2. Trafficked in Plain Sight

Hi everyone, before we begin, please be advised that this podcast does contain adult themes, and it is intended for a mature audience. Listener discretion is advised. Amen.

When you arrive in Kentucky, there's one urgent issue that's totally unavoidable. It's the opioid epidemic. And it's something that makes people vulnerable to sexual exploitation. It's super early on a Saturday morning and this fire department sees a lot of heroin overdoses and told us to come by during the day because surprisingly that is when they see a lot of the heroin overdoses. Kentucky is one of the top five states in the country when it comes to drug overdoses.

I'm here at the Covington Fire Department. It's just south of the Ohio border. Is it more common to see something like an overdose than say a fire? Our fires are Seems like they're down a little bit and overdoses are way up, so we do see more overdoses than fires, that's for sure. Why is it handling? So we just gotta call uh of a possible overdose, so we're hopping into the fire truck. to head over. It's crazy how like common it is to get calls like this.

So it looks like we're going into some type of residence or some type of I think a home to the scene of an overdose. I'm walking into the house and it's dark. The light that's coming in is bleeding through these makeshift curtains, and I can see the dust particles in the light. All of a sudden I notice this terribly skinny man lying on the ground and his pants are almost all the way off. I can see his rib cage, tattoos all over his body, and an old pair of boxers he's wearing.

The paramedics are totally unfazed. They've been in this house before. And they've seen this scene so many times. The paramedics start giving him narcan. And I can just see the wrinkles on his tan face, the stubble. I've never seen anything like this. And For a moment I'm so overwhelmed that I look away because I feel my eyes starting to well up.

And that's when I notice the most disturbing part of this entire situation. A pair of pink, sparkly toddler shoes on the ground next to a toy table with coloring books on it. And that's when I realized. Um the photos of the toddlers on the wall that either kids live here or kids spend a lot of time here. There you go. Just relax, okay?

Just relax. Just relax. So what just happened? Uh his respiratory drive's starting to come back and he's starting to breathe on his own again. Let's take you to the hospital, okay? I can't believe I'm watching this. But the man is coming back to life right before my very eyes. The Narcan worked. It's the medicine they use to save people from opioid overdoses. But while he's coming back to life, he's throwing a fit. He does not want to go to the hospital. He's afraid he'll get in trouble.

They insist the man go and Finally they convince him. We leave the house in a hurry and honestly we don't even have time to breathe. So we haven't even officially wrapped up the scene here at the first heroin overdose and we're already on our way to the next one. They just told us that there were five overdoses in 25 minutes just in this area in this part of town. It has been an insanely busy morning, but this is just a glimpse into the reality of what.

Today's heroin epidemic looks like. And what's even worse about this is the huge intersect between this and sex trafficking in America. I can't tell whether sex trafficking was actually happening in this house, but these kinds of conditions can lead to that kind of abuse. And after seeing it firsthand,

Unfortunately, it's really easy to imagine. Parents who are addicted to drugs might do anything to get their next fix, including exploiting their own children. And that's why people here in Kentucky are being forced. To take action. I've come here to learn firsthand from the people who are confronting the intersection of drugs and sex trafficking. I'm Nortigori and this is sold in America.

These traffickers are manipulators. They're controllers. They're abusers. These sex workers that are doing things illegally have all these excuses. It's bullshit. It trust me, it's bullshit. It's not just wrong because it causes trafficking, it's just wrong. It's non-consensual sex. They see me on their corner when they went to work. They see me on their corner when they get off of work. And they see me on that same corner for three or four days. Something is wrong.

And nobody's never stopping asked.

I really wanted to understand the role drugs play in sex trafficking. And several people in Kentucky told me if I really wanted to see that, I had to come here, to a suburban-looking neighborhood in Louisville. I'm on a block that's clearly seen better days. Some of the windows are boarded up on the homes. There's graffiti on a lot of the sidewalks. It's quiet and the grass hasn't been cut for a while. Hi! How are you? She's wonderful. I'm here to meet Christy Love.

She's an older black woman whose face immediately lights up when I come to the room. Thank you so much. She wraps her arms around me in a huge hug as if we were old friends who haven't seen each other in years. And immediately I feel welcomed. Her hair is in a side ponytail wrapped in a beautiful silk ribbon. She has on big,

shiny pearl earrings and her lashes are totally on point. Thank you so much for having us. Oh my gosh, you have such a beautiful place. Thank you. Thank you so much. I pride myself in making every survivor feel worthy. She takes me out to the back porch and we sit in these white wooden rocking chairs. This place is a safe house she runs for victims of sexual exploitation looking for a way out.

If you want to see some pictures of life at the safe house, text the word safe house to the number two zero two eight zero four two four eight zero. That's S-A-F-E-H-O-U-S-E to the number two zero two eight zero four two four eight zero. She calls this safe house the Christy Love Foundation. How did you come up with the name of the foundation? A pimp gave me that name 20 years ago. Christy's real name is Angela Renfro, and she doesn't just help survivors.

