“There was just a fear of being in danger if I was to leave because of just the things Royall [Jenkins]would say about people who left … that they were all killed in various ways.”
Children were starved, beaten and worked to exhaustion for 16 hours a day in a Kansas cult known as "The United Nation of Islam and the Value Creators." Six of its members were convicted of conspiracy to commit forced labor last Monday after being on trial for 26 days in Kansas City's federal district court, the Daily Mail reported.
The six held to account were all from the upper echelon of the cult or wives of the group’s founder, Royall Jenkins, according to the Department of Justice. Before being identified as a cult in 2018, the members had enjoyed relative obscurity since 2000. Children as young as eight suffered beatings and sexual abuse while being deprived of food and nourishment. Yet they were expected to labor for twice the average work day and live among rats and filth.
The court heard of a child being dangled over a railroad track because he refused to confess to stealing food to fill his empty stomach or of another who drank toilet water in order to quench her thirst. The late Royall Jenkins founded the cult in Maryland in 1978 before it moved to Kansas City. Children of cult followers went to an unlicensed school run by the organization. But schooling included trips to work sites across the US where the kids labored for long days without any pay, the Mail revealed.
The cult made money from the children’s work. Kendra Ross said while she was never paid for the labor she was chronically being assaulted, starved and sexually abused. Ross, who is now 31, entered the cult with her parents when she was only 11 years old.
“There was just a fear of being in danger if I was to leave because of just the things Royall would say about people who left,” Ross first told officials in 2018 prior to the cult being charged. “Especially people who left and talked bad about him or his organization, that they were all killed in various ways.”
Ross already filed and won an $8 million lawsuit against the cult but was back to testify against the leaders for the criminal trial. “They took my childhood, my life and, I mean, I can't get that back. So I want them to pay for that.”
The woman said her mother embraced the United Nation of Islam in 1993. The founder was a former truck driver who attracted hundreds of followers by telling them that he was the incarnation of Allah. In 2015, he renamed the cult The Value Creators.
Court documents revealed how he was in a polygamous relationship with 13 women by the time he died and had fathered at least 20 children. Three of his “wives” were charged. He claimed divinity by telling his followers that he had been abducted by extraterrestrials and “taken through the galaxy by aliens on a spaceship,” court files revealed.
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