PRESENTER: On this suburban street in regional New South Wales,
an abusive cult has been hiding in plain sight.
Good morning, master.
Your own property slave 580317885 has missed you
and is here presented ready and waiting to serve you.
A former Australian Army soldier
living with six women he calls his slaves.
Let's start with the cage on our way in.
I think every man needs a cage in their room.
I initially thought that a cage would be a great punishment,
but it's backfired.
I think I made it a little bit too comfortable.
What were you required to do as his slave?
Anything. Anything that he wanted.
The man claims he's simply living an alternative lifestyle
with multiple partners.
People have a lot of assumptions
about a man who would live like this.
They think I must be some kind of abusive oppressor,
a misogynist, manipulator or even a monster.
I've been through it. I lived it.
I've been on that side with him.
I've been on the other side with him and I know what he truly is.
And he's a dangerous, dangerous man.
I know personally of a lot of other victims
that are too scared to come forward.
Tonight on Four Corners, we investigate how a sex slave cult
could operate in full public view in Australia.
We reveal how a group of women have been literally enslaved.
And we ask how the men behind it
were able to get away with it for years.
(MEN CHAT SOFTLY)
MAN: Yeah, it's just the right-hand side one.
Alright? Yeah.
Mm. Yeah, that's good.
All good? MAN: Yeah.
You ready? Ready.
OK.
Why did you feel that it was important
to speak to us publicly about this today?
I felt, um...
..like it's been a really long, challenging road for me.
And every day since, I have been trying to, like,
overcome what has happened and, like, my path in life.
When you're in that position,
all your power is taken away from you
and it's really hard to get out.
So I think that having the opportunity
to be able to talk about my experiences
could potentially help other girls in that situation
to be able to escape.
Felicity Bourke's story is difficult to comprehend.
For three years she lived in a violent relationship
and was treated like a slave.
She is still struggling to come to terms with what happened.
I never thought that I would be in a position
to talk about my past and my life with him.
But he needs to be held accountable
for what he's doing now,
which, you know, is...
..it's taking away someone's freedom and their rights.
Before her life unravelled, Felicity had grown up
in a close-knit family on a rural property in New South Wales.
Felicity's personality was very easygoing.
She was very happy-go-lucky. She was confident.
She was very connected with her family.
So we had a very close relationship.
I was always very jealous of her.
She was always strong and good at everything,
and popular and had lots of friends, and was good at dancing,
good at horse riding,
good at all the things that I wasn't very good at.
Um, I saw her as a really positive role model for me, yeah.
I'd just had my 21st birthday and I was real bubbly and strong,
and, like, so excited to start my life.
I hadn't really tried very hard at school.
Um, I wasn't very good at school.
But halfway through I decided that I wanted to be a police officer.
Felicity was studying to join the police force
when she moved to Sydney.
It was there she met a man called James Davis,
who was a decade older.
It started out as like any normal relationship.
I met him through someone else,
you know, when I was dating someone else,
and here was the cool, older army guy,
and it was really exciting.
So I was only just 21 and had just moved to the city as well.
So, a whole new lifestyle.
I thought I knew what I was doing,
but I didn't, I had no idea.
When I actually met him, I found him to be incredibly condescending.
He was rude, he was attention-seeking.
There were a lot of occasions similar to that
where he spoke really strongly and aggressively about men's rights,
and feminists, very anti-women, a lot of misogynist comments,
a lot of racist comments, homophobic comments.
When we left, I turned to my husband
and said, "We are in really big trouble.
"This guy is really dangerous."
I think, when you felt... when you sat next to him
and you were with him, you automatically felt strong.
Because he was so good at making everyone else feel small around him.
What was the first incident that happened
that you thought in your mind, "This is not right"?
We were probably together about four months
when I remember him punching me in the face
in a street in Maroubra or Coogee,
and it was late at night and it was after we'd been at the pub.
And I dropped to the floor
and he bent down and looked me dead in the face,
and he was like, "If I can do this here, where everyone can see,
"imagine what I can do to you at home."
There's numerous times that he's punched me in the face.
Uh, I used to...
It used to escalate quite quickly.
And it used to escalate quickly when I had an opinion.
Davis steadily took control of every aspect of Felicity's life.
