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This is White Devil.

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So today I am in Malibu, California, looking down on the Pacific Coast Highway and the Pacific Ocean. And Cher's house, the actress and singer Cher, is just to my left.

This is a British photographer named Matthew Simmons. But to most of his friends, he's Jedi, and no day is the same for Jedi. He waits for a publication to ask him to photograph some glitzy event or a celebrity, or he gets entrepreneurial and tracks them down himself.

I liken my photography style to a like a wildlife photographer. I like to not be seen and let the action unfold as it were in the wild, basically.

Like On the day we reached him, he was on the hunt for a Hollywood legend.

So Cher, all going well. If she comes out, she won't know I'm there photographing her.

Jedai is what most people would call a paparazzo.

It's a role that looks down on by people. I like to call myself a photo journalist now.

Jedai is always on call for the next job. And two days after the shooting of Henry Jamat in Belize, he got a call from The Sun, one of the biggest tabloid newspapers in the UK, asking him to hop on a plane for Central America. He jumped at the chance, up for an adventure, but having absolutely no prior knowledge about the place he was going to shoot photos.

I'd heard of Belize, but I had no idea where it was. If you were to put a picture of a globe or a map in front of me, I wouldn't be able to put a pin on it back then.

After a brief stop in Houston, Jetai arrived in Belize on the first of June, four days after the shooting. He had no idea what to expect. One thing was for sure, though, he was going to have a really hard time getting a photo of Jasmine Harden in the wild.

Jasmine Harden spent her first night at the Belize Central Prison last night, and the news tonight is that she will have to spend quite a few more.

She arrived at a pair used primarily by Fishers on Marine Parade to a waiting prison van that whisked her to the Belize Central Prison in Hattilleville, where she's spending her first night behind bars.

It was starting to look like the billion-dollar Ashtraff machine might not have as much influence as we thought. From Campside Media, this is White Devil, and I'm Josh Dean. Episode 2, The Shitstorm. A guy like Jeti isn't typically called to jet off to countries in Central America, but you can see why here. A glamorous woman, a A member of perhaps the most powerful family in Belize had apparently shot and killed a senior Belizean cop under mysterious circumstances, as the two of them were alone on a pier very late at night. A man had died, a much loved and prominent member of the community, and a woman, a Canadian property developer who the press had also been calling a socialite, was still in custody. But the case was otherwise developing as the Belizean public would expect it to. Powerful interests, as they do, were coming to this white woman's rescue.

I mean, you bring a senior counsel, Godfrey Smith, to deal with a manslata by negligence case, a criminal matter of that level.

This is Hippalito Navello, a reporter on the ground. Pointing out that Jasmine Harden didn't get just any old defense attorney. She got a baller. Godfrey Smith, dispatched by her partner's powerful family.

So we saw the guns coming out already there, for a lack of a better phrase.

Smith's resume is illustrious. Prior to going into private practice, he was a member of Parliament and served as both Belize's attorney general and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He's as big a lawyer as you can find in Belize, and he had some backup, too, in the form of a powerhouse UK lawyer named Edward Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald has defended numerous extremely high-profile defendants in the UK, and is known especially for helping on death penalty cases throughout the Commonwealth.

So people at that point believe wet lady, asked off lady, she can get off, she will be released in the charge, and she will never spend a day in jail.

Except that didn't happen. Jasmine Harton wasn't just released. Authorities charged her with manslaughter by negligence, and to the surprise of many, Harton was denied bail, which meant that she would be staying at least for a while inside a Belizeian cell, which makes you wonder, what exactly were her fancy lawyers doing here? Because when jedi arrived four days after the shooting, she was still in jail, and not just any jail. After five nights in the San Pedro town lockup, in a cell with no mattress, where she slept on concrete and used an empty soft drink bottle as a pillow. Harden was ordered by a judge to move to the mainland, to the infamous Belize Central Prison, known more commonly as Hattieville, a place so notorious as it was once featured in the Netflix documentary, Inside the World's Toughest Prisons.

I don't know what you call this, but just standing here, watching this guy being put in this space. I mean, those cells are bad enough, but this is terrifying.

They got two padlocks on it.

It's bolt. It's like something out of a movie.

It's a very rough place. Haddiville Prison in the 1990s was truly horrific, with reports that the prison couldn't afford to feed inmates. Since then, it's been taken over by the Kolby Foundation, an NGO that's done real work to try and improve things.

When I just came on 2013, I enrolled myself in the ARC program.

The what program?

The ARC, Ashcroft Rehabilitation Center.

It's a good program.

Did you catch that? This former inmate, featured on that Netflix show, said the Ashcroft Rehabilitation consultation center. So Jasmine Harton had been locked up in a serious prison that was paid for in part by her children's grandfather.

