World Of Secrets - Death in Dubai: 5. The reality of ‘Porta Potty’

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

The story behind the viral Dubai Porta Potty rumours and why, even in death, Monic became the subject of an online witch hunt. Meanwhile we go undercover – are we getting closer to Monic’s boss? And a breakthrough in the quest to find where she is buried. This episode includes discussion of disturbing events, including sexual abuse and violence. It also contains racist language.Presented by investigative journalist Runako Celina.Season 9 of World of Secrets, Death in Dubai, is a BBC Eye investigation for the BBC World Service, produced in association with Thread Studios.Please note, the image is being used for illustrative purposes only and the person depicted in it is a model.Audio for this episode was updated on 22nd September 2025.If you feel distressed by the references in this story, please speak to a health professional, or an organisation that offers support such as Befrienders Worldwide. www.befrienders.org For UK listeners, details of organisations offering information about or support after sexual abuse, or with feelings of despair, are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline. Here’s a link to the BBC Eye documentary film, which we recommend you watch after listening to this podcast: https://bit.ly/bbcdeathindubai If you are in the UK, you can watch on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/n12t256jg

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Take it from here. And don't miss the new season of Karen Piri coming this October. You don't look, let, please. I'll take that as a compliment. See it differently when you stream the best of British TV with Britbox. Watch with a free trial today. This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps.

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including sexual abuse and strong language including racist terms. I'll give you a heads up when it's coming so you can skip ahead if you prefer. The team continues to Keep eyes on the target and further updates we'll follow. We have a surveillance team watching out for Abbey. We understand he's moved his girls out of the cramped department in Albaasha where Monica was living. And now he's based here in this upmarket area of Dubai, near the marina. So we're trying to establish some kind of pattern.

At the property itself, trying to identify Charles himself. Charles Muesigua is his name, but everyone in Dubai calls him Abbey. The team have just done a drive past. There are two vehicles parked in the garage. We've seen Charles going in and out in and taxiing the girls away from the accommodation. They keep watch for a few days. What we have seen on a regular basis, I saw like three times now, is Charles driving or being driven in B2. so that's the blue Chinese model SUV

with two girls, at least two girls in the vehicle. It kind of blows my mind because almost exactly three years since Monica died. It looks like he's still one in this operation. This is World of Secrets. Season 9. Death in Dubai. From the BBC World Service, I'm Renarko-Selina.

Episode 5, The Reality of Port-a-Potty. It's my fourth night in Dubai, and I'm getting a room. really good understanding of this dark world that Monica was caught up in. Most nights, I've been going to the clubs where I'm told Abby forced her to go, and staying there till the early hours of the morning. I'm pretty exhausted. So tonight, I'm staying in and online. I'm flicking back through Monica's social media accounts.

The bicycle! You look like whitewater! The stunning pictures of her, the clips where she looks like she's living this glamorous lifestyle. And I start going through the comments people left after her death went viral. And after she got labelled a Dubai Porterpotty girl, they wrote things like this. It's true. Shit happens. She's a hollow.

It's a consensual act. Meaning they're given a choice. Many people always want to make fast cash and live a glamorous and luxurious life. It's nobody's fault but their own. These parents must really be suffering to discover the daughters debauched life. I feel their pain. It's so far from what I've learned about Monica. So far from what I've heard happened to her.

And I know how devastating it is for her family and friends to read these kinds of things. I remember Monica's niece, Rona, saying she wondered if lies were being spread online deliberately. And she even released her own video to try to correct the narrative. What I was trying to say, to tell people to call down, they are talking nonsense on her and saying many things on her. She was like an influencer that she had. have kept her so they should stop talking too much about her because they don't know what exactly happened. Why did her death go viral?