He took over everything.
So rent, bills, spending money.
You know, I'd be given an allowance.
He's taken away all my rights as a person
and my ability to live on my own.
That was another really big thing for him,
was him making me believe that I couldn't survive without him,
so I couldn't leave.
Davis promoted himself as a practitioner of BDSM.
He told Felicity he was her master and she was his slave.
Explain to me what he wanted from you in a relationship,
at that point?
Complete submission.
His whole goal I think was, you know...
..to have me as the slave.
Can we take a break for a second? Cool.
(SIGHS)
Oh, God, it's so sickening.
Davis drafted a contract of submission and servitude
for Felicity to sign.
He locked a stainless-steel collar to Felicity's neck
and arranged for her to be tattooed with a so-called slave number.
He said, "I'd like you to get the slave tattoo,"
and he booked it in and took me in and chose the spot,
and got it on big, dark, thick black letters...
..down, my, like, inner thigh, kind of on my undie line.
So very hard to cover up.
Very thick, very black, very noticeable.
Um, and it's eight or nine numbers.
What did he tell you that you would have to do for him?
So, the requirements for being a slave
and what I was expected was complete and utter servitude
to him and his desires and needs.
I'd wait at home for him in our position by the door.
And as, like, our relationship progressed,
like, you know, it would be naked by the door on your knees
in the yoga pose with your hands up.
Um, you know, cook dinner, clean the house.
Normal chores like that.
If you didn't do what he asked you to do,
what would happen, what were your punishments?
He would never reprimand me, like, in front of people,
but, you know, he might go home and I'd be...
..I've been chained to the dining room table.
Um, around my ankle.
And he used to have a cage.
Well, he still has a cage.
Um, used to be used as punishment.
I'm sure it still is on occasions.
How long were you in the cage for?
Uh...
The longest one...
..was three days.
Yeah.
He'd give you little like, "Oh, you can come out
"but you can only sit at my feet while we watch TV
"and then you have to go back in."
And there was numerous times where I just...I had to sleep in there,
and he'd take everything out and I'd have to sleep in there.
Davis also forced her to keep a daily journal of her thoughts.
It started as a way to be able to control
and see what was happening inside my mind.
This was a really good way for him to be able to draw out information.
These handwritten-pages detail years
of extreme physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
I don't know when my right disappeared,
but now I think about,
I don't think it was ever actually there,
because, you know, I...I remember crying and being like...
I remember having this discussion and being on my knees
and it was just like this, "You can't do this.
I said no to this."
And the way he says it to you is,
you know, "No.
"If you're with me, you know what it means to be with me."
Felicity's family had no idea how bad the situation was
but were desperate to get her out of the relationship.
We believed in the beginning that we would be able to rescue her
because we had such a solid sense of who she'd been
and our relationship,
and we had a lot of faith in that.
But over time, that relationship weakened, I guess, and...
..also, because she was an adult and had left home,
we simply didn't have the same kind of influence over her
that we had had previously.
It was very difficult because she was an adult...
..and she wasn't asking for help either.
As his hold over Felicity tightened,
Davis arranged for her to become a sex worker.
He lived off the proceeds.
I don't even know how it became a thing.
He just...
All of a sudden, I remember
just being dressed up and walking in with him and him dropping me off.
And then I was a sex worker. That was it.
He just took me in and told me where I'd be working, and worked.
Yeah.
And what happened to the money that you earned?
I'd give it to him. So I would get my pay.
So you get paid at the end of your shift.
And I used to...
He used to pick me up or I'd walk in and just give it to him.
But I don't...I didn't even think about it back then as a thing.
Um, you know...
He had really pushed into me that I was useless by myself.
So, my idea is that, you know,
I give my money to him was for the benefit of us.
Davis built himself a following on fetish websites.
He began trying to recruit more young women online.
He also promoted himself as a so-called fetish photographer,
taking explicit photos of teenage girls.
I found some photos...
..of some...
..very young women...
..teenagers that I knew were quite young
on his iPad.
He used to photograph everything and upload everything
and keep everything.
Very explicit sex photos, I guess.
He was never in...like, he'd never be in the photos.
Now I know...
..the girls that were in those photos are still in his life now.
