A young pro surfer was abducted on a squalid houseboat and was raped every night for two months after she was kidnapped in India.
Carmen Greentree was just 22 when she took time out from surfing to study under the Dalai Lama in the Himalayas in May 2004.
“There was this never-ending search that I was on for a long time to master myself, to not feel like that stuff controlled me that at the time was controlling me,” Greentree told ABC Illawarra this week.
“I met a girl who had just come back from India and she was very, very lovely. She had a very light, sweet nature, just the way that she was as a being I felt really drawn to her.
“I liked her a lot and she described how wonderful India had been and all the things she learned. It was more that I wanted to be like her, carefree and free-flowing and happy that I think maybe in my mind I tricked myself into assuming she’d got that from India so if I went to India I’d get that too.”
According to Daily Mail, after saying goodbye to her parents in Sydney, she touched down in New Delhi and fell victim to scammers posing as government tourism operators.
Soon she was forced to sleep in a dingy bedroom on board where she was raped dozens of times and beaten whenever she asked to leave.
“I got sold on the wrong track and that wrong track to Kashmir, where I was held captive for two months,” Greentree said.
“The person that picked me up from the airport to take me to my so-called tourist destination where I would get to stay for a couple of nights before I caught the bus to the Dalai Lama, pretty much within a matter of half an hour he managed to manipulate me into giving away my passport and my tickets, put the heavy on me telling me I was a woman and it was unsafe to be alone.
“When I look back at that I know there wasn’t any option. It was creeping in little bit by little bit as every little thing happened and it just got worse.
‘I didn’t think I was ever getting off that boat, I thought I would die there one way or another.’
She said that her captor made a mistake when he tried to get more money from her family and she was dramatically rescued when armed police boarded the boat and whisked her to safety.
Now 37 and married with three children south of Sydney, she has written a book about her harrowing ordeal in a bid to silence her demons.
A British backpacker has since told her he was kidnapped and extorted on the same boat nine years earlier, and it’s believed there are many other victims.
