‘Take it’: Woman says Columbus couple used her as sex slave when she was 13

Warning: This story contains graphic details.

Jurors heard graphic testimony Thursday from a woman who alleges a Columbus couple used her like a sex slave while she lived with them in the summer of 2012, when she was 13 years old.

Now 19, the victim was testifying in the trial of Kashonda Tekecia Miles, 40, charged with two counts each of aggravated child molestation and child molestation, and one count each of attempted child molestation and first-degree cruelty to children, offenses alleged to have occurred between June 1 and Aug. 1, 2012.

Miles’ husband, Marcus Anthony Miles, 35, also was charged in the investigation. He’s not on trial because he pleaded guilty to child molestation on Nov. 13, 2017, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison with nine to serve. He has refused to testify.

In recounting how she wound up with the couple, the victim described a loveless childhood with an absent father and a mother whose drug use led to poverty and physical abuse.

“Everything was not as smooth as maybe someone else’s childhood,” she said, her subsequent testimony making that understated. Asked whether her mother liked her, she answered, “It was very hard to tell.”

She was moved around a lot, sometimes living with relatives, or family friends or in foster care. When she got in trouble with a friend in the summer of 2012, her mother contacted the Miles, with whom they were close.

“I’d been around them numerous times,” the woman said. “I loved going over there because we always had a lot of fun.” The couple had nieces and nephews around her age who often were there to play with, she said.

Her visit in 2012 was pleasant at first, she said: Kashonda Miles often took her to the Boys & Girls Club for the day, but eventually those trips ended, the couple saying the club was too far out of the way.

Other changes followed: A floor-to-ceiling barrier meant to contain pets was installed in the Monmouth Drive home, with two locks on the outside, but none on the side facing the bedroom the then-13-year-old slept in. “You weren’t allowed to just walk around,” she said. Eventually she was told not to go outside, she said.

Marcus Miles began entering the bathroom while she was bathing, recording videos on his phone. He and his wife both had lewd videos on their phones that they showed her, she said: “They were very vulgar videos.”

She recalled one day when Kashonda Miles told her to dress up, and helped fix her hair and makeup, and she thought they were going out, she said. Instead she was told to stay in her room, and then a stranger entered – a woman in her 40s, wearing a hat, glasses and a suit, and pulling a case on wheels.

“The woman told me to lay back and open my legs,” she said. She refused, and the woman summoned “Mama Keisha,” the name the victim was told to call Kashonda Miles.

Kashonda Miles went to the closet of her own bedroom and returned with a briefcase containing a Taser to which she attached a battery, the victim said.

Yelling angrily at her, Kashonda Miles then Tased her above the left knee, she said: “It burned very badly,” she said, and smelled like burning plastic.

When she came to, she had welts on her, felt pain in her vagina and noticed she was “bleeding a little bit,” she said.

She recalled another occasion when they cleaned the house so well that “things were kind of spotless,” and Marcus Miles was so excited he was “giggling” when he came into the bathroom with his phone as she was bathing.

When she went into her bedroom wearing only a towel, Marcus Miles and four naked men were in there, and he said, “Welcome to the Mandingo party,” she testified.

The men left the room; Marcus Miles gave her some water; and abruptly she felt drowsy, she said. Marcus Miles left, and soon came back to take her to the den, where the other men were.

“I just remember being grabbed,” she said. Marcus Miles grabbed her first, by the arms and neck, she said: “I also remember other hands being on me.”

She lost consciousness. “When I woke up, it felt like I had been asleep a long time,” she said. She was in a kiddie pool containing a fluid akin to baby oil, and her arms and legs hurt, she testified.

She recalled another time when Kashonda Miles’ made her give Marcus Miles oral sex, forcing her down by her arms and neck as he lay on a bed. She was told that because her mother sent the couple no money for keeping her, she should feel obligated to satisfy their desires, as though “this is like something I should have been doing, something I should have taken the initiative to do,” she testified.

