‘Cocaine Cassie’: How she went from Minlaton in SA to a Colombian prison, worldwide infamy, and love
How did a young woman from country SA, with dreams of running her own business, end up with a conviction for drug smuggling in a notorious prison in South America?
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Convicted South Australian drug smuggler Cassie Sainsbury is back on home soil for the first time since she was arrested in Colombia in 2017.
Sainsbury’s plight captured the nation’s attention as the former fitness trainer, gym operator and aspiring model faced the very real prospect of spending more than two decades behind bars in a notorious South American women’s prison.
Sainsbury ultimately served almost three years of a six-year sentence before being released along with about 4000 other prisoners in early 2020 on humanitarian grounds amid the spread of Covid. She was ordered to stay in Colombia for a further 27 months.
But how did she end up in Colombia in the first place?
EARLY YEARS
Sainsbury, 27, grew up with her parents Stuart Sainsbury and Lisa Evans at Minlaton on South Australia’s picturesque Yorke Peninsula.
As Aleks Devic reported following her arrest in 2017, Sainsbury’s parents divorced when she was 11 years old and she moved with her dad to the nearby town of Warooka where she spent much of teenagehood. She attended Yorketown High School.
Sainsbury’s dad told Devic his little girl tended to her own chooks and nursed them back to health when they suffered heatstroke. The pair went camping together.
Sainsbury was a volunteer with the Country Fire Service (CFS) but quit the service in 2014 due to the trauma of having to help save the life of a close friend who was badly injured in a car accident.
The CFS would later distance itself from Sainsbury, asking the family to remove a reference to the organisation from a fundraising page, pointing out that Sainsbury “has not been a volunteer for the past three years”.
CASSIE OPENS A GYM
Sainsbury ran a private training business from home, but her dream was to open her own gym.
As Aleks Devic reported, she worked as a cook and at a kiosk, petrol station and bar to save up enough money to buy all the equipment she needed.
“She worked her arse off to get that gym open,” sister Khala said.
Sainsbury spotted her opportunity when the only gym in Yorketown moved towns and worked long days to get the business on its feet.
But after six months clients stopped turning up, the money dried up and Sainsbury was forced to close her nascent business owing thousands in unpaid rent.
Sainsbury packed up and moved back to Adelaide but, Devic reported, not before leaving a “trail of enemies” in the town of roughly 700.
“Some loathe Cassie. Some won’t even talk about her. Others have disowned her from the town,” Devic wrote.
Sainsbury moved back to Adelaide to live with her then-partner Scott Broadbridge’s parents and told Scott their financial troubles were over.
She’d picked up work with her uncle Neil’s cleaning business, which paid well and necessitated many trips to Sydney.
SYDNEY BROTHEL
But there was no cleaning business. Sainsbury had started working in a Sydney brothel.
As Devic reported, some of those who worked with her described her as lonely, fly-in, fly-out who would sit in the corner, cry and eat pizza.
In a September 2017 interview Nine’s 60 Minutes, Sainsbury admitted she had worked at a brothel in western Sydney but said it was as a receptionist, not a sex worker.
“I did some work there, but I wasn’t a prostitute,” she said.
“They were struggling to have receptionists, they were struggling a lot with that sort of thing.”
ARRESTED IN COLOMBIA
As Michael McGuire and Sarah Blake wrote in May, 2017, the first most Australians had heard of Sainsbury, who was quickly dubbed “Cocaine Cassie” in the press, was when a fundraising page set up by her desperate mother, Lisa, and sister, Khala, was made public.
Cassie, Khala wrote, was being held by authorities in the Colombian capital Bogota, accused of trying to smuggle almost 6kg of cocaine out of the country hidden in 18 boxes of headphones, which her sister said were meant to be given as gifts at her wedding the following February.
“They X-rayed her luggage and they found 5.8kg of cocaine concealed in packaging, which was meant to be gifts for people for her bridal party and family friends,” Khala told The Advertiser.
Sainsbury, then aged 22, was arrested at El Dorado International Airport in Bogota on April 11, 2017 with 5.8kg of cocaine in her suitcase, just minutes before she was due to board a flight home to Australia via London, France and Hong Kong.
Following her arrest, she was held at Colombia’s largest women’s prison, El Buen Pastor, to await her trial.
Meanwhile, her family was setting up a fundraising page to help meet Sainsbury’s legal costs which were mounting by the day.
“As her mother I’m devastated that my little girl is in this place … our family just wants her home safe,” mum Lisa wrote in a message on the page.
CONFUSION AND CONTRADICTION
In the days following news of her arrest, accounts of how Sainsbury had come to be in Colombia in the first place differed widely. There was confusion and contradiction.
Sister Khala suggested Cassie had been in Colombia on a “working holiday” to promote personal training, despite the fact Australia did not offer working holiday visas to Australians.
