On a sweltering afternoon late last year, I sat in an ice-cream parlour in Suva, the capital of the remote Pacific nation of Fiji, and ate a croissant waffle topped with vanilla ice cream, chopped peanuts and honey. Despite the parlour’s unpromising location, on a street crammed with second-hand shops, boarded-up pharmacies and tropical-themed cafés, its interior gleamed: large, illuminated snowflakes dangled from the ceiling, and a wall of giant white letters spelled out the words “Snowy House”.

A Fijian waitress in a floppy white beret served coffee to a pair of young women on their lunch break. Two teenagers, seemingly on a date, sat shoulder-to-shoulder and flipped through a menu. I leaned over to interrupt a conversation between a local businesswoman and one of her employees. I’m sorry, I said, but had the businesswoman heard the stories about the ice-cream parlour’s South Korean owners beating their followers? “I’ve seen nothing,” she responded. “I think it’s people making stories.”

Grace Road – the Korean Christian cult that owns the Snowy House chain, as well as an empire of organic supermarkets, patisseries, pizza restaurants and other businesses across Fiji – has encouraged this sort of scepticism. As I ate my waffle, I read a booklet I had picked up at the counter. “To our esteemed customers and the people of Fiji, Grace Road Group has been under a constant witch-hunt,” it declared. “We hear all the absurd accusations of labour exploitation when we simply work hard to grow our business as owners of our group.”

Over the past decade, Fiji – a tropical nation whose name summons visions of cocktails under verdant palm trees and luxurious oceanside resorts – has become a haven for Grace Road, one of many shadowy Korean cults that have found footholds abroad. Since it arrived in Fiji in 2013, Grace Road has been accused by local and foreign police of forcing its 400-odd followers to work in its businesses, abusing them with violence and sleep deprivation, and kidnapping their family members. The cult has also been accused of corrupting members of Fiji’s former government, which allegedly helped fund Grace Road’s commercial ventures and resisted international warrants to arrest its members.

Most Fijians have turned a blind eye to these allegations. Locals have become enamoured with the products and services offered by Grace Road – and the promise of economic development represented by its businesses, which are as omnipresent on the island as Starbucks is in America. The bizarre, parasitic relationship that has developed between Grace Road and Fiji exemplifies the risks that arise when a small, poor nation chases prosperity by sacrificing some of its sovereignty to mysterious outsiders – in this case, a cult preparing for the world’s end – and the immense difficulty of expelling these groups once they have put down roots.

After my snack, I walked up to the till, where a young Asian woman in a dark-blue dress stood alongside a pair of Fijian employees. All three smiled at me – until I asked about the Asian woman’s involvement with Grace Road, at which point her smile froze and the Fijian employees hurried away. The woman explained that she was the ice-cream parlour’s supervisor and a longtime member of the Korean group. I asked whether she had been beaten by the cult’s leader. “It’s hard to explain,” she told me in halting English. “Nobody can just, without anything, do a slap. The media is making [up] the bad things [about] us. They don’t want the truth to be heard.” Her voice faltered, and she glanced around to check whether anyone was watching; it struck me that she was scared. Suddenly, she scurried into the kitchen. Around me, the hum of customers in cheery conversation continued unabated; none of them had noticed anything amiss.

In the latter half of the 20th century – as South Koreans grappled with the legacy of Japanese colonial rule (which came to an end with the second world war), the traumatic division of the Korean peninsula, a series of brutal military dictatorships and nuclear threats from their northern neighbour – cults sprouted throughout the country. According to Tark Ji-Il, a professor at Busan Presbyterian University who is an expert on South Korean cults, the country’s social and political troubles were “turning points” that made doomsday messages particularly appealing to people who were desperately seeking stability. Most of the nascent cults had their roots in Christianity, but with an alarming twist: their founders typically claimed to be the modern incarnation of Jesus, demanded obsessive devotion and predicted the imminent end of the world. Today, about a third of South Korea’s population consider themselves Christians; of that number, Tark estimates that around a tenth are members of cults.

In recent decades, cults have played roles in some of the country’s biggest scandals. Tark’s own father, a prominent theologian, was fiercely opposed to them; in 1994, three days after criticising a cult on television, he was stabbed to death in what appeared to be a retaliatory attack. In 2016 South Korea’s president was impeached after it emerged that the family of a shamanistic cult leader (whom many in the country called a “Korean Rasputin”) had edited her speeches, advised her on policy and used government connections to press the country’s largest businesses into donating $69m to cult-controlled charitable foundations. In 2023 a Netflix documentary alleged that leaders of several of South Korea’s largest cults raped and sexually exploited many of their followers.

Some of these groups have established outposts among the Korean diaspora in countries such as America, South Africa, Singapore and Japan. The best known is the Unification church – often referred to as the “Moonies”, after the surname of its founder – who came to global attention for organising mass weddings between members. (In 2022 Abe Shinzo, a former prime minister of Japan who had ties to the Moonies, was killed by a man whose mother bankrupted herself through donations to the cult.)

But even as Korean cults have become notorious for their eccentricity, their growth abroad has gone relatively unscrutinised. Partly this is due to confusion about who has jurisdiction over them – the governments of the countries where they have outposts or South Korea itself – as well as the difficulties authorities face in gaining the trust of Korean immigrant communities.

Grace Road’s path to Fiji began with its founder, Shin Ok-Ju – a prim woman, now in her late 60s, with a bouffant of black hair and a penchant for pastel blazers. Little verifiable information exists about her. She has claimed she graduated from a Presbyterian seminary in Seoul, then preached in Philadelphia and South Korea before spending three years evangelising in China. (South Korea’s Presbyterian church, one of the country’s mainstream Christian denominations, has said that Shin’s account of her involvement with their organisation is false.) During her travels, she apparently became disillusioned with the church’s teachings and, upon her return to South Korea around 2008, began urging others to abandon what she called their false Christianity and to follow her instead.

Shin started preaching to disaffected Christians in a ramshackle hall surrounded by car-repair workshops at the southern edge of Seoul. According to a pamphlet published by the cult, her early sermons proclaimed that Christ’s return was imminent and heralded the “day of judgment” when the “time for Satan, devils and demons to do their work ends”. If people followed her, she said, God would grant them an earthly paradise. She began posting her sermons to YouTube, where they found an international audience. South Korea’s Presbyterian church warned its followers to avoid Shin. Nonetheless, Shin’s congregation in Seoul grew to at least 400 people.

In Shin’s interpretation of Christianity, salvation was linked to violence. She implemented a practice called the “threshing floor”, in which she beat adherents to expel the Devil from their bodies. According to American court documents, during a stint in New York in 2012 Shin tried to heal one follower’s schizophrenic brother through prayer. When that didn’t work, she ordered her followers to tie the man up and leave him in a basement for a week; the bindings caused his leg to develop gangrene, requiring amputation. He spent several years in a mental-health facility in Connecticut – only to later be kidnapped by his parents, who were also members of Grace Road, according to the man’s American lawyer. (In 2018, SBS TV, a Korean television-news channel, found the man’s mother on the outskirts of Seoul. She shooed reporters away, insisting that her son “is doing well. Don’t worry.”)

In 2014 South Korea’s Presbyterian church declared Shin a heretic. According to Korean media reports, Shin told her followers that the church’s officials were demons. Shortly afterwards, several dozen reportedly stormed into a Presbyterian church before the Sunday service, grabbed one of the officials by the neck, and dragged him down a set of stairs. Shin wasn’t prosecuted, but the ensuing scrutiny she faced from both the media and the police may have spooked her into making arrangements to flee the country. After the incident, she warned her followers in South Korea that a great famine was coming and pointed to God’s instruction to Abraham to “go forth from your country, and your relatives, and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you.”

Shin later told a Fijian newspaper that she ordered her son, Daniel Kim – a slim man with a slight lisp and an intense smile – to find an earthly paradise with a balmy temperature of 20-30°C. He subsequently boasted that he had travelled to 60 countries to identify the perfect one: Fiji. The island, 8,000km from Seoul, experienced perpetual summer and was covered in lush fields. For someone terrified of famine – and, presumably, the reach of Korean law enforcement – it must have seemed like paradise indeed.

At the time, Fiji was a pariah state. In 2006 a general named Voreqe “Frank” Bainimarama seized power in a bloodless coup, prompting investors to flee and sending a chill through the country’s lucrative tourism industry. Three years later, Bainimarama delayed scheduled elections, spurring New Zealand and Australia to cease development aid and impose sanctions.

