Where are they now? The characters of Netflix's 'sex cult' docuseries, 'Wild Wild Country' by Kenny Herzog on Mar 28, 2018, 11:58 AM Wild Wild Country, the compelling Netflix docuseries produced by Jay and Mark Duplass and directed by Chapman and Maclain Way, unpacks the Byzantine saga of an Indian commune that moved into a rural Oregon town and got caught in all manner of criminal activity. After you spend six-plus hours watching the surreal true-life narrative, which unfolds largely via decades-old vintage footage that flashes forward to present-day interviews, there’s only one thing left to do: desperately scour the internet to find out what the hell everyone involved is up to now. We’ve tracked the whereabouts and doings of Wild Wild Country’s eclectic characters best we could, from Sheela the sharp-tongued town leader to the prosecutor who brought her (temporarily) down. This is Wild Wild Country: Where Are They Now? SEE ALSO: The story behind Netflix's new docuseries about a 'sex cult' that committed the largest bioterror attack in US history Sheela Birnstiel (a.k.a. Ma Anand Sheela) Now living as Sheela Birnstiel (she remarried in 1984, but was widowed nine years later) in a small Swiss village not far from Zurich, the fiery former secretary for Rajneesh commune founder Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later Osho) made quite the pivot. As revealed at Wild Wild Country’s end, she now runs a caretaking and nursing facility for older individuals dealing with a range of aging-related disorders, a kind of small-scale analog to the sprawling rural ashram she helped erect by Bhagwan’s side. Sheela has also engaged in Dadaist theater and written a memoir of her time with Bhagwan, which is perhaps why she was so worn out from rehashing details by the time the Ways were done filming her.
Jane Stork (a.k.a. Ma Shanti B) When Stork recalled having initiated the process of breaking the spell upon leaving Rajneeshpuram, she wasn’t simply turning a phrase. She was also subliminally promoting her own tome about those times with Bhagwan, titled — you guessed it — Breaking the Spell. (This also gives context to the recent Australian TV appearance excerpted in Wild Wild Country.) Per her website bio, she now resides in Germany, and strongly encourages people to “meet” her in the Netflix docuseries in which she is so prominently featured.
David Berry Knapp (a.k.a. Krishna Deva) The once-hubristic mayor of Rajneeshpuram fell hard from grace after flipping on Bhagwan and the commune to cut a deal with law enforcement. And though Wild Wild Country implies that he was swept off into witness protection, Knapp actually served two years in federal prison for his role in the group’s sophisticated immigration fraud. It’s no easy task to track his current residence, but curiously, there was a David Knapp who founded an El Segundo, California-based mortgage-brokerage firm in 1985 (right around the time he was working with the U.S. Attorneys office toward immunity) called Trust Capital. And public records show that there is a 69-year-old David Berry Knapp who lives in El Segundo today and was born in 1948. And per FBI records (which also divulge all those beans Knapp spilled on his fellow commune members), Knapp graduated from high school in 1967, which about adds up. Then again, Knapp would have been lucky to survive at all, given that there was allegedly at least one plot to kill him while he was incarcerated.
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