At 13, my best friend pimped me out to be raped by a grooming gang and I was passed from house to house like a toy for three years
Samantha Owens was taken to parties to have sex with men, most of them Asian aged between 20 and 60, sometimes three or four times a week, multiple times a day
SAMANTHA Owens was just 13 when she was taken to a gathering of five men in a ground floor flat by her best friend and left there to be raped by one of the older men.
“This man took me into a bedroom, grabbed at the flat skin on my chest – I didn’t even have breasts yet – did his business and finished,” Samantha, now 25, from Grimsby, tells Sun Online.
“Afterwards, I curled my legs inwards, feeling so ashamed and heartbroken. I cleaned myself up and left but that night changed my life. It’s a night I’ll never be able to erase.”
Samantha is telling her shocking story in a new memoir, Pimped, published today, to encourage other victims to speak out about sexual abuse.
The best friend who impressed her – then pimped her out
Having been brought up as the oldest of six kids in a family of chronic neglect, Samantha was in foster care.
Sexually abused aged five by a friend just a few years older, her mum told Samantha at nine that the man she called Dad wasn’t her real dad, which left her reeling.
When he left, her mum slid into a life of promiscuity and Samantha and her siblings were taken into nearby foster care homes.
“Getting caught by the cops one too many times playing truant, I was seen as a problem child but, because I was also labelled ‘at risk’, social workers started to take an interest in me and I began having regular contact with them,” she says.
She met Amanda Spencer randomly, just after she moved to Sheffield from Grimsby, while walking down Sheffield high street with her brother David.
She saw Amanda smoking in front of a shop and was dared by David to introduce herself.
She pointed at men and told me how big they were
“At 15, she was only two years older than me but the way she dressed and acted made her seem so much older and I wanted to impress her,” says Samantha.
“She was pretty and skinny and friendly and we actually looked quite similar too which was bizarre – she had dark hair, brown eyes with a cool lip and eyebrow piercing and would wear her hair scraped back into a side ponytail.
“She was very sexual and would often point to various men around the markets and tell me she’d had sex with them.
“She even took a man around the corner one day, then came back boasting about how big he was. I was very naïve and a virgin so I did think she was a bit slaggy, but I liked her confidence.”
Soon after they met, Amanda’s grooming process kicked in.
She gave Samantha a makeover, bought her tight-fitting clothes and took her to houses filled with older men, making out that prostitution was something cool and a great way to earn money.
Samantha says: “Amanda would say to me, ‘I have sex for money and look at all the things I have,’ gesturing to the stuff in her room. ‘It’s easy. It’s just sex.’
“In the end, I felt she was my best friend and the only one who seemed to really care about me so I went along with it.” I was constantly truanting from school at this point.
I was taken from house to house like a toy
For three years, Samantha was taken to lots of different house parties and gatherings by Amanda.
It was here she’d have sex with men, most of them Asian aged between 20 and 60, sometimes three or four times a week, sometimes multiple times a day.
“I was going on jobs for Amanda nearly every day and taken from house to house like a toy,” says Samantha.
“Amanda took all the money and she gave me between £20-£80 each time but I had no idea how much she got herself.
“She also introduced me to drugs and alcohol and a lot of the time, when I had sex, I was completely out of it, as it felt like the only way I could cope.
“Amanda didn’t physically force me to have sex but emotionally, she made me feel like she was the only one who cared and I had to do these things to keep her friendship.
“Once, out of nowhere, this guy grabbed me and forced me onto the floor. I lay still as he raped me on the floorboards, thinking over and over again how proud Amanda would be of me. I was totally under her spell.”
I saw what she did was twisted and wrong
Samantha’s life quickly fell even further off the rails.
The pair were caught shoplifting and Samantha was moved to a children’s home in Chesterfield by social workers for her own safety.
It was here that she met boyfriend Blaine, 27, – a friend of someone at the home.
“Blaine treated me differently from all other men and didn’t seem to be interested in sex first,” says Samantha.
“But when I fell pregnant at 18, I realised I didn’t want to go the house parties anymore and I started to see that what Amanda was doing was twisted and wrong.
