1: The Groupchat

Novel.

Hey listeners, I'm your host, Ellie Flymm. Before we get started, I just want to let you know that this episode contains swearing, explicit sexual language, and claims of sexual abuse. It's also a story of female empowerment and camaraderie thanks to the women who have shared their stories with us. We contacted the photographer mentioned in this podcast multiple times for comment, but we never heard back. He has not been charged with any crimes and is presumed innocent under

But enough of the admin, let's get started.

We've been sitting manning all the entrances and exits for like two hours now, no sign of him or anyone that looks like a models of yet. I'm sitting in a white SUV parked on the edge of the Nevada Desert. The heat is stifling, so we've wound the windows down the whole.

Way a lot of nervous energy.

To my right is a hotel complex, massive orange buildings stretching up to a bright blue sky. To my left a long freeway which leads back to the sparkling lights of the Las Vegas Strip. But I haven't come to Vegas for a holiday. I'm here for a steakhout.

God, this is fucking stressing. It is really stressful.

In the back of the car is my producer, Eleanor, and next to me in the driver's seat is an armed security agent, an ex cop experienced in tracking down dangerous criminals. I'm here on the trail of a man accused of horrendous behavior who I've been investigating for the past four years, a photographer named Luis.

Do you guys know the vehicles we're looking for?

So a model that was shooting with Luis yesterday uploaded a video of them doing some shooting in some sort of white car.

There's a problem.

We've been staking out the hotel for eight hours and there's been no sign of him anywhere. Oh now, just got this horrible anxiety of like what if he left last night or early this morning and he's just not here anymore.

Suddenly we spot something Oh my god, that looked like him.

Yeah.

Fuck, okay, shit shit shit, shit shit.

Our agent gets on the phone to another security guard who's been monitoring a separate entrance, and jeep four by just came to the back.

Looks like a wagon. Ear take a look at the mail in it. It's a male.

Subject wearing a ball cap.

Windows are down.

We start to move, letting our third and final agent though.

Hey start looking for a looks like a jeep.

Not a jeep Cherokee, but an actual jeep.

The jeep comes into vision again.

Okay, I've got it up front.

We slip into the traffic behind the car and follow it as it weaves down a busy boulevard.

Okay, you guys, get up front and copy this plate.

Get a camera out, Get a camera out.

The jeep makes a sudden turn. It's picking up speed.

This guy I think he does. We're followeeno. The jeep's heading north, away from the strip, the casinos and the hotel complex. He's going towards the desert with red canyons stretching out in all directions.

As we slip onto a dirt road, we're moving closer.

Oh yeah. As we gain on him, He's winding and weaving, trying to shake us.

This is so intense. We get ready to face him. I'm just gonna pull right at Barney.

I can't believe that I might finally be coming face to face with the man I've been after since twenty twenty. Suddenly the jeep speed drops. We lurched the side after him, slamming on the brakes.

Let's see, he's gonna all over.

It all comes down to this.

The story of how I came to be chasing that jeep through the Nevada Desert began in the summer of twenty twenty. What started as an investigation into one man ended up going much much deeper.

It became a.

Journey into the fringes of the sex industry, a world full of smoke and mirrors where exploitation is rife. Unraveling this story has taken years and has sent me around the world as I uncovered a rotten industry with scams more outlandish than I ever thought possible, a world where dreams.

Are twisted into nightmares.

But I'd never have taken on this mission if it weren't for a group of around a dozen brave women who came together first to share their allegations of abuse. I'm Ellie Flynn and from the team at Novel. This is the Bunny Trap, Episode one the group chat.

It all began with an email.

I'm an investigative journalist and I've dug into a lot of different stories over the years, but mostly my work's about women and the abuses and injustices they face. A fair bit of that has taken me into the sex industry, where experiences of abuse are depressingly common. I get a lot of emails tipping me off about news stories, and most of the time they don't lead anywhere. But every now and then you get a tip that catches your attention.

