Groomed at 15: Indonesian actress lays bare her stolen youth in viral memoir

Her book, Broken Strings: Fragments of Stolen Youth, recounts how she was groomed as a teenager – and how long it took her to understand what had happened.

The story has struck a nerve across Indonesia, where parents, educators and officials are now asking how such harm could have happened unseen.

Made freely available online, the memoir quickly went viral, drawing praise for confronting a subject rarely spoken of so openly.

In her book, Moeremans describes being 15 when a man more than a decade older began showering her with attention, gifts and unrelenting praise: behaviour commonly known as “love bombing”.

Shortly after she turned 18 in 2011, she said the man – identified in the book as Bobby – hired two actors to pose as her parents so that he and Moeremans could marry in a church in West Java. Indonesian law requires parental consent for marriage.