Angie, who was a Scoan disciple for 10 years, recalls Marten as being “bright, witty, compassionate, funny, kind, and very independent”.
She told the BBC how the church was “a place of torture, psychological abuse, physical abuse, spiritual abuse, and sexual abuse” under Joshua’s leadership.
Angie said: “I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone and I feel very sad that she [Marten] was taken there in the first place.”
Unlike some Scoan disciples, who remained under Joshua’s control for years, Marten was thrown out after a few months and returned to the UK, where she went to Leeds University to study for a degree in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies.
But messages seen by BBC News suggest she was still affected by her experiences in Nigeria years later. In October 2012, she got in touch with Angie via Facebook Messenger.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone about what happened at the synagogue,” Marten wrote. “All my university friends are secular, and if I told them about what I’d seen in Lagos, they’d think I was lying or mad!”
Marten wrote about how TB Joshua had abruptly thrown her out of the church and explained that, for years, she thought it was her fault. She said she didn’t want to acknowledge Joshua was effectively running what she and others felt was a cult at the time.
Marten said she had tried to deal with what she experienced “silently and with a lot of confusion”. “It’s taken me years to get back to normal,” she wrote.
She said it would be a great help “both emotionally and spiritually” to talk to Angie, who replied and later met Marten twice.
