"In the evening after the rounds at the Czerwony Bór Prison there was hot water. I went to wash myself. Islam A. came in behind me, hit me in the ear with his fist. I fell into the paddling pool, lost consciousness, when I woke up I already had a rag in my mouth. He put his penis in me and raped me. He took it out, hit me again and raped me a second time. After washing up, I came under the cell. He continued to pick on me. He hit me from the head. He put a razor blade to my eye. He threatened that if I said something he would hurt me, kill me. Later he took a towel - the applicant was crying all the time - and started choking me with it twice. I had darkness in my eyes, I was losing consciousness, speech loss. He beat me with an open hand. The next day the prisoners did not let me get to the door, they took away my food, they made sure I did not go to the bathroom" - this is not the script of Patryk Vega's new film, but an excerpt from the protocol reached by TVP Weekly during a journalistic investigation.

Daniel Kasprzyk, now 50, from Lomza, has had to recount at every hearing for the past four years the horror that befell him in custody.

It started with him being accused of committing paedophile acts, a charge from which he was eventually legally cleared. But before that, he was placed in an unmonitored cell in a detention centre with some of the most dangerous inmates, including, among others, a Chechen suspected of murder. He claims he was raped twice, humiliated, beaten, suffocated and starved daily.

Prosecutor Anna Zejer, who - successfully - applied to the court for Daniel Kasprzyk's arrest, ignored the change in testimony of the girl who initially incriminated him. When evidence and opinions pointed to the 50-year-old's innocence, she argued for an extension of the arrest and later appealed for him to be punished and jailed.

Today, the same prosecutor is again acting against Kasprzyk. This time in a case for compensation for wrongful pre-trial detention. For the 4 months of detention in Czerwony Bór, where he was allegedly raped twice, she has offered.... PLN 30,000 compensation. That is, her month and a half's salary. Kasprzyk is a wreck of a man unfit for work. He receives psychiatric treatment and lives on psychotropics. He wets himself at night, wakes up with nightmares, is afraid to cross the road. He has lost all his friends.

When the court of first instance awarded him PLN 350,000 in damages, the prosecutor appealed, believing it to be a "grossly high amount". Another hearing is imminent, at which Kasprzyk will again have to recall and recount what happened in custody. SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE This dramatic story illustrates well the numerous weaknesses of the Polish justice system. The most frequent applications for pre-trial detention in the whole of the European Union, endless cases lasting many years, the lack of clear guidelines on compensation for unfair detention, beatings and rapes with impunity in Polish prisons, the inability to separate pathological criminals from pre-trial detainees, the lack of accountability of detention staff and, finally, the maniacal desire of lawyers to prove that they are right, resulting in endlessly drawn-out appeals.

Because dad wouldn't let me play...

18 March 2019 was the day that ruined the entire, peaceful life of a Lomza family. Aldona, 13 years old at the time (name changed, the girl has a different surname from her parents), wrote a letter accusing her stepfather Daniel Kasprzyk of molestation.

"I'm scared because my dad would put his hand in my trousers and touch me there or kiss my neck," were the words on a note given to Aldona's older sister.

The concerned mother first confronted her daughter's words with her husband, and then went with him to the Crisis Intervention Centre in Lomza to present the situation.

A short time later, Kasprzyk was arrested by the police and taken into custody. It was only then that Aldona confessed to her mother that she had written the letter "because her dad made her study a lot and she couldn't play on the phone".

The 13-year-old was therefore questioned again by the prosecution. She admitted that what she had said the first time was a lie. She confirmed that she wanted to take revenge on her stepfather.

The girl's previous testimony was that during a period of about 10 months, her father allegedly committed inappropriate acts of a sexual nature towards her on average three times a week. This adds up to about 120 intimate close-ups - in a 50-square-metre rather crowded flat, as there were six people living there (the parents, Aldona and three of her older siblings).

For a long time, however, no one took this into account. It was only in the justification acquitting Daniel Kasprzyk that the judge admitted that it was impossible for no one in the household to have noticed something suspicious over such a long period of time, in such a small area.

"Daniel Kasprzyk pleaded not guilty. He gave an explanation in which he indicated that he treats Aldona as his own daughter. The whole incident is the result of her biological father setting her against him. He stressed that he would never have taken the card written by Aldona to the Centre if these acts had actually been committed," reads the case file.

Doesn't feel like a man

Kasprzyk spent a total of more than four months in custody. He continued to sit there even when his stepdaughter admitted to lying and when she wrote a letter to the prosecution and the court asking them to release her stepfather. On 22 July 2022, Aldona once again confirmed that she had testified untruthfully. However, this did not help at all. A short time later, on 8 August, he was brutally raped.

"I have never had a criminal record, I have never had to deal with violence, I have spent my whole life as a simple, peaceful person. I was completely unprepared for what I might face in prison. Especially since I was locked up with a Chechen who was suspected of murder. He was a psychopath who cared about everything, and human life did not matter to him," Daniel Kasprzyk tells TVP Weekly in an interview.