Um, some of the girls were, I believe 16, potentially 15.
It was just before her birthday.
When I saw those photos, we were in Brisbane
and it made me so sick.
When I confronted him...
..I described that as like the final blow-up of our relationship.
He...beat the living hell out of me.
And we were...
He locked me in a room for about 12 hours.
And to the point there was blood everywhere,
and he just laid on the floor hugging me
because I'd confronted him.
I was like, "It's over. It's done. That's it. We're through.
"You can't do this."
After repeated attempts,
Felicity finally managed to escape James Davis's control.
Were you scared about what could happen to you if you left him,
or what he could do to you?
Yes, very.
I ran. I hid.
I was homeless for eight months.
I was so thankful that I had a beautiful, beautiful friend
who let me stay at their place.
And I stayed on her couch every night for eight months.
And it was a really hard time in my life.
Even if that fear wasn't, like, justified in reality,
I felt like he was around every corner.
You know, I knew that in his eyes, at that point,
I felt like his little prized possession,
that he'd put so much and invested so much into me...
..that he was gonna kill me.
There was no doubt in my mind
that caning was used because I hated it so much.
Because it was such a fear thing for me.
American cult expert and deprogrammer Rick Ross
runs the Cult Education Institute.
He's very narcissistic, very manipulative.
I think James Davis is a threat.
He's violent, he beats women,
he takes advantage of them,
he uses them sexually like a pimp.
I think for him to say that
this is just some kind of mutually consensual arrangement
is negating the facts.
And if you look at what he's really doing,
he's breaking them down systematically
so that he can take them over,
and basically turn them into puppets
which he can sex traffic or exploit in any way that he wants.
..you weren't a real woman or a real person...
Rick Ross has spent decades assisting survivors of brainwashing.
..it's really negative.
James Davis, he is a cult leader.
In my opinion, he is forming a destructive cult,
and he's trying to expand it.
It's small now
but look at the devastating harm that he's done to women,
the way that he has physically abused them and exploited them.
Davis attended BDSM events in Sydney to find more young women.
He was banned after physically assaulting several women
in front of other people.
WOMAN: So he generally targeted
people that were brand-new in the scene.
They were 18, 19 years old.
They were only just...just coming into their age.
And during that, he would lure them in straightaway at these gatherings.
The problem is, we never found out exactly what happened.
A lot of the time, they just disappeared.
In 2015, Davis found and groomed a Year 10 student online.
We'll call her Emma.
In a video posted on social media, she described how she met him.
EMMA: I met master through a kink and fetish community website
called FetLife,
and then we did a photoshoot together.
It was a fashion photoshoot that
I was currently at the time trying to build up my fashion portfolio
because I was doing a lot of fashion modelling,
a lot of glamour modelling,
and he took those photos for me,
and then he asked me if I wanted to do nude photos
and I was 16 and I then said, "I'm actually not 21, like I said.
"I'm actually 16."
David began a sexual relationship with the schoolgirl.
He boasted on social media
about attending her high school speech night.
Weeks later, Emma posted a graphic description
of violent sex with Davis.
She wrote that everything was consensual.
It's a terrible thing,
but for the women that are caught up in that bubble that he controls,
it's very hard for them to determine
what they should do, or what...
..the kind of reality is that they're living in.
I think for a lot of us, when we look at groups called cults,
we're looking in
and we don't realise what it's like to inhabit that bubble.
What we think is crazy,
they inside that environment that is controlled by the leader,
they think it's perfectly normal,
and what we think is normal, they often think is crazy.
In 2018, Davis moved to Armidale in regional New South Wales.
He took with him four women, including Emma, who was by then 19.
Hundreds of kilometres from family and friends,
he exerted control over almost every aspect the women's lives.
People who'd witnessed his behaviour were alarmed by the move.
There was nothing we could do to protect them.
The problem was we had no way if anything went wrong
of ever intervening.
There was... There was nothing we could do from afar.
Like, he needed to go,
but when you drag somebody away from their home environment,
and here you could already tell he was making sure
that they had no relationship
with too many people that he didn't agree with,
and he would cut off their communication from those people,
and with that, it was an abusive situation just already starting.
