Gulnara Karimova, whose father runs the central Asian state of Uzbekistan, vanished on 16 February as reports were heard of a large raid on her luxury apartments.
She had kept in touch with the world beyond her heavily censored nation by using Twitter, but her account went silent.
However she did manage to smuggle out a letter to the BBC. "I am under severe psychological pressure, I have been beaten, you can count bruises on my arms," it says.
Described as rambling and disjointed experts say it appears genuine and includes an account of her arrest, and her discovery that Uzbekistan is not a land that respects human rights.
It says, "What makes it all worse, is that it is impossible to live like a human when you are watched by cameras, when there are armed men everywhere and when you are depressed because of what you have seen: special forces jumping on to the roof, your things in a mess, broken windows and doors and worst of all: a blindfolded person who is being dragged along the floor.”
She has been arrested with some of her closest associates on charges relating to money laundering and corruption.
Karimova has frequently sparred on Twitter with human rights activists and one of her noted online inquisitors is Andrew Stroehlein from Human Rights Watch who told New Europe about his thoughts, “My guess is it's genuine. It sounds like her - her style and her issues. It shows the continued split in the ruling elite, and that split stretches beyond the first family and into the security services.”
Asked about her claim to have been “naïve” about the human rights abuses in her country, we asked the activist if he was convinced by her apparent concern, for her own rights if not anyone else’s.
“I've talked to her a lot on Twitter and told her about many human rights abuses in the country - systematic torture, forced child labour in the cotton fields, the massacre of hundreds of demonstrators in Andijan in May 2005 - so if she didn't know about them before 2013 for whatever reason (which seems doubtful...), she certainly knew about them by then,” Stroehlein says.
“But knowing about them and being willing and able to talk about them are clearly two different things, and the most interesting thing about this letter is it's still not really looking at human rights abuses more generally in the country. She still seems more concerned about what they are doing to her specifically.”
He continues, “ I would find it more convincing if she was openly talking about the torture of others, the abuses in the cotton sector and the Andijan massacre – and if she exposes some insider details on those issues specifically, I think others will find it more convincing as well.”
Asked how the regime would respond to the smuggled letter, Stroehlein says, “Abusively. That's the way this regime always responds.”