Tatum told her disturbing story in a new podcast [stock image] (Image: Getty Images)
A woman who found herself in a relationship with a self-styled cannibal has told how she watched him trying to eat pieces of her skin. The woman, who gave her name as Tatum, says that the man drugged her and carved a piece of flesh from her leg, which he then proceeded to chew.
Tatum explains that she first met her cannibal boyfriend in 2017 when she was 18. He was 22 at the time and a friend of a friend: “I didn’t really know him personally but I knew his face … then one night I was walking around downtown where I live, high as a kite, and I saw him sitting in his car.
“I just kind of stumbled into his car and sat down and started a conversation and it just went from there.”
She says that he didn’t initially come across as sexually adventurous: “I was the one that wanted to try out new kinks, or try new things… but he was very neutral. He didn’t really want to spice things up.
“I think in hindsight that may have been because maybe he had these thoughts and didn’t want to cross that line.”
Tatum’s boyfriend carved a slice out of her thigh [stock image] (Image: Getty Images)
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For a long time, Tatum said, the relationship was quite unremarkable: “Everything about our relationship was normal,” she recalled. “We lived together, we, you know, spent every day together; he would go to work, I would do other things, you know, we would watch TV at night, go on dates.”
But Tatum says everything changed on 8 June 2022. The night started like any other: “We were sitting in bed watching a TV show and I was drinking Pepsi… I guess he had spiked it so he roofied me. After about half an hour I started to feel pretty woozy and tired.”
At the time, she says, she didn’t realise anything was wrong and simply started drifting off to sleep. But in the middle of the night, her boyfriend did something truly disturbing.
“While I was passed out he put a black garbage bag underneath my leg and then put a towel on top of that,” she said. Tatum explains how her boyfriend then took a razor blade and carved a neat section of skin, roughly 6in by 3in, from her thigh.
Tatum says she lives in fear that her boyfriend will one day return (Image: Getty Images)
Tatum was delirious from the sedative he had given her, but can still recall the experience of having a section of skin removed from her leg: “It was mainly just the top layer of skin… but while he was doing it, he had a bunch of paper towel and he was taking time with each little cut. Each section that he kind of took off and peeled back, he kept dabbing the area so that it wouldn’t bleed too much.
“I don’t know if he thought that I would just wake up and be fine with it… but he made sure that there was not a lot of bleeding.”
Tatum slowly regained consciousness as her boyfriend sat next to her on the bed while he was “trying to chew through” the slice of her flesh: “He just sat there with the piece of my skin in his hand and was just sitting there chewing on it and watching me sleep.
“He was able to chew and swallow quite a few bites but he still had some left when I started to come to. I don’t remember exactly what time [it was], but I remember as I was becoming conscious I was still really woozy and I felt sick and then felt the pain, and it was going back and forth between dull aching pain and really sharp stinging pain.”
The cannibal still had a slice of Tatum’s flesh when he was arrested [stock image] (Image: Getty Images)
For a while, Tatum thought she must be having a particularly terrifying nightmare, but as she finally came to, her boyfriend simply stood up and, without a word, left the apartment.
Realising that she was badly hurt, Tatum took herself to hospital, where shocked medics called the police: “The police ended up finding him walking on a side street in the area and they just picked him up. He hadn’t fully finished that piece of my leg, so he just put the rest in his pocket.”
The reason for the incident has never been made completely clear. In court, the defence team argued that the substantial scar left on Tatum’s thigh had been the result of self-harm, but they failed to convince a jury and her cannibal ex was jailed. However, she says she now lives in fear that one day he’ll be released and “possibly do this again.”