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Cocaine Cassie reveals more on working in a brothel and how she was tortured in a dental chair on I Catch Killers podcast

Cassie Sainsbury has told Gary Jubelin about how her life spiralled out of control in a brothel, before she was thrown in a Colombian jail where she was tortured. Listen to the podcast.

Cassie Sainsbury: My secret love made me a drug mule

Cassie ‘Cocaine Cassie’ Sainsbury has opened up to Gary Jubelin about how her life spiralled out of control before she was thrown in a Colombian jail, where she was raped, beaten, repeatedly strip searched by male guards, and tortured in a dentist chair.

Sainsbury was 22 when she was caught trying to smuggle 5.8kg of cocaine out of Bogota International Airport on a flight bound for Australia in 2017. The drugs were hidden inside headphones.

She spent three years at the hellish El Buen Pastor, struggling to survive.

Now 29, Sainsbury has reflected on key details that led to her failed drug smuggling attempt in an interview with Jubelin on his hit podcast, I Catch Killers.

Cassie Sainsbury was arrested and jailed for cocaine smuggling. Picture : RoyVPhotography
Cassie Sainsbury was arrested and jailed for cocaine smuggling. Picture : RoyVPhotography
Cassie Sainsbury aka Cocaine Cassie. Picture: Channel 7
Cassie Sainsbury aka Cocaine Cassie. Picture: Channel 7

Sainsbury tells Jubelin that she was teased at school because her mother and father had split, because she was overweight, didn’t wear makeup, didn’t go out, and because a few people assumed she was gay.

She is now married to a woman, but she came from a small town in South Australia, her father’s family was Anglican, and she hadn’t yet come to terms with her sexuality.

“So having this super low self-esteem, this fear of failure, being stuck in a closet and not wanting to be bullied more because they’d already copped so much, it was very, very overbearing growing up with those situations,’ she told Jubelin.

“Obviously there’s a lot worse people can go through … I just kept falling down further and further because I just, I didn’t like myself.”

By 19, she was a certified personal trainer with a number of clients and decided to pour her life savings into a gym. She emptied her bank account, took out a loan and bought all the equipment she could afford.

Six months later, the doors were closed and Sainsbury was in debt.

“Watching this gym that I’ve just invested everything that I have in paying off a debt for a loan, paying rent, and I realised that I wasn’t moving forward, but I was actually starting to move backwards and I was terrified, and I went into this really dark place,” she said.

She and her boyfriend had broken up, she had loans that she couldn’t repay, and her business had failed. When she got home after closing the gym, she made an attempt on her own life and woke up in hospital.

Cassandra Sainsbury attends a court hearing in Bogota, Colombia. Vanessa Hunter/ The Australia
Cassandra Sainsbury attends a court hearing in Bogota, Colombia. Vanessa Hunter/ The Australia
Cassie Sainsbury while in a Colombian jail. Picture: Nathan Edwards
Cassie Sainsbury while in a Colombian jail. Picture: Nathan Edwards

Sainsbury then went to Adelaide to work in a gym, where she became friends with, and developed a crush on a female trainer.

The trainer told her: “I work in this club, I run it. We do really well, you should come in and help me.”

Sainsbury told Jubelin: “She never actually really kind of said, you know, it’s a brothel.”

“She kept saying, ‘this is a club, this is a gentleman’s club’. And because I came from a bubble. I was like, cool, she’s a personal trainer.”

Sainsbury went to Sydney, worked in a brothel, and things went from bad to worse.

She went overseas, was vulnerable and in financial trouble when she tried to smuggle cocaine out of Colombia. She was surprised when she saw how much cocaine was pulled from the headphones.

“I did know that something had been put in there, but I didn’t know how it was or what was in it. I obviously imagined the worst, but I just hadn’t actually seen what it was or how it was coming or anything,” she said.

She initially thought she’d be in prison for 30 years, but ended up staying for three. They were the worst years of her life.

Before she was formally sent to jail, male guards repeatedly performed invasive strip searches on her, and they took their time doing it. They never found anything on her.

“Women should be doing it with the same sex, male police officers, they were quite handsy when they were doing their searches,” she said.

Former NSW Detective with Gary Jubelin for the I Catch Killers Podcast. Picture: David Swift
Former NSW Detective with Gary Jubelin for the I Catch Killers Podcast. Picture: David Swift

It was difficult every time, because she was often stripped in front of about 60 men, but she decided that she deserved it.

One of the first things she noticed in jail was the phones, so she used someone else’s phone card to call her sister.

She said: “I’m in prison. I need a lawyer. I’m going to die. These people are scary.” The phone then cut out because calls to Australia were too expensive.

She had an asthma attack and no one helped because she couldn’t pay them, she had to sleep on the floor, she was robbed and subject to rapes and beatings by other inmates.

There was one gang leader in particular who made her life difficult.

“I was sexually assaulted by one of her gangs that first night. And it kind of set the pace for me there because I just remember going, ‘how can women do this to other women?’ … I didn’t expect it from a woman,” she said.

“I couldn’t tell anyone because I couldn’t be a snitch. So I know people were aware of what happened to me that night, but nobody acknowledged it. And the next morning, because they beat the living crap out of me, I was covered in bruises. I couldn’t walk properly.”

One of the punishments in the prison was unnecessary dental work. Sainsbury was punished for getting into a fight with another inmate. That inmate had stabbed her.

“I’m put in the chair and they start looking at my teeth, and they’re pushing back, looking back at my, my back teeth, and all of a sudden I feel the guard’s hands grip down my arms on the side and chair goes back and this dentist just starts drilling into my back tooth,” she recalled.

“That nerve pain, it shot through my whole body and – I wasn’t too bad with dentists before then, but to live through that agonising pain. And it was about five minutes, but I can tell you, you felt like an entire lifetime being drilled at this one tooth.”

They left the nerve exposed for weeks. When they eventually did patch it up, they didn’t do it properly.

Want to hear more? Visit the I Catch Killers podcast.

Originally published as Cocaine Cassie reveals more on working in a brothel and how she was tortured in a dental chair on I Catch Killers podcast

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Original URL: https://www.couriermail.com.au/truecrimeaustralia/cocaine-cassie-reveals-more-on-working-in-a-brothel-and-how-she-was-tortured-in-a-dental-chair-on-i-catch-killers-podcast/news-story/252d55878198fd1c754722fbfc3d8fc5