Maoist ‘leader’ raped followers

Jail for ‘woman’

LONDON, Nov 12, (Agencies): A Maoist cult leader sexually abused his brainwashed female followers and imprisoned his own daughter in homes across south London for more than 30 years, British prosecutors said on Thursday.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, used fear, sexual degradation and physical and mental violence to keep the women under his control, turning his commune based on Communist teachings into his own personal cult, London’s Southwark Crown Court was told.

Even his own daughter, who was born to one of the women in the collective, was bullied and beaten, barely allowed to leave the house, never permitted to go to school, play with friends or see a doctor, said prosecutor Rosina Cottage.

She was not told who her mother and father were, and when she finally escaped his clutches two years ago, she was aged 30 and very ill with diabetes.

Aravindan

Balakrishnan, a small, greyhaired bespectacled figure, denies 16 charges of cruelty to a child, false imprisonment, indecent assault, rape and assault.

“This case concerns the brutal and calculated manipulation by one man to subjugate women under his control,” Cottage said.

“Each woman lived a life of violence, fear, isolation and confinement. They were forced into sexual acts over which they had no choice and were deliberately degrading and humiliating. He seemed to exult in his power over them.”

Balakrishnan was the head of a Communist group in the 1970s called the Worker’s League in south London, a charismatic and energetic speaker who attracted students and followers with his plan for world revolution and to overthrow what he saw as Britain’s fascist state.

Cottage said he made himself its Party Secretary and the collective’s members were only allowed to recognise the authority of Balakrishnan, or Bala as he was known, and Chairman Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China.

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 that he was all powerful and all-seeing, the prosecutor said.

“From being a collective agitating for the rights of the proletariat the group had become the cult of Aravindan Balakrishnan,” Cottage told the jury.

The women were allowed no friends or social life and the house was locked all the time which Balakrishnan said was to keep out fascist agents, the court heard.

They stayed because they were too frightened to leave, reporting each other to Balakrishnan if they were critical or not following orders.

“If you questioned him or said anything he considered anti-party he would become furiously angry and hit the offending individual,” Cottage said.

In the 1980s the women began to be sexually abused when his wife was sent away. One of the alleged victims, who “escaped” in 1989, was forced to write pornography, then later made to give him oral sex and raped, Cottage said.

Another, who came to Britain from Malaysia to work as a nurse, said she was punched in the stomach when she resisted his advances before too being sexually abused and later raped.

LONDON:

Charges

Locked

Also:

A woman was jailed for eight years by a British court Thursday after tricking a friend she met on Facebook into having sex with her by disguising herself as a man.

Gayle Newland, 25, met the victim on the social network in 2011 using the profile name Kye Fortune and spoke to her on the phone impersonating a man’s voice.

They finally agreed to meet faceto-face in 2013.

But Newland insisted that the other woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, wear a blindfold for the meeting, claiming to feel insecure after brain surgery.

They subsequently spent more than 100 hours together in which the other woman always wore a blindfold during activities which included watching television together and sunbathing.

The couple had sex around 10 times before the woman ripped off her mask and saw that Newland was wearing a prosthetic penis.