The daughter of a communist revolutionary who allegedly imprisoned her in his Maoist collective for 30 years wrote a note to him after she escaped, rejecting what she called her life of abuse, a court heard.
The daughter was born into the communist collective in south London in 1983 and left it in October 2013. The court also heard on Friday that an attempt to leave eight years earlier, when she was aged 22, ended when the police sent her back to her father.
Her father, Aravindan Balakrishnan, now 75, brainwashed his female followers and treated them as his sex slaves, a jury at Southwark crown court has heard.
After she left the collective, the daughter wrote: “I’ve pleaded with you not to treat me like this, but instead you’ve treated me to even more abuse ... I’m sick to death of being held hostage.
“You think I simply have to take all of the treatment and the indignity to which you have subjected me, and I’m supposed to accept it unquestioningly.” She went on to detail the damage to her mental and physical health, which she said his violent and abusive regime had inflicted upon her.
She continued: “You really ought to be ashamed of yourselves and if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you. I want nothing to do with my old life, my life of abuse. That name has nothing but bad memories, I may have no wealth, no property, no prestige but I have my dignity and I will defend it with my life.”
Balakrishnan, the court has heard, insisted to his followers who lived with him in a series of communes in Brixton, Tooting Bec, Streatham and Clapham, that only he and the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, who died in 1976, had the authority to “lead the world to revolution to establish an international dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Balakrishnan faces charges relating to three women. In relation to two of them, he denies four counts of rape, seven counts of indecent assault and three counts of assault causing actual bodily harm. He also denies child cruelty and false imprisonment in relation to his daughter.
His daughter was allegedly treated as a “non-person’ after her birth in 1983. She was allegedly subjected to violent beatings and every sphere of her life was controlled by Balakrishnan. She rarely went out, never went to school, never played with friends, suffered violence and abuse, and had been told her parents were dead, the jury has heard. In fact her mother was one of Balakrishnan’s followers, and the cult leader was her father.
But in May 2005 she made an attempt to escape the commune in Streatham, Rosina Cottage QC told the court. “She was fed up of being a non-person and so just ran away,” said Cottage. “She packed her things secretly and went away. She had nowhere to go and had no friends.”
Cottage said a man asked if he could help and when she said she had run away from home he told her to go to the police station. “It was scary, she had never before been out on her own,” said Cottage. She arrived at the police station, but it was a bank holiday and the woman on duty did not know what to do, Cottage said.
“She [the daughter] did not tell her of the violence and only told her that she was running away because of the oppression ... [She] was persuaded to call the defendant as she was told that otherwise she would be reported as a missing person. So the defendant ... came to collect her from the police station, with promises that things would improve.”
But the court heard that the daughter was called a “police agent” and slapped for being a traitor by going to the the authorities. It was to be another eight years before she was able to leave again, in October 2013, when she and two other female followers of Balakrishnan walked out of the collective with the help of a charity, and spoke to the police.
After her attempt to leave, Cottage told the court that the daughter developed an interest in one of her neighbours, Marius Feneck, whom she called Angel. They began a sexual relationship which was carried out in secret, with Feneck climbing through the window of her home to meet her. But on one occasion when Feneck arrived at night, his mobile phone rang and Balakrishnan discovered the relationship.
“The defendant was enraged, his hands were flailing and slapping her [his daughter] on the face,” said Cottage. “She was hit in the stomach. She was cursed and abused.” Balakrishnan threatened to burn her on the spot. The daughter believes she had been carrying a child at that point and a few weeks later she miscarried.
After her liaison was discovered in 2008, Balakrishnan, whom the women called Comrade Bala, was said to have locked all the windows and banned her from seeing Feneck again. “There was not a single window open thereafter in the house for at least three years,” said Cottage.
The court heard Balakrishnan told his daughter she must never dream about anyone other than him, and that if she did she must tell him straight away so he could protect her from having crushes.
“So, she told him she had a crush on Ken Livingstone. She thought if she wrote it down in a nice way then he would be nice and understand,” said Cottage. But, the court heard, the then 13-year-old girl was told that she would be executed for going against Balakrishnan.
Balakrishnan used “brutal and calculated” manipulation to subjugate women under his control, repeatedly assaulting some of them and using violence and sexual degradation to bend them to his will, the court has heard.
“In order to bend them to his will he used mental and physical dominance and violence,” Cottage has told the court. “In relation to one, his daughter, he controlled every sphere of her life to the extent that she was unable either emotionally or physically to leave his influence until she was 30 years old and ill with diabetes.”
The trial continues.
