Cassandra was abandoned as an infant but rescued and later adopted by Angie Baxter Hubbard and Jacob Foster. When Angie and Jacob divorced, Cassandra moved to Paris to live with her father. When Cassandra was eighteen, she arrived in Pine Valley to visit her mother and to meet her mother's presumed-deceased husband Jesse. Cassandra did not care for Jesse or her mother's plans to remarry but she changed her mind after she witnessed how much Jesse loved Angie.

While Cassandra was in town, she befriended Colby Chandler and Andre "Dre" Woods. They were together in a car one night and accidently ran into something on a dark road. The next day, they suspected they had killed a man named Richie Novak. The teens lied to cover up the events of the night but eventually the truth came out. Richie had been killed by someone else before the teens had hit him. Shortly after Cassandra and her friends were cleared, she returned to Paris to be with her father.

In 2013, Cassandra planned to return to Pine Valley as a surprise to her mother. However, as her plane landed, she was kidnapped by Russian sex traffickers. The Koslov brothers, Uri and Vlad, injected Cassandra with drugs and forced her to strip and participate in pornography. She was also raped. Cassandra begged Uri and Vlad to let her go and she insisted that her step-father, the Pine Valley Chief of Police, would find her. Cassandra did not participate willingly in the activities that were forced upon her and Vlad beat her repeatedly.

After spending several weeks in captivity, Cassandra was drugged with heroin and released. She was taken to the hospital and reunited with her family. Cassandra suffered from drug withdrawal and experienced several nightmares in which she relived the horrors she had been through. As Cassandra struggled to move forward, she learned that she was pregnant from a rape that she had endured and immediately decided to abort the pregnancy. Her mother asked her to take more time before making a decision.

Cassandra did not want to upset her mother but believed that terminating the pregnancy was the best choice. Her friend Colby paid her a visit and with Colby's support, Cassandra underwent the abortion. Afterwards, Cassandra feared that her mother hated her but went home with Angie and Jesse upon her release from the hospital. Angie insisted that she only wanted Cassandra to be able to move forward after everything she had went through. Cassandra blamed herself when Jesse lost his job after he had broken the law in exchange for her freedom. Jesse insisted that she was more important than his job but she was hesitant to believe him. Angie, Jesse, and Colby remained by her side as she struggled to reclaim her life.