Bainimarama’s government was left with little money to fund its ambitious support programmes for struggling Fijians, many of whom are subsistence farmers – so it began to court new foreign backers. In 2010 Bainimarama visited China, where he declared that the country was “the only nation that can help assist Fiji in its reforms…they think outside the box”. In return, China showered Fiji with an estimated $160m in aid.

That same year, Kim, Shin and several hundred followers settled near Navua – a riverside town where the soil was so rich and the sun so abundant that the grass grew tall enough to obscure the trunks of palm trees. Grace Road leased 33 hectares of land originally owned by the local Deuba tribe (Fiji has several thousand indigenous tribes, which own most of the country’s land). Soon, they built a compound of whitewashed homes, warehouses that quickly degraded in the intense sunlight, and hydroponic sheds that sheltered rows of lettuce and tomatoes. Around this hub, workers carved farmland from unruly bush. A nearby billboard declared the cult’s intention to “make Fiji shine”.

Despite a lack of entrepreneurial experience, Shin and Kim seemed committed to building a business empire in Fiji. Since 2014, 311 cult members have invested at least $10m in nine cult-controlled companies in the country (this figure includes only money spent on shares in the cult’s businesses; Grace Road claims it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in total in the country). This influx of cash enabled many cult members to acquire investor visas – at the time available to anyone putting over $25,000 into a company – and get on the track for residency.

With these funds, Grace Road leased several hundred more hectares of farmland, where they continue to grow tropical cash crops like cassava and papaya, primarily for the local market. The cult’s enterprises then rapidly diversified. Between 2015 and 2025 they set up six beauty salons, five True Mart supermarkets, a dental clinic, a construction firm, five patisseries, three Snowy House ice-cream parlours, a chain of eight Korean restaurants called Grace Kitchen, nine pizza parlours, two Italian trattorias and a fried-chicken restaurant called Fierce Chicken.

Almost overnight, Fijians, used to buying groceries at roadside farmers’ markets or picking up dinner from greasy buffet restaurants, were presented with a staggering range of alternatives. At Grace Kitchen they could purchase healthy banana berry smoothies, sushi rolls and homemade bibimbap; at True Mart they could pick up foreign goods, such as Korean noodles, Australian salad dressings and American ready-made desserts; at Snowy House they could indulge in elaborate cakes or flaky croissants. For many Fijians, who had never had such glorious choice before, Grace Road’s businesses seemed like godsends.

As its empire grew, Grace Road’s relationship with Bainimarama deepened. His government gave the cult lucrative state contracts and, from 2015, funnelled at least $3.8m in loans from a state development bank into its businesses, according to an investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative-journalism network. While some Fijians believed Bainimarama was merely encouraging a business whose success was an economic bright spot for his regime, others speculated that corruption was at play.

Whatever the reason for it, Bainimarama’s support helped the cult snap up land and expand its presence across the country. Grace Road’s headquarters at Navua – now a tangle of gleaming rice silos and low-slung, white-panelled worker dormitories – grew beyond its boundaries and onto the farmland of the Deuba tribe. In 2018 the tribe’s leaders approached a local official to express their anger. The official visited Grace Road’s headquarters to inspect the property, said the tribe’s treasurer, Sevanaia Tabuakovei. Later that day, the official’s phone rang: it was Bainimarama. The official later told Tabuakovei that Bainimarama asked why he was investigating Grace Road. When the official explained his concerns, Bainimarama allegedly threatened him: “Do you want to be 55 today?” – a reference to what was then the government’s mandatory retirement age. The official allegedly dropped the case. (Bainimarama did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

That same year, details about the cult’s violent behaviour in South Korea and Fiji began to emerge. In October, SBS TV broadcast videos showing cult leaders slapping followers, pulling their hair and throwing them across rooms. In one video, an adult shook a child while yelling at them to confess their sins. In another, Shin gave a sermon while her followers huddled and bowed. Shin grabbed one woman’s head and asked, “How should I kill this demon, this wicked thing?” She cut off a swathe of hair with scissors, then waved the blades around the woman’s head. “This crazy bitch must be chopped off like this.”