Why did people repeat these rumors about her? How do you think stories on the internet become sensationalized in that way? People like me, of course. No, I'm just joking. This is Wiley Mobs, one of the TikTokers who covered Monica's death. He's a content creator from Cedar Rapids, America's Midwest, and he's also a rapper and musician. When I started doing the true crime videos, I think what made them so popular is I found stories that a lot of people didn't know about. Riley, like most people online and Monica's friends in Dubai, calls her by her social handle, a nickname, Mona Kiz.

Mona Kiz was a young beautiful woman from Uganda who became enthralled with the glitz and glamour of becoming becoming an influencer, she began taking even more trips to Dubai. The first time I ever heard about Mona Kiz was on Reddit and I'm just looking at all these stories and I scrolled past one and it was Mona and she was there and she was beautiful, like breathtaking model and then I remember going to her social media and there were like a lot of posts that were her traveling and living like this luxurious life and most people that are victims of those types of stories, it's usually not someone that looks like they're on top of the world. It was just, whoa, like, what is going on? This is like a real mystery.

In his video, Riley didn't actually call Monica a porter potty. It was nowhere near as salacious or cruel as some of the other content out there. But to his thousands of followers, he repeats the rumor that Monica killed herself because of shame. After, in his words, Mona and her friend were forced to do terrible sexual acts and some of them are unspeakable and it was all filmed and released on the internet when this happened Mona was destroyed where did this come from where did this thought come from

yeah so there was a rumor and like I said I feel like this whole story just feels like a rumor now that was one of the things that was thrown around that she had been driven to do these nasty things and for money and it was filmed and that that video was put out and then it kind of made sense to me if you know if I was forced to do something that degrading and it was filmed and put out for my family and friends to see

you know maybe that would drive someone to take their own life were you ever able to confirm that that was mona in the video i'm not able to confirm almost anything in this story because there was not any official news sources that had an information if you don't know everything the internet's going to try to come fill the pieces or fill the missing links in and i think that's a bad thing but there's also been lots of cases solved you know victims of have gotten their justice because of people like me on the internet. So I'm hard pressed to say that the internet sleuthing

and reporting should stop, but I'm also conflicted because we don't know what's true and what's not. So you could be spreading false information without even knowing. You know, it's really, the internet is like I said, it's the Wild Wild West and there's really no jurisdiction on the information that can spread. I go deeper into this Wild Wild West, as Riley calls it, to find out where the whole Dubai

Port-a-Bottie narrative came from. How did it even start, and then end up being linked to Monica? When I go down that rabbit hole, the earliest mention I can find is from 2003, when American comedian Dave Chappelle is mocking the disgraced R&B singer and producer R. Kelly. Your body is a portal party. Only thing to make my life completed when I turn your face into a toilet seat. R. Kelly's now serving a 30-year jail sentence

for sex trafficking and racketeering with a further conviction for child sex abuse. By the time he was convicted, the port-a-potty thing had taken on a life of its own, and it's now firmly linked to Dubai. Dubai Porta Potty, a pretty trending topic across social media platforms. I have just bared witness to that Port-a-Pottie video. Oh my God, do you not watch it?

Is this what it's come down to for a burking bag? My eyes are all of you influencers that are living in Poo-Bai. Yeah? There's an urban dictionary entry for Port-a-Potties that dates back to 2012. Expensive escorts bought by rich Arab and European men to go on yacht parties, for $30,000 plus apiece. In reality, these women are brought onto these boats to get shit and pissed on. Hence the name, porta-potties.

The entry even tells you how to identify a porta-potty. If her friend of the female kind is always posting pictures of shopping sprees in Dubai and then a yacht drinking champagne in any UAE or Central Pei area, she is a porta-potty. By this definition, half the woman on Instagram must be porta-potties. The whole thing feels like a digital witch hunt. If this is really happening, it involves two people. So, why are only the woman being shamed? Why don't the clients face the same vitriol?

