An English woman has claimed she was abducted when she was just 15, and held captive by a taxi driver who forced her to wear a head scarf, raped her every day for 13 years, and sold four children he fathered with her.
Anna Ruston – not her real name – made the revelations in a new book published this Thursday, Secret Slave, which she wrote as part of her therapy. Ms. Ruston, from near Birmingham, is now aged 44 and has been free for 16 years.
According to the Birmingham Mail, she writes of how she lived with her abuser’s brothers, their wives, children and his mother –all of whom turned a blind eye, even as she was forced into prostitution in their home.
After her parents and grandparents died when she was 15, taxi driver “Malic” lured her to his house. He knew Ms. Ruston was vulnerable, and no one would notice if she disappeared.
“They gave me milky tea and chapattis and even when Malik said I should stay the night I thought nothing of it, I assumed he would take me home in the morning”, she said.
However that night Malik came into her room and branded her a “filthy white sl*t” who he would “make his own”. The door was locked and her decade of enslavement and torture began.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today Programme, she explained how she was kept lock up for so long: “There were always three or four people with me, so I couldn’t see an escape. I never answered the doctors I just nodded or shook my head.
“I just wish that if someone had left the room then I could have said to the doctor: ‘Look, I need help, I’m being held, I need to get out’, but they never left the room. If I went to the toilet then they were outside the door.”
She also said in the book that she was “let down” by authorities and that people were afraid to help her because they could be accused of racism and discrimination.
“Malik dressed me in his culture’s clothes, dyed my hair black, made me wear a scarf and keep my head down”, she added.
“When he spoke for me they thought it was a cultural thing. And I think people are scared to be accused of discrimination.”
Describing her ordeal, she told the Birmingham Mail: “I can still see that bedroom, the corner where I would rock in pain. Although after a while I stopped feeling pain, I think my body shut down.
“And I can smell it – the can I used as a toilet, the garlic he reeked of. I got to the point where I didn’t know what life was.”