Australia

A former Australian surfing star has bravely opened up about her horrific ordeal after she was kidnapped and raped every night for two months in India.

Carmen Greentree, 37, from Sydney shared the harrowing details about her horrific experiences in her new book ‘A Dangerous Pursuit of Happiness.’

Australian pro surfer who was abducted and raped every night for two months on a squalid houseboat in India shares her horror ordeal

In the book, she tells how her dream trip to India in 2004 turned into a nightmare when was abducted after seeking help from a local to find her way to Dharamshala. She was forced onto a houseboat where she was raped multiple times and beaten whenever she asked to be freed.

“I didn’t think I was ever getting off that boat, I thought I would die there one way or another,” she told Daily Mail Australia.

Carmen, who dreamt of being a surfing world champion and also represent her country across the globe for competitions, took a break from the sport after failing to qualify for the world tour at 22. It was at that time she took a sabbatical to India where she went through hell.

“I got really devastated and lost,” she told 9 News. “For seven years of my life I was 100 percent, morning to night, solely focused on being world champion.

“Nothing else mattered more than that. It was an escape from life.”

The married mum-of-three said she wrote about the ordeal in her book to help combat her demons.

She also revealed that a Brit backpacker has since told her he was kidnapped and extorted on the same boat.

Carmen told the Mail: “I had travelled so much that I was used to winging it.”

Her ordeal started when she was approached by a stranger who offered to take her to someone who could arrange her journey to Dharamshala. Unknown to her, she was tricked into flying to Kashmir where she was met by a man who said it would be safer to stay with him.

She said the man told her it would be best to spend the night on his houseboat on Dal Lake before jumping on a bus to Dharamshala, where she was booked into a course at the Dalai Lama’s ashram.

After days fighting him off for her release, she soon realised that she had been trapped on the squalid boat.

Melanesians are black island people in the south pacific that migrated over thousands of years ago, long before the blacks that came to the Americas as slaves.

Melanesia is a sub-region of Oceania extending from the western end of the Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, and eastward to Fiji. The region comprises most of the islands immediately north and northeast of Australia, including the countries of Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Island, and New Caledonia. The name Melanesia was first used by Jules Dumont d’Urville in 1832 to denote an ethnic and geographical grouping of islands distinct from Polynesia and Micronesia.