She is a survivor. She says she met her pimp when she was very young. But I fell in love with him and uh Well I thought I filmed that well. And uh and um he had multiple girlfriends. It's like it became my survivor skill. It just became a way of life. I and I told myself, Well, if I'm gonna live like this I might as well be the best. And being the best means getting lots of clients. So that's what she did. She saw lots of men, night after night, year after year.

But there's one man she says she will never forget. So he came up with fifty dollars. And uh he said, I got it. He said, Well we're gonna go to my spot and uh I might share with him that I'm scared where he took me down by the river and I looked back, it was a roll of plastic, you know. like drop sheet plastic like when you paint. And he had one of the things that just Um

cut down weeds with. And we went down the road. I said I said, Do we gotta do here? I'm shaking'cause I'm afraid of water. And he said, We're gonna do it here and call me a whole bunch of names. And um and he told me if I didn't do it he was gonna kill me. And he's gonna chop me up, cut me up, and put me in that plastic throw me in the river. What was the turning point for you transitioning from in the life to getting out?

I went to jail. Inside that jail, I just thought about what my life could be. And it took one person who came inside the jail. One person, one person believed in me. She was coming there to teach Bible study. And somehow I told her about my life. She said, Angela, what's wrong? And I told her. Nobody never asks me how they can help me. And from then, not only was I free on the outside, I was free from the inside. Inside out. From just one person.

Now Angela wants to be what that visitor in jail was for her. She wants to find girls who want to escape their exploitation and get them back to her safe house. Well of course um this is um a safe place for victims of human trafficking and delinquent kind of trauma. Um we serve children. uh mothers, daughters, nieces, and cousins. Um we don't even have to know your name.

Once you touch the doorknob at the Christie Love Foundation, you're no longer a victim, you are a survivor. A lot of'em don't have job skills. So we teach'em how to uh great job skills for them for them. So the first place that we use is our foundation as they do volunteer work here. And so we use all the skills that they have as far as um their education. Um we do GED classes here and also get'em signed up for um college if someone wanna go back to college.

But that's not all Angela does for these girls. If a victim ever said she didn't do drugs, I can say and I would go on camera and I would I would look her straight in the eyes. You're a lion. Every girl has to take something. How often are drugs related to the cases of the girls who are coming here? Um ninety percent. Yeah. Yeah. Major, major.

Even if um she get free, we still have to deal with that chemical dependency because she could be free but if she still suffer from addiction, all it's gonna do is push her back to the street without a pimp. And then if uh if a pimp know that she's back back on the street'cause the worst travel immediately. Um, that he would send someone out to um just to bring her back it to her to him or whatever. So of course if they have the addiction it's easier for them to go back it's some

can be described as an invisible leash. Yes, uh a great leash. That's why we we deal with uh drugs, the substance first. And then once we get the substance under control, we can deal with the behavior. The Invisible Leash. If a pimp can get a victim hooked on drugs, the victim can never leave. Sometimes, oftentimes, withdrawal is scarier than the actual exploitation itself.

Angela was clear about one thing. Unless she helps these girls deal with the drug addiction, she can't help them in any other way. And she knows she has to make the drug epidemic part of the conversation. That's the only way she can truly address and tackle the issue of sexual exploitation that she's seeing in her hometown. And she's not alone in that fight.

There's another person who's doing just that. And his picture is hanging on Angela Renfro's safe house wall. Everyone's like, how do you get the turning journal to come down on 18th Street of all streets and look in Louisville, Kentucky, period. That is the hot spot.

She's talking about Andy Bashir, Kentucky's attorney general. He loves me. He made me slip in the front with him. Uh we take pictures. He make everybody take pictures of me and him. Everything. I just think he found the compassion. I I really I really believe that he see a survivor. So we're about to go in and meet Mr. Bashir Attorney General of Commonwealth of Kentucky.

I'm in a small conference room looking at the backs of fifty heads. They're all undercover cops, so I can't talk to them directly. They're waiting to hear from their attorney general. Oh good morning. I'm incredibly excited to see uh this crowd and I know each and every one of you all are too. Uh today Bashir is a clean cut.

Tall white guy. He's dressed in a crispy gray suit, a blue shirt, and a red striped tie. He's kicking off a three day intensive training with officers on how to deal with the trafficked people they come across. The idea here is to teach these cops how to collect evidence in a way that will really nail down traffickers and how to deal with victims who have gone through serious trauma. You might think this is obvious, but it's not often taught. Bashir is a politician and he sounds like one.

