ONLY Monique Smith knows how she's still alive to tell her harrowing tale.
Abducted as a baby, sexually, physically, and mentally abused as a child before becoming a victim of human trafficking, it's a miracle she is able to sit down with The U.S. Sun and share such a horrifying story with grace and positivity.
Incredibly, she only found out she was stolen as a two-year-old from her birth mother's house in New York City 28 years later, becoming the oldest living missing person in the process.
But Monique, who is now proudly known as Simboli Ruffin, is alive and kicking despite her hellish past, breathing fresh hope into those affected by sexual and domestic violence, while giving a voice to girls who fall into the vile world of trafficking.
Considering what she's suffered over the years, her mental strength and resilience is astounding.
It's difficult to know where to start with Monique's story, but perhaps going back to the very beginning is the only way.
Stolen from the Bronx as a toddler, and taken to Baltimore, she was too young to know any different. For Monique, the woman whose house she was now living in, was her mother.
"Let's not use that term," she told The U.S. Sun. "She was the woman who raised me."
Monique's earliest memories aren't of a happy, normal childhood, spending time with family and friends.
All she can remember is vicious mental and physical abuse, being smacked and hit while being constantly sworn at and talked to in a nasty, aggressive tone.
"She was like a dictator," continued Monique. "Malicious and abrasive with how she handled everything."
She recalls one incident when she was just six years old. Running outside like any normal kid, she tripped and badly gashed her elbow and knee.
A band-aid and some TLC were needed, so one her supposed brothers patched her up and sent her home.
Monique, however, was told not to leave in the first place, so when the woman found out what had happened, she administered the most brutal of beatings.
"She hit me so hard, every time she struck me, the bandages started coming off," she recalled.
Monique began to realize her supposed mother was the kind of person the other kids in the neighborhood were scared of, yet had no idea she was a missing person, ripped away from the heart of her real family.
At the tender age of nine, instead of becoming engrossed in school and spending time with friends, she spent her evenings cleaning toilets and floors.
The woman, who worked as a cleaner, employed her as part of a crew, sometimes traveling on a school night outside of Baltimore to a hotel in Virginia.
Monique was old enough to realize it was a "weird" turn of events - she was actually registered as an employee and even had an ID card - for someone so young but, of course, her education suffered horrendously as a result.
"I was falling asleep in the classroom," she admitted.
This carried on for years, also taking on work in a restaurant, earning money, and giving straight to her abuser, getting just enough back for a bus pass.
"It was like I was her personal slave," said Monique who still had no idea the woman wasn't her mother. "I would do her hair and clean her home."
While the woman continued her sick campaign of terror, two men whom she was led to believe were her uncles, were sexually abusing her.
The molestation and rape started at just four years old. It went on for another 14 years.
Monique says the two men were over 30 years old and because everyone lived together, her sickening secret was never aired.
"One person ain't going to tell the other," she admitted. "This woman had no clue either."
She had to leave Baltimore and so, at the age of 18, she jumped aboard a Greyhound bus headed for the Florida sun in St. Augustine.
A new start? Unfortunately not.
Just another dark, unimaginable horrific chapter of her life.
Virtually homeless, Monique met people on her travels who groomed her for sexual trafficking. A woman she met on the bus initially took the teenager in, before getting her a landscaping job with a man she knew.
Some days, however, instead of working, he would "take me around and made me perform certain acts." She fell into prostitution.
"I was in sex survival mode," she said.
This fresh hell continued for a couple of years before a return to Maryland beckoned - and the hope of a new beginning presented itself when she was 28 years old.
It would shape the rest of her life - and finally bring down the appalling human beings who had destroyed her childhood.
She wanted to finally stand on her own two feet and start a 24-hour care center for police and firefighters, and after the woman she refuses to name continually refused to hand over a birth certificate, which, of course, she never had in the first place, Monique started digging with authorities.
