A British woman has revealed she was sold as a sex slave in Greece
and forced to work as a prostitute for six years after going on holiday
to the country with her mother at the age of 14, Dailymail reports.
Megan Stephens (not her real name), 25, was regularly made to sleep
with up to 50 men a day - and was once forced to have sex with 110 men
in just 22 hours - after the man she thought was her boyfriend sold her
to a sex trafficker called Leon.
Megan, who is keeping her location a secret as she lives in fear of
the sex traffickers finding her and hurting her family, has written a
memoir of her experiences called Bought & Sold with a ghostwriter.
She was bought and sold by several traffickers, being forced to
work on the street and in brothels, before she eventually made her
escape six-and-a-half years ago in 2009.
Megan, who said she has found the strength to speak out now she is expecting a baby with her partner, told FEMAIL:
'I used to put myself down about how stupid I'd been. If I could go
back now and tell myself what to do, I'd say to myself to get up and run
and do something more to stop what was happening.
'But through therapy I've realised I felt so weak inside and mentally broken down that it was impossible.
'So I don't really know what I'd say to myself. I don't think I could have done things differently.
'When I look back on that time I feel angry with myself and
incredibly sad. When you truly believe that you're nothing, you don't
even consider the possibility that you have a choice about anything.
'Because you've got so used to being a puppet you've forgotten that you were ever able to think and act for yourself.
'I believe that if I'd been more mentally strong and I had
people around me I could turn to I could have got out easier. But I
didn't, it was just me.'
Megan, says that she now realises that her troubles began long
before she made the fateful trip to Greece with her mother. Her parents
split up when she was four years old, and both struggled with drinking
problems - although she maintains that her mother was a wonderful parent
when she wasn't drinking.
When Megan was 14, she went on holiday to a seaside town in Greece
and met an Albanian man called Jak in a bar. She admits she was
'desperate to be loved' and felt bowled over by his attention. Her
mother wasn't overly keen on 22-year-old Jak, whose eyes she said were
'cold and hard'. However she allowed her daughter to spend all her time
with him as she enjoyed a romance with a bar owner called Nikos.
Struggling with her own past, Megan believes that her mother wasn't
in a fit state to be a proper parent at the time. At the end of their
stay, Megan managed to persuade her mother not to return home so they
could both spend time with their new love interests. Within days, Jak
started telling Megan that he loved her. He also confided that his
mother had thyroid cancer and that he couldn't afford to pay her medical
bills.
Soon after, he took her to live in an apartment in Athens. There he
persuaded Megan to take a job dancing in a topless bar, promising she
would only have to do it for long enough to raise the money to pay for
his mother's surgery.
'I hated every minute of every night I danced at the bar and I could never look at the faces of the men who were looking at me,' Megan recalled.
But she admits she felt 'like a hero' for helping to save his
mother's life. When Megan's mother finally left for home, Megan
convinced her to let her stay with Jak.
After two weeks, he took her to a burger bar where he introduced her to a man called Leon, telling her: 'This is your new boss.'
They spoke in Greek before Leon passed Jak a wad of folded bank notes. It wasn't until much later that Megan realised Leon had 'bought a stake' in her.
Megan has shared her horrifying true story in this book
Leon spoke to her in English, saying: 'So you know what you're going to be doing, don't you? And you're happy with it?'
She glanced at Jak, who said: 'I love you. It's alright.'
Jak then took her to an office building and told her to go to the
top floor. She went upstairs to find herself at a lawyer's office.
Inside, he locked the door and pushed her into a small windowless room.
'There was a single bed and at the foot of it a video camera on a tripod,' she said. 'I
was so frightened and convinced that he was going to murder me that I
just stood there making little whimpering noises like a defeated and
submissive animal.
'I was so shocked my mind went completely blank and I think I
barely struggled as he flipped me over on my back, pulled up my skirt,
ripped off my pants and forced himself on me. The pain was excruciating,
but I was too traumatised to even cry.'
The lawyer had sex with her again before thrusting a wad of €50
notes at her. She expected Jak to be shocked by what happened. Instead,
he told her he was sorry but promised her it wouldn't be for long and
that soon they would have enough money to start a family, save for a car
and buy a house.
