Comrade Bala: Maoist cult leader 'used mind control to groom female follower'

'Cult leader': Aravindan Balakrishnan is on trial at Southwark Crown Court
John Stillwell/PA
Robin de Peyer16 November 2015
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A Maoist cult leader used mind control to groom and sexually abuse a female follower, a court has heard.

The woman was “dehumanised” by Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, known as Comrade Bala, while she was a member of the far-left group in the 1970s, she told his trial.

This included forcing her to keep an "extremely explicit" sex diary detailing past relationships, which he shared with other followers to humiliate her, she told the jury.

Southwark Crown Court in London heard that the abuse began with kissing while Balakrishnan's wife was in hospital in a diabetic coma, and moved on to oral sex when she lived with him and others in a south London commune.

Fighting back tears as she spoke from behind a screen, the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons and also accuses Balakrishnan of raping her, told the jury: "The only thing that saved my sanity was going outside because I was meeting with normal people.

"I know he is there (in the dock) and I want him to hear it because I loathe him so much. You must know that - how much I despise him."

The woman was asked by prosecutor Rosina Cottage QC if she ever refused to take part in the sex acts. The witness said she had not, "because his authority was so complete, his control was so complete".

She added: "Psychologically he had already manacled you. You didn't have control over your own mind. He controlled your mind.

"It was something you had to go through. It was almost like we were like animals by then. It was seen as training, that we had to get through this."

The woman told the court Balakrishnan demanded the sex diary also include her imagining having sex with him and that she should "masturbate accordingly”.

She also said he wanted her to write about imagining performing an extreme sex act, which she refused to do.

She said: "We were just dehumanised, psychologically stripped. He gave you the sense he had absolute power over your body and your mind. Your deepest ego was being shaped by him."

She described to the jury how he instilled fear into his Workers Institute commune, convincing followers they were surrounded by "fascist agents" and making them inform on each other.

She added: "I believed that he could kill us and that no-one would know. The others would cover it up."

The woman told the court that Balakrishnan had created such an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion that she felt massive guilt over buying a pair of Levi jeans for work and also destroyed with a hammer a bottle of expensive Estee Lauder perfume she had bought before joining the group.

Balakrishnan, of Enfield, north London, denies seven counts of indecent assault and four counts of rape against two women during the 1970s and 1980s.

He also denies three counts of actual bodily harm, cruelty to a child under 16 and false imprisonment. None of his alleged victims can be named for legal reasons.

The trial continues.

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