Of course, once somebody is deprogrammed, you don't hear anything about it again, unless you actually talk to them.  So, they were sort of forgotten, and it was only the violent, dramatic escapes that you ever heard about.  No wonder it made us all paranoid.

I had the same experience and I have talked to a few people who were deprogrammed while premies.  In those cases, it was like you said, it was more like what we would now call an "intervention."  The family was all there as well as the "deprogrammers," and unless the premie bolted out of the room (which they usually didn't because they were not really restrained, and they felt they could "hold their own" in the back and forth), they usually left the cult.

I remember talking to a friend of mine who was deprogrammed and she was amazingly calm about it all.  She wasn't the least bit worried about talking to me "a fervent premie," she was just firm that it was over for her as far as Rawat was concerned.

All cults have self-interest in portraying all of that in the most negative terms possible.