It teaches you about socialization. It teaches you about anger management. My point of view, if you're speaking, it helped me.

All right, that's good. So this must be hard. You spent four years on remand. More than a third of the inmates at Hattieville are on remand, which means they're still waiting for a trial. There are people there who have been waiting two, three, even six years with no trial. And for all the talk of reform, Haddiville is still not a place you want to be, with one to three guards per 100 prisoners and four prisoners assigned to each tiny cell. In 2020, an inmate was shot and killed by guards after a group of 28 tried to escape, and another was killed killed following a riot the next day. Jezai couldn't believe this was where Jasmine Harden had been sent.

The prison was disgusting. There's vultures hanging off the electricity wires, looking over the prison. It's a really grim scene. It's a very hot, muggy, humid country. And there's no way there's any AC or good toilets in these places. She was ruffing it while she was in there.

He's not kidding. Rumor had it, Horton was in solitary in a cell that supposedly had a bucket, not a toilet. Hippolito knows Haddival well. He's been there many times.

There are horror stories coming out from there. I mean, there was this one case where one of the prisoners was raped not once but twice. And apparently, the prison officers allowed this to happen. The young man was given trouble, and he was intentionally placed in a with a rapist, with the belief or with the hope that he would be raped. And he was raped several times.

It goes without saying that this is not the place a woman like Jasmine could ever imagine to find herself. And the idea that this wealthy expat, partner of one of the country's most powerful men, could land there, well, that wasn't a thing anyone in Belize would have expected either. So what was going on? Jedi spent his first few days in Belize waiting around, wondering just that. Jasmine was locked up, and no one really understood why. She had a powerful lawyer and backers with massive resources. Also, the police weren't even alleging that this was a murder. Belize's Department of Public Prosecutions had decided to charge Harten with manslaughter by negligence, basically agreeing with what Harten was alleged to have said in her caution statement, that Jamat's killing was a terrible accident. But, prosecutors would be arguing, we assume, also one that could have been prevented. It's a charge that typically carries a fine of maybe $10,000 US dollars and rarely results in jail time.

Commissioner of Police Chester-Williams insists that contrary to what some members of the public may believe, the accused has received no special treatment.

We were going to do our investigation as impartial as we possibly can, and that there was going to be no special treatment afforded to her. Were the police responding to public sentiment, going above and beyond to show they were treating this very unusual prisoner the same as any other? Well, something was off. Finally, on June ninth, more than a week after entering prison, Jasmine Harden was granted bail. 30,000 Belize dollars, which is 15,000 US. A huge amount by local standards, but basically pocket change, if you're in the atmosphere of the Ashcross. Jeti was there outside the prison when she got out. Along with Hippolito and numerous other journalists.

I think there were maybe eight police officers surrounding her, covering her with a blanket, so we couldn't get a clean picture of her.

It was amazing. The security guards there, she heard completely. There was five or six security guards surrounding her.

And this shocked me. One of their own has been shot and killed by this woman, but these guards and prison officers are helping her. I thought when she left the prison, they make her do the walk of shame.

The optics of this were strange. Again, it certainly looked very much like this rich foreigner was getting special treatment.

It was so confusing. It was so shocking because we know once you're detained for shooting a police officer, you're going to get a proper beat down. That's how they behave. That's basically part of the process. I was so confused as to why a bunch of security officers were not only physically protecting her, but physically shielding her from the cameras. I mean, we have seen her before. We know how she looks like. So why would they do that?

There was a car waiting for her, a black SUV with a driver. She was hurried inside and whisked away. Jeti and his partner tried their best to follow.

This guy driving was like a race car driver, just absolutely tearing up the streets, overtaking cars, taking cars. He went like grease lightning, basically. And the road laws in Belize, they don't seem to exist. It seems lawless there. And this guy just completely vanished from sight, which we weren't too worried about because we knew that between 07:00 AM and 05:00 PM the next day, Jasmine had to check into this prison.

This was one of the conditions of her bail. That Jasmine had to check into a police station every day. In a typical case, this would be the station closest to the accused's home, which for Jasmine, would be San Pedro on Ambergus Key. But the judge here made a peculiar choice. He required Jasmine to check in daily at a station in San Ignacio, a 90-minute drive inland from Belize City. In the jungle near the Guatemala border. And Belize City is another hour and a half from Ambergus Key. You almost couldn't pick a further point from her home and her family.

They've just lifted, I believe, their COVID curfew.

Remember, this was June 2021, smack in the middle of the pandemic. But while we were there, nobody was allowed to be out before the hours of 05:00 AM.

