Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Michigan sting uncovers child sex workers
Episode Date: October 16, 2018The rescue of dozens of children during a sweep by law enforcement in Michigan this month highlights how many of America's missing children are victims of human trafficking. Nancy Grace assembles a te...am of experts to discuss the problem, including Melody Miller, director of the documentary "California's Forgotten Children" and victims' advocate Marc Klass, -- the founder of Klaas Kids Foundation. Also joining this show are prosecutor Kenya Johnson, psychologist Caryn Stark, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan, and reporter Nicole Partin. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. In juvenile hall, I had given up on life.
I thought, I won't live.
I won't live past 16.
There's no way I'm going to make it.
And I was only 13.
I wasn't even 14 yet.
And I couldn't see myself making it to 16.
Maybe not even 15.
It just wasn't even a thought that I would.
By the time when I was trafficked at 12, I should have been dead by 19.
I mean, that's the statistics statistics a seven-year life expectancy and that's
what should have happened to me but fortunately someone came into my life
and planted this seed and said you have potential and then I started trying to
figure out what that meant. This message that we can all do something needs
to get out there. We have our unique abilities, talents, and we can develop them and we can change
the world with them. You are hearing the voice of a child sex trafficking survivor. Wow. I'm Nancy
Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us. I can distinctly remember prosecuting a case of child molestation where the child, the girl, was about 12 years old.
And when I went looking for her, trying to find her out on the streets of inner city Atlanta, I found her in a brothel.
And I went in the room and came out and said, she's not there.
And the cop said, my undercover vice cop said, go back in.
She's the one in the white boots.
I went back in.
I came back.
I said, no, she's not.
That's a 35 year old woman. 13-year-old girl that they had made up to look like a grown woman with a weave and high-heeled
boots and tons of makeup. And I could not believe that that was the little girl whose picture I had
in my file. You were just hearing the voice of Carissa Phelps, child sex trafficking survivor.
And that voice was brought to you by an incredible woman, Melody Miller, a documentary director of
California's Forgotten Children. With me, Melody Miller, Mark Klast, world known victims advocate
and founder of Class Kids Foundation, Joseph Scott Morgan
forensics expert, professor of forensics, Jacksonville State University, and author
of Blood Beneath My Feet, Karen Stark, veteran New York psychologist, and Kenya Johnson,
felony prosecutor.
To Melanie Miller, how did you meet all these child trafficking survivors that are in California's Forgotten Children?
Well, when I was 17 years old, I started volunteering for a nonprofit in Oakland called Missy, and they rescue and rehabilitate children who have been commercially sexually exploited.
And I wanted to make a film for them after volunteering for nine years now about child sex trafficking, but through the
voices of survivor leaders. And so they were able to connect me with survivor leaders who are
openly sharing their stories and their journey in order to make a difference in the world and also
doing incredible things, fighting every day to help victims worldwide. As we hear Carissa Phelps' voice, this child sex trafficking survivor, this with the
backdrop of in the last days, 123 missing children have just been found in Michigan during a sex
trafficking sting. 123 missing children were found across Wayne County in a single sweep aimed at identifying
and saving missing children victims of sex trafficking you know Mark Klass when we first
started this business of trying to find missing people which you've devoted your life to after
someone abducted your daughter, Polly,
I kind of poo-pooed sex trafficking.
I thought that was too organized, that you couldn't get defendants together to have a
sex trafficking ring with children without somebody talking.
Boy, was I wrong, Mark Klass.
How does it happen?
Well, Nancy, for most of our history,
human trafficking in the United States was a supply and demand issue. We always thought
that foreign nationals were supplying our demand. But what we found in recent years,
really almost in the last 10 years or since President Bush signed the first TVPA in 2001. What we have discovered is that our youth are supplying our demand.
So we have runaway children who become very, very vulnerable and oftentimes fall under the spell of human traffickers and find themselves caught.
And law enforcement understands this now in ways that they couldn't
even five or ten years ago. And they're working in multi-jurisdictional task forces like the one
in Michigan that are comprised of law enforcement, nonprofit organizations, oftentimes merchants,
to try to figure out who these kids are and where they are and this demonstrates a very profound success in that effort.
Listen to this.
My childhood was filled with just constant trauma and at the same time I had to hide
it and had to act like it was a normal childhood life.
People often assume that when I say that I'm a survivor of sex trafficking that I'm from
Southeast Asia and I fit that stereotype.