“In a way, I saw her as being worse than the men who’d abused me; she had led me there and had profited from my pain.
“It made me think that everything about our friendship had been a lie. I changed my number and broke off our friendship.
But it was too late for me and Blaine as I’d told him I wasn’t sure the baby was his – I felt it was my obligation – and he felt betrayed and ended it. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I was too ashamed. ”
My baby was taken away
In 2009, Samantha, then 18, was caught stealing some baby clothes one day and ended up in a youth detention centre, later confiding in a girl about her harrowing experiences.
“I realised I was just a child and Amanda was the perpetrator and she knew what she was doing,” says Samantha, who was released after 32 days without charge.
She started opening up to the police about Amanda’s involvement in the sex ring. “I didn’t want it to happen to any other girls like me.”
Police, who’d had suspicions about Amanda, were working on a case to bring her to justice.
In September 2012, Samantha gave birth to her son Jordan who was taken into foster care after two days, because of her history with drug and alcohol, which had become an addiction.
“I absolutely cried my eyes out,” recalls Samantha. “It was the hardest thing to ever go through, to have my baby taken away.
“But I had no choice. He was taken to a really nice family who were brilliant with him and at 10 months old he went to live with Blaine as he insisted on a DNA test and it turned out he was the dad.”
I had to warn others not to make the same mistakes
The devastation of losing her child sent her into a deeper downward spiral and she returned to drugs and alcohol to blot out the pain, ending up in prison for robbing a couple of people in the street in 2013.
Inside, she befriended a girl called Bunny who had also been induced into the prostitution ring by Amanda and who later committed suicide.
It was the friendship with Bunny and the three years she spent in prison – 18 months for the robbery and then another 18 months for breaking parole – that made Samantha realise she needed to make a change.
“It was awful what happened to Bunny and when I came out of prison, I knew I wanted to live a different life.
“I wanted to help people come forward and warn people that these older people weren’t friends but just wanted to use you,” says Samantha.
After about eight months in prison, Amanda’s trial started and Samantha was called to be a witness.
She bravely told the court all that Amanda had put her through.
In 2014, Amanda was imprisoned for 12 years having been found guilty of 14 counts of arranging or facilitating child prostitution and two counts of causing or inciting child prostitution.
In April 2017, she received an additional sentence of three years for four counts of arranging or facilitating child prostitution between 2005 and 2012.
Four men have also been jailed for their roles in the sex ring – they were brothers Christopher, 23, Matthew, 25, and Shane Whiteley, 30, all of Hackenthorpe.
They were found guilty of multiple sexual offences including rape, sexual assault against a child under 13 and conspiracy to arrange child prostitution and theft.
During the six-week trial, Whiteley and Amanda Spencer were identified as the main players in the child prostitution ring. The group was jailed for a combined total of 43 years.
I won’t let anyone hug my baby or let my kids go to birthday parties
When Samantha was released from prison in 2015, she was moved to a flat just behind where Blaine was living and it didn’t take long for them to realise they still had strong feelings for each other.
They became a couple and slowly, but surely, she became a mother to Jordan.
“I took it slowly as he barely knew me,” says Samantha. “He went from calling me his friend, to ‘Sammy mummy” to just ‘mummy’ which made me so happy. And now we have so much fun together. ”
She had another son, Quinlan, with Blaine six months ago and is fiercely protective of both her children after her experiences.
“Jordan has only just been to his first birthday party because I would never let him go to any party for three years, because I didn’t know or trust the people and didn’t want to let him out of my sight,” says Samantha.
“He’s still begging for sleepovers but I can’t do it. I’m too scared for him. I’d die if anything happened to him.”
She won’t let anyone hug or hold Quinlan either, wary of all adults after what she has experienced.
“I just hope I don’t have a daughter as I really don’t want a girl,” says Samantha.
“I know men and boys get abused but I’d be absolutely terrified. I would never let her out of the house.”
As for Amanda, Samantha doesn’t think about her very often but when she does, she feels angry she only got nine years for what she did to her.
“I’m still suffering from what I went through and I will for the rest of my life,” she says. “She should have got longer.”
by Samantha Owens is published by John Blake today, priced £8.99.