We were sat at our hotel in Belize City in our cars waiting for the clock to turn to 05:00 AM, so we could start driving. It was pedaled down, and we managed to get there in 90 minutes, and Jasmine showed up at pretty much bang on 07:00 AM.

It seemed like Jasmine was basically hiding out, staying away from the media in middle of nowhere. She had the protection a lot of money can buy.

I don't think she was expecting to see us there that early. That's why she chose to get there so early. She arrived with an armed guard in a blacked-out BMW X5. This guard had a pistol on his hip. Jasmine didn't talk to the media. She went in the police station, head down, was in there for two, two and a half minutes, came out, jumped in this car with the guard. And again, they went off like grease lightning, couldn't on the following, and they just vanished into the day. We thought that Ashcroft has her in some protective, not custody, but has her somewhere that she's protected. The armed guard worried us. We were worried that if we did get on this follow, what's stopping them from pulling us over somewhere, shooting us in the middle of nowhere, Belize, basically. We were thinking at this point, it looks like Jasmine is getting away with murder or with at least shooting this guy, what's then stopping them from getting us if we rubbed them the wrong way? It's rainforest out there in San Ignacio. It's a lot of jungle we could easily banish.

What didn't quite track here was that Jasmine could have also hidden out just fine at her luxurious condo behind walls in San Pedro, where her partner, and more importantly, her four-year-old children lived. That was her home. Instead, here she was, living many hours away in the jungle and anchored there because of her daily check-ins. It's one of the first things I asked Tipalito after hearing that Jasmine was granted bail.

I sat in her bail hearing, and I felt as if those considerations weren't given to certain things. This is actually the first time I think someone is asked to report every single day. In most In those cases, it will be every Monday or every Friday, but not every single day.

It was her lawyer who agreed to this, right?

Yes, the Ashcroft lawyer.

That's Godfrey Smith, the lawyer provided by the Ashcrofts. If I squint, I can see Now, from the police's POV, this Canadian with piles of money might be a flight risk. But that's honestly a stretch. Jasmine had very young kids, and considering the charge, she could certainly expect to get out of this whole mess with a fine. There's just no reason reason to blow up your life and abandon your kids over this charge. But this pattern, that's where things settled for quite a while. Every day, for weeks on end, Jasmine would check in at the San Ignacio police station, and it was likely to go on this way until her trial was set. According to Hippalito, that could take a while. The wheels of justice turned very slowly in Belize.

The word faas and the word justice system do not go together in a sentence. Everyone in Belize knows this. Some attorneys would tell you that it's unnecessarily sluggish, and spitesfully so. We don't have a lot of managed rates of justices or Supreme Court justices. There's a huge backlog of cases. It gets to the point that the wheels of justice here in Belize That just sluggish or slow. It just doesn't move.

And at that point, the British papers lost a little bit of interest in it. Nothing new was coming out of the story. As far as we knew, Jasmine was just going to be checking in to this prison for the next however many days it was going to be. So I think I left on either June 12th or June 13th. It's an amazing story. I said that to the journalist as we're flying out and back to Los Angeles. I said, There's way more to come from this story. We're going to be back. I guarantee we are going to be back. And he's like, Don't hold your breath. And a week later, we're on a plane heading straight back to Belize.

Jedai is right. There is way more to come from this story. That's after the break. Thank you for listening to White Devil, a podcast about Power and Privilege in a Fragile Paradise. You can hear new episodes released weekly on Amazon Music. You're listening to White Devil from Campside Media. Up to this point, we've been seeing the story largely from the outside, from Hippalito, Jedi, and the media. But now we're going to flip things around and hear from those on the inside, people who are close to Jasmine and from Jasmine Harton, because it felt like the only way to truly get to the bottom of this was to ask her myself. In fact, I've spoken with Jasmine quite a lot now, and from our early conversations, it's clear that the story that was unfolding in the papers, scandalous though it was, was far from the whole story.

I'm I'm fine talking about absolutely anything. I'll answer any question. I'll tell you everything. I'm ready. Gloves are off. Filter's gone. I need the truth to come out.

Jasmine says that she sensed things weren't exactly right quite early on.

I spent initially two weeks at Hattieville, Belize Central Prison. And if I have the best lawyers and the biggest family backing me, how is that possible that I'm the only one? No one else goes to jail for that charge.

If from the outside, it appeared Jasmine was getting special treatment, this was not her impression from the inside.

I was the only one with a cell that didn't have a sink and a working toilet. They put me in a PC, like protective custody cell, where I was not allowed to speak to any of the girls. I was not allowed out of my cell. So when all the other girls are going to watch movies and having yard time, I had to stay in my cell.