It's like you get a.

Gut feeling that this could be something big, and this email was one of them. It was addressed to me and the news desks of twelve international newspapers. The subject line read sexually abused by Playboy photographer. The writers were a group of models on a mission to expose the alleged behavior of a glamour photographer named Luis Gomes. If you grew up in the UK like me, you probably

I love your bag. It's fake?

Oh is it so good?

My real bags? Because I just trashed them.

Yeah, obviously we're not here to talk about her bag. We're here to talk about Luis Gomes, who, I want to be clear, is the photographer based in Austin, Texas. There are other photographers named Luis Gomes around the world, but I'm not talking about them.

What do you want me to call you?

Emily's fine?

Is that fine? Yeah?

Emily's in her late twenties. We're not using her last name because it's risky for glammor models to reveal their real identities online, so in her work she goes by a pseudonym, Emily Ray. On Instagram, Emily's your quintessential modern day glamor model. Her profile is littered with glamorous photos of her in lingerie or latex costumes. But the first thing Emily wants me to know is that she's much more than her sex bond persona.

I am very goofy. I am so goofy. I'm a bit of a nerd. I am the most squishy emotional person. I cry at the Andrex advert with the puppies. I love musical theater. I'm just a regular person and people do forget actually that we.

Are real people. I'm a big family.

Emily grew up in a market town in the southeast of England with her mum, dad and brother, and it was there, in her completely normal, far from glamorous home that she first became interested in glamor modeling. In the early noughties, when Emily was around eleven years old, she saw something in her older brother's bedroom.

This massive poster of this blonde girl dressed in an army outfit and she had these tiny little shorts on, fake bullets, blonde hair, big eyelashes, and these massive, massive boobs.

She'd creep into her brother's room when he was out with his mates just to stare at this poster. To little Emily, who was skinny and a bit of a tomboy, the model in the poster represented everything she longed to be, but it was about much more than just her massive, massive boobs.

She looks so sexy and happy and like she looked like a strong, independent female.

Like her confidence. That's what Emily wanted the most.

Let me take you back to Britain in the early noughties when I was growing up. Craig David and the Sugar Babes are on the radio, the Olsen Twins are on TV, and glamour magazines are everywhere. I remember standing outside the newsagents with my mates, all of us sniggering as we passed around copies of FHM, feeling my cheeks go bright red as we leave through page after page of gorgeous women in skimpy bikinis. It felt funny and embarrassing, but also we secretly aspired to be like those girls.

It was something else.

They had a kind of relatability that didn't exist on high fashion catwalks. Glamour girls were cheeky, they had a sense of humor. They seemed like they'd be fun to hang out with, which, of course, for young girls like Emily, was the point.

I just loved the look, and then that sort of started a I'd love to be a glamor model, but I don't look like that.

So Emily gave up on the dream.

She finished school, worked a series of jobs, and got a steady boyfriend. But one day in twenty eighteen, her boyfriend introduced her to OnlyFans. OnlyFans burst onto the scene in twenty sixteen. It's an online platform, but unlike Instagram and Facebook, its subscription model means followers have to pay to see your posts. It also allows explicit content for

I thought, well, I used to take pictures of myself from lingerie all the time. I had two years worth of photos on my camera roll.

So I was like, kil what have I got to lose?

She unlocked her phone and started browsing for the perfect first post.

I think it was a thirty second video of me pulling shorts over my bum. You can just hear the as the jeans go up open my bum and this little jiggle, and I absolutely loved it.

I was like, that will be the first one.

So I uploaded and I started advertising it on my social media and it just took off.

To Emily's surprise, dozens of people started subscribing to her only Fans account, and then hundreds.

She was kind of a hit, and with each new fan she got paid.

And then you go on your balanced and you keep refreshing it, and it's just going up and up and up and up.

Emily says that in her first twenty four hours on the site, she made about two grand and.

I thought, oh my god, if I can keep this up for six months, I'll quit my job.

And that's exactly what happened.

