This is like something out of the movie Room. Katie Beers, 34, is sharing in a new memoir how she was sexually abused from a young age, but that it conditioned her for when she ended up kidnapped, repeatedly raped and chained inside a coffin in an underground bunker at age nine. In a Reddit AMA on Dec. 29, she detailed her horrific childhood and sadly revealed that her years of childhood sexual abuse made her more conditioned to handle the trauma that she would later endure as a kidnapped sex slave.
When she was just a toddler she was sent to live with her godmother Linda Inghilleri, whose husband Salvatore allegedly sexually abused Katie from the age of two until she was kidnapped at nine by a family acquaintance John Esposito. “I should have been in foster care from the time that I was 2 or even younger. I was sexually abused by my ‘aunt’s’ husband from the time that I was 2 until I was abducted by a ‘family friend’ when I was almost 10,” Katie revealed.
“I was also physically, emotionally and verbally abused by all of the adults who were supposed to take care of me as well as neglected. CPS did come to the house to do interviews with me, but it’s difficult to be truthful with CPS workers when they’re interviewing you in the house where the abuse is occurring in the exact room where it was occurring,” she continued.
John abducted her on December 28, 1992 under the guise that he wanted to take her toy shopping. He later claimed that she vanished at the store and became an immediate suspect in her disappearance. He had built an underground bunker underneath his Long Island, NY garage covered by 200 pounds of concrete so that no one could find Katie or hear her screams. Police even searched his house for the girl and never knew she was underneath them. For 17 days he kept her in total darkness chained to a makeshift coffin and repeatedly raped her. She managed to get him to turn himself in to the police by playing mind games with him by constantly asking about her future. He ended up being sentenced to 15 years in prison and died in 2013 while still behind bars.
“There are times that my memory is more clear about the day I was abducted. As part of my coping mechanism, I blocked out the experience,” Katie explained in her AMA while promoting her memoir Buried Memories. She added that “The most important part of Buried Memories is not about the abuse that I sustained, but that because of my support system afterwards, that I was able to come out on the other side & have a somewhat normal childhood, teenage years, and adulthood.”
After Katie was rescued, she went on to live with a loving foster family that gave her the safe environment she always craved. “But… to understand how far I came and the hurdles that I jumped, you have to understand what I encountered and endured,” she explained. She’s now a married mother of two young children and living the happy life she always dreamed of. After her horrific childhood, boy does she deserve it!
HollywoodLifers, are you move by how Katie has made a happy life for herself after all of her childhood trauma?