So I want people to know that it happens here and that I'm a U.S. citizen.
I was born here and that I was sold here.
You are hearing the voice of Min Dang, also a child sex trafficking survivor,
as she is speaking out in Melody Miller's documentary, California's Forgotten Children.
This with a backdrop of a recent sting where 123 children were discovered in a single sweep in Wayne County. To Kenya Johnson, Atlanta prosecutor, you know Kenya, I recall that particular case and prosecuting the pimps that were pimping out the girl.
Just so you know, I got a mistrial in the opening statement when I called the defendants pimps.
They were not charged with pimping.
They were charged with aggravated child molestation.
I can't even remember all the charges.
But yeah, I got a mistrial.
It was in front of Judge Don Langham, who was a great
judge. There's nothing he could do about it. You know what I did? I said, fine. That was on a Monday
morning. We had struck the jury and just started opening statements when I called him a pimp,
which was true, and got a mistrial. As you know, grand jury in inner city Atlanta is on Tuesdays and Fridays.
I think it was.
I grabbed the detective by the collar and went, come on, come on.
We're going straight down to the Grand Jury.
We re-indicted the case, okay, and included a misdemeanor count of pimping.
On Wednesday, we restruck a brand new jury jury and I gave the same opening statement and I remember
the girl was so afraid of testifying against her traffickers we called them pimps now they're sex
traffickers that she ran away in the middle of the trial honey let me just tell you I had her
picture all over the evening news we found her at like 1 a.m one night hiding and had to basically
put her in protective custody to testify thank god we got a conviction but back then at that time it
was called pimping not sex trafficking kenya johnson that's right in here in atlanta uh we
see that very often atlanta is a hub for sex trafficking due to its proximity to the interstate highways and the world's busiest airport.
So congratulations on sticking with that case and trying it has grown into the Internet and computer based.
So they have these affinity groups and networks of hundreds of people that are interested in these sex slaves and underage women or young ladies for sex. And so it's a very protected network that is very alive here in
Atlanta. And we need more prosecutors like you that are willing to follow the cases all the way
through to make sure that they are tried and resolved appropriately. What do you do if your
child goes missing? Do you know what to do? I will never forget when my son, I was with John David and Lucy, alone with them.
They were about two and a half, and John David went missing in the blink of an eye in a huge
Babies R Us superstore. What do you do? Did you know 450,000 missing children are reported every
year? One in seven runaways, we now believe, are victims of child sex trafficking.
Nearly 40% of attempted kidnaps happen when a child is walking to or from school.
I just want to go run right now and check on the children.
What do you do if the unthinkable happens to you?
This isn't just a story or a hypothetical question. It happens every day.
I want you to learn from people who have dedicated their lives to protecting children. Go to
crimestopshere.com. I want to tell you about a new online video series for you called Justice Nation
Crime Stops Here. It is a five-episode series delivering action information you can apply in
everyday life to protect what you love the most, your family. Go to Crime StopsHere and get a huge discount.
Know that portions of proceeds are going to Class Kids Foundation and NICMA, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
CrimeStopsHere.com
Class starts October 16. He's the son of the former Louisiana Chief Justice, and now he's accused of buying and selling a 14-year-old girl to have sex with.
According to the Bill of Information, on multiple occasions, Pascal Calagaro III paid $120 to have sex with the child.
The documents say Calagaro also drove the child to a hotel on O'Keeffe Street to have sex with another man.
In fact, the documents say Caligaro began to sell the child to multiple men.
Federal prosecutors say Caligaro used his own home for prostitution dates
he set up between the child and an adult male.
Neighbors say they noticed multiple men and at least one young girl going in and out of the house in the past.
We've done a lot of
advocacy. Sherry Lockridge is a human trafficking case manager for Covenant House. She says this
story represents a common arc. We've seen that before where johns have become then the trafficker
where they've used that to introduce themselves to the girls as a customer and then exploit them further. She also says stories like
this are more common than people realize. It happens every day right here downtown, uptown,
suburbs, Metairie, Kenner, everywhere. In a federal bill of information prosecutors say 59-year-old
Pascal Calagaro III trafficked a 14-year-old girl. Federal investigators say in May of last year, Caligaro III engaged in prostitution dates with the victim
and drove her to dates with others.
They say he also negotiated prices and arranged times
and locations of prostitution dates with other men.
