In a recent episode of People Magazine Investigates: Cults, Niki Lopez shared her experience with the now defunct United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors cult led by Dwight “Malachi” York.

According to People, Niki Lopez was 11-years-old when her family moved into a Brooklyn compound run by York, who, at the time, was teaching a doctrine of black supremacist ideals and Islamic mysticism.

In 1988, at the age of 13, Lopez began to be sexually abused by York. Her story of slavery, starvation and sexual abuse was the truth of many young children on the compound.

In the compound, Lopez said young women were being groomed to accept abuse.

"He would allow the children to watch cartoons and feed them ice cream,” Tracey Bowen, a lieutenant in the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office said. “It was a progression, a complete grooming process he did with these kids.”

Lopez said she was forced to make sex videos with other children, and one of York’s wives taught her how to perform oral sex. Eventually, she was asked to stay behind one evening at York’s house, where she was held down and raped.

York moved his followers from New York to Eatonton, Georgia, in 1993.

There, he created a new compound, complete with twin pyramids and began to refer to himself as Chief Black Thunderbird Eagle. He claimed to be the modern-day leader of a lost Native American tribe that fought early European colonization.

Later he rechristened the group the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors and claimed to be both an Egyptian god and an extraterrestrial from the planet Rizq.

Lopez made her escape in 2000 at the age of 25 and testified against York in 2004.

Her testimony along with others' who escaped York's group led to the cult leader receiving a prison sentence of 135 years for transporting minors across state lines for sexual purposes. A search on the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator lists his release date as June 7, 2122.

Lopez is now 43-years-old and works as a visual artist and graphic designer. She also continues to help people, working to feed the homeless and assisting with LGBTQ issues.

“I felt empowered,” she says of helping to bring down York. “I lived my whole life being told what to do by this person, and he governed everything that I did.”

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Niki Lopez

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