TREATED LIKE VERMIN
Locked up with killers. A cockroach-infested cell. Fending off advances from fellow inmates. And prison officers who spied on her via CCTV. In part two of her harrowing account of a Cyprus rape nightmare, the freed British teen recounts life as prisoner 6
AT NIgHT there is no respite from the fug of cigarette smoke that chokes her. Locked in her prison cell with nine other women, sleep eludes her.
The teenage girl — blonde, sweet-faced; an english rose — crouches by the door reading by a chink of light that filters in from the corridor.
Her weight has plummeted to less than seven-and-a-half stone; nightmares haunt her.
And there has been a sexual assault; all the more terrifying because the girl, imprisoned in a squalid Cypriot jail, was gang-raped by a group of young Israeli men while on holiday in the resort of Ayia Napa only two weeks earlier.
A fellow cellmate exposes her breasts, then squeezes the teenager’s bottom. ‘I’ve just had a panic attack in the toilet,’ the girl, who cannot legally be named, writes in her prison diary. ‘I am scared . . . she’s chosen the bed above mine . . . I feel how I did on the night after [the rape].
‘I know I will not sleep tonight, I do not want to. I want to be invisible, I want to be gone. I want to see my mum . . .’
How has it come to this? How could a fresh-faced, sports-mad teenager from the Midlands — she could be your daughter or mine — poised to start university, on her first holiday abroad on her own, have ended up in prison after enduring the most horrific multiple rape?
How has she turned from victim to perpetrator? How has her orderly, middle- class life descended into such terror?
Her story has sparked an international furore and global debate. Does it highlight Western depravity, Israeli misogyny or the corruption of the Cypriot legal system?
Wherever you stand, at the centre of it all is a bright young woman who had hoped for a police career in counter-terrorism — that promising life now in tatters.
Today, she is back at home with her mum, 48, a divorcee who works as a senior project manager, in rural Derbyshire.
However, a four- month suspended prison sentence, imposed by a Cypriot court, still hangs over her. It is a criminal conviction she is appealing.
Her ordeal began, as we described on Saturday in the first of this two-part interview with her — the fullest account yet of her ordeal — with an ordinary holiday romance.
SHehad a fling with a handsome 21-year- old Israeli footballer she knew as Sam, but the romance descended into the horror of gang rape.
She was having consensual sex with him in the early hours of July 18 last year at the Pambos Napa Rocks hotel when he pinned her down after as many as 12 of his compatriots burst into the room and took turns to violate her.
Then the nightmare escalated and, nearly seven months on, she is only just emerging from it.
After reporting the gang rape to police, events took a sinister turn. She was branded a liar, charged with fabricating the offence, coerced into retracting her accusation and, in a series of court appearances in Famagusta, hectored by an aggressive judge who did not believe her.
Today, she takes up the narrative following her first court appearance, on July 29 last year, after which she was held on remand in Nicosia Central Prison for five weeks, charged with having caused ‘public mischief’.
‘I was thrown into a police car. There was a crush of people outside the court, some of them pulling at my jumper, lots of them Israeli Press. They were shouting in a foreign language and I froze and started to shake,’ she recalls.
‘The police didn’t understand why, but it’s a symptom of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder ( PTSD). Loud male voices, shouting in foreign languages, sets it off.
‘I was wearing handcuffs with a fixed metal bar across them, and the metal was so sharp I had little slits on my wrists and bruises on my forearm.
‘I was treated no differently from a common criminal, as if I’d committed a capital offence.
‘At the prison, they pulled the drawstring out of my hoodie. They didn’t take my phone and I was harassed on it by some of the Israeli boys who’d raped me. They were laughing and jeering.’
She shared a filthy, cockroachinfested remand cell with Filipinas, Russians and Cypriots, sleeping on ‘military-style’ bunk beds, on plastic sheets with scratchy wool blankets to which she was allergic. Among the other prison inmates were convicted murderers.
‘A woman who’d killed her entire family ran after me screaming when I left a toaster plugged in. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but she terrified me. A prison guard had to jump in to calm her down.
‘Then there was Ifygemia who was put into our cell, and to begin with I was frightened of her. Then I learned that she had the mental age of a child — she’d been taking drugs since she was nine — and she’d have seizures.’ She wrote in her prison diary at the time: ‘ Ifygemia has made several advances, she’s squeezed my bum, shown me her bare t**s, begging to see mine, too. I felt awful and sweaty and sick. I was sick as I thought about the stains of hand marks they’ve [ the rapists] left on my body.’
Today, she remembers: ‘ One day her eyes were grey and rolling. I took her pulse and it was really irregular, so I rang the bell for the guards. They said: “How dare you?”
‘They treated us like vermin.