Caligaro III is the son of retired Chief Justice
of the Louisiana Supreme Court, Pascal Caligaro Jr.,
who is the longest-ser serving justice in state history.
According to federal investigators,
Caligaro, the third conspired with
another person listed on the bill as JB,
who is accused of recruiting the 14
year old to work for him as a prostitute.
Attorney Bobby Hortsburg says
the charges are serious.
They're not only accusing him of
having sexual sexual encounter
with this minor, but they're also accusing him of facilitating other sexual encounters between this minor and other individuals.
And so obviously that's very serious.
The son of a retired Louisiana chief justice charged with sex trafficking, a minor child? You are hearing from our friends at WWL-TV News in
New Orleans, Lauren Bale and New Orleans Fox 8, Rob Krieger, reporting on federal charges
against the son of a Louisiana Chief Justice. You want to tell me that child sex trafficking is not happening? It is happening right under our noses.
Joining me, Mark Klass, Melody Miller, Joseph Scott Morgan, Karen Stark, and Kenya Johnson.
To Joseph Scott Morgan, if the children are too afraid to speak out, how can you prove it?
And I mean, here you've got the son of a retired
Louisiana chief justice. And what about LT? Remember him? Lawrence Taylor, the football star
who competed on Dancing with the Stars? He ordered up a little girl like she was a pizza delivery and then raped her in his hotel room. He got zero jail time. Yeah. LT,
Lawrence Taylor. Every time I watch him dancing across the floor on Dancing with the Stars,
I want to puke. How does it happen and how can we prove it, Joe Scott?
It's very difficult. Nancy, I'm going to mention two streets here. And the first
one is from my old jurisdiction in New Orleans. It's called Airline Highway. Many people will be
familiar with it from the Jimmy Swaggart incident many years ago. And the other place is something
you're very familiar with. And that's Stewart Avenue, now known as Metropolitan Boulevard.
Stop right there. Hold on. Hold on. Just before you finish your story, that's where I found the little girl I was telling Kenya Johnson about
in a flop house on Stewart Avenue. I think it was called the Twin Oaks or something like that. I
don't know what it's called now, but it was a filthy, at the time, a filthy motel. Yeah, there was the Alamo.
There were a variety of these places.
And it's interesting, you know, you draw this comparison,
the case involving LT with kind of ordering up a pizza.
Will you stop calling him LT?
It's Lawrence Taylor.
Thank you.
What are you, our best friends with him?
No, absolutely not.
I don't generally hang out with people that snort cocaine.
But at any rate, these two places are notorious and they are absolute dens.
I mean, dens of horror and strife for these young girls that come into these areas.
They're in these hotels many times. They're walking the stroll.
They have their pimps that are that are out in the dark shadows watching.
These girls have no way to escape, and it leads to horrible things, drug addiction.
It's a pestilence in the local neighborhoods that affects the people that live there.
And also for these poor girls that are so desperate and longing for help,
many times they end up killing themselves, and that's the horror.
To Karen Stark, New York psychologist, what he just said is true, that many of the children end up committing suicide. Explain. that happens because they are too young to be able to process developmentally what is going on with
them. Life is despair. They have no way out. They don't see a future. They're addicted to drugs.
They're being taken advantage of and used for sex. And so they kill themselves because there
is no other alternative for them the way that they see it. It's horrific.
You know, Jackie here in the studio with me is pointing out something that one of Melody Miller,
the director of California's Forgotten Children, one of her survivors, Min Dang, said.
She said, quote, I was born here and I was sold here.
To Mark Glass, founder of Class Kids Foundation, Mark, people have the misconception
that these child sex victims are from, you know, like Thailand or China. That's not true, Mark.
Oh, that's exactly right. We are supplying our own demand. And it's estimated, Nancy, that
1.2 and 1.6 million children run away in this country every year and that half of those
children are girls. And what happens is they run away from their homes. They find themselves in a
very small fish in a very big pond. They may find themselves in Atlanta, for instance,
or San Francisco or Los Angeles, and they are very vulnerable. And what happens is that the
pimps are looking for that.
They're looking for vulnerable children, and then they use all of the means necessary to coerce and
groom and lure these girls into their web of protection, so to speak. And you find situations
where children who have not really had any kind of a solid relationship in their lives are drawn
to these guys, and they feel that their lives are drawn to these guys and they
feel that these guys actually care for them and they end up finding themselves being trafficked.