Lest you think Jasmine is exaggerating about the awful conditions, a US State Department human rights report that included a look at prison conditions in Belize, talked about exactly this, the arbitrary use of isolation in small, dark, poorly ventilated rooms that often were infested with snakes, scorpions, and roaches.

I didn't have a book. I wasn't allowed to phone calls. I didn't have a fan. They kept my lights on 24 hours a day. While I was sleeping, they would bang on the gates just to irritate me. They would tell me almost daily, Why haven't you killed yourself yet? It's okay to cry. Just go ahead. You should kill yourself by now.

Jasmine says that it felt to her like a psychological warfare.

They put on the news that was talking to Henry Jamut's family, and I had to listen to them crying. I was slowly starting to feel myself lose control of my emotions, and I was definitely very upset many nights. I couldn't listen to three hours straight every single night of how horrible I am for that accident.

For days after the shooting, Jasmine's mom, Candice Castiglioni, had been unable to contact her daughter. The phone didn't ring, and Andrew wasn't picking up either. Finally, about a week after her daughter's arrest, she reached Jasmine, first through email and then eventually by phone. It was immediately clear to her that things were not okay.

She said to me, Mommy, I need you. You might get hurt, and I won't blame you if you don't come. But Mom, I'm in trouble. That's all she said. And I said, You know what? I don't care. I'm coming. I'm coming.

From her home in Kingston, a city in Southeastern, Ontario, in Canada.

And I literally walked out my door, left my apartment, my car, my business, walked right out the door. And then when I finally got here, I found her in the middle of a jungle. There was two men at the gate to keep her in. For it's supposed be a car coming every day to take her in to sign in because she doesn't sign in. Instant jail.

That daily sign in, those were the stakes. If Jasmine missed it even once, she'd be remanded back to prison immediately.

She told me, I'm not safe. I'm not safe here. And I kept saying, I'm going to phone Andrew. Tell him to get you out of there. And after a week, she'd say the same thing. I said, well, what did Andrew say? He's not responding.

Candice, like everyone else, assumed that Jasmine's partner, the father of her children, would be standing by her side. That was not the reality.

He instructed my nanny immediately. The day after the accident, she was to go in and take all of my belongings out of the house. So all of my things were packed up the very next day. Because I was wondering, why can't I come home? Why am I put in San Ignacio? So when I got my bail, Andrew wouldn't tell me where I was going. I had to hear at prison on Love FM that they're sending me to San Ignacio, which is by the Guatemala border, the furthest point possible from my children.

So, yeah, the distant check-in, the remote jungle hideout, not her idea.

And I didn't understand this because I have security at San Pedro. Why can't I just come home, be with my children after this traumatic event, and heal at home with security, with my kids, with my friends? I had a cell phone he gave me that only made calls to him. I could call him, and I could call my dad. Those They were the only two numbers that would work. 911 didn't even work.

This explains why Candice had been unable to contact her daughter.

Then I started to see, okay, all of a sudden, the security guard calls Andrew. This is what Andrew claims, and says to him, Jasmine tried to buy weed from me last night. And he called me and said, Jasmine, that's a breach. It sounded like I was being recorded, actually. And he said, That's a breach of your bail conditions to try to purchase drugs. And I said, Andrew, we all know I don't smoke weed. This is ridiculous. What are you talking about? And then the next call was, I heard that you broke curfew last night to go get a pizza. And he goes, Breaking curfew is part of your bail conditions.

From Jasmine's perspective, Andrew is acting really, really weird.

And then I tried to sign into my Netflix because we have obviously a shared Netflix, and he changed the password. He goes, Oh, yeah. I changed the password. You'll have to get your own Netflix.

To this point, Jasmine was confused, but didn't really doubt that Andrew and his various security guards weren't just protecting her. Suddenly, she was seeing things very differently. She had a realization.

And I start to realize I put the dots together and figure it out. I'm literally sitting in a trap. They've never been on my side. Now I'm in a jungle house, and the only people that can pick me up and take me anywhere are employees of Ashcrofts. And I'm literally trapped in this home, and I can't go anywhere.

We asked Andrew to explain the jungle hideout, which we know belongs to some wealthy friends of the family. His response, via a lawyer, was that The remoteness of the location was deliberate to keep Jasmine outside the media spotlight, and that she was moved there for her own safety. He called the house a, Luxury accommodation on a hilltop overlooking the jungle.

Yeah, it was definitely a beautiful home. It was a beautiful prison.

The worst part of this period at the jungle hideout, according to Jasmine, was that the drivers were not in her control, and they became unreliable, causing her to risk missing the daily check-in. Sometimes the car just didn't come, and Jasmine had to scramble for help. Remember, if she missed even a single sign in, she'd be remanded immediately back to Hattieville.

