On just one station, a former pimp talks about his victims and the sex trade.
“There’s gonna be monsters like me. They’ve been there since the beginning of time.” He doesn’t want to share his name, but he will share his story.
He’s a former pimp. A sex trafficker who spent nearly a dozen years convincing young women in Massachusetts to sell their bodies and give him the money. He tells us it started with his first girlfriend.
“I remember the first time. When she brought me the money she was disgusted. But with all her hate and disgust for herself, she just went and did it again.” And how, exactly, did he convince a young woman to prostitute herself for him?
“Persuasion,” he says. “It was like ‘I know when you walk into a room you feel that nobody notices you, but that’s what makes you the most beautiful person in the room.’”
He says he would find his victims at tanning salons, gyms, bars, and nightclubs, and was always on the lookout for girls who seemed to have low self-esteem. “You dress them up. I might have to spend $5000 on breast implants, which is worth it to me. You make them feel rich. Alive. Who doesn’t want to feel pretty?”
Experts say human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. According to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, hundreds of victims in Massachusetts call its hotline every year, desperate for help.
So who are these women?
“It doesn’t matter if it’s the neighborhood girl with great parents or if it’s the girl who don’t have parents and is raising herself. It really doesn’t matter,” he says. He claims that at one point he had 16 girls working for him. He’d drop them off at a hotel, sometimes for the entire day, and they’d turn trick after trick.
Once they were in the lifestyle, he admits he used shame to keep them there. “They have to 100 percent rely on what I give them. Nobody could ever love them, and there will never be a man in the world who would marry somebody who used to sell their body.”
After years as a sex trafficker, he had a daughter and everything changed. He says he got sober and left this life of crime behind ten years ago. Now, years later as he thinks about what he did, he says his belief in God is the only thing that prevented him from killing himself.
Parents, he says, hold the key to protecting young girls from men like him. “Fathers have to spend time with their daughters,” he says, quietly sobbing. “They have to show their daughters that I’m the man you want to find in life. I’m the man you want to marry.”
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