They've been betrayed again and again and again in their lives to the point where they seem to
feel that there are absolutely no options for them, which is when we have to intervene and try
to find a way to give them a life. If you know or think you know of a child being mistreated or a sex trafficking victim,
dial 855-814-7728.
855-814-7728.
I grew up in foster care.
I see more than 14 homes that I can remember.
But a lot of times growing up in the foster care system, I just was put in positions where I was abused verbally, sexually.
I was also being told that I was going to have to pay a paycheck.
I couldn't fully comprehend what was going on at that age. I was too young. I was a baby.
Talking to a girl that at 15, 16, you know, early 17, I didn't have any dreams. And now I've exceeded beyond
anything that I could have ever imagined. You are hearing from a child sex trafficking survivor
with Thelma T. Ortiz Walker-Pettigrew, lived to tell her tale. And she told it to Melody Miller,
documentarian of California's Forgotten Children. Melody, your documentary,
California's Forgotten Children, is making all the rounds at film festivals right now,
and I'm sure it's going to be highly, highly acclaimed. But when you look back on speaking
to all these people, these child sex trafficking survivors, what is your prevalent thought?
Well, the documentary took me five years
to make. It was a long and beautiful journey. And I think what kept me going and what kept me
inspired was the survivors' stories and all the amazing things that they're doing now,
their healing journey. And just being able to give back and create such a huge change in our society by telling their stories.
And it's just really inspiring for me.
And it's what kept me going to share their story.
To Mark Klass, Victims Advocate, founder of Klass Kids Foundation, all over the Atlanta airport and airports all over the country,
there are now posters and billboards about trying to
stop child sex trafficking. What do we look for? What do we look for? We look for situations.
And somebody had just mentioned this whole thing has moved on to the internet.
And the pimps are trafficking the girls via the internet. They were doing it via Craigslist until it was stopped, and they were doing it
via Backpage until they stopped doing it. And so they just migrate to different websites to do it.
And what they do is they advertise children, and they identify them by keywords like
new to business, young and tender, pretty young thing, fresh meat, etc., etc., etc.
So if anybody sees those kinds of advertisements and they need to do something about it.
Hold on. Let me take that in a moment. New to the business, young and tender.
Mark Klaas is child sex trafficking as prevalent in rural areas as in metropolitan areas? Because this
Wayne County, Michigan suite, that included rural areas too. Sure, sure. It goes on absolutely
everywhere. And that's something we understand and realize now that we didn't understand
even a decade ago. And I'll tell you where it really takes off is when you get into huge venues,
things like the Super Bowl, places
where you have a lot of men with disposable money and a lot of time, then you're going to find a
great migration to these venues. And the activity on things like Backpage or Craigslist will
multiply tenfold in the week leading up to these situations. And then they'll disappear and move
someplace else, oftentimes back to the rural areas in the aftermath of up to these situations, and then they'll disappear and move someplace else,
oftentimes back to the rural areas in the aftermath of these huge events.
You know, human sex trafficking of children is happening right under our noses.
One girl says she woke up in a room in a house in New Jersey she had never seen before.
There were two men in the room.
One was who had gotten her out of jail. She's a teen, a teen girl, when she was picked up on a theft charge
and he, somebody she had never met, bailed her out. After she refused to become one of their sex
slaves, he rammed her head into a bucket filled with bleach and glass shards.
And I am reading directly from court documents.
A grand jury listened in November as this woman, who only refers to herself as victim number five,
talked about being in another room as all this was happening.
Take a listen.
An end to domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.
I will not live to see it.
I think folks think about, they have a mental picture of who is trafficked,
and it's so much more than that.
And there is actually people who can you know can live in an area
never leave their neighborhood and be trafficked as well a lot of times when
this happens it's not someone someone would look for also people kind of have
this vision of pretty woman you know with prostitution and there's no Richard Gere's out there either so what we see
is folks that you know yes there are some folks that are trafficked and
brought into this country that is not the rule especially for what we're
seeing here in Adams County there are good there is that and there's quite a bit of that. But we also see folks
that are trafficked by people close to them. You know, I would really like to be out of business
because we're not needed and, you know, that no one does this anymore. But unfortunately,
that's not the case. You were just hearing from Terri Hamrick, the president and CEO of Survivors, Inc.
She has been working to end human trafficking for years, as we all have.