Even more serious were the allegations that Shin had forced her followers to work in Grace Road’s businesses or on its farms without pay. In an interview with the Korean Centre for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom, one former member described how the workers slept in small rooms with seven or eight people, woke each morning at 5.30am, worked until 6pm, worshipped until 10pm, and were woken throughout the night for further prayers. (Another former member said they never got more than five hours sleep a night while in Fiji.)

Escapees claim they were beaten for offences such as overlooking weeds while tending the fields or for using chemical fertilisers – a breach of the cult’s commitment to organic farming. Former cult members allege children in the cult were not permitted to go to school; others have claimed that leaders confiscated their passports and phones to prevent them from leaving. In late 2024 one person who escaped from the cult told the Fiji Times that she had been separated from her children, beaten, and forced to work gruelling hours for eight years. “They follow the laws with the Fijians but with us, they treat us like animals,” she said.

Ana Turaganivalu, a Fijian woman with tightly curled braids and a tattoo of hibiscus flowers across her shoulder, used to work as a barista at a branch of Grace Kitchen in the cult’s Navua headquarters. Most workers were Fijian, she told me, but the junior supervisors were all Korean. Fijian workers were treated well enough, she said, but she noticed that the Korean workers were “there from five in the morning, then they’re on the premises until 12 at night.” At one point, she saw one woman trying to hide two bruises across her neck and back. The woman confided that she had been assaulted for complaining about her boss. “Their lives had been taken away from them,” said Turaganivalu.

When I approached Grace Road’s lawyers, they said they were not familiar with these allegations of abuse. In its stores’ brochures, the cult wrote that any accusations of violence are misleading: Shin “showed from the Bible what sin is, and she strictly rebuked those who sinned as a mother would to her child.”

Even after the videos obtained by SBS TV and other reports of abuse began to circulate, Grace Road seems to have maintained positive relationships with Fiji’s power brokers. Ministers from Bainimarama’s government attended the openings of new stores, where cult officials thanked them for their stalwart support; Bainimarama has given Grace Road’s leaders awards for their contributions to the country.

But the appreciation does not seem to have flowed both ways. Privately, Shin expressed disdain for the locals who had welcomed her group. “Surely, someday, we will enter politics,” she said during one of her sermons from this period, according to videos leaked to SBS TV. Fijians “are our servants according to our Bible. They are not very smart. Their brains are not fast enough.” She wheezed a sharp laugh. “So what should we do?” She jerked her hand like a club. “We will conquer, govern and rule.”

On occasion, Grace Road is alleged to have mistreated ordinary Fijians too. Partway through 2018, two cult members drove a car up a pot-holed road to a dilapidated shack outside Navua, just two miles from the cult’s headquarters. The shack’s owner, Nainoca Kaukibeqa, a thin man with a near-permanent glower, and Suzanne, his 16-year-old daughter, greeted the unexpected visitors in their unkempt front yard. Neither father nor daughter had ever had a proper conversation with anyone from the cult before. According to Suzanne, the messengers handed Kaukibeqa a letter instructing his family “to get out of this land”; otherwise, they threatened to “pull up the house” to force Kaukibeqa out.

Kaukibeqa is a member of the Dravuni tribe, which had owned the land for generations. Three decades ago, after his chief gave him several acres to live on, Kaukibeqa built a house from corrugated iron and sheets of pink and white plywood. He has lived there with his mother, wife, two children, their spouses and many grandchildren ever since, growing cassava, sweet potato and taro on the surrounding property to sell at local markets. He was proud of his home; he had no inclination to sell it.

Confused by the letter, Kaukibeqa and Suzanne took the cult members to their chief’s house. There, the chief explained to Kaukibeqa that Grace Road had leased a nearby property; perhaps the group was mistaken about its boundaries. Then, in an apparent attempt to ward off further incursions, the chief showed the cult members a map of the tribe’s land and recounted a story about one of his ancestors, who spooked her enemies by hanging human fingers above her stove. “We also can eat you if you keep disturbing us,” the chief threatened, according to Suzanne. (Many Fijians delight in scaring foreigners with tongue-in-cheek references to the country’s cannibal past.) Furious, the cult members stormed out.

