Hell is too good for my grandmother who betrayed me in the worst possible way at age five. Now, 60 years later, GLORIA MASTERS exposes the evil that hid in plain sight

Arriving at her grandmother’s home, five-year-old Gloria Masters breathed a sigh of relief and her tense muscles relaxed knowing she’d have a warm meal waiting inside.

For a vanishingly brief moment during her childhood, grandma’s house was a safe haven for the hungry child who was neglected of love, attention and food by her father.

‘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.

Her family home in Auckland, New Zealand, was ‘hell on earth’ for Gloria, who was a victim of child sex abuse and trafficking at the hands of her monstrous father for the first 16 years of her life.

When she was a very young child, going to see her grandmother was the only respite from the nightmares at home. But before long, even she would turn into a cold, cruel woman, and her home became another place of misery and abuse.

‘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.

Her paternal grandmother took her into a bedroom and locked the door. There she would teach her about sex and how to please men – at age five.

‘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.’

Her grandmother’s home wasn’t just a depraved training ground; it was also one of the locations where Gloria was abused by grown men who would pay her father and grandmother – who have both since died – 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.’ 

From the age of 11 to 16, her grandmother also was the one to perform forced abortions on her. Gloria remembers least three.

A childhood of trauma 

Gloria can’t recall a time during her childhood when she wasn’t being sexually abused by her father.

‘From the time I was born I was being sexualised. I was touched inappropriately and my father first raped me when I was four,’ she says.

‘He said we were “going to have a special time together” and he would buy me an ice cream after. 

‘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.’ 

When she was being raped, her mind dissociated from what was happening. 

‘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.’ 

Being a child, she had limited awareness of what was happening to her – or why. 

In her memoir, Gloria says the only way she received attention from her distant mother was by demanding it or doing something she wanted.

‘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.

Meanwhile, to try to keep away from her father, Gloria spent as much time outdoors as possible. She loved netball and would run through the neighbourhood playing with friends until the sun went down.

She also stole from local grocery stores because she was starved at home. She grew up thinking what was happening was normal.

‘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.

Birthdays and Christmases were rarely celebrated. The one time she recalls receiving a birthday present was at age six. She opened her bedroom door to find a bright red scooter waiting for her.

This pitiful act of kindness stands out today because of how rare it was. 

To her father, she was simply an object for sexual and financial gain. Today, Gloria now only refers to him as ‘the monster’.

‘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.

After a childhood marred by beatings, sexual abuse, forced prostitution, trafficking and image-based abuse, Gloria was so traumatised by age ten she was acting out at school. The teachers, she explains, didn’t know how to control her behaviour.

‘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 behaviour. 

‘My behaviour screamed “help me, see me, save me, don’t send me back” but the teachers never asked 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.’

At age 11, Gloria’s parents’ toxic marriage came to an end, and she and her three siblings were given the choice of who they wanted to live with.

Despite the horrors he’d subjected her to, Gloria chose her father. Ever the manipulator, he had promised to buy her something every little girl dreams of: a pony.

That promise was never kept. Gloria’s trust was broken yet again, and the sexual abuse only got worse.

‘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.’ 

Over the next 18 months was when the ‘real horror began’.

‘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.’ 

She was raped daily by either her father or other men. The incessant abuse became so unbearable she attempted suicide three times. 

At one point, when she was 11 and a half, she was ‘leased out’ to the back room of a nightclub where she was chained to a bed, drugged and abused by both men and women.

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

In a particularly shocking example of the abuse she was subjected to on a near-daily basis, Gloria, then aged 12, was taken by her father to a gang hideout and was collected 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 recalls another twisted detail about her father’s abuse: by the time she reached her teens, she had come to view herself as his ‘mistress’ who slept with him every night.

One day after coming home from school, she found another woman in her father’s bed. Shocked and confused, she ran to her mother’s home five kilometres away and told her what was wrong.

Her mother took her to see the Catholic priest who said it was unsafe for her to remain with her father. On the way back to her mother’s, Gloria was laughing and crying from relief thinking she would never have to see her father again. 

‘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.’

From that point on, she would have 12 days of living in safety with her mother before facing two days of complete hell with her father.

It wasn’t until she turned 16 that she had the legal choice to never see him again. She ran and never looked back.

Recovering from unimaginable abuse

In the mind of a child being abused at the hands of those who should have loved her most, Gloria became a hollow version of herself.

It wasn’t until she first sat on a therapist’s couch at the age of 32 that she asked herself: ‘Who am I?’

Gloria wept as a flood of emotion hit her like a tidal wave.

She was left to face the consequences of what happened to her alone. Despite the sheer number of witnesses there must have been to her abuse, no one was even charged, although police did conduct an investigation when she was in her early thirties.  

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

After living in a heightened sense of fear for so long, Gloria had to contend with the fact she’d spent much of life wearing a mask to hide her true self.

Now age 64, Gloria is a mother and far more childlike than she ever was during her miserable youth. She is cheeky, inquisitive, happy.

‘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 this 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.

Now she’s written three books, including Keeping Kids Safe: A Roadmap for Parents, Teachers and Others, Flightpath to Healing: A Guide for Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) Survivors, and On Angels’ Wings: My Flight from Trauma to Grace.

Keeping Kids Safe is also set to be released across schools in New Zealand.  

Gloria’s bravery has inspired other survivors to speak out about their own trauma.

She is also host of the podcast and founder of Handing the Shame Back, a charity dedicated to adult survivors of child sexual abuse.