You know, I'm trying to figure out how you prove it, how you stop it.
And the only way I know to stop it is to prove it and to prosecute it.
And I don't understand. Let me go to you on this, Mark Klass.
How was it that in Wayne County,
they knew where 123 missing children were in one sweep?
I believe it was through networking, Nancy.
I believe that they diligently talked to the families,
to the friends, to the acquaintances,
and they put the pieces of the puzzle together. And when they felt that they had that puzzle figured out, they
went out and did their sweep. And that's how they pulled in all of those kids. Well, take a listen,
Mark Glass. This will interest you. WXYZ-TV News Detroit's Seema Chowdhury, and she's talking to
Michigan State Police Missing Person Unit Sergeant Sarah Krebs. Listen. We took a ride along with police. In one case, officers found
a 14-year-old staying in a vacant house. He hadn't eaten a meal in three days. Those are the types of
kids that we're dealing with in this, and it's really sad. Once recovered, the next step is to
ask a series of questions to find out if they were sex trafficking victims. Who did they stay with? Did somebody pay for, you know, pay for them to stay somewhere? Did they do favors for them?
Did they give them drugs? Officials tell us one in six runaways get involved in sex trafficking.
By finding them, it not only saves their life, but it could lead police to the traffickers.
In less than a day, law officials recovered more than 100 missing kids from Wayne County.
Of those, three sex trafficking cases have opened.
If we can do this more often, hopefully we won't have this big of a problem.
You know, and to you, Melody Miller, a documentarian of California's Forgotten Children,
people think, where are you going to find child sex trafficking victims?
Or how are they going to
act if you see them in public? If they are out in public, they blend in. They blend in because
they're too afraid to speak, Melody. Yeah, I think what really drove me to fight in this movement is
when I was in high school and I started volunteering for MISTI, I wasn't able to meet
any of the children because they were going to the same high school as me. So for MISTI, I wasn't able to meet any of the children because
they were going to the same high school as me. So I didn't, a victim could have been sitting right
next to me in my classroom. And so from that moment on, I knew that I had to do something
about it and had to fight for my peers. He drove me off into an industrial area and he's cussing
at me and he told me he was going to kill me if I didn't do what he told me to do. But I looked on the dashboard and there was this picture of this
little girl and I asked him, you know, is that your daughter? And he said, yeah. And I said,
I'm somebody's daughter too. You know, will you please let me go? I'd had a pimp tell me
that I wasn't going to make it trying to get out. One of the happiest moments in my life was when I graduated from college.
You are hearing the voice of a child sex trafficking victim.
That was Leah Jonette Albright Bird, who is now a nationally recognized motivational speaker and human rights educator. You know, I'm just so overwhelmed. And it's, it's hard to change
public perception because Karen Stark, New York psychologist, I thought for so many years,
children were kidnapped, or they ran away. But I always would suspect a kidnap when a child would
go missing. But this is much bigger than single kidnaps. This is child sex trafficking.
And it's happening all around us.
Do you remember, Karen, when you and I covered the case of Shasta Groney?
She and her brother, Dylan, were kidnapped and brutally raped over and over and over.
Dylan was murdered.
And then video surveillance emerged after we began covering it on TV so often
and a 7-Eleven worker, a convenience store worker identified Shasta. And she was just walking along
a few paces behind her kidnapper and her brother's killer. She looked sad and downcast and she wasn't
speaking, but she wasn't screaming for help. She didn't indicate in any way that something was
wrong or run up to someone and say, help me, I've been kidnapped. So you can't tell when you see a but she wasn't screaming for help. She didn't indicate in any way that something was wrong
or run up to someone and say, help me, I've been kidnapped. So you can't tell when you see a child
sex trafficking victim. You don't know that. Why? You don't know that because they're not
capable of asking for help. They are terrified and they become indoctrinated where they don't
feel like they should belong in a different situation. They don't really understand anymore what's happening to them.
This is what life is like.
It becomes normal.
So they're terrified for their life, but they've also adapted to the situation,
believing that they deserve to have this happen.
They take responsibility for it.
Children blame themselves for everything.
Take a listen to this.
We took a ride along with
police. In one case, officers found the 14-year-old staying in a vacant house. He hadn't eaten a meal
in three days. Those are the types of kids that we're dealing with in this and it's really sad.