I called my friend and I said, Get here now, rent a car. Please come pick me up. This is where I am. I finally got a hold of her because Andrew had brought me my computer by this point, and I got WhatsApp on my computer, and I can find some people on my iCloud.

She's like, I have no security guard to take me to the police station, so what am I going to do? This is the friend she got a hold of. Her name is Rachita, and she got there with a car as quickly as she could. We put her in the vehicle.

Then as we're driving off the property, we get completely roadblocked by the guy that's in charge of the house.

I told the security guard, We need to get out of here.

She needs to sign in. Otherwise, she's going back to jail. He said, I've been told to restrain you even by force. You are not allowed to leave the property. I said, Excuse me? He said, The only way you're allowed to leave the property is with your paid driver from Andrew. I said, Well, he's supposed to be here this morning at 10:00. It's now 2:30.

She had to sign in by 4:00 at the latest. The security stood in front of the car, and she's like, Please move your car so we can pass.

And he wouldn't. So I was in the passenger side, and I stomped on the gas and I pulled the wheel and I went around him.

We got out and we ended up in the police station.

She signed in just in time.

And that's when I contacted my brother and I said, You need to get me out of this house.

The way I look at the situation, yes, she was kept against her will.

Andrew was the one that was keeping her dear and didn't want her to come back on the island.

He didn't want her to communicate with nobody. And I believe that he was the one that was behind that. It was finally sinking in. Maybe her partner, her kids dad, didn't have her best interests in mind after all.

This is a prison. I'm literally in a prison.

Somehow, Jasmine's family, back in Canada, found a guy who was willing to break Jasmine out for a price.

My son hired a man. I think he was ex-military. He broke the gate down. He got my daughter out of there.

Candice had an idea. Once Jasmine was out of what seemed to her like a jungle prison, they should be proactive. Go straight to Andrew and find out what was going on. That's where the kids were. After all, the only unbreakable condition of her bail was that she had to check in every day at the station in San Ignacio. And if they worked fast, she could make the trip in a day.

I said, well, there's nothing stopping me from checking in in San Ignacio, driving to Belize City, and then getting on a boat to San Pedro and going to see my kids.

Remember, she hadn't been home since the night of the shooting.

Collect my things, like my birth certificate, my jewelry, my clothing. See my kids.

So she signed in at the police station, drove the 2 hours to Belize City, hopped in a water taxi to San Pedro, another hour and a half, and was dropped off outside the property. This was the 22nd of June, 25 days after Jasmine was arrested, and exactly that many days, it turns out, since she'd been home. When they arrived, it was not the homecoming she'd hoped for.

Why won't you let me see the kids, Andrew?

Candice was there, too, and used her phone to get the whole thing on video. As Jasmine must have feared, her own staff had been turned against her.

When I was greeted with a wall of security at my own house, and Andrew refusing to speak to me, I was blindsided. Why won't you let me see the kids, Andrew? Why won't you let me see the children? Why are you stopping me from being at my house and seeing my kids, Andrew?

While Jasmine is calling out to Andrew, you can see him in an orange T-shirt walking rapidly away through the kitchen of the Resort's restaurant.

Let me see my children. That was what I was walking into. I thought I would be walking into like, hugs from my staff and going into my home again. I hadn't been to my home. I wanted to get my things, and I wasn't expecting that. I was not going for a fight.

Instead, the resort staff ushered her off the property, her property. The storming of the Alaia Resort was instantly all over the Internet, particularly Facebook. Basically, as I said, the biggest news source in Belize. And this is what pulled Jedi back into the story. Jeti returned on the 24th of June, around noon, and went back to where he knew Jasmine would inevitably be, at the police station for sign-in.

Jasmine rolls up. She goes into the prison to do her check-in. I'm waiting around the corner by the car to get some nice, clean, full-em shots of her leaving.

Usually, this daily check-in was uneventful. Took no more than a few minutes, but it was clear this time that something odd was going down.

And I'm waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and she doesn't come out. So I'm like, What's going on here? So I go into the police station, and she's behind the front desk, and she tells us she has been detained. On a new criminal charge related to the events at the Alaia: assault.

This detail wasn't clear to reporters at the time, and not even to Jasmine, as you can hear. And I'd like to know why. I'd like to know what- She seemed genuinely confused as to what she was being detained for.

Assault. Come on, assault. Common assault.

Common assault?

Yeah. Where is she? She did assault her. Yeah, who did I assault? Do you know how many witnesses were there?

Everything was on camera, so this would be very interesting. This is just another game.

