Prakashanand Saraswati

In 2012, on the one year anniversary of the trial, Vrinda Devi, Radha Madhav Dham spokeswoman, stated that "What we've been trying to do since then is moving forward."

A 12-person jury declared Saraswati guilty of 20 counts of child molestation, after 50 minutes deliberation, on Friday 4 March 2011. After being convicted, he was released on a $10 million bond provided by TV infomercial entrepreneur Peter Spiegel. As part of the bond condition, Saraswati was barred from entering the Barsana Dham.

The punishment phase of trial was scheduled for Monday morning of 7 March 2011. However, Saraswati didn't show up for his trial and his disciples and legal team said that they didn't know his whereabouts. Defense attorney Jeff Kearney said he believed his client's health was the likely reason behind Saraswati's absence. The jury sentenced him in absentia to 280 years and a US$200,000 fine. At the penalty hearing, Spiegel said he hadn't understood the terms of the original bond agreement. On 4 November 2011, Texas Watchdog reported that he had been required to pay only $200,000 of the $10 million bond, plus the previously disclosed $1 million. Hays County attempted to keep the amount secret but a Nov 2011 ruling from the state Attorney General's office made it clear that the amount is clearly public record. Federal officials believe Saraswati's followers moved him to Mexico in March 2011, and then helped him travel to India on a fake passport in November 2011.

In 2007, three former residents of Barsana Dham (Radha Madhav Dham), aged between 27 and 30 years old, told Hays County, Texas police that they had been abused at the ashram by Saraswati, who was then arrested on 25 April 2008.

A simplified and abridged version of the book for college students, entitled Amazing Facts about Hinduism, was released at the Global Dharma Conference in 2003. He was awarded the title of "Dharm Chakravarti" in India for his efforts in "reestablishing authentic Hinduism".

In 1999 he wrote The True History and the Religion of India: A Concise Encyclopedia of Authentic Hinduis, a "monumental dissertation" on the history of Indian civilization and religion. The eight-hundred-page tome is entitled The True History and the Religion of India. It is a comprehensive history of religion in Indian culture. The book has received laudatory comments from prominent Hindu academics and leaders in the United States and India. It was released by The Minister of State for Information & Broadcasting Shri Ramesh Bais. The encyclopaedia won an award at the World Religious Parliament in New Delhi in 1999. In 2001, the book was published by Motilal Banarsidass. It has subsequently been published by Macmillan Publishers.

Cade published his research in his "landmark book", The Awakened Mind. Cade's research with Swami Prakashanand Saraswati has also been discussed in several other publications including by Hill (1979), Inglis & West (1983), Treece (1989) and Peake (2013).

He spent the next 20 years as a wandering ascetic in the Himalayas and in the forests of central India, ending in Braj. Following the strict discipline of sannyas, he first lived in the Himalayas (Joshimath, Badrinath, Rishikesh, Haridwar, etc.), forests of Amarkantak, near the Narbada River, Allahabad and Kashi for about four years. Later, he went to Vrindaban and then to Barsana where he spent over 18 years in the deep woodlands of Braj. In 1975, he emerged from his solitary life he began his mission of teaching the path of bhakti.

He founded the International Society of Divine Love in India in 1975. The society was established in New Zealand in 1978. Later on he travelled to America and founded an ashram for his devotees and disciples. By 1981 Swami Prakashanand Saraswati, who had begun to be thought of as a distinguished sage and a saint, conceived of creating a global mission, establishing religious centres in India, England, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia.

Swami Prakashanand Saraswati's state of "conscious ecstasy", and the effects of his Divine Love Meditation, was studied by Dr. Maxwell Cade in the 1970s.

Dr. Maxwell Cade, a leading physicist of London, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, had been doing psycho-biological research during the 1970s on meditation and the altered states of the consciousness of the mind.

Maxwell Cade co-developed the "Mind Mirror", a portable EEG machine that could monitor the alpha, beta, delta and theta rhythms from each brain hemisphere simultaneously. In the 1970s, a number of eastern religious teachers expressed an interest in participating in Maxwell Cade's research, and agreed to have their brain rhythms measured. In 1976 when he was touring England, Swami Prakashanand Saraswati requested to participate in Dr. Maxwell Cade's research. Dr. Maxwell Cade and his team found patterns they had not seen before. Maxwell Cade concluded that the Swamis' spiritual training conferred unusual powers of healing and perception.

Prakashanand Saraswati or Swamiji (born 15 January 1929) is a convicted child molester and Hindu monk from Ayodhya, India. Previously, he founded the Hindu new religious movement "International Society of Divine Love" and Radha Madhav Dham temple in the United States. In 2011, a jury found Swami Prakashanand Saraswati guilty on 20 counts of indecency with a child. He is still a fugitive and appeared on the Fox TV show America's Most Wanted.

Swami Prakashanand Saraswati was born in a respectable brahmin family in 1929 in Ayodhya, India. His early life was fraught with intense religious feelings, and as a youth he became a reclusive mystic so that he might find God. He completed his studies and at age of 21, renounced the world and took the order of sannyasa of the Gaudiya Vaishnavite (Chaitanya) lineage from his guru, Kripalu Maharaj. In 1952, he was offered to become the Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath but he declined.