Cult leaders use such tactics as social isolation,
control of communication,
cutting people off from their family,
their old friends,
controlling their time,
hour by hour, day by day.
In a way they create a bubble
in which the person is in a controlled environment, a space,
where only the leader determines
what information they have access to,
and who is their friend or who is their confidant.
Until recently, Davis and the women had been living
at this house in Armidale.
Under his rules, they are required to call him master
and ask for permission to eat and go to the bathroom.
They participate in elaborate ceremonies,
including signing contracts of enslavement,
attaching collars to their necks
and holding fake weddings.
He has never shied from the fact that he wants to be a polygamist,
open sex household that is a BDSM functioning house
and has committed 24-hours-a-day slaves.
He's never hid that.
And when you go back through his writings
and things that he's put down on paper, it's very clear.
The whole protocols and contracts
and set guidelines that you have to follow.
Well, what Davis is doing through all of these rituals
and these events is constantly instilling in his targeted women
the feeling that they must subordinate everything to him,
to his system.
They are just, you know, cogs in the machine, in the rituals,
in the events which put him in the centre.
He becomes the focus of attention.
He's all powerful, and they are diminished,
and they just simply become his servants
to subordinate and submit themselves to him.
Everyone knows who we are, we're that weird polyamorous family.
We're the polygamist sex cult, we're all the things they think we are
and we're not all the things they think we are.
Everyone knows who we are.
There are three primary core characteristics
that form the nucleus for a definition of a destructive cult.
One is an all-powerful leader who becomes an object of worship,
who is a virtual dictator over the members of the group.
Whatever he says is right is right, whatever he says is wrong is wrong.
The second characteristic
is that there is an indoctrination process
that is used to gain undue influence
over the members of the group.
And then finally, the third characteristic is that the leader
uses undue influence to exploit and do harm
to the members of the group or even to society at large.
Davis brags on social media about his lifestyle.
People look at my life and they can't reconcile what they see
because they see a reasonably poor, middle-aged, bald, overweight guy...
..and they can't understand why I have what I have.
So they need to cite other reasons like I must be a creep
or I must be hitting on all the girls,
or I must be, like, have some kind of scam running.
He's held Q&A sessions on Instagram
to explain his process for enslaving women.
(READS) "I would like to know please how you hold collaring ceremonies?
"After how long and what tasks do girls earn their collar?
"What are the meanings behind the different collars?"
OK, quickly, so, I'll answer this as fast as I can.
Davis has published instructions for other men online
on how to abuse women.
He wrote that women can be trained like dogs
and subjected to Stockholm syndrome-like effects.
And that after "years of psychological conditioning
"to become 100% dependent,"
his slaves could be passed on to other men.
What I see frequently with these malignant,
narcissistic cult leaders is that they feel that the people
who they have taken control of have no purpose in life
or no meaning in life without them.
It seems to me that what Davis is doing is he's trying to organise
and structure a group
that you could see as a kind of pyramid scheme of authority
with him at the top.
So these men, I suspect that he would train,
would see him as a mentor and a leader.
And it could be seen as a kind of franchising
of his way of manipulating women,
with him as the key leader at the top.
Davis has gathered around him a group of like-minded men
who he has trained to subjugate women.
They've used social media to recruit more followers.
One was an 18-year-old from Sydney.
She didn't want her face shown or her real name used in this story.
We'll call her Tiffany.
Like many of the young women that Davis and his followers targeted,
Tiffany was extremely vulnerable.
I've grown up, went through some traumatic experiences
that caused me to have a lot of mental health issues.
I had just turned 18 and I was starting to explore more.
And they followed me on Instagram,
and so I followed them back and was watching their posts.
And they said they were in Sydney,
and so I said, oh, I'd go and meet up with them.
So I went to a bar and met up with them.
That's how I kind of met them.
The man who recruited Tiffany was Joshua Clinch,
James Davis's best friend and right-hand man.
Jimmy informed me last time I saw him that my mentorship
is coming to an end,
which I take with a great deal of pride,
that he thinks I'm ready to branch out on my own.
That he believes his mentorship with me is finished.
We're looking at expanding to a new house within Sydney,
definitely not the inner west or anywhere like that.
It's going to be somewhere a bit... a little bit cheaper.
