For the first three decades of her life, Katy Morgan-Davies was trapped in a brutal cult in south London controlled by her father, Aravindan Balakrishnan. Eight years after getting out, she reveals how she's struggled to adapt to her new-found freedom.
Why do some people fall victim to cults and their bizarre belief systems while others can resist them? It's a question that has interested me over the past year as wild conspiracy theories have simmered and thrived under the pressure of lockdown. And it's a question that has brought me to Katy Morgan-Davies, who was born into a cult and managed to escape it at the age of 30.
She was one of three women who fled a Maoist sect, known by its followers as the Communist Collective, in Brixton, south London, in 2013. The news reports at the time were almost too bizarre to believe. The Collective had begun life as a political group that followed the teachings of Chairman Mao in the late 1960s, controlled by Aravindan Balakrishnan, a former student at the London School of Economics. Balakrishnan called himself Comrade Bala and his wife Comrade Chanda. He recruited a handful of female followers, attracted initially by his charismatic revolutionary patter, but whom he came to rule over with psychological and physical terror, supernatural threats and sexual violence.
He predicted a Maoist world revolution and the overthrow of the "British fascist state", which had agents everywhere — even living in the house next door. Over time he convinced his followers that he was a god and leaving him would result in death. They would spontaneously combust; be hit by lightning; be struck down by "Jackie", a Chinese-built satellite weapon over which Comrade Bala had control.
In 2016 Balakrishnan was given a 23-year prison sentence for a litany of offences including rape, actual bodily harm and cruelty to a child under 16. Soon afterwards Morgan-Davies wrote an autobiography, spoke to the press to say that she forgave her father and then disappeared from the spotlight. So I have no idea what to expect when she agrees to an interview.
I'm relieved to see that she looks happy. Her hair is a defiant shade of purple. "It was red a while back, blue before that, green, orange, silver," she says. There is a lava lamp on the table next to her and a poster of John Lennon with the lyrics to Imagine behind her head. She is in her second year of a philosophy and sociology degree at Leeds University and is about to embark on a trip to Bristol, Plymouth, Brighton and Canterbury.
"If I won the lottery I would travel all the time. I would never stay still," she says, laughing. But after half a lifetime of captivity the transition to the outside world was never going to be straightforward.
Morgan-Davies is Balakrishnan's daughter, conceived after a sexual encounter with Sian Davies, a follower who died in 1997. Known within the group as Project Prem, she was raised to believe she had no parents and was forbidden contact with the outside world. During her 30 years inside the cult she never went to school, never saw a doctor and never made a friend. On the few occasions she did go outside, she was always chaperoned. When she escaped she was on the verge of diabetic coma and suffered debilitating headaches if she spent too long outdoors. She discovered that she couldn't do basic things — running, for example, because she had never done it as a child.
"I do struggle, I get lost a lot," she tells me. "What others can do on automatic I have to think about and it quickly becomes very tiring."
Yet the escape was her idea, a plan she masterminded and plotted for years. Despite having almost no experience of the world, Morgan-Davies deradicalised herself. I want to find out how and why. The process was a gradual one, she says.
"I remember hearing the tales from my dad and my stepmother [Chanda] of when they were children and what their lives were like — and they sounded a lot more exciting and varied than mine."
As she got older and her father grew less concerned that a neighbour would see a child in the window and sound the alarm, she spent more time watching the world go by outside. "I could see what other children were doing, that they were going out to play and I was stuck in the house roasting away." Heat is one of the sensations she most associates with her time in the house because the windows were always locked.
She was also an avid reader. She doesn't know who in the house first taught her to read, but she devoured every book she could find, including encyclopedias and dictionaries. "Sometimes, if there was nothing to read, I would start memorising the ingredients on crisp packets, just to have something to do," she says. She called it her "secret reading" and hid it from her father.
