Cocaine Cassie ‘I'm Engaged!'

CASSIE SAINSBURY IS NOW PLANNING HER WEDDING

- April Glover

Cassie Sainsbury once thought she’d barely survive being locked inside a dirty prison in a foreign country, thousands of kilometers away from her comfortable life in Adelaide.

But now New Idea can exclusively reveal the 24-year old is happier than ever after getting engaged to a fellow female prisoner.

Two years into her six-year sentence, former personal trainer Cassie is preparing to marry her fiancée, a 29-year-old Venezuelan woman named Joli.

Cassie was at El Dorado airport in Bogota, Colombia, in April 2017 when she was arrested for attempting to smuggle 5.8kg of cocaine out of the country. As a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Australian who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, Cassie stuck out like a sore thumb.

She hid in her squalid cell, refused to talk to anyone or even learn the language at first. But all that has changed.

Speaking to New Idea from behind bars in Bogota, Cassie gushed about her fiancée and is optimistic about their future in the outside world.

“It’s very overwhelming because it’s not something that I exactly expected from all of this, that’s for sure. At first, we took it very slowly … and here we are!” Cassie tells New Idea.

“Joli has a very strong character. I’m a very timid person and she’s the complete opposite. She’s very funny, very outgoing, she livens up the atmosphere here. She gets along with everybody and she’s never had problems. It’s a good way to take my mind off where I am.”

About nine months ago, Cassie’s relationship with her now-fiancée, Joli, started to blossom. It’s not the first same-sex relationship the Adelaide native has ever been in. Cassie says she had been with a woman once back home.