Real Life ‘Tarzan Woman’ Who Lived With Monkeys' Family Speaks Out
Oct. 29 2012, Published 3:30 p.m. ET
By Breaking Celebrity News Staff
Family members of the woman who lived like a real-life Tarzan are speaking out about her incredible claims that she lived with monkeys in a Columbian jungle for five years before being rescued and eventually adopted by their family.
Marina Chapman, who thinks she was born in 1950, claims to have been kidnapped when she was five, but was left abandoned in the jungle.
She says she lived with a colony of capuchin monkeys for five years and was rescued by hunters and brought to the city of Cucuta where she was sold to a brother, beaten and groomed for prostitution but luckily escaped and lived on the streets.
Her adoptive sister and cousin spoke out about their relationship with Marina, and they both recalled what she was like when she first came to live with them.
“When I first met she seemed like such a sad girl, a very sad girl. I didn’t know why. She had sad eyes. She was very active,” her adoptive sister Nancy Forero Eusse told the UK Sunday Telegraph.
Carlos Velasquez, Marina’s adoptive cousin, said she told the family about her ordeal and living with the monkeys.
“Maybe about five years ago we found out that she had memories of her being kidnapped and living in the jungle and then coming back to the city,” he said.
“We don’t know exact dates but that’s what she recalls. We knew that she was adopted, my grandma told us about it. We knew that she was in the streets and she was picked by my grandma and taken care of.”
He said that she told them how she survived while living with the animals.