For four years, Vicky Unsworth was a slave in a secret sex cult. She speaks for the first time to Paul Cook about her ordeal and why she believes her abuser’s prison sentence is too lenient.

THIS was a chapter in her life that Vicky Unsworth wanted to forget.

“I’d blocked a lot of that time of my life out of my mind,” she says. Then the flashbacks began and finally a phone call from a friend spurred her into action.

She reported sex slave master Lee Thompson to the police and pressed charges, fearful that he would do the same to other women if she didn’t take a stand.

Now, for the first time, she has spoken openly about her life as a sex slave with Thompson, who was sentenced to three years in jail – with Judge Tony Briggs describing him as “dominating and manipulating”.

It’s a description of her “master” that she recognises now. “He was controlling and domineering,”

she says. “I lost me. I was just an extension of him. I couldn’t be on my own and I couldn’t be me. He moved me away from everyone.

“He would also force me to sleep with other men. And while I was pregnant, he would threaten to abort my child if I wouldn’t sleep with a drug dealer.”

Yet, she had no inkling of what life with him would be like when they met through a friend in 2000, when she was 17, near her home in the North-West.

She says that, for four years, she was Thompson’s girlfriend in what she believed was a normal relationship, but one she now describes as “controlling, domineering and abusive”.

Home in Darlington was a small terraced house. They met in Preston, but moved around.

Their North-East homes included Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Newcastle, but they also lived in London and even the Isle of Skye.

Thompson was a sex slave master in the Kaotian sect, a splinter group of another organisation called the Goreans, that had up to 350 members across the North-East, engaged in slavery rituals based on science fiction novels from the Sixties.

Vicky was unaware of the sex slave cult. “He never mentioned anything about the Kaotians,”

she says.

“He just moved me around and I did as I was told. It usually started when I made friends. Unless he was punishing me, we were always together.

“He would leave me inside the home on my own. I had nowhere to go and no money. He left me without a phone and he would pack up and go. When he came back, everything was wonderful with the world.”

Although Thompson allowed her little contact with the outside world, she remained in touch with an old friend, who was looking after her dog.

That link provided her escape route. One day, Vicky told Thompson she was going to visit her sister. Instead, she met her friend and walked out of Thompson’s life for good.

“I had had enough. I was working and had made friends and I could see what a normal life was. Up to then, I was under his control,” she says.

Vicky tried to put the bizarre relationship out of her mind as she forged a new life away from Thompson. Little did she realise that one email would help uncover the activities of the sect and cause a national media frenzy.

Worried father Tony Nicodemous contacted The Northern Echo because he believed his son was being manipulated by the cult. Rather than dismissing it, Thompson confirmed that he’d been a sex slave master for ten years and had taken on Mr Nicodemous’ son, Zachary, as his new apprentice.

Another email a month earlier had helped tip off police about the activities. A Canadian woman involved in the sect had told a Texan friend she wanted to return home, but was unable to because her passport had been burned.

Police investigated, but admitted they were powerless to take action against the cult because no offences had taken place and people were there of their own free will.

THE Northern Echo’s story about the sex slave cult created a media storm, with national newspapers and television following up the story.

It was that barrage of publicity that alerted Vicky to what was happening with her former boyfriend and led to the court case against him.

Her courage helped convict Thompson, who was charged under his alias, Harrington, in December last year.

He was jailed for three years after admitting a specimen charge of procuring a woman to have sexual intercourse by threats or intimidation, and one specific count.

The story would have rested there if Vicky, now 26, hadn’t decided to waive her lifetime anonymity because she wanted to tell what happened to her as a sex slave.

She is struggling to get over her ordeal. She is unable to form close relationships and is undergoing counselling. And she is angry at what she sees as the lenient treatment of Thompson.

“It is absolutely ridiculous that he got such a short sentence,” she says. “He’s going to serve just a year and a half for ruining my life. I think that man should never see the light of day again.”