Media Watch presenter Paul Barry accused journalists of failing to question convicted drug dealer Cassandra Sainsbury about inconsistencies in her memoirs and her story since she was released from prison.
Sainsbury, then 22, was caught smuggling 5.8kg of cocaine at Bogotá international airport in Colombia on a flight to Australia in 2017.
Speaking to Natalie Barr on Sunrise on October 14, Sainsbury said she “was attracted to someone who I had opened up to completely.”
“I had been very vulnerable and unfortunately she used that to destroy my life, essentially.”
But Sainsbury had never mentioned this person, Wendy, in any of their previous interviews going back years; all the people she previously blamed for her plight had been men.
But even those men varied in name and appearance from interview to interview, as ABC reported. Media surveillance show pointed out.
Convicted drug dealer Cassie Sainsbury (pictured) has been making the rounds on Australian radio and television shows to promote her biography, Cocaine Cassie: Set the Record Straight.
In total, he did at least 17 interviews last week, including on Nine, Seven, Ten, ABC and Sky, but not a single interviewer asked him a vital question. Sainsbury appears in the sunrise photo.
For years, Sainsbury had been telling the media about a ‘handler’ called ‘Joshua’ who introduced her to drug dealing in Sydney and then sent her to Colombia.
When appearing on 60 Minutes on 19 April 2020, Sainsbury said Joshua was “tall but chubby, with green eyes and brown hair”.
But two years later, on Channel 7’s Spotlight, Joshua’s appearance had changed dramatically. He was now “muscular, tanned, light-eyed (and) bald.”
But in his book, which is supposedly about “setting the record straight”, Angelo is not mentioned, but there is another guy named “Carlos” who fills a very similar drug dealer role.
Nick also, apparently, had a British accent and ‘lots of tattoos on his arms; snakes, dragons and foreign words.”
There was also another bad man Sainsbury mentioned earlier, ‘Angelo’, who was allegedly the mastermind behind his brief, failed drug dealing career.
Cassandra Sainsbury, better known as Cocaine Cassie, is pictured arriving at a court hearing in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2017.
Sainsbury (left) now lives in Adelaide with his Colombian partner Tatiana (right), who he calls his “anchor in all of this”.
“(Angelo) told me that if I didn’t do the job and take the package my mother, sister and partner were carrying, they would be killed,” Sainsbury said in 2017.
But in his book, which is supposedly about “setting the record straight,” there’s no mention of Angelo or Joshua, but there’s another guy named “Carlos” who fills a very similar drug dealer role.
“Surely these were all key points for the media to address,” Mr Barry asked. “Yet none of them (and we counted a whopping 17 TV and radio interviews last week, including Nine, Seven, Ten, ABC and Sky) didn’t.”
‘Instead, we get gentle questions about life in a Bogotá prison, along with plug after plug for the book.
‘Did anyone really read the book? I doubt it, and they certainly didn’t do any homework before talking to her.
But of course, these interviews were not about the truth, but about ratings and celebrities. Which is what has already seen criminal Cassie star in Seven’s SAS Australia.
Following her trial, she was sentenced to six years in prison, but was released in 2020 after serving two years, 11 months and 21 days.
He then spent 27 months on parole in Colombia.
Sainsbury now lives in Adelaide with his Colombian partner Tatiana, who he calls his “anchor in all of this”.
“I was portrayed as such a nasty, horrible person and I just wanted to give people an idea of how it really played out and how I ended up there,” he said.
“I’m sorry, but it was never intentional.”