Writing on the fundraising page, then-fiance Scott Broadbridge described the theory as nonsense writing that, while Sainsbury was a personal trainer, “she is not currently personal training and hasn’t been for six months”.
“I don’t know why that was mentioned at all. She helped manage a commercial cleaning business that had both national and international clients,” he wrote.
He also claimed Sainsbury had worked three jobs to save $20,000 to work in Bogota.
But as Michael McGuire and Sarah Blake reported, that statement jarred with Sainsbury’s extensive travel movements before her arrest.
In the weeks leading up to her trip to Colombia, Sainsbury had been to Canada, China, Vanuatu and the US, where it appeared she caught a connecting flight to Bogota.
And on April 8, she posted a photo to Instagram from Colombia, which also raised the question about why she would need the $20,000.
“Can’t complain about an all-expenses paid work trip which is mainly holiday and very little work,” the caption read.
CASSIE TELLS HER STORY
Following her arrest, Sainsbury first claimed she became entangled in the illegal drug trade after applying for a loan through the popular US classifieds website Craigslist.
But in an interview with 60 Minutes five months after her arrest, Sainsbury said she was offered a job as a legitimate international courier and had been offered $10,000 to transport what she thought were documents from Colombia.
Asked if she had thought $10,000 was a large amount of money to be paid simply to carry documents and too good to be true, Sainsbury said: “Yes, but I suppose it was at the point where I needed the money. So I thought, yeah, I’ll do it”.
She admitted she had, at one point, thought the mission could be “a bit suss” but said she took the job believing she wasn’t doing anything criminal.
In Colombia, Sainsbury said she met a man named Angelo, who didn’t provide his surname, who was the person who packed and locked her suitcase.
“I didn’t know exactly what was in … I didn’t know it was headphones. I didn’t know. I wasn’t allowed to look. I wasn’t allowed to touch. It was packed in my suitcase.”
Sainsbury told 60 minutes she began having second thoughts when her flights out of Colombia were changed by a person who “could be fake”.
“I said I don’t want any part in this, I didn’t come here to do anything illegal,” she said.
At this point, Sainsbury said, she began receiving threats, including a “very nasty phone call” telling her that her family would be killed if she didn’t go through with the job.
The threats included surveillance photos of her family back in Adelaide, including a photo of her then-fiance, Scott, leaving a gym.
During the 60 Minutes interview, Sainsbury claimed evidence for the threats existed on her phone. Problem was, she couldn’t remember the passcode.
Suggesting Sainsbury’s claim was absurd, interviewer Liam Bartlett said he didn’t know “another millennial who has forgotten their password”.
“I’m sure if you were in prison for five months you would forget it,” she replied.
CASSIE SENT TO PRISON
In November, 2017, seven months after she was first arrested, Sainsbury was sentenced to six years in prison after the judge accepted a plea deal and her claims she was threatened into committing the crime.
The then-22-year-old was facing up to 30 years behind bars for the drug-smuggling mission.
The sentencing hearing was closed to the media but speaking to reporters after the sentence, Sainsbury’s lawyer Orlando Herran said his client was “lucky” to be handed such a short sentence for carrying such a “large” amount of drugs.
This, he said, was due to the fact the judge had accepted that Sainsbury was a small fish and a victim of the operation.
“Victims of deceit, victims of their own socio-economic conditions and victims of ignorance regarding Colombian law,” Herran said, speaking in Spanish, outside the court.
He said investigators had discovered a larger operation and suspected Sainsbury was “used as bait to distract authorities while they smuggled drugs out undetected”.
Mr Herran said Sainsbury was also ordered to pay the equivalent of 72 months the Colombian minimum wage – or about A$130,000.
LIFE IN PRISON
Just weeks after her arrest, News Corp. journalist Sarah Blake landed a world exclusive interview with Sainsbury, conducted by phone from inside her prison cell.
In a wide-ranging interview, Sainsbury talked about conditions inside the prison, how she was coping with life behind bars, her diet, health and relations with the other inmates.
“There’s 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,” she revealed.
Read a full transcript of the interview, and hear the audio.
SCOTT AND CASSIE SPLIT
In 2018, Sainsbury announced she had broken up with fiance Scott Broadbridge and had called off their wedding, which had been planned for February that year.
Sainsbury told radio station KIIS FM it was her decision to end the relationship and that it was “the best thing” for both of them.
“For quite some time things just weren’t good between us,” she said.
“Probably from the moment I got in here … the relationship was doomed.
“I needed to start thinking about myself and what I needed for myself and my future and it came down to for me, I broke up with Scott because it was the best thing for me and I also believe that it is the best thing for him in the future as well.”
CASSIE’S NEW MYSTERY LOVE
In late 2018, Sainsbury revealed she had a new love in her life, a mystery person also doing time behind bars at El Buen Pastor.
“It’s something that’s just starting,” she reportedly told New Idea magazine, but declined to say whether her new flame was a man or woman.