Books taught her about morality, friendship, love and politics. In particular she adored the Harry Potter series. She was allowed them after Balakrishnan became convinced that the story of the boy wizard was really about him (his fantasies were many and varied, and he was later diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder). JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings became her greatest passion, and remains so today. She has a quote from the books tattooed on her back (an Elvish message from Arwen to Aragorn: "I would rather spend one lifetime with you, than face all the ages of this world alone"), and she is reading one of her own poems at a Tolkien convention in the autumn.
She also loves trains: she dreamt of being a train driver and still finds it hard to accept that her diabetes makes that impossible. "I cry when I stand at the station and see trains going. I think, oh, I wish I was driving that," she says.
If there is one thing that set Morgan-Davies free, it is her questioning mind. "I find it very oppressive to believe in something without proof just because everyone else is doing it," she says. "I have always needed to think for myself."
That is why, she tells me, she is concerned that the world is starting to resemble the one she left behind. "I see a lot of cult behaviour in mass movements and identity politics," she says. "People are being excommunicated if they don't follow a certain way of thinking. Sometimes I feel like the cult is following me around."
Balakrishnan's belief system was as inflexible as it was incoherent. One day in 1989 Balakrishnan suddenly declared Mao a genocidal war criminal. He justified it by saying his decades of praising Mao had been a test for his followers, and they had all failed dismally. "I found the change mind-boggling," Morgan-Davies writes. She was only six years old, and began to "feel sorry for Mao" — but then became terrified because she believed that Bala, a god, could read her thoughts.
Any transgressions in the house incurred punishment. Making noise; being drowsy in the morning; praising another comrade if you liked their hair. "One of the most difficult things about living in the collective was that the rules could change instantly, so something that was allowed one day was anathema the next," Morgan-Davies writes. There was an atmosphere of perpetual fear in which the women were encouraged to report on one another and shamed if they transgressed.
Physical beatings were a part of daily life, but that was only a small part of the cruelty she endured. At five years old she formed an attachment to a little yellow blanket, so Balakrishnan took it away. Emotional attachment of any sort was seen as weakness — no one in the house was allowed to hug her, except Balakrishnan, who did so once a day. When she first left the house, she says, she found it almost impossible not to embrace everyone she saw. "Now I wait for the other person to say if they want to or not, otherwise I would hug everybody," she says, laughing.
Balakrishnan's manipulation of Morgan-Davies's mother, Sian, is one of the cruellest parts of the story. She had been an economics lecturer at the London School of Economics when she met him. Her family were from Wales and her father had recently taken his own life, so she was alone and vulnerable in the city.
"I think she fell in love with him," Morgan-Davies says. Her mother went on to become Balakrishnan's most devoted follower, obeying him even when she became pregnant with his child and he forbade her from showing any emotion towards her baby. Morgan-Davies had no idea that Sian was her mother until she was old enough to put the pieces together herself.
At his trial two women testified that he had sexually assaulted them in the house, though Morgan-Davies had no idea that this was going on at the time. She says there is no way of knowing whether she was the product of a sexual assault, but her mother was so devoted to Balakrishnan that Morgan-Davies thinks she was probably a willing participant. It raises an interesting question, she writes in her book. "If you are brainwashed do you have the mental capacity to consent?"
By the time Morgan-Davies realised that Sian was probably her mother, Sian was buckling under the pressure of Balakrishnan's mind games. She became very ill, hallucinating, talking to herself, weeping, but the cult members were not allowed to seek medical help. Eventually Sian jumped, or fell, from an upstairs window and was paralysed from the neck down. This time an ambulance was called and she was taken to intensive care. Two months later she started having epileptic fits and fell into a catatonic state. She died two months after that. Morgan-Davies had one conversation with her in hospital days before she died, which gave her a glimpse of the person her mother might have been. With Balakrishnan sitting beside her, she said, "Bye-bye, mummy" — the first time she'd ever used that word — and Davies replied, "Bye-bye, baby."
Remembering her mother now, she says: "Sometimes I think she was very cruel, but she was also treated very cruelly. She was very cold to me, but I think it was because she was trying to fight what she felt, and allowing herself to be nice. It would just blow up, she wouldn't be able to cope any more."
