Sep 27, 2026 · 20 min · 11 segments
What began as an innocent friendship would become a secret Helena carried for years. Helena Brady was just 13 when she first met ambulance driver John Corteggio. Growing up in Worthing, Sussex…
Helena BradyGuest
Daisy MaskellHost
So these photos were probably the only ones really that I've got from a childhood, from my childhood, because I destroyed a lot of them.
And I look at that and I think, It wasn't long before I stopped smiling like that for a very long time.
You know what is happening shouldn't be happening but what do you do? I didn't know what he was capable of and it is that realisation that I either do as he wants me to do or I risk not ever being able to get home.
At the end of it, he said to me, or at least you can tell your friends now you've had sex in the back of an ambulance, like it was nothing.
And I just cried and cried and cried and spent, I would say, probably two or three days in my room, coming out just to go to the loo, try and go down and have something to eat.
I just thought, why didn't you protect me? Why can't you see what's going on? But she didn't know.
Where do you begin to unravel that as an adult, let alone as an angry teenager? I thought that part of my life was over.
So these photos were probably the only ones really that I've got from a childhood, from my childhood, because I destroyed a lot of them.
And I look at that and I think, It wasn't long before I stopped smiling like that for a very long time.
You know what is happening shouldn't be happening but what do you do? I didn't know what he was capable of and it is that realisation that I either do as he wants me to do or I risk not ever being able to get home.
At the end of it, he said to me, or at least you can tell your friends now you've had sex in the back of an ambulance, like it was nothing.
And I just cried and cried and cried and spent, I would say, probably two or three days in my room, coming out just to go to the loo, try and go down and have something to eat.
I just thought, why didn't you protect me? Why can't you see what's going on? But she didn't know.
Where do you begin to unravel that as an adult, let alone as an angry teenager? I thought that part of my life was over.
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