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A mentally ill Ottawa woman with the emotional age of a 13-year-old was sentenced to federal prison for two years on Thursday for using teenage girls as sex slaves in her parents’ basement.

The victims, both 16 at the time, testified at trial and gave horrifying accounts, with one saying she had been bound and gagged only to be repeatedly raped by Caroline Budd, 22, and her ex-boyfriend Anthony Comunale, 33, on the Victoria Day weekend in 2014.

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One of the girls testified that she screamed in pain and begged them to stop, but the couple just laughed.

Budd and Comunale had plied the girls with booze until they were falling-down drunk. They were convicted of several counts of sexual assault and forcible confinement last September.

At Budd’s sentencing hearing Thursday, defence lawyer James Harbic urged the judge to spare the young woman a jail sentence in light of her emotional capacity, her list of mental disorders and a court-appointed psychiatrist’s conclusion that the “vulnerable” woman is “most at risk of being taken advantage of by other offenders due to her tendency to depend on others.”