I grew up in Belgium and was sold to a murderous pedophile network around my sixth birthday.
I was used in this network for five and a half years.
The adult men who belonged to this exclusive club were there for various reasons, but there was a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs.
And the children were the commodity, the highest, the most valued commodity and were mainly used for sex.
But there were also a few aristocrats in this club who also liked to kill children.
And then it was my turn. I was to be killed at the age of eleven.
I was tortured because someone who had protected me for a while and then abused me really badly was done with me.
I was strapped to a slaughter bench.
It was black from the blood of all the children in front of me.
I was there for a few hours.
My body is full of scars. And every scar reminds me of this moment.
I thought I would be killed, like all the children who were not loved enough to live.
And I too would be forgotten. And I was not ready to die.
Someone from within that network loved me enough to save me.
The torture lasted a few hours. I was in this network for five and a half years.
During this time, I was raped many, many, many times.
I have no scars that show how often I was raped.
But I did the math. It was usually at the weekend, for a whole night.
And so I calculated that I was raped, really raped, for about six hours a week.
1,716 hours of rape before I had even reached the age of twelve.
I grew up with instructions given to me by the person who saved me.
It kept me away from prostitution and drugs and got me out of the country, out of Belgium, where all this happened.
Even though I didn't have scars, as a young adult I was so designed to be a sex object that I
attracted men and part of me needed that to live.
Because that was the only way I knew to feel good.
And as a young woman, I was treated so disrespectfully and used so much.
And yet everyone was so ready to blame me. Being promiscuous .
Cheap, as they said, a whore. All these things, all these epithets, they condemned me so quickly.
And then, while I was healing, I realized, no, I need to break out of this pattern that I'm in of needing sexual attention.
I have to free myself from it and stop allowing myself to be turned into an object. I want to become a liberated woman.
And so I have worked decade after decade to feel all the pain of what was done to me,
all the betrayal of being sold by my parents.
Children are the most vulnerable members of our population. Let us therefore create a society in which children
are safe, in which children have a community around them.
Every child deserves safety. No child deserves what I went through and what millions of children go through every day.
But unfortunately this is part of the current system.
As women, we have so much potential to be truly empowered, to empathize with everything we have to endure as women.
That gives us more strength than anyone else. All the pain behind all the powerlessness and humiliation, to really feel
what was done to me, to really understand that it wasn't me.
That I feel good at the end of the day.
I was a child. I was victimized. It wasn't my fault.
Find out more about Anneke Lucas in the following interview.
Introduction Gareth: Our next guest joins us from New York. Anneke Lucas was sold by her mother as a
child sex slave to a pedophile network in Belgium.
Anneke was raped daily by older men until she was 11 years old.
Many of them were important Belgian politicians. At 11, she was no longer considered useful
to the network and was almost tortured to death.
She was saved from death by a man who negotiated with the politicians responsible for the network.
Interview Gareth: Anneke, thank you very much for talking to us. The first thing that really touched
me was the fact that you were sold by your mother.
As a father, I struggled to make sense of it. How do you process that?
Anneke: It's a lifelong process. Because, of course, my mother is the person who was closest to me.
I think we are all primary caregivers first and foremost. She was also alone and she had me.
And then - you know, my mother wasn't well, you could say she was mentally ill, which was never diagnosed.
I would describe her as a psychopath, in a way that sometimes happens with women.
As such, she was extremely sycophantic towards all men.
She behaved like a five-year-old, bizarrely flirtatious, sexualized little girl - towards all men.
She submitted to herself very easily. I think I was a reflection of her.
And it was very difficult to be around her because there was never a place for me. It was a complete projection.
I was either some kind of weak, unimpressive, ugly little girl who was their little helper and then I was good, or I was bad.
But the real question you have to ask yourself is: "How can someone do this? How can the
adults in this network do this to children?"
Many of them were parents. And many of them, I'm sure, were also incestuous parents.
Well, the thing was that my mother hadn't developed emotionally since the age of 5 or so. That was the time when her mother died.
It came from a massive trauma that took place - I have to assume - in Belgium in 1939; in a
city that was frequently bombed during the war.
Her father was a prisoner of war in a concentration camp.
You know, I think it had been very difficult with the death of her mother and other deaths in the family.
After the war, there were few resources available for people to heal from trauma. So she was passed around in provincial Belgium,
she was totally passed around. Maybe people thought she was a little sexual because it was a very Catholic
community, but she was passed around. And I was her main victim.
Gareth: It's so difficult to understand this mindset where you sell your own child
there. But also the people who are able to do it.
It's very difficult to find your way around. That people are capable of doing something so bad.
How old were you when you realized the extent of the evil?
Because that is something a child should never, ever have to deal with.
Anneke: Right! Well, the network is very sinister. And I was - as you said in the introduction -
really in a Belgian network that operated like a mafia.
But it was led by the then Minister of Defense.