She's giving pretty much a press conference behind the police desk. She cannot believe that they're holding her again for this alleged assault.

I would go to prison every day if it meant I can have my kids. This is horrible. The worst thing ever that he's I do need to me is take my kids from me right now.

This assault was alleged by an Alaya employee who Jasmine knew well, an employee who had, until just weeks before, worked for her, but who, in this case, stepped in and asked her former boss, whose children and home were on the property to leave.

I raised my voice and I waved my arms, which I did. I speak with my hands. I'm Italian. So yes, I said, Good distraction, Sandra. That put me in jail for common assault.

In the wake of this shocking new charge, it was now crystal clear to Jasmine that she was beingiced out by nearly everyone in her former circle, especially, it seemed, by Andrew. She was now certain had turned on her almost immediately after the shooting. Andrew's explanation? We He asked him this in other questions, but he declined an interview, first via his father's spokesperson and later via a lawyer. His lawyer did reply to this specific allegation. On the one hand, he denied that he or his father had washed their hands of Jasmine and noted that he provided Jasmine with a lawyer and the jungle house. But on the other hand, Andrew's attorney also said that it, cannot come as a surprise to anyone that he chose to distance himself from a woman who had inexplicably killed a much respected local figure. This was coming almost three Three years later, long after the facts of the case had shaken out. There was nothing inexplicable about it anymore. At the time, though, Andrew's behavior was certainly a surprise to Jasmine. Sure, she could have just been paranoid, except that certain actions spoke very loudly.

The day I went to jail is the same day he started all the documents, and the next day notified the Belize Registry Company Act that I'm no longer a director of these companies. But where did my shares go?

These shares she's we're talking about were in a company called Misty Horizons Limited, which owned the Alaia. Candice would later tell me that those shares should have been worth millions. And Jasmine was actually removed as a director on June second, just five days after the shooting, when she was in Hattieville. So suddenly, this woman who had been living a life of luxury, a lead investor in Belize's fanciest new resort, had nothing.

When he gave me my personal effects, he didn't give me everything at all.

She She says that when Andrew brought her wallet, it was missing her credit cards, bank cards, even her Alaia business cards. Andrew says that he didn't remove anything from the wallet, and we have no proof that he did. But regardless, Jasmine was left without access to her account, and without Without any money, she says, she was now in a very difficult situation. Here she was, part owner and on the board of directors of a luxury resort, and yet barely able to scrape together the thousand Belizeian dollars for bail on the new assault charge. Here Here's how it all looked to Hippolito.

In one day, she was part of the Ashcroft team. She was The following day, she was kicked out on the call. So they, blatantly, without any respect, disowned Jasmine Horton, quick, fast, and hurry.

When the Ashcroft started distancing themselves from Jasmine, so apparently did Godfrey Smith, that fancy lawyer they'd put on the case. So she chose a lawyer of her own, Richard Bradley. Bradley is well known well-regarded in Belize, where people often refer to him by his nickname, Dickey. Jasmine says she actually wanted Dickey from the beginning when she was first arrested and introduced to Godfrey Smith.

From day one, I said I want Dickey because I know him to be the best criminal defense attorney in police. And I had never heard of this person, so I was trusting them.

Ultimately, she did get Dickey.

She and her family contacted me. I think they were probably notified that the Ashcroft arrangement It would no longer continue.

He means her legal arrangement with Godfrey Smith, the Ashcroft appointed lawyer.

So she felt she was on her own at a period when she was basically being railroaded.

Jasmine is adamant that Smith stopped responding to her and wasn't listening to her request, especially pushing the judge to move her check-ins closer to her home and kids. I've seen emails where she's expressing this frustration to Andrew from the jungle house. The way she interpreted all of this was that Smith was not actually representing her anymore. Smith himself and Andrew both deny this. They agree that Andrew hired Smith and paid him, but say that he did not stop working on Jasmine's behalf until she hired Dickey Bradley. As soon as Dickey dove in, he saw peculiarities in the case. Red flags were just flying all over. In particular, it made no sense to him that Jasmine was placed in such a remote location and subjected to daily check-ins.

It is unprecedented in my experience that Jasmine was required to be in San Ignacio. She was almost banished 100 miles from her home.

Jedi who had been watching closely obviously knew exactly what was going on.

The Ashcrofts at this point have pretty much disowned Jasmine. After she approached Andrew at the Elea with the cell phone, asking all of her questions and that stuff, it seems like they completely cut ties with her, and she was being left to fend for herself.

