"He'd tell me not to tell anyone, or else something bad would happen," Masha said. To keep her silent he used rewards - as well as threats. "But it always came back to me - couldn't stop it." "I'd make myself think of other things when it was happening," she said. And then, a few days later, he started raping her repeatedly - and taking sexually explicit photographs. Then he started touching her private parts.
The first couple of nights, he touched her leg or chest. When it was time for bed that first night, he didn't send her to her room - he told her to get in bed with him. The nightmare began when Masha flew home with Mancuso to his modest, middle-class house on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. "I remember asking him if I was gonna get a mother, and he'd say that he wasn't married, and that he didn't think I would," she said. But there was also something strange about him. Masha said Mancuso was friendly and brought her gifts. He said he wanted to adopt a 5- or 6-year-old Caucasian girl, and Mancuso picked Masha out from a videotape sent to him by the adoption agency. Matthew Mancuso had found Masha through an adoption agency in Cherry Hill, N.J. Then one day, a divorced 41-year-old American showed up saying he wanted to adopt her. It was a sad and desperate existence, but because adoption is rare in Russia, Masha expected to live there until she turned 18. When authorities responded, they took Masha away to live in an orphanage. When she was 4, Masha says, her mother stabbed her in the back of her neck during a drinking binge. She doesn't remember her father, and says her mother was an alcoholic. Masha was born in a small, industrial city in southern Russia.
"He took away five years of my life that I could never get back." It's part of a larger law called the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which requires convicted child molesters to be listed on a national Internet database and face a felony charge for failing to update their whereabouts."It's like he stole my childhood," the young girl, Masha, said. In July, President Bush signed Masha's Law, which dramatically increases the fines and penalties for downloading kiddie porn. There are dozens of notices of other pending cases, a number that does not begin to reflect the actual number of potential defendants in criminal and civil cases. Nine other people have been convicted in federal court for downloading Masha's pictures. Masha's courage may now assist lawmakers as they look for ways to combat the growing child-porn industry.Īuthorities say one in five children is now approached by online predators in what Congress calls a multibillion-dollar industry. "If they tell somebody, it's going to change." "Even if they are afraid to tell somebody, no matter what they think is going to happen, it's going to be for the better," she said.
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