An ex-professional surfer who was repeatedly beaten and raped after being kidnapped in a horror two-month ordeal in India has said she is now "afraid" to have sex.
Carmen Greentree was 22 at the time when she became a victim of scammers posing as government tourism operators and was held against her will on a houseboat in New Delhi, reported the Daily Star.
Ms Greentree was in India in 2004 after leaving Sydney to study under the Dalai Lama in the Himalayas.
She was held captive by Rafiq Ahmad Dundoo and raped dozens of times while she was beaten every time she asked to leave.
Ms Greentree was on the boat with Dundoo's elderly mother and father, two brothers, and his wife and their baby.
After spending two months, she was finally rescued by the authorities who stormed the boat having worked out the location after her attacker had tried to extort money from her parents.
But the ordeal has left Ms Greentree, now 38, with mental scars and she has said she is "afraid" of sex.
She took a period of celibacy, before later marrying her husband and becoming a mother-of-three, but has now returned to a life without sex.
While speaking to SBS program Insight's segment on Celibacy, Greentree said: “At that point [after getting married at 32] I'd actually lost myself a lot and I'd stopped listening to my body.
“I'd stopped listening to my soul...my heart. I was very much more focused on living up to society's expectations of what a woman should be like.
“I was telling myself on the surface I was having a really great time and I was amazing and this was amazing. And deep, deep, deep down I was like, 'I don't like this. I don't want to be doing this. This is not right for me'.”
She added: “The most beautiful thing about it was that I felt as though I was mine again - my energy was mine. My soul felt happy finding my way back home to me.”
Ms Greentree was known to travel and her going quiet was quite common but it was only when a friend had a dream about her being in trouble that she was saved.
Katherine spoke to the Australian High Commission in India to investigate and local police began treating her as a missing person.
She was saved on July 25, after several police boats arrived and armed officers stormed the houseboat.
Dundoo and his brother Shabir Ahmad Dundoo were arrested and Ms Greentree’s passport and belongings were retrieved.
Ms Greentree published a book last year called "A Dangerous Pursuit of Happiness", which details her abduction and how she recovered from the ordeal.
