HOSTAGE HORROR STORY
Coleman accuses husband Boyle of abuse during captivity
Caitlan Coleman says her husband, Joshua Boyle, deepened the nightmare of her captivity during their five years as hostages in Central Asia.
In unsealed court documents, Coleman alleges she was physically and emotionally abused by Boyle while they were being held by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network.
“J.B. (Joshua Boyle) regularly threatened to kill me by setting me on fire,” Coleman says in an affidavit filed in June as part of a family court application to gain sole custody of the couple’s children.
The specific allegations contained in the affidavits have not been proven in court.
Coleman, Boyle and their three children, all of whom were born in captivity, were rescued in October 2017 by Pakistani security forces after living as prisoners for five years in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The U.S.-born Coleman, 32, is now in Pennsylvania with the children after being granted temporary sole custody of them by an Ottawa family court judge on July 23.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Tracy Engelking also issued an order restraining Boyle from contacting or coming near Coleman and their children.
“To say that the circumstances of this case are tragic in the extreme would be an understatement,” Engelking said in her custody ruling.
The judge was presented with wildly different stories by Boyle and Coleman, but ultimately decided that it was in the best interests of the children to allow them to return to Pennsylvania with their mother. “Under the exceptional circumstances of this case, requiring C.C. (Caitlan Coleman) and the children to remain in Ottawa would be akin to once again holding them hostage.”
Boyle, 34, vigorously denied Coleman’s allegations, and levelled his own allegations of abuse in documents filed as part of a failed cross-motion to block his wife from leaving the country with their children.
In his 23-page affidavit, Boyle alleges his wife assaulted him and neglected their children because of untreated mental health issues.
He also alleges Coleman tried to push him in front of a Toronto Transit Commission subway car years before they were married.
Justice Engelking, however, said she received no evidence to support the contention that Coleman suffers from a mental health issue that could affect her suitability as a parent.
“The court does have evidence, on the other hand, that C.C. is healthily and protectively parenting the children,” Engelking noted before concluding: “Based on all of the evidence before me, I can find little to suggest C.C. would not be a suitable temporary custodian of the children.”
Obtained by the Citizen after a court application, the documents in the case offer a window into the couple’s deeply troubled relationship and provide new details about their hellish, five-year hostage ordeal.
Boyle, an aspiring journalist, met Coleman, a Quiznos restaurant manager, online in 2002. They became romantically involved four years later, but theirs was a turbulent, on-again, off-again relationship.
Boyle says their shared interests sustained them. “We both enjoyed BDSM (bondage),” Boyle says in his affidavit. “We both wanted to travel by way of backpacking, and we both wanted to see the world.”
They married during a trip through Central America in July 2011, but soon separated. Coleman began divorce proceedings in March 2012.
One month later, Boyle visited Coleman at her home in Pennsylvania, where they reconciled. They agreed to go backpacking through Central Asia, he says, and decided to leave on the trip even after finding out that Coleman was pregnant with their first child. They left in July 2012.
In her affidavit, Coleman insists she reluctantly agreed to the trip only after Boyle promised not to go to Afghanistan. Boyle disclosed his true intentions after they landed in Central Asia, she says, “so that I would not back out.”
Boyle insists Coleman knew he intended to go to Afghanistan, a trip designed to further his journalistic ambitions.
“We crossed into Afghanistan for a short while in hopes that I could meet people who could give me a story I could write about,” he says in his affidavit. “I had hoped that personal experience in Afghanistan might help me to land more permanent journalism work.”
Boyle has previously suggested that they travelled to Afghanistan to do humanitarian work.
They were taken hostage on Oct. 10, 2012, after leaving a Kabul guest house in a taxi. Coleman was five months pregnant at the time.
Boyle says their captors inflicted severe physical and psychological damage on them for the next five years, during which they were moved to 19 hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In their affidavits, Boyle and Coleman offer completely different accounts of their relationship during captivity.
Coleman says Boyle became increasingly erratic and irrational during their ordeal, and fixated on “depicting me as an enemy in his life.”
“The guards would separate us for a few days, weeks or months at a time,” she says. “When we were returned together, J.B. would accuse me of betraying him by accepting niceties from the guards and not asking for him more often.”
After three years in captivity, he became increasingly abusive, she says. “J.B. had uncontrolled rage, instituted corporal punishment of me, and struck me in a fit of rage.”
He repeatedly told her that she was “one of the worst people in the world,” Coleman says, and suggested that “a husband who kills his wife is justified.”
After a disagreement in February 2017, she alleges, Boyle “hit me in the face hard enough to break my cheekbone.”
Coleman alleges Boyle later confined her to a small shower stall for weeks at a time.
In his affidavit, Boyle alleges that Coleman neglected their children while in captivity, leaving him as the primary caregiver. “Multiple captors would reference me as the ‘wife and mother, husband and father’ in the family, noting that all nurturing of the children was entirely upon me,” he says.
Boyle says he slapped his wife once while in captivity as she attempted suicide by trying to overdose on stockpiled medication.
He often went without food, Boyle says, to give more to his children or pregnant wife, and spent hours whittling toys and gifts for them with a spoon.
He built a small garden beside the family’s squat toilet, he says, and planted okra, bean and mango seeds so his children could appreciate gardening. He captured mice for the children to keep as pets, and sewed them clothes from blankets and scraps. He wrote them songs, taught them sign language, made up stories to entertain them, and helped them memorize selections of the Bible and Qur’an, according to his affidavit.
Boyle says he also taught them about their Canadian and Irish heritage.
“Their knowledge of Canada was exhaustive enough to being able to identify northern islands such as Devon, Banks and Victoria on hand-drawn maps, a desire to move to the Magdalene Islands due to a Stompin’ Tom Connors song they knew, bedtime stories often drawn from Road to Avonlea, and pretending to be Emily Carr when using mud to finger paint pictures of Salish homes (that always looked suspiciously like our cell, unsurprisingly).”
Coleman, meanwhile, told court that she was the primary caregiver, and was responsible for homeschooling the children during the family’s captivity. In a second affidavit, filed in response to Boyle’s, Coleman alleges she did not share her husband’s interest in Central Asia or the extremist ideologies it harboured.
“I would like to stress, most strongly, that for more than a decade, the respondent (Boyle) has had an interest in extremist ideologies and in the complete subservience of women. I have never shared that interest.”
She pointed to his previous marriage to Zaynab Khadr as evidence of his interest in extremism. Khadr is the eldest daughter of Ahmed Said Khadr, a member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle who died in a firefight with Pakistani forces in October 2003; she outraged many Canadians with her comments in a 2004 documentary in which she suggested that the Sept. 11 terror attacks were justified.
The Boyle family was rescued last October in a dramatic shootout that made international headlines. Weeks after returning home, the Boyle family met Justin Trudeau in the Prime Minister’s Office.
In his affidavit, Boyle says that readjusting to life in Canada has been a traumatic experience. “While captivity was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he says, “the adjustment to coming home was a very close second.”
Coleman is due to give birth to the couple’s fourth child this month.
While captivity was the worst thing that ever happened to me, the adjustment to coming home was a very close second.