By: Daiyu Tang
Trigger Warning – Article Covers Abusive Subjects –
Dear readers, as promised in the Hathian Observer’s Year in Review 2025, I did promise that May 2025’s CU Plane Crash / Kidnap Drama / ‘Lord of the Flies’ tale would be expanded and here, I deliver on that promise with an interview with Jessica now known as ‘Jizzabelle‘.
A recap for those who don’t want to read the two articles we had that covered the actual disaster and rescue..
What happened: In the chaotic aftermath of the CU ‘Cheerios’ charter crash (May 2025), survivors moving through remote terrain encountered a site that was not part of the wreckage. There, they found a captive identified as Jessica and freed her. She was brought out alive. She reported being restrained and threatened; basic needs had been sporadically met, apparently to keep her compliant. She detailed significant abuse at the hands of a criminal group.
“Becoming Jessica Again?”: A survivor’s Year on From the Jungle
Last spring, a young woman was pulled out of the swamps after a storm and a plane crash forced strangers together. Nearly a year on, she came to the Observer office to talk about who she was, what was done to her, and why she has chosen to live openly with it.
She arrived in pink, all bright edges and big talk, asking for coffee and offering a diary. She calls herself ‘Jizzabelle’ now; but she showed me that her birth certificate once read Jessica Marie Hansen. Her story is uncomfortable, complicated, and very Hathian (yet was oft located outside our City): trauma and tenacity poured into the same cup, stirred with opinion and a steady stare. Pain. A lot of pain. Yet pain that was turned into something for her own armoury. It was, dear reader, confusing. I was confused. But let’s start with a quote:
“I was kidnapped at a young age… kept a diary in captivity and now I’m an open book,” she told me, outlining a decade-long ordeal that began in Iowa, detoured through an island off Colombia, and ended with a gator-churned boat and a cheer squad stumbling on a wreck that eventually led back to Hathian and CU in particular.
Independent police records obtained from outside Louisiana confirm key biographical details: Jessica Hansen (b. Nov 16, 2001) was reported missing from West Des Moines in 2014, her parents and brother were found deceased inside their family home, and she is documented as a victim of trafficking. The file lists her ultimate captors as the ‘Costa del Norte’ cartel and notes she was found near a Louisiana crash site in April 2025 by CU cheer survivors. So far, the facts stack up – so what was the story that led to those police files?
Pavlov on People
In our interview, Jessica described a process that was less about constant beatings and more about conditioning: reward over punishment, compliance trained into reflex.
As she put it, girls were first “broken,” then “rebuilt,“. Once they started to comply they were moved from a basement to a better level, with better food, beds, even, eventually, “spa days,” with praise for obedience and eagerness. In psychology we’d call that classical conditioning: pair a stimulus with a reward until the response fires on its own. Pavlov without the bell, just the spa day treat. It’s quite… sickening.
“See, for us… that’s where they started teaching us. Rebuilding us with rewards… headpats. Attagirls. Better food. Better sleeping conditions.”
JB
Here’s the thing that will make many readers bristle (and my skin in the interview feel clammy, upset, disturbed at the world): Jessica says she did not dissociate to survive. She “became.” She argues that the micro-culture on the island stripped away mixed messages about sex and replaced them with a single, blunt instruction and a stream of rewards for following it. She also says she functions better, mentally, when she keeps an active sex life now. That is her claim about her body and mind. The Observer neither endorses it as a prescription nor pathologizes it. We note it, and flag the obvious: long conditioning can feel like preference, the research on this is clear, but for now, I, and I stress this, try and respect people for the choices they make and for the trauma they’ve beaten. Who can have overcome more than this woman?
It’s Jizzabelle, not ‘Jessica’
Jessica has filed to make ‘Jizzabelle’ her legal name. She says it isn’t a change so much as an admission: “Jessica went to the island and Jizzabelle came back.” I asked the hard question: does taking the name given by abusers hand them the pen again? Or is she ripping the pen from their hand and writing her own foreword? Her answer: she spent two months trying to be “normal,” then stopped pretending and chose the version of herself that functions. Readers will or may disagree. That’s allowed. The point of agency is that she gets to decide and the burden on the rest of us is not to turn that into a public referendum on her body and how she chooses to identify through a name. Still, like if I named myself ‘Satan’ or something, people would get an idea – would make judgements – would discriminate perhaps. But the difference here is that JB seems not to mind. Perhaps Carly Cox has finally found both her perfect student and perfect example? The feminist in me objects and supports in the same breath. Be who you want. But who you want was created by powerful men? It’s hard readers. What do you think?
Turning to the Problem
JB’s account paints the same silhouette we’ve seen in case after case: men who collect money, yachts, and girls like they’re the same category of asset; systems that launder violence through etiquette; and a market that rewards ‘quiet’ consumption far more than it fears consequence. Whether the visitors to JB on that island were household names or merely household monsters is, legally, still a blank. The Observer is not going to get tech titans down on our head without proof. What’s not blank is the dynamic: money buys privacy; privacy buys abuse; abuse buys silence.
“… Sex … Instead, we’d do well to see it as a way to hit the reset button on our stress response, to connect with another human, and be an important part of our mental health, even if our partner isn’t quite as perfect as we’d like”
JB
Maybe that resonates with you and if you’re reaching for ‘she looks happy now‘ as your rebuttal to my worry or perhaps you think Carly was right, set that down. Conditioning can leave you walking in the same direction long after the hand on your back has lifted. That doesn’t make the direction a sin, nor does it make it free of gravity. Two things can be true: she can feel whole, and a system can still have carved her to fit a hole (and carved her hole to fit the system). Shit. It’s complex right?
For women in Hathian, the risk isn’t just abduction or a gang (cartels thankfully seem not to get their grip in easily here). It’s the casual shrug that greases every wheel: the club owner who “didn’t ask,” where their latest dancer came from (or what she really wanted), the friend who “didn’t want drama,” the reader who clicks for the salacious and skips the civic. You want Isabis and her boobs, you don’t want consequences and JB? In totality, it’s power without scrutiny. What I do, can only do so much (little?); it’s on you as Hathian residents, business owners, law enforcement to do more. Enough is enough right?
