A Nigerian woman convicted of enslaving two young women from Nigeria, who worked with her as servants and nannies at her Atlanta home has been sentenced to more than 11 years in United States federal prison.
Bidemi Bello 41, who was arrested was in June this year convicted by a United States jury on charges of two counts of forced labour, two counts of trafficking for forced labour, one count of document servitude, one count of alien harbouring, and two counts of making false statements in a U.S. citizenship application.
Bidemi Bello apologized to the judge and to the victims before her sentencing Thursday, “I’m sorry,” she told her victims with teary eyes.
Prosecutors said she lured the women to Georgia on separate occasions with false promises of education and then forced them to do menial labour, adding that she routinely beat them, forced them to eat spoilt food and cut her lawn by hand.
The two women, both 27, managed to eventually escape. They still live in the U.S. and are working to rebuild their lives.
Bello had previously requested that she not be sentenced to more than 10 years because she claimed she learned the abusive behaviour as a child when she was also a forced-labour house girl and raped repeatedly from age 10.
Prosecutor Susan Coppedge contended that Bello conjured up the story of childhood abuse to mitigate her sentence. Bello had physically abused and psychologically intimidated the young women, Coppedge said.
U.S . District Judge William S. Duffy Jr. said whether Bello had suffered abuse was not the issue. She had prospered after becoming an American citizen and instead of using her wealth to hire servants for her Sugar Hill and Suwanee homes, she instead had imported two girls from Nigeria and abused them, the judge said.
“You made a comment that you were alone and at the mercy at other people,” Duffy said before imposing sentence. “I wondered what it was like in your home … There wasn’t much mercy.”
Duffy sentenced her to 140 months in prison and ordered her to pay $144,200 in restitution to the victims.
One of the victims who spoke to Gwinnett County news agency said “When she called me and I didn’t answer in time, she would slap me,” said one of the young women, Laome, after the sentencing. Bello told her the police would put her in jail if she left, Laome said.
The U.S. Attorney’s office only identified the victims as Laome, now 27, and Dupe, now 27.
Bello recruited Laome, then 17, in 2001 and she escaped in 2004, when she said a woman who learned of her predicament helped her flee.
Bello later returned to Nigeria to recruit 19-year-old Dupe to the U.S. later that year, authorities said.
She did not send the two women to school or pay them and had them cut the lawn by hand with a knife, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The victims were not allowed to sleep in beds or use the shower, and sometimes had to eat spoiled or mouldy food.
Dupe, her second victim escaped in 2006 by taking a cab to a Marietta Methodist church.
“Both women were brave enough to testify in court,” Coppedge said after the trial in August. “This is shocking behaviour going on in a normal-looking subdivision in Suwanee, Georgia … I think there are other instances in Georgia and certainly the metropolitan area.”
Bello left the United States during the investigation, and when she re-entered she was found and arrested at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.
She was indicted in September 2010.
Bello was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2004 but will lose her U.S. citizenship. She will be deported back to Nigeria after serving time in prison. Laome and Dupe are now living and working in the United States on visas.