Soon OnlyFans was her full time job, led by her online autery.

Emily Ray, You've.

Got to get out of bed and you've got to create the content otherwise you're not going to get paid. So there was a bit of anxiety, but nice to know that your sort of destinies in your hands.

It's not somebody else's decision to make. I had the free run of the world. It was lovely.

A typical post might be a photo of Emily Ray in a lingeriser, something like a lace balconet bra with a thong and suspenders. She's usually on her bed with a sultry half smile or pout, a tattoo of a rose winding around her waist. Her captions are short, snappy, and often flirty, like the one of her looking sunkissed on holiday that says Pamela t Anderson, she ooses confidence and sex appeal. Emily Ray was strong and tough, sexually empowered. She didn't take any shit, and her fans ate it up.

I suffered trauma, a sexual abuse thing when I was fifteen, so that's always been in my mind. That's always been a big, big part of me, but I didn't really talk about it for a long time. I found it quite liberating doing only Fans because I regained control of my body and I was getting almost like reparations I call it from men.

Not that it was all men that hurt me.

But it just felt like it was nice to get that control back and have control over my images and my body, and I think that helped me cope.

When Emily started doing OnlyFans, it didn't take long for her to go all in. What photos and videos did you post on OnlyFans when you first started cool?

I went straight into it, Honestly, I did not hold back, putting everything out there from day dot.

Overnight, her boyfriend became her own personal photographer.

If I was going for a shower, he would literally be there by the door.

I'm like, can you oh wait, I just want five minutes, five minutes of peace to wash my hair.

They quickly graduated to filming sex scenes together. It's not something everyone on OnlyFans does, but it is pretty common.

There was filming couple stuff. Extreme levels.

Levels are a crucial concept in the glamour world. All models know the different levels because they're about boundaries about how much of your body you're willing to expose.

With glamour, you can do lingerie topless implied nude, which is where you would essentially, for example, have your legs open, but you have your hand in front of your genitals, so you're fully nude but there's nothing on show. You've got obviously full nude, and then you've got explicit, which is when you move towards sort of like the porn.

Industry, but Here's another important thing about levels. They can change depending on who's behind the camera. Just because Emily had high levels and was comfortable filming open leg herself, that doesn't mean that she'd be comfortable with anyone else filming her that way. But with her boyfriend behind the camera, Emily was happy, and soon she was earning up to eight grand a month. She did so well that she

Was starting stressing about money because of my mortgage payments. You know, I've got used to living a lifestyle.

All that forward momentum was gone. She wondered if this was the end of her financial freedom and also the end of the modeling career that she dreamed about all her life. But then she caught a photographer's attention, who said he shot for one of the most iconic glamour brands in the world, Playboy magazine, and that he wanted

Emily had heard of Luis.

I thought he was an amazing photographer. I'd always admired his work.

He's from Venezuela but had been based in the United States for years. He did photoshoots all over the world, had forty five thousand Instagram followers and was a big deal in the industry. Instagram is, without a doubt, the foundation of a successful career in glamour. It's where photographers and models find each other, where everyone builds their reputation. Luisa's profile was full of photos he'd taken of women on Playboy covers.

And how big a deal was Playboy to you at the time.

It's just the name, I think, the legacy. You know, everybody loves Playboy. Everybody knows Playboy. It's universal. It just sort of became a little dream that I didn't really know that i'd had, because I still love Playboy. Just have the necklace, the watch, the bedding all of us did remember.

I remember one of my friends had it as a wallpaper.

It's crazy, insane as it seems now there was once a time where preteen girls in the UK loved Playboy. The bunny logo was a staple of Naughty's Fashion and The Girls next Door. The reality TV program showing life inside the Playboy Mansion ran for season after season.

It had this very.

Catchy theme tune about candy that invite you into the world of Playboy.

Welcome to the Playboy Mansion.

Come on to my house and the house I'm gone, give me.

Good morning.