But as I keep listening to him, I can tell he's genuinely passionate about the focus here. Seeking justice for victims of rape and sexual assault, and finding workable solutions to this drug epidemic that plagues each and every one of your communities. And as you'll hear through the next three days, all All of those issues intersect in human trafficking.

Bashir wraps up and the room erupts with applause. He makes his way back, doing, you know, the politician thing, shaking people's hands as he goes. Thank you. And he finally makes his way to me. And you know, I'm not really hard to miss. I'm the only woman in this room wearing a hijab surrounded by white people.

Hi Bashir. I'm Noor. Noor, nice to see you. Good to meet you. We're so looking forward to talking to you. Thank you so much. Bashir and I make our way to this little garden in the back of the building and we sit on a cold bench surrounded by greenery. Are trafficking and drugs connected? Absolutely. Uh Sadly, right now, just about every crime and drugs are connected. And Kentucky has one of the worst drug epidemics.

uh in the country. Uh we were uh the birthplace of the pill mills that pushed out opioids by the uh hundreds of thousands and millions. There was a time in Kentucky where uh there were uh more than ten uh prescriptions Uh for every person. uh that we have in our state. So it led to massive levels of addiction and a massive uh drug trade that our state is still fighting day in and day out.

Uh the connection in Kentucky is absolutely real and we see tragic situations. We see mothers who get their daughters addicted to heroin. so that they can traffic them. We've seen a number of those cases. We see foster parents using drugs as a way to create dependence. But but these traffickers are manipulated. They're controllers, they're abusers. And drugs provide them a tool to create the type of dependence uh that they use uh to try to uh subject uh these uh

children to some of the worst acts that they could ever be put through. So definitely one part of addressing human trafficking is is addressing that that drug epidemic. It's so hard to wrap my mind around this stuff. Mothers selling time with their children, pimps using drugs to keep people dependent. But I wanted to get a sense of the scale of this thing. So my team and I looked at the 2017 report from the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services. It says 250 kids.

were allegedly trafficked in Kentucky that year, and more than half of those kids either had drugs provided to them or drugs were somehow involved in their trafficking. We're talking about some of the most traumatized individuals who should have never been put through what they've been put through. We need to have that specialized training that's out there where there are multiple providers in the community.

that truly have experience about helping those that need our help the most and we need to make sure they're connected. Every single human trafficking investigation needs to be victim-centered. And what does that mean? That we all agree that the most important person in the crime is the victim. That needs our help. From the very beginning, if that victim comes forward, they are believed. That they never have questions asked of them that would suggest they're to blame because they are not.

No one's decisions, especially no child's decisions. uh ever make them responsible uh for being for being uh trafficked and that they believe that in the criminal justice system we as prosecutors are on their side that we are seeking justice for them. Firefighters, survivors, and police. They're all tackling one part of the problem here in Kentucky when it comes to drugs and exploitation. After the break, what doctors are actually doing to find sex trafficking victims in their own exam room?

Come in. Hello. Hi. I'm Letitia. I'm at the med school at the University of Louisville watching a special kind of training. It's one of the first of its kind in the US. I'm watching a young student doctor in a white lab coat talking to a patient who's really an actor. And the actor is playing a victim of sex trafficking. Um, I have this really bad burning down there. Thank how long has that been going on?

I'm in the room next door. The doctor and the patient are being recorded by video, and I'm watching the whole thing play out on a screen in real time. And don't worry, they know they're being watched. And by the way, if you wanna see a video of the exam itself. Just text the word exam to the number two zero two eight zero four two four eight zero. That's EXAM to the number two zero two eight zero four two four eight zero. I want you to see what I'm seeing.

The patient is sitting at the edge of the exam table and she looks the part. She's wearing a hospital gown. Her head is hung low, she has long blonde hair, and she won't look the doctor in the eye. Playing around with her phone and anytime she's asked a question, you can tell she's uncomfortable and she's just mumbling her answers. So, um, anything else you want to talk about? Or

I don't know. I want like anything, um, how things going at school and um just life in general, just how things go and how you feeling. I mean like this past week I haven't felt very good, but I mean other than that everything's fine. Doctor Olivia Middle is sitting right next to me. She's watching the screen too. She's a pediatric doctor at the University of Louisville and she's the one running this training.

As we watch, she does a play by play of what exactly we are seeing. So we instruct them to act like adolescents I would, you know, just kinda playing with their hair. Unsure of the doctor, not really wanting to answer a lot of questions. This med student is struggling. It's obvious that the patient has some kind of STD, but she isn't able to go much deeper than that.

She's stuck. So I feel bad. And like she's like she knows something else. You need to ask something else. She didn't know what to ask. The med student doesn't manage to get much out of the actor patient. She ends up with a diagnosis of herpes, but She ends up missing the signs that might suggest any type of sexual exploitation. And Dr. Middle knows exactly what it's like to miss the signs. So I actually um was a fairly new attending physician working in the children's hospital.

