Schapelle Corby: SAS Australia star shares Bali prison terror
Convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby has spoken about why she turned vegetarian during her long years in prison on the Indonesian island of Bali.
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Schapelle Corby has detailed her years of terrifying psychosis in a Bali prison that led to her hallucinating that she had eaten her father.
In an explosive interrogation to air in Seven’s new reality show, SAS Australia, the convicted drug smuggler revealed why she became a vegetarian.
“I don’t eat meat anymore because my hallucinations were so vivid that I thought I was eating my dad`s human flesh,” Corby said in the confronting scene that will play out when the season premieres Monday night, October 19.
“I would see visions, I would hallucinate and I wasn’t able to read. Reading really was my saviour before my illness because I would just block everything out and just read. I couldn’t read anymore and I couldn’t handle it. The only way my body could handle it was to hallucinate.”
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Corby said her father Michael’s death in January 2008 set off four years of psychosis when she was in Bali’s infamous Kerobokan prison.
“I am not fully recovered from it,” she said. “He (my dad) used to come to visit me a lot. I didn’t think that he would die and I didn’t understand that would be the last time that I would see him. We had been appealing and appealing and then the final appeal came back denied so it was those things that I couldn’t get my head around. So mid 2008 I started losing my mind … hallucinating, I couldn’t eat.”
Corby spent a decade in prison before being released on two years parole following her 2005 arrest for the importation of 4.2kg of cannabis into Bali.
She continues to claim her innocence.
“I didn’t (do it),” she said. “I went to Bali for a holiday and then in Bali Airport I picked up my boogie board and the handle had been cut.”
The 43-year-old is one of 17 celebrities to take part in the reality show, where contestants are put through their paces attempting to pass the gruelling Special Forces selection course.
Corby’s controversial interrogation was by SAS Chief Instructor Ant Middleton. She told him she found resilience “along the way”.
“I think my biggest achievement to date is still being alive,” she said. “I am a survivor.
That building, those walls, those visions, the mental illness, hallucinations, they were yesterday, but they are still hovering in my every day. I need help to move on from them, to live now and see what I am capable of in the future.”
* SAS Australia premieres on Channel 7 at 7.30pm Monday.
Originally published as Schapelle Corby: SAS Australia star shares Bali prison terror