She also was compelled to give Kashonda Miles oral sex, and the wife was more demanding than the husband, she said: “Keisha had a certain way she liked to receive her oral.” On one occasion she had to do this when Kashonda Miles was having her menstrual period, she said: “I could smell her blood.”

Kashonda Miles also made her have sexual intercourse with Marcus Miles, bringing her into their bedroom where he was naked, and telling her she needed to be grateful, as if she owed them.

“I remember my clothes being taken off,” she testified. “Keisha had me in a weird type of lock…. I couldn’t breathe.”

As she was forced into sex, Kashonda Miles whispered “Take it” and “Be good,” she said.

Her testimony described symptoms of being drugged: She said she often found herself “waking up in awkward circumstances” as if she had blacked out and had no memory of what happened afterward. “I even woke up once with my hair cut differently,” she said.

When her mother came to pick her up that August to take her to the mother’s home in Albany, Ga., she was conflicted about what to report, she said: “I was in denial about a lot of what had happened.”

Maybe it was her fault for leaving her mother to live with people who had more money, or her mother’s fault for never paying the Miles anything, she said: “I felt guilty…. I was confused as to whose fault it was.”

The victim said that when she finally told her mother, “she made it sound like a conversation that didn’t really need to be had … like, ‘I get it.’”

Their relationship worsened, as her mother projected anger for other issues onto her, leading to physical abuse. Finally one night her mother kicked her out with no change of clothes, in an area the victim called “the ghetto of Albany.” An older neighbor took her in, and there she called her father’s sister in Columbus, who came to get her.

That aunt testified that when she picked the girl up around the end of July or early August of 2013, she had no underclothes, no shoes, and scars on her body. The aunt brought her to Columbus to live with her father and go to high school here.

Then came the fall, when the girl abruptly became “chaotic, out of her mind,” and the father rushed her to the hospital, the aunt said.

The victim testified that she’d gone into diabetic shock, having been given no insulin nor placed on a proper diet for the disease. She drifted in and out of consciousness, which she found “very confusing,” she said: “I remember feeling like I was back at the Miles’ house.”

When her aunt came to the hospital to get her, “she knew something was wrong,” the victim said. “I told her everything that happened…. My aunt took it really hard that that had happened to me.”

The aunt took her to the FBI office downtown, where agents sent her for a forensic interview with a professional counselor.

In November 2013, authorities served a search warrant at the Monmouth Drive residence. What they seized there was displayed for the jury Thursday, as police Sgt. Mark Richards donned gloves to hold each item up.

They included a Taser, leather masks, a warming gel, a lubricant jelly, a leather collar and leash, a spiked leather collar and leash, a leather whip, a black strap-on dildo, a dildo with a charger cord, and a box of large condoms.

The prosecutors in Kashonda Miles’ trial are Assistant District Attorneys Michelle De Los Santos and Kimberly Schwartz. The defense attorney is Stacey Jackson.

In his opening statement, Jackson told jurors that Marcus Miles was the sexual deviant in the case, and prosecutors were blaming his wife for his proclivities. By the time the girl moved to Monmouth Drive, Kashonda Miles had left her husband to move to an apartment, and only visited occasionally because the couple had a son at the house, he said.

The victim told police other stories that proved untrue, including an account of another girl’s forced abortion with antifreeze and whiskey, after which the aborted fetus was buried in the backyard, Jackson said, but investigators found no remains. Tales of other abused girls also remain unconfirmed, he said.

Though a medical exam found the victim has injuries, prosecutors cannot pinpoint when those occurred, he said.

He said authorities don’t have the evidence to convicted his client as a party to Marcus Miles’ crimes.

The victim testified Marcus Miles would not assault her without his wife present.

“He never did nothing by himself,” she said. “It’s like he had to get permission.”

The trial resumes Friday in Judge Maureen Gottfried’s Government Center courtroom.

This story was originally published August 16, 2018 at 7:10 PM.