If you're a rich Arab in the UAE and you want to see how low women from the West will sink in order to make a few bucks, it's very simple. There's an Instagram account. Tag the sponsor, that Taggswoman, accusing them of being Dubai Porterpotties, they even trick some into recording videos, saying what they're willing to do for money. Tag the sponsor gives us a closer look into what these Instagram models would do for money. They would expose these women destroying the little career they have left. I do think it's funny what they're doing, but I have a very sick and twisted sense of humor. Digging deeper, I find an in-cell thread on the notorious online forum, 4chan.

A British woman is being shamed, an actor's reading their words. What do you think a beautiful woman like this is doing? Getting married to a British man? Having kids? Doing anything wholesome? Maybe at worst, she could be a stripper, right? Wrong. She's a Dubai potter potty. It's not only woman being shamed. Shamed. Another poster writes,

We need to get this out to the mainstream. Make the public hate these filthy Arabs. And the hashtags are also horrendous. Hashtag Ahmed has the laxatives ready. Gross. Prominent Emirati TikTokers have poured scorn on the whole idea, distancing themselves from the narrative. I can assure you that this fetish is not a very common one among us Arab men.

This ain't something a normal human being, rather a whole nation craves on. You do understand that by making these statements, you are racist. You are generalizing every Arab man in Dubai. This is not only racist, but it is disgusting. The rumor has taken off. It's in rap songs, comedy skits, trending sounds on TikTok. It's thrown around in rap battles and free. styles. It's everywhere.

Hey, Habibi, come on to Dubai. Dubai, Dubai, Dubai, Dubai, Dubai for the party. So when we were in Dubai, obviously we went and saw the Birch Khalifa, unbelievable, but I heard that when it was built, it wasn't connected to the sewage system. They have like these poop trucks, and that's why you shit on a hooker's chest. This crude online joke isn't so funny when you speak to women experiencing the ripple effects of it. There is a man who used to call me a toilet and I had to play along actually to his fantasy because he was paying a lot of money. This is Lexi.

Like the other woman I've spoken to, she says she was tricked into coming to the UAE and forced in the to sex work. But she managed to escape and now helped rescue other women. So she has insights on the clients based on all the women she supports, as well as her own horrific experience. Lexi hadn't been there long when a Russian client sent her a proposition. I should say, this is quite a hard listen, so skip on around four minutes if you don't want to hear it. This client offered her a significant sum of money for violent and forced sex with a group of men and extra if she'd do an additional horrible request.

He's like, if it is a yes, we can buy ice cream cones. We can buy ice cream cones, shit in them, and we watch you eat. And that will be more, $5,000, if you will eat our sheet while we are recording you. That wasn't the only time she was asked for these extreme acts. Each time it happened, she understood more about what was going on, that for the clients, it was about power and humiliation.

Every time I said that I wouldn't want to do that, it seemed to get them more interested. I don't know how that psychology works, but every time I would show like, ew, that's not something I want to consider. Then they would be like persistent. They want somebody who is going to cry and scream and run, and that somebody should be a black person.

Lexi says requests like this were just, just one aspect of the extreme racism she experienced in Dubai. Black monkeys, that is one of the times they used. Oh, they like telling black girls to get on their knees. And there was this one client who asked me if I was comfortable putting on an Ankara thing so that when he rips it off me and whips my ass, he can feel the satisfaction of, Yeah, like that's something that used to turn him on.

Lexi tells me she called the police several times, trying to get help to get out of there. Every time I would try to explain, they would be like, you Africans cause problems for each other, we don't want to get involved. And they would hang up. The same thing Michael and Troy said.

the police showing no interest in investigating. So now I know the most extreme part of Dubai Porterpotty definitely happens. And for those forced into it, it sounds like there's little help to get out. When I speak to Mia, Monica's friend, she tells me at least one of Abby's clients demands it. Abby has so many clients. They do weird stuff But there's this one client He poops on girls

He poops and he tells them To eat the shit Those are the fantasies he wants He doesn't care if you're sick He doesn't care And if they try to say no Abby would force you You dare refuse

He would tell you You know how to make money But forcing people to do that kind of shit Eat poo But if Monica was sent to do this, Mia thinks she would have refused. Because you can't force Monica to do something she doesn't want. There's no evidence that Monica ever did these ads, but the internet didn't need any.