I could probably have told you the names of more people living in the Playboy Mansion than I could have world leaders at the time. But Playboys and Law was about more than cute March and Hugh Hefner. It was about fame, beauty, and most of all, power. For Emily, it wasn't just about clout or fulfilling a childhood fantasy. She also saw being published in Playboy as a huge business opportunity. This was a chance to set herself apart from all the other thousands of models on Instagram and OnlyFans.

The rates to shoot with him were sort of like three thousand pounds up if you wanted to pay for it.

This might sound weird. Louise asked Emily to shoot. Why is she paying? But actually it's pretty common for models to pay photographers. It's like an actor paying for a new headshot. But his rates were too expensive.

I said I can't. I'm sorry.

I don't have any spare money. It's all tied up in my new house. And then he said, yeah, that's fine. We'll give you a golden ticket. We give out golden tickets.

A golden ticket the chance to shoot with Luis Gomez world class photos that might just get published in Playboy, all for free.

I thought it was this Charlie the chocolate factory. So yeah, got my golden ticket and we booked a shoot date.

On August eighth, twenty twenty, a swelteringly hot summer day. Emily arrives at the venue Louise has chosen for the shoot. It's an air in a victorian townhouse in London. It's taken Emily a couple of hours to get here from the town where she lives. She's going to stay in a hotel nearby and is lugging a suitcase of outfit options and accessories. Her friend's going to join her, because even with a well known photographer, it's best to take

There were bin bags everywhere, like nappy bags, all piled up on the porch, and I was like, surely I'm at the wrong place. Rang the buzzer, rang the buzzer, rang the buzzer.

Nothing.

Just when Emily's wondering if she should leave, Luise.

Comes flying down the stairs, absolutely driven with sweat and was like hello. It was like, Hi, he's five for eight, he's quite a strong build, dark brown hair, He's got dark olive skin, brown eyes.

Louisa's dre all in black with a cap on backwards and a Star Wars T shirt. He's wearing knee length cargo shorts with pulled up socks and black lace up boots. Luise leaves Emily into the building and up a narrow spiral staircase. It opens up onto a landing with two bedrooms, each with a small balcony overlooking tiny terraced gardens below. The balcony doors are open, allowing some of the stifling

He was asking me why I wanted to be in Playboy, how long I've wanted to be in it. What are my goals and expectations for shooting? Like, what did I want to do going forward?

Emily says she's doing this for the exposure, for the chance to build her portfolio and set herself apart from the crowd, and she explains her levels for the shoot. She's happy to shoot clothed, implied, and nude. She wants to get a range of beautiful images. Luise tells her he can also shoot some more X rated content for her. Emily's open to the idea. She shoots with sex toys for her OnlyFans, so she has a couple in her bag.

I think I literally took like one dildo and a vibrator and that was it. It wasn't going to be like a crazy shoot. I just thought, oh, if you've got time at the end, then could get some cool shots, like proper four K shots.

High levels.

Sure, But as far as Emily's concerned, Luis is a photographer that she can trust.

I mean, he says, he.

Works with Playboy, he should be the best of the best. But then Luise says something that puts her on edge.

He said, I'm giving you this for free because you've got a golden ticket, so you know you're gonna stay with me here tonight.

This was the arrangement.

You have a free photo shoot, and you spend the night with me, and I'll take you to the top. I'll make you a star. I said, no, what do you mean arrangement? Why would I be staying the night. I'm at a photo shoot. And at that moment, my heart literally sank, my stomach flipped. I thought, oh my god, now it's clear to me what he wants from this shoot.

Do I get up and leave? Do I just get my stuff and go?

Just then Emily's friend arrives.

I said I need to go and let my friend in.

So I just like jumped out from the table and ran downstairs and I opened the door, and I was like, oh.

My god, Oh my god, he thinks I'm going to sleep with him.

And she was like, what was like, I don't.

Know what to do?

