I was kidnapped and forced to be a maid for a wealthy man in Thailand. This is my story.

Forced Labor and a Glimmer of Hope

One day the slim man walked in and didn’t bring any food with him; he only brought a glass of water. I took it, and after a few hours, I started feeling woozy. I fell asleep. I didn’t know how long I was out.

I woke up in a new location, which was in a beautiful bed of silk. The room around me was spacious with a high ceiling, and the walls had classic pieces of art on them. There was a large fireplace to the far left side of the room, and a man sat in a chair looking back at me.

I screamed and tried to escape. I jumped out the bed and ran towards the door, but it was locked. I looked around the room frantically, trying to find any other exit. The man sitting in the chair just watched me as I ran around the room screaming for help.

I couldn’t find a way out. I yelled at him and told him to let me free. I told him that people knew I was there and they would call the police. He just looked at me.

My stomach felt uneasy. I felt like I was going to throw up. I began to cry as I realized that I was stuck there.

He came over and tried to console me. I wiggled out of his grasp and moved away from him. He began to speak to me in really broken English.

He told me that he purchased me and I was supposed to be a maid for him.

He said that I was welcome to anything in the kitchen and could join the other girls later that day. I would have my own room, and my duties would be to cook and clean for him.

He offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for this. He seemed to be a man of power here in Thailand because of how he was living and how much money he seemed to have.

There were five other girls there who served him and had to have been brainwashed into loving him. I saw this as the days went by. Either they were the best actresses in the world or they genuinely loved him.

Days then weeks went by, and I started working with the five other maids. When we were alone in our rooms, I would try to talk to them and see if they would keep up the facade of being happy there.

But each and every one of them told me they were content and grateful that this man took them in.

I watched them as they served him, each with precision and grace. It felt mechanical. Their smiles seemed too practiced, and their eyes were empty. I chose to conform and obey the man too because truly I was extremely scared of what was going to happen if I decided not to do so.

After a while, the man began to call me more to his room. He would prefer me to wash his clothes and serve him dinner. I wasn’t sure why, but more often than not, the man found reasons to be around me. I think he thought I was prettier than the other girls.

One night he invited me to his library in the mansion. He told me to dust the bookshelf, and I did. As I was cleaning, I felt him watching me. I looked over and saw him nod and smile.

He came over and picked up a book off the shelf. He asked if I had read it. I shook my head, and he handed it to me and told me I should.

He never wanted the maids to read, watch TV, or even listen to music, so his telling me to read this book felt like a test. I did as I was told and took it from him.

Soon I was given more important tasks. He let me take care of his private study, a special room no other maid could enter. This made me realize he trusted me a lot.

After being this man’s maid for a year, I was his favorite. He would call on me to do almost anything and let me have special privileges that the other maids could not have. This infuriated the other maids, and I could hear them talking about me behind my back.

They just didn’t know about the trick that I had up my sleeve. One night after cleaning the man’s private study, I noticed a cell phone sitting inside the drawers of his desk.

I hesitated and looked over my shoulder. I needed to know if this was a test, so for the first night I left it there and made note of where I found it.

The next few days as I cleaned his private study, I checked again and again, and the phone would be there, two drawers down on the left side of the desk. On the fifth day, I decided to open it. Luckily enough, there wasn’t a passcode on it.