Escaping cult leader's daughter told to 'call home' at police station

The daughter of a man accused of leading a brutal cult ran away but was told at a police station to phone her alleged captor, a jury has heard.

She left Aravindan Balakrishnan's collective in 2005 and went to a police station, according to the prosecution.

A woman working there persuaded her to call her father, who met her and returned her to the commune.

He denies 16 charges including sexual assault, rape, false imprisonment and mistreating a child.

Fled to police station

The jury at Southwark Crown Court was told that the escaping woman, who was then aged 22, had never been out alone and did not even know how to cross the road.

Prosecutor Rosina Cottage QC said: "She arrived at a police station and spoke to a woman called Donna, but did not tell her of the violence and only said she was running away because of the oppression.

"Donna did not know what to do - it was a bank holiday and there was nowhere for her to go."

After being collected from the police station by her father and taken back to the house she shared with him and his followers, Mr Balakrishnan allegedly slapped her and branded her a "police agent".

'Endless indignity'

The court heard she remained there for another eight years before she approached a charity.

When she eventually left, she wrote Mr Balakrishnan a note saying: "I will never ever ever be returning, there are no words to describe the personal anger I have been feeling."

She said he had treated her with "utter disrespect and endless indignity" and had been "cursed, insulted, mocked, denigrated, excluded, beaten up, caged like a wild animal, and deprived of what really mattered to me".

Addressing him and other women members of the collective she said: "I have pleaded with you lot, not to treat me like this... I am sick to death of being held hostage."

She signed the letter with the words: "Not hoping to see you soon."

Ms Cottage told the jury: "By the time she left, aged 30, she'd never been to school or other educational establishment; had never played outside as a child or gone out with friends as a teenager or adult."

She read to the jury a poem by Mr Balakrishnan's daughter, "I Am a Shadow Woman", which concludes with the line: 'I am alive (or so 'tis said but maybe I'm meant to be dead.'

The court heard on Thursday that in the 1970s Mr Balakrishnan was at the helm of a communist group known as the Workers Institute, based in Acre Lane in Brixton, south London.

Mr 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.