According to Kaukibeqa, the cult returned to his property a week later with an excavator and began unceremoniously uprooting a bamboo grove. They dumped the stalks along the border of his property – which Kaukibeqa interpreted as a warning that if he wouldn’t go quietly, they would use force against him. According to Suzanne, Kaukibeqa and his chief (who has since died) complained to the cult and to the police, only to be ignored by both.

After several weeks of work clearing the land of bamboo and bush, the excavator arrived early one morning and woke Kaukibeqa’s family with the sound of its engine. This time, he snapped. He marched outside, grabbed a fist-sized stone, and threw it at the machine, cracking its windscreen. The operator swung the digger’s arm to frighten Kaukibeqa, then rumbled back towards Grace Road’s headquarters. A short time later, three men arrived at the property by car: the excavator operator, a middle-aged Grace Road member, and Daniel Kim, Shin’s son, whose typical smile was absent as he stalked towards Kaukibeqa’s property. “Go back!” Suzanne yelled as she emerged from the house. Kaukibeqa followed with a machete. He slashed at Kim, who avoided the blow and pushed him to the ground. Suzanne remembers screaming while Kim and the middle-aged member kicked Kaukibeqa until he lay unconscious in the mud; photos from the incident show blood pouring from his nose and mouth.

When Fijian police arrived an hour later, they threw Kaukibeqa in jail – and let Kim go. (Kim maintained that he and the other Grace Road member accused of assaulting Kaukibeqa were innocent of any wrongdoing.) Juki Fong Chew, who was then Fiji’s acting police commissioner, told me that there was no investigation at the time because “the previous government was looking after Grace Road.”

Meanwhile, South Korea’s government was increasingly concerned about the allegations that its citizens had been virtually enslaved. In 2018, it issued an arrest warrant for Shin and Kim, later circulated by Interpol, on charges of kidnapping and assault. It seems Shin did not know about the warrant; that July, she flew to Seoul, only to be arrested upon her arrival. She was later convicted of violence and fraud and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

A few days after Shin’s arrest, 17 Korean police flew to Fiji and, in a joint mission with local officers, seized several cult members during a night-time raid. Among them was Kim, who had taken over as Grace Road’s leader. But according to Korean police, before the cult members could be whisked to South Korea, Bainimarama’s private secretary had a meeting with Fiji’s immigration chief, solicitor-general and chief prosecutor. Although Fijian police had approved the operation based on the arrest warrant from South Korea and Interpol, it seems that Bainimarama was opposed to deporting Grace Road’s leaders. Soon after the meeting, Fijian police released Kim and the other cult members.

Fong Chew, the acting police commissioner, told me that an investigation into corruption allegations involving Grace Road and Bainimarama is ongoing, although he refused to give details. He suggested that the investigation had been delayed because Bainimarama destroyed documents, emphasising again that the cult was a “protected species” under Bainimarama’s government. If you investigated without the approval of the former attorney-general, he said, “you’d be retired right there and then.” Fong Chew laughed. “What was done behind the scenes? Only God and the government of the time knows.” (The former attorney-general did not respond to requests for comment.)

Soon after, I spoke with Graham Davis, an Australian journalist who once advised Bainimarama. Davis said he had asked the former attorney-general why the cult wasn’t being prosecuted for labour abuses. The attorney-general waved Davis away. “Don’t worry,” he allegedly said. “They make good ice cream.”

Bainimarama was ousted in a general election in 2022 (he was later convicted and briefly imprisoned for obstructing an unrelated corruption investigation). One of the most senior figures in the new coalition government is Pio Tikoduadua, a former lieutenant colonel. As Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration, his initial brief included overseeing Fiji’s security. One afternoon last year, I met him in a government building made of crumbling concrete. The air-conditioning in Tikoduadua’s office was set so low that my glasses immediately frosted over. Tikoduadua, a tall man with white curly hair and deep purple bags under his eyes, lounged in a powder-blue suit and pink tie behind an enormous desk covered with half-empty bottles of Fiji Water – a ubiquitous brand in the country, despite its high-end reputation abroad.

Before 2022, Tikoduadua told me, his only interaction with Grace Road had been a visit to one of their restaurants. “I was actually quite impressed,” he said. “Everyone likes Korean barbecue.” He looked at me expectantly. Several years ago, he suffered a stroke that left his mouth frozen in a grimace; it took me a few seconds to realise he was joking.

