Robert Booth
The Guardian
January 8, 2016
Before Josephine Herivel joined Aravindan Balakrishnan’s Maoist cult in 1976 she was set for musical stardom. As a child, she stunned judges with faultless violin recitals, the Royal College of Music awarded her a scholarship and she was on course to go to New York’s Juilliard conservatory. But her bow was not welcome inside the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
“Comrade Bala” ran the Brixton collective using violence, intimidation and fear, a court heard in December. In a few weeks, the 75-year-old will be sentenced for rape, sexual assault and assault of two members and false imprisonment and cruelty towards his daughter, Fran, who spent the first 30 years of her life inside the cult.
Now Herivel, who blew the whistle on the secretive collective in October 2013, is filled with regret. She called a charity and reported that Fran – not her real name – was being held against her will, but now she has described her actions as “mad”, saying: “I wish I had never done it.” She believes Balakrishnan – who threatened that anyone who left the cult would be struck down by a Chinese-controlled “electronic satellite warfare machine” called Jackie – is innocent.
Meeting the Guardian for an in-depth interview in Leeds, where she has been living in a safe house with victims of trafficking and modern-day slavery, the 59-year-old Belfast-born woman tells how she rejects outright her diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome – the psychological condition where hostages empathise with their captors – and how she has refused attempts to reintegrate her into what she still believes is “a fascist state”.
She has rebuffed approaches by her long-lost older sisters, Susan and Mary.
“They are just trying to tell me I have done the wrong thing,” she says. “I am just trying to be single-minded. They call AB an abuser without knowing anything about the case. I can’t deal with this sort of thing at the moment. Maybe later on.”
Social workers tried to give her a violin to help her reconnect with her past before the cult but she was not interested.
“I took it out of the case but I had no desire to do it,” she says. “I tried, but it sounded terrible.”
Most significantly, however, she has turned against Fran and now disputes the emotional evidence that Fran gave against her father in court, during which she said: “He wanted everybody to be his slave”. Herivel also believes the two other commune members, who cannot be named, but who gave testimony in court that they were raped and sexually assaulted by Balakrishnan, were wrong to do so.
“I have to be prepared to be ostracised, but that’s OK,” Herivel says. “It is a just cause. I am hopeful for the future, but it is going to be hard, it is going to be a big struggle.”
Walking through Leeds city centre with a handbag across her chest, Herivel looks like any other shopper. Only when she starts talking do the clues to her strange life start emerging. She speaks with a hint of an Indian accent, influenced by her 38 years inside the collective with the Kerala-born Balakrishnan. She only saw the internet for the first time in 2013 and was astonished by the avalanche of media coverage of the “slave” house from where she was said to have just fled.
Herivel struggles with solitude and misses the collective enormously, saying: “I can’t bear being on my own.” She has been watching TV programmes about cults and reading Paul Gambaccini’s book about being wrongly accused of child abuse and Janis Sharp’s book about her successful fight against the extradition to the US of her son, Gary McKinnon, on computer hacking charges. She is finding purpose in focusing on trying to free Balakrishnan, but she has also reflected on how she got involved with him in the first place.
Aravindan Balakrishnan during his court case at Southwark crown court in December. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
Herivel was the youngest of three daughters born to the celebrated wartime codebreaker John Herivel, and his wife Elizabeth Jones, who also worked at Bletchley Park. In 1940, the Cambridge-educated mathematician, who worked with Alan Turing, cracked “Red”, an Enigma code used by the Luftwaffe, and it made him a hero. He returned to his native Belfast to raise his family and lecture at Queen’s University, where he taught the actor Simon Callow, who recalled “a profound thinker”.
But Josephine says she was “a failure in my father’s eyes from the start because I wasn’t a boy”. “He couldn’t even look at me for the first three months. He sent a letter to me in 1986 saying that. I was always running after him trying to get his attention, which I didn’t get.”
She started sweeping the board in music competitions on a violin her mother had bought her as her father “escaped into his work, writing books”. A 100% mark in an under-16 contest had the adjudicator cooing about her “completely professional performance”. Her precocious brilliance won her a place in the National Youth Orchestra and she went up to the Royal College of Music in London. But at the time she first met Balakrishnan she was feeling “very depressed” and uninterested in her music.
“I could discipline myself enough to do it but I just didn’t feel happy,” she recalls.
Her clarinetist boyfriend was a budding communist, so one day when she was handed a flyer for a political meeting emblazoned with the face of Chairman Mao she went along. It was the first time she had set eyes on Aravindan Balakrishnan as he addressed 200 people in a room at University College London about “state and revolution in Britain”. He was talking about how the police had knocked out his front teeth and were attacking his newly established Workers’ Institute on Acre Lane in Brixton.
Josephine Herivel says: ‘I have to clear AB’s name ... it is an injustice.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
“It was 15 October 1976,” she says. “I can’t ever forget it.” Balakrishnan had the air of “an Indian mystic” and her depression started to lift as she began attending Balakrishnan’s political evening schools.
“I grew up with my father, who was supposed to have one of the best brains in Britain, but my mind was not excited. Aravindan really excited my mind.”
Herivel moved into the collective, sleeping five to a room, and was expelled from the RCM for wearing a Chairman Mao badge. Her worried mother and father paid a visit to the Workers’ Institute.
“It was terrible. My father was there taking notes,” Herivel recalls. “Bala was talking about things that were for him explosive: Soviet Union, America, the British fascist state. [My father] started making funny comments, shouting and disturbing the meeting. I think he was frightened. At the end of the meeting, my mother said ‘Give me back the violin’, so I did.”
She hardly saw her mother or her “blood father” again. Balakrishnan became her father figure.
There were also historical forces at play. Indian-born and Singapore-raised Balakrishnan espoused anti-British, anti-colonial politics. His anger at the British “fascist state” – which he claimed once attacked him with a death ray fitted in a taxi meter – was rooted in his rage at British actions in Malaya and south Asia.
Herivel had strong family connections to imperialist Britain. She found out that her mother’s family were British officials in colonial India; indeed, one of her relatives led British troops into Malaya and she felt “very ashamed”. So when Bala talked about being under surveillance or attack from the state, “for me the state was very personal – it was my family”.
Now, she can’t let go of her 38 years inside the collective – two-thirds of her life. She handed the Guardian two medical reports from the months following her departure. One states: “She has overwhelming sympathy with her captor and is believed to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome”, while the other describes “traumatic bonding”, which occurs with hostages and trafficking victims. She rejects this characterisation of her attitude to Balakrishnan.
Two years on, her support for Balakrishnan has only been hardened by his trial and conviction. Herivel, who many would see as one of several victims of a cruel cult, refuses to accept any such thing.
“I have to help clear AB’s name,” she asserts. “It is such an injustice. It is all wrong. It is hard to think that life has gone.”
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