UK Maoist Cult Leader Jailed for 23 Years for Raping Followers
Prosecutors said Aravindan Balakrishnan abused and brainwashed his followers into believing he was God-like.
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A Maoist cult leader, convicted of raping and beating his brainwashed British female followers and keeping his own daughter a fearful prisoner for more than three decades, was jailed for 23 years on Friday.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, known as Comrade Bala, used sexual degradation and physical and mental violence to keep the women under his control. Prosecutors said he turned his south London Communist commune into his own personal cult with members who believed him to be a god.
His own daughter, Katy Morgan-Davies, who was born to one of the women in the collective, was also bullied and beaten, barely allowed to leave her home and never permitted to go to school, play with friends or even see a doctor.
Balakrishnan, a small, grey-haired, bespectacled figure, denied all charges but was convicted at London’s Southwark Crown Court in December of offences spanning almost 34 years including child cruelty, false imprisonment, rape and indecent assault.
He began as the charismatic head of a Communist group in south London in the 1970s called the Workers’ Institute following the teachings of Chairman Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China.
However, over time, the group’s numbers waned, the men were forced to leave and the dwindling group of women were so dominated and brainwashed they believed he was all-powerful.
Among the group was his daughter. She was not told who her parents were, only learning who her mother was after her death when she was a teenager.
Her fate and that of the other followers only came to light when she escaped his clutches in 2013 when she was 30, very ill with diabetes, and suffering with chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.