The witch-hunt mentality meant that she was labelled, the porta-potty girl anyway. People said stuff they don't know. Maybe just because they want likes, views. Why did they use their platform for negative stuff? Why didn't they use the table? chance to ask why she died. Why are people so mean? Behind the internet to buy Porter Potty narrative lies a reality that's much more sinister.

It's nothing to do with influencers willingly doing this for money. For the woman I've spoken to, there's no choice. It's something they're forced to do. I can tell you a little bit about what I have found so far. I tell Riley, one of the TikTokers who repeated the rumours about Monica,

about what I've uncovered. Her real name was Monica Karunji. She went to Dubai, according to her family, for a job and ultimately ended up being involved. Riley asks how she died. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to say exactly what happened that night, but I tell him what I can reveal, the circumstances that led up to her death, identifying the first man who arranged for her to leave Uganda

and if her undercover operation goes as planned I'll also expose the pimps she worked for in Dubai I'm sitting here awestruck like I'm out of loss for words myself when it comes to that when Mona died the comments were really really evil I mean hideous hideous things and I guess personally one of the things

I'm hoping is that after this investigation is finished and released, I'm hoping that, you know, with your platform, you might join me in correcting the narrative. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, no, I definitely would make a follow-up video, especially with, like, you know, all the new information we have and stuff, like, absolutely. For Monica's friends and family,

these false rumors really hurt. It was like their moniker was being taken away from them a second time, so correcting that narrative will really be. that narrative will really matter to them. When I spent time with Rona and the family at their farm, the other thing they pressed on me is they wanted to know what had happened to her body. Where's her final resting place?

Even if she died in pieces, then we should want our pieces to bury in her country. Just we need to bring her back in her motherland and we're no longer yearning to know what exactly happened in her. And I'm going to do my best to help them. Implementing AI is now a must for companies and the executives in charge of steering them. But how do you turn AI experimentation into actual business results?

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should you buy? And how do you avoid common pitfalls that derail most AI initiatives? All of that and more on this episode of Resilient Edge. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts. Michael, Monica's elder relative who was in the UAE when she died, was told by the police that he had 21 days to raise the money to repatriate her. The family did their best, but it was a large sum, and sadly they couldn't manage it in time. And Michael was told later by the Ugandan consulate that Monica had been buried somewhere in Dubai. Since meeting her family, I've been trying to find her grave. With the help of my Arabic-speaking colleagues, we found someone official who might be able to help. Our family didn't have money to bring the body home.

Where is she buried? is there a headstone marker and I'll go through the script basically when I'm on the phone with them. Shall we try? We've been warned not to tell this person we're journalists so we're just going to say

that we're calling on behalf of the family. We go through the plan. So we have a name. We've got our name. Monica Karunji. And do I say where she's from? Uganda. After lots of back and forth,

The contact finds Monica's name and the date of burial, the 26th of July, nearly three months after her death, and says she's buried in Alcassez Cemetery. We're told her grave is in a section for unknowns, which is where unclaimed bodies of migrant workers often end up, and warned that the gate into that area is probably going to be locked. But maybe someone will take pity on us and open it. What flowers do you think would be best?

Maybe we can go with just plain white, pure white. Pure white? I won't get into the cemetery if I say I'm a journalist. I'm just going to go in with flowers to simply pay my respects. So you've got roses? With some green, you see? Yeah, that's lovely. Okay, ma'am, no problem.