The Department of Social Services and the Board of Education were contacted in the hope of finding some documentation, demanding they trawl through the archives and retract records in order to release social security numbers.
A few weeks went by and then, one day, came a bolt from the blue in the mail.
"I almost passed out," Monique said.
One document stated she was born in 1966. Another in 1968. The name Monique Smith, however, was nowhere to be seen.
Turns out the woman had applied for three social security numbers under different names - Symbolie Smith, Symbolie Terrie and Symbolie Terri, with birthdates of May 11 and May 13, 1966.
"My whole world started coming apart," she recalled.
Piece by piece, Monique began to realize she wasn't who she thought she was.
Her mind raced back to arguments with other family members when she was a child, how they would drop in comments like "you can tell your mother but she's not your mother anyway."
The sexual abusers played a similar game. "When I was 16, I told them to stop, and they just said: 'Well, you aren't my f****** niece anyway," she added.
Alarm bells began to go off in her mind. Monique questioned family members who began to shed more light, stressing the woman "just showed up with you, we didn't know who you were."
She conducted a national search, calling the police and the FBI, accusing the woman of stealing her as a baby, how the paperwork she received confirms Monique wasn't who she thought she was.
"They were confused," she said. "I spent so much time looking for Monique Smith, not realizing the person I was looking for never existed. They were fictitious names, they were false identities."
The National Center of Missing and Exploited Children were next on the list, yet they were similarly dumbfounded.
It took two years for her to finally be added to the national registry - missing child number 129 was her latest name.
She made posters, sent out flyers. Monique was on a nationwide search - for herself.
The woman who claimed to be her mother remained as despicable as ever.
"She told me to screw myself and that she was going to her grave with what happened," Monique said.
"I never spoke to her again after that."
The search was costing her thousands, traveling from state to state while daycare for her kids to be looked after overnight just adding to her expenditure.
She went to homeless shelters, and even the Salvation Army in search of answers.
"They sent me a letter saying I am a living Jane Doe and that they'd never seen anything like this before, " she said.
As the truth began to open up before her very eyes, Monique began to write a book to ensure her children would know her backstory while also contacting chat show hosts like Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, and Ricki Lake in the desperate hope of spreading the word and jolting the memory of someone watching.
A documentary film was also made, although the onset of the Covid pandemic didn't help get the message out.
Monique was even registered in the NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) database, which is usually only reserved for deceased people found in homeless shelters or whose bodies haven't been claimed.
However, it wasn't until the introduction of renowned genealogist CeCe Moore, that the revelations started.
She pulled together the DNA components and found a woman in her 60s looking for the death certificate of her baby sister.
"I was like: 'Wow'," Monique said with a tear in her eye.
She contacted the connection and it was, indeed, her biological sister Veronica who could recall seeing her on the bed one day, before being gone the next.
Her birth mother had died at just 34 years old - "she was a troubled woman, a teenage mom" - but Monique had seven sisters in total, all with different fathers.
"It was just a beautiful thing," she said of the moment she was reunited with her sisters. "I felt great, but it was strange. At that moment I really only wanted to know who I was."
Now, Monique wanted the people who attempted to destroy her life punished.
Unfortunately, it wasn't easy.
Maryland police would divert her claims of abduction to New York officials, and vice-versa. There was another problem - all of her abusers were dead.
The woman who claimed she was her mom passed away the year Monique discovered her name.
Finally, she was able to move forward with her life, and she did just that.
The newly named Simboli Ruffin was moving up, and moving on.
Simboli has a successful construction company and has been an advocate for women finding themselves in similar situations, helping push through legislation changes to help protect people who've been charged with criminal activities while in captivity.
She also supports initiatives for missing children and human trafficking and is forever "using my voice to help elevate humanity."
Thankfully, Simboli's life is in a far better place now.
She preaches to girls about never giving up, though the pain of her story will forever remain.
"I will literally never know why that woman did what she did," she concludes. "I'll never get closure."
