Airdre Mattner was just like any other young person: she wanted to explore the world. The 25-year-old primary school teacher took a job teaching English in Japan, and decided to explore the nearby Asian countries.
One of the first stops on her list was the bustling town of Seoul in Korea, where she planned to soak up the local culture. Since she was travelling alone, she decided to sign up for a pub crawl, where she hoped to meet fellow travellers.
On the night in question, Airdre purchased all her own drinks. Somehow, her third drink of the night was still spiked. Instead of enjoying a relaxing evening, Airdre was drugged, kidnapped and raped.
On last night’s 60 Minutes, she told her story in the hopes that no other young women will fall victim to the same type of crime. “It was not a slow process,” Airdre tells Allison Langdon of realising she had been drugged.
“It was a blackout and being aware that I was in the back of a taxi being taken somewhere, and being violently ill.”
It quickly became clear that Airdre was in danger, but the man who sat with her in the back of the cab refused to let her out or take her home.
"I was terrified and I didn't know what else I could do, other than just beg with the man to take me back to the hostel."
But they didn't. And although Airdre's memory from that point forward was a hazy mess, security footage from the hotel clearly shows two men going in to rent the room.
They returned just over an hour later with Aidre in tow.
The next clear memory Airdre has is of being inside a hotel room, naked on a bed, while a man tried to force his way inside her.
"I tried to push him off but I wasn't strong enough," she says. When she woke up, all her money was gone. But her ordeal wasn't over.
Airdre went to the Korean police immediately, but they were shocking unconcerned by her plight. Instead, they asked her questions typical of victim-blaming: What was she wearing? Had she been drinking? Why did she go out alone at night?
After hardly any investigation, the police dropped Airdre's case. The reaction is typical of Korean authorities, who tend not to take rape charges seriously.
When Airdre decided to fund her own investigation, the Korean police were forced to keep pursuing her attacker. Within a week, an arrest had been made. But the police weren't happy about having their hand force, and fought back by posting Airdre's private information on their public Facebook page.
Watch the trailer for tonight's 60 Minutes. Post continues after video...
"I believe they did it to save face, to humiliate me in the eyes of the Korean public, to discredit to me and to scare me off, to try to get rid of me," Airdre says.
While she did receive some hate mail, what surprised her was the amount of support she received from women who'd been through the same thing. One of those stories was 35-year-old Amanda Wilson. Amanda was also sexually assaulted in Korea, but unlike Airdre, she remembers her attacker: a US military contracted named James Hillier.
Amanda met Hillier at a bar in Korea, after being introduced by the bar owner, where he asked her home to a "house party". When she arrived, however, there was no-one else to be seen. "He looked at me and just said, 'You won't leave. You won't be leaving,'" Amanda tells 60 Minutes.
Desperate to escape, Amanda bit Hillier's face while he was on top of her. She made a run for the fence, but impaled her wrist on a barb. She hung, helpless, by her impaled wrist for an hour while cars drove past. Nobody came to help her.
In the weeks after the assault, Hillier wrote to Amanda, offering her $50,000 to drop the charges against him. "Neither one of us deserves to have our lives ruined by this," the letter said.
Amanda refused the money. Then, to her utter disgust, the Korean authorities decided not to pursue her attacker.
"He had no repercussions whatsoever," she says. "It scares the hell out of me. Because I worry that somebody else is going to hear about my story and choose, because mine didn't get prosecuted..."
Top Comments
Men get away with rape in all countries of the world, including Australia. The coverage of this story I have seen so far has been heavily biased and quite hypocritical. I read elsewhere a highlighted quote from the victim saying that Koreans have a sleazy nickname for white women and a perception of them as sexually promiscuous. White Australian men also have sleazy nicknames for women of various Asian ethnicities and racialised stereotypes of their sexual behaviour.
Ofcourse the rapists should be charged and punished accordingly, yes the alleged behaviour of the police was appalling. Could this just as easily have happened in Australia? Yes.
Thanks for this. I cannot believe how many times it takes for people, even really smart women to be told this about Australia and either no one gets it or no one cares.
Contact the US Military? Are you kidding? There was a woman in this show last night raped by a US serviceman in Japan and the US Armed Forces let him get away with it! The US armed forces have many strategic interests in Japan and Korea - that means they are unlikely to kick up much of a fuss about sexual assault.