Yeah, it just might need to shift some stuff over. Does anyone have a pen for the card? We set off, and as we drive out of the city centre, the landscape shifts from skyscrapers and malls to lower-rise buildings. We're on our way to Alka-Sy Cemetery. We've been told that this is where Monaco was laid to rest, but in a special section of it called the unknown section, it's where people who didn't manage to get repatriated in their death are laid to rest.

rest, so I'm hoping I can find her or find someone that will help me to locate her. As I stare out the window, my mind goes back to Uganda. The sense of responsibility I feel towards Monica's loved ones hits me hard. I remember leaving Monica's family and one of the key things that they wanted was to know where she was laid to rest. So this is really important for them. there's almost this sense of lack of closure because no one's received the body.

We don't have a grave number, so we're going to have to look around, hopefully without raising suspicion. The problem is that it's an official site in Dubai, and anything official here is going to have high security. I was even told about the need for a police letter, so I just don't know if we'll even get access. or even be let in.

Are you ready? Yeah. We're just coming up for a gate now. There's a barrier in place, but it's open. Oh gosh. Okay. Yeah, let's just drive in. Okay.

Wow, okay. We are inside Alka-Sai Cemetery. Burial areas A, B and C, there's signs on either side. The cemetery is huge. Graves as far as the eye can see. And there's a maze of roads through the different sections. I mean, there are just so many headstones here. So many of them don't have names on them.

And it's just impossible to know where to start. God, if only we had a grave number, because they do have these little signs saying like B-22. It literally is like a needle in the haystack. I think my next step has to be to ask someone. I was told that we're not supposed to go into the unknown area of this cemetery. So potentially, if I do ask someone, we'll be asked to leave. The heat is so intense, our equipment keeps switching off, and we realise we're starting to attract attention. We get back in the car.

There's some people at the gate who've definitely clocked us. Yeah. I feel like people are seeing us. We drive away from the guards to an area we haven't been to yet. And there we find something. Locked gates. Locked gate. How frustrating.

It would be nice to lay eyes on her grave. And we're so close. And there's this kind of brick wall. A wall with a locked gate. And beyond it, what looks like more graves. I think she's here. I think she has to be. I think she's here.

But we've definitely been spotted now. Careful, there's a lot of workers out there on the right-hand side. And there's a shiny black SUV coming towards us. This car, I feel like it definitely took a picture of the car. I saw the driver raise this phone up. We drive off, and when we feel it's safe, park up. It's just sad to think that Monica ended up here. Monica ended up here.

Monica deserved more. She does have more. It's sad, isn't that? You're all right. You're okay? Yeah, I'm just not good with that. It's just so sad. does she?

No, I know. You know. It's just like, she probably just has one of these wooden slabs. It's like she probably didn't even have a headstone. Like, imagine that. And it's like that, the way she's been remembered online

and the fact that even here, like, it's just, like, her whole legacy is just reduced to, like, What? God, it's just horrible, really. Locked away, even in death, Monica's trapped. Even in her final resting place, she's not free. And her family needs answers. While I still don't know exactly what caused Monica's death,

what I have been told about is the circumstances she was in and the man she was trying to get away from. We need to get close to Abby, to hear how he runs his operation. And to do this, we're going to go undercover again. My colleague Mark is going to pose as someone looking for girls. His cover story is that he organises parties for wealthy clients in Dubai. Troy, Abbey's former right-hand man, has agreed to make an introduction. Okay, so I've got a camera in the chest about here.

I've got a microphone on my leg here. Put the Omega Watch for a bit of bling. Do I look like your average sex party organiser? That's next time on World of Secrets. In the next episode, Charles Muesigua, known as Abbey, gets a chance to respond to these allegations. This has been episode 5 of 6 of Death in Dubai, season 9 of World of Secrets. you for listening, please tell people about it and follow or subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And if you have any information that could help our investigation, please get in touch

on Renarko, RUNA-K-O at bbcc.c.c.com at bbc.c.combe. World of Secrets, Death in Dubai, is produced by Ruth Evans, Lee Chung, Bondo and me, Renarko Selena. The sound design and mix is by Andy Fell. The editor is Rebecca Henski. It was a BBCI investigation produced in association with Thread Studios.