Morgan-Davies was failed by her immediate family, but also by the outside world. Over the years there were many missed opportunities for the authorities to ask questions. The cult was visited by the police after Sian's death, and also that of Oh Kar Eng, a nurse from Malaysia who had been with Balakrishnan since the 1970s, and died in 2004 after banging her head on a kitchen cabinet and suffering a stroke.
Over the decades the group were evicted from several homes for failing to pay rent. Nobody thought to ask who this child was and whether she was being properly cared for. "He was very clever, he knew what to say," Morgan-Davies says. His disabled sister-in-law, Shobha, lived with them and he used her as a barrier, saying, 'She's ill, she can't be disturbed.' "
The families of the cultists were left trying to save their loved ones alone. Sian's mother, Ceri, would regularly call the house trying to speak to her daughter. Morgan-Davies longed to meet Ceri but she had died by the time she escaped. She is now in touch with her aunt and has visited the family in Wales (and taken her name from the Welsh side of her family).
For Morgan-Davies, escaping from the house had become an obsession. She had tried twice before. Once she made it to a nearby police station. But she had never spoken to a stranger and couldn't communicate what she was trying to leave behind. All she could say to the police was: "I'm lonely." On their advice she called Balakrishnan, who took her back to the cult.
She realised she was not going to be able to leave on her own, so persuaded another follower, Josephine Herivel, that Balakrishnan's wife was an evil influence on him, knowing that any criticism of Balakrishnan himself would be reported straight back to him. They escaped together, getting hold of a mobile phone and memorising the number of a charity they saw on a television ad. She and "Josie" left first and a third woman, Aisha, followed soon after. But within months Josie sought Balakrishnan's forgiveness and returned to live with his wife, Chanda, where she remains today.
Aisha is living independently in Leeds, and she and Morgan-Davies remain close. Aged 76, Aisha is studying for a degree in Arabic and went to Morocco on her own to do her year abroad. "She has gone deep into Islam — I think she finds it difficult to think independently."
Only Morgan-Davies is completely free of ideology. Why does she think that certain people are susceptible to belief systems? "There is a need to believe because it feels comforting, there is a God looking after you so you are not alone. If you don't have it in the form of religion you look for it elsewhere," she says. "It is complicated to think, it is tiring to think, but that is what your brain is for. You have to be willing not to give your power away."
The inability of people to do this leads to cultlike behaviour, which she now sees everywhere. She compares the group bullying she endured in the house to today's social media witch-hunts. "There are online pile-ons if someone says the wrong thing and everyone jumps on them. It is like me as a kid with a group of people standing around shouting at me. I think it is very ugly, this idea of destroying somebody's reputation because they said the wrong thing. I feel like saying to people, 'If you keep going like this you might end up treating people the way I was treated.' "
Through her "secret reading" in the house she learnt about Lord Longford, the Labour party politician and social reformer. She joined the Labour party but has since quit. "I hear things that remind me very much of the cult, some of the language, the hating on white people or on men. I just think it's wrong," she says. She finds certain conversations around colonial guilt particularly troubling. "My dad used to say that my mum can't say anything critical about him or my stepmother because she was from a colonialist, imperialist background. Because she is white, she has to apologise and allow them to bully her," Morgan-Davies says. "I hear the same things on the left nowadays."
We are becoming "more unkind, more punitive", she says. What she finds hardest to accept is the clampdown on independent thought. "I feel like there is an element of [George Orwell's] 1984. We have to think in a certain way and speak in a certain way."
Lockdown has been harrowing. "Being stuck in when it was cold and dark — it wasn't nice." She still has diabetes and kidney disease, and shielding felt uncomfortably familiar. "I have been having dreams that those lot were coming to move in here," she says.
She has no contact with her father but says she would if he sought her out. She just feels sorry for him now. "I think he may have realised that it wasn't right to treat me this way, but there was no way back," she says. "It is the power of one ring in The Lord of the Rings, the cultish power of ideology." We should never reach a point where it is forbidden to ask questions, she says, "and always consider that you may be wrong"
Written by: Rosie Kinchen
© The Times of London