Once recovered, the next step is to ask a series of questions to find out if they were sex
trafficking victims. Who did they stay with? Did somebody pay for, you know, pay for them to stay
somewhere? Did they do favors for them? Did they give them drugs? Officials tell us one in six
runaways get involved in sex trafficking. By finding them, it not only saves their life,
but it could lead police to the traffickers. In less than a day, law officials recovered
more than 100 missing kids from Wayne County. Of those,
three sex trafficking cases have opened. If we can do this more often, hopefully we won't have
this big of a problem. You are hearing from WXYZ-TV News Detroit, Seema Chowdhury. Speaking
with Michigan State Police, Sarah Krebs, about a huge operation, Michigan Save Kids, that saved 123 child victims. You know, that begs the question,
what would you do if your child went missing? Do you know what to do? Do you know that over
450,000 missing children are reported every year? One in seven so-called runaways are now believed to be victims of child sex trafficking.
Age doesn't matter to the sex traffickers or the kidnappers.
What do you do if the unthinkable happens to you?
You know what?
I've got Mark Glass right here with me, who joined me as we were creating Justice Nation
Crime Stops Here, a five-episode series delivering action information that you
apply in your daily life. You go to crimestopshere.com. You know, Mark Klass, you were the
one that told me nearly 40% of kidnaps happen to and from school, and I could not believe it, Mark.
It's absolutely unbelievable because given that knowledge, we can take steps to be able to protect children on those school routes and dramatically cut the instances of stranger abduction in the United States.
And I'm talking about surveillance, whether it's high tech, whether it's low tech.
I'm talking about better school bus routes. I'm talking about, you know, giving children the knowledge that they may be
targeted going to and from school because of the patterns that have been established.
And, you know, you really opened my eyes to that. We cover safe at home, out and about,
safe online, safe at school, safe at daycare, or with a babysitter. Go to crimestopshere.com.
Use promo code Nancy for 15% off.
Proceeds are going to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
and Class Kids Foundation founded by Mark Klass to help save children. Right now, we are really spurred on by a Michigan sweep that discovered 123 missing children,
many of whom we now believe were sex trafficked.
You know, I'm so overwhelmed with what is happening.
Joe Scott Morgan, for instance, on a plane, let's just say on a plane.
How do you identify that a child has been sex trafficked?
Well, I think that in my estimation that if the child is acting oddly, say they're reserved, maybe perhaps they're acting in terror.
They look diminished in some way.
Say, for instance, they're frightened.
They're contracted in some way, perhaps seeking
something to eat. Maybe they haven't been fed in some time. You know, I'm reminded of a very
recent incident where an airline ticket agent saved two teenage girls from human trafficking.
It was an American Airlines ticket agent. The quick thinking on behalf of that agent saved two
little girls in a human trafficking, sex trafficking scheme. And that is according
to police in Sacramento. These two teen girls were boarding a flight to New York from Sacramento
without ID, without adults, without luggage. That's a big indicator.
According to ticket attendant Denise Miracle.
And what a name.
How appropriate is that?
She called authorities.
She said the tickets were first class and purchased online,
as Mark Klaas just told us,
with a credit card and a name that did not match either one of the girls.
And the card had been flagged for fraud.
Between the two little girls, they had a bunch of small bags.
And it looked like they were running away from home.
And they kept looking at each other.
That looked fearful. And this flight attendant just got the feeling, the deep feeling, that something was very wrong. As it turned out,
after the flight attendant, Miss Miracle, calls the cops, the girls say that a guy named Dre
had gotten their tickets that they had first met on Instagram and that they were going to be paid $2,000. Well, guess who Dre was? A child sex trafficker.
What about that, Mark Glass? Well, you know, it's a 21st century phenomenon, Nancy, that we finally
are identifying these underage girls. And when I say underage, I mean under the age of 18 that
are engaged in prostitution. we, prior to the 21st
century, we always considered them criminals. They were the prostitutes. Now we understand that it's
a very different dynamic, that in fact they are the victims, and that the real criminals are the
ones that control them. So just that shift in understanding has led to this whole openness about the issue
so that ticket counters are able to identify people
that might be involved in these kinds of situations.
So it's about education, it's about awareness,
and it's about continuing the fight to save these young girls.
If you have any information on human trafficking,
a tip, even a theory, something you've seen, please call
888-373-7888. Nancy Grace, Crime Story, signing off. Goodbye, friend.
This is an iHeart Podcast.