He made Tiffany sign a contract of submission
and took her to sex parties at the house in Armidale.
There were some girls
that were there that, you know,
it was their first time as well.
And, you know, James would force them to
have oral sex with him.
And, you know, there was...
..they were doing impact, which is, like, you know, hitting people.
And everyone was really, really drunk.
And so it's very dangerous to do,
because, you know, when I was there, I got hit really hard,
but it was right where my kidneys are.
So it caused me to, like, pee blood for a couple of days
and, you know, things like that.
And you couldn't really say no or stop
because the men were just adamant that, "No, no, we're OK,"
even as they'd do that.
Incredibly, Davis was so keen to publicise what he was doing,
in 2018 he made a failed attempt to launch a reality TV career.
Hi, I'm James Davis,
shibari rigger, rope performer,
fetish photographer,
BDSM writer, kink educator,
lifestyle dominant, consent advocate, sex industry professional,
slut enthusiast,
unlicensed gynaecologist and anti-PC supervillain.
He gave two young videographers access to his house in Armidale.
Honestly, I love my desk.
I think it appeals to the inner tyrant in me.
You know, I feel very patriarchal and oppressive when I sit here.
It was billed as being like The Kardashians -
set in small-town Australia
with a family who regularly throws sex parties.
Let's start with the cage on our way in.
I think every man needs a cage in their room.
He showed off the cage which he'd used to abuse Felicity Bourke.
I initially thought that a cage would be a great punishment
but it's backfired.
I think I made it a little bit too comfortable.
In early 2019, Davis started bragging online
that he had a fifth new partner.
She was a 17-year-old from Sydney.
She was also struggling with mental health issues.
So I think it was probably either January or February of 2019,
she was hospitalised for, like, mental health reasons.
And, you know, they would visit her while she was in hospital.
And I think it was the day after she got out of hospital,
they moved her straight to Armidale against the wishes of her family.
She's...
..living with us kind of like on a trial basis,
try before you buy, for all parties.
So she's moved up, yeah, she is living there.
She's moved up for a three-month period of time
to see if it is good for her, to see if it's healthy for her.
Within weeks of meeting the 17-year-old,
Davis posted a sexual image of her online.
He's also repeatedly posted incest-themed sexual images
and videos of teenagers made to look under age.
The girls were made to work at sex parties
organised by Davis and his followers,
held at the house in Armidale
and other locations around New South Wales.
I was, um, I was one of, like, the helpers.
I was, like, staff, is what they called us.
Um, so I wasn't involved in the actual...sex part.
And we had to go around serving people and cooking things,
while chained to the... by the neck to each other.
They would get a bunch of women.
I think it was, like, 10 women.
And then they'd get, like, 20 guys
that were all James's friends.
And the women would be dressed up in, you know, lingerie.
They'd be have...
They'd have blindfolds on and they'd have numbers written on them.
And then they would get led out in a line to the men.
Um, and then they would,
all the men will just have sex with the women.
And the women, you know, were...were called by numbers.
They didn't have names, it was just numbers.
Um, and, you know, they, um, you know,
they obviously didn't know who anyone was.
They didn't know if protection was being used.
They didn't know, and they couldn't say anything,
because, you know, they were... they were told not to.
They were told to just take it.
Davis has used the women who live with him to do paid sex work.
Their escort profiles had promoted one as a young teenager,
and another as a girl studying her HSC.
Tiffany was told to quit her job and become a sex worker too.
And what happened with the money that you earnt from doing the sex work?
Um, the guy I was with, I would give like, some of the money to him.
It was like, him, you know, he'd drive me to wherever it would be,
or things like that.
I'd give money to him for that.
And then I'd... he'd take the rest of the money
and put it in a safe in his house,
that I couldn't access unless asking to access it.
Um, and he had the key and I-I had to ask to get money out.
Felicity Gerry is a criminal barrister currently in the UK.
She specialises in human trafficking and modern slavery.
I think what you have to be aware of,
where you might have women who enter into a relationship within a house
that is subject to a contract
that then very quickly go on to carry out some form of sex work,
that there may be a pattern of behaviour
that is sufficient to support an accusation of slavery,
servitude, trafficking, um, or types of coercion.