We'll be right back. You're listening to White Devil from Campside Media. Charged with manslaughter, separated from her kids, and cast out from her home, it really seemed like Jasmine Harton had nowhere to turn. But in the chaos Plus, at the moment, no one really understood what was happening. It was all so quick. The night that Jasmine was taken into custody in front of Jeti and the other reporters, she was basically on her own. This was before her new lawyer, Dickey Bradley, arrived, but after Godfrey Smith had left her team. So Jasmine had no attorney there to help at all. That's when Belizean authorities held her at the local jail until sundown, and then moved her from one police station to another to another, all in the middle of the night. Dickey He still can't believe how it all went down.

One day when she went to sign in at the San Ignacio Police Station, she was not allowed to leave. She was detained. She was kept at the San Ignacio Police Station and secretly removed at night to the Belmo Pan Police Station, which is 50 miles away from Belize City. She was then secretly moved to the Belize City Police Station, where early dawn, she was put on a boat and sent to the San Pedro Police Station, where she was read two additional charges. One that she had committed a common assault, and the other one is that they had just remembered that when she was detained for the shooting, they had found a small quantity of cocaine. They just remembered that many weeks afterwards.

This is worth pausing for. They're not saying they found cocaine when they arrested Jasmine for assault. They're claiming they found it the night of the shooting, back in May. Now, this cocaine wasn't mentioned in any police report. Jasmine denies it. And Yet, a month after the shooting, after numerous police reports and court filings, the cop suddenly remembered a bag of Coke. Even if she's acquitted of these charges, possession or assault, the charges themselves could be a breach of her bail conditions.

The One condition is you're not to be charged for any offenses. She was charged for two offenses.

Dickey is suggesting something very suspicious here, that this new round of accusations, it was just an attempt to show that Jasmine had broken her bail conditions. Which would be a violation, causing her to be sent immediately back to prison. But it was clumsy, and Dickey spotted the hole.

Fortunately, the date of the violation was before she was granted the bail condition, so they could not take away the bill on that.

So if it was an attempt to get her bounced back to jail, it failed. But even now, Jasmine wasn't out of the woods.

So what you think happened that same day, after she left the court in San Pedro, In the late afternoon, somewhere between 3:00 and 4:00, she was brought back to Billy City by boat and taken straight to the Supreme Court in Belize City.

As Jasmine arrived at the Supreme Court, it became clear why she was The court had received a letter from the general manager of Grand Colony. That's the luxury condo complex next to Alaia, where Jasmine and Andrew lived. So this was an employee and friend named Frank Habet. He's the person who put up Jasmine's initial bail. And he had apparently decided suddenly to take that bail money back.

Frank Habet is my manager, and he's crying. I'm in cuffs, and he had to stand up, and he was so emotional, he couldn't even get the words out.

As was Sandra, who To accuse Jasmine of assault, he was an employee of Andrews and another manager of the resort that he and Jasmine had just opened, the guy you would send to do this job to save his boss from having to brave the media. We asked Andrew directly whether Sandra or Frank were working under his instruction. He replied only via his lawyer to the Sandra question, saying that she made her own decision in making her complaint. It did not require Mr. Ashcroft to encourage her. Either way, this twist, it was unexpected. Jasmine was dumb struck.

I said, Your Honor, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure I have the right to sufficient notice before my bail is revoked. This is extremely unfair. 45 minutes is not sufficient notice. And she just looked down. She knew it was wrong, but they were bringing me there anyways.

Hippolito managed to get a copy of the letter Frank Hibet filed with the court, and he read it for us.

I am the general manager of Grand Colony Resorts on Pedro Ambarga's Quay Belize. On 9 June, 2021, I paid 30 $40,000 in fulfill of bail conditions for the release of Jasmine Harton from remand. On 22nd, June 2021, Ms. Harton appeared at Grand Colony Resort, behaving in a disorderly and abusive manner. I now think Ms. Harton is quite capable of not showing up for trial, and I therefore wish to immediately withdraw my cash deposit and revoke the short- So Jasmine's former general manager and a friend was claiming a sudden change of heart.

That seeing her barge into the resort to see her kids had caused him to reconsider her as a flight risk. Oh, and also the bail was his personal money, he said, and he was worried he would lose it. Were you in court when this happened?

Yes.

Did you feel that the look on his face was that he wasn't doing this of his own will?

When we saw the letter, all the reporters understood what was happening. And when Habet was walking past Jasmine, he looked at her. She looked at him. All he did was touch his heart. It was understood between them. She understands what's happening, that he has to do it.

What's being suggested here is that Frank was being directed to reclaim the bail money.

Frank's in tears, and he's crying, and he's shaking, and he's like, Jasmine, I don't want to do this. This is not me. I said, I know Frank, it's not you, but you have your family to think about. He's the breadwinner. I said, I get it. It's not you. Do what you have to do. If you don't, you lose It's your job.

