Katy Morgan-Davies says she is waiving anonymity to retrieve identity stolen from her by ‘narcissist’ Aravindan Balakrishnan

The “slave” daughter of the Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan has revealed her identity for the first time as her father was jailed for 23 years for her imprisonment and repeated sex attacks on two followers.



Katy Morgan-Davies, 33, who spent the first thirty years of her life in Comrade Bala’s south London revolutionary collective, waived her legal right to anonymity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aravindan Balakrishnan. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

Balakrishnan, 75, ran the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought from 1976 to 2013 and was sentenced at Southwark crown court on Friday for his daughter’s false imprisonment, child cruelty and the rape, sexual assault and assault of two other female followers.

Showing her face to the media for the first time, Morgan-Davies told how her father was “a narcissist and a psychopath” whose actions were “horrible, so dehumanising and degrading”. She called on him to “recognise what he did was wrong”.

But Morgan-Davies says she has forgiven her father and would like to be reconciled with him some day. “Nelson Mandela said: ‘If you leave the prison with hatred and anger and bitterness, then you are still in prison,’” she said.

Her comments came as Judge Deborah Taylor told the India-born communist he was guilty of “grave and serious crimes committed over a long period and you have no remorse whatsoever”.

She revealed he had been diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having a narcissistic personality disorder and had caused significant psychological harm to his daughter.

The judge told Balakrishnan that he had evolved into “a largely housebound demagogue or dictator” who beat and humiliated his followers. “You were ruthless in your exploitation of them,” Taylor said.

His sexual abuse and rape of two women had had profound effects on their lives, Taylor said, praising his rape victims for their great courage in confronting the past by testifying against him.

She said he told his daughter that if she left the collective “she would be killed by fascist death squads or would spontaneously combust”, while in her adulthood “you deprived her of friendship and love”.



Balakrishnan ruled the small, mainly female collective with violence and psychological terror, including threatening members with an electronic satellite warfare machine he called Jackie and claimed would strike them dead if they stepped out of line.

Morgan-Davies said she wanted people to know who she was “to retrieve the identity the cult tried to steal from me” after spending the first 30 years of her life inside Balakrishnan’s collective which he set up on a mission to bring down the “British fascist state”.



The trial jury heard how he beat his daughter as a young child, would not allow her to play with other children and did not let her go out of the commune alone until she finally escaped in October 2013, aged 30. When she left, her carers said she had the life skills of a six-year-old, with no knowledge of how to cross the road or use domestic appliances.

Her new name represents a rejection of what she was called in the collective, Prem Maopinduzi, meaning “love revolution” in Hindi and Swahili. She said it was inspired in part by the Katy Perry song Roar, which talks of empowerment and finding your own voice. “It is about not being put down, coming back, standing up for yourself,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Balakrishnan’s flat being boarded up in November 2013. Photograph: Pagal Sathi/Demotix/Corbis

Morgan-Davies said she wanted to escape from being the “non-person” she was under her father who “was just obsessed about control”.

“The people he looked up to were people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein,” she said. “You couldn’t criticise them either in the house. They were his gods and his heroes.”

At the same time, she said, Balakrishnan wanted to be first among dictators. “Sometimes he would say he didn’t like Mao, because he saw Mao as a rival to him as well,” she said. “So he sort of followed them and wanted to be like them, but at the same time he didn’t want them to be worshipped, except as secondary to him. [He wanted to be] bigger than all of them.”

She said their cult was seen as a “pilot unit” where Balakrishnan could learn “how best to control people” before he took over the world.

Morgan-Davies was born to Sian Davies, one of Balakrishnan’s small group of followers, but Balakrishnan was married to another collective member and he lied to “Prem” that her parents were dead. She only found her relation to Davies when her mother lay dying in hospital after an unexplained fall from a commune window in 1996 following a mental breakdown.

“I remember I used to dream about her a lot, and I used to wake up crying,” Morgan-Davies said. “I used to dream that I said: ‘I know you are my mum’. Or I would say: ‘I didn’t know you were my mum, nice to meet you as my mum’. I would hug her – things she never used to do in real life. Then I would wake up and I would cry.”

Morgan-Davies’ bedroom at the collective. Photograph: Metropolitan police

She spoke of her new-found joy at the freedom to do “things like dyeing my hair or piercing my ears or having an alcoholic drink – something just small might not mean much to most people but for me it does. Just having that choice, being free to make that choice, that is the main thing.” Other pleasures included having her own key and being able to come and go as she pleased, she said.



Morgan-Davies said she was now making up for her lack of any formal education by studying English and maths at college, where she was making friends with classmates. “The main thing is I have joined the Labour party,” she said. “I have been out canvassing and made a lot of friends there and get to do a lot of different things. I also get to go to different locations.”

Starved of love and companionship in the collective, Morgan-Davies would retreat into fantasy and tried to befriend rats and mice she heard scuttling under the floor. “I used to sit there and look at them and hope that I could pet them. They would come and look and I used to think they were smiling at me almost, telling me everything would be all right.”

Josephine Herivel, the commune member who helped Morgan-Davies flee the commune, has since said she deeply regrets the decision and that she believes Balakrishnan, who she calls AB, is innocent.

Leaving the court, Herivel shouted: “This is a political persecution. AB has been framed. He is a good man.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Josephine Herivel. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Herivel has been diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome, when hostages or trafficking victims sympathise with their captors, but rejects that assessment.

Speaking outside the court, Eleri Morgan, 66, Morgan-Davies’s cousin, said she was now looking forward to taking her to Tregaron in Wales to show where her mother Sian grew up. Asked about Balakrishnan’s sentence she said: “Let him be locked up for once.”

In a victim impact assessment one of Balakrishnan’s rape victims said she suffered nightmares in which she was “surrounded by cult members and Balakrishnan would be trying to hold on to me as I made my escape”.

The woman spoke of the years of sexual abuse by Balakrishnan, saying she was “traumatised, shocked and horrified at what he habituated me to and against which I had no defence. I will live with this torment for the rest of my life.”

The other rape victim described Balakrishnan as “such an evil force” and said she suffered fear and nightmares. “He wreaked havoc on every part of my life before and after I left,” she said. “He literally shattered my life.” She said she had never managed to fully rebuild her family relationships.

Morgan-Davies said in her victim statement that she lived in constant fear and still found it difficult to trust people or get close to them. She said she remains terrified of shouting and physical pain.

Balakrishnan will serve at least half his sentence which means he will be 87 before he is eligible for parole.