, the mother walked in and he took it off and then did again when she left.” These minutes show what he knew by 2011, not when he learned it.

The panel’s view. The GBC’s 2022 Lokanath Swami Case Panel wrote that “to the extent that the GBC did ratify this decision in 1997, it appears this was done based on the summary in Bir Krishna Goswami’s email rather than a full review of all the evidence. Viewed from the perspective of a CPO panel, this process was substandard in that the members of the Committee were not vetted for bias. This is the unanimous view of the panel.” The criticism is directed at the process rather than at him by name, and the GBC’s 2022 decision imposed no sanction on anyone for that handling.

2012. He was one of ten GBC sponsors of Resolution 502, “Lokanath Swami Continuing to Initiate”, which let Lokanath Swami resume initiating under conditions (Appendix K, p. 59).

No public response from him to the panel’s finding has been found.