‘Cocaine Cassie’ Sainsbury returns to Instagram sharing message about her wife Tatiana

‘Cocaine Cassie’ Sainsbury has opened up about the people she ‘hurt’ during her drug smuggling ordeal in a rare social media post, before thanking her wife for helping to turn her life around.

The convicted drug mule, 27, spent 27 months in jail after she was caught trying to smuggle 5.8kg of cocaine out of Columbia in April, 2017. 

Sainsbury was sentenced to six years in prison but was released early from the notoriously tough El Buen Pastor prison in Bogota in April, 2020.

She flew back to Australia with her wife, computer technician Tatiana, 34, in August and has remained silent on social media since January. 

But the Adelaidean shared a heartfelt message to Instagram on Thursday describing her struggles, regrets and newfound love. 

‘Words can’t ever explain what I feel everyday for the past I lived and for the people I hurt,’ she wrote.

‘Words won’t ever be able to describe the place that I barely managed to crawl out of and what it did to me.

‘Many people believe that I deserve everything I got, but wouldn’t ever wish it on my worst enemy’.

She said the harrowing ordeal in prison ‘changes you’ and that she’s not the same person she was ‘all those years ago’.

‘I had to move forward because that’s all I can do, I acknowledge my past but I can’t live in it,’ Sainsbury said.

‘But living one day at a time became just that little bit easier when I met my wife.

‘She’s my motor, she’s the person that keeps me going and our life together is only just beginning.

‘And a special thank you to all the people who have supported me throughout all these years, to those who have stood by me.’

Sainsbury (pictured with Tatiana), who was sentenced to six years in a Columbian jail after being caught with 5.8kg of cocaine in 2017

Sainsbury’s Instagram is littered with pictures of the happy couple 

Before her arrest, Sainsbury got in desperate financial trouble and fell into working as a shady ‘courier’ in Colombia, a nation synonymous with the global cocaine trade, after working as a sex worker in a Sydney brothel.

In Colombia, she claimed to have been raped by the mastermind of the failed smuggling plot, a Brazilian man named ‘Angelo’.

She said he spiked her drink after she went to his Bogota unit.

She made international headlines and stood numbly as she was photographed with 18 numbered parcels, all containing cocaine with an estimated street value of $2million. 

Sainsbury is pictured above at the time of her arrest in Colombia in April 2017

Sainsbury was just 22-years-old when she was arrested with 5.8 kilograms of cocaine hidden in her luggage at Bogota airport (pictured, arriving for a court hearing in Bogota in 2017)

Convicted Australian drug dealer ‘Cocaine’ Cassie Sainsbury (pictured right)  married her IT whiz girlfriend Tatiana (left) in Colombia in March

In an interview with 7News Spotlight, she said she saw people die by getting stabbed or hanging themselves while in prison.

The ‘helplessness’ in the prison eventually wore Sainsbury down and she attempted to take her life by jumping from the prison’s fourth floor.

But another inmate grabbed her as she was about the go over the edge and told her not to give up.

‘When I went to take the step off, I felt someone pull me back,’ Sainsbury said.

‘She told me off. She basically said that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.’ 

Sainsbury did make it through her time in the prison and eventually met Tatiana who she married in a Columbian nightclub.