Tikoduadua’s impression of Grace Road changed after the election, when officials briefed him about the violence. He authorised another attempt to expel the cult from Fiji. In September 2023 Fijian police arrested four cult leaders, two of whom were dispatched to Seoul before Grace Road’s lawyers could obtain an injunction. Police could not, however, find Kim. Tikoduadua said he ordered the police to search widely: “Fiji is an island. He’s got to stand out in the crowd.”

For two days, they scoured the country. On the third, Kim called a press conference at the cult’s headquarters. Local TV footage showed Kim seated beneath a map that had, at its centre, a supersized Fiji rendered in gold. He spent several minutes ridiculing Tikoduadua, then brought his hands to his chest and let out a throaty chuckle. “He called us a runner. Do I look like a runner?” Kim asked. “If I did wrong, come and arrest me.”

Soon after, Fijian police arrived to call his bluff. Kim surrendered and was escorted to an immigration detention centre in the capital. The cult’s lawyers have subsequently filed multiple lawsuits contesting the effort to deport him. Tikoduadua almost rolled his eyes as we spoke. “I want him to avail himself of all of his rights under the law,” he said. “Which might be an inconvenience to me.”

Tikoduadua was clearly still intent on expelling Kim. Even if the courts ruled against the government, he hinted that he could rewrite the law to ensure he could nonetheless kick Kim out of the country. “The evidence is there, how they treat members of their congregation. It’s scary, man. If you don’t believe in Jesus, you beat them up?” Again, he glanced at me expectantly. I forced an awkward chuckle. Satisfied, he continued. “Parts of the world are really bloody crooked, y’know?”

As Tikoduadua’s aide escorted me out of the office, I asked whether I could visit Kim, who was then still in detention. “We’re not allowing people to go and see him,” said the adviser. “Every time we give him a mic, he goes off on a rant.”

Despite Tikoduadua’s bullish desire to banish Kim, it seemed indicative of the mood in Fiji that the minister insisted that he didn’t want to push the entire cult off the island. “It’s had a positive impact, if you’re talking about Grace Road, the company,” he told me. “The red notice is only on Kim, it’s not on Grace Road. Unfortunately, this guy has dragged the whole bloody company into the soup.” When I pressed him on the allegations of corruption and abuse, his mouth lifted into a half-smile. “I really don’t have proof for that. That’s the subject of another process.”

He’s not the only official wary of criticising Grace Road. The current ruling coalition, which barely squeaked into power in 2022, has since lost support due to sex scandals and internal power struggles. The cult’s influence on the island is so pervasive that angering voters with ties to it might lead to electoral defeat. Grace Road claims to be Fiji’s largest farming group, and says that it employs over 800 Fijians – making it one of the country’s biggest private employers. And its businesses remain popular and valued on an archipelago where grimy conditions and shoddy goods are the norm.

On Suva’s waterfront, I met several taxi drivers who were relaxing at a picnic table and watching rusting ships bob on the incoming tide. “The church thing, all of that is rumours,” said Joe Ratu. “They bring a level of service that is bigger, more modern, clean.” Ratu drove past Navua’s True Mart most days and often used its toilets: they were the only clean public lavatories he knew of.

Another Fijian I spoke with, a middle-aged woman with a towering brunette pompadour named Va Rokobui, was also aware of the allegations of abuse – but nevertheless still bought her groceries from True Mart and ate at Grace Kitchen once a week. She told me her favourite meal was teriyaki chicken with noodles.

Later, I met two delivery men resting in red wheelbarrows on the side of the road while they waited for their next job. One ran to a nearby market and brought back his uncle, Orisi Somumu: one of the few ordinary Fijians I met who was vocally critical of the cult. He had heard gossip about Shin’s insulting rhetoric towards Fijians. “They want to build an empire in Fiji,” he told me. “They have to be thoroughly investigated.” But Somumu still felt conflicted about whether Grace Road should be kicked off the island. “There’s not much employment around,” he explained. “They’ve brought development to us.”

I had expected that Fiji’s mainstream churches, which exercise enormous influence in this deeply Christian country, would view the Korean interloper with scepticism. I was wrong. At Suva’s Anglican cathedral, I met a clergyman named Mosese Toroca. A compact man whose sharply protruding ears and mournful eyes gave him a mouse-like appearance, he took a break from repainting the church’s roof to speak with me. Toroca grew up near Navua. “When people are talking about Grace Road in the media, they only see the negatives,” he said. “For my village, it was good, because most of them get employed.”

