Two distinct clusters of documented controversy run through ISKCON's record, both rooted in the difficult period after founder A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's 1977 death, when he had named eleven initiating gurus to guide the movement and several of that original group were later removed for serious misconduct.
The first is the gurukula abuse settlement, already carried in this atlas as its own inquiry record: a 400 million dollar federal lawsuit filed in Texas in June 2000 alleged child sexual, physical and emotional abuse at ISKCON boarding schools in the United States and India between 1972 and around 1990. ISKCON filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002 while the litigation continued, and a US bankruptcy court ordered a 9.5 million dollar settlement, announced May 2005, ultimately paid to roughly 450 claimants.
The second is the collapse of the original zonal guru system into open scandal. Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada, who co-founded the New Vrindaban community in West Virginia and was one of the eleven gurus Prabhupada named, was expelled by ISKCON's Governing Body Commission in March 1987 for defying ISKCON policy and claiming sole spiritual authority. He was indicted in 1990 on racketeering, mail fraud and conspiracy to murder charges connected to the killings of two devotees who had threatened his control of the community; a jury convicted him on the racketeering and fraud counts in 1991, and he pleaded guilty to one racketeering count in 1996, receiving a twenty year sentence later reduced to twelve. ISKCON's Governing Body Commission has since replaced the original guru monopoly with a system open to multiple qualified initiators.