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Escobar's widow fell for the drug lord aged 12 and said she 'wasn't ready'
Maria Henao tells in a new book of the ramshackle clinic Escobar took her to
'Violated' teen bled for days after what she thought was contracpetive treatment
She would later see her 'Prince Charming' as a ruthless psychopath

Published: 04:20 EST, 9 November 2018 | Updated: 09:10 EST, 9 November 2018

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Pablo Escobar's widow felt as if she had been 'violated' after he made her lie down in a shabby clinic to abort her pregnancy at age 14, she has revealed.

Maria Henao says she was not sure whether she was pregnant when, as a smitten teen, her 'Prince Charming' took her for the procedure.

The revelation comes in her memoir, 'My Life and My Prison With Pablo Escobar,' in which she opens up for the first time.

Henao reveals 'the secret I've held for years,' as she tells of lying down on a stretcher while an elderly woman inserted several plastic tubes into her womb.

Pablo Escobar, 'The King of Cocaine,' who died in 1993, with his wife Maria Victoria Henao, now aged 57, they were married in 1976 when she was 15

Escobar, former boss of the Medellin drug cartel, with his wife and their son, Sebastian, and daughter Manuela

Henao's new book, 'My Life and My Prison With Pablo Escobar' in which she opens up for the first time about her life

She believed she was receiving a contraceptive but over several days she endured bleeding and intense pain as a pregnancy was aborted.

With time, and much therapy, she says she came to view the experience as a 'violation.'

Her revelatory memoir is the first time she has opened up about her life alongside one of the world's most ruthless criminals, portraying herself more as a victim of the boundless violence of the Medellin cartel boss than as an accomplice to his lawbreaking.

She writes that she had been 'paralyzed' with fear the first time Escobar was intimate with her.

'I wasn't ready, I did not feel sexual malice, I did not have the necessary tools to understand what this intimate and intense contact meant,' she says.

Talking of the abortion, something she had kept even from her children until now, she says, 'I had to connect with my history and immerse myself in the depths of my soul, to find the courage to reveal the sad secret that I have harbored for 44 years.'

Henao says she decided to break her long silence and write the 523-page book with the hope that younger generations of Colombians would see how much blood has spilled in Colombia as a result of its cocaine business.

Escobar at home with his son Juan Pablo - Henao said she created her own world with her children and expensive art works to escape from the reality of life with the psychopath

Escobar with Henao and their son Juan Pablo at the birth of their daughter Manuela

But it is also a page-turner that provides an intimate look at Escobar's fast evolution from a small-time grave robber to one of the world's most wanted fugitives.

Henao says she met Escobar when she was 12.

She came from an upstanding, traditional family in the Envigado district near Medellin and disobeyed her parents by falling in love with Escobar, the son of a poor watchman who rode around their neighborhood in a flashy Vespa motorcycle and was 11 years her senior.

During a courtship that led to marriage when Henao was 15, Escobar showered her with gifts like a yellow bicycle and serenades of romantic ballads.

'He made me feel like a fairy princess and I was convinced he was my Prince Charming,' she writes.

But from the start there were long, unexplained absences and he frequently flirted with other women.

As the Cocaine King began to amass a fortune, he also became manipulative and paranoid, she says.

Henao insists she was largely kept in the dark about details of his criminal activities and says she escaped from the 'inferno' of living alongside Escobar by creating an alternative world devoted to their two children and collecting expensive artworks by the likes of Dali and Rodin.

Pablo Escobar, with his wife Maria Henao and their son Juan Pablo attending a soccer match in Bogota, Colombia

After the Medellin cartel's 1984 assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara, Escobar went into hiding and waged a bloody war with the state that included killing a presidential candidate and blowing up a commercial jetliner.

Over much of the next decade, until Escobar died during a 1993 rooftop shootout with police, the family's contact with the kingpin consisted of short visits to safe houses where Henao and her children arrived blindfolded and were escorted by Escobar's army of assassins.

In an interview Wednesday with Colombia's W Radio before the November 15 publication of the book, Henao started off by apologizing to Colombians for what she said was the enormous damage her husband caused the nation.

Referring to him throughout the interview as 'Pablo Escobar,' she said she felt a mix of pain, profound embarrassment and disappointment with the man who had been the love of her life.

'I chose to bear all of this pain to protect my children,' she said.

After Escobar was killed, Henao began a frenzied search for asylum, fearing that his many enemies would extract revenge and kill her children.

After being turned down by several countries they settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and changed their names.

But there attempt to lead a relatively normal life was interrupted when they were arrested in 1999 for money laundering.

They were charged again this year for allegedly helping a Colombian drug trafficker hide money through real estate and a cafe known for its tango performances.

Henao denies any wrongdoing and said once again that she and her children are being unfairly targeted for the sins of their father.

Escobar, played by Wagner Moura, and Henao, played by Paulina Gaitan, in Netflix's hit series 'Narcos' about the drug lord's life

Henao was arrested in November this year for allegedly helping a Colombian drug trafficker hide money through real estate and a cafe known for its tango performances

In 2009, Escobar's son, who now goes by the name Sebastian Marroquin, starred in a documentary in which he seeks to atone for his father's sins by meeting with the orphaned sons of Lara and another prominent victim of his father's cartel.

The film left Colombians transfixed and spurred a more dispassionate look at Escobar's role in the 1980s and 1990s drug wars.

But with the proliferation of books, the hit Netflix 'Narcos' series, and tours of Escobar's former haunts in Medellin, some worry that the capo is being glorified by younger Colombians who didn't live through the bloodbath.

And even a quarter century after his death, not everyone is willing to forgive.

Writing recently in the newspaper El Tiempo, popular columnist Maria Isabel Rueda said that Henao's book 'isn't the excuse of a victim, but of a shameless senora who knew perfectly well that she and her family swam in rivers of gold preceded by a flood of deaths.'