This included Toroca and his brother-in-law, who both took jobs with Grace Road as drivers. They weren’t oblivious to the cult’s sinister aspects, however. Toroca told me about an incident in 2023, when his brother-in-law was transporting several Koreans to work. The brother-in-law had parked his van outside a shop and left to use the toilet. When he returned, a Korean worker had disappeared. When he asked where the worker had gone, nobody answered. Toroca’s brother-in-law was terrified that he would be sacked. (Later, said Toroca, Fijian media reported that the worker had escaped to South Korea.)

According to Toroca, he and other Fijian workers were never abused. “The harsh treatment is only to their own workers,” he told me. How did he feel when he watched the videos of cult leaders slapping followers? I asked. “I didn’t react because it’s not one of my own.” He shrugged. “If I see a Fijian, then it would bother me.”

There was, of course, at least one Fijian who alleged that he had been a victim of an assault by a member of Grace Road: Nainoca Kaukibeqa. Following the 2018 fight between Kaukibeqa and Kim, a judge convicted Kaukibeqa of assault and warned that if he offended again, he’d face jail time. Kaukibeqa lodged his own assault charge against Kim, but after the judge’s warning, he dropped it. That same year, according to Kaukibeqa, the cult pulled out the boundary markers at his farm’s eastern edge and used the space to grow crops for their cattle. Kaukibeqa gave up on that land, too. His son started working at a Grace Road business, where he was careful to never mention his father’s name to colleagues.

But in 2023 Kaukibeqa heard about the police raid Tikoduadua had ordered on Grace Road. “I was a victim of the Grace Road group,” he wrote on Facebook. “They can kill people just to get the land they want.” The post went viral on social media. Two days later, Fijian police revived Kaukibeqa’s assault case against Kim and the other Grace Road member who was alleged to have participated in the fight.

The revival of Kaukibeqa’s case presented several problems for the cult. It was not just a public-relations crisis; if Kim were convicted of assaulting a Fijian, it would give the government a new justification to deport him, potentially allowing it to circumvent Kim’s legal challenges. And if Kim and other prominent Grace Road figures were kicked out of Fiji, they would be vulnerable to extradition to South Korea – where they would almost certainly be imprisoned on similar charges to those for which Ok-Ju Shin, Kim’s mother, was prosecuted. Last July, she was convicted in South Korea on new charges of abusing almost a dozen children and sentenced to a further six years’ imprisonment. Amid these court cases and Tikoduadua’s opposition, it seemed that the cult’s time in Fiji might well come to an end.

Instead, its fortunes shifted once more. Late last year, over Tikoduadua’s objections, Kim was released on bail and returned to the cult’s Navua headquarters. Then, in January, in a bid to strengthen his struggling government, Fiji’s prime minister reassigned Tikoduadua’s policing and immigration portfolios to new allies who had once belonged to Bainimarama’s party — significantly weakening Tikoduadua’s ability to pursue the cult.

Last week, a judge acquitted Kim and the other Grace Road member on the charge of assaulting Kaukibeqa, citing Kaukibeqa’s “unreliable, inconsistent” testimony. In a statement to the media, Grace Road welcomed the ruling, saying that both men “had always maintained their innocence” and that they had been vindicated. In another statement, the cult thanked “everyone who has stood by and supported the Grace Road Group” and “reconfirm[ed] our commitment to Fiji and its people and look forward to the continued love and support of one and all”.

To observers outside the country, these developments offered further proof of how deeply Grace Road had entrenched itself in Fiji. Even as the allegations of abuse remain live, it seems that the country’s crises and the ongoing challenges of economic development have resulted in little political will or popular demand for a sustained battle against the cult.

To Grace Road’s loyal members, Kim’s acquittal must appear to be further evidence that they are part of a divine plan, and that their group will survive any challenges it faces. The turnaround in their circumstances brought to mind Shin’s reaction to her conviction in 2024. As she was escorted back to prison, she had reassured a group of supporters. “Don’t be surprised,” she told them. “It’s God’s work.”