She said, you want to just go leaving with me and passing up the biggest opportunity of her career so far. Emily knows she might not get another chance. This silent debate is something I know many women will relate to. It's that internal voice quickly rattling through the possible outcomes of a situation you're not feeling one hundred percent comfortable with. It's keeping a smile on your face as you scan the room for exits while simultaneously telling yourself that you're

And I said, no, you're here.

Now.

I can hold my own I can look after myself. We've come all this way.

We'll see how it goes, and if he crosses the line again, I'll get my stuff and we'll leave.

Emily takes a deep breath, steals herself and makes her way back inside. Upstairs, in a bedroom with high ceilings, a four poster bed and windows draped with long white curtains. Emily's posing in her first outfit, a short poker dot dress and black patent hills.

I look like a housewife. I was comfortable doing that. We had music on. It was a bit more of a chilled vibe.

Luise gets into all sorts of positions to capture her best angles. He's going to a lot of effort. He's even wearing knee pads. Emily's warming up to the camera and starting to enjoy herself. After another quick outfit change and some more lifestyle shots, it's time for lingerie. This could end up in Playboy after all. Emily's friend decides to give her some privacy.

She was like, Oh, I don't want to sort of impose because sometimes obviously you can do some risk a stuff. And I said, oh yeah, I'll just call you if I need you.

Emily and Luis are now alone. Emily poses by the wall in a lazy black lingerie set. She's in her element. She loves shooting in lingerie. Then something strange happens. Luise puts down his camera and picks up his guitar.

He was playing his own music in the background, so in the middle of the shoot he'd stop and he'd get out of his guitar and he'd start playing chords and playing along to music.

But then it shifts from weird to worse. Just a heads up. What Emily describes next might be distressing.

It was lingerie, and then it was lingerie with my brass strapped down, and then it was lingerie with my off and then.

It was here, here's an ice cube.

Put it in your mouth, suck it, put it on your nipples, you know, like, play with it. Things kind of sort of started escalating to pornographic, and I just thought, what is going on?

Emily racks her brain, thinking back to Luis's shots that she'd seen on the front cover of Playboy magazines, gorgeous girls on exostic beaches and tiny bikinis looking tall, strong, sexy, hair flowing in the breeze, amazing makeup, flattering angles, not ice cubes in a shitty airbnb. But then again, maybe it's fine. After all, Playboy editorials are pretty sexy. Maybe this is just what Playboy models do.

Okay, we'll just go with it for now.

Like he's far away, he's not near me kind of thing, so I could deal with that.

But then Louise moves closer.

He would physically come over and grab your hand and put it somewhere, and he was very aggressive and pushy, and he gets very in your space and I just sort of just went with it because you don't really know what to do. I was just anxious and eager for it to be over with.

Louise should know that he's not supposed to touch her, but by now this shoot isn't feeling very professional at all. Emily had been so excited for a glamorous sheet with a photographer who had the power to make her name, but it feels like he's hell bent on getting to the OnlyFans content.

He wanted me fully nude with just heels on, like on the bed. He was asking me to spread my legs. Then he went in my suitcase and took out one of my toys and sort of like throw at me and was telling me what to.

Do with it. Emily wants to push back to focus on the glamour shots, but her resolver is worn down, so she does as she's told.

The way he was behind the camera, he's a very strong presence. He's very old, do this, do that, do this, and then it was right now, put it in you, and then it was just going on and on and on. I didn't mind having toys and being seductive or like putting a toy in my mouth. It's not like I'd never done open leg, but the way he made me feel was very uncomfortable and dirty and horrible.

Emily thinks that if she stops the shoot now, she'll blow the whole thing and ruin her chance to get into Playboy.

So she rationalizes, I'll just do it and get out. I remember just looking up at the ceiling. I'm just thinking this is too much.

Emily notices that the room has become eerily quiet.

He stopped clicking. Yeah, he'd switched his camera from shoot to film.

According to Emily, Luis has stopped taking photos. Now he's taking videos. She never agreed to this, and he must have.