In December, 2019, Sainsbury became engaged to fellow inmate Joslianinyer Pico, who posted the news on her Instagram account.
Pico, then 30, was serving a stint in prison for theft.
“We came back in from playing a game of soccer and I walked to the passageway and she had a poster on the wall which said, ‘Will you marry me?’” Sainsbury told New Idea.
“A huge amount of people were watching me! She doesn’t speak English, she was trying to learn English to propose. It was quite cute! I said yes, of course.”
In April, 2020, Sainsbury reportedly told New Idea she one day hoped to start a family with Pico, through IVF.
“We’ve spoken about it; Joli wants heaps of kids. She told me she’d like to have kids by the time she’s 35,” she told the magazine.
“If everything goes well and we’re together, I don’t have a problem with going through the process of having kids.”
But the pair reportedly went their separate ways after Pico was released from prison in early 2020, with Sainsbury saying her ex-fiance had ended up “being with someone else”.
CASSIE FINALLY WALKS OUT OF PRISON
In April 2020, Sainsbury, 24, also tasted freedom after she was released from prison along with 4000 other inmates, who were let out on humanitarian grounds to protect them from Covid, which was beginning to spread around the world.
Speaking again to 60 Minutes following her release, Sainsbury said she had grown as a person during her time in prison.
“I’ve grown up a lot. I learnt a lot about myself, I learnt a lot about people,” she said.
“But at the same time, everything I’ve been through in prison, everything I’ve learnt, I wouldn’t change it because it’s made me a strong person, it’s made me who I am today”.
ONLY FANS
In late 2020, it was reported Sainsbury was selling nude photos for money, while serving the remainder of her sentence on parole in Colombia.
She told one buyer she was “happy” with the $400 a week offer made by one man in exchange for photos and calls.
She later turned to popular adult subscription site Only Fans to make some extra cash, saying it was because she was unable to work in Bogota because of visa complications.
But she said she’d quit the service a few months later, saying it made her uncomfortable.
“I was on OnlyFans but it wasn’t ever anything fully explicit,” she told KIIS FM’s Kyle & Jackie O show.
CASSIE’S NEW LOVE
In October, 2021, Sainsbury revealed her engagement to a 33-year-old computer technician named Tatiana.
Sainsbury told the Daily Mail the pair had friends in common and “hit it off” one night at a birthday party.
“It was a really unexpected relationship,” she told the publication.
After a brief relationship, Tatiana proposed to Sainsbury on a getaway trip to the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena.
‘She took me to Cartagena and organised a small, romantic dinner at a cosy little restaurant on the beachfront. She asked me to marry her there.”
WEDDING BELLS
In March 2022, Sainsbury announced she and Tatiana had tied the knot, sharing a photo of her new bride along with the hashtag “Just Married”.
A month before, Sainsbury was spotted in Bogota’s wedding district admiring wedding dresses and gemstone-encrusted jewellery in shop windows.
“It will be a big wedding, in a church, with lots of guests – especially all of Tatiana’s family and Cassie’s mum,” a source close to Sainsbury said.
COMING HOME
In May, Sainsbury revealed plans to return home to Australia for the first time since her arrest and release from prison.
Speaking during a live stream on her Instagram account, Sainsbury said coming back to Australia would “close a chapter in her life” but she was not planning to return for good.
“I’m excited to go back, yes, don’t get me wrong.
“(But) my life is pretty much here in Colombia and I’m starting a new English school, I’m married, I’m projecting myself in the best way possible.”
“But I’m excited to come back and I guess close this chapter because I feel like, until I go back home, I’m never going to be able to close that chapter.”
Sainsbury touched down in Sydney last week.
‘I’M STILL PRETTY ANGRY ABOUT IT’
It’s unclear whether Sainsbury will visit South Australia during her stay in Australia. Dad Stuart told The Advertiser he wasn’t expecting a visit from his daughter, adding he was still “pretty angry” about the whole affair.
“I am still pretty angry about it. My family was trashed. We share the same surname. I’ve got an elderly mother to protect,” Mr Sainsbury told reporter Andrew Hough.
“I don’t expect her to come up here. I don’t expect to see her. You can’t drag someone’s family through the dirt and not expect to be pissed off. If she wants to talk to me, she knows where I am. I’m not going to trash her,” he said. Read the full story.
TV CAREER
In March 2023, Channel 7 announced Sainsbury would compete in its latest season of the reality show SAS Australia.
The network also named model Lindy Klim, Olympic athletes Matthew Mitcham and Stephanie Rice, actor Zima Anderson and former Bachelor Tim Robards among the cast of 14 contestants.
For the first time the contestants would be taken offshore to a base in the Middle East to “eat, sleep and train together in punishingly hot and arid conditions, with no allowances or exceptions made for their celebrity status or gender”, Channel 7 said.
The show sees contestants being subjected to a series of gruelling mental and physical challenges set by elite British ex-Special Forces soldier Ant Middleton as part of an SAS selection course.
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