Tuesday 23 August 2016

Bad Girls!

Drugs offences, steroid supplying, shoplifting, prostitution, child pornography...

All of the above (and more) are crimes for which female bodybuilders - many well-known to female muscle lovers - have been arrested and/or charged with.

Of course, female bodybuilders are not more prone to criminality than other women, but their crimes are much more likely to get reported in the media, as Dani Reardon's brush with the Florida police in 2014 proved. Female Bodybuilder Attacks Boyfriend is a headline, Average Woman Attacks Boyfriend is not.

It's always a shock to a Brit like me to see those mug shots published, and not only because the likes of Denise Rutkowski (evading arrest - for what is not clear) and Rhonda Lee Quaresma (prostitution sting - guess she was offering sessions plus plus) look so horribly different from their former selves in those pictures.

Over here, rather than the mug shot that gets published, it's the picture of the defendant "arriving at court", and recently that's just what British female bodybuilder Maria Glazowska found herself doing as she faced charges of benefit fraud.

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Maria was caught bang to rights claiming a total of £40,000 plus in Disability Living Allowance between 2009 and 2014. During this time she had taken up bodybuilding, and gone on to compete at national and international level. Sadly, her cunning ploy of using the stage name "Glazowska" - her real name is Maria Hughes it turns out - hadn't put the Department of Work & Pensions off her scent. She pleaded guilty and now faces jail time, not least because she has previous - she was handed a 15-month sentence after being caught growing £30,000 worth of cannabis in her pre-bodybuilding days.

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Ironically, she had turned to the gym - powerlifting initially - as a means of reforming her life after years as a self-confessed "hard clubbing, rave scene party animal".

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And, even more sadly, in bodybuilding, she seemed to have found her calling. Quite simply I was built for bodybuilding, she told Real Female Bodybuilding in 2013, so I decided to do what Mother Nature obviously intended my body to do which was to lift, and lift HEAVY! And the results spoke for themselves. Within two years she was exactly the "big, muscular, ripped" woman she believed us fans want to see.

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Benefit fraud is no joke, but it's not like Maria was the only one at it, with some reports suggesting up to 15% of the UK's working population are - either knowingly or unknowingly - receiving more in benefits than they are due. And her story (see The Birmingham Mail, or The Daily Star - unsurprisingly The Star uses somewhat more vitriolic language) reminded me that this is not the first time in recent years that a UK female bodybuilder has been hauled up in front of the judge for such an offence.

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Back in 2013, Northern Ireland's Kerry Boomer, a NABBA/WABBA Figure athlete, got a suspended sentence and was ordered to pay back around £47,000 in various benefits she had wrongfully obtained between 2005 and 2010 after pleading guilty.

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The very striking Kerry was a runner-up at WABBA Northern Ireland in the Toned Figure category in 2012, and runner-up again at the 2013 NABBA NI, this time in the Trained Figure category before she was caught out. Whether she did in fact pay back the money within the twelve months the judge gave her and consequently avoided prison time is not something I've managed to find any information about though.

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The point is, bad muscle girls don't always have to end up behind bars. At the time of writing, Maria was due to be sentenced last Friday (if that makes sense). So, let's hope the judge - if he sends her away at all - at least sends (has sent) Maria - who once claimed that if she didn't "collapse and maybe throw up" at the end of her workout, then it hadn't been hard enough - away to a facility with a decent weights room.

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Watch Maria in action at the 2013 NAC Universe here. No footage of Kerry Boomer in action unfortunately, but you can see a bit more of her in this interview after she'd come off stage with the silver medal at the 2012 WABBA Northern Ireland. Worth a watch if only for the most obviously stoned-out-of-his-mind interviewer ever.

We resume tomorrow.

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