And I assume everybody, it believes, reads between the lines here of what's happening?

Yeah, it's hadnusted.

And the removal of her bail in front of the Supreme Court? This, Dickey says, is flat-out bullshit in violation of policy, if not law. There's a particular set of rules for how bail is revoked. To protect defendants from exactly this situation, staring down a sudden and unavoidable return to prison.

That should not have been allowed because the Supreme Court is a court of record. They would have to have filed an affidavit, filed an application to allow the person to withdraw the bill. They would have had to give a notice to Ms. Jasmine that there is an application and you would need to go and find someone else to replace the bill. That it happens regularly in the courts. You give people notice. That is the law. She was given no notice. She was given no document. There was no application in writing anywhere.

And this happened on a Friday of all days, Friday at 04:00 PM.

On Friday, the system shuts down. We least if it doesn't work on Saturdays and Sunday, we are free to go about our business. They could have easily said to the person, Your application is approved. It will take effect on Monday at 02:00 or Tuesday. So she has time to rustle up a replacement.

None of that happened. Jasmine was not allowed to solicit another source for her bail.

She was given no time, and she was taken off to prison.

Right there on the spot, she was sent back to prison, and Jasmine was in a very difficult position now. Her family seemed to have cut off all ties, so she no longer had a way to access any of her money.

She don't know nobody here in Billy City. She probably don't know much people in the country, Billy. Her only assistance would be through her family and their employees and their friends. Basically, what you did was you have literally put her in a position to to jail.

But if this was all an attempt to silence Jasmine, to put her back behind bars for the foreseeable future, it failed. Because as soon as word got out that Jasmine had been jailed again under truly bizarre circumstances, a stranger stepped in, a good Samaritan, and posted Jasmine's bail. Nobody had any idea who this was. Again, Dickey couldn't believe what he was seeing.

Who would come forward and sign a bill in a large amount for a foreigner, at least $10,000 or $20,000? Who would sign for a foreigner who can get on a boat and live?

The bail was actually $30,000, Belizean, and this person had to put a house up as surety. A mysterious strain danger in a country where everyone seemed to be turning against her. Eventually, Jazmin would discover her Guardian Angels true identity. But at that moment, her relief overshadowed her curiosity. She'd escaped. Still, it was disconcerting, and the facts, stacked up, were shady as hell.

I'm trying to wrap my head around it. It is unheard of. It's unprecedented that all those things should happen. That cannot be a coincidence.

First, they come up with a new charge, weeks after the fact. Then they move Jasmine all over the place, station to station, and finally into the Supreme Court, where they tell her with no notice that her bail has been revoked. Then, they throw her in a cell because the whole thing is happening on Friday afternoon, guaranteeing that there's not enough time for her to find a new source of bail money. In all his years practicing law, Dickey had never seen anything like it.

That is a very unusual set of incidents to have occurred in the space of a few hours.

It sure seemed like somebody or some people with a lot of power were pulling strings.

One would want to think so, but then that is frightening that there is a possibility of manipulating the system all the way up the top. That is most disturbing. That is something the journalist who was here need to look into. How did that happen?

Jasmine was, for the moment, out of prison, but she wasn't out of the woods. Even with her mom by her side, they were a long way from Canada now.

In my life, I've always used the law. Always. You could always go by the law and go to court and whatever. Like, you always use the law. But here, they have the same laws. They just don't obey them. Nobody does. So what does that mean? Without law, you have chaos. And that's what I see here. Anything goes.

Under the shade I flourish.

Under the rocks and stones.

White Devil is a production of Campside Media in Association with Olive Bridge Entertainment. The show was written and reported by me, Josh Dean, with the series producer, Joe Barrett. The story editor and Sound Designer is Mark McAdam, who also provided original music. Additional sound design by Joe Barrett. Studio Engineering by Ewen Lytrom-Ewen. Our closing theme is Under the Shade, I Flourish by Chris Halton and New Manhattan, including Eli Carvahal, Hava Carvahal, and Louis Chernyovski. This episode was fact-checked by Sarah Ivry. Additional research by Emma Simenoff and Reporting in Belize by Hippolito Navello. Artwork by Anthony Garace. A special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slaywen, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, Emma Simenoff, Destiny Dingle, and David Eichler. Campside Media's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriades, Adam Hoff, Matt Sher, and me, Josh Dean. At Olive Bridge, the executive producer is Will Gluck. If you If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. It really does help other people find the show. Here's a thought, maybe tell a friend to check out White Devil while you're at it. Anyway, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to White Devil, a podcast about power and privilege in a fragile paradise.

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