This was a politician who had a meteoric career. He was Prime Minister of Belgium twice: Paul
Vanden Boeynants. I mentioned him in my book.
It was really networked with..., it was a local network; a Belgian network.
As you know, Belgium is a small country. It was a small network.
But through Satanism they were networked with other, higher-ranking Satanists and always used children as a commodity.
I was used from the age of six when I was first trafficked.
I was late, because children from Satanist families are usually abused much earlier.
So I was placed in the network at the age of six, and I was abused in Belgium.
Either by certain nobles who were extremely violent and sadistic and had no qualms about killing children.
So there's really no reason why I survived that.
And then at the age of nine... in those early years I was often abused by men who were indoctrinated into this system.
It was really a system of blackmail. In which they were - you know - first paired up with a
young girl who was about 14 or 15 years old.
They may have been told it was older. That was recorded on tape. That's when the blackmail began.
And then they came to me. At the age of 6 or 7, there's no question that you're a very young child.
Anyone who is there and rapes a small child like that - even if I asked them to. I was taught to make them comfortable.
But even then, there is no question that a crime has been committed.
But there were always men who said: "I won't do it. I can't do it."
But I didn't realize at the time how deeply these men had already been indoctrinated and that it takes a man to
do everything, as they say. That's what they always say.
I always had the feeling that the people who abused me had themselves been abused as children and
that they were repeating it from a position of power.
In this way, they coped with their own feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, which
they had suffered as a result of their own abuse.
Through this very crude act where they felt great in a position of power. And of course, most survivors do not become criminals.
But the method is set up to allow or urge people who stand ready to become offenders to
share this huge, big secret of pedophilia.
As an introduction, to have them all in my pocket. And that covers... Gareth: Do you still see some of these
people on TV or in the newspapers in Belgium who abused you?
Anneke: Look. It wasn't limited to Belgium. I was trafficked in the United States, France, Switzerland, Italy.
You know, at the age of 9, you could say I was given to an international networker who took me to the United States.
This was someone who is very well known on the world stage. During this time, I was manipulated into consciousness.
I spent a year there, what I called the 'seat of power': This was a group of very powerful people,
Satanists, including celebrities, politicians, royal families.
And of course you see these people, of course I still see them - even if most of my perpetrators are now dead
- because they were so prominent. They are everywhere.
Gareth: That must be extraordinary for you. To see that with your knowledge of who these people really are.
How does it feel to see them? It's probably a stupid question, but I could imagine 'anger'.
Anneke: Yes! It makes me want to name them. Which is something I can't do.
That is very clear to me: if I did it, I would be dead. My family would be killed. That's the message I got.
The family of my main perpetrator, I found out that they run their own secret service.
It seems like I've already experienced a bit of that.
These are all the people who have appeared in my life and who have been trained in this way.
I was trained as a spy. So I was able to recognize it.
But the message was very clear, in their own way they let me know that the threat was always:
"If you mention this person's name, you're dead.
And I think many survivors like me would be willing to give their lives for the cause if it was worth it.
But you always have to weigh up what you can and can't disclose. That makes me very angry.
It also makes me very angry how most people believe the narrative that these are wonderful
people who need to be championed to be seen.
Gareth: Of course, I remember; as a child in the UK. There was a huge pedophile network that was uncovered in Belgium.
It made major headlines here, here in the UK.
Was that related to the network you were in? Or was that just a case of people getting a bit closer to the truth?
Do we give them a few lesser pedophiles to quench their thirst a little while we protect the big names?
Anneke: That's exactly what happened in the end. What you are referring to has become known as the "Dutroux case".
I would like to show my book . In it I write about the "Dutroux case". It's very closely linked to my life story.
It is basically the same network. We heard about it in 1996 when the bodies of children were discovered.
Two children were rescued from a dungeon.
A pimp from this Belgian network had started abducting children.
That was very unusual, he was caught.
Children had died in his care - because most of the pimps invade families, take the children and bring them back home.
I had gone to school myself, so it was much easier. There were no parents looking for me. My parents
were involved, like most parents of abused children.
The "Dutroux case" was supposed to stir things up. Marc Dutroux was the pimp.
And what happened next: it became a very big dispute - worldwide.
They talked about the network, people around the world talked about it and what happened was extraordinary.
In this... It took 8 years before the case ended up in court.
A number of survivors came forward as witnesses and testified.
That was checked, double-checked, by some really good police officers, criminal investigators.
They found similarities, things that these survivors could not have known if they had not been there.
I wasn't in Belgium at the time. I hardly knew anything about the 'Dutroux case' before the first judge, the first
person responsible for the case, had already been dismissed.
Because of alleged partisanship, which triggered the white marches at the time.
The entire Belgian population was in an uproar because there were child victims.
They were all dressed in white to emphasize the innocence of the children.
But eight years later, there was a huge, massive, massive attempt to erase that knowledge.
