“It was a horrible scene,” nurse Ladonna Batty says.
Two Kentucky women who were on a cruise ship vacation recently spoke out and said they were drugged and assaulted while on an excursion at a Bahamas beach resort. Officials at the resort they were visiting say their account does not match their security video, but a nurse practitioner who was on board the cruise and helped the women says she believes they are telling the truth.
Amber Shearer and Dongayla Dobson say the alleged incident took place when they took the day trip ashore from their cruise ship, the Carnival Elation. They claimed the drinks they were offered were drugged.
“Upon further review of the surveillance videos, the allegations made on site, and in subsequent social media posts and news stories, conflict with what the time-stamped surveillance videos contain,” Pirates Cove, the resort where the women were allegedly raped, said. “The lengthy videos… have been handed over to the local police.”
Ladonna Batty, a nurse who took the same day trip to the shore, came forward to say she believes the two women are telling the truth.
“It was a horrible scene. They were having a hard time forming sentences. I was thinking as a practitioner, ‘Let me get all this documented, let me get all these details for the girls because they’re not gonna remember some of it they were drugged,’” Batty says. “Seeing those girls in that state, it was awful. Something happened to them that they will carry for the rest of their lives.”
Nicholas Gerson, an attorney representing Shearer and Dobson, spoke with Inside Edition.
“If they have documentation or video footage that they claim pokes a hole in these women’s story, produce it, show us the video,” Gerson says.
Last month, the U.S. State Department issued a level two advisory warning American tourists to “exercise increased caution in the Bahamas due to crime.”
