On Wednesday, 12 April 2017, 22-year- old Cassandra Sainsbury, a personal trainer from Adelaide, South Australia was arrested at Eldorado International Airport in Bogota, Columbia. In her luggage she had been carrying 5.8 kilograms of cocaine. She was looking at up to 30 years incarceration for drug trafficking. It was to be the beginning of a harrowing ordeal of survival in El Buen Pasor – one of the world’s most notorious prisons and the setting of a tale of violence and abuse as a young woman struggled to make sense of the madness all around her. At the centre of an international media circus, the woman who the world would come to know as “Cocaine Cassie” survived beatings, stabbings and rape while her story played out in public, distorted by lies and exaggerations that played out over years. Now, in her own words, Cocaine Cassie sets the record straight in this raw and harrowing account of what it was really like. Bruised, battered and scarred she tells of how she was forced into becoming a drug mule. It is a story of pain and loss of hope for a future. But it is also a story of her rise to forgiveness and redemption – to creating a life where a woman’s past does not define her future. I am not ‘Cocaine Cassie’. I am Cassie Sainsbury.
