Peru Two's Michaella McCullum soaks in the Benidorm sun after telling of prison ‘horrors' awaiting Brit ‘smugglers'

The Sun

03-06-2025

PERU Two's Michaella McCollum has been spotted soaking up the sun in Benidorm — just days after warning that Brit 'smugglers' Bella Culley and Charlotte Lee could face 'prison horrors' she wouldn't survive.
The 31-year-old convicted drug mule was seen in a pink Louis Vuitton bikini enjoying the beach in Spain.
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The mum-of-two, who had a boob job at the end of last year, was pictured cooling off in the sea and playing with a ball on the sand.
McCollum served three years in a hellish jail near Lima after she and pal Melissa Reid were busted smuggling £1.5million of cocaine into Peru in 2013.
Now, after carving out a new life as a public speaker and influencer, she has opened up about her time behind bars — and issued a chilling warning to 18-year-old Culley and 21-year-old Lee.
'I could not do 20 years in a prison like that. I just couldn't. And that's what those girls are facing,' she said.
Culley was caught earlier this month with a 31lb stash of cannabis and hashish at Tbilisi airport in Georgia — and told a court she's pregnant.
She's being held in a Soviet-style clink ringed by watchtowers.
Lee, from south London, is locked up in Sri Lanka after two suitcases packed with 46kg of super-strength kush were allegedly found in her hotel room.
The potent synthetic drug is 25 times stronger than fentanyl.
Friends say she's been denied medicine and is forced to 'have a glass of water poured over her head' to clean herself.
Brit 'drug mule' Charlotte May Lee, 21, tears up as cops wheel £1.2m kush haul into court she 'didn't know was in case'
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McCollum compared their ordeals to her own — and said she 'couldn't imagine' how pregnancy would complicate Culley's ordeal.
'As a mum, I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to give birth in that sort of place, and to potentially have the child taken from you and put into care,' she said.
'That adds a whole new, terrifying, dimension. It's just incredibly sad.'
Reflecting on her arrest at 19, McCollum said: 'The situation was almost exactly the same.
'Her mum had reported her missing, then it emerged that she'd been arrested.
'There were such parallels with my case – except it was just in a different country.'
She added: 'They are 19 and 21. Whatever they have done, it's so young to be caught up in something like this, and I know what they are going to go through.
'And their families. It's the worst thing anybody can have to face.'
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Lee claimed she was duped by a mysterious Brit called 'Dan' who bought her a flight to Sri Lanka from Thailand — and then vanished.
McCollum said she was also coerced — offered £5,000 to carry the drugs and manipulated by older men.
'At the time I was so high (on cocaine) that I could barely walk. Yet the men around me were all sober,' she said.
'I thought they were my friends, but actually they didn't give a s**t about me.'
She added: 'It's easy to look at girls like this and think 'how could you be so stupid?' but I look back at myself and think exactly that.
'The vast majority were the victims of some sort of coercion, usually by men.
'Prisons all over the world are full of women who have been caught up in something like this.'
The once notorious mule has now written a book, starred in a Netflix doc, and works with police to warn teens off drugs.
With an estimated net worth close to £1million, she says: 'Even £50,000 isn't enough. No amount of money is worth your freedom.'
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