And I saw a fifteen year old patient um who was admitted for the third time to the hospital for IV antibiotics because she had basically it's an it's an S T D and so she needed IV antibiotics and she had a couple of cell phones though in her bud which I did think was odd. Um just wonder you know, thinking back.

I think in her past history she had some other things like she had had an abortion or two. Um and every time I asked her if she had any questions, it was when can I go home? She just wasn't interested. She wasn't interested in talking to me and so I would just kind of

Shrugged my shoulders at like this was another adolescent that I wasn't gonna be able to reach. Um and so uh discharged her home as you know, per protocol and um it wasn't until I learned about trafficking and that it actually happened here in the United States that it actually happened here in Kentucky. that I realized that she was likely a victim of human trafficking and I had missed it. And It was then that I realized if if I was missing it, then my colleagues are missing it too.

It turned out that She was right. They were missing a huge opportunity. I mean, physicians would be the only people that would ever be alone in the room besides obviously someone that's hurting them. Um and so that's why it's such we have such a unique we're in such a unique position because we have the opportunity to to kick everyone out of the room and be able to talk to them one on one.

It's hard to know how often trafficking victims actually see a doctor. Getting any kind of concrete numbers when it comes to this is pretty hard. But Dr. Middle being a professor points me to some studies. And one of the studies shows that as many as nine out of ten trafficking victims see a doctor while they're being exposed. When she saw those crazy numbers. That's when she knew she really needed to start training her students to look for the signs. And one of those signs is Is drug addiction.

So a big one is that there's a the presence of an overbearing someone in the room. Um, that's a big one to always look out for. An aunt, an uncle, a brother, a a sister, a mother. It's maybe someone that claims to be one of those things but that isn't, but is answering all the questions for them. Another thing would be signs of health neglect. I mean, most of the time these victims aren't necessarily going to their general um, you know, yearly checkups and

So poor dentition, their teeth can be you know, they haven't seen a dentist for a while. Or some of the signs of drug use or alcoholism, those are other things that are really important. If physicians are aware, they are more likely to ask the right questions and at least be able to refer them to the national organizations that are out there or local law enforcement. Um right now if if we're just missing that opportunity to communicate with the victims and and h get them help.

That's really the whole point here. There is so little awareness about the connection between drugs and exploitation. My team and I called officials in the top 15 states. For overdoses in the country. We wanted to know who was actually keeping track of sex trafficking cases where drugs were also involved. But it turns out the record keeping is pretty inconsistent. Most states acknowledged that there's a connection, but they don't even have specific numbers.

Here in Kentucky, though, they are tracking it. And the people we spoke with here agree the best way to help those people who are being exploited is to teach other people to look for the signs. Лакри, і комсдайн торкоти.

But as I left Kentucky, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. If we wanna talk about exploitation, we need to talk about both sides of the equation. Not just people who are selling sex, but people who are buying it, the buyers. Can I ask about your just kind of I guess mentality towards women while you were buying sex? Like, did you have Any I don't know, specific thoughts about women, just in general? I was mad at my wife.

It's for me it's kinda as simple as that and I know it's a like a horrible like coping mechanism to see prostitutes'cause you're mad at my wi your wife, but that's why w that's why I need it. Yeah. That's why I did it. It was you know, and then it became a compulsive behavior for me. It's something I did a lot. I was just used to it and it was like an escape Are we ignoring a major part of this equation? The guys who actually buy sex? Next time on sold in America.

Hey, I really would love to know what you thought about this episode. Did you have any questions or comments? Did you remember one of your own personal memories or stories? And do you want to share those with me? I'd love to hear them. If so, record a voice memo on your phone of you asking that question or even telling me your story.

And then text it to me at two zero two eight zero four two four eight zero. We'll gather up all of your voice memos and then use them in a bonus episode at the end of the season. Can't wait to hear from you. Sold in America is reported and produced by me, Nortigori, with Eric Krupke.

Kate Grumke and Kevin Clancy. The show is edited by Suzanne Rieber and Ellen Wise. Our executive editor is Peter Clownie. Sound design and original theme music by David Herman. Special thanks to Mark Fahy, Karen Rodriguez, Aisha Bonne. We also want to thank Andrew Haig for our collaboration with Ground Source.

Sold in America is a production of the Scripps Washington Bureau and Stitcher. Our senior producer is John Asante. Our executive producers are Jenny Radilett and Chris Bannon. I'm Nor Tagori. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at Nor.

and Twitter at n to Gori. And I'd also love it if you checked out our video documentary. You can find it by Googling Newsy sold in America. If you like this show, and I really hope you do, don't forget to rate it and review it on the Apple Podcast app. It really really helps other people find the show, and of course, thank you so much for listening. You can think of household name episodes as lifelines when you're stuck in a boring conversation. Need to change the

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