The case file we accessed leaves no illusions about the psychological profile of the detainees:

"After the rounds they all took it in turns, one after the other, one after the other they beat me 50 times in one knee by flexing the spoon. Two were holding hands, one was beating. They covered the peephole in the door. They even tried to cut my fingernails. That same day while still climbing onto the bed Kacper G. grabbed my neck with his hand, knocking me off the bed and I hit my pelvis on the floor. During the night Islam would come up and see if I was asleep. I feared for my life. Everyone intimidated that if I said something they would kill me. I was not allowed in the door. Later, I had to drink a salt solution. If I didn't, they would pour it forcibly down my throat. After that I was spitting blood, blood was pouring from my nose. I even urinated with blood".

Co-prisoners forcibly shaved Kasprzyk's head with a primitive razor, leaving serious wounds. According to this testimony, it was the prison housemaster who was supposed to tell the Chechen what the 50-year-old was accused of, and as is well known paedophiles are at the bottom of the prison hierarchy and are treated worst by other inmates. He adds that when he reported the rape not even a swab was taken from the anal area. The tests that were necessary to determine the perpetrator of the rape were therefore not performed.

"Even though I'm breathing, my life is over," cries Daniel Kasprzyk when interviewed. "I don't feel like a man, I can't function normally. I am afraid of everything, I exist only thanks to strong psychotropic drugs. I am not able to work. We have nothing to live on. I no longer have acquaintances or friends. Everyone has turned away or points fingers in the street. It's vegetation and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to finish with myself.

Unjust enrichment

Adam Andruszkiewicz, an MP from that region who became involved in helping Daniel Kasprzyk, believes that the compensation of PLN 30 000 proposed by the prosecutor is scandalously low. "This is a blatant mockery of human misfortune," he believes. "But above all, I cannot understand why the same prosecutor is now dealing with the compensation case. This is an absolute basis for her exclusion. And humanly speaking: after all, her face is associated by the victim with everything that has happened to him in the most horrible way in his life. And at subsequent hearings he has to see her again, plus he sees that the prosecutor once again wants the worst for him. How many years can you put up with this?", he asks.

Even the spokesman for the Bialystok Court of Appeal, where the appeal case will be heard any day now, was puzzled by this situation. - I also think that the prosecutor should disengage herself from the proceedings. In the case of a judge, this would certainly be the right thing to do," argues Judge Janusz Sulima in an interview with TVP Weekly.

We tried to talk to prosecutor Anna Zejer (who is also a spokesperson for the District Prosecutor's Office in Łomża). When she could not be contacted directly we asked 8 questions about the case by email:

1. Why did Daniel Kasprzyk end up in custody in a cell with the most dangerous criminals, including Islam A., a suspected murderer?

2. Why - despite Patrycja Wykowska's changed testimony and her admission that she gave false testimony - did Daniel Kasprzyk continue to remain in custody and have his detention prolonged?

3. Why are you representing the prosecution in the second case (for damages) against Daniel Kasprzyk?

4. Is this not a basis for excluding the prosecutor from the case?

5. Do you not think that human empathy would dictate a change of prosecutor in a situation where the victim testifies that he was raped and abused in a detention centre - a place where he was placed by the prosecutor from a paedophilia case? Each subsequent encounter with you may bring back memories from the detention centre

6. Why does the prosecution insist on such a low compensation for the harm suffered by the victim (PLN 30,000 in the first instance and less than PLN 60,000 in the second instance)

7. Why did the prosecution change the amount of compensation from PLN 30,000 to PLN 59,297.8? What has changed in that time?

8. Do you really think that 4 months in detention, in which you were humiliated, beaten, abused on a daily basis - and probably also raped twice - is "unjust enrichment", as stated in the grounds of appeal?

After five days, we received an official letter from the public prosecutor's office.

It turned out that in the appeal, the prosecutor is already more generous and proposes almost twice as much as before, i.e. 59,297 zloty and 81 groszy in damages. Which, in her opinion, "is an amount adequate to the harm Daniel Kasprzyk suffered and will not constitute a source of unjust enrichment for him", as she wrote.

Kasprzyk's defender, Jakub Harkiewicz, sat down in awe when he read the statement of reasons. "How is it possible to first completely destroy a man's life and then still send him an official, official letter explaining that a raped and ridiculed man is trying to unjustifiably enrich himself? Or would the lady prosecutor like to swap places with Daniel Kasprzyk and carry his cross?"

Daniel Kasprzyk is requesting a seemingly very large sum: PLN 1 million in compensation. Is this an exorbitant amount, for the prison trauma, the rapes and the ruining of his life and family? Because it is not only he who takes psychotropic drugs today, but also Aldona, now 17 years old. The stepdaughter still lives with Kasprzyk and his wife, who, by the way, also to this day cannot pull herself together, is permanently traumatised.

Judgement will be given on 21 February 2022.

– Karol Wasilewski
-translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists