Former sex slave pens tell-all book

Cape Town:09/04/16 Exit the true story a Book by Grizelda Grootboom Picture Ayanda Ndamane

Cape Town:09/04/16 Exit the true story a Book by Grizelda Grootboom Picture Ayanda Ndamane

Published Apr 13, 2016

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Cape Town - A Cape mom has written a shocking tell-all book about her living nightmare when she was sold into sex slavery.

Last week Grizelda Grootboom, 35, launched her book, Exit, documenting her ordeal as a victim of human trafficking and drug addiction.

Grizelda grew up with her father and his grandparents in Woodstock but ended up bouncing from one shelter to the next.

She ended up living on the streets and at the age of 18 she met a girl known as Ntombi who convinced her to move to Johannesburg.

When she arrived at a house in Yeoville, she discovered she had been “sold”.

For two weeks she was kept tied up, drugged and locked in a room where she was repeatedly raped and beaten.

When she had been “used up” and a new girl was brought in to replace her, she was kicked out onto the streets, half-naked and addicted to the narcotics she had been injected with.

“After my release from the house, the first thing I craved was drugs,” she explains.

“I became a prostitute from the age of 18 because I needed money for drugs.

She was a sex worker for 10 years.

“I had to be high in order to be confident, I was only high because I needed to be numb to work because whenever a client would do me while sober, it actually hurt my skin.”

Grizelda says violence plagued her from an early age.

She was nine when she was gang-raped in Site C, Khayelitsha.

She says she was at a tap with four friends when four older boys forced them at knife-point to an empty shack nearby.

“When we asked why they were doing this, they told us to shut up,” she writes.

“They released the girls one by one, once they had finished... I was the youngest, I was the last.

“I was terrified and in pain. They all came into the room at the end.

“There were all these legs around me and sperm on my face.”

Grizelda says writing the book was a form of release from all the anger still trapped in her.

“It took me about a year to write this book but it was something I always wanted to do,” she says.

“But the process was very hard; I went to a place where I thought I would never have to go again.

“I was trafficked for two weeks, after that it was from one pimp to the next, travelling through provinces.

“I ended up in PE and it was there that I finally decided to stop.”

In the book, Grizelda explains that she first got pregnant by a client while working at a bar in Benoni years ago. She gave the baby boy up for adoption.

She has another son who lives with her and her mother in Khayelitsha.

It was, however, the abortion of her baby (named Summer) at the age of 27 while living in Port Elizabeth that was the last straw.

“In the last parts of the book, it talks about getting out, I walked into rehab shortly after my abortion and it was hell, it was not easy but it can be done.”

Grizelda, now an activist for the rights of sex workers, says she wants readers to know prostitution is not their only option.

“It’s impossible to say being a prostitute is the only way for us as women, not when we are so intelligent and gifted, have the potential to be so much more.”

Daily Voice

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