That’s why I didn’t tell them after I fainted several times.’
Little wonder she was weak: in five weeks of incarceration, her weight dropped by two-and-ahalf stone because the prison food — typically undercooked chicken and stale bread — made her sick.
She was drugged, too, on high doses of the anti-panic medication Xanax.
Banned by the NHS because it is highly addictive, it also worsened her PTSD symptoms. ‘I had hallucinations; I’d see imaginary people,’ she recalls. ‘I felt awful, drowned in anxiety. I had a lot of nightmares, but they didn’t come as much if I slept in the day, so I’d stay awake by reading through the night, sitting by a sliver of light that came through the cell door.
‘ Mum brought me books. Ironically, I read far more than I had at college — 54 in all; mostly historical novels. I love Downton Abbey — anything set in that era. And every day I wrote my journal.’
Her mother, who visited her in jail regularly and who is sitting PRINTED AND DISTRIBUTED BY PRESSREADER
with her when we meet, interjects: ‘It was horrifying, just torture, to see her diminishing before my eyes.
‘When you’ve been through a gang rape, and then been shoved away into a tiny, crowded prison cell, you lose control of both your life and your autonomy.
‘It was abusive. And then the way she was treated on her court appearances was torture for her as well. The judge shouted at her. He conducted the proceedings in Greek and the translations were ropy at best. There just wasn’t the rigour or seriousness you’d get in an English court.’
Curled up on a sofa under a fleecy blanket, her daughter speaks animatedly, then intermittently her eyes gaze off blankly into the distance.
She has suffered from both insomnia and hypersomnia — excessive sleeping — and the night before we meet she was wakeful, drifting into a fitful slumber only at 7am. She remembers the prevailing stench of the prison — cigarettes and sweat — the lack of privacy (the open showers and loos) and the occasional, redemptive glimpses of beauty and kindness. ‘There was a courtyard with flagstone paving and two trees with twisted trunks, flowering with vibrant pink and ivory petals,’ she remembers.
She spent her 19th birthday behind bars: ‘I had no presents but a cellmate,
Tatiana, who has a lad my age, put sweets under my pillow.
‘Everyone said “Happy Birthday”. A visit from my dad was a highlight, but it was bittersweet. When he left, I felt even more alone.’
She felt unnerved when guards forbade her from wearing shorts because male prison staff had been ogling her: ‘It was 48c and I went out in the yard in them. I got an absolute telling off. They told me male prison officers were watching me in my shorts on CCTV, which was creepy.’
The daily routine was monotonous: a sunrise reveille, breakfast of stale bread and jelly- like marmalade, then cleaning.
‘I swept and scrubbed the prison floors with soap and water until my hands were covered in blisters.
‘Then I’d go back to bed and sleep until lunchtime. There was a tiny gym with a treadmill and I’d run on that for about two hours a day.
‘Lunch was often chickpea stew — the only meal I liked — and after that I’d write my journal or play chess with Tatiana.
‘We were locked in our cell at 9pm. Some of my cellmates would smoke all night. People were having asthma attacks. I saw an attempted suicide — one prisoner drank the bleach in the loo.’
When she thought of her life at home in Derbyshire — country walks with her sheepdog; the comfort of a snug duvet; her two beloved cats — she could not believe what her life had descended to.
‘If you’d asked any of my friends if I would end up in prison, they would have laughed,’ she smiles ruefully.
OnAuGuST 29, she was freed from jail on €20,000 bail, which had been raised by her family. ‘Mum came to collect me and as soon as I got out we celebrated with fish and chips.’ But there was no jubilation. The conditions of her release were punitive. ‘I was under house arrest, reporting to the police station three times a week,’ she recalls. ‘I was still traumatised.’
Her family took turns to fly out to Cyprus to stay with her. Then, on January 7, she was back in court in Famagusta where she received a four-month jail sentence, suspended for three years.
She was permitted to return home to England, but the celebrations were muted. She still has a criminal conviction, but plans to clear her name.
She and her mum flew home to the rapturous welcome she’d dreamed of. ‘My dog went crazy and the cats were on the stairs, waiting. They kept patting my face with their paws to make sure I was still alive,’ she laughs.
We ask why she is fighting on — to Cyprus’s Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights if necessary — and her answer is simple.
‘The main thing for me is to hear the words, “not guilty,”’ she says. ‘ The Cypriot courts have handled my case atrociously. I can’t let them get away with it.
‘I know some people with closed minds might think: “This girl was in prison for lying about a rape.” But why would I lie? Why make it up? I have nothing to gain.’
She ends with a warning: ‘ Cyprus isn’t safe. It’s not just a question of staying with your friends and watching what you’re drinking.
‘The judicial system isn’t safe — and that’s what I’m fighting.’