Of all the characters on “The Sopranos” who give Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) the agita, almost none of them can get under his skin like his older sister Janice (Aida Turturro). In a lot of ways, she’s just like him –- selfish, dishonest, and prone to fits of violent rage –- but she lacks Tony’s sense of responsibility. For all of Tony’s many faults, he does try to take care of people who are important to him, and he doesn’t bail at the first sign of difficulty. Tony stayed in New Jersey and looked after their emotionally abusive mother Livia (Nancy Marchand), while Janice left for 20 years.
A fan theory speculates about where Janice was during that time, and if it’s true, it shows that Janice has been getting in trouble and walking away from it on a large scale for a long time.
The theory, from Reddit user magecatwitharrows, is based on a few pieces of evidence about Janice’s whereabouts in the years she was away. We know that she joined an ashram in Los Angeles and changed her name to Parvati, an Indian name derived from a Hindu goddess. We also know that she eventually made her way to the Pacific Northwest, and was in Seattle before she moved back to New Jersey at the start of Season 2.
This little bit of information is all magecatwitharrows needed to come up with a wild, wild theory about something Janice was involved in before the events of the show.
Ma Anand Janice
Magecatwitharrows speculates that Janice was a Rajneeshee. As in, a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Indian spiritual guru and cult leader who founded the community of Rajneeshpuram in rural Oregon in the early 1980s. The story of Rajneeshpuram is told in the gripping Netflix documentary “Wild Wild Country,” as well as an episode of the humorous history podcast “The Dollop,” which is where magecatwitharrows learned about it.
The Rajneeshees quickly built a large town in the middle of nowhere and began practicing their communal way of life, which put them in conflict with the region’s long-term residents. There were legal battles over land use, and a bombing at a Rajneeshee-owned hotel in Portland put the community on edge. Things escalated to the point where Rajneesh’s right-hand-woman Ma Anand Sheela committed large-scale election fraud, coordinated a poisoning campaign at area restaurants that sickened hundreds of people with salmonella, burned down a county office building, and plotted to assassinate a federal prosecutor who was investigating the group. They operated sort of like an organized crime family.
Wherever Janice goes, there she is
Magecatwitharrows says that the Rajneeshees’ various criminal enterprises are things Janice would be very familiar and comfortable with, as the daughter of a mafioso who grew up exposed to all sorts of criminal activity. “And the timeline matches up perfectly,” they write. “After the cult disbanded, all of the members who had not been arrested scattered and went back to living normal lives, never mentioning what they had been a part of in the previous years. They might have done something like go work in a coffee shop in the next state over, until they get word that their mother has fallen ill, giving them the perfect excuse to move back to the East Coast and have a free place to stay. The rest is history.”
Knowing what we know about Janice, It’s not hard to imagine her sprinkling salmonella culture on a salad bar or plotting to kill someone she deemed an enemy. We’ve seen her assault a soccer mom for being rude to her stepdaughter. Janice is a person on a perpetually unsuccessful spiritual journey to try and soothe the anger and resentment that burns inside of her. Joining a cult that turns into a terrorist organization seems like something she would do. After all, she takes it too far on a regular basis.
