Cassie Sainsbury is scared, sick and lonely inside a Colombian prison, new world exclusive audio reveals
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Scared, sick and bullied, Cassie Sainsbury has given her first interview as she remains caught up in a TV war. HEAR THE AUDIO
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WORLD EXCLUSIVE
Cassie Sainsbury is scared, sick and lonely in her Bogota prison cell as she ponders whether to plead guilty to smuggling drugs, despite insisting she is innocent.
In a world exclusive interview with News Corp Australia, the 22 year old reveals the torment of her new life since being locked up a month ago in Colombia after being arrested at El Dorado International Airport with 5.8kg of cocaine in her suitcase.
“I’m handling it,” she said.
“I have good days and I have bad days, but every day is hard.”
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MORE: Read the full transcript of Cassie Sainsbury’s first interview
Declaring she can’t trust anyone in the prison, Sainsbury said she is scared for her safety and unable to understand much of what is going on around her because she doesn’t speak Spanish.
Sainsbury said her greatest hope is the narcotics police in Bogota find the mysterious man she knew only as Angelo, who she says tricked her into packing the drugs into her suitcase, thinking they were instead a bargain batch of headphones.
“I hope they find the person,” she said, speaking over a public phone available for several hours a day for all prisoners to use.
Sainsbury has spent the past month in Patio 5 of El Buen Pastor, a minimum security wing of Colombia’s most notorious women’s prison, which houses several other foreigners, drug smugglers and political prisoners.
Despite the relative safety of her wing, she says she is being targeted by other women.
“They are all talking about me quite obviously behind my back and they’re not afraid to push past me and push me around,” she said.
“There’s just a lot of chaos here.
“Quite a few of the inmates here are very pushy with me. They push past me. They start abusing me in Spanish because they know I don’t understand it and I haven’t actually done anything wrong.”
It’s not just her physical safety she is worried about though — Sainsbury says she is also sick and not getting appropriate medical attention.
“I started losing feeling in my arms,” she said.
“It’s not all the time but it’s becoming an often occurring thing, and when I went to the doctors about it they basically just gave me vitamins and said ‘it’s stress’.
“And I said, ‘well no, because you know this happened a few years ago and I lost complete feeling in half my body’ and they just wanted to just like push it under the rug.”
She’s also struggling with the “horrible” food.
“I don’t eat red meat and I told the doctor I needed to see a dietitian and they just basically said ‘oh well you have to eat what you’ve been given’,” she said.
“Basically you always get rice and some sort of red meat. Sometimes you get chicken which is fine and salad, but usually it’s some kind of offal looking meat.”
Sainsbury said she’s gradually getting used to living in the jail, saying: “It’s not too bad here.”
“But it is cold and you can’t lock the door, so there’s no security there. People do steal a lot here. You do get a blanket a mattress, a pillow and everything.”
She plans to start learning Spanish, describing the language barrier as her biggest challenge.
“It’s not nice. And being a foreigner it doesn’t help the situation either. It’s harder because I don’t speak the language,” she said.
“I think I understand it to a degree but it’s still quite hard. People are taking advantage of the fact that I don’t speak Spanish,” she said.
Sainsbury has from day one insisted she was set up, and whether you believe her or not, her story has served as a stark cautionary tale.
She issued a warning to any other young women who were planning to explore the world by themselves.
“Just be safe when you’re travelling alone,” she said.