I was kidnapped & assaulted for days…but police called me the ‘real life Gone Girl’ & claimed I made it up for fame
A KIDNAPPING and assault survivor who endured 40 hours of hell has recalled how she had to fight for the truth after being branded the “real life Gone Girl” by police.
In 2015, Denise Huskins was blindfolded and abducted from her boyfriend’s home in Vallejo, California by stranger Matthew Muller, a former US Marine and Harvard Law graduate.
As told in Netflix documentary American Nightmare, the physiotherapist and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn were drugged with sedatives during the home invasion and he was told if he didn’t pay a $15,000 (£11,800) ransom Denise would be hurt.
She was held for days, drugged, and assaulted before finally being released by her captors.
But when Denise told the police what had happened to her, nobody believed her and, when it later emerged the couple had argued the night before the kidnapping, they even suspected she had devised a kidnap-ransom scheme to “get revenge” on her boyfriend.
She was branded a liar, hoaxster, fraud, and the real life “Gone Girl,” with police claiming she’d made it all up for fame and attention.
Joining Alex Cooper on podcast ‘Call Her Daddy,’ Denise recalls how she was woken up in the middle of the night after Muller broke into their home with a fake gun and a flashlight and was forced to take sedatives.
Despite telling her it was a “robbery” and that they weren’t here to hurt her, Denise recalls: “Still in the back of your mind you’re like, are they going to torture us, rape me, rape him and me?”
By their public statements, people saw my name, my face and people thought, Gone Girl, liar, hoaxster, fraud
Denise Huskins
“You also have to try and figure out how to stay calm and present because at least for myself in those moments, I’m like, ‘if I freak out and lose my sanity that’s going to make it riskier for me because I’m not clear headed and I might not pick up on some information that’ll get me out alive.'”
She goes on to say how the night progressively got worse when she was separated from Aaron and taken downstairs.
There, the man who went on to hold her captive told her this was actually meant for Aaron’s ex and that they had to figure out what they were going to do.
She adds that shortly after he came back and told her he was going to take her for 48 hours, put her in the trunk of Aaron’s car and then another car, and that Aaron was going to have to complete some tasks for her to be released.
Denise was taken to a remote cabin where she was isolated, bound, blindfolded and sedated.
“You envision all of the possible ways you can be tortured and killed,” she says.
“Am I going to bleed out slowly? Am I going to be raped? By how many of them? How am I going to be able to face and tolerate any of that?”
Whilst in solitary confinement, Denise says her only defence was to try and show her captor the human being in front of him and just hope he decided not to kill her.
Denise says her captor told her he was from a black market start up company hired to fulfil personal and financial debts and they were hired to target Aaron and Aaron’s ex.
“Later that day they came in and said that because it wasn’t meant for me, they didn’t have any information on me, so they were going to record him having sex with me,” she says.
“And if they thought I was ever going to speak to the police they’d release it on the internet.”
Denise continues: “It’d been hours of wondering if that was going to happen.
“As much as I felt the soul sucked out of me, also, I was like, of course this was going to happen. At that point too – what do I say? There’s nothing I can say that’s going to stop this…and I just laid there.”
To survive and get through it, Denise explains how she had to fully detach from the situation and was almost “floating overhead” watching it happen.
However, the next day, Denise recalls being told the “footage wasn’t good enough” and this time she had to “seem like she liked it.”
In the middle of the night, she was woken and shown an article of her dad’s plea to the kidnappers and, only then, after 40 hours of hell, she was told: “It’s time to go.”
Two days after Denise was taken, she was released by Muller in an alleyway near her parents’ home.
Everything I worked for, that meant something to me, was taken from me. It was devastating
Denise Huskins
However, little did she know her nightmare was about to continue.
When she finally told police about her horrifying ordeal, they doubted her testimony and in public revealed plans to charge the couple with wasting police time and resources.
Soon, she caused a media frenzy and was referred to as the “real life Gone Girl.”
“The processing through everything, the pain, what happened after the kidnapping has absolutely been the hardest part to deal with,” Denise recalls.
“You can kind of understand there’s people out there who are motivated to cause harm and it’s just a really unfortunate horrible situation that we were targeted and it happened, but when you go through a traumatic event you want to call upon your community, the people in your life, other humans to get you through it.
“You’re trained all your life that if something bad happens, call 911 and they’ll help – and they only made it worse.
“By their public statements, people saw my name, my face and people thought, Gone Girl, liar, hoaxster, fraud.
“Like how can I work again? How can I put my hands on another human and have them trust me with their well-being if they think I’m some con artist?
“Everything I worked for, that meant something to me, was taken from me. It was devastating.”
It wasn’t until there was an unsuccessful kidnapping 10 weeks later that the couple were finally believed and evidence proved that Denise’s story was in fact true.
Muller was sentenced to a total of 71 years imprisonment for kidnapping for ransom, two counts of forcible rape, robbery, burglary, and false imprisonment.
Denise and Aaron, who were awarded $2.5million in a defamation settlement against the City of Vallejo.