Net porn victim who helped change law
Net porn victim who helped change law
Bob Kemper in Washington
May 4, 2006
SHE was known as Disney World Girl, the Internet Girl or, more precisely, the Internet Porn Girl. But Masha Allen finally has an identity all of her own and a newfound voice - and she is intent on telling the world how she, and an untold number of children like her, have been allowed to suffer.
Masha, now living in the US state of Georgia with her adoptive mother, was born in Russia to a father who abandoned her and an alcoholic mother who stabbed her. She was five years old and living in an orphanage in 1998 when an American showed up to take her to what she thought would be a wonderful new life in the US.
But the world Matthew Mancuso, a 39-year-old divorced engineer from Pittsburgh, brought her into was the furthest thing from wonderful. Masha's supporters, who appeared with the now 13-year-old girl at a congressional hearing yesterday, say the adoption system, schools, social workers and police all failed her.
Mancuso, who on his adoption forms requested a five-year-old girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, raped Masha that first night home and regularly after that for the next five years. He limited her food so she would remain slight and look younger. At the age of 10, she fitted in clothes made for a six-year-old.
Investigators say Mancuso took hundreds of pictures of Masha partially clothed or naked in a variety of humiliating poses, and uploaded at least 200 pictures of her to the internet. They have been traded and sold by pedophiles ever since.
Law enforcement officials believe 80 per cent of the pedophiles under investigation around the world have in their collections at least one picture of Masha, said Maureen Flatley, an adoption consultant working with Masha.
Canadian police tracked down Mancuso after identifying the backgrounds in Masha's pictures, including a fountain at Walt Disney World in Florida. Mancuso, now 46, is in a federal prison hospital in Massachusetts that manages sexual predators.
Mancuso has federal and state charges still pending against him, and if convicted is unlikely to ever be free again.
Masha was readopted. After hearing about her case, several congressman, including the Democrat senator John Kerry, introduced legislation dubbed "Masha's Law" that would triple to $US150,000 ($200,000) the penalty for those who download child pornography.
It also would mean victims aged over 18 could still sue anyone who buys, sells or distributes pictures of them taken at an earlier age.
In TV appearances Masha said having her pictures still circulating around the globe was worse than the five years of abuse she endured with Mancuso. At least the abuse stopped, she said.