A cult leader gets 1,000 years in jail for keeping sex slaves

FOR YEARSTV, Adnan Oktar’s cult made for outrageously bad television. Newspapers indulged him as a crackpot, an Islamic preacher surrounded by a harem of women in heavy make-up and swimsuits. (Mr Oktar argued the bikini was a form of religious covering.) Few people took him seriously. The authorities mostly seemed to ignore him.His luck ran out on January 11th, when a Turkish court sentenced him to over 1,000 years in jail for fraud, torture and sexual abuse. Mr Oktar was a chameleon. He embraced, then disavowed, anti-Semitism. He convinced his followers he was the messiah. He preached a conservative strand of Islam in the 1980s, dialogue between Christians, Muslims and Jews after 2001, and after 2011, when he launched his own channel, sex. On his show, Mr Oktar would appear flanked by scantily clad women, whom he called his “kittens”, and men dressed up to the nines. Between sermons on world events and Islamic doctrine, he would dance with his “kittens” to pop music.