Off The Record

Hell Is Too Good For My Grandmother Who Betrayed Me In The Worst Possible Way At Age Five

Published on March 12, 2025

When Gloria Masters, age five, arrived at her grandmother’s house, she exhaled with relief and her tense muscles relaxed since she knew that a hot supper was waiting for her inside.

For a fleeting moment in her early years, the starving kid who had been denied food, affection, and attention by her father found refuge in her grandmother’s home.

“I’d enjoy going to visit because she’d always let me eat. Even though that’s a basic requirement, in our home there wasn’t a lot of food,” Gloria, now 64, tells me.

For the first sixteen years of her life, Gloria endured child sex abuse and human trafficking at the hands of her evil father, making her family’s home in Auckland, New Zealand, “hell on earth.”

The only way she could escape the nightmares at home when she was a very small child was to visit her grandma. But before long, even she would become a heartless, ruthless person, and her house would become yet another scene of torture and suffering.

“She told me she would be teaching me some things. I was a bit confused at first,” Gloria explains, recounting the day she realised the grandmother who would give her hot meals was in cahoots with her evil father.

After locking the door, her paternal grandmother led her into a bedroom. At the age of five, she would teach her about sex and how to win over guys there.

“Some of the things she wanted me to do felt abhorrent. She taught me how to please men, touch them and what to do with my hands,” Gloria explains today.

“She became a different woman behind that locked door,” Gloria adds.

“She was angry, scary and would hurt me. She’d slap me if I did something wrong or send me to the garden and lock me in the shed. Later on I heard – and saw – she got paid a commission to “train” me [for sex trafficking].”

“My father had decided she would be the best one to teach me. I honestly think this [abuse] went through generations on his side because to her it was normal to do this to me.”

In addition to being a corrupt training ground, Gloria was abused in her grandmother’s house by adult men who would pay her father and grandmother, who are both now deceased, to rape her.

“I noticed everything,” she tells me.

I was too young to understand the transaction at the time. All I was told was, “If you’re good and keep the men happy, you can have a treat later.”

“I was a child conditioned into doing what they wanted, but it never felt okay. I was always scared. I was worthless to everybody apart from being able to be used sexually.”

Her grandma also performed forced abortions on her between the ages of 11 and 16. Gloria can recall three or more.

A childhood of trauma

Gloria can’t remember a period of her early years when her father wasn’t abusing her sexually.

I was sexualized from the moment I was born. “My father raped me for the first time when I was four years old, and I was touched inappropriately,” she claims.

According to him, we were “going to have a special time together” and he promised to buy me ice cream afterwards.

“Food was used as a lure to get me to do what he wanted. Of course, as a small child, you want to believe what your father says.”

She lost awareness of what was happening as she was being raped.

“My mind left my body. I was up on the ceiling watching myself. The mind is so powerful it’s a way to protect you,” she explains.

“My father was classic psychopath. He never showed any love. My self-confidence was non-existent. I felt like a burden or a nuisance.”

She was a child, so she didn’t really understand what was happening to her or why.

Gloria claims in her memoir that she had to ask for or do an action she desired in order to get her mother’s attention.

“As a child, I had to get through somehow and I did this by reading what she wanted. To keep myself looked after and cared for meant I had to provide something she required,” she wrote.

Gloria, however, spent as much time outside as she could to avoid her father. She enjoyed playing netball with pals and would run about the neighborhood till dusk.

She was starving at home, so she also stole from nearby supermarkets. As a child, she believed that what was occurring was typical.

“I knew I would be killed if I ever spoke out [about the abuse]. Being threatened by my father was sometimes scarier than the abuse itself,” she adds.

Christmases and birthdays were seldom observed. She only remembers getting a birthday present when she was six years old. A bright red scooter was waiting for her when she opened the door to her bedroom.

Because it was so uncommon, this pathetic gesture of charity is particularly noteworthy today.

She was nothing more than a sexual and financial object to her father. Gloria just calls him ‘the monster’ these days.

“He doesn’t deserve the title of “father” or “dad”. He was my biggest, scariest monster. Every child has a fear of monsters, and that was mine, living in the house,” she says.

By the time she was ten years old, Gloria was acting out at school due to the trauma she had endured from a childhood filled with beatings, sexual abuse, forced prostitution, trafficking, and image-based abuse. She claims that the teachers were unable to regulate her behavior.