All witness statements were deleted; removed from the case.
30 people who had some form of evidence relating to the wider network died.
Many important circumstances were suppressed from the case.
A new file was created to represent a different case.
When the trial began in 2004, there was only Marc Dutroux.
And then there was another person who was the closest, but who was a little higher up in the network.
That was Michel Nihoul. I wrote extensively about Michel Nihoul in my memoirs.
Because it started when I was there. I was there from 1969-74.
I spent a lot of time with Michel Nihoul. He was a kind of sidekick, the middleman for
everything. He dropped out at the end in this case.
And Marc Dutroux was basically sentenced to life imprisonment.
At some point he even escaped from prison.
Now they are trying to catch him and free him. It's really quite amazing.
It's like the Satanists who say: We can do it. We can win.
And... (is interrupted) Gareth: Yes, that's almost mocking.
Anneke: Exactly. Mockery! I think that's a big ritual of Satanists when they mock victims.
Mocking anyone who... The victims were also, the survivors were also extremely mocked and
ridiculed. And of course it goes on and on.
Gareth: Of course. It's a way for them to exert even more power over you and make you feel helpless.
Um...Because you have written about your experience, talk about your experience.... Are you then contacted by people who
have had similar experiences in other countries, networks, or for example in the UK or in Germany or other places?
Anneke: Yes, thank you. That's what I basically do all day long.
I work together with other survivors. In 2016, my story spread like wildfire on the internet.
I have been in the public eye since 2013. And I have been contacted by many, many other survivors.
I work together with them. I have experienced more than 30 years of healing, which of course continues to this day.
But because of the circumstances and the way I've had the privilege to really focus on healing, I share that.
Although it is, I also talk to people all over the world. Actually, it's more the western world.
I work a lot with people from England and the Commonwealth; and of course from Europe, pretty much all
of Western Europe and of course the United States.
This network has similarities everywhere.
There are slight differences for children who come from military families.
But the manipulation of consciousness is similar everywhere. Mind control training is similar everywhere.
The intended use of each child varies according to rank.
That depends on their families. But there are great similarities in the way the network operates.
I have learned that the smaller networks, like the Belgian one, connect with each other.
Through secret societies or whatever in their city, they have some powerful people and they can then keep
control or obstruct the investigation if they need to.
There's a judge, there's a lawyer, there's someone...a police chief or something.
There are doctors. And then they often network with even more powerful people in the world through their own children.
And so they protect their positions or their reputations or they rise to whatever they want, really!
Whatever they strive for, whatever their ambitions are.
You can definitely achieve something if you are part of this network around the world. And
that is very much at the expense of many children.
Gareth: I believe you have a workshop coming up called 'Shifting the Power'. Can you tell us something about it?
Anneke: Yes, thank you. That's what it says on my website.
I worked in the prisons of New York for 10 years.
I founded a non-profit organization to bring yoga into prisons.
And I started teaching yoga from the very beginning. That was in the 2000s.
I have always used yoga as a healing modality but found it very difficult to apply because of the way it was taught.
That's why I've always thought: if you want to be a provider, a teacher, a therapist, there is a
way of dealing with people that is not helpful.
And I've seen a lot of this unhelpful nature, whether it was therapists or yoga teachers or something else.
So I worked my way through these programs in prison.
I have been working on finding a method that allows me to really be fully present; on a horizontal level. Because
we are all invited to participate in this power structure.
So we are all being asked to graduate and then play our part.
And to the extent that we need this status and position, we can mask our own trauma and
place ourselves above the people we work with.
And of course many therapists do the same.
In my experience, the more you specialize, the more this happens.
So it's really up to each provider to look at themselves, to look at the psychology of how they
unconsciously participate in the power structure.
Who do you give your power to and who do you look down on?
And if you can assume that it's really about unresolved trauma; that when you look up to someone and relinquish your power,
you're putting someone on a pedestal, then you're looking at an authority figure from your own
childhood with whom you have unresolved issues.
And if you look down on someone and judge them, then you are projecting negatively.
And that has to do with some parts of you that you haven't really accepted yet.
So this is really the prerequisite and the unconditional model. So this workshop is a 10-week online workshop for each class.
And I think it's a... I've done it. I've actually traveled around the world teaching certain
therapists who really rely on this information a lot.
That this goes deep into the dynamics and how they relate to trauma when you ask this question.
Conclusion Gareth: Thank you very much. Thank you so much for joining us! It's been fantastic talking
to you, even though the subject is as awful as it is.
Talking to you about it... You uncover it and help other people who are in the same situation.
That still feels uplifting in a way. Do you know what I mean?
I hope people at home don't think I'm talking nonsense, but it still feels uplifting to talk to you because you... You've
been through such terrible things, but you turn it around.
As you say about your workshop, you shift the power and that is, that is fantastic!
Anneke: Yes, thank you.