The Cult Next Door
BBC2

Last year I attended a conference in London during which a woman in the audience shouted: “I am not a slave.” She then started to berate the British press and Establishment and called for the release of Aravindan Balakrishnan, jailed for 23 years in 2015 for crimes including rape, false imprisonment and child cruelty.

The case of the south London women who formed the followers of the Maoist cult established by Balakrishnan (known to them as AB or Comrade Bala) is strange and terrible; the story of lonely, searching people locked for decades in a flat run by a despotic leader who preached revolution and Utopia.

When the press broke the story, the headlines screamed “slavery” but the truth turned out to be more difficult to prise out: and the woman who had called the helpline that alerted the police was Josie, the woman I had seen at the conference campaigning tirelessly for the release of the man who had held her in thrall for 40 years.