“At school I was free. No one would hurt me, trick me, trap me or lease me. I was free for six hours a day, five days a week,” she reveals.

“My whole body would go into free fall, which meant I was out of control. Children don’t use words [to tell you what’s wrong]; they show it through behavior.”

“Help me, see me, save me, don’t send me back” was my cries, but the professors never inquired as to what was wrong.

“This meant I was always in trouble and being kicked out of class. I would even steal food from other children’s bags because I was starving.”

When Gloria was eleven years old, her parents’ terrible marriage ended, and she and her three siblings were allowed to choose who they wanted to live with.

Gloria chose her father in spite of the atrocities he had exposed her to. He had promised to buy her a pony, something every young girl wants, but he was always the manipulator.

That pledge was never fulfilled. The sexual abuse only worsened after Gloria’s confidence was betrayed once more.

You could be forgiven for thinking, “Why did you go with him when he was always tricking you, lying and hurting you?” Because he offered me the most magical thing any girl can hear,’ Gloria tells me

“Choosing which parent to live with should never have been a choice I was given.”

The’real horror began’ throughout the course of the following 18 months.

“Once there was no other adult in the house, I was being trafficked freely from home,” she said.

“I was being put into my father’s van at night and taken to other men and other groups. My father made so much money out of me that he purchased one of the first four Pontiac vehicles imported into New Zealand.”

Every day, her father or other guys would rape her. She made three attempts at suicide because the constant abuse became intolerable.

She was once ‘leased out’ to a nightclub’s back room when she was eleven and a half years old, when she was drugged, beaten, and shackled to a bed by both men and women.

She ‘performed’ on stage for child sexual abuse material at the same club during the day.

In a particularly startling illustration of the torture she endured almost daily, Gloria, who was 12 at the time, was taken by her father to a gang hideout and picked up 12 hours later, looking “unrecognisable.”

The details are too shocking to publish, but when her father picked her up she recalled him saying to the gang leader, “Mate, can you be careful with what you do to her? She won’t look as good for you otherwise.”

Gloria remembers another perverse aspect of her father’s mistreatment: by the time she was in her teens, she had started to see herself as his “mistress,” sharing his bed each night.

She discovered another woman in her father’s bed one day after returning home from school. She hurried five kilometers to her mother’s house, shocked and bewildered, and explained the situation.

After taking her to see a Catholic priest, her mother concluded that staying with her father was unsafe. Gloria was so relieved that she would never have to see her father again that she was crying and laughing on the way back to her mother’s house.

I kept saying, “Mum, I’m so happy,” but she replied, “Don’t get too excited, you’ll be going back every second week and a half of school holidays.” That almost broke me.’

After that, she would spend 12 days with her mother in safety before spending two days in total misery with her father.

She didn’t have the legal option to stop seeing him until she was sixteen. She never turned back as she fled.

Recovering from unimaginable abuse

Gloria was reduced to a hollow version of herself in the mind of a child who was being mistreated by the people who ought to have loved her the most.

Not until she was thirty-two and sat on a therapist’s couch for the first time did she question herself, ‘Who am I?’

Gloria broke down in tears as a wave of emotion swept over her.

She was left on her own to deal with the fallout from what had occurred to her. When she was in her early thirties, authorities conducted an inquiry, but no one was even charged despite the overwhelming number of witnesses to her abuse.

“I was angry and so sad that my childhood had been stolen from me,” Gloria tells me today.

Gloria had to face the reality that she had spent a large portion of her life hiding who she really was behind a mask of fear after living in it for so long.

Gloria is 64 years old, a mother, and much more innocent than she was in her wretched youth. She is gregarious, curious, and joyful.

“This stuff happens, but I want to let others know if someone like me can make it through, others can too. Always hold onto hope,” she says.

“I’m really grateful for the fact that I survived it. I made it, and I live on to help others.”

“The shadow of these types of trauma lasts the length of a lifetime. But it only needs to happen once as a child and it changes the way you see the world—and you never get that back,” she said.

She has already authored three books: On Angels’ Wings: My Flight from Trauma to Grace, Flightpath to Healing: A Guide for Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) Survivors, and Keeping Kids Safe: A Roadmap for Parents, Teachers, and Others.

Additionally, Keeping Kids Safe will be made available in New Zealand schools.

Other survivors have been motivated to talk about their own trauma by Gloria’s courage.

In addition, she founded the nonprofit Handing the Shame Back, which supports adult survivors of child sexual abuse, and hosts the podcast.