From the Outback to Radnor
An Australian woman is suing a Philly dance school, claiming she was defamed.
IN THE LAND down under, Natasha Lakaev's been called an "alleged cult leader" by some of Australia's largest newspapers.
But on Cabrini College's bucolic campus in Radnor, Lakaev, a psychologist, was just another mother, she said - there to support her son, who had been accepted into the Rock School of Dance Education summer program at Cabrini last year.
The program began around June 22, 2013, and on July 6, according to a lawsuit Lakaev filed recently in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, officials with the Rock School asked her and son Nobel, 20, to leave and called the police.
Lakaev, who lives by the Tasman Sea in the Australian state of New South Wales, is suing the Rock School for defamation, accusing its owners of running a "smear campaign" against her while she was there with her son.
"The defendants deliberately orchestrated this spectacle on July 6 to further damage Ms. Lakaev's reputation and character, and to mentally break her," Lakaev's attorney, Diane F. Averell, of Morris County, N.J., wrote in the complaint.
Averell did not return requests for comment, and a woman who answered the phone at the Rock School said, "No comment," when asked about Lakaev.
According to a 2010 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Lakaev used a "mish-mash of New Age theories and therapies, an end-times philosophy based on environmental disaster" to mentally break people who paid tens of thousands of dollars to take part in her Universal Knowledge group.
One former member told the paper that Lakaev claimed to have been the Queen of Atlantis in a past life. Lakaev denied the allegations, and several websites and blogs appear to have been created just to defend her.
Rick Alan Ross, a Trenton-based cult researcher, said Lakaev had asked him to remove content about Universal Knowledge from his website in the past.
"I have repeatedly communicated to her that if an article published about her was retracted, or a correction published, send me a notarized copy of that article or direct me to it. That hasn't happened," Ross said yesterday.
Lakaev, according to the complaint, claimed that the Rock School's residency program for about 200 dancers was in shambles when she got to Cabrini and that its directors asked her to take over as residence director for $5,000 per week.
The lawsuit claims the Rock School came to resent Lakaev's efforts and began distributing information about her from the Internet. Employees also spread rumors, the lawsuit alleges, that Lakaev was "mind controlling" and "abusing" kids in the program along with stealing materials.
Radnor Police Superintendent William Colarulo confirmed that his department was called to Cabrini on July 6 for a report of a possible theft but no charges were filed. A Cabrini spokeswoman said only that "someone" was escorted off campus that day.