Megan recalls her confusion that the man she believed was in love
with her would make her do something like that. But as he started
talking about the money she could make, it suddenly hit her that he'd
set it all up and that he expected her to do it again.
'Suddenly I understood it and all the air that should have been
flowing into my lungs seemed to have fathered in a solid lump at the
back of the throat so that I couldn't breathe,' she said.
She cried hysterically and desperately wanted to speak to her
mother, but Jak wouldn't allow it. He took her out on his motorbike and
drove up into the hills on the other side of the city. Megan told him
she couldn't do what he was asking, and demanded to speak to her family.
He grabbed her by the hair, threw her to the ground and started kicking
her before throwing a rock at her. Then he drove off and left her on
her own in the dark for hours. By the time he returned, she admits she
was so relieved not to be alone anymore that she forgave him for
assaulting her.
'I truly did believe that what had happened must have been my fault,' she said.
From then on she noticed a marked change in Jak's attitude. He
criticsed everything about her and she lived in constant fear of him
being assaulted again. But she was also terrified that if she did
something wrong he would leave her.
'I was becoming dependent on him, practically and emotionally,' she said.
Two days after she had been offered up to the lawyer, Megan started
working as an escort. She moved from one hotel to another and was
having sex with eight to ten men every day. It was only then that she
started having sex with Jak. He didn't force her, but she says she
didn't enjoy it even though she still believed she loved him.
Jak's moods were unpredictable and he would fly into a rage and hit
her for no reason. One day he poured a jug of water over her head and
spat at her in a restaurant, and he tormented her by talking about her
mother and what he would like to do to her sexually.
Then Megan started feeling sick and discovered she was ten weeks
pregnant. She told how Jak kicked her in the stomach, causing her to
miscarry at the age of 14.
The physical violence continued and rarely a day passed without him
slapping or punching her or dragging her around the room by the hair.
After she had spent six months in Athens and a brief stint in
Italy, working the streets as a prostitute, Jak told Megan he was going
home to his family.
He left her with an Albanian man Elek, who she had to give half her
money to. The other half she wired to Jak at the end of the week. Elek
set her to work in a brothel where men paid €20 for five minutes with
her. By the end of her first night she'd had sex with more than 50
clients.
As weeks turned into months, she was moved from brothel to brothel,
having sex with an average of 50 men a night. On one occasion, she had
sex with 110 men in a single 22-hour shift before being violently sick.
The brothel owner closed up early when he saw the state she was in.
'I thought that was decent of him, which shows just how distorted my sense of normality had become,' Megan said.
Elek eventually sold Megan on to another pimp called Cristoph and
she continued to work in brothels as well as doing escort work. All the
time she was working as a prostitute, she spoke to her mother on the
phone pretending that everything was okay. The pimps forced her to send
happy, smiling photos of herself pretending to work in a café to her
mother to keep up the pretence.
In reality, she suffered physical violence on a daily basis and
contracted syphilis after being forced to have sex without a condom for
extra money.
Megan only managed to escape the sex traffickers after hitting rock
bottom and attempting suicide when she was 20. She was sectioned and
spent three months in hospital, where the staff won her trust. They
contacted her mother and the pair were reunited. Now, although Megan has
said she doesn't blame her for what happened, the pair are no longer in
close contact.
'To be honest, I don't see my mum really at all. We talk now
and again, but we're not close. It's sort of at arms length. I don't
have much to do with her,' she explained.
'I think it's just the fact that I've got to a point where I'm
happy in the bubble that I'm in now. In a way, she is sort of in the
past.'
After returning to the UK, Megan struggled with alcohol issues and
it's only in the past year and a half that she's been able to confront
what happened and stop blaming herself. She is now happily settled with
her partner and they are looking forward to the birth of their child in
March.
However, Megan admits that she is still scared that such a thing could happen to her again.
She said: 'I do think most of the time that it could never
happen again. But there are still parts of me that are quite vulnerable
to believing everything that someone says. I still have to be very
careful.
'Jak has tried to contact me and my family through social media, trying to ask people where I am.
'He still frightens me. He's very powerful in my opinion, and
he's not just one person there's a lot of them and they're capable of
hurting my family.
'I thought about pursuing legal action but I was just too
afraid to ever mention names. I would still be too scared to go down
that route.'
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