When nude photos of leading Ugandan model Judith Heard were published without her consent last year she not only found herself under arrest, but also under attack in the media and online. To break this pattern of victim-blaming, she is now urging Ugandan women to talk openly about s*xual abuse - and to show solidarity with one another. She told her own story to Sophie Hemery and Alice McCool.
Some readers will find this story disturbing
She arrives for our interview in a borrowed £50,000 dress. She's a jetsetter and socialite, in London for some modelling engagements and charity events. On the surface, her life differs entirely from that of the average East African. But there is one thing Judith Heard has in common with many women in Uganda.
A survey conducted in 2016 found that 50% of Ugandan women aged between 15 and 49 had experienced physical or s*xual intimate partner violence. Heard, whose pre-marriage name was Kantengwa, has experienced both. (We discussed with Judith which name to use for this story, and decided on Kantengwa, though she uses Heard for professional purposes.)
The publication of the nude photographs - downloaded, she believes, from a stolen computer or telephone - is just the latest in a long line of abuses she has suffered at the hands of men, she says. She has been silent about them for many years because she has been "scared to be embarrassed and humiliated".
"We are judged for this, so you keep it to yourself and end up getting your mind messed up psychologically," she says. "I've decided to tell my story because I want to be a free woman. I don't want to walk for the rest of my life with this heavy stone."
Some of Kantengwa's earliest memories are of her father beating her mother, who eventually left home in fear of her life. As a result, at the age of eight, Kantengwa moved to her father's family home in Rwanda - and was raised mainly by her grandmother after her father was killed in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
It was in Rwanda that she was first raped - at the age of 15, by a family member at home, on the night before her final school exams. The next day, after doing her exams, she ran away.
Kantengwa ended up in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, where she took refuge in a ghetto in the Nyamirambo district - "a very, very crazy place", as she puts it. Here she became a performer in a music group. "Whoever wanted to join would come and you would have a place to sleep, some food," she laughs, giving a rendition of her Shania Twain act.
She wasn't paid for singing but would "just survive by being nice to the people in the neighbourhood... to get some beans, some chapati." The ethos was: "If I get, we share. If you get, we share."
At 17, Kantengwa got a job as a waitress in a club frequented by the rich and famous, and became known as "the beautiful Ugandan girl who speaks English". With her earnings, she was able to get her own apartment.
Things were looking up. So when a woman approached her in the club one night offering her a better life, she felt fate was on her side. She arranged to meet the woman to travel with her to Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where, she was told, she "might meet somebody nice… who can take care of you".
The chance of security was too much to turn down. "I was a little girl and just wanted to find a better life for myself, and find money, and one day go and look for my family," she says.