Been doing this for a good five minutes before I'd realized. And he was getting closer and closer and closer to me with this camera between my legs. His camera lens was probably about two inches away from me. It was basically inside me at one point. And then he was asking to perform oral sex on him for the camera, and I said to him, I'm not doing things like that. He was just so pushy and persistent, and I thought,

She doesn't care about anything except getting out of that room.

What was his proximity to you? Where was he standing?

He was very close in my breathing space. He kissed me and he was so sweaty, and he kept going for my mouth and I had to turn my head and he put his hands like round my waist, and that was enough to make me feel disgusting. He was always touching my lower back or trying to touch my bum. He was like, nobody has to know. I said no and not doing that that I've told you when I got here. That's not the arrangement. He kept saying, But you're staying here, You're staying here.

No, I'm not, and just got my stuff and I just left with my friend.

Which you think would have happened if your friend wasn't there.

God do you know what, I don't even want to think about it. That's such a hard thing to think about. I had a lucky escape, a really lucky escape. I was like, I need to get back to my hotel and I need to shower.

I've never felt so dirty.

I felt gross, I felt sweaty, I felt degraded. I remember just scrubbing my skin in the shower. It's like there's things under your skin. It's just that you can't get something off you. Literally, somebody's got under your skin. You can't get it out.

In the following days, Emily couldn't stop thinking about what happened to her. It all felt somehow planned. She had an instinct that she might not be the first model he'd felt this way after a photo shoot with Luis Gomes.

I think I put out a post on my Instagram story actually to see if anybody had had a bad experience with a photographer, and I didn't name anybody, and a lot of people that clicked yes sent me a direct message straight away saying is this about Louis Gomas.

And suddenly Emily wasn't alone. She was one of around a dozen pissed off models, all of the voice notes you're about to hear are the words of real women, but to protect their identities, some have been voiced by actors. I couldn't really get out that he had the door locked, he had the key.

I was the only person.

There scaring models.

He's intimidating them, preying on them, sexually harassing them.

He was fucking horrible.

He's a level pusher and a fucking dirty perve.

I'm a really like experienced model and I was modeling for like three years before I shot with Louise, but even he made me uncomfortable. He's like the Harvey weinscene of the photography industry.

He's disgusting.

To Emily, it was clear that what she'd experienced with Louise hadn't been a one off.

He's just spinning the web for you to get.

Trapped in it. Predatorish, that's the only word for it. He is literally a predator.

It felt like these shoots weren't about the pictures or Playboy. It felt like they were an opportunity to abuse models behind closed doors.

We thought, we can't let this happen again.

The women organized.

I'm getting a group chat together of girls that have all had a really bad experience.

So yeah, WhatsApp group for all the models who claimed they'd been abused by Louise. It would be a place to share experiences, support each other, and come up with a plan to make sure that no other model would shoot with Louise without hearing their allegations. First, they'd all realized one thing Luis was hiding behind his self proclaimed statis as a playboy photographer.

That's what had got them all in the room.

So when it came to choosing a name for the group chat, well that was only one choice.

Fuck playboy coming up on the bunny trap?

Why do I start relying?

Oh my god, it's way darker and white, deeper than I could every imagine.

I wanted to be cool, and I wanted to be in the magazine, and I wanted to be in the limelight.

He said, for five thousand pounds, I could be the playboy playmame.

If they're asking you for money, it's a scam because why do you have to pay to be a model.

The whole industry has just changed. I was stupid in naives because I didn't know, like, what the fuck is mam?

Right, He's everywhere and has been everywhere ladies.

I got it all.

I got it all. It's not just me.

We're an army and perison to him.

Thanks to the women who shared their stories with us. We contacted Luis Gomez multiple times for comment, but we never heard back. He has not been charged with any crimes and is presumed innocent under the law. We also sought comment from Playboy USA. They declined our request for an interview, but you can hear their statement later in the series. The Bonnie Trap is produced by Novel. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show is

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