It's not a defence to consent to modern slavery or human trafficking.
So what that really means is you can't agree to be a slave.
You can't agree to be trafficked.
Davis has profited from selling videos of degrading sex acts
and extreme violence online.
Sex worker advocate Lucy Price was shown some of the videos.
I have been in the industry for a long time.
I've seen a lot. Yeah, that's correct.
I have never seen, actually, anything like this.
It was actually so horrific that I still, to this day,
if I get a flashback of that, it's horrific.
Of seeing him punch...
I've never even seen a grown man in a movie
punch someone with that severity,
yet a young girl that he was having sex with.
It was actually that extreme. I've never seen anything like that.
Lucy Price was so worried
she messaged one of the women living at the Armidale house.
The woman responded,
"We ensure that each person has autonomous, enthusiastic,
"and informed consent."
Do you think it's possible she had consented to that?
Absolute... There's no way.
No-one would consent to being smashed in the head that violently
to the point where your head is, like, jolted,
but no real, like, flinch.
It just seemed like
I don't even know if she was even completely responsive.
It just didn't seem as though...
There's no way you could actually consent to that type of violence.
Four Corners has learned that numerous complaints about Davis
have been made to state and federal authorities
over several years.
When we contacted New South Wales Police
and the Federal Police last month,
both said they were not investigating Davis.
The AFP's human trafficking unit has since launched an investigation
based on information provided by Four Corners.
We are appealing for members of the Australian community
to come forward.
Potential victims, witnesses,
anybody that is impacted by human trafficking and slavery,
and in particular with this matter,
please come forward to the AFP.
We are here to help.
There is a way out of these terrible situations.
The AFP has dedicated investigators in this unit,
who are specialised, they are compassionate,
and they will deal with your matter,
with your wellbeing first and foremost.
Davis appears confident he has nothing to fear from the law.
Look, we don't break the law.
A lot of people may not like things that we do.
People might think that things we do are wrong or immoral
towards their own moral code.
But we don't break the law.
Therefore...go to the police. What do you want?
Earlier this year Davis moved the six women he calls his slaves
to a more isolated rural location in New South Wales.
Two have been with him for more than five years.
Davis has spoken openly
about his plans to have children with all of the women.
In recent weeks, he's shared photos
of the women on a property with farm animals
and of the youngest aiming a rifle.
FELICITY: There is no other description
I think that you could come up with
that describes what he's got now as a cult.
Like, he secluded his wives to a rural property.
He's teaching them how to hunt and survive,
you know, basically if the world falls apart,
they're his little warriors.
The trajectory of a situation like this is ominous.
I mean, he has the power virtually of life and death over these women.
He has broken them down
to where they have no will of their own,
and where they've subordinated everything to him.
And so whatever madness consumes him will ultimately affect them.
I mean, that is the terror of an authoritarian cult.
One of the key challenges for the AFP and police
when investigating and prosecuting
human trafficking and slavery offences is that...
..often the victims in that situation
don't recognise at that time that they are under those conditions.
Without having the victim,
we are unable to, most often than not,
have a prosecution take place.
So the victim... That's why it's a victim-centric approach.
And the victim is the primary concern
of all of our investigations.
We would also like to appeal to the Australian public
to look a little deeper.
Look in your communities, your neighbourhoods, your backyards,
for the signs of human trafficking and slavery.
It is very much an unseen crime or hidden in plain sight.
Tiffany managed to escape the cult with the help of friends in 2019.
She's desperately worried for the other women Davis has enslaved.
I just wish that the girls would be able to get out
without all of the backlash.
And I just...
I feel so, so bad for all the women
that have been, like, sucked into his, you know,
black hole of...his life.
Felicity is still struggling from the years of violent abuse
she suffered at James Davis's hands.
She wants to see him brought to justice.
He needs to know that he is not the ultimate,
that he's not the god,
that he cannot walk through this life
doing as he pleases to women and getting away with it.
I've been through it. I lived it.
I've...I've been on that side with him.
I've been on the other side with him,
and I know what he truly is.
And he's a dangerous, dangerous man.
I want him to know that everyone is gonna see him
for what he really is.
Thank you.
Captions by Red Bee Media
Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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