National Post (National Edition)
‘THE ABUSE HAD MADE ME HATE MYSELF’: LINDHOUT SPEAKS AT SENTENCING.
Journalist describes toll of 2008 kidnapping
Prosecutors are seeking a 15- to 18-year prison sentence for the only person convicted in the abduction and torture of Canadian freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout and her Australian colleague, photographer Nigel Brennan.
“No hostage-taking in Canadian history parallels the depravity Amanda Lindhout was forced to endure for 15 months,” Croft Michaelson told Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Smith in an Ottawa court on Wednesday.
Last December, Smith convicted Ali Omar Ader, the negotiator for the band of armed gunmen who took Lindhout and Brennan hostage near Mogadishu, Somalia, in August of 2008. Though Ader took no part in the assaults upon the pair, he was found guilty as a party because of his “integral” role as the gang’s point man with Lindhout’s and Brennan’s families.
They knew Ader as “Adam.”
In his decision last year, Smith praised the courage of Lindhout, from Red Deer, Alta., and it was on abundant display again this day.
In the time of #MeToo, with monikers like “Climate Barbie” and gender insensitivity deemed their own sort of violation, Lindhout is the personification of the real deal, unimaginable resilience in the face of unspeakable sexual violence.
In a strong voice, with her longtime psychologist and torture expert Dr. Katherine Porterfield at her side, Lindhout described the ordeal that saw her and Brennan beaten, starved, degraded, chained and shackled and, in Lindhout’s case, rape used as a weapon.
She was sexually assaulted so often that she had to have a series of “invasive and painful” procedures to remove scar tissue.
They were released only after 460 days, on Nov. 25, 2009, but neither one of them will ever be free of the experience, as they made clear in the victim-impact statements they read in court here Wednesday.
For both Lindhout and Brennan, the sexual abuse visited upon her was the worst of it, she for the obvious reasons, he because he had to listen to it, helpless in his separate room.
As Brennan put it, “Being forced to listen to the torment she suffered during the last 13 months of our ordeal, once we were separated, was not only horrific, but souldestroying.
“Knowing that she was being sexually assaulted, tortured and likely raped” in her nearby room, “almost pushed me to an emotional breaking point where I was considering taking my own life.”
It left him filled with rage and hate and survivor’s guilt, Brennan said, though after eight-plus years, he has come to accept that “forgiveness is the one thing that will keep humanity moving forward” and asked the judge to show leniency to Ader.
He made a particular point to correct the public record, noting that despite media reports to the contrary, the ransom that was facilitated and paid was raised by his family alone.
“It is deeply important to me that my family is acknowledged for such a noble act in securing freedom for both Amanda and myself,” Brennan said.
Lindhout also wished for closure and healing for “Adam’s wife and five children in Somalia.”
The effects on Lindhout were and remain almost beyond description, even hers, and she is an articulate public speaker and author of the bestselling memoir A House in the Sky.
Even before she entered the courtroom, a court staffer came in to fetch a box of tissue for her, and as Lindhout approached the witness stand, frail and thin, she was whimpering as a small and wounded creature.
But she composed herself, grabbed Porterfield’s hand, and began to make public the excruciatingly intimate details of the damage done to her.
Because of the sexual violence, her view of her own body changed, she said. She saw herself as “a damaged woman who no one would ever find attractive or love again,” and she was a young woman “wanting to rebuild my life, find love eventually, maybe have a family, but the abuse had made me hate myself.”
And the fact that her abduction was high-profile, and in the news, meant only that she attracted the attention of those “men around the world who are obsessed with kidnappings” and with the “female hostage sexual scenario …”
Both suffer the lasting physical effects of captivity and starvation, everything from compromised digestive symptoms to, in Lindhout’s case, “a mess of broken teeth” that require extensive dental work.
But being in the dental chair leaves her “feelings of being trapped and held down,” so she must be sedated first, which usually leaves her depressed.
Ader was lured to Canada, where he was promptly arrested, by the prospect of a lucrative book deal brokered by an undercover RCMP agent known only as “A.K.”
Even then, Michaelson told the judge, “his motive was greed.” He told the undercover agent he’d been paid $10,000 for his role as negotiator (he felt cheated) and even after Lindhout had been freed, tried to sell her back the letters she’d written and which he’d found.
Once, in the fall of 2009 in one of a half-dozen conversations he had with Lindhout’s mother, Lorinda Stewart, Ader told her that her daughter “is not what she was to you,” that she was ill and confused.
Ader’s lawyer, Samir Adam, is seeking a sentence of between 10 and 12 years, citing the 1,022 days Ader has spent in pre-trial custody, sometimes under crowded conditions.
Whatever the judge decides, Michaelson has also asked him to consider imposing what’s called a “halfparole order,” meaning that Ader would have to serve at least half his sentence before being deemed eligible for parole.
Though he several times appeared to wipe tears from his face when Lindhout was speaking, and then made an apology, Ader also asked the judge “to give me back my freedom” so he can look after his family in Somalia. He is not, he said, “that bad guy in 2008-09.”
The judge has reserved his sentence until June 18.